There is a world where the trees grow so tall that whole peoples live and die in their branches without ever touching the ground.
On Kashyyyk, the wroshyr trees rise hundreds of meters into a green sky. Their trunks are wide enough to hollow out and live inside. Their roots tangle together into roadways. Their canopies stack into whole worlds, one above another: bright gardens at the crown, shadowed hunting grounds in the middle dark, and at the forest floor a dim, dangerous place of roots and mist that even the Wookiees enter with respect. The Wookiees have called this planet home since before the Republic existed. To be born on Kashyyyk is to be born small beneath very large things, and to learn early — before language, before memory — that the world is bigger than you and does not slow down for you.
It was into this world, in the year 39 BBY, that a child was born to two servants of the Republic who owned almost nothing on it.
A Child of the Trees
His parents were researchers. Both of them were scientists in the Republic's service, posted to a small survey outpost in Kashyyyk's mid-canopy country. The work was the unglamorous kind the Republic ran on: cataloguing, sampling, measuring. The outpost was a cluster of domed prefab shelters set on a root-latticed clearing, ringed by equipment crates and sensor masts, supplied by shuttle and otherwise left alone. It was a posting for people who loved the work more than comfort, and by every account they did.
The outpost itself was the kind of place the galaxy forgets the moment it files it. The survey team's days were measured in samples: leaf cuttings pressed between sheets, soil cores in sealed tubes, water drawn from the canopy's collected rain and tested for the minerals the trees pulled up from depths no drill had reached. Wookiee guides came and went along the root roads, trading news and dried meat for spare parts and word of the wider Republic, and the researchers learned, as everyone posted to Kashyyyk learns, to plan around the trees rather than through them. They planned around the morning mists that swallowed the sensor masts whole, around the migration paths of the canopy's great beasts, and around the simple fact that on this world the ground was a rumor and the real country was vertical. A child born into that rhythm would learn the shape of patience before he learned the shape of a sentence, if he had stayed long enough to learn either there.
Their son was born there, in the shadow of the trees, in a place about as far from the centers of galactic power as a Republic citizen could be while still standing on a Republic chart. He was, on paper, unremarkable: a human infant, healthy, loud, and entirely ordinary in every way a record can measure.
Records, of course, do not measure the Force.
What the first year of his life looked like, no chronicle can fully recover — and this one will not pretend otherwise. He would grow up with no memory of Kashyyyk's light through the canopy, no memory of his parents' faces, no memory of the outpost at all. He never went looking for those memories later, and he never spoke of seeking the people who gave him life. The family he would know was the one that raised him. But a beginning matters even when the person who lived it cannot remember it, because everything that came after started in that clearing, with two researchers and a child who reached for things before he could crawl.
Because that is how it showed, at first. It always shows small. An object that slides an inch too far across a table toward a waving hand. A toy that arrives in a fist it should not have been able to reach. Coincidences, each one explainable, each one forgotten — until they stopped being forgotten, the way a pattern stops being deniable once you have seen it three times.
The Republic had a system for exactly this, and Kashyyyk was inside it.
The Republic That Found Him
To understand what it meant to be taken by the Jedi in 39 BBY, you have to understand the galaxy doing the taking — because it no longer exists, and neither does the Order that walked its worlds so freely.
The Republic he was born into had stood for a thousand years since its last great reformation, and the Jedi Order with it. There had been no galactic war in living memory, nor in the memory of anyone's grandfather's grandfather. The Jedi numbered some ten thousand Knights and Masters. They were peacekeepers, mediators, and traveling judges, sent out from Coruscant to settle disputes that ranged from trade wars to planetary succession crises. People trusted them nearly everywhere they went, with an instinct the Republic's citizens rarely examined. A Jedi at the door meant the galaxy still worked. Parents who gave their children to the Order in that age were not surrendering them to a military. They were enrolling them in the most respected institution in civilization, one that had kept the peace since before their species had starflight in some cases.
Kashyyyk in that era stood in an unusual position inside that Republic: a member world, proudly independent in spirit, whose Wookiee people managed their own affairs beneath their own trees and dealt with the Republic largely through trade, treaty, and the occasional request for exactly the kind of scientific work his parents did. Survey outposts like theirs dotted the Mid Rim — small, unglamorous, essential. The Republic at its height was not mostly senates and starfleets. It was mostly people like his parents: specialists in prefab domes at the edge of the map, doing careful work carefully, in places where the light came down green through leaves older than the government that employed them.
That was the world that found him: peaceful, confident, and certain of itself. In the clearing there was only a pattern that would not stay deniable, and a system — the oldest child-welfare machinery in the galaxy, for that is honestly what it was — beginning to turn its attention toward one small boy.
How the Jedi Find Their Children
The Jedi Order did not stumble upon Force-sensitive children by luck. It searched for them — patiently, lawfully, and with the consent of their families — through a network that reached into every corner of Republic space.
The first layer was medical. Standard Republic screening of newborns tested blood for midi-chlorian concentration, the microscopic life forms that live in symbiosis with all living cells and through which sensitivity to the Force can be measured. A high count did not make a child a Jedi. It made a name appear on a list — one of thousands maintained in the Jedi Temple's records, a list of possibilities scattered across ten thousand worlds.
The second layer was human. Jedi seekers traveled the Republic confirming what the numbers suggested: visiting families, observing children, testing gently and openly, and then doing the hardest part of the work — explaining to parents what the Order was asking. Because the Order did ask. A child was not taken by right or by force. Parents were told the truth as the Jedi understood it: that their child had a gift that would grow whether it was trained or not; that the Order could raise the child in that gift, educate him, and give him a life of service among his own kind; and that the price of that life was the severing of the old one — that if they said yes, their son would be raised by the Temple, and the bond of family would be given up in this life for something the Jedi believed was larger.
It is the hardest yes in the galaxy, and parents said it — or did not — for reasons that were their own. The researchers on Kashyyyk said it.
There is no record of that conversation, and this chronicle will not invent one. What the record holds is the outcome: before the child's first birthday, Jedi came to the clearing in person to bring him home. Among them was a Jedi named Kelleran Beq. For children taken from that world were Wookiees, nearly without exception; a human child of researchers was a rarity that stayed in the memory.
The Wookiees watched them go. From the platform cities in the high branches, Kashyyyk's people marked the departure the way they marked all significant leavings — by witnessing it. The child would not remember their watching, either. First, he had to be raised.
The Long Way Up
The journey from Kashyyyk to Coruscant is long by any chart, and for an infant it was simply the first of many thresholds he would cross without knowing it. The shuttle climbed out of the canopy into Kashyyyk's bright upper sky, left the green world shrinking behind, and carried him across the Mid Rim toward the Core — toward a planet that was the opposite of everything he had been born under.
Coruscant had no forest floor, no canopy, no sky you could see from most of its surface. It was a world built into a single city, layer upon layer, a trillion lives stacked in metal where Kashyyyk stacked them in wood and leaf. At its heart, on ground the Republic's founders had consecrated before the Republic had a name worth the word, stood the Jedi Temple: five spires rising from a vast stepped pyramid, part fortress, part monastery, part school — and for the next twenty years of the galaxy's story, the only home this child would remember having.
He arrived shortly before his first birthday, which is to say he arrived exactly as the Order intended children to arrive: young enough that the Temple would not be a place he was sent to, but the place he was from. The Jedi believed — and built the entire architecture of their childhoods on the belief — that attachment to a former life was the one weight a Jedi could not afford to carry, and that a child raised from infancy inside the Order's walls would know its rhythms the way other children know their mother's voice. Whether the belief was wisdom or merely the confidence of an institution ten thousand years old, no child could have said. For now it is enough to say that for him, it worked the way it was meant to work in exactly one respect: the Temple was home. Whatever else he became, he never doubted that.
His first years were the years every Jedi child's were: the crèche, where the youngest initiates were raised in common by the Order's caretakers; a world of small robes and smaller lessons, of learning to sit still inside a silence that hummed. He learned to walk on stone instead of roots. He learned the names of stars his birth world never saw. And somewhere in those years, in the way of very small children everywhere, the trait his teachers would come to know best in him showed itself — not dramatically, but plainly.
He did not quit.
Every clan of younglings produces the full range of small stubbornness, and most of it burns itself out by age five. His didn't. Set a task scaled for a three-year-old's hands and attention — a balance exercise, a puzzle of nested rings, the endless beginner's discipline of reaching for a training remote's soft target with a padded stick — and the other children would try, fail, wander, return, forget. He would try, fail, and remain. Not angrily. Not tearfully. Simply still there when the session ended, hands not yet able to do what his will had already decided they would do, waiting with the patience of a creature much older for his ability to catch up with his intent. The crèche masters had a word they used among themselves for children like this, half warning and half respect. It was a fire, they said, that would either warm the whole Order or have to be watched for the rest of his life.
Bear Clan
At three years old, as was the custom, he was assigned to a clan.
The Order grouped its younglings into clans named for the creatures of the galaxy — Wolf, Loth-cat, Thranta, and others — small fellowships of children who would learn, train, eat, and grow together through the whole of their Temple childhood. A clan was a child's first family inside the family: the faces across the training mat, the competition and the comfort, the standard against which a youngling first measured what a Jedi was supposed to be.
His clan was Bear Clan, one of the oldest and most storied of them, and its teacher — the teacher of Bear Clan across more years than most Masters could count — was Yoda.
To be taught by Yoda was the common inheritance of generations of Jedi. Nearly every Knight of the late Republic had, at some point in childhood, sat in a half-circle on the training room floor while the Grand Master moved among them at the pace of a creature who has never once been in a hurry and has never once been late. What was uncommon was to be noticed by him — and Yoda noticed this one. Many Jedi instructed the boy in those years, as the clan system intended, but the record of his life is clear on the point that matters: the Grand Master of the Order saw great potential in the child from Kashyyyk, and watched him accordingly, the way a gardener watches the one seedling in the tray that has already begun to lean toward the light on its own.
Under that watching, the boy grew the way Temple children grew: into the rhythms of meditation before he fully understood what meditation was for; into the first forms of lightsaber training with a training blade's sting; into the slow discovery that the hum he had been born hearing under everything — the Force, moving through the trees of his birth and the stones of his home alike — was a thing he could reach for deliberately, and that reaching for it was the work of his life. He was not the most gifted child in Bear Clan. The Order's childhood is full of prodigies, and this chronicle does his memory no favors by inflating him. What he was, from the age of three, was the child who was still trying after the gifted ones had finished. In a Temple built to produce guardians for a galaxy, that turned out to be its own kind of talent — the kind that compounds.
A Youngling's Day
What did those years actually look like, from inside them? The Temple childhood of that era was gentle by design and total by the same design: every hour of a youngling's day belonged to the Order's idea of what a Jedi was made from.
Mornings began with meditation, scaled to a child's capacity — minutes, not hours, of learning to sit inside the current of the Force and let it move without grabbing at it. Then the physical work: movement, balance, the endless games that were not games, in which small bodies learned the geometry their adult fighting forms would one day be built from. Bear Clan trained with training lightsabers early and often — real hilts, real energy, turned down to a sting that taught respect without injury — and the salle echoed most days with the snap-hiss of a dozen child-sized blades and Yoda's commentary drifting through it like weather: correction, riddle, and laughter in equal measure, for the Grand Master taught the youngest Jedi the way water wears stone, and considered humor a legitimate instrument of instruction.
The training room itself was a lesson in the Order's way of building: stone floors worn smooth by generations of small feet, high windows that let Coruscant's pale light fall in shafts across the mats, and along one wall the racks where the training blades waited in their rows, each one sized for a child's hand and checked daily by the salle's keepers. The younglings learned to bow before they learned to strike, to name the parts of the blade before they were allowed to swing one, and to lose a bout without losing their temper — the last of these being, for children of three and four, by far the hardest discipline in the room. The boy from Kashyyyk was no exception to the losing. He was an exception only to the quitting.
Afternoons were the mind: languages, star-charts, history, the flora and fauna and politics of a galaxy they would one day be sent into in pairs and expected to understand on arrival. Evenings belonged to the clan — to the refectory's noise, to the Room of a Thousand Fountains where the Temple kept its one great indoor wilderness and children went to be small under something green, and to the slow business of growing up alongside the same handful of faces year after year.
The boy from Kashyyyk took to one part of it with a recognition none of his teachers had expected to matter. The Room of a Thousand Fountains is an artificial forest, lovingly maintained, and nothing on Coruscant is truly wild — but a child born under wroshyr trees, carried out of real wilderness before he could walk, would spend his free hours in the Temple's garden more than any of his clanmates, drawn to growing things with a pull he could not have explained. His teachers noted it the way they noted everything: without alarm, and without yet understanding it. Kashyyyk had given him up. It had not let him go.
The researchers' son had become the Order's child entirely. He had a home with five spires, a family numbered in thousands, a teacher nine centuries old, and a road in front of him that every Jedi child walked: years of clan training, the great test of the Gathering on Ilum when he turned ten, and beyond it — if he proved worthy — a Master's choosing and a Padawan's braid.
He was three years old, and his name is the one thing about him that this chronicle will never print. Names are for records, and this is not his record. This is his life.
Next week, in Chapter 2, the boy leaves the only home he has ever known. Ahead of him lies a frozen world at the edge of the map, a journey every Jedi child must make, and a cave of ice where each child walks in alone to find the crystal that will sing to them. The journey to Ilum begins.