A new excerpt from the upcoming novel Star Wars: Legacy, starring Rey and Leia in between the events of The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, has been released. It shows Rey trying to repair Luke Skywalker’s old kyber crystal while she struggles to overcome her own doubts and insecurities without a proper Jedi to guide her.
You can read some of it below, but for the full excerpt, head to USA Today.
““Where are you going?” were the last words she heard as the droid’s golden head became just a wink at the base of the tower.
“Scouting,” Rey had called back, bracing against the face of the tower to wipe the sweat off her left palm. “Won’t be long.”
The backpack had been heavy, weighing her down during the climb, but more keenly, she’d felt the small, inert crystal in its pouch bumping against her thigh. It was always there. It’s time.
She couldn’t do anything about it on the Millennium Falcon. Chew-bacca was always around, and she didn’t need an audience. What if she failed? No, this hideaway was better. Rey lifted her hands from the floor and heaved the overstuffed pack closer, then tilted out the contents. She placed two of the ancient Jedi texts to her right. They were more than familiar to her now, every flaw, dent, rip, and stain like the well-loved wrinkles on an old friend. Even just the paper the texts were written on was unbelievably rare, but with time, shock ceded to reverence, then practicality. Within the Jedi texts, she had found both technical schematics and esoteric meanderings that suggested she could fix Master Luke’s lightsaber. Rey took a deep breath. In the past, when she brought up the broken crystal, Leia had urged Rey not to take it too seriously. “Don’t let a rock get the best of you” was her winking advice. It was guidance Rey tried to follow now. One memory of Leia’s wisdom led to another . . .
“We have everything we need.”
But those were the words of a general. No Jedi remained to teach Rey. She had the brief lessons from Master Luke and these salvaged texts, only echoes of wisdom, pieces and fragments that her tinkerer’s heart yearned to make whole.
“And the will to try,” she muttered, wry. “Let’s make that count for something.”
Another deep breath. She had memorized the passage on healing from the Chronicles of Brus-bu, whispered it to herself every night be-fore bed until it was burned deep into her conscious and subconscious mind.
“The Jedi attune themselves to their lightsaber’s crystal, but the Sith at-tune the crystal to themselves. They corrupt and bleed it of power, as they do to everything they dominate. Such bled and broken crystals need not remain so forever. Though the art of healing is rare, a Jedi can achieve wholeness in anything. To heal in the light is to know sacrifice. To give and to heal share one mindset, one peace.”
Master Brus-bu’s words were among the most direct in the text, with its many authors, and were therefore her favorite. Trying to get through Master Farseeker’s musings in a section called Poetics of a Jedi was about as straightforward as bartering with a Teedo junk trader. Sacrifice. Giving. Healing. Sounded simple enough.”
“A figure stormed toward her out of the darkness.
The small measure of stillness she had found vanished, and those eyes, which she had ignored, which had felt so far away, returned. Now they belonged to one person and one alone, and within his seething mass of black robes, he marched across space and time itself to find her. And then he was there, all around her. Him. The man who had tried to lead her down the path of darkness, the reason the lightsaber was bro-ken at all. No, not a man, a monster. A monster with reach. He had taken hold of her through their connection, and what had once felt like a bond, like solace, had been corrupted. No, too passive. He. Him. He cor-rupted it, corrupted her, setting to a boil the anger that simmered in her veins. Goading her. Tricking her. If she had been stronger, smarter, she would’ve never fallen for his manipulations.
Rey shouldn’t have left him on that ship. She should have killed him.
One more groan of thunder, and then the strike: Lightning struck the jagged edge of the mud tower, so close that it rattled her bones and raised every hair on her arms.
And now she felt him seeking, his hunger like a beam, laser-hot and searching, always searching . . . His image split down the middle as if cleaved in half by the lightning. Now it was not just one hunter coming for her, but two.
“No!”
Her eyes opened on a gasp, and the first thing she saw was the crystal still hovering between her hands. It shuddered and spun, a memory of Kylo Ren’s eyes, vivid, liquid black, just beyond it. She heard his voice, softer than she remembered, unpolluted by the rage and arrogance that consumed him. “It’s time to let old things die,” he said. Was that sadness she heard? Regret? Perhaps it was the blue of the crystal, its muted glow bathing Ren’s image in kinder light, that fooled her into noticing the flare of hope in his gaze. Then his image faded, the shock of it lingering like a blaster burn. A soft cracking sound drew her attention back to the crystal. It was blackened, charred, the conductor that had drawn the single precise punch of lightning. Another fissure appeared, slicing a haphazard path through its pale-blue heart. She caught the gem as it fell, cradling it carefully in her palms.
No. No. She had come to this hidden place to heal it and succeeded only in wounding it more. She had been right to attempt this alone; she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone knowing she hadn’t just failed but made it all worse. Her fingers closed gently around the crystal before she placed it back on the floor. The fate of the entire galaxy rested on her shoulders, and she couldn’t accomplish this simple task without losing control, without almost alerting—
It was just a vision, just her own tormented mind.”
Author Madeleine Roux notes that both Rey and Leia are enduring a time of hardship and great loss after the events of The Last Jedi, and they need to overcome the “emotional obstacles” in front of them to achieve the connection they secretly crave.
“Leia has so much to give Rey in terms of a nurturing relationship and all of the more technical expertise she’s gathered over the course of her life, but Rey is fresh off of a really complicated interaction with Leia’s son. She’s struggling with doubt and fear, and it makes it difficult for Rey to see Leia as the person she needs in this moment. Getting to navigate the two of them through a fraught emotional landscape was a challenge, obviously, but also incredibly rewarding.”
Rey is in a particularly dark place at the beginning of the book as she frets over her broken lightsaber, severed in her confrontation with Kylo Ren, and Roux saw that quest to repair the lightsaber’s broken kyber crystal as a symbol for Rey’s own need for healing.
“The crystal itself ties closely to her growth in this book, so it was essential to establish that she’s only going to fix this thing when she deals with what’s eating her up inside.”
For the full excerpt, head to USA Today. You can also read our own review before the novel is released tomorrow, Tuesday, July 28.
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.