Quoted By:
“…you think that I should have killed Master Potkin,” you say flatly.
After a very long and profound silence, she intones: “Are you seeking guidance, or are you hoping to confirm what you already believe?”
Your face screws up into a scowl. “The former. I made my choice, and I’m not second-guessing it. Killing her would’ve been unnecessarily cruel.”
“Cruel?” Her tone adopts an incredulous lilt. “You humiliated her in front of the other Jedi Masters, even before your little duel. By your own account, you tore Potkin’s strategy apart without the delicacy or politeness afforded to another Jedi. Tell me that you delivered the news of her duplicity without feeling sort of smugness or righteous indignation.”
…you hadn’t been smug. There hadn’t been any room in your heart for that.
Anger is not the Jedi Way. But you had been…incensed about the fact that her plan involved lying to seven other Jedi. Drawing them without their knowledge or consent into a duel against one of the two Sith that all but destroyed the Jedi Order. The sheer recklessness of her folly would have made any sane and rational man appalled and compelled to act against it.
In the silence, Kriea continues: “But her reaction is entirely her own, even if your words had provoked her to such an effect. That she lashed out like an unruly child throwing a tantrum at not getting her way speaks ill of the age’s Jedi…or what so little remain.”
And there it is. The parts of Kreia’s ‘teachings’ that always manage to catch you flat-footed. Telling Master Larid that the holocron was critical of Jedi teachings was an understatement at the best. There are serious moments in your little talks that her critique of the Jedi goes beyond philosophical disagreements with the order’s teachings…although perhaps not so Sith-like.
You sigh. “Can’t we go one conversation without you complaining about how your Jedi were better than ours?”
“I never made such a comparison,” she refutes. “I am merely observing how very little has changed since the time of my creator.”
Now that gives you pause. “…in what way, exactly?”
Kreia’s image shifts. “Were I to detail the faults and failures of the Jedi of my time, we would be here for several days. I will not stray too far and reminisce about an age so long ago, but know this, Farren Gaelle. Master Shadday Potkin may very well be the latest, but she was not the first Jedi to be blinded by her own arrogance and ambitions – the Jedi Covenant, Masters Vrook, Kavar, and Zez-Kai Ell to only name a few, have found in her a worthy successor of their collective self-righteousness.”
The last three masters, you know very little about, if nothing at all. Their names are familiar, but not enough for you to know them immediately. But it’s still unfair to compare Potkin to Lucien Draay and his clique of paranoid, padawan-murdering masters…
…erk.
...okay, maybe she has a point.
(cont.)
