The sun had barely touched the Jedi Temple's highest spires when Eli Kaen slipped out of bed.
The dormitory was silent save for the occasional shift of fabric and soft breathing of younglings still dreaming of lightsaber duels and future Knighthood. But Eli no longer dreamed.
He knelt beside the foot of his cot and took a deep breath. The cool stone floor chilled his knees. The Force buzzed faintly, like a whisper he could almost understand. Not quite.
His eyes drifted to the adjacent bunks—Tavi snoring quietly, limbs sprawled across his sheets, and Niyala curled in a perfect circle like a Loth-cat, her face half-covered by a loose braid. Both so close. Both so unaware.
They were always so full of life.
And they always died.
Every time the loop reset—every time the Temple fell—he watched them die. Sometimes quickly. Sometimes screaming. Once, he had even convinced them to fight with him.
It had ended in fire and tears.
Eli rose and slipped his boots on silently. No words. No goodbyes. Just motion.
He moved through the Temple halls like a phantom, ducking under sensor beams, timing his steps between patrols. He didn't need a map anymore. He didn't need a plan. This was the tenth reset.
Everything was memorized.
And this time… this time, he wasn't staying.
Not to fight. Not to warn the Masters. Not even to protect Tavi and Niyala.
They were going to die anyway.
That truth burned behind his ribs like a slow ember. And he hated himself for accepting it.
But this was survival.
He needed to get away—far enough from the Temple, from the clones, from Anakin Skywalker—to live more than just one day. To see what came after. To understand the galaxy he'd never reached before.
So he could come back with answers.
He navigated downward through the sublevels, following memory more than light. Blue stripes on durasteel beams marked old maintenance routes, buried beneath centuries of reconstruction. The Temple was ancient. Older than the Republic. Beneath its foundations were tunnels even Jedi didn't speak about.
Eli crouched beside a rusted access grate and reached for the Force—not to lift, but to guide his breath steady as he pried the latch open. The grate groaned softly, dust falling from its edges like flaking skin.
He slipped through and began to crawl.
The shaft was tight and foul, a mix of copper dust and stale air, and it descended at a steep angle. The deeper he went, the colder it grew. He reached junctions remembered from past loops: a cracked wall where he once turned back, a flooded chamber he had avoided before.
He took a new path this time—one he had only glimpsed on an old data schematic in the Archives.
It opened into a deep tunnel lined with power conduits and ventilation cables, humming softly.
And for the first time since the first loop, Eli Kaen breathed air that hadn't circulated through Jedi halls.
He was out.
Not into Coruscant proper—but into its veins. The underworld. The city beneath the city.
He stood still on a narrow catwalk, sweat slicking his forehead. A dull vibration thrummed beneath his boots—the heart of a world that never slept.
Far above, the Temple stood bright and serene. And within it—Tavi and Niyala laughed and trained and meditated like it was any other day.
He had left them behind.
It felt like betrayal.
He sank to a seated position and pulled his knees to his chest. It wasn't cold, not really. But his whole body shivered.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
The words didn't echo. The tunnel swallowed them.
Eli had convinced himself that surviving alone would be worth it—that bringing back days of knowledge would justify leaving his friends to die.
But now, sitting in the bowels of Coruscant, he realized something else:
He had no idea how to survive out here.
The Temple had always been his world. Food, warmth, protection, the Force—structured, refined, and taught. Out here? The Force felt… stranger. Not evil, just raw. Wild. As though it didn't care whether he lived or died.
Still, he had time.
That was the point.
Every second out here was a second more than he'd ever had before.
Then it happened.
A pulse.
The Force screamed through him in a single, ripping jolt—pain, fire, death. He clutched his chest, gasping. It was like being dropped into ice water.
Order 66.
He didn't need to see it to know it had begun.
He could feel it in his bones.
Tavi.
Niyala.
Master Tallis.
Master Drallig.
All of them—dying.
He pressed his forehead to his knees and shook as tears slipped down his cheeks. He wasn't there. Couldn't help. Couldn't save.
The death of the Jedi wasn't just a future to him now. It was happening. It was now.
Above, somewhere in the Temple, Anakin ignited his blade. Blue. Not red.
The betrayal had begun.
And Eli had run.
He stayed in that spot, paralyzed by guilt and failure, for what felt like hours. Time meant nothing down here.
Eventually, when the tremors of death in the Force began to fade—when only silence and shadow remained—he stood.
He climbed a narrow duct until he reached a hatch that opened onto a high outcropping overlooking the lower city.
And for the first time, he saw it—Coruscant not from the Temple's serene towers, but from the gutters. The streets glowed with neon, the air thick with speeders, smoke, life.
A different galaxy.
He turned his head slightly—and through the haze, he saw smoke rising from the Temple. Fires. Damage.
He had never lived long enough to see it burn.
He stared for a long moment.
Then—a presence. He froze.
Something cold and fast moved behind him.
And a blue lightsaber lit the shadows.
Anakin.
No words. No warning.
Eli barely had time to scream before the blade struck—
—and everything went white.
Reset.