Interlude – Archivist Log 004: The First Flame
I’ve begun to believe the stories aren’t just fragments.
They’re wounds.
Some cry out. Some have scabbed over. Some—most—have been silenced.
This is the story I’ve been able to reassemble from the Codex of Embers, cross-referenced with forbidden entries in a corrupted Jedi archive, and oral memory from two surviving Nightsister refugees. No part of it is whole. But this is what the flame remembers.
Long before the galaxy named the Force, it was called the Breath.
And in those earliest days—when hyperspace was still a theory and empires hadn’t yet drawn their borders—there were those who breathed it without fear. They were the First Weavers, though they didn’t call themselves that. Names were not important. Only memory. Only instinct.
They were born of planets that no longer exist—the moon-blooded women of Hesperon, the fire-callers of the Ash Sea, the dream-singers of early Dathomir. They did not wield the Force like a weapon or code. They sang it, shaped it, wove it into the world through ritual, blood, dance, and breath.
They did not build temples. They walked between graves and starlight. They carried their power in bones, in flame, in story.
Among them, there were three who rose from myth to legend:
Thess of the Deep Vale, who could speak to the dead and walk untouched through fire.
Calmae the Unseen, whose voice could twist memory and shape time’s rhythm.
Zhorel Flamebound, the first to wear the Mourning Face, who saw the galaxy’s future burn and stood in the ashes alone.
They became known as the Three That Keep—the first true Keepers of the Night Flame.
Together, they created a lineage that never taught—but remembered. Their teachings were passed through ritual, dream, and sacrifice, not scrolls or lightsabers. And their greatest oath was this:
“The Force does not serve us. We serve what remains when all else is gone.”
But time turned.
And the galaxy changed.
The Jedi Order began to rise—elegant, structured, seeking harmony through detachment. To them, the Keepers were wild, emotional, dangerous. They whispered of balance, but feared those who moved through shadow.
And the Sith? They sought the Keepers not to understand, but to steal. To cage the raw power of flame untouched by doctrine.
One by one, the outer covens were hunted. The rituals deemed heretical. The women burned.
Those who survived retreated into legend—some say to Dathomir, others to forgotten moons. And the Keepers, the true Keepers, disappeared entirely. Gone from maps. Gone from memory.
All that remains are echoes.
A burned mask. A broken glyph. A flame that flickers in dreams.
But I have seen the vision myself now.
A girl standing before a blackened tree, masks watching from the branches above. The wind speaking in the voice of someone forgotten but not gone.
“She is waiting.”
I don’t know who she is.
But I think the Force does.