JEDI HoloNet

Sion Enes was born in Baruun, a highland settlement on Mirial where terraced fields of tel-grain climbed the valley slopes in slow, deliberate rows. His early years were quiet and unremarkable to those around him, spent among the labourers and traders who worked the highlands. He was tall for his age, and grew taller still as the seasons passed, so that strangers often took him for a boy of eleven or twelve and addressed him as they would an older child. What they met instead was a timid, watchful stillness that seemed to belong to someone half his size, and the mismatch tended to catch people off guard, leaving them uncertain how to speak to him. From the beginning he carried a quiet that older Mirialans tended to notice, a reserve that set him apart from the louder children.

The illness that took his parents moved through the highland settlements during a hard season, when the passes were closed and help from the lowlands came too late for many. Sion was not yet five when he was left without family. Something in him folded inward after that. Where other grieving children grew angry or clinging, he grew quiet, and quieter still as the seasons passed, until meekness became the settled shape of him. He spoke little, asked for less, and carried his growing height as though faintly apologetic for the space it took, shoulders drawn in, as if he wished to be smaller than he was.

The communal house that took him in cared for the region’s orphaned and displaced children, a modest place run by a handful of elders. Among them was one, an aging woman named Herae, who took particular care of the boy. She did not press him to speak or to be other than he was, but sat with him in the evenings and kept a patient watch over him through the years, and it was she who came to understand him better than anyone.

The only time Sion seemed truly to open was in the practice of the old Mirialan spirituality. In the settlement’s small observances, the quiet rites and meditations built around the belief that no life falls outside the wider pattern, the withdrawn boy became present and attentive in a way he was nowhere else. He took to the practice with a seriousness that surprised the elders, and in those hours something in him that ordinarily stayed folded away seemed briefly to unfold.

It was during one such season that Sion caught the attention of a Jedi Watchman passing through the region. The Watchman observed the boy for a time and grew quietly certain of what he had found. With the consent of the elders who held responsibility for the child, he carried out the traditional assessments long used to gauge Force sensitivity, conducting them without ceremony and disclosing nothing of the outcome to the household.

For Sion there was little to leave behind and no family to release him. He had never received his tattoos, the marks a Mirialan child would ordinarily earn in the course of growing up among their own, and so he would carry that bareness with him alongside a height that promised a confidence he did not possess. He travelled to Coruscant shortly after his eighth naming-day, taking with him only a single worn cord that Herae pressed into his palm at his leaving, and the unshaped potential that had drawn the Order to him in the first place.