Aavruun and Krawruuk were nine years old, and the youngling wing had one topic on repeat.
Anakin Skywalker.
Aavruun heard it before he saw it—kids bunched up in the corridor, talking over each other, hands chopping the air like they were trying to reconstruct a holo they'd only half watched. Someone insisted Skywalker had blown up a Separatist droid ship. Someone else swore it was a Trade Federation ship. A service droid rolled through with a bin of folded linens, paused at the traffic, then hummed and took a side route like it had the hallway map memorized.
The second thread came right behind the first, every time, said lower like the words carried weight.
A Sith had appeared. A Sith had killed Qui-Gon Jinn.
Aavruun kept walking, braids brushing his shoulders, Temple air cool and dry on his nose. He caught pieces as he passed—"Naboo," "red blade," "two blades," "duel"—kid-level details bouncing around without anyone in charge filling in the gaps.
Qui-Gon's name still landed.
Qui-Gon Jinn had taught the younglings a couple times. He didn't make a show of it. He'd step in, run a lesson clean and practical, answer a few questions, and move on. Most of the time he was too busy with his padawan—Obi-Wan Kenobi usually stayed at his shoulder, quiet, focused, tracking whatever Qui-Gon pointed at like it mattered.
Now Qui-Gon was dead, and the Temple felt it in the way people spoke.
Aavruun turned a corner and the noise thinned. The corridor opened into a calmer stretch—smooth stone, steady light panels, a wall board updating group rotations in neat columns. Aavruun glanced at it out of habit, then kept moving, the rumor-feed still crawling in the background of his thoughts.
And thinking about it—having actually lived through what younglings went through—Aavruun kept circling back to the same conclusion.
The Jedi were fucking incompetent for taking a former slave kid and leaving his mother behind.
Skipping youngling and dropping him straight into padawan training, too? Boo.
Aavruun rolled the thought around like grit in his teeth. His paws clicked softly on the floor. His ears flicked at a burst of laughter down a side hall, then settled again.
Aavruun had room to judge. He was nine in this body. He was also Caleb under the fur, and Caleb had watched leaders make "we'll deal with it later" decisions that came back bloody.
How did nobody in the Order go: fine, we want the kid detached, so handle the obvious problem first. The kid had more midichlorians than fucking Yoda, and they left his mother on a sand planet with a slave collar in her past like it was someone else's responsibility.
Aavruun slowed near a wall niche where younglings left messages—small slips, hand-scratched notes, training meet-ups, dumb jokes. He stared at the empty space for a second, already picturing the note he'd write. Something blunt. Something that made an adult actually move.
Go get the chosen one's mom.
Aavruun's hand lifted a few inches.
Then the system hit him.
Aavruun's vision caught with that familiar overlay, clean text snapping into place like it owned the inside of his skull.
SYSTEM NOTICE — CAUSALITY RESTRICTION ACTIVE
Host: Aavruun
You do not get to warn anyone about the following, directly or indirectly:
• Anakin Skywalker's fall
• Chancellor Palpatine's identity as a Sith Lord
• Order 66 and the Jedi purge
This includes "helpful hints," coded messages, vague warnings, emotional signaling, leading questions, and "accidental" conversations that somehow land in the right place. Nice try.
Enforcement method: automatic mute.
Any thoughts, intent, or emotional spikes tied to these subjects get blocked at the source. Observers receive nothing. Not a ripple. Not a gut feeling. Not a "something feels off."
Jedi around you will sense a blank. The Force around you will carry a blank. The Father, the Son, and the Daughter would sense a blank.
Scope extension — HISTORY BYPASS
You also do not get to avoid these outcomes by altering the path. That includes actions meant to prevent key triggers—such as intervening with Anakin's mother or trying to "fix" the situation early to change what follows.
Accidental thoughts happen. The system accounts for that. They get muted. You keep walking. Everyone else keeps breathing.
Defiance clause:
If you attempt a deliberate breach—if you force it—you die.
Failure mode: catastrophic internal hemorrhage. Bleeding from seven orifices. Slow enough to understand what you did.
Restriction remains active until Order 66 is issued.
The overlay snapped out.
Aavruun's hand lowered, and the corridor's quiet returned like it had been there the whole time.
The thought barely finished forming before the overlay snapped across Aavruun's vision—clean text, tight spacing, the same cold timing the system always used.
Aavruun pushed a quick pulse down the Doppelganger link. Krawruuk answered with the same hit of recognition, the same tight edge in the back of the mind. He got it too.
The warning was simple.
Aavruun couldn't warn anyone about Anakin Skywalker's fall, Chancellor Palpatine's hidden identity as a Sith Lord, or Order 66. Anything that pointed at those outcomes hit the same wall. Unintentional thoughts got muted. Deliberate intent got him killed. Simple enough to understand.
The system stacked one more rule on top: he couldn't go out of his way to alter the timeline around it either. Saving Anakin's mother counted. Nudging events so the path changed counted. All of it sat in the same locked box.
"So, Anakin," Aavruun thought, and he actually did shrug in his own head, "guess your mother is going to die."
He'd tried to think his way around it for about two seconds and felt the mute clamp down. He let it go. Annoying. Clean. Final. Nothing he could do about it.
And honestly? He didn't even want to stop the war. He wanted the fight.
That didn't mean he was going to walk into Order 66 blind. The warning didn't say he couldn't prepare. It didn't say he couldn't build habits, position himself, stack advantages, shape the people around him. If he needed people to follow him when it mattered, he just had to make them do it without needing an explanation.
He could do that.
Aavruun's mouth pulled into a grin before he bothered hiding it. The challenge sounded fun.
Fighting Darth Vader sounded kind of fun too.