‘The High Republic: Trials of the Jedi’ Excerpt Shows Yoda Holding Back the Blight

Key takeaways:

• Entertainment Weekly just released our first full excerpt from the final book of The High Republic Initiative – Charles Soule’s Trials of the Jedi

• The excerpt features the first chapter of the novel as a young girl, Bree, races through the Jedi Temple to find Master Yoda who is currently holding back the mysterious Blight

• Check out a section of the excerpt below and read the full excerpt on EW!

Random House Worlds

CHAPTER ONE – THE JEDI TEMPLE:

Bree went down into the dark, to a place she was not sup­posed to be, as she had been told to do.

She was only nine years old, a member of the Jedi Order, on the older side of the youngest group of students being trained in the Jedi’s great temple on Coruscant—appropriately called younglings.

Bree descended another step, then paused to look back. Behind her, an arch of light awaited—the path back to the main levels of the Temple. She wanted to go back—to her friends, to her studies, to the sun, to the light.

But Bree had a job to do. She sighed, turned her eyes back to the stairs, and continued on her way.

The stairs were old. Everything in the Jedi Temple was old, but it didn’t look like it. Maintenance droids kept everything shining and clean. These steps were different. They were crumbled at their edges, with wisps of dust and dirt, even little dead bugs. Bree didn’t mind bugs. Her friend Toko was a different story, but Bree didn’t care so much. Creatures were creatures, big or small.

The staircase wound down, down, down, light provided by illumina­tion globes strung along the walls. Most of the time, Jedi didn’t need lights for something like this—they carried light with them—but the globes had been installed here when it became clear that this route would need to be used more frequently.

Is it getting hotter? Bree wondered.

She put her hand against the wall. Yes. She wasn’t imagining it. The wall wasn’t hot, not like a flame—more like a sun-warmed patch of stone in one of the Temple’s many terraces high above her. But there was no sun, not down here.

Bree pulled her hand away, frowning.

She continued down, moving faster, wanting to be done with this task.

They shouldn’t have made me do this, she thought. They’re all so much stronger and older than I am. I’m just a kid. They could have found another way.

But there was no other way. Bree was just a kid, that was true, but she had eyes, and she had ears. The grown Jedi were too busy with all the ter­rible crises that had landed upon their Order, one after the other. Jedi Knights were . . .

Dead, she thought. They’re dead, killed and eaten by the monsters. The Name­less.

Trials of the Jedi releases on June 17th and is available for pre-order now!