Recorded by Thorne, Scroll-Keeper of the Prime

  I write this record by the light of a single candle, my quill freshly cut, my ink still wet with the crush of beetle-black and berry gall. The stone of Ahch-To is cold beneath me, but the Force is a living fire, and I have learned that fire does not care about the comfort of those who tend it.

  I am Thorne. I am the Keeper of the First Scrolls, the one the Prime has trusted to capture what cannot be touched. It is a heavy commission. The Force moves through all living things like wind through a harp, and I am expected to write down the music. I do my best. I always do my best.

  We came to this island from a thousand worlds. Some of us were drawn from palaces of glass; others were pulled from the blood-soaked mud of wars we had not chosen. What united us was not origin or station but the hum in the blood, the thing that made stones rise and fevers break and the dying draw one more breath when logic said there were none left to draw. We followed that hum here, to the high cliffs of Ahch-To, to the First Temple, where the sea crashes against the rock as if reminding us that some things are older than our names for them.

  We called ourselves the Prime. It was not a title of arrogance but of order. Someone had to go first. Someone had to press the first characters into the vellum so that those who came after would know where they stood.

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  Our mission was simple, and I record it here as it was given to us, without revision: find those who whisper to the wind and move the stone. Find the ones the world calls strange, the ones whose hands glow in the dark and whose grief moves furniture. Bring them to the sacred peaks. Teach them the song of the stars.

  We believed, in those early years, that love was not a weakness of this work but its foundation. I recorded marriages in these scrolls. I documented the laughter of children playing in the tide pools below the temple walls. Master Morvin himself told us that to feel deeply was to touch the Force, that the two were not separate currents but one and the same river. I wrote that down too. I wrote it down in large, careful letters because it seemed to me the most important thing any of us had said.

  I think of my wife, Shebi, and my daughter, Lindy, when I need to move great stones. The love I carry for them does not cloud my purpose. It sharpens it. It reminds me what the light is for.

  We were a family of light in those days. We traveled from the Core to the Rim with open hands and open records. We gathered the gifted and we brought them here, and we taught them what we knew, and we did not yet know how much we did not know.

  The Force, in those years, felt like a wild and uncharted sea. We were sailors who had only just built our first boats. The horizon was magnificent. The water was clear. And on the day I dipped my quill to begin a new entry, I looked up from my vellum to see a gilded ship descending through the clouds from the direction of the Core Worlds.

  I prepared a fresh line at the top of a clean page. I wrote: Arrived today, one new seeker, bearing the crest of Misith.

  I did not know, as I pressed that name into the vellum, that I was holding the very instrument that would one day have to strike it from history forever.