Star wars the old republic books
Aryn Leneer, too, is wrestling with the morality and common sense of agreeing to form a truce with the Sith. In addition, he struggles to balance his cult’s tenets of burning rage and cold malice with the love he feels for Eleena, the devoted Twi’lek he rescued years earlier from a cruel slavery. Malgus, a powerful Sith lord, has to deal with what seem like soft intentions from his Darth superiors, who are making a bid for peace with, instead of all-out destruction of the light side users of the Force. I admire Kemp for choosing character backgrounds that set them apart and give them each a unique variation of inner conflict. Something that has really stuck in my mind about this story is not the events themselves, but the characters that Kemp introduces and develops throughout. Though the sacking, sending tidal waves of shock and grief across worlds to the Jedi delegates, do not stop the peace talks, they do eradicate all thoughts of peace for one Jedi on Alderaan: Aryn Leneer, the one-time apprentice of a Jedi who was gutted and murdered by Malgus in his attack of the Temple. With the Jedi presence on the capital world all but destroyed, the Sith are able to conquer the planet. But the talks are partially a distraction unbeknownst to the Jedi gathered there, a party of Sith led by Darth Malgus and his servant/lover Eleena, explode into the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and kill all they find there. The Sith-controlled Empire and the Jedi-protected Republic have been at war but in a turn of events that is almost too good to be true, representatives from both the Sith and the Jedi have agreed to meet on Alderaan to discuss the possibility and terms of peace. The story takes place in a time when the galaxy is as it always seems to be: in flux between two powers. And by that, I mean that in the framework of the Old Republic’s timeline, the story mattered, but only in such a way that it made its mark on the former (and myself) without ending in an epic sacrifice or a dramatic explosion. Kemp’s writing style, combined with the weightlessness of reading a story that can hold its own within official canon, and still effect the present of its timeline in a significant, if subtle way, made the reading of Deceived light but still important. Though the future of the Old Republic stories and their status in the official Star Wars canon universe is uncertain, Deceived was no less enjoyable for that fact indeed, reading a novel set in the Old Republic time period (which takes place around three to four thousand years before the Battle of Yavin in A New Hope), is for me almost more enjoyable because of its distance from events that have already been accepted as canon. Kemp makes the second book in the Old Republic saga that I’ve ever read (following Fatal Alliance by Drew Karpshyn).