Today saw the release of the second issue in Dark Horse Comics’ Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear miniseries, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear #2 begins with young Jedi Knight Reth Silas and Padawan Amadeo Azzazzo in the Jedi Archives on Coruscant, continuing their research into the fabled Echo Stones. After recapping the tale of Darth Ravi from the previous issue, Reath launches into the next story, this time concerning a Jedi Master from a century earlier named Barnabas Vim (who first appeared via hologram in Claudia Gray’s Star Wars: The High Republic – Quest of the Jedi one-shot). It seems Vim was after the Echo Stones as well– he and his apprentice Vix Fonnick had destroyed one and spread its shards across the galaxy to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands, and then Barnabas follows a lead to a second stone in the possession of another Jedi called Tar’ak Borran on the planet Petris Major.
It takes Vim a while to track Borran down, traversing the planet’s various biomes, but when he does the Jedi is hesitant to give up the stone because of how much it has allowed him to help people. But the Echo Stone is also taking its toll on Tar’ak’s life, making him look sickly because of the energy it drains from him. So Barnabas agrees to help his friend use the stone one last time in order to stop a tidal wave from destroying an indigenous settlement– by raising an enormous land-built dam from the oceanside– in exchange for the dangerous artifact being handed over afterward. Vim takes the Echo Stone to planet X (seen throughout all three phases of The High Republic) following directions provided by Borran, and struggles to get one last message out to Vix as he passes through the barrier that surrounds the planet.
Back in the present, Reath wraps up his tale without a concrete ending, much to Amadeo’s frustration. But there’s a hint that others tried to follow in Barnabas Vim’s footsteps, and in the final splash page we see that the Jedi apparently did make it down to the surface of Planet X. Both of our protagonists hope they can one day track his path so they can make sense of the Echo Stones and the Nameless creatures that are controlled by them, with the ultimate goal of defeating the Nihil. I’m pretty into Echoes of Fear at this halfway point, as I always enjoy when characters explore the past and mythology of the Star Wars galaxy. My big question coming out of this issue is when exactly Barnabas Vim would have arrived on Planet X– whether it was before or after the events of The High Republic Phase II, when Marda Ro and company visited the planet– but I have a feeling writer George Mann and artists Vincenzo Federici and Juan Samu have much more up their sleeves in filling in the mythology of this mysterious location and the unwieldy powers that originate from there.
Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear #2 is available now wherever comic books are sold.