Last week saw the release of the third issue in Dark Horse Comics’ current miniseries Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear #3 begins in the Jedi Archives on Coruscant, where Jedi Knight Reath Silas and Padawan Amadeo Azzazzo are still looking into the history of the Echo Stones, in an effort to track down the Rod of Ages, which might help them control the Nihil’s deadly Force-eating creatures known as the Nameless. They are approached by Jedi Master Cohmac Vitus, who gives them some additional information about the fate of Barnabas Vim, and the two Jedi who sought to track him down decades after his disappearance. Most of the remainder of this issue is a flashback to Master Atticus Cale and his Padawan Jadia Brink, as they travel to the planet Varovia (newly introduced here), where the native species the Varovians have been divided in civil war since the arrival of the Rod of Ages. Cale reveals that this is also the last known stopping point of Vim before he vanished somewhere else in the galaxy.
When Atticus and Jadia arrive on Varovia, they find they are less than welcome, as the leader of one of the two factions suspects them of wanting to claim the rod’s power for themselves. They also learn more about the rod’s history and how it came to be brought to the planet by the Tolemites, an ancient species recently discovered and expounded upon in the young-adult novel Star Wars: The High Republic – Tears of the Nameless by George Mann, who also wrote this comic. So the two factions of Varovians (namely the “Prophets” and the “Seers”) have reached an unsteady stalemate in the wake of a generations-long war over whether they should use the rod to further their society’s standing in the galaxy. I’m a bit confused by this because the Republic Pathfinders accompanying the Jedi note that the planet had been described as “peaceful” only decades earlier by Barnabas Vim. “Clearly things have changed since then,” responds another Pathfinder, but it hasn’t been generations since then. I guess I’m a little confused about the timeline of Varovia, but regardless the Jedi convince the Seers to let them approach the sealed-off temple where the rod is held to try and decode the “arcane trickery” that is holding the enormous door shut.
Eventually they figure out how to get in, but upon approaching the rod Cale decides its powers are too much for even a Jedi to handle and that the door should be sealed off again– permanently this time. But from outside they hear the army of the Prophets approaching, and Atticus’s only choice is to activate the archaic security system protecting the rod, collapsing the entire structure down on top of it. Here’s where we get to another plot point that didn’t quite make sense to me– the Prophets assume that the Rod of Ages is destroyed by the cave’s destruction (as apparently was Cale’s intent) but when we cut back to the “present” of the story Reath, Amadeo, and Cohmac deduce that it was simply buried under the rubble… I suppose my question is why wouldn’t the Varovians have figured that out themselves? But outside of those few narrative nitpicks I am really enjoying this miniseries that delves further into the history of the galaxy and the origins of the Echo Stones. Next month will bring its conclusion, and maybe by then my minor quibbles with the story will have been addressed.
Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear #3 is available now wherever comic books are sold.