LUKE would have melted into the night but for the flaming torch he held. It lit his way up the cliff to the giant tree, where he would do what he should have done long before.

Before he entered the trunk, he felt a presence from the past appear behind him. “Master Yoda,” Luke said.

Small and green, with pointy ears, playful eyes, and wisps of white hair, the wizened old goblin leaned on a walking stick and grinned. “Young Skywalker,” he croaked, as if decades hadn’t passed since he’d last seen Luke on Dagobah.

Luke knew such time didn’t amount to much in Yoda’s lifespan, but to Luke it seemed like an eternity. And during that eternity Luke had come to a grim realization. Yoda and Obi-Wan might have forged him into a weapon to fight the Emperor and Darth Vader, yet they had failed to equip him with the knowledge to stamp out the darkness for good. Their belief in the return of the Jedi had led Luke to err in his teaching and produce another Darth Vader in Kylo Ren.

“I’m ending all of this. I’m going to burn it down. Don’t try to stop me,” Luke said, holding his torch high.

Yoda didn’t try anything. He shuffled aside, putting up no defense at all.

Luke stepped toward the tree, grappling with what he was about to do. A single lick of flame would burn down millennia of scholarship. The history of the Jedi, their secret lore and ancient wisdom, would be gone. Not because some evil emperor or dark lord had destroyed them, but because he, Luke Skywalker, had decided such knowledge was best not learned.

He had been preparing himself to do this for years. Yet now he couldn’t.

Yoda snuffed in annoyance, just as he had on Dagobah when Luke failed one of his lessons. He lifted a gnarled finger toward the tree. Lightning shot forth and hit the trunk to do what Luke could not.

The library began to burn.

Guilt suddenly seized Luke’s heart. What had his old master done? He dropped his torch and tried to smother the fire with his robes while Yoda cackled. “Yee-hee-hee—ending this all I am—ho-ho-ho-ho! Oh, Skywalker, missed you I have!”

Luke rushed toward the hollow in a vain effort to salvage what he could. But the fire roared at him, preventing him from entering.

He retreated from the blaze. There was nothing he could do. And if Yoda had permitted it, perhaps Luke hadn’t been so wrong in his decision after all. “So it is time, for the Jedi Order to end.”

“Time it is,” Yoda said, “for you to look past a shelf of old books.”

“But the sacred texts…” Branches fell from the tree and the fire blazed like a funeral pyre, consuming everything within. Luke hadn’t expected to regret the library’s loss, but regret it he did.

“Read them have you? Page-turners they were not,” Yoda said.

Luke peered down at the diminutive creature. Was he truly the ghost of the Jedi Master who had once led the Council and gone into hiding to save the Order? Or was he just a figment of Luke’s imagination?

“Skywalker, Skywalker,” Yoda said with a heavy sigh, “still looking to the horizon. Never here. Never now. The need in front of your nose.” He dinged his walking stick on the bridge of Luke’s nose. “Wisdom the books held, and goodness the Jedi Order has, but these are not what the girl Rey needed. Needed a master, she did.”

Luke was loath to admit it, but the tiny Jedi Master had a point. Luke had been so stubborn—so set in his ways about ending the Jedi for good—that he hadn’t allowed himself to become a mentor to her like Yoda had been to him.

“The Jedi failed. I…failed, Master Yoda,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment. “I was weak. Unwise. I can’t be what she needs me to be.”

“Heeded my words not, did you? ‘Pass on what you have learned,’” Yoda said, repeating the words he had uttered on his deathbed. “Wisdom, yes. But folly also. Strength and mastery, hmph, but weakness and failure—yes! Failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is. Learned this you have not.”

Yoda might as well have been talking about himself. Was the Jedi Order’s failure to stop the rise of the Empire why Yoda had fled to a swamp planet rather than return to confront the Emperor? If Yoda, with his talent in the Force, had led the fight from the outset, he could have reestablished the Jedi and saved the galaxy so much pain.

Yet Yoda had not incited more war. He had retreated in defeat. Wars not make one great, he’d told Luke when they’d first met. His exile had allowed the galaxy—in the guise of young Luke Skywalker—to come to him.

Luke had followed Yoda’s example by secluding himself on Ahch-To. He had accepted failure and defeat, but what he hadn’t accepted was the idea of forgiving himself. He’d made mistakes in teaching Ben Solo, yet that didn’t mean what he had taught was wrong, or even that Rey would follow in Ben’s path. Good teachers were not tyrants. They could not control how the students used the knowledge they were taught. Teachers could only pass on what they themselves had learned. For hadn’t Yoda taught him, despite knowing the sins of his father, Anakin Skywalker? The Jedi Master had never given up on the hope that every student, no matter their background, could apply what they learned to bring light into the universe.

“We are what they grow beyond.” Nine centuries of wrinkles furrowed Yoda’s brow. “That is the true burden of all masters.”

The heat from the flames scorched Luke’s skin, but he did not move away. When the morning came and the fires had died, Luke watched the smoke curl and vanish from the husk of the tree.

He stood alone.