Celeste is an agent of the Covenant. The Covenant are Jedi who believe the Jedi Council is inept when it comes to chasing down the Sith. People who know about the video game, know that there is tension between the Jedi Council and Revan's group in this era who want to involve the Jedi against the Mandalorians. But there is this secret group among the Jedi, led by very powerful seers who can tell the future with astonishing accuracy, whose primary concern is the Sith. They think the Mandalorians invading the Republic is just a sideshow. The Sith are the real problem, and it was the Covenant having a vision about Zayne Carrick that started the series with him being a fugitive.
It is also revealed in "Vector" that the Covenant has another mission. The galaxy has produced plenty of Sith artifacts that have been handed down by people from the Golden Age of the Sith onward. Every so often, one of them will turn up. They don't want this to happen anymore. The Covenant doesn't want there to be old Sith Holocrons that people like Exar Kun can find and discover hidden secrets from the past.
Even though the Jedi order hunts this stuff down and locks it away, the Covenant thinks the Jedi aren't doing a great job of it. They have heaping gobs of money to be able to do this. The founder of the Covenant is part of the House of Draay. They have all these millions of millions of credits, so one of the things they have done is that they've established their own team of Jedi that are loyal to their cause and also off the Jedi record books. They are people who are presumed dead or otherwise have been made blanks in the system. The Covenant calls them their own Shadows. That is Celeste Morne is.
It's interesting that this sort of echoes Episode II, with Dooku operating off-the-grid because he thought it was right.
Everybody keeps asking when are your Covenant guys going to fall to the dark side? This raises the question: can you fall to the dark side if what you think you are doing is right? Of course, people have various answers for that. The story will certainly provide an answer for that in the end. This all goes back to Ben Kenobi saying that a lot of the truths we cling to depend on our point of view. There's a lot there, and that is Celeste's role in this. When we meet her, she is hunting down the artifact that brought Lucien and the other Covenant Masters -- Zayne's teachers -- to Taris in the first place.
This all ties into a lot of Taris history that we never went into before. We get into the Undercity, and the Rakghouls, and a lot of what lurks in the real estate there. We also have the Mandalorians invading the planet. This is like no invasion ever. Instead of an army taking over a city from east to west, the Mandalorians have over the course of the last year taken it over from the top to the bottom. Now, they're further down past the Lower City, and we see that they're also interested in the same thing that the Jedi are interested in the Undercity.
I was reading the outline for the subsequent parts of "Vector" in Knights of the Old Republic ... a subzero world of ice with horrible mutated monsters popping out from around the corner. I was getting a real John Carpenter vibe out of it. Was I imaging that?
Well, the covers are already out for those issues. We see that this is the world outside my window [in Wisconsin] right now: it's all ice. Hoth, I think, looks a lot like the Russian steppes under heaping gobs of snow. Whereas the major motif of Hoth is snow, with this planet that we're going to in "Vector", the major theme is ice. It's much more like Greenland: big sweeping ice sheets. Where you do see geological formations, they are stark, they are big, and they dominate the landscape. That allowed us to come up with a set piece that-- well, yeah, I think you got it. In it's own way it is isolated and remote and claustrophobic a;; at the same time.
The reason is that we weren't going to stay on Taris forever is that it's dark. What we wanted to do was absolutely the reverse. If you've been reading the series regularly, the last three issues have been spent in the lower city that's been all dark and drab tones (except for the things that have been on fire). There's this postindustrial nastiness all around: old factories and old buildings. Where we're going is going to be a complete 180 from where we've been. We're bringing the characters out into the daylight.
I think it's a really interesting story. I went ahead and wrote the next story after "Vector" completely, so that I could be absolutely sure that everything that happens in "Vector" really seriously does flow into the future. It is not the case where Zayne will just have a new costume at the end of it. What happens at the end of "Vector" really sets the stage for everything that happens in the third year of the series. That is really what has been the directive all the other writers have gotten. This will not be side-trip.
This has consequences.
If you're a regular reader of the series, this is not something that you can skip. You don't have to read the other chapters, but we think you'd enjoy it if you did.
