Nelani Dinn

"Jedi girl, you're not strong enough to save lives. You're not strong enough to sacrifice one to save many."

- Darth Vectivus

"This sweet, doctrinal Jedi is about to kick your teeth in!"

- Nelani to Lumiya

Nelani Dinn was a Force-sensitive human female, who became a Jedi Knight before being slain by her former mentor Jacen Solo in 40 ABY.

Biography
Nelani may have been a native of Lorrd, but little is known for sure about her early years, although it is known that she was trained in the use of the lightsaber by Jacen Solo around 33 ABY. At this time, Jacen was on his five-year journey away from the Jedi Order, and it is likely that Nelani was simply a Force-sensitive who he encountered on his travels, not yet a member of the Jedi Order. She was a shy girl, unable to pluck up the courage to express her feelings for Jacen, but his training regime&mdash;which apparently involved slicing live gundarks in half&mdash;helped her overcome her nervousness, as well as making her more proficient with the Jedi weapon.

Nelani subsequently trained formally as a Jedi, becoming a fully-fledged Knight shortly before the Second Corellian Insurrection broke out in 40 ABY. She was assigned to Lorrd, and was stationed there when Jacen Solo and his apprentice Ben Skywalker came to the planet while investigating the events at Toryaz Station. Nelani still harbored feelings for Jacen, but she found him impassive and hard to communicate with, and she became increasingly concerned by his questionable methods in preventing a bizarre series of violent threats from misguided members of the public who claimed to have been guided by Force ghosts.

Nelani was wary when a Force-sensitive woman named Brisha Syo came forward and told Jacen the nature of these disturbances. Her concern that they were being led into a trap only deepened when Brisha offered to take them to her home, an asteroid which she later identified as the former lair of a Sith named Darth Vectivus.

When Brisha revealed that a Sith Lord dwelt in the caverns beneath the asteroid's surface, Nelani nevertheless insisted on accompanying the others down into the depths, but the older woman telekinetically shoved her and Ben out of their mine cart, so that she could take Jacen deeper into the caverns without interference.

Brisha now revealed herself to be none other than Lady Lumiya, and attempted to subvert Jacen to the Dark Side, while Nelani and Ben did battle with the Force Phantoms, conjured by Lumiya to keep them at bay. It was at this point that the ghost of Darth Vectivus appeared to her and explained that each phantom she slew was connected with a living being who would somewhere die. Proclaiming that all she needed to do was cut him down in order to save the "lives of thousands", Vectivus offered Nelani his head. True to her Jedi training, Nelani refused to cut down the apparition, but when she reached the caverns where Lumiya and Jacen were, she was shocked to discover Lumiya urging Jacen to reject Jedi morality and embrace the ways of the Sith&mdash;all the more so because the Dark Lady's words were having an evident effect on him. She intervened in the discussion, but Jacen still seemed seduced by Lumiya's words, and although Nelani grew more convinced that she was manipulating him, she could find no trace of influence in the Force.

When Lumiya proposed that Jacen's mentor Vergere had also been a Sith, Nelani attempted to strike her down, but Lumiya countered with her lightwhip. They fought a brief duel, which ended when Jacen ignited his own blade and blocked Nelani's attack. Lumiya offered to surrender herself, but she also urged Jacen to look down the paths of the future which would result from her arrest. Every way he looked, he saw the Galactic Alliance continuing to fall apart, and each path invariably led to his murder of Luke Skywalker.

As he looked further into the Force, Jacen came to believe that the only way he could avoid killing his uncle was if he stopped Nelani from telling anyone what she had learned: and the only way to do that permanently was to kill her.

"Nelani, I'm sorry, you're a deflector that sends the future spinning into tragedy. And you're too young, too weak to understand this, to change it."

- Jacen Solo to Nelani before her murder

Distraught, the young Jedi girl fled into the caverns, pursued by Jacen. Close to despair and already injured by Lumiya, she was also less used to the asteroid's low gravity than him, and much less powerful in the Force. He caught her easily, cutting off her right leg at the thigh, disarmed her, and then killed her with a single thrust via lightsaber through the chest. Nelani could only stare into Jacen's eyes, as she died and disappeared from the Force.

After Nelani's death, Lumiya promised Jacen to give her body the proper rites due to a noble warrior. Jacen also distorted Ben's memory of the events on the asteroid. In the next few months, Ben, after witnessing Jacen's killing of Ailyn Vel, decided to investigate further into how Nelani truly died.

Behind the scenes
Nelani says that Jacen taught her lightsaber technique "seven years ago" before the events of Betrayal, set in 40 ABY. As noted above, would place their first meeting, and the time in which she was his pupil, during the five years which Jacen spent away from the Jedi Order between The Unifying Force and The Joiner King.

However, the date of "seven years ago" may have originated as a holdover from earlier drafts: as Aaron Allston has revealed in his blog, the novel was originally set in 37 ABY, and later revised. Working back from the earlier date, Jacen could have taught Nelani in the brief period between the end of the Yuuzhan Vong War and the start of his quest. At least one other trace of the revision of the dating survives in the published novel, when Zekk, who should be 32, is said at one point to be 29.

It is thus possible that this part of Nelani's backstory will be retconned at some future date, but as it stands, there is no direct evidence that the dating is a continuity error, and there seems to be nothing in canon to contradict the interpretation presented above, which is a simple juxtaposition of the dating evidence in the text and Jacen's situation at the time implied.

Appearances

 * Betrayal
 * Bloodlines