Vernestra Rwoh – ‘Star Wars’ Character Spotlight
Welcome to our Star Wars Character Spotlight, where we take the opportunity to highlight the supporting and tertiary characters that pop up across the various different Star Wars eras who deserve a bit of love. This week, we’ll be looking at Vernestra Rwoh before she makes her live action debut on The Acolyte next week.
Vernestra Rwoh was a Mirialan Jedi during the time of the High Republic. A child prodigy, she was the padawan of famed Jedi Master Stellan Gios and became a Jedi Knight at 15 years old — for context, Obi-Wan Kenobi was 25 when he got knighted — she is also the only character in current Star Wars canon to wield a lightwhip. Despite her obvious talent, her youth and inexperience meant she was often unsure of herself and lacking confidence.
Fighting the Nihil and the Drengir
Though knighted at 15, it wasn’t until Vernestra turned 16 that she received her first assignment — protecting Avon Starros, a talented inventor and daughter of Hosnian Prime Senator Ghirra Starros. During the mission, she dreamed of a way to turn her purple lightsaber into a lightwhip, extending the blade so it could switch between the two modes. She would practice with the lightwhip in secret, afraid that her old master Stellan would not approve of her unorthodox modifications.
Vernestra and Avon travelled aboard a ship that was attacked by the Nihil, a group of ruthless pirates who were rapidly expanding across the Outer Rim. Their ship was transporting a delegation from Dalna on their way to treat with the Republic, and the Nihil sought to disrupt that process as it would reveal their hidden base on the planet. Vernestra saved many lives in the chaos as she led a small group to a maintenance shuttle, escaping the ship before it exploded. The shuttle crashed on the planet Wevo. She led a small group including Jedi padawan Imri Cantaros, whose master had been killed in the attack, through the jungle.
They eventually fought the Nihil, who had pursued them to the planet surface, and Vernestra was forced to stop Cantaros from falling to the dark side, using her lightwhip to prevent him from exacting revenge for the death of his master. They were stranded on Wevo for a few days before they were rescued by the Jedi.
Vernestra offered to take Cantaros on as her own padawan even though they were closer in age than most masters and padawans, hoping to offer him some guidance after the loss of his old master. The two of them helped defend Starlight Beacon — a huge Republic space station in the Outer Rim — when it was invaded by the Drengir, a dark-side plant species.
Attack on the Republic Fair
Vernestra Rwoh was investigating Nihil raiding patterns with her padawan when they learned that the pirates had attacked the Republic Fair on Valo, an event attended by the Supreme Chancellor. They headed to the planet immediately, joining her former Master Stellan Gios to help him fight off the Nihil raiders. The Nihil inflicted heavy losses on the Republic, with the chancellor heavily injured.
Vernestra still had a strong bond with her old master, with him later teasing her not to crash his ship during a future engagement with the Nihil. She was involved in a few combat engagements with the Nihil around the time of the Battle of Valo, including a trap set for one of their three leaders Pan Eyta. The trap was successful and resulted in the complete destruction of Pan Eyta’s forces and saved many lives at the Cyclor Shipyards, where many ships were built for the Republic.
In the aftermath of Valo, Vernestra joined her fellow Jedi in an attack on one of the Nihil’s largest bases on Grizal, dealing a significant blow to the pirates in retaliation to their attack on the Republic.
Frustration with the Jedi
After the Battle of Valo, Vernestra and her padawan were stationed on Starlight Beacon, which Rwoh found frustrating as she would rather be taking the fight to the Nihil. Her time there allowed for some contemplation though, and she reconnected with an old friend of hers by the name of Reath Silas. Reath was the same age as Vernestra but was jealous of her rapid ascension to Jedi Knight. Her padawan Cantaros used his empathic abilities to soothe Reath’s jealousy, which earned Vernestra’s strict disapproval as she felt it was manipulative.
Rwoh spent time talking with her padawan, trying to figure out the best way to help him control his abilities without manipulating people. She reassured him that his actions were not borne of the dark side, but that he needed to recognize clear boundaries and not be invasive of other people’s feelings.
Later that night, she dueled with her old friend Reath, confiding in him that despite her knighthood, she didn’t feel any more knowledgeable or wiser than she was when she was a padawan and worried that other Jedi knights and masters didn’t take her seriously because of her young age.
She also wondered if the Jedi should be actively trying to destroy the Nihil, who had become a galactic-level threat to the Republic, as while Jedi are not supposed to be warmongers, they would be saving many more by ending the Nihil threat. You wonder if she might have felt more at home during the Clone Wars.
She was soon assigned a mission to protect an arrogant nobleman from the Graf family on a business deal, and while she was frustrated that she wasn’t assigned on a mission to attack the Nihil, she didn’t have to wait long to encounter them again. Graf didn’t respect her, considering her a child rather than a Jedi, and unwittingly led them into a Nihil trap. Rwoh was lucky to survive the fight and was given a lead on the Nihil by the Graf matriarch.
This led her to the Gravity’s Heart, a ship containing the source of the Nihil’s hyperspace paths — an old Force-sensitive hyperspace prospector called Mari San Tekka, who the Nihil kept in a stasis tank to prolong her life and give them new hyperspace paths. Rwoh cut the hoses connected to the pod, mercifully letting San Tekka rest in peace while also eliminating one of the Nihil’s key assets.
A short time later, it was revealed that Avon Starros had been kidnapped by the Nihil. Vernestra Rwoh tracked her to the Nihil base on Dalna, managing to save her as well as the local population when a device was activated that caused mass earthquakes across the surface. Vernestra managed to evacuate everyone to Starlight Beacon.
The Fall of Starlight Beacon
Vernestra was working on the planet Eiram when the Nihil destroyed Starlight Beacon, which had orbited the planet and crashed to the surface. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lives were lost in the disaster, believed to include her padawan Imri Cantaros and possibly the Dalnan refugees whom she had saved. Desperate to hit back against the Nihil, Vernestra joined many missions fighting against them but they almost always ended in failure.
The Nihil’s Stormwall technology meant hyperspace travel into Nihil territory was all-but impossible without their path engines — they used routes previously created by Mari San Tekka — and Rwoh felt that the Jedi Order were ineffective in their attempts to fight the Nihil and protect innocents. No longer wishing to follow the orders of a Jedi Council she deemed useless, she decided to become a Wayseeker Jedi. Wayseekers were allowed to follow the will of the Force rather than the orders of the council (interestingly, the position no longer existed by the time of The Phantom Menace).
As a wayseeker, Vernestra travelled to Wild Space to meditate on her grief. The time spent there allowed her to regain her trust in herself and the Force. She intended to remain away from the rest of the Jedi Order for some time, but she was reunited with young Avon Starros with a mission she couldn’t turn down.
Her padawan Imri, who was believed to have perished in the attack on Starlight Beacon, was alive. This news served as a jumpstart for Vernestra to thrust herself back into the action. Ultimately, she found her padawan safe and sound leading a resistance movement against the Nihil. She took this as a sign he had completed his training and conquered the trials, and annointed him as a Jedi Knight.
She made her way back into Republic space to face the Jedi Council once again.
What next?
Vernestra Rwoh will definitely star in more High Republic novels as Phase 3 continues, but until those arrive we don’t have much more info on her life other than that she eventually attained the rank of Jedi Master and is set to make her live action debut in The Acolyte next week, along with her lightwhip.
She’ll be over a hundred years old in that series, and showrunner Leslye Headland has explained that she’s not the fun-loving adventurer that High Republic readers recognize from those early novels, skewing closer to the type of Jedi we know in the prequel trilogy and considered one of the most powerful Jedi during the series. However, despite her long life and the grief that she experienced in the High Republic stories, Headland claims that she is still “in love with the Force”.
“I’m just so excited for people to see her in this show because she is so different. She’s very rarely in the mission robes adventuring and dreaming. I think, as the show goes on, you’ll understand why. She has seen so much and she is so in-tune and in love with the Force. Here she’s much more of a high-ranking official. The other Jedi revere her. I’m just really excited for people to see her in this show and to see the performance.”
We’ll get to see more of Vernestra Rwoh next week when The Acolyte debuts on June 4.
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
