‘There will be casualties’: Author Claudia Gray teases The Fallen Star with interview and new excerpt

With one more excerpt from The Fallen Star, Star Wars is getting us ready for even more action, epicness and heartbreak as The High Republic wraps up its first phase of new literature. And author Claudia Gray teased the “deadly serious” crises to come in the next adult High Republic novel in a recent interview with i09.

“I’m not going to lie: there will be casualties,” Gray told i09.

Gray also said that while she “loves” causing readers pain, she reiterated that enjoyment comes not from a place of cruelty but one that hopes “readers will be deeply involved with (the writers’) characters, and because these are the events The High Republic has been leading up to for a while, and the stakes have to be that high.”

In the latest excerpt from The Fallen Star, we get a taste of those high stakes as Jedi Master Indeera Stokes experiences a terrifying hallucination of being cut off from the Force while moving through a storage area on Starlight Beacon.

"“The Force was not speaking to her here. There was the faintest…call it a whisper…proof that she hadn’t lost her mind, that the Force continued ever on, as it must. But for the first time since she was youngling, Indeera had trouble connecting herself to the Force.”"

The excerpt ends with Indeera with eyes full of tears and pain with the Force “gone, gone forever, and she had not known it was possible to feel so frightened, so alone.”

Read the full excerpt through Gizmodo.

The Fallen Star picks up months after the events Cavan Scott’s The Rising Storm — where the Eye of the Nihil Marchion Ro teased the horrifying power of his recently uncovered secret weapon called the Leveler, which has the ability to wipe out the Jedi’s connections to the Force. The Leveler ended Jedi Master Loden Greatstorm’s life by turning him into stone and tormented Jedi Knights Keeve Trennis and Terec in The High Republic comics.

We still don’t know exactly what the Leveler is or what Marchion Ron plans to do with it, but we’re about to find out in The Fallen Star.

Star Wars: The High Republic: The Fallen Star releases Jan. 4, 2022.

Keep up to date with all things The High Republic and Star Wars books through Dork Side of the Force.