Via Starwars.com:

LEARN THE SURPRISING — AND IMPORTANT — CONNECTION BETWEEN THIS STAR WARS REBELS-ERA TALE AND THE FORCE AWAKENS.

Warning! If you haven’t read The Secret Academy, stop! Spoilers await!

More than a year ago, I started mapping out the last book in the four-part Servants of the Empire series, which followed Zare Leonis’ quest to find his missing sister.

By the time I’d reached The Secret Academy, Zare and Merei Spanjaf had discovered Dhara had been kidnapped as part of a secret Imperial project targeting Force-sensitive youths. They knew she was being held on the planet Arkanis, and Zare — undercover as an Imperial cadet — had transferred there from Lothal. But he didn’t know that his transfer had been approved by the Inquisitor, who hoped to discover his connection to Ezra Bridger’s crew of rebels.

For The Secret Academy, I knew I wanted to bring back the crew of the Ghost, whom Zare and Merei had helped in Rebel in the Ranks. I knew Beck Ollet — Zare and Merei’s friend who’d been arrested by stormtroopers in Edge of the Galaxy — would reappear to play a pivotal role in the story. And of course I knew Zare would find Dhara.

I also had some settings, themes, and key scenes clear in my head. I wanted Arkanis — a planet named but never seen in Legends — to be a gloomy, perpetually wet world, with an academy set in a crumbling estate from a Gothic novel. I wanted to explore scent as a trigger for memory, and have that become important at a critical moment. I wanted a courtroom scene where Zare denounced the Empire with a point-by-point indictment of everything it had done to his family, to Lothal and to the galaxy.

And I wanted to shock the reader with a fun scene I’d imagined way back in the first book: Zare would finally get into the tower where Dhara was held, only to run into Beck, who’d been brainwashed and would immediately reveal Zare as a traitor.

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