Marda Ro's journal

The journal, recorded by Marda Ro, the Evereni who founded the pirate group that would become the Nihil, comprised entries intended for her descendants. These entries detailed Ro's life after she abandoned the Path of the Open Hand cult in 382 BBY, as well as her quest to locate other members of her species in the following years. The first message recounted Ro's visit to the oldest settlement on the planet Dantooine around 381 BBY, where she questioned a human about other Evereni and recruited the Twi'lek Fori Nagor into her pirate band.

Another message gave an account of her activities in the time between leaving the Path and visiting Dantooine. A pair of entries recounted how Ro encountered a Jedi at a marketplace around 379 BBY, attacked him, and brought him to her starship, the Gaze Electric, where the Great Leveler, a Force-consuming beast, killed him. The latter of these two entries included a description of a conversation between Ro and her human assistant Alirya that occurred shortly after the Jedi's death.

The journal also included a recollection of a different conversation between Ro and her assistant concerning the purpose and future of the group that the Evereni had gathered. Other entries recounted Ro's visit to a bar on the planet Ryloth, where she encountered the Evereni "Isren," and an event in the Gaze's throne hall where Nagor presented a group of refugees captured during a raid to Ro. Another series of messages detailed the time Ro spent with the Evereni twins Vika and Velya Faer, a feast on the Gaze Electric during which Alirya died while trying to kill Vika, and a conversation between Ro and Velya after Ro had shot his sister to avenge Alirya. The journal also contained various messages from Ro intended for her descendants.

Marda Ro created the journal after she left the Path of the Open Hand in 382 BBY, and some entries were recorded after Alirya's death, which occurred no earlier than 379 BBY. Eventually, Marda's granddaughter, Shalla Ro, obtained the journal. By 252 BBY, Shalla had introduced her grandson, Marchion Ro, to the journal. As a child, Marchion listened to all the recordings but deemed them worthless.

By 228 BBY, Marchion stored the journal and other family records in a family storage room beneath the throne hall on the Gaze Electric. In that year, after discovering a husked crystal forest on the fifth moon of the planet Norisyn, Ro entered the storage room to determine if his predecessors had encountered anything similar and found the ghost of his great-great-grandmother awaiting him.

Unable to gain any insights from other family records, Ro played the recordings from his great-great-grandmother. Ro was reluctant to do so as he did not want to give voice to the journal, but he listened to what he considered to be his ancestor's ramblings about home, freedom, her hunt for other Evereni, and her gradual descent into violence. As he listened, Marchion noted that if he had found it useless as a child, the journal would be even more useless to him at that point. He eventually left the storage room without discovering any indication that his family had ever encountered anything like the husked forest.

Marda Ro's journal initially appeared in the short story "A Closed Fist Has No Claws," penned by Tessa Gratton and featured in the 2023 young-adult anthology The High Republic: Tales of Light and Life as part of the Star Wars: The High Republic multimedia project. "A Closed Fist Has No Claws" was structured as an epistolary collection of journal entries. The journal's existence as a recording within the universe was later confirmed in The High Republic: Temptation of the Force, a novel by Gratton released in 2024 as part of the multimedia project's Phase III.

In an interview, Gratton mentioned initially writing the story in third person due to the expectation for Star Wars books to be in that perspective; however, they concluded that it didn't suit the story. She wanted to include "gut punchers," which she considers the best Evereni moments, but the third person felt too detached and not raw enough for an Evereni narrative. Gratton stated that he was not sure what the reason for switching to second person was, but thinks that he decided that the story needed to be told by Marda Ro herself in the middle of a draft.

Gratton did consider including a scene in "A Closed Fist Has No Claws" where Marda recorded the story, but they "galaxy-brained" during the writing process, deleting the scene before rewriting it in its current published format. The author mentioned that one of her favorite things about Phase II of the multimedia project, where Gratton had wrote for Marda, was the ability to play with how slippery history can be and how what people later think happened can be different from what truly happened, going on to talk about how Marda was not a reliable source regarding her own history.

Gratton also revealed that he wanted to plant ideas in the story that he could reuse in Phase III in the event he got to write Marchion Ro, which he did in Temptation of the Force. In the novel, they established a connection between Marchion and the journal created by his great-great-grandmother. In a different interview, Gratton discussed that Marda's ghost, which Marchion sees in Temptation of the Force, may be in his head and could be based on what Marchion thinks his great-great-grandmother to have been—based on the contents of the journal and what he was told by his family.

Gratton also added that she does not think Marchion would be able to hear and see the apparition of Marda in a recognizable way without the journal to have taught him something about her. Additionally, they spoke about how Marchion revealing himself to the galaxy—an event depicted in Claudia Gray's 2022 Phase I novel The High Republic: The Fallen Star—was one of the reasons the importance of names was discussed in "A Closed Fist Has No Claws," thinking that the character's decision to do so was influenced by the contents of the journal despite Marchion himself likely not realizing it.