Ahsoka Tano's white lightsabers

In the years before the Battle of Yavin, Ahsoka Tano used two white lightsabers as her personal weapons. The lightsabers, which had white blades and curved hilts, replaced the lightsabers she used before leaving the Jedi Order during the Clone Wars, which Tano had abandoned in order to fake her death to the Galactic Empire after the Siege of Mandalore.
Tano obtained the kyber crystals used in these lightsabers one year after the end of the Clone Wars, retrieving them from the lightsaber of the Sixth Brother, an Inquisitor she had killed during the Imperial occupation of Raada. Though the crystals originally emitted a red blade, she purified them with the Force, turning them white. The hilts of the lightsabers were originally created from pieces of scrap metal that Tano had acquired over the year since the fall of the Republic, but were later modified to be more functional and decorative.
She first used the lightsabers in battle on Raada just after she had constructed them, rescuing her friend Kaeden Larte and covering the escape of the population of Raada onto arriving evacuation ships. Later, after introducing herself to the Spectres rebel group and Phoenix Cell, Tano fought various Inquisitors with the weapons, before duelling former Sith Lord Maul and her former master Darth Vader on Malachor. After the events on the Sith world, Ahsoka Tano continued to carry her two lightsabers throughout the Galactic Civil War and beyond.
==Description==
Ahsoka Tano's second pair of lightsabers were both curved-hilt lightsabers with a rectangular profile, although upon their initial construction, the hilts were much rougher due to having been assembled in a hurry in the middle of battle out of pieces of scrap metal. As with her original pair of lightsabers, they consisted of one regular saber and a shoto lightsaber. The blades were white, powered by two kyber crystals that Tano had retrieved from the double-bladed lightsaber of the Imperial Inquisitor known as the Sixth Brother. She purified them of the dark side taint they had been imbued with via bleeding before assembling her lightsabers, initially using various mechanical components she had picked up on her journeys and some specialized components she recovered from the Sixth Brother's lightsaber. Tano believed the kyber crystals had initially been looted from the Jedi Temple after the downfall of the Jedi Order.
==History==
===Building new weapons===
Ahsoka Tano had grown up in the Jedi Order and, during her time as a youngling and Padawan before and during the Clone Wars, constructed two lightsabers.Star Wars: The Clone Wars film However, after being framed for treason by her former friend Barriss Offee, leading to her trial and near-execution, Tano lost faith in the Order and left, leaving her weapons behind. Late in the war, after joining up with Mandalorian warrior Bo-Katan Kryze and her Nite Owls, Tano received her lightsabers back from her former master Anakin Skywalker upon temporarily rejoining the Republic military to lead forces in the Siege of Mandalore. After winning the Siege and capturing the renegade Sith Lord Maul, Tano and Clone Commander Rex's journey back to Coruscant with their prisoner was disrupted by Darth Sidious' issuance of Order 66, which initiated the Great Jedi Purge. After freeing Maul as a distraction for the attacking clone troopers, Tano ambushed Rex and had his control chip removed. However, Maul's subsequent destruction of the hyperdrive of the Tribunal,Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Character Encyclopedia - Join the Battle! the Venator-class Star Destroyer they were traveling on, caused the stricken starship to crash on a moon, with only Tano, Rex and Maul making it off beforehand. Afterwards, Tano abandoned her lightsabers by the graves she and Rex had dug for the clones who died in the crash to fake her death, before she and Rex parted ways to go into hiding.
Tano spent the next year in hiding on the planet Thabeska, working as a mechanic for the Fardi clan. After fleeing the planet on the first Empire Day, Tano, under the alias "Ashla," wound up on the remote farming moon Raada. As she befriended various locals, including sisters Kaeden and Miara Larte, Tano began to collect various mechanical bits and pieces, not quite sure why she was doing so. After the Empire arrived on Raada, Tano began to organize a resistance, but was forced to leave with her friends in hiding after exposing herself as a Force-user to rescue them from a botched plot cooked up by the farmer Hoban behind Tano's back. Tano returned to Thabeska briefly, but was eventually contacted by agents of Senator Bail Organa, who had noticed a pattern of good deeds being done in the area and suspected a Jedi (or former Jedi) might be in the area and sought to recruit her for his burgeoning rebellion. After joining Organa, and learning that a Force-using agent of the Empire — an Inquisitor called the Sixth Brother — had been sent to Raada and was holding Kaeden hostage, Tano decided to build herself new lightsabers in earnest, having already realized what the components she had been collecting would fit together to make.
Needing new kyber crystals, Tano traveled to the sacred Unknown Regions planet of Ilum, where the Jedi had harvested their kyber crystals for millennia. However, she found that the Empire had begun strip-mining the planet, and was forced to hide further out in the system so she would not be spotted. Meditating into the Force to look for where she might find new crystals, Tano heard a song that pointed her back to Raada. Having arranged for Organa to send aid to evacuate the moon's population, Tano returned there, finding Miara, who had been in hiding after the Inquisitor had attacked the caves where she, her sister and their surviving friends had been sheltering, with her as the only survivor after Kaeden's capture. Miara was sent to begin arranging the evacuation, while Tano followed the song of her crystals to a confrontation with the Sixth Brother. Despite being unarmed, Tano easily defeated the unprepared Inquisitor, killing him by accident when she pulled on the crystals in his double-bladed spinning lightsaber with the Force and caused the weapon to explode.
Tano took the kyber crystals housed within the deceased Inquisitor's lightsaber, which had been calling out to her. She noted that the crystal had been turned red through the practice known as bleeding. Realizing that the crystals were meant to be hers, she purified them back to the light side of the Force, the process turning the crystals a pure white. Tano then assembled herself two new lightsabers from the components she had collected, as well as the specialized crystal mountings from the Inquisitor's lightsaber. She noted that the hilts were rather rough, but had no time to make them more functional. Assisting in the evacuation of Raada, Tano leapt into battle with her new weapons, rescuing Kaeden from where she had been imprisoned and covering the locals' retreat into the evacuation ships sent by Organa. Afterwards, during a meeting on the Tantive III, Tano showed the Senator her new weapons, before agreeing to take up the position of Fulcrum in order to improve the rebels' communications.
===Fulcrum===
Over the years that followed, Tano rebuilt the lightsabers' hilts to make them more functional and decorative, with new curved hilts and her recently acquired white blades. Fifteen years after the rise of the Empire, Tano met the rebel group known as the Spectres, who included Jedi Padawan Kanan Jarrus and his apprentice Ezra Bridger. Tano used her weapons to give Bridger a combat lesson. During a mission to rescue a contact, Ahsoka and Sabine Wren traversed a submerged freighter that had crashed on the ocean world Quila. Tano used her lightsabers to cut through several pieces of large debris, giving her and Sabine a path through the ship. Later, during a mission to rescue Force-sensitive infants from the Empire, Tano fought Inquisitors Fifth Brother and Seventh Sister in Hammertown on Takobo, defeating them easily but sparing their lives as she was covering Jarrus and Bridger's escape with the two children, Alora and Pypey, as well as Pypey's mother Oora.
Sometime after, Tano accompanied Bridger and Jarrus to the Lothal Jedi Temple. Inside the temple, Ahsoka experienced a Force vision while meditating. The vision, of Anakin, expressed anger at Ahsoka's departure from the order, calling her selfish and accusing her of abandoning him. He asked if Ahsoka knew what he had become, changing into the form of Darth Vader. Refusing to accept the truth, Ahsoka lashed out with her primary lightsaber, hoping to destroy the vision with tears in her eyes. Tano was subsequently left alone in the dark to grapple with the revelation.
After the visit to the Lothal Jedi Temple, on the advice of Jedi Grand Master Yoda, Tano, Jarrus, and Bridger traveled to the forbidden planet of Malachor searching for answers on how to destroy the Sith. There, they encountered an Inquisitor who had been searching for Maul, who Tano had last seen during her escape from Order 66, and who had been stranded in the ruins of the Malachor Sith Temple for some time. When the Eighth Brother summoned backup, Tano and Jarrus reluctantly teamed up with Maul in order to fight the three Inquisitors. However, after Maul's inevitable turn against the Jedi party, Tano declined a rematch, instead tasking the injured Jarrus with dealing with him as she could sense the approach of a greater threat: Darth Vader.
Tano arrived to fight Vader just in time to save Bridger's life, engaging in a fierce battle with the Sith Lord. Vader eventually knocked her off the top of the temple before returning to deal with the two Jedi, but Tano recovered and ambushed him from behind, cutting open part of his helmet to reveal his right eye. As the two resumed their fight, Jarrus and Bridger escaped in the Phantom before the Sith Temple exploded. A few years later, Bridger entered a portal to the timeless World Between Worlds from the Lothal Jedi Temple and discovered a portal through which he saw Tano's continued fight with Vader. Tano was being forced back, beginning to lose her ground in the duel, so Bridger pulled her into the timeless Force realm just before the destruction of the temple.
After spending some time in the World Between Worlds, Tano and Bridger were forced to retreat after being confronted by Sith alchemy cast through another portal by the Emperor, Tano using her lightsabers to break it off the fiery energy from pulling Bridger to make him coming through the portal as she and Bridger fled. Separating, they headed back through the portals from which they had come, with Tano promising to find Bridger again someday. Back on Malachor, Tano headed beneathUltimate Star Wars, New Edition the ruins of the Sith Temple and embarked on a spiritual journey that changed the course of her life before making her way off-world. Years later still, in the aftermath of the Galactic Civil War, Tano continued carrying her blades. While traveling with Professor Huyang, Tano also began training Bridger's friend Sabine Wren as her apprentice, but their relationship ended on bad terms.
===Hunting the Grand Admiral===
In 9 ABY, Tano was still using her white lightsabers while searching for Grand Admiral Mitth'raw'nuruodo "Thrawn." Having learned that a former Nightsister witch, Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth, was a servant of the Grand Admiral, Tano traveled to the forested planet Corvus. She became a threat to Elsbeth's rule of the city of Calodan and used her lightsabers to defeat Elsbeth's scout guards. The following day, after mistaking him for an enemy and attacking him with her white sabers, Ahsoka gained the help of Din Djarin, and she was able to infiltrate the magistrate's sanctuary. Armed with a spear of pure beskar, Elsbeth engaged Tano in combat, and even managed to knock one of her lightsabers into a pond. Tano, left with only her shoto, still gained the upper hand and disarmed Elsbeth, and demanded the whereabouts of Grand Admiral Thrawn. In defeating Elsbeth, Ahsoka ended the magistrate's rule of Calodan, and set free its oppressed villagers, but Elsbeth was later freed from New Republic custody by two hired mercenaries, former Jedi Baylan Skoll and his apprentice, Shin Hati.
Tano continued to wield her lightsabers as she reunited with Wren and continued her search for Thrawn with Huyang and her Padawan. In that time, Tano used her lightsabers against Elsbeth's HK-87 assassin droids and scout guards, the former Inquisitor Marrok, and Skoll. In the end, Tano and Wren would discover Thrawn and Bridger on the extragalactic planet Peridea, where Tano engaged in a second duel against Skoll and, together with Bridger and Wren, fought Thrawn's Night Troopers in an effort to prevent his escape from Peridea. In that battle, the Night Troopers were slain but risen from the dead by Thrawn's allies, the Nightsisters known as the Great Mothers, which left the Night Troopers able to rise after lightsaber strikes or deflected blaster bolts. Tano also fought and killed a Blade of Talzin-wielding Elsbeth, whom had been formally welcomed into the Nightsister order by the Mothers, although her shoto lightsaber was sliced in half and destroyed during the duel. While Bridger was able to escape back to the galaxy about Thrawn's Star Destroyer Chimaera, Tano, Wren, and Huyang were left stranded on Peridea.
==Behind the scenes==
Ahsoka's white lightsabers first appeared in the TV episode "Fire Across the Galaxy," the season one finale for Star Wars Rebels. According to Dave Filoni, one of the show's creators, the lightsaber blades are white to reflect her non-affiliation with the Jedi or Sith. During production of The Mandalorian television series, property master Josh Roth noticed that Tano's lightsabers kept getting bigger because of the batteries, receivers, and wireless gak they put inside them. Director Filoni said the lightsabers could not look like that, so they ended up being powered by an external battery.
==Appearances==
===Non-canon appearances===
*LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens 
*LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga 
==Sources==
==Notes and references==
Category:White lightsabers