Obi-Wan lets Vader strike him down and somehow becomes more present in Luke’s life. Yoda fades away on Dagobah and still trains Luke afterward. By the sequels, we have whole choruses of Jedi voices speaking from somewhere beyond the living galaxy.
For years, we’ve heard the phrases — “becoming one with the Force,” the “Netherworld of the Force,” “luminous beings” — but we’ve never really seen what that afterlife actually looks like.
So where do Jedi actually go when they die? What happens to them on the other side of that fade-out? And what does the newest story with Luke and Kylo finally add to that picture?
What Star Wars Already Told Us About Jedi After Death
The movies and shows have been circling this idea for a long time, even if they never stop to explain it out loud.
Yoda tells Luke on Dagobah that “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” pushing the idea that a person’s real self isn’t the body at all, but whatever shines through the Force.
By the end of Revenge of the Sith, we get another layer. Yoda tells Obi-Wan that “an old friend” has “returned from the netherworld of the Force” and learned “the path to immortality” – Qui-Gon Jinn, who’s going to teach Obi-Wan how to keep existing after death. That line is our first clear pointer that there is some kind of place or state Jedi go to after they die, and that a few of them have figured out how to come back from it.
Reference material later gives that place a name: the Netherworld of the Force, also called the Mist-Beyond or the Garden Beyond. Wookieepedia sums it up as “the place the souls of every being and creature were thought to ascend to after their physical bodies died,” with a darker counterpart called Chaos for the truly damned.
Jump forward to the sequels, and we see the other end of that process. In The Rise of Skywalker, when Rey is lying on the ground on Exegol, she hears a whole chorus of Jedi speaking to her: Obi-Wan, Anakin, Yoda, Mace Windu, Ahsoka, Kanan, and more, many of whom never appeared as Force ghosts in life. Whatever this after-death state is, it clearly isn’t reserved for just the handful of Jedi who learned a special ritual on screen. Their voices are still there, still able to reach the living.
Legacy of Vader #10 Finally Lets Us See the Jedi Afterlife
Legacy of Vader #10 is set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Kylo Ren is already Supreme Leader, but he’s still stuck on Luke. Even after Crait, he can feel Luke’s presence in the Force and reads it as a kind of constant judgment he can’t escape.
Looking for a way to confront him directly, Kylo goes back to Vader’s castle on Mustafar and uses the Sith meditation chamber to push deeper into the Force than he ever has. He isn’t trying to “become one with the Force.” He just wants to find Luke and shut him up. Instead, he slips across a line he didn’t mean to cross.
On the other side, things don’t feel like a normal vision. Kylo is surrounded by points of light rather than solid bodies. There’s no blue ghost glow, no clear faces at first—just presences. His senses don’t quite know how to read what he’s seeing, because the people here aren’t anchored to matter anymore. It’s the same idea Yoda tried to explain to Luke on Dagobah, now drawn on the page: “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
The place itself isn’t just empty white space. Kylo finds himself near ancient stonework, an entrance built into a mountain or cliff that feels like a Force vergence—very much the kind of architecture we associate with Jedi sites and old temples. The comic doesn’t label it, but between the visuals and the way the scene is framed, it’s clear this is meant to be the Netherworld of the Force we’ve heard about since Revenge of the Sith.
Among the lights, one presence steps forward and chooses to take on a familiar shape. Luke appears—not as a hazy blue projection, but simply as Luke Skywalker, the way Ben remembers him. They talk face to face. Kylo rages, accuses him of abandoning Ben and choosing Rey, and tries to assert the same control he has in the physical world. Luke doesn’t budge.
Luke meets all of that fury the same way he did on Crait: calm, almost gentle, but with no give in it at all. He tells Kylo, in his own way, that there’s nothing here for “Kylo Ren” to destroy. Luke is part of the Force now. If Ben wants to swing at something, he’d have to strike at the Force itself—and that would take him down with everything else. The old power dynamic is gone. Kylo’s lightsaber, his rank, his armies, none of that matters in this place.
What Luke does focus on is the split he’s always seen in front of him. He makes it clear he isn’t talking to “Supreme Leader Kylo Ren.” He’s talking to Ben Solo, the person who is still capable of feeling the light strongly enough to end up here by accident. Luke tells him that Kylo means nothing to him, but Ben does, and that he’ll always be there for Ben. It’s not a big speech, just a simple reminder that the only reason this meeting is even possible is because Ben has never fully gone away.
For Kylo, the whole experience lands as another failure: he dove into the Force to hunt Luke, and instead he found a realm where Luke can’t be touched and where his own darkness doesn’t give him the control he expected. For us, it quietly confirms what the story has been hinting at for years. Luke is still himself inside the Force, moving in a real, structured “somewhere” beyond death, surrounded by other luminous beings. And if Ben Solo can stumble into that place while he’s still alive, it says something important about how the Jedi afterlife works—and about how hard the light keeps pulling at him, even at his worst.