'Rise of Skywalker' concept art may reveal fate of Luke's green lightsaber

January has been a weirdly reflective, “what might have been” kind of month for Star Wars fans. We learned about the (probably legit) Colin Trevorrow draft version of Episode IX, known as Duel of the Fates. We heard a lot about how haphazardly thrown together The Rise of Skywalker actually was from the mouths of the people who made it. The latest intriguing morsel of news from a galaxy far, far away comes in the form of photographs of what appears to be the Korean edition of the forthcoming The Art of the Rise of Skywalker book. In one of the images, Rey appears to be holding a green lightsaber. Now, where might she have gotten that?

The Art of the Rise of Skywalker won’t be out here until March. Lucasfilm did this before with The Art of the Last Jedi, keeping the book out of production in the months ahead of the theatrical release in order to avoid spoilers. That didn’t seem to work so well for *Rise of Skywalker; even the Burger King marketing team knew what happened weeks before it came out.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in this Twitter thread, which we won’t embed here lest we incur the wrath of the Mouse House. But there’s one image we need to talk about specifically, an image of Rey holding a green blade while Force-choking Kylo, who hangs in mid-air as his hands claw desperately at his throat.

There’s a few possibilities for how Rey managed to get hold of this blade in the early iterations of The Rise of Skywalker. The most obvious option is that she got it from Ahch-To, where the island’s caretakers had been looking after it for Luke. The last time we saw him use his Return of the Jedi saber was in the flashback to his time training Ben Solo. Given all the bad stuff that happened after that — the destruction of his temple, his nephew turning evil — it makes sense that poor Luke would have just chucked it in a drawer.

It’s also possible that this green blade isn’t Luke’s at all, but Leia’s. After all, the Princess-turned-General does give Rey her old training blade. Rey later gives this to Ben, who uses it to defeat the Knights of Ren. In the Dark Empire comics, Leia used a green blade.

While the green saber in the Rise of Skywalker concept art could have belonged to either Luke or Leia, it seems strange that the final version of the movie didn’t include it. The only explanation we could think of is that Rey just had too many lightsabers, and the filmmakers thought viewers would be confused. After all, in the existing version, we see her wielding the red dual-blade as Dark Rey, along with the two Skywalker blues and her own yellow-gold blade at the end. Adding old greeny to the mix would have made four.

But really, how could anyone think there’s such a thing as too many lightsabers?! It’s a shame this cool little throwback to Return of the Jedi didn’t make the cut. Maybe we’ll find out why when The Art of the Rise of Skywalker officially releases.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is in theaters now.