FicWad

Darkness is the core of all being, and only weaklings or fools would deny that this is the absolute truth. Violent supersession is the way of all things, the natural progression of all things, and this is a truth that Darth Sidious embraces and embodies with every fiber of his being. He is well aware of the fact that every living thing is a murderer: the very design of nature is success by murder. One need look no further than the nearest garden and its greenery – each and every plant fighting to reach out and up, with murderous intent, to the sun, selfishly striving to stretch to ever greater heights and so banish all of its neighbors and rivals to increasing obscurity and the eventual inevitability of a slow death within its growing shadow – to see the truth of this. Life is always for the strongest. There is no true sympathy for the weak, for the slain, only admiration for the winner’s strength. Those who succeed in rising to the loftiest of heights are those who manage, by whatever means, to seize the most for themselves alone, and therefore win the greatest amount of admiration from – and, hence, the greatest amount of power over – others. Power is the key to life. And the Dark is key to power. The Sith have known and embraced this knowledge from the very beginning, ever since the first of their kind willingly tore the veil of naïveté away from his eyes with which the Jedi and their Light-loving ways had been blinding him. That first rebellion and its rich harvest – including freedom from the unnatural limitations of artificially created and imposed systems of morality – is, after all, progenitor of the seed that gave birth to the Dark Order of the Sith.

The line of supersession – and, thus, adherence to its earliest and truest of teachings – is unbroken, flowing from him all the way back to that first Dark father: the dissident Dark Kashi Mer Jedi, Xendor, who precipitated the Great Schism nearly 25,000 years ago by daring to teach his disciples that true power is achieved not through pensive meditation, as is and always has been taught by the peace-loving Jedi Masters, but rather through active emotion; who was banished from the Jedi Order for his teachings, as well as for using the Dark Side of the Force to reinforce his Jar’kai and Teräs Käsi techniques in combat; and who was therefore specifically targeted in the war that followed, between the cowardly hypocrites in the Jedi Order and Xendor and his followers, named by Xendor the Legions of Lettow. Although the war ended in defeat for the Legions of Lettow, following Xendor’s foul murder by those Light-loving fools and the accidental placing of his lover and second-in-command, Arden Lyn, within a state of Force-induced suspended animation by Awdrysta Pina – an incompetent Jedi Master whose attempt to slay Arden Lyn with a treacherous attack utilizing the Force-power of mortichro, which stops the victim’s heart, was converted by Lyn’s strength in the Force into an extreme form of morichro, a healing trance so deep that it has lasted now for well over 24,500 years. The attempt to murder Lyn killed Pina, and although Arden Lyn was left for dead by the Jedi – who in their conceit never even thought to check whether the Dark Jedi might have survived the infliction of Force energies powerful enough to have slain one of their own – Xendor’s loyal followers have always known that the Dark Jedi is only sleeping, and have been patiently waiting for her reawakening, so as to reap the rewards of her knowledge, ever since Awdrysta Pina’s attack.

However, given the choice to either willingly repent and renounce their adherence to the Dark Side and rejoin the Jedi Order or else be forcefully rehabilitated and then reabsorbed into the Order by the victorious Jedi anyway, following their defeat after the loss of first Xendor and then the leadership of Arden Lyn, the pitifully few remaining members of the Legions of Lettow – after reaffirming their devotion to Xendor’s teachings by secretly renaming themselves the Minions of Xendor – made a strategic decision to go underground, and allowed themselves to be taken back into the fold of the Order, all the while being careful to never reveal the true object of their allegiance. Watched over closely by the Order, their words and deeds and their pupils carefully scrutinized by the fearful Jedi for signs of slippage, of backsliding or of falling to the Dark Side, it had been necessary to wait until a time when the Order had grown so complacent that its members no longer feared the specter of Xendor. Although various Jedi who were taught (Master to Padawan apprentice or Knight to fellow Knight and Force-partner) by the direct descendants of the surviving Minions of Xendor afterwards occasionally tried to break free of the Jedi Order and its restrictions, it was not until thousands of years later, when the time was ripe for a Second Great Schism, that the Dark Jedi came out into the open again in force, beginning a new war with the Jedi Order by once again publicly adopting Xendor’s teachings regarding the Dark Side.

Although the forces ranged against one another in the Second Great Schism (named by the Jedi and their Republic the Hundred-Year Darkness) had proven to be much more evenly matched than in the First Great Schism, the Dark Jedi descendants of Xendor’s renamed Legions of Lettow had still eventually been treacherously defeated, after which the remainder of their army was banished by the forerunners of the Jedi High Council, the squeamish Jedi Assembly of Masters (too weak-willed to do what any fool would have understood was necessary to ensure total victory, by putting to death any and all survivors from the opposing side), and the Galactic Republic from known space, to the distant planet of Korriban, a desolate world inhabited by a relatively primitive people known as the Sith, within whom the Force flowed surprisingly strongly, allowing them to create their own brand of Dark power. Recognizing the situation for what is was – an opportunity to regain prestige and perhaps even win additional power to their side – the Dark Jedi descendants of the Minions of Xendor had made the best of the situation by using their training in the Force and their newly won mastery of the Dark Side to amaze the Sith and elevate themselves to god-like status on Korriban, becoming the rulers of the Sith people and eventually, through interbreeding and cultural integration, birthing the Dark Lord of the Sith, a title that was first bestowed upon the leader of the Sith Empire by a council of lesser Sith Lords and later altered to Darth to designate a the status of anyone who was a Sith Lord and practitioner of the Dark Side of the Force.

Thus, from Xendor and the descendants of the Minions of Xendor to Dark Lord of the Sith Naga Sadow, and the so-called fall of the Sith Empire with the Great Hyperspace War, the line is unbroken. And the line continues – occasionally interrupted, perhaps, but nevertheless quite intact – from Dark Lord Naga Sadow to the fallen Jedi Knight Freedon Nadd, whose spirit survived death to linger on at Dxun for hundreds of years and eventually corrupt another fallen Jedi, Exar Kun, who thereafter became a Dark Lord of the Sith and began the Great Sith War when he took as his apprentice yet another fallen Jedi. Although the Great Sith War (also known as the First Sith War and the Exar Kun War by the Jedi and their Republic) ended in disaster for the Sith, the line nevertheless continues, unbroken, from the remnants of the Sith Brotherhood who survived both the Great Sith War and the purge known as the Cleansing of the Nine Houses by fleeing from the Galactic Republic into the Unknown Regions and seeking sanctuary with the remnants of the original Sith Empire – long assumed by the Jedi to have been destroyed by their Republic and by infighting, in the aftermath of the Great Hyperspace War – as well as from the remnants of the original Sith Empire and the direct descendants of offspring of the Minions of Xendor to the so-called heroes of the Mandalorian War – that bloody conflict instigated by the ancient remains of the first Sith Empire, in the Unknown Regions – the fallen Jedi Revan and Malak, who founded a second Sith Empire and began the Second Sith War, later called the Jedi Civil War and, still later, the War of the Star Forge.

Under the combined might of Revan, the new Dark Lord of the Sith, his Dark apprentice, Darth Malak, numerous battle-hardened veterans of the Mandalorian War, and a host of Jedi converts, an invasion of the Galactic Republic was launched that almost succeeded in seeing the Jedi Order exterminated. And so the line extends through the combined might of legions of Sith and Dark Jedi under Revan and Malak to Darth Nihilus, Lord of Hunger, and Darth Sion, Lord of Pain, students of Revan’s former Jedi Master, Kreia, who had been reborn a Sith as Darth Traya, Lady of Betrayal, and the end of the Old Sith Wars with Revan’s betrayal of his Dark ways. In spite of Revan’s treachery (and its bloody aftermath, in the First and the Second Sith Civil War, following Malak’s defeat by Revan during the final battle of the Jedi Civil War and the attempt made by several of the surviving Dark Jedi who had originally followed and fought under the combined might of Darth Revan and Malak first to attempt to hold on to power by taking what they could from the remains of the first Sith Empire – the Empire founded by the descendants of the Minions of Xendor following the Second Great Schism – and then by trying to eliminate the resulting uneasy alliance formed by the triumvirate of Sith Lords who had risen to power over the remains of the first Sith Empire, including Darth Traya, Darth Nihilus, and Darth Sion), the line nevertheless progresses, intact, from the surviving remnants of that heinous betrayal to the successful corruption of yet another Jedi – the first of the Jedi Order’s so-called Lost Twenty – who became Darth Ruin and then spawned a new series of conflicts, the New Sith Wars (or the War of Light and Dark, alternatively also known as Light and Darkness War, as the Jedi taking part in the conflict would also often name the entire series of bloody and destructive conflicts, though their Republic eventually came to simply shudderingly refers to that period as the Republic Dark Age).

Darth Ruin’s New Sith Wars would last for a millennia, as his Brotherhood of Darkness conquered vast swathes of both Republic territory and worlds once ruled over by the first Sith Empire, establishing a New Sith Empire as they sought to create a new Dark Side Empire that could finally utterly triumph over the Jedi Order and succeed in establishing a rule over the entire galaxy that would last forever, before infighting among the ranks of the (often only self-proclaimed) Sith Lords once again decimated the Sith and they were forced to regroup under the leadership of the charismatic but weak-willed Kaan, lest they finally be destroyed. Although the final conflict of the New Sith Wars came about under Kaan’s bungling, with the decimation of the Sith at the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, the line extends, unbroken, from Darth Kaan – who abandoned the millennia-old tradition of one ruling Dark Lord and foolishly granted the title to a good number of his followers, though very few of them were deserving of it – to the survival of that final conflict of the New Sith Wars (which would sometimes, afterwards, be referred to as the Great Sith War, as Exar Kun’s war had been, since the remnants of the Jedi, in their conceit, seemed convinced that the Sith had finally been entirely eradicated, in the caves of Ruusan) by one lone Sith Lord, a rival of Darth Kaan’s born on Apatros under the name of Dessel but renamed, as a legitimate heir to the Dark tradition of the Sith, Darth Bane.

From Darth Bane, who reinvented the Sith by taking steps to prevent the Sith from ever destroying themselves yet again by taking on only one apprentice – therefore beginning a one-master-one-apprentice tradition known as the Rule of Two to safeguard against the Sith self-destructing or losing sight of their ideals again – and who abandoned many of the rules and overall structure of the Brotherhood of Darkness in order to restart the tradition of passing the name Darth on to each of his successors (a trend that had originated with Darth Revan though, in a nod to Kaan’s more recent pronouncement, both master and apprentice in Bane’s Sith Order would hold the title Dark Lord of the Sith, making them at least nominally equals), therefore founding a new Sith Order, whose tenets would be cunning, stealth, and subterfuge, the line stretches, unbroken. It extends from Darth Bane’s reorganized Sith Order, which went so deeply into hiding that they fooled the Republic and most of the Jedi into believing that the Sith had been completely eradicated at Ruusan, to Darth Plagueis. And from Darth Plagueis, it culminates directly – so far as Sidious is aware, and even if there were failed apprentices to Darth Plagueis before him, such failures hardly merit the reward of his attention – in Darth Sidious. The line is unbroken. It has been thinned out and it has been cut back to the root stock several times, to avoid the taint that comes with the addition of too many weak bloodlines and the danger of too many clamourous and contentious offspring, all striving to undermine and cut down those towering Dark colossi whose long-stretching shadows would otherwise consign them to the pale of obscurity and slow death, but it has never truly been broken. Sidious knows this to be true, for deep at the core of his own magnificent darkness is the evil spark that first drove Xendor to rebel against his Light-loving Jedi Masters and seek the greater power that could be found by actively embracing the Dark Side of the Force.

The Dark Lords of the Sith have always fed off of their own, especially those who are subordinate in their mastery. Xendor augmented and replenished his own power in his pursuit of the Dark Side and all of its many secrets with the life-force of his followers. And thus so, too, did the offspring of the Legions of Lettow, the remnants of the Minions of Xendor, feed off of the life-force of the humanoid and yet somewhat insect-like Sith people who were the original inhabitants of Korriban, whose instinct for a collective or a hive mentality proved to make the primitive Sith both ideally suited to act as sources for this type of energy draining and naturally inclined to become conduits for (as well as harvesters of) the flow of such Dark energies. Thus, the Sith learned early on how to consume the Dark energies of their own. In a very real way, to truly be a Sith is to embody the sum force of all the power of those who have come before, all the way to Xendor, himself. Granted, far too much power has been lost, over time, to the fracturing that inevitably accompanies the creation of one too many secret cabal and the loss that inexorably results from the total destruction of nearly all of the many overambitious rebellious offshoots – save, of course, for those who have proven clever enough in their bids for power to successfully seize and then subsume the power of those whose lines had previously been the ruling ones. Overall, though, much more power has been carefully built up and preserved than has been lost in the many centuries that have passed since the time of Xendor, Without a doubt, it is the sum total of that power, the unthinkably enormous combined Dark potential of the line that stretches unbroken from Darth Sidious all the way back to Xendor, that makes Darth Sidious such an overpoweringly evil colossus in the Force. Darth Sidious is the realization of that vast potential of pooled darkness.

Though the gradual leaching of power from apprentice to Master and the eventual seizing (or stealing away, in some cases) of the sum total of that power by apprentices who are worthy of becoming Masters in their own right has embodied Darth Sidious with more power than that wielded by essentially all of the Jedi combined, it unfortunately has not yielded a similar store of pooled knowledge. The preservation of power through its usurpation unfortunately does nothing to preserve the knowledge of the generations. Although many Sith Lords have proven powerful enough to cheat death on an individual basis, by passing on from life into existence as a Force ghost – the individual mind and character preserved against the dissolution of death by emotion alone and generally eventually returned to life in the body of one whose mind and will had not proved strong enough to fight off attack and possession by such a maleficent Force-preserved intellect – no Sith Lord has yet proven himself (or herself) to be powerful and clever enough to cheat death collectively. Unfortunately, in this, their nature – which lends itself to a collective pooling of power – works against them. The Sith are not at all inclined to trust, nor they are inclined towards sharing. Much knowledge has been lost, due to this fact. Thus, over the years, much time and effort has been lost to the perpetually recurrent need to discover and rediscover the same knowledge, the same Dark skills, over and over and over again. Although the Sith have always kept meticulous histories of their people and they have also, since the time of Darth Bane, kept very careful, very detailed records of their plans and their accomplishments (including their methods), no Dark Lord has ever been so foolish or so trusting as to write down all of his or her hard-won knowledge of the Dark Side. Thus, much knowledge has been lost since Xendor first parted ways with the Jedi and the genesis of the Sith was eventually born out of the fertile grounds of his implacable anger at and hatred of the Light-loving Jedi Order.

If not for this, the time lost to repetition, Darth Sidious is certain that the path of the Sith to galactic domination and the utter extermination of the Jedi would have easily been millennia shorter. The loss of knowledge he engendered through his own Master’s murder is a pain and a fury that will never leave him. However, because he feels that it is his inborn right to covet and to collect power and it truly is his nature to equate knowledge with power, Darth Sidious does not flinch from the hoarding of either. He shares nothing even approaching the fullness of his knowledge of the Dark Side with his own apprentices – mere pawns, for the most part, their lives potential (and often practical) sacrifices for the advancement of his plans: tools either summarily drained of life and power when they are of no more use to him or else destroyed outright when it becomes apparent to him that the risk of such a tool finding the means to leach power off of him, rather than simply providing Sidious with another source of replenishing energy, has risen too high – nor does he commit the majority of his own dark powers and evil tricks to any kind of record. In fact, though he does keep highly meticulous records of his many plots and plans for the future of his Dark Empire (which he is determined will be born from out of the ashes of the Galactic Republic, once the Jedi Order has been crushed and the Jedi all hunted down and destroyed), Darth Sidious devotes very little time or effort to recording the extent of his Dark Side skills or the range of his mastery. He knows the nature of the Sith far too well to ever dangle the temptation of such explicit rewards to any who might think to follow in his footsteps.

Thus, much like those who have preceded him, Darth Sidious does not send much time attempting to learn from the past – unless, of course, such knowledge involves an immediate practical use, as in the creation of a trap that has proven itself by working several times in the past. Therefore, although Darth Sidious is, literally, the most powerful Sith Lord the galaxy has ever known, far more powerful than any mere Jedi could ever dare to dream of being, and he is, without doubt, well versed in the manipulation and manifestation of the evil energies that only exist when one truly embraces the malignant taint upon the Force that is known as Dark Side of the Force, he is also far less knowledgeable of the ways of the Force than many, especially those who have preceded him and the splintering of the Jedi Order that was responsible for the line that spawned him. Even Xendor knew more of the ways of the Force than Sidious does, though the raw strength and the quality of his extremely densely compacted and rarefied evil far outstrip that of Xendor. Hence, for all his unimaginable strength, for all his Dark power and potential for pure evil, for all of his carefully hoarded vast stores of cunning and darkly polished malicious intellect, Darth Sidious is, surprisingly, in certain areas almost entirely unlearned in the ways of the Force. Sidious, for example, knows very little regarding the actual mechanisms that allow an individual to survive after death, as a mental construct supported and fueled by the Force. He also knows very little regarding the natural use of the Unifying and Living Force, since they are regarded as aspects of the Force suitable only for those who love and use the Light Side of the Force. And although he knows that the Jedi are obsessed with the idea of the Force needing to be balanced, Darth Sidious quite frankly prefers to cling to the what he knows (the Dark) and to ignore the whole mess that is the rest of the Force.

Therefore, Darth Sidious is, essentially self-blinded to one of the very few quarters from which a challenge to all of his Dark power might arise with sufficient power – i.e., sufficient Force – to derail all of his dark plottings and evil plans. Not only does he have no interest in understanding the true extent or nature of the power potentially available to one who believes so utterly in the Light Side of the Force that this individual would be driven to refuse to give up the fight to preserve and multiple that Light, even in death: Darth Sidious is also completely complacent in his utter uncaring for and inattention to the idea of natural balance within the Force. These are flaws in the Sith Lord – small flaws, true, and slender hopes indeed upon which to hang the possible prevailment of peace and preservation of Light, but as all know, it takes but the presence of one live spark to light a fire. And even the smallest of fires can, once kindled, spread to become the light of a world, or a people . . . or even, perhaps, a galaxy of worlds and peoples.

Hope, that most persistent of all sparks, that most infectious of all fires, can potentially kindle the cosmos with its light.

***

The Force ghost stands (or perhaps hovers is the better word, considering his current wholly ephemeral nature) atop a garden summit in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant at sunrise on a summer day, late in the third year of the galaxy-wide conflict known as the Clone Wars. He is, for better or for worse, entirely invisible to all of the eyes that might conceivably pass over him, his face only a shaft of sunlight, his plain, flowing garments bundles of wind gently stirring the leaves on the nearby trees, the foliage of the plants in the nearest beds, and the blades of verdant grass covering the artificial hilltop. Yet, in his eyes, nothing touching upon this world is hidden. He sees the pale and sometimes stuttering or sickly flames that represent the locations of all of the living things and beings currently residing on the planet as well as the purely burning blazes of white – currently oddly muffled, oftentimes to the point of being nearly wholly obscured, by a pall of lowering darkness from the growing evil that has latched itself upon the radiant blaze of the Force and, like a malignant growth, expanded to such size that it blocks many of the natural points of egress that the purity of the Force would normally take, flowing naturally from out of itself into the core of those beings who are most attuned to its workings – that reside at the core of the Jedi and initiates who currently reside within the vast Temple structure. Frail tendrils of Force power that would otherwise, but for that expanding dark obstruction, be as raging cataracts of energy draw near the blue-white blaze of his fire in a frail net of misting eldritch glow. The hosts of the Temple and the planet flicker like stars before him, and beneath his gaze every sparrow strung on its thread of song is stitched brightly against the infinite curve of the heavens.

Under his watchful gaze, a cluster of tiny, vividly colored, vibrantly bright sparks rise up from the pale and sickly conflagration of flames that marks the current population of the Senate Rotunda, but they vanish immediately into a roiling bank of clouds that completely absorbs them, extinguishing their brief beauty. Aside from the Temple complex, which still shines with power, magnified and focused by its central ziggurat, and a very few places of residence within the complex of apartments at 500 Republica Way, Coruscant is so heavily blanketed by the dark clouds of greed and frailty and selfishness that the Sith Lord and his wars have unleashed that they overwhelm almost every spark of decency that dares flare into life upon the planet. Avarice, lust, and self-centered intolerance run riot. Sentient beings behave with less sense of obligation than the lowest forms of unthinking animal life. Nothing is planned, nothing is ordered, nothing is worked out properly or rationally, except for in the case of items that might have outcomes influential towards what the Dark Lord himself has long since been guiding events up to. The vast majority live only for the moment, thoughtlessly snatching up one pleasure after another and discarding them just as quickly. Seize, grab, take, all the time and above and before all else, all other things, take and possess and use. More and more, nothing is enough, because nothing ever will be enough for such fearful and greedy little lives, such soulless shadows of being. Children abuse their parents and parents abuse their children while neighbor turns viciously on neighbor and all those who have not yet fled who are not human or near enough to human to pass as such suffer increasingly under the prejudice and fear that flourishes in such an atmosphere of ignorance and constant suspense from terror.

Soon enough, if left unchecked, all restraint will be abandoned upon Coruscant. Not even the light of the Temple will be enough to hold back the tide of night. It is a painful thought, but unavoidable, undeniable. Increasingly, those few souls who cling to light, to order, outside of the Temple bounds are being pressured into giving up, giving in, or simply getting off of the planet. The few noble thoughts and tendencies remaining among the ranks of the general public are devoured and destroyed almost as soon as they appear, almost before they can even properly finish forming. It is a shame and a sorrow that would break a lesser being’s heart, but the Force ghost has walked and thoroughly mapped all of the lines of Coruscant’s immediate future, and they are all, inevitably, the same, leading to the same end in chaos and in darkness – except for in the case of one always very slight and increasingly unlikely to occur aberration among all of the possible pathways of the probable future. The future of Coruscant – and, as with Coruscant, the Republic’s capital planet, eventually also the whole of the Galactic Republic – is all but undisputed, though in all the long history of humankind within this galaxy there have been less than a handful of futures entirely beyond the ability of any being or any thing to change. Yet, Coruscant’s ultimate descent into darkness, its wholehearted embrace of madness and savagery, hovers precariously upon the cusp of needing to be numbered amongst the ranks of that slight handful. One would never believe it, just from looking at the planet, or even the breakdown of numbers, alone. Paradoxically, Palpatine’s increasingly obviously despotic rule in Coruscant has brought immense prosperity to the planet.

Builders and craftsmen and artisans have made obscene fortunes creating new towers and palatial holds for the newly rich, the new noble classes. Merchants, arms traders, and technocrats have grown grossly rich supplying both the ever-increasing population and the growing needs of the expanding armed forces, not only within the largely cloned ranks of the navy and army, but among the ranks of the mostly entirely illegal public and private personal bodyguards and cadres of police forces increasingly staffing the households of both the local bureaucrats and off-world politicians who make up the bulk of the Senate and governmental infrastructure. Fine craftsmen, builders, bakers, arms’ men and security details . . . all have benefitted greatly from the wars and the chaos engendered by the Sith Lord’s plotting and manipulation. Pleasure houses, illegal body trades, and both legal and illegal recreational drugs (especially the most dangerous and addictive types) have all flourished wildly. Easily over hundreds of thousands of beings – tens of millions, even, counting those who do not make their permanent dwellings upon Coruscant itself – have profited and live far better lives than they ever did or could have, before the rising of Sidious, the election of Palpatine, and the outbreak of the Clone Wars. Yet, for all that the people have gained, for all the wealth and good fortune that the vast majority of Coruscanti tradesmen and sojourners upon Coruscant have enjoyed, thanks to the unmitigated suffering and fear of others, they are not satisfied, they are not happy, and, more than anything, they have not learned any better, how to do or to be any better than they are. So they keep striving, more and more selfishly, to steal or to otherwise gain more and more pleasures, more and more riches, for themselves. And so they guide the whole of their world with increasingly rapidity more and more unwaveringly down towards an inevitable path into darkness.

Resisting the urge to sigh, the luminescent soul patiently stares south over the verdant stretch of the garden and past the unliving vast monuments of shining towers that lie beyond the enormous structure of the far more organic Jedi Temple until he is looking upon Coruscant’s lone free ocean, the carefully preserved and beatified Western Sea, as it restlessly turns its pages upon the shores of its many jewel-like, artfully scattered, artificial islands and the borders of the largely off-limits nature preserves that cover and protect the twin peaks and nearest surrounding foothills of the Manarai Mountains. He reads there the seemingly inevitable coming culmination of the darkness currently engulfing Coruscant and most of the known galaxy in a reign of evil that will erect an Imperial Palace across much of the expanse of those preserves, and he mourns ceaselessly in his heart for the darkness that he can no longer stave off, not if he continues on alone. Sitting among the wild flowers and gorse on the closest slope of the nearest of the twin peaks of the Manarai Mountains is an ancient notch-stone erected by the people who lived on Coruscant after the fall of the Zhell and Taung and before the coming of its human inhabitants and the vast Galactic Republic they helped to establish in a spreading net all around Coruscant. Now apparently inexorably destined to eventually be destroyed to make way for that Imperial complex, the upright stone currently catches the weak and artificially magnified and reflected light of the now completely risen summer solstice sun and casts along its length crooked shadows that suddenly and briefly spell words none among the living know how to read. However, the Force ghost knows how to read what it says, being able to access the memories of the planet and its peoples through its soul-deep uninhibited connection to the Force.

The truth of this dreaming world is the turning of the stars. As the seasons turn and return after long rest, this marks the land where dream returns to its native ground: truth. Here reigns the true ruler of this land in memory and in promise. Great is the burden of this care. Greater still is the Light that is the truth, the Light that is the impetus for the turning of the cosmic wheel and the creation of the peopled lace of ages forming the woven tapestry of its pattern. Let the memory of this truth linger in dreams, never to be lost, so long as the stars may wheel in the turns of their dance.

For just a few fleeting moments one day each year, the angle of the sun aligns properly with the primeval stone so that the notches carved into it cast shadow-patterns that abruptly and fleetingly spell words that no one among the living know how to read. Then the planet turns, the shadows lengthen, and the ephemeral words smear away and are gone, not to return for another year. That day has come and gone and will come again. The significance of the words remains, though, and so the bright soul of the watcher directs his attention towards where the lengthening shadow of the notch-stone points, a blazing path of falling glory where the fragmentary remains of a ship will inevitably, one way or another, soon be flaming to earth. The Force ghost sighs silently, stirring the leaves of the nearest tree to momentary frenzied dance. Much has yet to be accomplished for this dream to return to its native ground, and there are still paths of divergence in the near future that leave the outcome of those accomplishments shadowed, in doubt, and not yet accomplished even after more than another two decades, and so the blazing soul stands atop this mounded hill in mute witness to all that still remains undone. For him, there is no choice. To help stave the tide of evil, the swelling flow of darkness, he must fight. He fights to preserve the dream of truths yet to come as well as for the lofty reach of cloud-piercing crystal towers and unfolding flowers of chapterhouses and gem-toned glory of geometrically and organically shaped cities and even city-planets that blossom and grow and are dreamed of upon the many planets of the Republic, for the allied and united galaxy-spanning nations of prosperity destined someday to defeat poverty and sickness and eventually even death.

The desire to exalt all intelligent life and aid all sentient beings in uniting in their drive to the stars, to the stitching together of planets and moons and even artificially created stations and satellites into a vast glittering weave of cosmic cooperation, drives him to keep on fighting. And to aid him in this struggle, he has, of late, earnestly pursued one ally alone, in the last place any would think to look: among the ranks of the enemy, in the deepest folds of darkness at the heart of the evil cancer that would devour and destroy the Light for all time, if it could. For years now, ever since he was unbodied when the blow of an enemy stole the life from his body, he has struggled – mostly in vain, unfortunately – to make himself heard by those who should be his greatest natural allies. It is an irony that shivers him down to the roots of his very soul that the one whose reception to his touch he had taken most for granted, even to the point of turning away from that bond and trying to reject or even severe it, in life, is now the one whose notice he would give his all to be able to catch.

He barely has to think about it at all, anymore, to call forth a vision of Obi-Wan Kenobi – a slender and obviously fit, somehow seemingly taller and larger than he truly is (until he towers, in memory, larger than life itself), often slightly distracted-looking youth, a beautiful boy who has gracefully aged into a man whose good looks contribute only the smallest portion to what makes him interesting, makes him stick in the mind and shine perpetually within memory like a brightly burnished star. Obi-Wan’s inherent value, his unique worth, declares itself instantly, to those who have eyes and wits enough to truly see him. Even when troubled to distraction by some private concern – some vague inkling of a puzzle that needs solving, as might easily be guessed in the face of that often present contemplative half-frown and the single furrow carving itself ever more deeply down the center of that brow – Obi-Wan cannot help but radiate a persuasive calm authority. Just by looking at him, one knows that he is one of those persons to whom others turn when they feel stumped, threatened, thwarted, or trapped by circumstance. Wisdom, humor, compassion, strength: these things glow in his eyes and speak from the curves of his mouth, from the very molding of his face. He is radiant with spirit and inner grace, visibly lit from within, kindled with Light. Intelligence, resolve, and dependability have shaped the cast of his features so deeply that their attractiveness is irrelevant to their meaning. Obi-Wan never pauses to admire himself in mirrors: vanity plays no part in his character. His is a beauty that is not put on in front of a mirror but that grows, instead, with breathtaking simplicity, directly out of his innermost being: what is seen is only the small, visible portion of a far greater, more comprehensive, luminescent, and formal quality within.

Perhaps more strikingly, though, Obi-Wan’s actual age seems no more relevant than his attractiveness: despite the perpetually youthful cast of his features, he has an air about him of having passed through lifetimes before this one, of having gone places and seen things beyond the scope of most other sentient beings. And he listens. Most importantly of all, Obi-Wan Kenobi knows how to listen. He doesn’t just hear other people when they speak to him, he truly listens to them. And because he truly does listen, because he sees and hears and knows so much that often those who flock to him find themselves staring as if at some kind of wizard – blankly wondering, How’d you know that, how’d know that would happen/did happen/will happen? – they come to him for help and return to him continually, iron fillings drawn to a magnet, and they pour out to him their love and their trust, and they give all that they have to give, and they hope all the while that he might some day look up with a smile and ask for more. It is no wonder so many admire him, no wonder so many yearn for his attention, his assistance. It makes perfect sense that Obi-Wan should be regarded as a rising star within the ranks of both the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic’s army, those who have known him and worked with him constantly overflowing with praise, good will, and commendations. Yet, in spite of it all, despite the many people who flock around him, clamoring for his time and attention, basking in the blazing glow of Obi-Wan’s inner light, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a spectactularly solitary and even distant man, untouched and untouchable by the adoration that all so often approaches – and even crosses over the line into – outright worship so unstintingly offered up to him by so many.

There is only one who has the power to reach him, consistently, and to touch him, on the deepest of levels. And as the Force ghost is – to his unending sorrow – all too aware, he is not that one person. Locked securely away behind shields so complex and impenetrable that he can no longer even begin to hope to win past their barricading walls, the core of his former student constantly blazes fiercely with so much restrained power, such an absolute purity of the Force – an all but perfect self-adjusting balance of countering and complementing energies, representing all aspects of the Force in an easy harmonic equipoise – that the Force ghost can no longer quite understand how he ever failed to see it, while living, any more than he can comprehend how so many others can continue to fail to see it enough to truly understand what it is, now. The only one who truly seems to see the truth of that perfection of blazing balance, though – the only one who is consistently able to reach Obi-Wan through all of his many interlocking and overlapping levels of shielding and touch him, in almost every sense of the word – is the one whose life and soul currently seem to be inevitably forfeit to the coming darkness. And that one has, most unfortunately, closed himself off from the watchful Force ghost so utterly that he can no longer touch him, even within dreams.

With other, more natural connections closed to him, he has been left with little choice but to seek for aid elsewhere. As other potential allies – mainly Jedi whose inner lights are constantly and ever more quickly becoming further and further obscured by that insidious creeping darkness – have proven extremely hard to contact, it is to the concealing darkness that he has been forced to turn. Within close orbit of the blackest core of evil feeding the spreading malignancy upon the Force is one whose soul once burned pure white with the Light of the Force. And so he has turned to that darkly shrouded and entangled soul, striving with all of his might to reach, to touch, to influence, and to help free that soul from the evil that currently binds it to the devouring darkness at the core of that evil cancer. That ensnared, enscrolled soul is currently on a collision course with the core of that darkness, and soon enough it will either be devoured utterly, its light snuffed out for all time, or else it will first be cut free from its tethers, which have kept it unknowingly enthralled and subservient to an evil that has lied to it at every turn, and then utterly extinguished. There is an extremely narrow sliver of time in which events are not already so set that they may as well have already occurred, some leeway in which he can work to save that soul by capturing its light when it is about to be cast free of its fleshy shell, before the evil heart of that darkness can utterly subsume and destroy it forever. If he can succeed in this, in shedding enough light upon the subject to allow that soul to see the tangle of lies that bind it, there is a small chance that the resulting change to the chain of events might possibly be enough to shift the future path away from the evil that will, otherwise, culminate in the building of that Imperial Palace on the foothills and lower slopes of the Manarai Mountains. Maybe. Just maybe. If, that is, he can prove strong enough to first draw the attention of that dark-bound, Sith-ridden soul to certain truths, and then catch it as it is about to tumble free of life.

The Force ghost whose name was, in life, Qui-Gon Jinn, sighs yet again, more softly than before, barely rustling the nearby leaves. He does not think overly highly of his chances, and yet he cannot bring himself to turn away from the plight of the one who was once his own Master within the Jedi Order, either. That parasitic leech of a Dark Lord of the Sith has so thoroughly overwhelmed Dooku that his light is little more than an intermittent and shivering glimmer, little more than a pale echo of light. Much of the fault for that lies with him, not Dooku, for it was his own foolishness that doomed his flesh to death and drove his former Master first to despair and then to the shelter of darkness, in hopes of finding revenge. Once the Sith Lord was able to get his hooks into Dooku, the rest of the Jedi Master’s long fall into darkness had been inevitable. If only Qui-Gon had not been too stubborn to confide in his Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi . . . or too proud to accept the offered help of his former Master, when the Jedi High Council turned their collective face against him and ordered him and his to Naboo . . . or too hesitant to rely on the boy, Anakin, for his help in freeing Naboo . . . If he had only been wiser, more able to trust, then he could have prevented the vast majority of this terrible mess, simply by surviving the battle with the Sith Lord’s apprentice, on Naboo. Instead, he’d been a pigheaded idiot, and gotten himself killed. And so he has been fighting, ever since that day, to try to right the many wrongs his death has helped facilitate or otherwise set into motion.

How constraining and frail are mortal limits, how misleading and futile the lure of pride! He who was Qui-Gon Jinn lets loose a mighty sigh that gusts along the trees in a brief gale of wind. He is all too aware of the fact that he is bound by the limits of his own energy, his own knowledge, just as much as any physical individual is bound, despite the fact that he is now a creature of pure energy, powered by the Force and his own will alone. He has given everything he has to the effort to stave off the encroaching darkness and repair the harm he inflicted on events and individuals with his untimely death, and yet he must work unrelentingly just to maintain the few gains he has made, to protect his fragile works against the destructive power of the evil that is the heart of the Sith Lord. There is precious little power to spare, even for such a desperate and vital endeavor as his bid to free Dooku from the Sith Lord’s web. Yet, what else can he do, except try? If he does not depart this world soon, he will lose even this slim chance to save Master Dooku. So he rises, determinedly casting himself free of the gravitational pull of the city-planet that is Coruscant and disappearing into the wind that rises up into and through the enclosing shell of the planet’s atmosphere, willing himself towards the Separatist flagship that Dooku will soon be aboard and which even now is rushing into a position that will ready it for an exit to hyperspace, once it reaches the outskirts of the planetary system. A small bird perching on a nearby jut of stone, white as winter against the vibrant green of the ivy spilling over the rock, starts at his passage, bursting away from the sighing noise of the wind from his wake. As the white bird comes clear of the ivy wall, a flash of reflected sunlight from the summit of the Temple’s main structure startles it higher. The hot reflection dazzles several more times, casting from the pinnacle of the ziggurat sharp rays of sunlight like the beams of a beacon.

The bird climbs rapidly away from this startling light, rising far above the dazzling heights of the surrounding buildings and gliding upward with the wind caused by his passage, towards the umber mountains and absolute blue of the overarching sky. Atop a rocky pinnacle, the bird alights, blazing luminously in a shaft of lucid white sunlight let down from a zenith of towering cumulus clouds. To all eyes, the Force ghost remains invisible, his face only a lambent sunbeam upon the whiteness of the bird’s breast and outstretched wings, his robes bundles of wind stirring the gorse and scrubby grass on the higher slopes of the mountainside. But for a while, that simple white bird becomes more than it obviously is, surrounding by the wake of the fiery presence of he who was once Qui-Gon Jinn. The effect lasts only a few moments, until his shadow trawling after him through the hot day becomes shimmering rain in the deceptively still clear sky that falls in widening veils upon the slopes of the Manarai Mountains, obscuring the brilliance of his passage and the bright whiteness of the bird, riding the chill mountain air down the slopes and across the gorse and conifer highlands. When the lustrous torrent finally blows away from the sea out across the broad tableland where the sprawling Temple structure rises in majestic splendor above the forest of needle-sharp towers and decorative, shining domes, the brief sunny downpour sweeps down into a Temple whose doors have all inexplicably flown open, startling many of its inhabitants as it turns up their amazed faces to its fragrant coolness and rewarding many with a glimpse of a rainbow, bright and hard as stained glass or a candy confection, standing as a bower arch over the whole Temple, sparked by the pure fire of the radiant aura of one whose passage has imbued each raindrop with a world of light . . . and a galaxy of hope.

***

Darth Sidious has the power to see deep into the future. It is this ability, more than any other, that had allowed him to orchestrate the rise of his alter ego to a high enough position of power to permit him to make all of the necessary delicate arrangements to cause events to seemingly conspire to place dominion over the known galaxy into the palm of his iron hand. The current war within the Republic, between the Separatists and those who have supposedly remained "loyal" to the Republic, may very well be the result of thousands of years of execution of carefully plotted and laid out plans on the behalf of the Sith, tens of generations of power and knowledge of the Dark Side of the Force – however censored and fragmentary that knowledge doubtlessly is, given the innately untrusting and power-jealous nature of the Sith – bequeathed along an unbroken line of inheritance, master to apprentice, stretching back to the time before the reformations of Darth Bane – when, to safeguard the existence, knowledge, and power of the Sith following their decimating defeat at the Battle of Ruusan, the tradition of two was established, only one master and one apprentice at a time, to harness the strength that flowed from the Dark Side and to allow every opportunity for that darkness to wax strong rather than to dissipate in the endless bickering and infighting of a horde of jealous brethren – but Darth Sidious is the culmination of those thousands of years of manipulation and plotting, of facilitating war, murder, corruption, injustice, and avarice whenever and wherever possible, all towards this one ultimate goal: the destruction of the Jedi Order, the fall of the Galactic Republic, and the creation of a new empire of darkness, with all of the planets and principalities of the old order brought low under the power of a single brilliant, evil mastermind.

Although it almost succeeded in destroying them first, the Sith eventually learned from their own deadly internecine struggles that even an enormously influential and wide-ranging system could be easily toppled, laid low from within, if power could be made to become the sole reason for that system’s existence. The greater the threat to that power, the tighter the threatened would cling to their right to it. The greater the sense of actual entitlement and the more jealously possessive of that power the members of a system could be encouraged to grow, the blinder they would become to anything actually occurring in their midst. The greater the blindness to elitism and self-complacency, the further the rot of arrogance and obliviousness could be allowed or actively encouraged to spread within, the easier it would become to manipulate, to undermine, and to entrap. After all, enslavement to a form not only makes one all too predictable, it also opens one up to defeat by the unforeseen. And Darth Sidious is nothing is not the ultimate expression of the unforeseen – a Sith Lord, powerful enough to work in plain sight and yet still remain hidden, undetected and undetectable by the combined might of the entire Jedi Order, even with all the myriad vast resources of the Republic at the beck and call of the extremely politically connected Jedi High Council. Thus, Darth Sidious is the Sith Lord, the one born with the will, the power, and the opportunity to take the final few necessary steps to ensure both the destruction of a Jedi Order grown soft and bloated with power, its members self-blinded by entitlement, and the end of the criminalization and elitism of the Republic through the imposition of order by and under one controlling hand.

While it is occasionally true that there sometimes appears unexpected new wrinkles in even the most thoroughly thought-out and carefully laid plans, Darth Sidious knows that, with the power of the Dark Side and the ability to see clearly enough to do whatever is necessary to pursue a goal to its completion, there also comes flexibility. The team of Kenobi and Skywalker do manage to be persistently difficult, and the Jedi Order itself can be bothersomely focused, on occasion, but given a combination of several weaknesses – including single-mindedness, naivety, honor, and mercy – it inevitably becomes much easier to foresee the directions in which both that particular team of Jedi and the ruling circle of the High Council will jump, given certain pressures, and to manipulate them so that they will follow only those trails that have already been blazed out for them. Or so Darth Sidious believes. In his arrogance, he is convinced, much like the Jedi Order, that his is the one and only way, and so he embraces the Dark Side fully, its most dedicated instrument.

Unfortunately, in this, Darth Sidious forgets the cardinal rule of the Sith, apparently having lost sight of it in his own single-minded arrogant pursuit of power: first and foremost, the Dark Side is the way of treachery. Although treachery is born of equal parts deceit and power, power can only be safely used with the lightest of touches, for to attempt to grasp at power with too much force is to be taken over by that power and made its victim, deluded into the belief that enough power can overcome the defects of ignorance and the sin of self-blindness. Darkness may have no heart, but knowledge is the most pitiless and unforgiving of opponents. Blinded by his arrogance and convinced that he can clearly see the way in which the troublesome team of Kenobi and Skywalker can be broken so that the ultimate fulfilment of his most desired goal can be ensured, he does not and cannot recognize the fact that he has become as deluded as those he opposes. It is an undeniable and unalterable fact that individuals always create their own futures through their beliefs, which control their actions. The sufficiently powerful convictions of a strong enough belief system can make anything happen. Indeed, this is how a society creates a consensus reality, including its gods. More importantly, though, this is also the way in which people shape and bring about their own dooms.

Inevitably, Darth Sidious’ doom will be shaped by actions caused by beliefs that render him blind to his own arrogance and unable to recognize the threat of too much power held far too tightly. This is why, for all his undeniable talent for casting his mind accurately along the most probable paths of the future from moment to moment, Darth Sidious never quite manages to foresee the one incident capable of causing a ripple effect so ultimately inexorably powerful that it will lead to a chain reaction of events so altered from the future he has plotted for and predicted that it will eventually inexorably undo all of his schemes, render his ultimate goal unwinnable, and, in the end, claim his life. Blind as he is, he simply doesn’t see it coming.

***

It’s a simple enough mistake, especially given the circumstances under which it occurs – one tiny incident of unplanned for and unnecessary mayhem, one teensy little bit of unforeseen collateral damage in the midst of what has been orchestrated to appear as a no-holds-barred out-and-out attack on Coruscant, the very heart of the Republic herself. When the unexpected threat of a far too closely focussed Jedi Order coincides with the unforeseen escape of the Jedi team of Kenobi and Skywalker from yet another carefully planned trap, the suggestion of a startled and worried apprentice – "Can you leave Coruscant, my lord?" – takes root in a mind so preoccupied with self-centered worry and treacherous plans regarding unwitting tools that are fast outliving their usefulness that the true costs of such a risky feint are never entirely calculated. Thus, as Sidious’ plan to arrange for the abduction of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine by General Grievous comes to fruition, so, too, is the fatal seed sown for Sidious’ destruction.

While an apparently flustered, confused, and probably frightened if still stubbornly brave Supreme Chancellor Palpatine refuses to "hide from enemies of the Republic" and therefore places himself and many of his would-be protectors unnecessarily in harm’s way, Senator Padmé Amidala Naberrie of Naboo, formerly Queen of the Naboo, and several other delegates who are (most assuredly not just coincidentally on hand) on Coruscant to hear Palpatine’s State of the Republic address, including Senators Bail Organa and Mon Mothma, postpone their evacuation of Great Rotunda to try to determine where the Supreme Chancellor is and whether or not he is safely out of range of danger from this attack. Due to their delay to speak to Jedi Masters Stass Allie and Shaak Ti, Bail, Mon Mothma, Padmé, and Padmé’s protocol droid, C-3PO, eventually end up being led out of the building and to an oval-shaped Flash skimmer. Unfortunately, the skimmer is delayed in traffic on the way to the shelter entrances below the main skydocks of the Senate Medcenter. Enough time passes for several vulture droids from the attacking Separatist fleet to reach the dome of the Senate and begin indiscriminately firing on Republic gunships and the traffic of desperate evacuees alike, strafing vehicles, landing platforms, and building in the wide canyon below the plaza where the Senate Building sits.

Unavoidably caught up in the swiftly changing and unplottable obstacle course of blaster bolts, plasma, flak, and collisions caused by other drivers unsuccessfully trying to dodge through the net of both friendly and unfriendly fire, the skimmer is eventually hit badly enough to tip harshly, almost spilling its occupants in midair. Despite the smoke that pours from the starboard turbine nacelle and the shallow dive that this hit drives the small craft down into, all might have yet been well, as Bail, a surprisingly skilled pilot, swerves for a nearby landing platform abutting a wide skybridge . . . if not for the fact that a pod-winged droid fighter, blown off course by a pursuing Republic gunship that managed to unleash a powerful wingtip cannon close enough to the vulture droid to fling it directly towards that very same skybridge, plows into the skybridge just as Bail is attempting a controlled crash into the landing abutting it.

As Threepio wails, "We’re doomed!" Padmé manages to just catch a glimpse of the wholly unsuspected fate barreling towards her. Tears streaming from her eyes, stricken with a sudden nausea, and understanding, in that instant, that she has failed, Padmé uselessly places her right hand over her still surprisingly small abdomen, and desperately tries to brace for impact.

Anakin! Padmé cries out to herself. /Anakin!/

The next few moments unfurl in silent slow motion.

Padmé understands that it is not her life flashing before her eyes, but rather her death.

Unable to look away, she sees the vulture droid impact with the skybridge and rebound only slightly, tearing completely through another section of the skybridge before tumbling down towards the landing, violently colliding and then slamming out away from the skybridge in a crumpled mass of jumbled up bits of droid and skybridge and landing, the entire deadly mass flying directly towards their already slightly out of control vehicle. She observes the storm of droid parts and rain of skybridge pieces as they streak and whirl out into their small skimmer, shoving the platform along with them, forward into their tiny craft. She then feels herself go airborne and crash with frightening velocity into a surface that has absolutely no give to it whatsoever, and all of her insides turn spongy. Afterwards, she is vaguely aware (though it is entirely possible that she could have lost consciousness there for a moment or three) of being slumped down against some surface – perhaps a wall – in a position that could never be described as one that comes naturally to a human being. It is as if every bone in her body has suddenly been rendered as pliant as rubber. What light there is appears to be red, though perhaps it is simply tinted so, either by blood filling ruptured eyeballs or blood dripping down into her eyes from other injuries. Her violently sloshed about and therefore apparently liquefying brain notwithstanding, Padmé has a moment to realize that she is dying and that she is astonished because it doesn’t seem to hurt a great deal, at least not yet. Then the stable bulk of the surface beneath her flings her forward, as the remainder of their craft strikes another surface and is thrown in yet a different direction, and darkness momentarily lowers across the curtain of red veiling her sight.

In the darkness behind her eyes, Padmé Amidala Naberrie Skywalker sees Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, standing together as they so often do, touching easily, casually, as they do more and more often, Anakin laughing, his hands gripping Obi-Wan’s shoulders, thumbs sliding over his collarbones to brush up lightly against his neck, Obi-Wan smiling, his left hand covering Anakin’s and his right hand just touching Anakin’s face, the backs of his fingers sweeping against that golden skin, thumb tracing a path across one prominent cheekbone. They are so perfectly right together, so beautiful, that her heart breaks within her. /Kenobi and Skywalker/, /Anakin and Obi-Wan/, not just two people, not just partners, but a team, /the team/. Not necessarily plural, as the word would seem to imply, but instead somehow strangely singular. Anakin is a towering bright golden god with bronzed skin and unforgiving hands. Obi-Wan is a luminous transparently pale vessel of power with skin like the moon and mercifully just hands. There is an awful darkness within her husband and an equally awesome light within his Master. There always has been. She knows it. She’s always known it. Together, they balance, they are equipoise, they offset. Together, they complete, they counteract, they compliment. Together, they finish one another, they fit together to form one being only, her husband and his Master. Truth be told, Padmé likes to envision them like this, to think of them this way, to know that their edges bleed together until there is no black and no white but only gray, going on forever, stretching away into eternity. The potential of either one alone, the possibility of either one being alone, cannot be borne. Love, adoration, worship: these are the observances they inspire, the emotions that Padmé has chased after for years, now, desperately longing to devote herself their consecration. This, she also knows, though it is not a truth that she likes to think about. It seems, though, that all other choices are rapidly becoming closed to her.

When Padmé’s eyes flutter open again, the sooty, blood-smeared, and tear-streaked face of a grief-stricken Mon Mothma swims into focus.

"Padmé – "

Padmé is so cold that she can’t feel her body, can’t feel the warmth of Mon Mothma’s lap beneath her head, carefully bracing her neck, and she knows, whatever Mon Mothma might so desperately be hoping, that she is done for. The expression on Mon Mothma’s face alone would be enough to tell her this, even if she could still feel her own flesh. "M-M-Mothma – "

"Padmé, please! Don’t try to talk! Don’t try to move! Please, I don’t – "

"D-dying."

"No! No, Padmé, I refuse to believe that! I won’t lose you and Bail both!" Mon Mothma is crying as she says this, the sobs coming softly, helplessly, though the majority of her body is, for the most part, held rigidly still to spare Padmé from any painful jostling. Her hands hover over Padmé for several long moments, unable to find anyplace to touch that doesn’t look as if it will hurt terribly from even the lightest of contacts, before one hand finally reaches out to stroke Padmé’s hair carefully back out of her eyes.

"S-sorry. But d-dying. Know it."

"Oh, Padmé – !"

"P-please, a m-message?"

"Anything, Padmé, I’ll do anything you ask!"

"O-Obi-Obi-Wan. T-tell him. For me. S-sorry. T-take care. Of him. P-please!"

"General Kenobi?"

"Yes! Please. Tell!"

"Tell him you’re sorry?"

"Yes! F-failed. Failed him. Tell, please!"

"Tell him you failed him and you’re sorry?"

"And t-take care. Of him. I-im-important! Please! Mon, please!"

Mon Mothma is so startled that her mouth falls open, though at first no sound emerges. Padmé has always seemed to have a special relationship with the Jedi Order, a much closer than normal working relationship with both the Order’s High Council and most especially their media darling, the young Knight Anakin Skywalker, who was decorated as a war hero bare days after his tenth birthday for the critical role he played in the offense to retake Naboo from the invading forces of the Trade Federation, but this . . . ? This is something much larger, something far more than just a politician’s gratitude or loyalty towards those responsible for helping to safeguard her people, her planet. This is not Senator Padmé Amidala Naberrie formally asking for a message to be carried to General Kenobi, Jedi Master. The way Padmé urgently speaks Obi-Wan’s name hints at something vastly more complex, something that no one, not even Padmé’s closest friends, have ever known or even suspected. Stunned, Mon Mothma can only shakily ask, "You want me to take care of General Kenobi or you want him to take care of someone else? Padmé! Padmé, please, focus! Stay awake, stay with me, please! Don’t go! I don’t know which one it is! How can I tell him the right message if you don’t stay with me and tell me!"

"-A-Ani . . ."

"Padmé, I don’t – "

"A-An-Anakin. Sorry! Failed. P-please. Tell! T-take care of him. Please!"
"Tell General Kenobi this?"

"Yes. Th-thank you. Mothma. Oh! Oh! M-M-Mon – "

"What? Padmé, please, please, lie still! Don’t exert yourself! Whatever it is that you want me to do, whatever you’d like me to say, Padmé, I will do it, I will say it, you know that!"

"T-token. Al-almost for-forgot. F-from l-love. Pl-please. Give. O-O-Obi-Wan!"

Mon Mothma is shocked speechless at what it is she thinks she is hearing. A Jedi Master, a Jedi General, has given Padmé Amidala a love token?! But she can’t waste any time wondering about it, not now, not when Padmé is so obviously near the end of her strength, her broken words coming out only in stuttering, panting gasps. If this token is so very important to Padmé, then it is Mon Mothma’s duty to help. "Padmé, what token is this? Where is it at, please? Whatever it is, wherever it is, I’ll find it, you know I will, and I will make sure that General Kenobi gets it. I’ll hand it over to him myself, for you. But I must know what it is that I’m looking for first."

"T-token. Made into j-je-jewelry. A-al-always wear. Hidden. So o-o-others cannot see."

"Oh, Padmé – !"

"S-slender. B-br-braid. P-pre-preserved. Special. N-neck-necklace. N-near heart, under dress. H-hidden. L-love. L-loved!" Padmé is struggling so hard to speak, choking over her own dogged attempts to breathe, that Mon Mothma finally carefully, gradually, eases her broken body just the barest fraction more upright, to help Padmé catch another few ragged breaths, some air getting through in spite of the blood flooding her lungs and already drizzling in a steady trickle out from the left corner of her mouth and down her chin. "M-Mon, you-you’ll give to – ?"

"To General Kenobi? Yes, Padmé, you know I will."

Padmé’s smile is beatific as she struggles to whisper, "P-please. Yes. To Obi. Th-thank you. Mothma. He d-de-deserves to – oh! – have."

Mon Mothma knows she is staring, but she can’t help herself. Padmé’s face is filled with such love that she is literally almost shining, especially her eyes, her smiling eyes and mouth shimmering, incandescent, with love. "Don’t worry, Padmé. I’ll give it to General Kenobi for you. I’ll tell him how you always wore it, and that you especially wanted him to have it back."

Padmé’s eyes suddenly fly very wide, as though startled, and her entire body goes rigid. "Oh! O, Ani! F-for-forgive me! Obi-Wan . . ."

"Padmé! Padmé, /please/, don’t! Padmé, don’t, please, oh, don’t go! Padmé!"

But it is already too late for such pleas. Senator Padmé Amidala Naberrie of Naboo, formerly Queen of the Naboo, has already gone, passing on into the Force and taking with her the unborn twin daughter and son of Anakin Skywalker.

***

The Force ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn has insinuated himself entirely into the space occupied by Dooku, once a contentious Jedi Master and now a conflicted Dark Lord of the Sith. It never fails to amaze him how just the mere fact of his presence can lighten the shadow cast upon and around Dooku by his Sith Master. He need do nothing more than remain with Dooku to weaken the hold Darth Sidious has on him. The longer the eldritch energies of his insubstantial fire burns within the core of his former Master, the more clearly Dooku can see the truth – not only of the precariousness of his own situation, but also of the unnatural and leach-like nature of Sidious’ insidious control over him – and the harder Dooku subconsciously struggles to free himself, to change that truth. So long as that struggle remains subconscious, Dooku is and will remain trapped, inescapably mired in the evil morass of Sidious’ influence. It is increasingly apparent, though, from Dooku’s restiveness and the increasingly skeptical tone of his thoughts regarding his Master’s plans, that the time is swiftly approaching when Dooku will have no choice but to acknowledge the internal strains and pressures brought about by that inner struggle. Once that has happened, Qui-Gon knows that Dooku’s conscious mind will be flooded with understanding, and he will then be forced to deal with that truth . . . one way or another. Dooku’s preoccupation with Obi-Wan Kenobi – with finding a way to preserve the young Jedi Master’s life, in spite of Sidious’ plotting – gives the Force ghost hope and strengthens his resolve to help Dooku win his freedom, and his light, back from the devouring darkness of the Sith.

They have not yet succeeded in "capturing" Palpatine and bringing Darth Sidious to the ship that Dooku is even now heading towards when there is an abrupt shock to the Force, as of some powerfully momentous occurrence, one so incredibly influential that for an instant all else stutters to a halt, time itself shivering to a complete stop – a single moment or an eternity long – before hiccoughing back to a start, events lurching forward in such a manner that reality itself splinters, the present throwing itself awry, away from the predestined sequence of things. Interrupted yet nonetheless culminant chains of pitilessly rational cause and effect suddenly spiral wildly away from the knowable and known probable paths of the future into new territory, ineluctably wrenching the flow of events out of the deep channel that the Sith have labored so long and hard to force the future into assuming by tirelessly manipulating the present towards an inescapable chain reaction of Jedi deathtraps. If he had still been mortal, with a body of flesh, Qui-Gon would have fallen, bowled over by the vast strength of that sudden wrenching blow, so powerful, so unexpected, that it has disrupted the whole of reality. As it is, he finds himself knocked free of Dooku’s space, as if he has been physically shaken loose from a perch upon and within the former Jedi. Yet, aside from a fleeting moment of lightheadedness – as from rising too quickly after too long a time sitting, without moving or partaking of sustenance – Dooku doesn’t seem to notice that anything has happened. Qui-Gon would be stunned by his former Master’s insensibility, but he is not given enough time to do anything more than notice Dooku’s lack of response.

In the next moment, time falls open, and the Force ghost falls with it, plummeting down into it. Like a mountain desert, the future opens out before him in an enormous vista, colorless as shale. Whole slopes of time veer away on all sides. Laughter rises up within him like mercury, hovering upon the edge of hysteria, drawn by the giddy panorama of busy, jumbled scenes. He sees battle, mostly – an extremely commonplace vision, given the darkness of the times – though surprisingly enough Qui-Gon’s attention is quickly drawn away from the endless raging battles, his sight fixing closer, on six beautiful white gualaars drawing a flower-draped open casket bearing the remains of woman, a beautiful young woman draped in an ocean of blues, her fingers finally and forever closed about a snippet of japor, one that had been lovingly carved by the hands of a young boy from an obscure desert planet in the far Outer Rim, a child suspended between two worlds, two destinies, even as he hovered upon the cusp of his ninth and tenth years. Before he can respond to this vision, though, a bright light flashes off of the clear gem at the center of the lady’s diadem, a luminescence that first gathers in upon itself, as if focused by the constraints of a force-field, and then detaches itself completely from both diadem and casket, resolving into the living fire of a luminous soul with blinding eyes, and suddenly he is back upon Coruscant again, floating just above the nearest slope of the Manarai Mountains that faces most directly upon that part of Coruscant where the Jedi Temple and the Great Rotunda lie, staring not outward towards those buildings but rather upwards into a javelin of sunlight.

Stunned, Qui-Gon turns his gaze away from the sky, and a black sun imprints his vision. Space shivers. He thinks at first that his vision has been scorched and reflexively tries to blink, though he no longer has eyes of flesh to protect. The air seems to swim with giant protozoa, and the contours of the garden around him warp and wobble with the passage of the large lenses of their bodies. Images smear and break apart as if seen through or perhaps in rippled water. When his vision calms and smooths out, the Force ghost finds himself within a circle of stone shining with fire-colored lichens. Nine trees stir in the sea-scented wind: holly, oak, hawthorn, rowan, ash, hazel, alder, birch, and willow. Energy pours into him out of the Force, fed by the Living Force that flows through those trees, and bright air, full of sea salt and the mineral breath of the mountains, encloses him, hampering his vision not at all. He can see all the way down into the crowded and battle-strewn streets of Coruscant, where panicked citizens clog the thoroughfares and present countless tempting targets for the weapons of the attacking Separatist forces. He can see the chaos eddying in the Embassy Mall and Hospital Plaza, near the Nicandra Building, centered around the shattered, smoking remains of the downed skimmer. And Qui-Gon can see something else, as well, something that accounts for both his vision of the flower-strewn casket and the shocking suddenness of the wrenching of the steady stream of events so that the foreseen and foreseeable actions of the present have abruptly fractured, the flow of the ever-changing now into the predictable parameters of what will be fragmenting, reforming into an unfolding flower of unpredicted probability and unplumbable possibilities.

Qui-Gon feels fear then, but not for himself. The Force ghost can all but touch the thick, treacherously churning currents of the cross-blowing winds of past did and present should and future if flooding up out of the suddenly wide-gaping, broken open chasm that but a moment ago had been the known, fixed pattern of destiny. The winds of time have shifted – quite violently, or so it seems to him, though the darkness of the Sith seems entirely unaffected by it, perhaps even wholly unaware of it – and they are still moving. Fate itself is transforming, slipping away from known designs, sliding into a changeful and shadowy realm of darkly obscured pitfalls and mist-enshrouded paths. But he has been returned to this place for a purpose, and so he does not linger. Brimming with a warmly glowing strength, he flies from the circle of rough-hewn menhirs with its ring of trees until he reaches the outer edge of debris from the skimmer’s crash. The one he is watching for is neither a Jedi nor particularly sensitive to the workings and energies of the Force, but Qui-Gon is nevertheless sure – however inexplicable the certainty – that if he does not catch this one person as she tumbles free of life, protecting and hoarding the bright light at the core of her, then the sudden snarl of new and not yet set possibilities will inevitably solidify into a future even darker and more barren of hope than the one he has been ceaselessly striving to stave off. And so, concentrating so that he can accurately read the constantly swirling streams of energy emanating from the dead, whose flickering multivariate lights are ever flowing into the greater light that is the Force, he waits and watches for that one alone, poised to capture her the instant her soul falls free of the constraints of her flesh, his bright aura for once flickering right at the edge of mortal perception, all but visibly incandescent with the Force . . . and with hope.

***

Confusion. Cold. Pain. Darkness. These are the sum total of her, of who and what she is.

And then, abruptly and without warning, like a sunrise suddenly bursting over a dark horizon and flooding both the earth and sky with light and warmth or the unexpected eureka epiphany of a dawning enlightenment and understanding, there comes a moment, a movement, and she is again herself and wholly aware of the fact that she is Senator Padmé Amidala Naberrie Skywalker of Naboo, formerly Queen of the Naboo . . . and that she has recently taken so much damage to her physical body that, logically, she cannot be anything other than dead. There is another short time of confusion, then, until she realizes that she has apparently been snatched up at the very instant of her death, everything of her mind and her soul that has made her Padmé Amidala Naberrie Skywalker, her very essence, or spirit, surrounded and engulfed by the mind and soul of another. She can see it, see the truth of what has happened to her, quite plainly, where and as she is. Laid out there before her, as in a mirror, is her own mind, captured and reflected in all of its imperfection and frailty and magnificence and beauty. And beyond that are vastnesses of thought, gulfs she cannot even begin to know how to bridge, heights she cannot ever learn how to climb, depths she cannot dare hope to plumb. Only the most minute portion of that stupendous mind is needed to utterly encompass all that she is, to completely examine and understand her.

The vast and lofty mind holding her – which apparently could, if necessary, concentrate itself totally and absolutely upon a single subject without a trace of irrelevant thought to act as a distraction and therefore dim the brilliance of that totality of dedication and purpose – appears to her to be compartmented as if it were actually the minds of many, many, many beings, not just that of one single man. Yet, it undeniably is the mind of one man alone, a man she herself once knew, when he was still living. Although Padmé did not know him well or grow very close with him in the brief time that she knew him – her own ability to focus having been much weakened by the constant agony of perceived helplessness and the ever-threatening darkness of despair – she nevertheless instantly recognizes Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, simply from the tone and quality of the warmth he is radiating. The visualization of her own self, so tiny and seemingly insignificant, utterly engulfed by his presence and tucked away into a small corner of his awesome intellect, shocks her, even more than his identity, and she can feels herself (and see herself, mirrored in his mind) cringe away from such terrible self-knowledge, from this vision of her own weakness. Rather than give in to the urge to turn away, though, she forces herself to remain steady, holding herself firmly in hand, taking advantage of the unique opportunity to study the mind of which she has apparently been so foolishly, so vainly, proud.

There it all is, not only that part which has handled her normal thinking, but the depths beneath as well, where lay buried all the things she has forgotten: all the resentments and evil thoughts and selfish wishes she has not allowed herself to cherish – animal instincts; memories from dreams she had not remembered, upon waking from them; idle daydreams and wishful fancies; plots and symbols and vague forebodings; shard and personal beliefs and notions and forgotten knowledge; long cherished hopes and well-laid plans and earnest dreams; half finished plots and subconscious schemes; firmly repressed realizations (most of them truths too hard for her to handle or else at such odds with her own understanding of reality, of the way that things work and the way that things are, that she simply could not face them and still remain the person she has always believed herself to be) and odd emotions and stranger still longings, bordering and sometimes even crossing over the line of sanity – and she forces herself to face it all squarely, unflinchingly, before lifting up her focus, her awareness, to the vastness beyond, to the immensities that so dwarf her that she is almost immediately hopelessly lost. Having never been one to willingly back down or turn away from a challenge, though, Padmé pushes and stretches herself, trying to understand the alien immensities that surround her; yet, although she can see her mirrored self stretch and grow from the effort, it remains a hopeless task.

The scope and power of Qui-Gon’s mind is beyond her comprehension, and she could no more have stuffed its contents into her own than she could have swallowed all the water from all of the oceans of Naboo while she had still been living. As soon as she has acknowledged that, a thought comes to her from out of that vastness, and it is not a thought of her own: It is good that you have not failed to face yourself. Most mortals do, or so I have been told. Many are offered this opportunity for growth, but few dare to take it up. I have been assured that many do not dare even to remember that it was offered, afterwards, instead burying that knowledge away in the depths of their souls to hide it from themselves.

Pride stirs at that, but it is short-lived, for Qui-Gon’s gentle amusement is plain to see. It hurts Padmé, momentarily, but she understands that his honesty is not meant to be wounding, but rather enlightening, and so she shrugs it off. In any case, there is knowledge contained within his thoughts of the memories of minds that have encompassed Qui-Gon and all that he is with the same ease with which he now contains her, so what would be the sense of taking offense at the way he holds her? Content enough with her place, but curious as to the purpose that has brought Qui-Gon to capture her, thus, Padmé wordlessly offers acceptance and query.

Wise child. I always did appreciate your ability to cut to the heart of things, Padmé. I have caught you, rather than allow you to dissolve into the Force, because I hope that disaster can be averted and I believe that it is the Force’s will that you aid me in this endeavor. You are not overly strong in the Force, child, but you are strong in love, and that makes you strong in the Light. There is still much you could do to help protect and preserve the Light. Listen, and I will tell you everything about the threat of the coming darkness that I have come to know, since the death of my flesh, on Naboo . . .

***

On the verdant, water-rich world of Naboo, two women in their late twenties – the elder bearing a striking resemblance to a certain former Queen of Naboo who became the Senator for the Chommell Sector and the younger having grown out of a similarly striking resemblance into an odd cross between that formidable young lady and her elder sister, Sola – are sitting together, discussing matters of state and duty (and just simply of interest) over afternoon tea. They’ve been conversing for the better part of two hours, touching on various topics – a moral-boosting speech for which Queen Apailana has asked their Lady’s input and for which they are both prepared to offer critique, when their Lady asks; the likelihood of Naboo ever receiving reparations for the wholesale slaughter and destruction perpetrated against the (mostly) Gungan colony on Ohma-D’un, Naboo’s Water Moon, by the Separatists; the unhappy near certainty of needing to order more of the materials used in the monument for fallen handmaidens, if the Clone Wars continue for much longer; the need to start recruiting yet another handmaiden training class for their Lady; the various possible outcomes of a deliberate act of disobedience, should they be forced to go behind Milady’s back and inform Obi-Wan of how Padmé secretly contracted to marry Anakin Skywalker, and the probability that doing so will save the lives and reputations of all involved – when both women abruptly fall silent and pale, a delicate cup of tea and a half-consumed finger sandwich falling from two different sets of abruptly nerveless fingers to shatter and spill and to break open messily on the floor between the edge of the couch and the low table in front of it.

"What – what is it? What was that? What just happened?" the younger woman, Dormé stammers, one hand groping blinding for support against the cushioned back of the couch while the other rises to cradle a suddenly fiercely aching head.

"She’s gone! I felt her go! Force save us, she’s dead! Padmé is dead!" the slightly older woman, Sabé, wails in reply, rocking herself on the sofa, sobbing in abject misery and clinging tightly when a tearful Dormé leans forward to embrace her.

The two women hold on to one another and weep, despairing, knowing that they’ve failed in their duty to protect their Lady and terrified of the unknown future barreling down upon them, now, with her gone.

***

"Anakin!" Obi-Wan Kenobi doggedly follows in the footsteps of his former Padawan, feeling Anakin’s pain, his anger, like blows against his heart.

Anakin’s stride may be longer than his, but Obi-Wan had years of practice keeping pace with an even longer one, long before Anakin came into the picture. Within moments, just as Obi-Wan is about to reach out and grasp the taller man’s shoulder, Anakin whirls about, pivoting so suddenly on his heel that his robe snaps tightly, flaring around him and momentarily shadowing them both with the shape of outspread wings. "We were wrong to come here, Master! I was wrong to come here. I never should have listened to Palpatine! It was all a feint, and we fell for it. We’re being kept away from Coruscant! I can feel it."

Anakin’s anguish is like a jagged obsidian knife, tearing into him. Obi-Wan folds his arms across his chest not because it is a pose that clearly radiates the most emphatic calm, but rather to reassure himself that he is not truly bleeding. Casting about awkwardly for the right thing to say, for the words that will soothe his troubled friend, he finally seizes upon the following: "You wouldn’t be saying that if we’d captured Dooku."

"But we didn’t, Master! That’s what counts. And now no communication with Coruscant? You don’t even see it, do you?"

"See what, Anakin?"

Anakin starts to speak, cuts himself off abruptly, then carefully begins again, shoulders drooping. "You should always keep me fighting. You shouldn’t give me time to think."

Obi-Wan’s hands are immediately on Anakin’s shoulders bowed shoulders, the weight of his concern far heavier than his hands, however rare the gesture of a touch uninitiated by Anakin. Anakin is not naturally inclined to despondence, and that momentary glimpse of despair hurts Obi-Wan far more than anything else, even the young man’s earlier anger. "Please, calm yourself."

Anakin shrugs him off, a new fire in his eyes, and although the swift motion hurts Obi-Wan in a way he has neither the time nor the inclination to look at too closely, the stiffening shoulders encourage him. "You’re my best friend, Obi-Wan. Tell me what I should do. Forget for a moment that you’re wearing the robes of a Jedi and tell me what I should do!"

Stung by the gravity in Anakin’s voice – so at odds with the look in his eyes – Obi-Wan is silent for several long heartbeats before he quietly offers, "The Force is our ally, Anakin. When we’re mindful of the Force, our actions are in accord with the will of the Force. Tythe wasn’t a wrong choice. It’s simply that we’re ignorant of its import in the greater scheme."

Again, Anakin’s shoulders slump, his head bowing in sadness. "You’re right, Master. Of course. You’re always right. My mind isn’t nearly so fast as my lightsaber." He stares down at his artificial limb, the mechanical hand hidden beneath that ever-present black leather glove. The words he speaks are so quiet that they almost cannot be heard. "My heart isn’t as impervious to pain as my right hand."

Obi-Wan feels as if someone has knotted up his insides and is hauling back against those knots, yanking on them roughly, pulling them taut, as though someone has plunged their arm up past the wrist into his chest and closed their hand upon his heart, squeezing tight. He is failing his apprentice, his closest friend. Anakin is suffering in a way that he has never seen before, and the only balm he offers are Jedi /platitudes/. His body heaves one stuttering breath, his mouth falling open as he casts desperately about for something more to say, for the right thing to say, for whatever it might be that Anakin so desperately needs to hear him say, before it happens.

Some shift in the Force, something so minor that he almost doesn’t feel it and yet at the same time so critical that he almost falls bonelessly to this knees, buckling beneath its weight as the backwash crashes over him. There is a voice, a girl’s, a woman’s, light, sweet, familiar, and in pain, crying out to him, sobbing his name as the world turns grey and bleeds out around him.

Obi-Wan! Obi-Wan, please! I’m so sorry!

When he eventually resurfaces, he comes to himself to the familiar feel and comforting scent of Anakin all around him. Anakin is holding him. His limp and largely unresponsive body is braced against Anakin’s, propped awkwardly upon his feet. Obi-Wan blinks slowly, struggling to focus, trying to push past the roaring in his ears, his head canted back loosely on his neck so that Anakin’s terrified eyes, Anakin’s soundlessly moving mouth, are the first things he sees. His former Padawan’s arms are like a vise across his back and sides, his hands so tight upon him that Obi-Wan can feel bruises forming. But for several long moments he has neither the strength nor the wits to protest. One arm flops aimlessly, bonelessly, up against them both as Anakin shifts his hold slightly and pulls Obi-Wan up more firmly onto his feet. As feeling gradually returns to his extremities, strength returning slowly, as though drop by drop, to his rubbery legs, Obi-Wan understands that his other arm (the right arm) is crushed between them and ever so slowly forces that hand to move, the fingers that at first will only twitch nervelessly eventually curling under in almost infinitesimal increments, tangling against and into the folds of Anakin’s outermost tunic. The relief in Anakin’s eyes is like a wave crashing down into him, washing away some of the confusion and lingering weakness, and although Obi-Wan is still so lightheaded that his ears feel as if they are packed with cotton, words begin to filter through, intermittently, as though from some enormous distance or over a faulty connection.

" . . . just wait a . . . moment! It’s not like . . . Master isn’t . . . fainted? I can’t . . . tell . . . safe to . . . don’t want . . . hurt . . . ceiling fell . . . thought . . . fine! He’s not . . . bleeding but . . .
Artoo, just wait a blessed minute!"

The shrilling, tootling, chittering, whistling, squealing blithering of the little astromech droid reaches his ears right about then, and Obi-Wan winces against the sudden stabbing pain in his head, eyes closing to slits. The sudden surge of unfocused healing power that abruptly pours into him, further rocking his equilibrium as waves of strength floods his system, shocks a gasp out of him as the energy buoys him up. For several long moments he hangs, as though suspended from a great height, galvanized by the Force, automatically grasping hold of that well-meaning boost of vitality, trying to direct it enough so that he can stand upright instead of just dangling from Anakin’s hands. With a second, less ragged gasp, the ground firms up under his feet, and Obi-Wan nods his head, both hands grasping Anakin’s tunic as he says, "Enough! Enough now. I am not hurt, Anakin! I swear to you, I am fine now!"

"Then what – ?"

"I am not sure. Something . . . a disturbance in the Force, I think. I am all right. Honestly, Anakin, you can let go of me now!"

Anakin releases his hold with obvious reluctance, though he is hurrying towards the still desperately shrilling droid so quickly that it’s likely that no one else notices his hesitation. The crew chief is already demanding Anakin’s attention, albeit apologetically. "I’m sorry, General Skywalker, but no one here understands droid. Will General Kenobi be alright?"

"I am quite recovered, thank you!" Obi-Wan snaps, hurrying to catch up as Anakin scales the cockpit ladder and then throws himself into the open cockpit, hands already reaching out to toggle switches. He reaches the base of the ladder just in time to hear the crew chief’s comlink tone as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s voice begins to issue over the cockpit annunciators.

"Anakin, if you are receiving this message, then I have urgent need of your help . . . "

Obi-Wan glances helplessly from the crew chief to Anakin and back again. "What is it?" he finally demands in a rush, looking at neither one.

"Tight-beam comm from Coruscant." Although he is clearly only listening with half of his attention, the crew chief is the first to reply, the look of shocked disbelief rapidly spreading across his face more than indicating the seriousness of the communication. "Sir, the Separatists have invaded Coruscant!"

Obi-Wan just gapes at him, utterly floored.

Above him in the starfighter cockpit, Anakin lifts his face up towards the high vaulted ceiling of the assault cruiser’s landing bay, his features contorted to the shape of a sustained snarl. His eyes glare sightlessly as he cries, "Why does fate target the people who are most important to me?"

The Jedi Master flounders helplessly. "I – "

"Crew chief! Refuel and rearm our starfighters at once!" Anakin is back by Obi-Wan’s side again so swiftly that he blinks and stumbles, knowing that he has somehow completely missed an entire series of actions that Anakin must have taken in order to come back down to him from the open cockpit. "Obi-Wan, Master, you must tell me the truth now." Anakin’s eyes and his voice bear down upon his former Master with so much weight, so much focussed Force, that the smaller man staggers a little bit before Anakin’s steadying hands can come to rest on his shoulders. "Are you absolutely certain that you are well enough to fly?" There is a Force-command sunk deep within those words, not a demand that he be well (whether he is in truth or not) but rather an irresistible compulsion for truth, that he honestly respond to the question. "I will not risk you, on top of everyone and everything else!"

Obi-Wan is forced to grit his teeth and dig in mentally in order to push the words out past the obstruction that wants to inhibit him from speaking anything less than the total truth. "I. Am. Fine. Anakin! What is happening?"

The intently focussed look in Anakin’s eyes so swiftly blanks out and bleeds to a barren bleakness that Obi-Wan wishes, for one desperately selfish moment, that his former Padawan’s compulsion could have proven too strong for him to overcome. For a long moment he doesn’t respond, almost as if the reality is so far worse than the simple sounds of the words that could explain it that they refuse to come to him.

When he speaks, Obi-Wan’s heart sinks within him.

"Coruscant. Palpatine has been taken by Grievous."

***

Death, destruction, defeat . . . a true labyrinth of lies, in which the world is turned upside down . . .

Within the relative (perhaps deceptive?) safety of the Jedi Temple, Master Yoda’s eyes snap open as a second sudden disturbance in the Force – even stronger than the first disturbance, which presaged the Separatist attack on Coruscant – breaks, losing its hold over him. The echo of the words Mace Windu was speaking in the moments before this second disturbance washed over the diminutive Jedi Master still reverberates on the air – "Master Yoda, we were close to capturing Sidious. I could feel it." – but the words that his lips had been moving to give voice to in response to Mace’s report dry within his mouth.

"No longer on Coruscant, he is. Hiding, now. Tipped his hand in this, he has, perhaps. Care, we must now take, infinite care! Perilous, the future will be. But a break, there has been. Shifts, something does, towards a new balance. Of grave concern, this will be to us all. To Obi-Wan we must speak again. And soon."

"Yes, Master."

Master Windu severs the transmission, having apparently not felt this disturbance within the Force in the cockpit of the cruiser he and Kit Fisto have piloted off of Coruscant in pursuit of the kidnaped Supreme Chancellor, and Yoda totters over to the windows, still shaking off the aftereffects of this second sudden change in the flow of the Force. Western Coruscant is entirely engulfed by darkness while the sky above it is splintered by rabid light. Squaring his shoulders, the elderly Master calls his lightsaber into his hand and ignites it, the trail of the glowing green blade parting the air like the wake of a falling star.

Knew, Sidious did, that too close we were upon his trail. Gone, he is now. But return he will. Watch for him, we must. This thread, far too important to lose, it is. Changed, something has. Much potential, this change brings, even a chance, perhaps, to end this. A new hope, this chance brings. Pursue it, we must!

Meanwhile, though, the battle in local space is not yet nearly at an end.

In fact, it is only just now truly beginning to reach the end of its first act . . .

***

Two starfighters sit side by side in the launching bay, only a few meters separating them, engines warming, droids in their sockets, cockpit canopies already raised. Neither of their two pilots wear a protective flight suit or even so much as a helmet, and so the younger man hears the elder plainly when he shouts out to him: "For all the jinks and jukes you’ve taken me through, there’s no one else I’d rather fly with."

Anakin Skywalker cants his head towards Obi-Wan and smiles softly, his expression fleetingly relaxing to simple pleasure. "It’s about time you admitted it! Can I take that to mean you’ll follow my lead without question?"

"To the best of my ability." Obi-Wan tries but fails to smile back with equal pleasure, knowing that his piloting abilities simply are not and will never be great enough to match Anakin’s. "I may not always be able to remain at your wing, Anakin, but I’ll never be far off, and I will always have your back."

Anakin’s features adopt a seriousness that tugs painfully at his former Master’s heart. "Obi-Wan, you don’t know how many times you’ve already rescued me."

The words are a blow. The response that he wants to give crashes headlong into the reply that he ought to give, to lighten the moment. He knows what he should say, he can almost hear himself saying the words – "Then whatever lies ahead for us shouldn’t be a problem." /– and yet the lump in his throat refuses to allow him to give voice to anything other than the following shameful admission: "Anakin, it is /you who have rescued me. I am not sure I would have made it, after Master Qui-Gon’s death, if not for you."

For once in his life, Anakin Skywalker is at a complete loss for words, his mouth open but unmoving as he stares at his former Master. At last, after several moments of stunned silence, he admits, showing a clarity of vision and a wisdom that is almost as shocking as Obi-Wan’s sudden declaration, "We saved each other, then." Then, with a laugh that should be light and yet isn’t, quite, he adds, "Come on, old friend. Who will save the galaxy, if we don’t?"

Automatically returning a tight-lipped nod, Obi-Wan sighs, "At least you said /we/," as the starfighters’ canopies begin to lower. Within moments, repulsors are engaged and the craft are lifting off, rotating 180 degrees before easing off through the launching bay’s transparent containment field.

Flying abreast, so closely together that they could share a wing, if only the design of their starfighters would permit such a thing, the two Jedi enable their thrusters and bank away from the massive attack cruiser /Integrity/, a capital ship of the Republic Navy and, more specifically, a /Venator/-class Star Destroyer of the Open Circle Armada in whose belly they’d so recently hitched a ride to Tythe. Accelerating on columns of brilliant blue energy, sluing slightly to port, slightly sinister, they couple their hyperdrive rings and vanish together into the long night.

There is hope of a new light dawning against the backdrop of the immense darkness of night that has been falling, with seemingly inevitably escalating rapidity and comprehensiveness, over the whole of civilization itself, but these two do not yet see the signs.

Their focus is locked in on Coruscant. On Palpatine, who is being held captive by the monstrous General Grievous. And on Count Dooku, who is, Force willing, fleeing before them for the last time.

***

Coruscant’s skies are alight, blazing continuous fire with war.

The artificial daylight spread out across half of the world by the orbital mirrors of the Galactic Republic’s planet-spanning capital city is sliced roughly but thoroughly by intersecting and converging lines of flame from ion drives and haphazardly punctuated by staccato blasts of starburst explosions, steadily increasing numbers of brilliant contrails of debris raining down into the atmosphere to become tangled ribbons of unfurling fireworks and falling stars, cloud-wreathed and indistinct but for their plummeting haloes of shimmering light. The nightside sky is an unimaginably complex latticework of overlapping shining hairline cracks, the shockingly dense web of spidering glowing lines unfurled across the darkness of deep space like an artful display of the fine platinum weave of some fine lady’s rich jewel-encrusted, brilliant-strung hair net atop a flatly black silken cloth. Those irregular, interlocking, spiraling tracks intersect in surprisingly graceful random patterns and multiply in mesmeric exploding showers of glittering confetti against the depths of darkness like softly tinted swarms of iridescent dancing glowing gnats or an endlessly shifting, gorgeously abstract kaleidoscope pattern of some infinitely intricate and gradually building laser show. Beings watching this display from the remove of the sometimes deceptively seeming safety of the rooftops – especially the night-shrouded roofs – of Coruscant’s endless cityscape could (and increasingly do, as the lowest reaches of that sparkling net draw further and further away from them, back from the bubble of Coruscant’s atmosphere and deeper into the vacuum of space) easily find such sights eerily fascinating or awe-inspiringly beautiful. But from the inside, it is a far different matter.

Those gem-toned glimmering gnats are the blazing hearts of various makes and models of starfighters, their drive-glow cores contained, artificial, miniature suns. The shining hairlines of the fine mesh net of platinum wire are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts more than powerful enough to vaporize a small town apiece. And those strung brilliants are the principle craft of both sides, battlecruisers and starships of enormous size and power. From the inside, the battle is a storm of confusion and panic, of galvanized particle beams flashing past starfighters so close that their cockpits ring like broken annunciators, of the endlessly repetitive stomping boot-sole shock of concussion missiles that mercilessly blast into cruisers, killing more and more of the many yet increasingly few brave souls who have trained and eaten and played and laughed and bickered together, hoping to soon see an end to this increasingly brutal escalating war. From the inside, the battle is desperation and terror and the stomach-churning certainty that the entire galaxy is deliberately conspiring to utterly wipe out all that is good within it.

Meanwhile, all across the tattered remnants of the Galactic Republic, stunned beings watch in horror as the battle unfolds unforgivingly, mercilessly live, on the HoloNet. Everyone knows that the war has been going badly recently, despite the uplifting and comforting rhetoric of the Supreme Chancellor’s latest impassioned speeches. Everyone knows that more Jedi are being killed or captured every day, that the Grand Army of the Republic has been pushed out of system after system, but – the Force itself wept – this?

A strike at the very heart and soul – not to mention the nervous system – of the Republic?

An invasion of Coruscant itself?

How could this happen?

How could it have ever come to this?

It seems as if it must be a nightmare, and yet it’s one from which no one can wake.

Live via HoloNet, billions of beings throughout the galaxy watch as the droid armies of the Separatists flood the government district of Coruscant and the Republic itself. The erratic but overwhelming glut of both eerily polished, precise, and apparently perfect – sometimes even to the point of seeming deliberately choreographed, blocked, and then shot – footage and obviously hastily aligned and dangerously captured – and oftentimes abruptly and violently abbreviated – coverage combines to form a spotty, overlapping, and remorselessly accurate account of the overall battle so desperately being waged through, over, and for Coruscant. Reports are filled with terrible, terrifying images of ranks upon ranks of horribly overmatched and yet nevertheless courageously persistent clone troopers being mown down by pitilessly powerful destroyer droids, even within the hallowed halls of the Galactic Senate itself.

There is just enough time for one shared shock of gasping, tearing relief as the dauntless troopers suddenly seem to find strength enough to rally, abruptly appearing to successfully beat back the attack. There are hugs and even quiet cheers in rooms scattered all throughout the galaxy as the Separatist forces start to retreat back to their landers and streak up into orbit.

The cry goes up then, regrettably premature: We’ve won! We held them off!

But immediately afterwards new reports start to trickle in – just whispered, sourceless rumors at first – that the attack wasn’t really meant as an invasion at all, that the Separatists weren’t actually trying to take the planet, and that – Force forfend! – this entire horror has been nothing more than a smokescreen intended to mask a lightning raid upon the Senate itself.

The nightmare immediately becomes worse: the Supreme Chancellor himself is missing.

Palpatine of Naboo, the most widely recognized and admired man in the known galaxy – he whose unmatched political skills have held the tottering, ravaged Republic together, he whose irreproachable and unquestioned personal integrity and bravery doubtlessly prove that the Separatist propaganda about corruption in the Senate is nothing more than a pack of bald lies, he whose eminently charismatic leadership has continually given the entire Republic the will to keep fighting, to carry on – is gone.

Palpatine is much more than a respected leader. He is loved the breadth and depth of the Republic over. Even the rumor of his disappearance strikes a dagger deep into the heart of every citizen, every ally, every single sympathetic supporter of the Republic. Each and every one of them knows it, in her heart, in his gut, in its very bones, that without him, without Palpatine, the Republic will fall. Swiftly. Inevitably. Unstoppably. And with the fall of the Galactic Republic, civilization as the galaxy has known it will fail, utterly.

When confirmation finally comes through, the news is far worse than anyone could have ever imagined. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine has not only been captured by the Separatists, he is not only being held by the enemy, he is in the hands of General Grievous himself.

Grievous is not like any of the other Separatist leaders. Nute Gunray is treacherous and venal, but he is, after all, Neimoidian, and in Neimoidians venality and treachery are expected – and even regarded as virtues in the chancellor of the Trade Federation, its Viceroy. Poggle the Lesser is Archduke of the Stalgasin Hive, of the weapon masters of Geonosis, that cursed planet where this seemingly endless and increasingly brutal war began. The vestigial-winged Geonosian is analytical and pitiless, yes, but he is also pragmatic, even reasonable. As for the political heart of the Separatist Confederacy, Count Dooku, he is a former Jedi Master, and he is known for his integrity, even somewhat admired for his principled stand against what he sees as corruption in the Senate. Though his opponents are certain that he is wrong, many still find it within their hearts to respect Count Dooku for the courage with which he so unswervingly stands behind his mistaken convictions. And as for the other members of the Separatist Council – the Neimoidian settlement officer Rune Hakko; the stalk-necked Gossam president of the Commerce Guild, Shu Mai; the almost two-dimensionally thin San Hill, Muun chairman of the InterGalactic Banking Clan; the cranial-horned Corporate Alliance Magistrate, Passel Argente; the Skakoan foreman of the Techno Union, Wat Tambor, encased in the cumbersome pressure suit that supplies him with methane; and former Republic Senators Po Nudo and Tikkes, turncoats of Aqualish and Quarren decent, respectively – they, like all Separatists leaders, are hard beings, it is true. They are dangerous beings. Ruthless and greedy and aggressive beings. But General Grievous, though –

Grievous is a monster.

It has been nearly four thousand years since the insanity triggered by the rouge war droid HK-01 and collectively known as the Great Droid Revolution swept across the Republic; yet, the sentient beings of both the Republic and its surrounding territories have had surprisingly long memories when it comes to matters involving droid controls and safety regulations, including the threatening specter of true AI, and no sentient race within Republic-controlled space has ever come as close to unleashing the danger of an artificially created truly sentient being of powerful, durable, and cleverly shaped and fitted together easily replaceable parts formed mostly from metallic alloys, so as to allow for full and easy mobility – in other words, a highly intelligent and mobile being with all the ambitions of personal drive and free will wholly unrestricted by any kind of learned morality and none of the frailties and limitations of a fleshly body – upon the galaxy as the Separatists have, with their numerous and powerful droid armies – each model of droid soldier more powerful and more adaptive, more capable of learning from past battles and using that knowledge to their own advantage, in later battles – helmed by the cyborg monstrosity that is General Grievous.

In the eyes of the Galactic Republic – not to mention the minds of many of his own allies, as well – the Separatist Supreme Commander is an abomination of nature, an unnatural fusion of flesh and droid that edges precariously close to the morally taboo territory that is AI, and it is consistently agreed that his droid parts have far more compassion than what little remains of his alien flesh. This half-alive creature is an unfeeling butcher, the murderer of billions. Once upon a time an unparallel warrior and commander of the reptilian Kaleesh – back before the InterGalactic Banking Clan had essentially bought Kalee and IBC chairman San Hill had (unknown to Grievous, at the bidding of Hill’s Sith ally cum master, Lord Sidious) helped to arrange a fatal shuttle crash, an accident so bad that it had left the dying Grievous little choice but to listen to Hill’s glowing talks of the Geonosians, how they had raised cyborg technology to an art form, and his assurances that their blending of living and machine technology would be the way of the future – Grievous had, rather than allow himself to die ignominiously, cheated of a death fitting for a warrior of his status, chosen to give the Geonosians permission to outfit him in an almost indestructible duranium and ceramic shell reminiscent of a Krath war droid, after which he had eventually been presented to Count Dooku, Lord Tyranus of the Sith, for specialized anti-Jedi training.

Much of Grievous’ recent cruelty and prowess is directly owed to that rebuilding and subsequent training. The Geonosians have ways of modifying the mind without a patient ever being aware that he had been tampered with, and so they had, in accordance with the will of Lord Sidious, privately arranged for Grievous to awaken to his new life as essentially nothing but anger and rage, thereby fitting him uniquely for Dooku’s particular dark methods for the proper refinement of combat skills. Since his rebirth, entire civilizations have been consumed in Grievous’ single-minded pursuit of blood. Whole planets have burned at his command. Entire systems have been laid to waste. He is the evil genius of the Confederacy – the architect of their greatest victories, yes, but also the author of their most unspeakable atrocities. And it is his durasteel grip that has closed upon Palpatine.

When Grievous confirms the capture personally in a wideband transmission from his command cruiser in the midst of the orbital battle, billions of beings across the galaxy watch hopelessly, shudder helplessly, and pray to every deity that has ever been known to sentience within the galaxy that they might please wake up from this awful nightmare, and soon, because they know that what they are watching, live on the HoloNet, is the Republic’s imminent death, and there is no hope great enough to comfort them against this looming loss, not even the usually immeasurably comforting thought of Anakin and Obi-Wan, Kenobi and Skywalker – two turns of phrase that have, ever since the beginning of the Clone Wars, both been a single shining word of miraculous power, Kenobi and Skywalker or else Anakin and Obi-Wan written and thought and spoken and breathed and believed in and held fast to in an unceasing invocation of all that is good and strong and pure still within the galaxy – is capable of conjuring up enough light to illuminate this falling darkness, this unremitting disaster. Palpatine has been captured. Grievous is escaping. And the Galactic Republic will certainly and irrevocably fall. Surely no mere human beings, not even the luminous team Kenobi and Skywalker, can turn back this rising tide.

So billions of beings all across the galaxy watch the HoloNet with wet ashes where their hearts should reside.

Of course, these billions of beings, desperately watching the HoloNet for more news, can’t see the two prismatic bursts of realspace reversion, far out beyond Coruscant’s gravity well, and they can’t see the pair of starfighters that so crisply jettison hyperdrive rings and then bravely streak forward into the storm of Separatist vulture fighters, with all their guns blazing.

One pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.

But two is enough.

Two is enough because this is the end of an age of heroes, and it has saved its best for last.

***

Although its stubby wings and bulbous aft cockpit give it a far less elegantly streamlined appearance, Anakin Skywalker’s Eta-2 Actis Interceptor Jedi starfighter is closer in design to the small, sleek Delta-7 Aethersprite Interceptor he flew at the beginning of the war than it is to the newer-generation V-wings and ARC-170s being flown by the clone pilots. As with all Delta-7s, the astromech socket is located to one side of the humpbacked cockpit. Also like the Delta-7s, Eta-2 starfighters are speedy, agile, lacking in shields, and too small for integrated hyperdrive generators. But whereas Delta-7s are triangular in shape, this silver-and-yellow starfighter, like all Eta-2 starfighters, has a blunt bow comprised of two separate fuselages, each equipped with a missile launcher, with laser cannons occupying notches forward of the wings. Designed with two forward prongs connected to an oval cockpit and two small radiator wings – part of an extensive system of heat sinks and pumps carefully designed and fitted for the Eta-2 to counter the risk of overheating in flight, given its compact size – bracketing the expansive cockpit viewports, Eta-2s are even faster and more compact than Delta-7s. Eta-2 offensive weaponry is also superior to that of the Delta-7. The Delta-7 only holds two twin-barrel laser cannons while the Eta-2 has its two large, dual laser cannons mounted on the inner edges of the forward prongs and capable of firing intense beams of energy plus its two secondary ion cannons partially concealed on the outer hull and quite effective in battle against droid fighters. Thus, the Eta-2 Jedi starfighters number among the lightest, most agile, and (above all else) deadliest ships of the age.

Of course, Anakin has also made a few significant modifications to his personal Eta-2 starfighter. Although the yellow paint scheme is the most obvious difference – Eta-2s are usually left unpainted (except for the much-revered familiar symbol of the disc with eight spokes, the unobtrusive icon of the Jedi Bendu, always placed somewhere on the hull to signify that the Eta-2s are Jedi vehicles) or else are customized, most often with some unobtrusively colored paint, by their particular pilots – Anakin’s starfighter is faster and its weapons are even slightly more powerful than those of any factory-model Eta-2. It is likely that no other pilot, not even a Jedi – with the possible exception of Obi-Wan – could efficiently or even safely handle this particular tiny craft, its engines and weapons are already so thoroughly customized and constantly continue to receive so many more modifications and upgrades that only Anakin and his little astromech Artoo are familiar enough with its quirks and tendencies to remain in rapport enough with the ship to keep it performing constantly at peak. Obi-Wan might be able to fly Anakin’s Eta-2, but only because his own starfighter has been and continues to be almost as thoroughly gone over and tinkered with by Anakin as Anakin’s own Eta-2. The dark red paint – red being the color of ambassadorial relations and neutrality for capital ships in the Republic for centuries – that tips Obi-Wan’s starfighter at the prongs, weapons, and wings, as though the craft has been dipped in blood, is a compromise that the two Jedi eventually arrived at after Obi-Wan flatly refused to fly a ship deliberately painted in an "O, here I am! Shoot me now!" glaringly easy to find and target hue like yellow and Anakin just as stubbornly refused to allow one of "his" ships remain unpainted or be painted the same ho-hum traditional shade of turquoise that most general-use field operative Jedi craft are colored.

Having been released with the other smaller, quicker fighters well beyond the outskirts of the battle surrounding Coruscant, the two Eta-2 starfighters quickly outdistance the enormous attack cruisers and warship transports of the large Open Circle Armada, named for the heraldic symbol awarded to Kenobi and Skywalker’s fleet for its actions in the war effort against the Confederacy of Independent Systems, the highly distinctive red-and-yellow double arc emblem emblazoned onto the hulls of every ship of the highly elite fleet of the two Jedi Commanders. Big enough to accommodate well over five full Republic sector fleets, including thousands of clone and non-clone pilots, gunners, and officers manning hundreds upon hundreds of ARC-170s and V-wing fighters, the Open Circle Armada is the most highly recognized and decorated fleet of the Republic, having won countless victories during the Outer Rim Sieges.

Now it – and the pair of legendary Jedi commanders responsible for bringing both the two distinctly colored Eta-2s and the rest of the Open Circle Armada into the fight – may very well prove to be the tipping point of both the highly visible battle raging across the Coruscant skies and the far less obvious but no less important struggle raging across the face of the Force, the brewing storm that is, as yet, only threatening to rise to a boil rapid enough that it could prove capable of unseating the flow of time, with its predestined progression of events, from a path fated to fall into darkness.

Perhaps.

***