Categories > Movies > Star Wars > You Became to Me (this is the working title, please note!)
Beautiful. The Force has remade you. Your hair appears to be thicker and stronger than human hair, the strands perhaps thicker as well and certainly more iridescent, incandescent. The flesh of your face is once again smooth and pliant all over, incredibly so, so soft in appearance that a baby might weep from envy. The features have always been perfectly symmetrical and flawlessly balanced: the long, straight, well-formed nose; the high, prominent cheekbones; the lovely sensitive mouth; the firm strong line of the jaw; the tempting dimple of flesh, just begging to be filled, in that cleft chin. You have always been beautiful, but now . . . a light floods from you. It makes your face brighter and yet somehow every feature is more distinct, more detailed. The flesh is but the thinnest barrier, a translucent membrane, betwixt the Force itself and this physical realm.
The woman shivers a little as she gazes at the features, so familiar and yet so new – an act of pure will alone sufficient to make her resist reaching out to trace longingly, reverently, across those features – and sighs, shoulders slumping slightly, as the sense of light flooding from that face suddenly doubles, that alluring mouth moving to the shape of a small, almost shy smile, and a fist clenches around her heart as a figure shifts, a head turning, allowing another set of features – equally familiar, equally new, equally filled with light – to shift fully into view, gazing with unmistakable love down upon the other. She does not trust this other, does not trust the light that seems to lime his features or the love in his eyes or the smile curving his full lips. She knows him too well to place trust in such things. So when he reaches with his (remade as human, mere flesh and blood and bone) long-fingered hand to trace the ’saber-calloused pads of his fingers lightly along the other’s cheek, her hands automatically double over into fists, and when that lovely man shivers, eyes slipping shut, eyelashes fluttering, and tilts his head up, smilingly, for the kiss, a rumbling growl of affronted fury catches in the back of her throat.
“Milady? You called for me?”
The low familiar voice calls her back from the edge of rage, and she turns, her snarl automatically transmuting to a smile, as the familiar form of her closest companion for these past nine months. “Yes, I did. I want you to gather together the others, and see to it that the most direct course from here to Coruscant is laid by in the Bright Flight’s navcomputer, my friend. We’re going back.”
The tanned battle-scarred features shift rapidly from their normal impassivity to surprise and then concern. “Back? Are you certain that’s wise?”
Her smile is radiant, transformative, and instead of a brooding, black-clad, ghostly pale apparition, a luminous young woman with bright blue eyes and a joyous smile stands before him, beautiful in the way that only a being deeply in love and happy with the way that circumstances are unfolding can be. “I am one hundred percent plus positive, Alpha. We’re going home.”
“Then it shall be done.” He snaps off a salute – a habit she has tried and failed to break him of – and turns sharply on his heel, striding off rapidly to see to her bidding.
Alone again, she turns back to the holorecording, features already softened by joy becoming radiant with wonder as she returns to her watching. “Soon,” she whispers, her voice deep and throaty with longing, almost crooning the words. “Soon, we shall see each other again. Soon, we shall be together, as we were always meant to be. This I swear to you, Obi-Wan.”
***
“My brother needs me.” The statement is made so calmly, in a voice so certain, that it would seem as if it should be impossible for anyone to doubt it is anything but the truth.
But, “The Adepts have more need of you. You were the one who told us to leave Lucazec for J’t’p’tan, and, in doing so, made sure that we avoided the notice of the Sith and the potential loss of one of our brightest sisters. We need you here, Owen. You were our first ae’shain in over a thousand years. The people need you!” the woman only insists, impatiently shoving an errant lock of waist-length, liberally silver-frosted fair hair away from face, out of her pale blue eyes.
Eyes like twin seas (deep blues and purples at their depths, with green flecks demarcating shallows and sandbars) regard her impassively. “You know what I want the people to do.”
The older woman instantly bristles like an angry feline, her chin snapping upwards with a force similar to that of a knife thrust in anger, pale eyes glaring into those darker, oceanic eyes, so unrelentingly primal beauty. “That will not happen. Not ever/. We do /not believe in fighting. You /know /this.”
“You do not and will not fight, believing yourselves somehow better than the beings of the galaxy who have no recourse but to fight, if they wish to live, and yet still you use your power to weave illusions that can lead others to their deaths. That is both hypocrisy and arrogance, Wialu. I have no desire to lead a people who are liable to follow any and every suggestion I might ever make but the one that is the most important. My brother, on the other hand, has need of me and will not turn me away because the truth I offer him is not to his liking. I am going to him. And you will not stop me, because to do so would make you a liar even in your own eyes.”
Voice strident almost to the point of shouting, she angrily retorts, “The Sith Lord is gone! The reign of darkness you have been warning us of these past several years will no longer come to pass! What possible need could this brother have of you that we cannot outmatch?”
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse. You know there are enemies coming. Some of them are already here. There is a chance, now, to change things for the better. He has helped to bring that chance about, and I will help to see to it that the fullest possible change will occur, whether the Adepts wish to help me or not.”
“He is a /Jedi/! He will not listen to /you/!”
“He is my /brother/. And he heeds the will of the great ocean of energy that carries the White Current of the Adepts and the Force of the Jedi and the strength and abilities of any number of such organizations within its boundless depths. One in need of the knowledge I carry will find me in his seeking, and my brother and I will be reunited. It is the way of things. If you would read the current rather than focus on your fears, you would know this as well as I.”
“You are being foolish and selfish, leaving us like this!”
The swirling seas of the eyes that have been so serenely regarding Wialu abruptly seem to gain rims of ice. “Our people are hidden so well that even those who are teachers among the ones still straggling in from the many worlds we’d established outposts on have difficulty attempting to locate our sanctuary. You are a self-centered liar, to attempt to claim I leave you helpless.”
“You leave us vulnerable to attack by any who might force the knowledge of us from you!” the older woman only snarls in return, clearly unwilling to be made to see reason.
“I was unworthy to ever be elected ae’shain/, if you truly believe that I cannot keep from leading others back to us and not have it be done a-purpose. And I seem to recall, Wialu, that /you were the one who called for my training and who pushed for the hardest for my appointment.”
“Owen – ”
“I am through speaking with you. I am going. Should you find that you have changed your mind in any manner and wish to speak to me, my contact information will be available.”
“Owen! Obi-Wan Kenobi will never accept you or the truth that you seek to give him!”
Ice-becalmed eyes gaze at her unblinkingly. “If that is what you believe, then you know my brother not at all, Wialu Vathan.”
And with that final proclamation, the younger man turns on his heels and strides to the ship that will take him away, leaving her to stare after him helplessly.
***
The woman – slender, well-formed, hovering somewhere near the borderline between average and greater than average height, and sharp-featured, with a slender blade of a nose that often reminds others of the sharp prow of a ship, high cheekbones, a strong, stubborn jaw, and a prominent, pointed chin, all of which combine to form a striking and oddly ageless countenance – shrieks, positively incoherent with and utterly beside herself with rage, and the holocomm receiver explodes in a pungent billow of acrid smoke and a cloud of splintered and badly twisted fragments. Some of the pieces slice into the woman’s face, arms, and hands, small impacts of stinging pain that draw blood but no real attention from the one being wounded so, as she is far too busy spinning in a circle, screaming and destroying every item she lays her eyes upon with burst after burst after burst of jagged power fueled by a dark, primaeval fury. Icy pale blue eyes flicker and darken and then flicker again, lightening towards an amber hue, with each eruption of power. Unaware of either her wounds or her strangely flickering eyes, the woman continues to keen and wail like a demented thing, her pale skin and shockingly white hair becoming streaked and speckled with blood as she spins, faster and faster, her hands raised and outstretched, fingers hooked like claws, and rips the room to shreds like an animal.
Her power fades, eventually, even if her rage does not, and she has collapsed in a panting heap on the floor, her scarlet-slashed white hair forming a short, tangled curtain between her and the sight of the rest of the room when the door to the room finally opens. The man who sticks his head in the door (brown-haired, brown-eyed, and possibly as old as twenty, though likely still in his teens) looks vaguely amused but mostly just disgusted by the destruction wrecked upon the room and its helpless electronics. Wisely, he does not actually come into the room. Rather less wisely, he dryly asks, “You do understand the concept of you break it, you buy it, don’t you? Because I have to tell you, Jedi, that most of the things you just destroyed are all items that we’re going to need, which means they’re all things that you’re going to have to pay ro replace.”
The woman only spits at him, her fury evidently having abated not at all, “Do not call me a Jedi! I am a Jedi no longer! The Jedi no longer exist/! The Order has been seduced by those – those – /those – ” she trails off, apparently unable to think of a word vile enough, and the look of unmitigated, utterly unreasonable anger on her face could have easily made a gown made turn tail and run screaming with fear into the night.
The young man who happens to be looking at her just snorts quietly, though, and wryly notes, in a clearly amused drawl, “I’m thinking you’re in a mighty small minority, with that there opinion, An’ya.”
“Do not call me that! It is not my name!”
A muscle twitches slightly in his left cheek, and he draws in a breath as though trying to breathe in patience. “It is the name you were born with, sweetness.”
“It is not the name that I call myself!”
“Alright, then. Fine/. So. /Woman. You do realize that you’re probably the only person in the whole of the galaxy who holds that particular opinion about the Jedi Order, right?”
“I don’t care!”
“Ah. So. What’re you going to do about it, then?”
“What am I going to do about it?” Eyes flickering madly between blue and brown and a bright, bestial yellow-gold glare at him, as through furious over such a show of impertinence.
The young man – who’s handsome, in a sort of unfinished, not yet entirely done growing into his features kind of fashion – just quirks a small, slightly lopsided smile at her and quietly points out, “Your little Force glamour thing for your eyes is falling, darlin’.”
“Then let it fall! What do I care if they see me, with my mismatched eyes, /now/?”
A slight flicker of a frown creases the stripling’s forehead, at that. “They’re becoming a bit more colorful than normal, actually. Are they supposed to turn that funny golden color?”
The woman shrieks wordlessly, and then screams, all but incandescent with rage, “If they are changing, then it is /their /fault, upsetting the balance of the Force and unending thousands of years of rules and traditions like it were nothing!”
The young man looks more than a little doubtful at the veracity of that proclamation, but (again, wisely) he just shrugs and offers a slightly hesitant, “If you say so, then I guess you’d know, seeing as how you’re so deep into that Force stuff and all. But I’m still wondering what it is that you think to do about this whole thing, if your own Council apparently couldn’t or didn’t want to stop it.”
“What am I going to do about it?” The look she turns on him, with eyes that flash a coldly reptilian yellow, is one of such absolute malevolence that it rocks the young man back on his heels, swaying him back away from her as if from a solid body blow. “Go and pack our things. We are going to Tatooine.”
Confused (and finally starting to be afraid), he just stares at her, frowning, before finally (and a little bit hesitantly) asking, “Tatooine? But . . . /why/? What’s on Tatooine?”
Her smile shows off far too many sharply gleaming white teeth, a few of them smeared here and there with crimson splashes of blood. “It’s not what’s on Tatooine now. It’s what will be on Tatooine. And we will be there, waiting, ready for them to arrive. Go. Get our things ready. I wish to leave /today/.”
“This damage – ”
“Leave it for whoever finds it! What care I? We shan’t be here to use it or suffer from its loss,” she snarls, cutting him off.
“Yes, An’ya.”
“I told you – ”
The stripling holds up his hands in a gesture half of warding and half of surrender. “Yeah, yeah, sorry, look, I’m going, I’m going! I’ll comm you when I have everything arranged and we can get out of here, okay?”
“Make it fast, Zai’ac Malthias Konran, or you’ll wish I’d left you on Nar Shaddaa where I first found you, all those years ago.”
The young man’s face goes still and cold as a carved mask at that, but his jerky nod and terse, “Understood,” seem to be all that she desires (and is certainly all that she notices).
His hands clench as he ducks back out of the room, and he thinks, not for the first time, that it might have been better for him (as it surely would have been for poor Aurra Sing, not to mention all of her kills) to have been left in Hutt Space, rather than taken in by this madwoman who refused her own name . . .
***
Wilhuff Tarkin – former governor of Seswenna Sector and commander of the Republic Outland Security Force, and a member of Eriadu’s hereditary aristocracy as well as a Lord of Phelarion by marriage – stands on the observation deck in the forward bridge of the /Venator/-class Star Destroyer /Judicator/, gazing out upon the research center that had, fortuitously, been finished only days before the Supreme Chancellor’s death at the hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. He and Palpatine had meant this installation for a weapons research facility, but unfortunately the Jedi meddlers killed the Supreme Chancellor before he could make his move to reshape the dying Republic into a new, strong, vigorous Empire of Man, and so there are, unfortunately, far fewer actual scientists and workers in the facility than he would like. Still. It is a start, and a safe haven, as well – one that not even the much-vaunted Jedi could ever get to, without the benefit of precise navigational directions. Slave labor had been utilized to construct the facility, using ores mined mostly from nearby asteroids, and so at least there was no need to worry about clone soldiers who likely would have turned on them. The workers may not last long, but they will, at least, behave and work hard (at least as much as slaves ever do – which is to say, they will behave and they will work, or they will be locked out of the facility with only a limited air supply and left to die slow, agonizing deaths in the darkness of space). Given a little more time and some help from the drugs of the mad scientist Jenna Zan Arbor, and they will do more than simply cooperate – they will fashion themselves into completely obedient, wholly eager to please worker drones and experimental subjects, becoming the perfect slaves. All they require is time and safety, and a little luck. With the resources of the Commerce Guild and those systems and sectors disgruntled by the changes in the new government to back them, the plans and resources left behind by Palpatine (whether he was a Sith Lord or not is irrelevant, after all, to the usefulness of his remaining currency and weapons), they will eventually have their day.
The Empire has not been defeated. It has merely been delayed a little in coming. Tarkin is quite certain of this. He will be the one to see the Empire born, and, when it comes to pass, he will avenge himself on the Jedi fittingly, for ever daring to cause such a delay. He is adamantly convinced of this fact. And so he stands. And he gazes upon the research facility whose building he helped to plan. And he waits for word on some samples that are currently being tested by none other than Zan Arbor herself – samples that may, if they prove to be genuine, prove to shorten the timeframe of the terrible delay in the Empire’s birth.
Eventually, footsteps sound behind him. He can see the woman reflected (if only vaguely and imperfectly) in the transparisteel, and so he doesn’t bother to turn. “Well?” he simply asks.
“They are genuinely viable cells. If you get me some cloning cylinders, Tarkin, we’ll be in business,” Zan Arbor replies, not bothering to hide the glee in her voice.
“It will be made a priority.”
“Good.”
He sees the reflection of her head – her normally quite blonde hair still dyed that jarringly vivid flame-red – nod once, briskly, and he waits until she’s turned around and is making as if to leave before he asks, “And the one who brought the samples?”
“I suspect some kind of gene therapy. She tests as a cross between Sola Naberrie and the deceased Senator. She also appears to be missing most of her memory and to be quite mad.”
“Ah. Do you believe she will be of any further use?”
Zan Arbor shrugs. “Not particularly, no, at least not once she’s gotten us into his other safe house. I’d rather confine my tests on Force-sensitives to those who lack enough training to pose a serious threat.”
“Ah. I shall pass on the order for the mission, then. I will make it clear that she is to be terminated once the mission is successfully completed,” Tarkin declares. “I trust this shall be satisfactory?”
“Immensely so.”
“Good. Then go back to your work.”
Zan Arbor nods, spins on her heel, and strides rapidly out of the room.
Tarkin is left alone, still looking out at the newly completed facility. Slowly but surely, a chilling smile curves his narrow slash of a mouth upwards. He is quite pleased – or at least as pleased as he can hope to be at the moment, all things considered.
Everything seems to be going according to plan.
***
The young man stands unmoving before the transparisteel windows, his dark eyes fixed sightlessly down on the city and the world he has claimed as his own. He is an exceptionally handsome young man seemingly in his mid-twenties – apparently human (or at least near enough to pass as a full-blooded human norm), taller than normal, and with a body that’s naturally slim but hardened and slightly bulked, at the chest and shoulders, with the muscles of either a warrior or a trained athlete – with gold-streaked brown hair, eyes so dark a grey that they are often taken to be black or brown in low light or when seen from a distance, clear fair skin with an extremely healthy looking natural rosy glow to his cheeks, and regular, harmonious features blessed by high cheekbones, a strong jaw line, a stubbornly proud looking strong chin, and thick, darkly dramatic eyebrows that call a great deal of attention to his eyes (with their long fringe of eyelashes). At the moment, though, the young man’s eyes are oddly blank, his face slack and strangely lifeless, and, if not for the fact that his chest regularly continues to expand and fall with each new breath, he might almost have been taken for a clever mannequin rather than an actual live person. He is clad from neck to wrist to toe in solid black clothing that almost seems to be a uniform of some kind – the fabric is heavy but of a fine weave, and fitted closely to his body, as are the nerf-hide boots that come up to a point not far below the hinge of his knees – and the thick, heavy leather belt cinching his slim waist dangles a blaster from his right hip and a lightsaber hilt from his left.
He stands there for a long time, unseeing, before quite suddenly asking, in a soft voice carrying the distinctive accent of Coruscant, “Tell me the possible names again, Prophet.”
An indistinct shadow moves within the recesses of the unlighted room, resolving into a black-cloaked figure. “Taral is ancient Sith for ‘he who protects.’ Judicar implies the highest of all judges, a dispenser of true justice. Paxis would connote one who brings peace. Bespredel is ancient Sith describing a state of existence without limits. Abaven connotes guardianship and Biàn translates to transformation or change. Sho’shin implies heartbreak, grief, agony; Kyo-Ran, fury; Hei’àn, darkness or misfortune; and Kyushu, vengeance. An’sèlóng is ancient Sith for chameleon, just as Krall is the word for king or ruler,” comes the answer in a low, gravelly voice.
“Ah.” The young man looks away from the transparisteel window, turning and slowly making his way to a small table part of the way across the room, where an indistinct black shape is resting, carefully centered on the highly polished round wooden table, as though on display. “Tell me, Prophet, would something like Kra’taral translate properly, in the old Sith language?” he asks, his voice oddly betraying little to no curiosity in the answer as he drifts over to the table and its mysterious black object.
“Something like ‘champion’ – a hero-king, a protector of those he leads.”
“Ah.” There is no sense of satisfaction in the voice, just a slight exhalation of sound in the same soft, obviously educated, precisely clipped Coruscanti accent. The young man’s long-fingered hands rest on the edge of the small table, skating along its rim as though in indecision. But after only a few heartbeats of silence, he reaches to pick up on the black object, raising it up and rotates it between his fingers, so that it catches what little ambient light is filtering into the room from the wide bank of transparisteel windows lining the whole of one of the room’s walls. The object is revealed as a helmet – goggle-eyed, fish-mouthed, short-snouted, and needlessly angular over the cheekbones, which, coupled with the flaring dome of helmet, yields an aspect similar in nature to the forbidding appearance of an ancient Sith war droid. No emotion shows on the young man’s face to reveal the queasiness twisting in his gut as he raises his arms to put the helmet on. Helmeted, he moves to stand in front of part of the highly polished durasteel casing for the windows. The black outline in front of him is smeared and hazy, a mere impressionist suggestion of what he is. He can barely bring himself to look.
“Lord Ferus? Perhaps you should consider – ”
“Silence, Prophet. I am considering. I do not need your prattling to distract me at such a critical juncture.” The almost cruelly derisive order comes out in a deep, naturally commanding voice, very unlike the youth’s naturally soft tones, and the shadowy figure instantly falls silent, the hand half raised in a gesture (as of wheedling or reassurance) falling back down laxly, until the black-cloaked and deeply cowled figure blends back into indistinctness in the surrounding darkness of the room. Perhaps three minutes of silence later, the young man draws in a deep breath and takes two steps backwards before pivoting sharply, taking several long strides across the room, and then looking upon himself in the mirror set into the wall. A small gesture of his right hand brings light into the room – sharp, merciless, and glaringly white, revealing a crystal clear reflection. He finds himself gazing at an image of all-encompassing black, the stylized helmet striking monstrous, unsettling, and weirdly fascinating atop his all too human form. He looks at himself for several long moments, without flinching, and then calmly, coolly, as if it were nothing of any real import at all, announces, “Kra’taral. I am Darth Kra’taral now.”
***
The woman shivers a little as she gazes at the features, so familiar and yet so new – an act of pure will alone sufficient to make her resist reaching out to trace longingly, reverently, across those features – and sighs, shoulders slumping slightly, as the sense of light flooding from that face suddenly doubles, that alluring mouth moving to the shape of a small, almost shy smile, and a fist clenches around her heart as a figure shifts, a head turning, allowing another set of features – equally familiar, equally new, equally filled with light – to shift fully into view, gazing with unmistakable love down upon the other. She does not trust this other, does not trust the light that seems to lime his features or the love in his eyes or the smile curving his full lips. She knows him too well to place trust in such things. So when he reaches with his (remade as human, mere flesh and blood and bone) long-fingered hand to trace the ’saber-calloused pads of his fingers lightly along the other’s cheek, her hands automatically double over into fists, and when that lovely man shivers, eyes slipping shut, eyelashes fluttering, and tilts his head up, smilingly, for the kiss, a rumbling growl of affronted fury catches in the back of her throat.
“Milady? You called for me?”
The low familiar voice calls her back from the edge of rage, and she turns, her snarl automatically transmuting to a smile, as the familiar form of her closest companion for these past nine months. “Yes, I did. I want you to gather together the others, and see to it that the most direct course from here to Coruscant is laid by in the Bright Flight’s navcomputer, my friend. We’re going back.”
The tanned battle-scarred features shift rapidly from their normal impassivity to surprise and then concern. “Back? Are you certain that’s wise?”
Her smile is radiant, transformative, and instead of a brooding, black-clad, ghostly pale apparition, a luminous young woman with bright blue eyes and a joyous smile stands before him, beautiful in the way that only a being deeply in love and happy with the way that circumstances are unfolding can be. “I am one hundred percent plus positive, Alpha. We’re going home.”
“Then it shall be done.” He snaps off a salute – a habit she has tried and failed to break him of – and turns sharply on his heel, striding off rapidly to see to her bidding.
Alone again, she turns back to the holorecording, features already softened by joy becoming radiant with wonder as she returns to her watching. “Soon,” she whispers, her voice deep and throaty with longing, almost crooning the words. “Soon, we shall see each other again. Soon, we shall be together, as we were always meant to be. This I swear to you, Obi-Wan.”
***
“My brother needs me.” The statement is made so calmly, in a voice so certain, that it would seem as if it should be impossible for anyone to doubt it is anything but the truth.
But, “The Adepts have more need of you. You were the one who told us to leave Lucazec for J’t’p’tan, and, in doing so, made sure that we avoided the notice of the Sith and the potential loss of one of our brightest sisters. We need you here, Owen. You were our first ae’shain in over a thousand years. The people need you!” the woman only insists, impatiently shoving an errant lock of waist-length, liberally silver-frosted fair hair away from face, out of her pale blue eyes.
Eyes like twin seas (deep blues and purples at their depths, with green flecks demarcating shallows and sandbars) regard her impassively. “You know what I want the people to do.”
The older woman instantly bristles like an angry feline, her chin snapping upwards with a force similar to that of a knife thrust in anger, pale eyes glaring into those darker, oceanic eyes, so unrelentingly primal beauty. “That will not happen. Not ever/. We do /not believe in fighting. You /know /this.”
“You do not and will not fight, believing yourselves somehow better than the beings of the galaxy who have no recourse but to fight, if they wish to live, and yet still you use your power to weave illusions that can lead others to their deaths. That is both hypocrisy and arrogance, Wialu. I have no desire to lead a people who are liable to follow any and every suggestion I might ever make but the one that is the most important. My brother, on the other hand, has need of me and will not turn me away because the truth I offer him is not to his liking. I am going to him. And you will not stop me, because to do so would make you a liar even in your own eyes.”
Voice strident almost to the point of shouting, she angrily retorts, “The Sith Lord is gone! The reign of darkness you have been warning us of these past several years will no longer come to pass! What possible need could this brother have of you that we cannot outmatch?”
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse. You know there are enemies coming. Some of them are already here. There is a chance, now, to change things for the better. He has helped to bring that chance about, and I will help to see to it that the fullest possible change will occur, whether the Adepts wish to help me or not.”
“He is a /Jedi/! He will not listen to /you/!”
“He is my /brother/. And he heeds the will of the great ocean of energy that carries the White Current of the Adepts and the Force of the Jedi and the strength and abilities of any number of such organizations within its boundless depths. One in need of the knowledge I carry will find me in his seeking, and my brother and I will be reunited. It is the way of things. If you would read the current rather than focus on your fears, you would know this as well as I.”
“You are being foolish and selfish, leaving us like this!”
The swirling seas of the eyes that have been so serenely regarding Wialu abruptly seem to gain rims of ice. “Our people are hidden so well that even those who are teachers among the ones still straggling in from the many worlds we’d established outposts on have difficulty attempting to locate our sanctuary. You are a self-centered liar, to attempt to claim I leave you helpless.”
“You leave us vulnerable to attack by any who might force the knowledge of us from you!” the older woman only snarls in return, clearly unwilling to be made to see reason.
“I was unworthy to ever be elected ae’shain/, if you truly believe that I cannot keep from leading others back to us and not have it be done a-purpose. And I seem to recall, Wialu, that /you were the one who called for my training and who pushed for the hardest for my appointment.”
“Owen – ”
“I am through speaking with you. I am going. Should you find that you have changed your mind in any manner and wish to speak to me, my contact information will be available.”
“Owen! Obi-Wan Kenobi will never accept you or the truth that you seek to give him!”
Ice-becalmed eyes gaze at her unblinkingly. “If that is what you believe, then you know my brother not at all, Wialu Vathan.”
And with that final proclamation, the younger man turns on his heels and strides to the ship that will take him away, leaving her to stare after him helplessly.
***
The woman – slender, well-formed, hovering somewhere near the borderline between average and greater than average height, and sharp-featured, with a slender blade of a nose that often reminds others of the sharp prow of a ship, high cheekbones, a strong, stubborn jaw, and a prominent, pointed chin, all of which combine to form a striking and oddly ageless countenance – shrieks, positively incoherent with and utterly beside herself with rage, and the holocomm receiver explodes in a pungent billow of acrid smoke and a cloud of splintered and badly twisted fragments. Some of the pieces slice into the woman’s face, arms, and hands, small impacts of stinging pain that draw blood but no real attention from the one being wounded so, as she is far too busy spinning in a circle, screaming and destroying every item she lays her eyes upon with burst after burst after burst of jagged power fueled by a dark, primaeval fury. Icy pale blue eyes flicker and darken and then flicker again, lightening towards an amber hue, with each eruption of power. Unaware of either her wounds or her strangely flickering eyes, the woman continues to keen and wail like a demented thing, her pale skin and shockingly white hair becoming streaked and speckled with blood as she spins, faster and faster, her hands raised and outstretched, fingers hooked like claws, and rips the room to shreds like an animal.
Her power fades, eventually, even if her rage does not, and she has collapsed in a panting heap on the floor, her scarlet-slashed white hair forming a short, tangled curtain between her and the sight of the rest of the room when the door to the room finally opens. The man who sticks his head in the door (brown-haired, brown-eyed, and possibly as old as twenty, though likely still in his teens) looks vaguely amused but mostly just disgusted by the destruction wrecked upon the room and its helpless electronics. Wisely, he does not actually come into the room. Rather less wisely, he dryly asks, “You do understand the concept of you break it, you buy it, don’t you? Because I have to tell you, Jedi, that most of the things you just destroyed are all items that we’re going to need, which means they’re all things that you’re going to have to pay ro replace.”
The woman only spits at him, her fury evidently having abated not at all, “Do not call me a Jedi! I am a Jedi no longer! The Jedi no longer exist/! The Order has been seduced by those – those – /those – ” she trails off, apparently unable to think of a word vile enough, and the look of unmitigated, utterly unreasonable anger on her face could have easily made a gown made turn tail and run screaming with fear into the night.
The young man who happens to be looking at her just snorts quietly, though, and wryly notes, in a clearly amused drawl, “I’m thinking you’re in a mighty small minority, with that there opinion, An’ya.”
“Do not call me that! It is not my name!”
A muscle twitches slightly in his left cheek, and he draws in a breath as though trying to breathe in patience. “It is the name you were born with, sweetness.”
“It is not the name that I call myself!”
“Alright, then. Fine/. So. /Woman. You do realize that you’re probably the only person in the whole of the galaxy who holds that particular opinion about the Jedi Order, right?”
“I don’t care!”
“Ah. So. What’re you going to do about it, then?”
“What am I going to do about it?” Eyes flickering madly between blue and brown and a bright, bestial yellow-gold glare at him, as through furious over such a show of impertinence.
The young man – who’s handsome, in a sort of unfinished, not yet entirely done growing into his features kind of fashion – just quirks a small, slightly lopsided smile at her and quietly points out, “Your little Force glamour thing for your eyes is falling, darlin’.”
“Then let it fall! What do I care if they see me, with my mismatched eyes, /now/?”
A slight flicker of a frown creases the stripling’s forehead, at that. “They’re becoming a bit more colorful than normal, actually. Are they supposed to turn that funny golden color?”
The woman shrieks wordlessly, and then screams, all but incandescent with rage, “If they are changing, then it is /their /fault, upsetting the balance of the Force and unending thousands of years of rules and traditions like it were nothing!”
The young man looks more than a little doubtful at the veracity of that proclamation, but (again, wisely) he just shrugs and offers a slightly hesitant, “If you say so, then I guess you’d know, seeing as how you’re so deep into that Force stuff and all. But I’m still wondering what it is that you think to do about this whole thing, if your own Council apparently couldn’t or didn’t want to stop it.”
“What am I going to do about it?” The look she turns on him, with eyes that flash a coldly reptilian yellow, is one of such absolute malevolence that it rocks the young man back on his heels, swaying him back away from her as if from a solid body blow. “Go and pack our things. We are going to Tatooine.”
Confused (and finally starting to be afraid), he just stares at her, frowning, before finally (and a little bit hesitantly) asking, “Tatooine? But . . . /why/? What’s on Tatooine?”
Her smile shows off far too many sharply gleaming white teeth, a few of them smeared here and there with crimson splashes of blood. “It’s not what’s on Tatooine now. It’s what will be on Tatooine. And we will be there, waiting, ready for them to arrive. Go. Get our things ready. I wish to leave /today/.”
“This damage – ”
“Leave it for whoever finds it! What care I? We shan’t be here to use it or suffer from its loss,” she snarls, cutting him off.
“Yes, An’ya.”
“I told you – ”
The stripling holds up his hands in a gesture half of warding and half of surrender. “Yeah, yeah, sorry, look, I’m going, I’m going! I’ll comm you when I have everything arranged and we can get out of here, okay?”
“Make it fast, Zai’ac Malthias Konran, or you’ll wish I’d left you on Nar Shaddaa where I first found you, all those years ago.”
The young man’s face goes still and cold as a carved mask at that, but his jerky nod and terse, “Understood,” seem to be all that she desires (and is certainly all that she notices).
His hands clench as he ducks back out of the room, and he thinks, not for the first time, that it might have been better for him (as it surely would have been for poor Aurra Sing, not to mention all of her kills) to have been left in Hutt Space, rather than taken in by this madwoman who refused her own name . . .
***
Wilhuff Tarkin – former governor of Seswenna Sector and commander of the Republic Outland Security Force, and a member of Eriadu’s hereditary aristocracy as well as a Lord of Phelarion by marriage – stands on the observation deck in the forward bridge of the /Venator/-class Star Destroyer /Judicator/, gazing out upon the research center that had, fortuitously, been finished only days before the Supreme Chancellor’s death at the hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. He and Palpatine had meant this installation for a weapons research facility, but unfortunately the Jedi meddlers killed the Supreme Chancellor before he could make his move to reshape the dying Republic into a new, strong, vigorous Empire of Man, and so there are, unfortunately, far fewer actual scientists and workers in the facility than he would like. Still. It is a start, and a safe haven, as well – one that not even the much-vaunted Jedi could ever get to, without the benefit of precise navigational directions. Slave labor had been utilized to construct the facility, using ores mined mostly from nearby asteroids, and so at least there was no need to worry about clone soldiers who likely would have turned on them. The workers may not last long, but they will, at least, behave and work hard (at least as much as slaves ever do – which is to say, they will behave and they will work, or they will be locked out of the facility with only a limited air supply and left to die slow, agonizing deaths in the darkness of space). Given a little more time and some help from the drugs of the mad scientist Jenna Zan Arbor, and they will do more than simply cooperate – they will fashion themselves into completely obedient, wholly eager to please worker drones and experimental subjects, becoming the perfect slaves. All they require is time and safety, and a little luck. With the resources of the Commerce Guild and those systems and sectors disgruntled by the changes in the new government to back them, the plans and resources left behind by Palpatine (whether he was a Sith Lord or not is irrelevant, after all, to the usefulness of his remaining currency and weapons), they will eventually have their day.
The Empire has not been defeated. It has merely been delayed a little in coming. Tarkin is quite certain of this. He will be the one to see the Empire born, and, when it comes to pass, he will avenge himself on the Jedi fittingly, for ever daring to cause such a delay. He is adamantly convinced of this fact. And so he stands. And he gazes upon the research facility whose building he helped to plan. And he waits for word on some samples that are currently being tested by none other than Zan Arbor herself – samples that may, if they prove to be genuine, prove to shorten the timeframe of the terrible delay in the Empire’s birth.
Eventually, footsteps sound behind him. He can see the woman reflected (if only vaguely and imperfectly) in the transparisteel, and so he doesn’t bother to turn. “Well?” he simply asks.
“They are genuinely viable cells. If you get me some cloning cylinders, Tarkin, we’ll be in business,” Zan Arbor replies, not bothering to hide the glee in her voice.
“It will be made a priority.”
“Good.”
He sees the reflection of her head – her normally quite blonde hair still dyed that jarringly vivid flame-red – nod once, briskly, and he waits until she’s turned around and is making as if to leave before he asks, “And the one who brought the samples?”
“I suspect some kind of gene therapy. She tests as a cross between Sola Naberrie and the deceased Senator. She also appears to be missing most of her memory and to be quite mad.”
“Ah. Do you believe she will be of any further use?”
Zan Arbor shrugs. “Not particularly, no, at least not once she’s gotten us into his other safe house. I’d rather confine my tests on Force-sensitives to those who lack enough training to pose a serious threat.”
“Ah. I shall pass on the order for the mission, then. I will make it clear that she is to be terminated once the mission is successfully completed,” Tarkin declares. “I trust this shall be satisfactory?”
“Immensely so.”
“Good. Then go back to your work.”
Zan Arbor nods, spins on her heel, and strides rapidly out of the room.
Tarkin is left alone, still looking out at the newly completed facility. Slowly but surely, a chilling smile curves his narrow slash of a mouth upwards. He is quite pleased – or at least as pleased as he can hope to be at the moment, all things considered.
Everything seems to be going according to plan.
***
The young man stands unmoving before the transparisteel windows, his dark eyes fixed sightlessly down on the city and the world he has claimed as his own. He is an exceptionally handsome young man seemingly in his mid-twenties – apparently human (or at least near enough to pass as a full-blooded human norm), taller than normal, and with a body that’s naturally slim but hardened and slightly bulked, at the chest and shoulders, with the muscles of either a warrior or a trained athlete – with gold-streaked brown hair, eyes so dark a grey that they are often taken to be black or brown in low light or when seen from a distance, clear fair skin with an extremely healthy looking natural rosy glow to his cheeks, and regular, harmonious features blessed by high cheekbones, a strong jaw line, a stubbornly proud looking strong chin, and thick, darkly dramatic eyebrows that call a great deal of attention to his eyes (with their long fringe of eyelashes). At the moment, though, the young man’s eyes are oddly blank, his face slack and strangely lifeless, and, if not for the fact that his chest regularly continues to expand and fall with each new breath, he might almost have been taken for a clever mannequin rather than an actual live person. He is clad from neck to wrist to toe in solid black clothing that almost seems to be a uniform of some kind – the fabric is heavy but of a fine weave, and fitted closely to his body, as are the nerf-hide boots that come up to a point not far below the hinge of his knees – and the thick, heavy leather belt cinching his slim waist dangles a blaster from his right hip and a lightsaber hilt from his left.
He stands there for a long time, unseeing, before quite suddenly asking, in a soft voice carrying the distinctive accent of Coruscant, “Tell me the possible names again, Prophet.”
An indistinct shadow moves within the recesses of the unlighted room, resolving into a black-cloaked figure. “Taral is ancient Sith for ‘he who protects.’ Judicar implies the highest of all judges, a dispenser of true justice. Paxis would connote one who brings peace. Bespredel is ancient Sith describing a state of existence without limits. Abaven connotes guardianship and Biàn translates to transformation or change. Sho’shin implies heartbreak, grief, agony; Kyo-Ran, fury; Hei’àn, darkness or misfortune; and Kyushu, vengeance. An’sèlóng is ancient Sith for chameleon, just as Krall is the word for king or ruler,” comes the answer in a low, gravelly voice.
“Ah.” The young man looks away from the transparisteel window, turning and slowly making his way to a small table part of the way across the room, where an indistinct black shape is resting, carefully centered on the highly polished round wooden table, as though on display. “Tell me, Prophet, would something like Kra’taral translate properly, in the old Sith language?” he asks, his voice oddly betraying little to no curiosity in the answer as he drifts over to the table and its mysterious black object.
“Something like ‘champion’ – a hero-king, a protector of those he leads.”
“Ah.” There is no sense of satisfaction in the voice, just a slight exhalation of sound in the same soft, obviously educated, precisely clipped Coruscanti accent. The young man’s long-fingered hands rest on the edge of the small table, skating along its rim as though in indecision. But after only a few heartbeats of silence, he reaches to pick up on the black object, raising it up and rotates it between his fingers, so that it catches what little ambient light is filtering into the room from the wide bank of transparisteel windows lining the whole of one of the room’s walls. The object is revealed as a helmet – goggle-eyed, fish-mouthed, short-snouted, and needlessly angular over the cheekbones, which, coupled with the flaring dome of helmet, yields an aspect similar in nature to the forbidding appearance of an ancient Sith war droid. No emotion shows on the young man’s face to reveal the queasiness twisting in his gut as he raises his arms to put the helmet on. Helmeted, he moves to stand in front of part of the highly polished durasteel casing for the windows. The black outline in front of him is smeared and hazy, a mere impressionist suggestion of what he is. He can barely bring himself to look.
“Lord Ferus? Perhaps you should consider – ”
“Silence, Prophet. I am considering. I do not need your prattling to distract me at such a critical juncture.” The almost cruelly derisive order comes out in a deep, naturally commanding voice, very unlike the youth’s naturally soft tones, and the shadowy figure instantly falls silent, the hand half raised in a gesture (as of wheedling or reassurance) falling back down laxly, until the black-cloaked and deeply cowled figure blends back into indistinctness in the surrounding darkness of the room. Perhaps three minutes of silence later, the young man draws in a deep breath and takes two steps backwards before pivoting sharply, taking several long strides across the room, and then looking upon himself in the mirror set into the wall. A small gesture of his right hand brings light into the room – sharp, merciless, and glaringly white, revealing a crystal clear reflection. He finds himself gazing at an image of all-encompassing black, the stylized helmet striking monstrous, unsettling, and weirdly fascinating atop his all too human form. He looks at himself for several long moments, without flinching, and then calmly, coolly, as if it were nothing of any real import at all, announces, “Kra’taral. I am Darth Kra’taral now.”
***
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