Within a Dark Wood

“But the stars that marked our starting fall away.
We must go deeper into greater pain,
for it is not permitted that we stay.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Midway through his life’s journey, Anakin Skywalker woke to find himself in a dark place, and knew that he had lost the path.

Spread-eagle on his back, he felt sand beneath him, an irregular wave formed of as many grains as there were stars in the universe. He had no recollection of how he had come to be in this place, or where it was, and he greatly feared that he had returned to Tatooine, in defiance of the solemn oath he had sworn after the death of his mother. Indeed, when he sat up, the familiar constellations began to take shape in the black dome above him. He discerned the Queen of the Sky and the Lord of the Underworld, whose secret names Shmi had whispered into his ear when he was a boy.

Anakin stood to see more clearly and felt the sand tumble from his clothes and skin in a slow, coarse wave.

It was Tatooine, he thought, and yet it wasn’t. The sky was bigger, and the spaces between stars yawned like black holes. The sand dunes towered above him monstrously, and he could not see the other side of them. He felt no thirst or hunger, but he knew that he must reach shelter, for the thirst would come as inevitably as the incandescent dawn.

He put one foot in front of the other and began the trek up the dune. As familiar as the desert was, he slid back almost as frequently as he ascended. When he called upon the Force to aid him, he felt nothing. Yet this did not surprise him. Mysteriously, he had known that he would fail to grasp the energy he was reaching for. He would have to do it in the way he had known as a boy. Anakin dug his hands into the dune and pulled himself up with raw determination. The time passed, seconds stretching into long minutes, and when next he looked up he saw a shadow in the shape of a man jutting down from the summit of the dune.

“Hello!” Anakin called. “Do you have a rope?”

The man shook his head and stayed fixed to the dune.

“I could really use a hand here!”

The stranger said nothing, and Anakin clenched his teeth hard enough to hear them grind. He put a burst of anger into scrambling up to the flat top of the dune. Only when he had nearly gained the height did the other man reach out to grasp his hand. Biting back his fury, Anakin accepted the aid. Sand slid treacherously under his boots as he crossed the final few feet, and he staggered before rising onto the summit, where he looked into the stranger’s face.

“Obi-Wan?” Anakin beseeched. “Why didn’t you help me?”

His old master refused to meet his eyes.

“You don’t remember, but you will soon. Come, there is someone you must see.”

Anakin allowed himself to be led. His memories remained amorphous, like an itch in the middle of his back that he could not quite reach. He thought it could not have been long since he had last seen his master, yet Obi-Wan’s touch felt unfamiliar and strange, and Anakin flinched under the man’s firm grip. They went down the other side of the hill together, and at the bottom Anakin saw Master Yoda, leaning heavily onto his walking stick. Anakin met his bulbous gaze and saw Yoda frown. The ancient’s ears twitched, and he slowly shook his head.

“Come with us you will.”

“What’s going on? How did we get here?” Anakin demanded.

“See, you will soon.”

“Master,” Anakin pleaded, turning to Obi-Wan and grasping his arm. “You must tell me.”

Obi-Wan’s face flickered like a poorly rendered hologram. In one moment Anakin saw the youthful features of a man in his thirties, and in the next moment the cracked and weathered surface of a white-bearded sage. Anakin's hand shook and he fell back from Kenobi.

“I am no longer your master, Anakin. I have not been that in a very long time.”

What Kenobi said felt right, yet Anakin could not have said why. He trailed behind Obi-Wan and Yoda, whose pace never seemed to increase, even as the world rapidly changed around them. The smooth dunes grew rockier, peppered with thin grasses and low-growing flowers that were rare on even the coolest plains of Tatooine. When the first green shrubs began to appear, Anakin knew that they were not on his homeworld. Like the treeline of a tundra, the shrubs grew gradually taller, until the three men walked through a lush forest.

A bold night wind blew through the transformed landscape, and Anakin shivered, clutching his arms around his sides. He turned his gaze onto a sky that was bright with a massive ring of fire. Debris fell from the astral disaster, tumbling into the atmosphere, and seemed to keep falling without ever reaching the ground, caught in a time loop while Anakin stared at it. His chills grew more dire, and he felt a great sense of foreboding, or perhaps déjà vu, as he struggled to remember something that he was certain held great meaning.

“What is that?” he asked. He pointed up to the sky and the surreal ring of fire that consumed it.

“Remember, you will, in time,” Yoda murmured. There was no comfort in the master’s voice, only a cold note of certainty.

The sounds of music drifted through the forest cover, and Anakin quickened his pace, eager to be away from his unfriendly companions, whom he seemed to have offended in some dire way. He climbed another hill and broke through the holt, following the joyous sounds of drumming and singing, and the high, poignant wail of woodwind instruments. Little campfires dotted the hillsides and hundreds of people danced and frolicked in unbounded jubilation. He spotted, too, stormtroopers bound to tree trunks, where tiny people who looked like wild animals drummed on the soldiers’ helmets in a show of malicious triumph.

Anakin looked at the sky and again saw the burning ring of fire. A battle had taken place here, on the ground and in the sky, and these people were the victors. The fire in the sky must be the remains of a great war machine, although he could think of no ship of such gargantuan proportions.

Obi-Wan and Yoda crested the hillside and stopped some distance from Anakin.

“See now, you do?” Yoda cackled.

Anakin folded his arms across his chest. “No, I don’t.”

“The boy is here,” Obi-Wan said.

His voice sounded different, lower, older. Anakin furrowed his brows and glanced at his former master in time to see the old sage appear again, white-haired and creased.

“What boy?” Anakin hissed. “What is this?”

“Your son, of course.”

This the Jedi said with great calm, as if Anakin might already have known. He watched as Kenobi flickered like a hologram caught between frequencies. Despite the unknown aspect of his aged face, his superior smile was too familiar.

Anakin clenched his jaw with a rage that increased when, a moment later, Kenobi blinked out of existence. With an arch of his nearly hairless brow, Yoda followed. This too was less alarming than it might have been, as though some part of Anakin already understood, if only he could recall. He examined the landscape and followed what had been the line of Obi-Wan’s gaze. There in the distance, Anakin saw a young man leaning against a tree, smiling at something that Anakin could not see. There was a gentleness to the boy that was alien to Anakin’s experience of manhood. It made him appear younger than his age, which Anakin thought that he must know, because he knew this boy.

“Luke,” Anakin whispered. Yes, the boy’s name was Luke. A familiar name. He and Padmé had thought of calling their child Luke, if the baby were a boy.

Memory crashed down like a tidal wave. Who he was. What he had been. The wreath of fire in the sky that must be the remnants of the second Death Star, where he had spent the last moments of his life. And the boy, Luke, who had lived. His son.

“Luke!” Anakin bellowed. He struggled to make himself seen by his child, whose smile was not directed at him, but at the treacherous Jedi. Anakin threw himself forward, determined to reach his son, but found himself hitting an invisible barrier. It pushed him back, and he hammered on it with a gauntleted fist. The invisible field spat static and thunder, and the landscape turned ominous, dark clouds moving into the space where Anakin stood. They blocked the way to his son and obscured the tenderness painted across Luke’s face.

This was not the way, Anakin sensed, for Luke was a creature of the Light, and to reach him Anakin must follow the Light. He cleared his head and his heart and watched as the darkness evaporated. A path opened for him, wreathed in golden light, and Anakin breached it without hesitation. He kept his thoughts clear, instinctively knowing that to dwell on his righteous indignation and resentment of his former masters would mean losing the way to his son.

The path was short, and it did not take long before Anakin alighted next to the elderly image of Obi-Wan. Anakin offered him a grin that was crafted of both understanding and triumph. Typically, Kenobi ignored him, and continued to gaze upon Luke as if Anakin were not there.

There would be time to settle their score later, Anakin thought. He had only a moment to bid farewell to his child. He smiled at Luke with all the love he might have offered him in life, which was not hard to imagine, for indeed he had already given Luke everything.

Luke smiled back at him. As Anakin watched, a young woman appeared beside his son, beaming warmly. Leia. His daughter, although he still reeled from the knowledge of it. She did not see Anakin, or perhaps did not wish to see him, for her eyes never once turned in the direction of the three spirits who should have blazed brighter than these bonfires to one who had the Force.

Luke offered a last lingering look to his teachers and his father, then turned back toward the warmth of the fires and the embrace of the living. He did not seek them out again, and Anakin thought of Shmi warning him, those many years ago.

Don’t look back.

The air grew dark around Anakin, and the bonfires, the music, his children, all faded away. When his vision cleared, he found himself standing on a bridge. It was very wide and long, its lines drawn with electric blue light and its transparent span stretched over a great gulf of darkness breached by distant, hellish flames. Anakin squatted down to look more closely and found himself watching the same ring of fire from the Endor wood, the debris of the Death Star, but this time he observed it from a profound height.

Anakin shivered anew. He was a man walking over his own grave.

To distract himself, he stood to examine his own appearance. He extended his hands before him and found that they were covered in the black leather of his gauntlets, and that he wore the heavy black boots of his most recent uniform. Even his bones felt heavier, and the silken weight of his cape hung behind him in a glossy fall, shimmering in the corner of his vision.

Only his helmet was missing. He no longer required the helmet, because he no longer required breath, but Anakin knew that the face he bared to the open sky was once more tight with scars. He found he didn’t mind much now that the relentless agony of his injuries had disappeared with his physical body.

The erstwhile Sith Lord turned in a slow circle and found a blue-grey cloud of mist at the far end of the bridge. As he observed, a man took shape within the cloud. He recognized Kenobi’s cocky stride long before he saw the haughty features of his face.

“Obi-Wan.”

Kenobi regarded him with that infuriating little grin that had never lost its bite.

“Shall I call you Anakin or Darth, then?” he asked, deceptively light.

Anakin narrowed his eyes. “Darth is a title. But call me whatever you like. You always did.”

“Ah, now it’s a title, when just yesterday you would not admit your name to your own son.”

“I suppose you were watching me.”

“I must admit I was curious to see how the drama would play out.”

A hoarse laugh broke from Anakin. He found himself enjoying the sound. It had been so long since he was capable of laughter.

“And did it play out as you expected?”

Kenobi examined him with that familiar, critical gaze. “Not entirely.”

“Not at all, is what you fear to say. But even having sacrificed my own master to save the life of my son isn’t enough for you, Kenobi. It never was.”

“Comparing your actions as a reckless but noble Jedi Knight to your crimes under the Empire is hardly apt, Sith Lord.”

Anakin turned his gaze away from his former master. He looked up at the sky and all around him, at the emptiness of the foreign landscape.

“No Sith Lord anymore. And no Jedi. In that, you are correct. But you didn’t expect me to make it here, did you?”

Kenobi’s lips thinned. “I trained for many years before I was able to grasp the technique of maintaining a stable astral form and consciousness, as did Yoda.”

“A no, then. You expected I would disintegrate from the physical plane, and you desired it to happen. You still believe that I deserve damnation as a Sith Lord.”

“One selfless action does not a Jedi make.” Bright irritation flashed over Kenobi’s craggy features, and Anakin was finally satisfied enough to end the conversation.

“I suppose not. So why are you here? What does this mean?”

He extended an arm towards the empty sky, the iridescent bridge, and the bottomless pit beneath them.

“Exactly that. Your sacrifice was enough to save you from the darkness, but it was not enough to grant you the light. You must seek that for yourself. You are sentenced to traverse the circles of the universe, its hells and its heavens, until you know yourself. Only then will you know your place in eternity’s fastness.”

Know thyself. If there was one thing that Anakin did not know, it was that, although he had searched for himself in so many places, in a myriad of names and faiths, in deserts and cities, at the feet of a king, and among the faceless masses of the enslaved.

“And if I can’t?”

“Then you will search forever.”

Anakin felt the scars on his face stretch as he smiled without mirth.

“Sounds like hell to me.”

Obi-Wan stroked his beard, and for a moment his face was smooth, and the hair was the red of a woodland fox.

“Knowing you. Yes.”

Anakin might have fought Kenobi there on the bridge, struck him down and gone into the azure haze at the other side to seek his reward, but he found himself uninterested in doing so. He could not think of any Jedi who would be pleased to greet him, and to be lonely in the light was surely its own kind of hell.

"Do I have a choice?"

Kenobi pointed a long finger at the other end of the bridge, where heavy darkness roiled, split with violent lightning, brief cracks in space that revealed a howling chaos somewhere beyond it. 

"Yes. You can go there."

"Into the dark."

"Into the dark, where all the Sith must go."

That was not precisely true, but perhaps Kenobi did not know that most Sith Lords chose to tether their spirits to the material plane in order to avoid that very darkness. Yet there had been no one to perform that rite for Darth Vader, the very last of the Dark Lords of the Sith. 

There seemed to be only one option remaining. 

“Where do I pursue this cosmic quest of yours, then?”

That awful grin quirked Kenobi’s lips, and Anakin knew that he was pleased to deliver the answer.

“Down.”

Raptor-like, the Jedi's spirit hurled itself into the sky, right leg cocked, and Anakin was unprepared to stop the blow that struck his face, launched him from the bridge, and spun him into the gaping abyss. 

“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
"Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?"

--Dante Alighieri, Inferno

The foul stench of unwashed bodies detonated like an ion bomb. Something heavy pushed Anakin up against a cold metal wall. He opened his eyes and saw vague shadows in a great darkness, other beings writhing around him, emitting the groans and wails of the dispossessed. The tortured voices stirred a distant and and long-forgotten feeling in Anakin. There was something familiar in this place, like a dream that had sometimes awoken him in the night, only to vanish when he chased it.

A whimper escaped from Anakin's throat, and he was astonished by the high and childish pitch of it.

“Hush, Ani,” a woman’s voice murmured. Unexpected, gentle hands pulled him close to a soft body covered in well-worn cloth.

Anakin tilted his chin to look up. A sliver of light from one dim ceiling fixture revealed the unmistakable structure of his mother’s bones. He drew back in astonishment, and his limbs thrashed, rejecting what he was sure must be a cruel deception.

Effortlessly, Shmi caught him. Her hands were large on his arms and shoulders, and he grasped that not only his voice, but also his body, had returned to childhood. As small as he was, he could be no more than three or four years old. Unbidden, he wailed in longing for Shmi. She was younger than he could ever recall seeing her, her features less careworn. She was still a pretty woman, and Anakin saw with a shock that she looked like Leia.

The juxtaposition of this adult thought in his child’s form broke him, and he collapsed, boneless, into Shmi’s firm embrace.

“It's you,” he whispered. “Mama. Mama.”

It was not what he had called her last, but his yearning heart screamed out with his earliest vocalization.

Gently, she pushed him back to look into his face.

“Oh, Ani. Of course it’s me.”

Unbidden tears sprang to Anakin’s eyes and streamed down his plump, childish cheeks. He felt his breath cut short in a way that was too familiar to elicit anything but panic. As one blinded and deafened, he tore free from his mother's grip, pushing through the mass of bodies to reach the centre of the dark enclosure. Hazy light spilled from a hatch on the far side, and he recognized the hold of a large ship, tightly packed with unhealthy-looking specimens from a range of species. There were several Wookiees chained to the walls, creatures too large and dangerous to roam freely. Blood formed a crust on their fur where the manacles bit into their limbs.

He was in a slave ship.

The air in the hold was rank and hot, and it pressed down on Anakin like a master’s hand. He turned in a circle of feverish confusion, crying. The thin wail of an infant in distress attracted notice from the other prisoners. They formed a circle around him, mocking and jeering, and Anakin fell to the ground, rocking from front to back in a feverish bid to shut out the terrible sensory onslaught. Some part of him must have believed that what he was experiencing was nothing more than a vivid hallucination, because he jumped in shock when the first, solid hand closed over his shoulder. More groans echoed through the hold, and another hand clapped onto his arm.

Anakin strained away from the repulsive, groping strangers, but his efforts were futile. When he turned to the left, the creature there pulled him closer, and when he fled to the right, another grinning stranger reeled him in. He slumped in their grip, cringing from fingers that felt unwashed and raw with sores, and the scant light above him waned as the heads of the creatures bent close.

They're gonna get me. Dire understanding manifested in the voice of his child-self, in the mind of the boy who had huddled under his rough blankets each night and made himself as small as he could so that the monsters would not touch him. That was a boy who had known with bedrock certainty that monsters were real.

Anakin was released from his terror when something large barrelled into the group of attackers, breaking them apart long enough that an arm was able to squeeze through and pull him out.

“Run, Ani!” Shmi shouted.

He did not question her, but ran blind until he reached the far end of the hold. He was certain that she must be just behind him. Only once he had stumbled into the ladder and scrambled half-way up did he look again.

She was gone.

“Mom!” Anakin gasped. “Mom!”

The ragged, starving masses of slaves were not far behind him. They stared at both boy and hatch with a great, hungry eagerness that Anakin recognized as a threat. Scanning the crowd, he was astonished to see Watto fluttering there, a broken set of chains dangling from his thin, blue wrists. The Toydarian aimed a sickly grin at him.

“Looks like we gonna be spending more time together, huh, little Ani?”

Anakin fumbled frantically with the latch. His hands shook and slid away from the metal, time and again. He felt a greedy touch on his foot and heard a shout of delight ripple through the ragged crowd of slaves. Quite suddenly, the hatch flew open, and a long arm descended to grip his smaller arm, roughly pulling him through the open hole. Anakin howled and struggled and clutched his hands over his face, certain that something even more terrible had seized him from above.

“You needn’t carry on so much, Anakin,” Obi-Wan’s testy voice scolded him.

Anakin gasped and flopped back against the ship’s deck, blank blue eyes staring upwards. Kenobi, red-bearded and young again, examined him clinically.

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin whispered. “They were going to get me. They were going to get me.”

“Very likely.”

 The Jedi hauled Anakin to his feet, and the former Sith found himself abruptly changed, no longer a small boy, but the lanky teenager he had been before the Clone Wars, when he was still Kenobi’s eager apprentice.

The beings in the hold continued to produce their cacophony, and then the former Sith heard the first, cautious step onto the ladder. Anakin's heart raced, but Kenobi simply kicked the hatch shut. Only once the voices had dwindled into silence was Anakin able to release a breath he had not known he was holding. His mind cleared, and he began to remember some of the details of what had happened.

“What was that place?” he hissed through clenched teeth. “My mother was there. And Watto as well. I saw other slaves. And masters.”

“Yes,” Kenobi agreed. “That is the place for those who profited in life from the willing and unrepentant enslavement of other sapient beings. In death, they are themselves enslaved, beaten and degraded.”

“But my mother--!” He seized Kenobi’s arm and shook it. The force of his panic and fury travelled the connection between them, and Kenobi’s body rippled like a stream in a storm, his calm facade shattering.

“Your mother is not there, Sith Lord! She came to find you. In fact, she came to save you, for slavery is among your multitude of crimes. If she had not come for you, I have little doubt that your former master and his fellows would have you now. I'm certain you can imagine any number of things they might have done to you, having done them all before yourself."

“Where is my mother now?” Anakin disregarded the rest of what Kenobi had said. He was not certain he could continue to speak if he paused to considered the fate he had narrowly avoided. Not the torture, but to be trapped there in the dark and the foul air, among the slavers he had despised. “I have to find her.”

“Shmi is an inhabitant of the blessed realm. She has already returned to it. But there is far more waiting for you here. Come.”

The Jedi crossed the planks with the smooth confidence of a being who had never doubted his place in the universe, nor his own righteousness. In Anakin's youth, Kenobi's confidence had made him feel inadequate. Now, these many decades later, Anakin was afraid. His own place in the cosmos, his certainty that he was destined for greatness, had been devastated by this man.

A man who had helped to raise him. A man who had claimed to love him. Kenobi had left Anakin a smoking ruin, and had never once regretted it. 

Was there anyone, Anakin wondered, who had claimed to love him and had not sent him into the darkness?

He ran to catch up with Kenobi, who stood by the ship’s main hatch. The one light on the wall provided steady illumination on the man’s beard, and on the long hair that he had worn as a general. When Anakin reached him, he saw white clone armour on the Jedi’s shoulders.

“Anticipating problems?” Anakin regarded the new addition with disdain.

“Only from you.”

“Why did save me from them? Clearly you thought I deserved it.”

The Jedi grimaced. “Yes. But your mother didn’t. She came to me when the slavers took you and pleaded for your rescue.”

Anakin stared at the light. “She couldn’t do it herself?”

“They cannot touch her, but she has little power in this place. A Jedi has a certain amount of latitude.”

Anakin grimaced. “As always.”

“Oh, you should be very grateful for your eleventh hour conversion, Anakin. It gives you a bit of latitude yourself, and there are many Jedi who are not be as forgiving as I am.”

The emperor is not as forgiving as I am. He had said the very words himself, not long ago, with the same satisfaction he imagined Kenobi felt now. He wondered if the Jedi had been listening.

“Then let’s go.”

Anakin leaned over and smashed the control panel. The gangplank tumbled open, admitting a blinding wall of sunlight. The former Sith Lord’s hand flew up to shelter his eyes. Squinting through his fingers, he was just able to distinguish a cliff face, its rocky outline coloured gold.  

He hurried down the gangplank with a lightness and economy of motion that he could not help but glory in, and thought that death was almost worth it, to feel like a whole being again. What bothered him was not the loss of his organic body, but the loss of control. Time had ceased to be a straight line, and Anakin had neither yesterdays nor tomorrows.

The glare on the rocks slowly eased, and he noticed the rough texture of the cliff faces and the scattering of pebbles on the land. Somewhere across the desert, he heard the low, haunting calls of a bantha herd.

“Tatooine again,” Anakin scoffed. “Don’t you have anything else for me, old man?”

Kenobi said nothing, and the wind whispered through the sands behind Anakin. He turned back to his former master with a cruel comment on his lips, but sealed his mouth into a firm line when he found the landscape devoid of human life. The ship was gone, too.

Perturbed, Anakin examined the horizon from every direction. The rocky sands were untouched by any shadow, and the sky was almost white with the blaze from Tatoo One and Tatoo Two, but the landscape appeared solid and the proportions reflected his childhood memories. It was nothing like that first, surreal desert, the monstrous sands he had scaled just after his death. This was simply the Dune Sea, and Anakin did not hesitate to breach it. Pebbles crunched under his leather boots. As he watched, his footwear turned from heavy Imperial black to the soft brown leather he had worn as a child, then to the dark brown of his Jedi apprenticeship.

He saw no one else in the open desert, and the heat seemed very real. Soon he was thirsty, and then he was parched. His mouth felt full of cotton, and he began to long for the automatic cooling system of his life support suit. He thought about it very hard, in the hope that thinking about it would make it materialize around him, but it never did.

Anakin walked until the rocks turned into smooth dunes, and then again into low, jagged cliffs. The next time he look at the sky, the suns were slipping closer to the horizon, and his thirst resembled the fire that had ruined his throat on Mustafar. Occasional winds filled his mouth and nose with sand, reminding him of why he had always hated it. After the third time he had been forced to spit up a mouthful of dust and grit, Anakin pulled his dark cloak from his shoulders and tore a long strip to tie around his face. What was left he wrapped around his head in a rough turban to protect his scalp.

He was ready for whatever came next.

So he believed until he heard the metallic burst of a manual rifle, the rapport followed by a pause, and then another blast. The grunting of a speech so rough that it was bestial followed, confirming what Anakin already knew. He was not surprised when the first Tuskens appeared on the lip of a cliff, staring at him through their expressionless goggles as they trained their rifles down on him.

Anakin’s hand shot to his belt, reaching for the lightsabre that was always there, and grasped empty air. The Tuskens hooted with delight and began shooting. Anakin dodged the first round, but the Force failed to come to his aid, and he had no other weapons. He ran for the cover of the cliff and stood under it while luminous bullets rained down on the sand.

Turned towards the shots, Anakin failed to notice a shadow easing down the cliff face. A whisper of movement alerted him at the last moment, and he prepared the only weapon had had left —a cocked fist.

The Tusken’s rifle slammed into his fingers, and he grunted, staggering. The Raider paused as if waiting, and then Anakin knew that another one was right behind him. He was too late turning, and the second rifle slammed into the base of his skull. Anakin fell onto the desert floor. He did not lose consciousness; nor did his vision blur or his mind slow; indeed his thoughts felt unusually clear and present. He was simply unable to move. He remained paralyzed as more Tuskens crowded around his prone form, hoisting him onto their shoulders and ferrying him across the dunes. The turban fell from his head, and he eyes were open as they moved. Anakin regarded the open expanse of the blue and gold sky with wonder and horror, as if he had never before seen it.

They travelled for a long time, and the creatures that bore him followed the secret desert paths with unwavering familiarity. Anakin thought that these creatures must have been real Tuskens when they lived, and on the heels of that thought came the notion that they may have been Tuskens that he had met, that he had known.

There was knowing in killing someone, certainly.

By the time they reached the Tusken camp, the last light from the suns had bled away. Stars studded the night like sequins on the evening gowns he had often seen on the capital, so very far from the rough, open vista of Tatooine. Anakin's view of the sky tilted madly as the creatures dumped him onto the hard, cracked ground before dragging him into a crude tent constructed of animal skins.

Even before he heard the broken murmur of his mother’s voice, he recognized the tent. It was the one she had died in.

“Ani?” Shmi murmured. “Oh, Ani.”

“Why are you here?” His voice emerged as a hoarse whisper. “Did the Tusken Raiders take you? Kenobi said that no one here could touch you.”

“They cannot. I am here for you, my son.”

He felt Shmi’s hand, the smooth glide of fingers over his short-cropped hair. He clenched his eyes shut and leaned into his mother's touch.

“I came for you in the Tusken camp,” he said. “This wasn’t the way it happened.”

“You came for me. Now, I have come for you.”

Her voice was unflappable, and her face was like the blank faces of the cliffs in the desert.

Anakin’s body trembled. “What will happen now?”

“You know what will happen. I cannot save you from that. But I will stay with you.”

Her hand slid from his hair, down his shoulder and along his arm. His fingers were clutched in hers when the tent flap opened. A Tusken warrior reached in to grip his left leg and drag him into the night. The desert air was cool now, and Anakin breathed a brisk wind through the cloth that still covered his mouth and nose. It eased the thirst that continued to scorch his throat.

The relief did not last. In the centre of the camp, the Tuskens had ignited a blaze with pieces of wood taken from rare desert palms. They burned with a hellish orange glow, reminding Anakin again of Mustafar, of Kenobi, of the glistening black banks that straddled a river of fire.

Another Tusken seized his right leg. Together with the first, it dragged him farther into the camp, where a silent circle of Tuskens waited.

With a cold shock, Anakin realized they were women.

Not just the men. But the women. And the children.

He remained limp in the grip of the two warriors, waiting for a chance to free himself. He only began to struggle when they dragged him clear past the witnesses, toward the centre of the circle.

Toward the fire.

Anakin twisted in their grip, kicking and scratching the ground. The flesh fingers that he had celebrated failed to find a grip where his prostheses might well have. He fought like a wild animal, struggling with his whole body and calling uselessly upon the Force, but the Tuskens were implacable.

“No,” Anakin gasped. “No!”

Panic-stricken, he turned his head from side to side, seeking any salvation, and glimpsed Shmi’s profile in the crowd. She stood openly among the Tusken women, and they seemed not to notice her. Worry was etched in her aged features, but her hands were clasped over the skirt of her dress and she did not move.

“Mother!” Anakin screamed. “Help me!”

Shmi slowly lifted a finger to her lips, pleading for silence.

“Obi-Wan!” Anakin wailed, looking in every direction for a rescue he knew would not come. “Mother!”

Shmi was still watching when the Tuskens put him in the fire. Her brown eyes were pained but very calm.

Smoke rose from the wood, and Anakin began to cough. The cloth that covered his mouth and nose ignited, and his breath shortened in a way that was excruciatingly familiar. His body released a guttural moan, while Tusken warriors retreated to join the circle. No one and nothing held Anakin in place, but he could not move.

As the Tusken mothers stared, as Shmi watched with embers reflected in her brown eyes, Anakin Skywalker slowly began to burn. An eerie serenity came over him, and he wondered what might happen once the fire had done its work. Was there a place here for men who had died twice?

A sudden, rough wind blew through the camp, fanning the inferno, blocking his view. Anakin, writhing behind a curtain of dust and smoke, summoned the last of his strength. He did not plan the words that flew from his mouth. They came to him as instinctively as fear or hunger, and he tilted his head back to look at the stars as he screamed through the terror and the flames.

“Master! Come to me! Master!”

Chapter 3

“At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain;

the language of our sense and memory

lacks the vocabulary of such pain.”

― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

"Master!"

Anakin’s cry pierced the fire to rebound across the heavens. Master. He had wailed the litany of his life and he did not recognize the greed of it until the thing was done. There had always been a master to level him, to both curb his power and shield him from his own recklessness. Even the cruellest masters had recognized his worth, his value, and his frailty, and there had been so many cruel masters. Now he called upon them all. Come for me, he demanded. Come for me and take me from the fire, and I will serve.

There was a part of him that recognized the craven nature of his plea and was ashamed. Luke had believed there was no need to abase himself before any master. Luke had insisted that Anakin was greater than his weakest moment. Yet there he stood, invoking the evil that had destroyed him.

Abruptly, the desert froze like a paused holovid. Above him, the stars ceased to glitter. Even the fire and the smoke hovered before his face like a theatre set, heatless and insubstantial. Beyond them, Anakin could see Shmi. She, too, seemed frozen in place, but he saw something in her eyes that told him she had heard him: disappointment. His own mother was disappointed in his weakness.

“If she had saved me, I need not have called for anyone else!"

Anakin growled his accusation into the night. He felt the weight of the awful words, the disrespect that bordered on blasphemy. How easy it would be to blame Shmi for the misery of his whole life, if only he could believe it.

The shuffle of approaching footsteps interrupted his disgruntled muttering.

“As I told you before, Anakin, she has no power here.”

It was Kenobi, of course, gliding into view from behind the fire, again wearing the form of the white-haired sage, the old man that Vader had cut down.

“What are you doing here?” Anakin cringed at the sulky note in his own voice. He sounded like a child.

Kenobi lifted his eyebrows. “Did you not call upon a master to save you? Was I not a master to you?”

“Not- not like that.”

“Ah, so you would rather an owner than a teacher, is that it?”

“Leave me,” Anakin barked, confusion and fury sitting tight in his chest. “I have no wish to see you.”

“Very well, Darth. I leave you to your fire.” Kenobi began to walk away.

Too late, Anakin realized his error. “No, wait!”

The Jedi's shadow shortened as he dwindled into the distance.

“Fine, leave without helping me! That’s what you’re good at!”

Without looking back, the Jedi Master waved a dismissive hand. A blue glow started around his fingers and moved along his arm until it surrounded his body. The air around him lengthened like a jump into hyperspace, and Kenobi vanished into the light.

“Obi-Wan!” Anakin screamed. “Come back! Obi-Wan!”

A new buzzing, flapping sound started, again from behind him, and Anakin strained to see the source of it.

“Ah, little Ani, looks like you in some kinda trouble.”

He spoke in Huttese, and although it had been many years since Anakin had communicated in the language of his childhood, he understood the words as clearly as a native. All of his knowledge rushed back to him now that the limitations of human memory had been discarded with his flesh. Indeed, memory appeared to work all too well in this place.

“Watto,” Anakin whispered.

“You called me, I think?”

Watto flapped into sight, hovering in the air before the bonfire. He inspected the Tuskens' work with a critical eye.

“They got you good, eh?”

Anakin scowled, his brows lowering over his eyes with vicious intent. He imagined pulling the wings from the Toydarian while his former owner howled. The image was so vivid that he hoped it might become reality if he focused with sufficient intent. That was how the Force had often worked for him. For although both the Jedi and the Sith had developed specific techniques to manipulate the energy field, at a certain level what mattered most was will, to want something so much that you would make the universe move to give it to you. Yet what had worked when Anakin lived continued to have no effect here. He was trapped in his own mind as surely as he was caught by the bonfire.

Watto put a hand to his lips, contemplating Anakin’s predicament in that way he had of considering the terms of a bet or a bargain.

“Hmm, I can help you, but for a price. No free lunches in this universe, ammi right, little Ani?” Watto chortled with visible contempt.

“What kind of price?”

“Don’t tell me you forgotten the ship already?”

A creeping horror washed over the former Sith Lord, unsettling him despite his determination to remain stoic.

“I did not believe that was real. You were truly there?”

Watto chuckled. “Oh, you better wise up quick, little Ani. Everything here is real.”

The Toydarian flew closer and peered into Anakin’s eyes. A toothy grin stole over the dead slaver’s blue snout.

“Everything.”

Anakin swallowed. “What do you want from me?”

“You come back with me to the slaver’s hold. Stay around for a while. Serve me. Keep me company. And why not? You’ve earned your place there! I only owned three, four slaves. The Empire enslaved more people than I ever dreamed of. And I always treated my slaves good, didn’t I? Better than the army treated the Wookiees. There’s a couple of those who might want to have a word with you back in the hold, but don’t worry, I won’t let them hurt you much.”

Anakin saw his proposed future with painful clarity. An eternity in the slaver’s den, passed around between those who hated him and those who wished to use him in every way possible. There would be no Shmi to save him a second time.

“No,” he denied. “No! I won’t do it. I won’t be judged by the likes of you.”

“Who then, little Ani?” Watto flapped and hovered. “Who is to judge you?”

Anakin turned his face to the side. “Not you. Leave me.”

“If that’s what you want. But remember there’s not many who can help you. You mighta end up staying on this pile for a long time, eh?”

The Toydarian laughed heartily, then zipped away like an insect, buzzing until he was swallowed up by the night. After, Anakin clenched his fists at his sides and listened to the frozen emptiness of the desert, where no wind blew.

“Oh, Anakin.”

The former Sith Lord closed his eyes wearily. It had been many long years since he had last heard that voice, yet the masculine warmth of it was immediately recognizable as the tenor of Qui-Gon Jinn. Renewed shame washed over Anakin. If there was one Jedi that he had always held in esteem, it was Jinn, who had freed him from Watto and fought for him before the contemptible Jedi Council.

“Master Jinn,” he murmured.

“Look at me, Anakin,” the Jedi enjoined.

Anakin did.

His first thought was that Qui-Gon looked just as he remembered him. There was the same long hair, the patient, noble features of the man’s face, and those cobalt eyes, always calm while hinting at passions unbecoming of a Jedi Master. That was what the Jedi Council had believed. During his years as a Jedi, Anakin had heard it whispered in corridors and dark corners. Skywalker is like Jinn. Too rebellious. Too independent. In his youth, those similarities had filled him with pride, for Qui-Gon had left a tremendous impression on the boy from Tatooine, despite the short amount of time they had spent together. Later in life, Anakin had speculated that Qui-Gon might have joined the empire, had he lived. He recalled that Dooku had thought the same.

All wishful thinking, Anakin saw now. It was true that this was not a man the Jedi had approved of, but the Order had long strayed from the ancient principles of its founders. Subsumed into the bureaucratic oppression of the Republic, the last generations of Jedi had obeyed the letter of the code rather than its spirit. It was the Order that had been corrupt, not Qui-Gon Jinn. This man was no candidate for the Sith. In truth he was a throwback to what the Jedi had been, long before the twilight years of the Republic. Light and a passion for justice poured from his whole body, and he gazed upon Anakin with a disappointment that turned his blue eyes to flint.

Once more, Anakin turned his face away.

“I can’t look, Master Qui-Gon,” he murmured. “I can’t look at you.”

There was a pause before wind swept through the camp like a sigh, and then the silence returned. Anakin knew at once that Qui-Gon had abandoned him, but it was some time before he was able to peer through cracked eyelids to confirm that he was alone.

Alone, but not for long, as a behemoth voice rumbled in his ears.

“Looks like it's just you and me now, child.”

Anakin stared at the tremendous form of Gardulla the Hutt with blank amazement. This was his earliest master, his first owner, one he had not thought of in decades.

“Didn’t expect me, did you?” Gardulla asked. Her voice was smooth, cultured and enormous. It was an operatic voice, one that had played a role in the drama of his life.

“No.”

“You sent out the call. You screamed it to the heavens. Master. You should have been more specific. There have been so very many masters, haven’t there?”

“How are you here?” Anakin asked. “You were still alive the last I heard.”

“Ah, but these things change so quickly, don’t they? One minute you’re enjoying the fruits of your labours, a banquet of choice delicacies from all over the galaxy, and the next minute you’re choking on poison. The risks of holding court.”

Anakin peered at Gardulla’s bulbous face. “You seem remarkably sanguine about it.”

A ripple passed through the slaver’s body, the Hutt equivalent of a shrug.

“I know who I am. I knew the rewards and the risks, all that I sacrificed for power. But perhaps you didn’t, for you seem quite surprised to be in your current position.”

A rough laugh escaped Anakin. He could not help but appreciate the irony of Gardulla’s intelligent discourse. If there was one thing that he had always been attracted to, it was a clever mind. Had he not loved Padmé for the same? Even Kenobi, once, and Palpatine as well. Yet to hear the same in the creature that had launched his child-self into a lifetime of bondage was bitterly amusing.

“Perhaps I did not know. But I didn't do it for power. Not only that.”

Gardulla’s body rippled again as a wave of hearty laughter rolled through her. The Hutt's noxious white skin glistened under the night sky, but her eyes were dark with knowledge.

“No one makes sacrifices just for power, human. We all have our reasons. And our reasons are so much better than any one else’s reasons, aren’t they? Family loyalty. Fulfilling our potential. Living up to the expectations of our teachers, our mothers and fathers. And for you? What was it? Idealism? Trauma? Love?” She saw him flinch and laughed again. “Oh, love. That one’s the most dangerous justification of all.”

Anakin swallowed down fury, outraged by the suggestion that his motives were no less flimsy than those of a common criminal, that his reasons hadn’t been special, different, more powerful and demanding. Yet awareness chased him in ways that he had always been able to elude. It hunted him down and pinned him in place, showing him all he had done. He saw the futility of his excuses and the unruly passions that had controlled him. Was it truly for the love of his wife that he had murdered young children? Padmé had never wanted the brutality he had offered to her like a ring of gold.

Or had it been for the love of Palpatine? Anakin's empty stare drifted to the darkened ground. It was true that he had loved his mentor, and he was certain that Palpatine had loved him in his own way, yet the Sith Master had been fully incapable of expressing that love. Even loving him, Palpatine had not spared Anakin the icy core of his sadistic greed. Through the twenty-three years of Darth Vader's subservience, Darth Sidious had continuously lashed him with scorn even as he had isolated his protégé from any other source of companionship. 

Perhaps the master might have been equipped to demonstrate more than mere possession, had they met in some other life, but something had mutilated Sheev Palpatine’s heart long before he had ever laid eyes on Anakin Skywalker. Whenever Anakin had reached out to sooth the raw edge of his loneliness, he had found in his master the tight grip of a man who owns a particularly vicious and devoted animal.

A proud grip it had been, but no affectionate, stroking hand.

“Would you like me to take you out of there?” Gardulla asked, bringing Anakin back to the present. She pointed with a stubby finger at the cacti and palm logs that continued to hold him impossibly fast.

The former Sith contemplated the half-ring of onlookers gathered before his pyre. There was the Tusken women and their children, the warriors standing guard, and his own mother, watching. He had thought to avoid this, but he could see now that there was only one way to escape his predicament. If he could not go around the fire, then he must go through it.

“No. You may go," Anakin commanded.

Gardulla huffed, exasperated. “As you wish. But the fire is real. Keep that in mind. It will burn no less than the fire that took you on Mustafar.”

He did not question how she knew his history. Everyone seemed to know everything about him in this place.

“I know.”

“Luck of the desert gods go with you, then, Anakin Skywalker.”

He envied the Gardulla's blithe acceptance, her understanding that a crime demanded a punishment. Even her own crime. Even his. Perhaps he might learn something from her, Anakin thought, but he wasn’t quite ready for that, for the perfect recall of the dead cast a glaring light on all he had forgotten. His earliest years with his mother. The capture by slavers and the trip to Mos Espa, trapped in the hold of a cargo ship like an animal. That was where he had first seen Gardulla, selecting living people to labour all their lives like droids.

"I would never have been here, if it were not for you," he accused her.

“Perhaps not. But Fate is a funny old thing. You might have ended here even if you’d been raised in a palace. In any case, I have my own fires to face now.”

Her body contracted, pushing her forward like a speedy worm as Gardulla departed without another word, vanishing into a dark tunnel that opened up just beyond the light of the camp.

When he was certain she had gone, Anakin inspected the landscape again, awaiting his final master. He waited for minutes, then what felt like hours, until at last he resigned himself to the truth.

Palpatine was not coming.

“Very well,” the former Sith whispered. “I will run no longer.”

The wind swept over him, releasing a long, tormented moan in his ear. As it swelled, the camp came alive before him. The scent of smoke filled the air, and the flames grew warm, then hot. He saw Shmi clutch her skirts in fists so tight that the skin of her hands appeared shiny and white. At last, the black smoke and the fire on the pyre rose higher, obscuring Shmi's face entirely. Anakin choked and wheezed, but this time he did not panic. The breathlessness felt familiar in a way that was almost comforting, for the pain of it had been his closest companion for much of his adult life.

Anakin opened his mouth and invited the fire in.

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Despite Gardulla’s warning, Anakin was petrified by the visceral reality of the fire.  Flames caught on his cloak—no more Jedi brown, but as black and glossy as a bird's feathers-- and climbed up to his shoulders. The fire alighted on the copper curl of his hair, and Anakin was tormented by a blaze as incontrovertible as the simmering inferno of Mustafar.

Yet even as he was set ablaze, the pyre at last loosened its paralytic grip, yielding to Anakin’s struggle for freedom. He leaped from the haphazard pile of light wood and cacti and raced from the desert camp. With a monstrous cloud of flame and smoke as his armour, the erstwhile Sith broke through the heavy crowd of Tuskens. Anakin felt their bandaged hands seize on his arms and cloak, only to snatch their fingertips back from the scorching heat.  

Shmi still stood amongst the Sandpeople. As he raced from the clearing, Anakin saw her dark eyes following him. He watched as her lips contracted around the weight of his name. Anakin, his mother whispered. Her voice followed him into the desert, though she did not, and the wind picked up the call as he sped across the sand with the laurel of flame on his brow. Panic carried him for a long time, but agony outpaced his determination, and Anakin felt the skin of his face crackling like meat on a campfire. A sickly-sweet scent filled the air. He was disgusted to hear his stomach growl with hunger at the smell of his own burning flesh.

When his eyes began to sizzle and swell, Anakin was at last forced to stop, too pained and heartsore to continued. He rolled on the desert floor to put out the flames, cringing at the rough, noxious texture of sand on blistered flesh. Then there was nothing left but the harsh pant of his own breath in his ears.

Having saved his son from the fell powers of his master, Anakin had thought himself returned to the Light, proven unworthy of the Sith tombs and the awful pits of blackness that even Palpatine had feared. At times, Vader’s master had spoken of those measures taken by the Sith to avoid the agonies awaiting them in the blackest Hells. Palpatine, too, had insisted that Vader memorize the procedure for Sith funeral rites, the tethering of the spirit to the material plane, often quizzing Vader on the matter, particularly in his later years.

He had hinted, Anakin recalled, at putting some other contingency in place should both of them be killed at the same time, and Vader left unable to perform his duties. Anakin recalled his unease and puzzlement during that conversation. Yes, Sith Lords had been killed prematurely in the past, often enough to give serious question to the Rule of Two, but never had both master and apprentice simultaneously lost their lives.

In their earlier years together, Palpatine would have explained his concerns with patience. When he experienced a premonition of note, he would inform Vader. But in those last, terrible days before Endor, Palpatine had been less resilient as he became a victim of the dark powers that ate his body from the inside, and he had seemed more like a crudely gathered bundle of sticks covered by a rough robe than a man.

Those sticks had been angry, terribly angry that the force of will that held them together must soon surrender to the demands of time. So Vader had not asked, and now he regretted it. Was it possible that Palpatine was not here, he wondered. Had he somehow avoided the fate that had claimed his apprentice? Was that why Sidious had not answered Anakin’s call?

His attention was seized by the sound of footsteps rustling in the sand.

“Who are you?” He lowered his voice to an intimidating growl. To his surprise, it emerged as the booming, silken tones of Darth Vader’s mask. He open his eyes and saw the red interpretive screen that had guided him after the fires of the Mustafar had irrevocably damaged his eyes.

“So here you are again, Darth.”

Only one man had ever called him that. And Kenobi had such a way about him, Anakin thought, an effortless contempt conveyed in the lightest of voices.

Unwilling to lower himself before the man he rightfully despised, Anakin ignored the scalding pain that still beat at his body—a pain that was far more difficult to dismiss without the opioid of the Dark and the most sophisticated of Core World narcotics—and hauled himself to his feet. He saw Kenobi as he had the last time they met—he the towering cyborg in his life support suit, Kenobi a withered hermit, aged before his time. Anakin thought that he should have been ready to wage renewed war against the Jedi, yet he was abruptly tired, his pains and the futility of conflict stealing his determination. What reason, then, for battle? There was nothing left to claim, no Empire to build or defend. No Master to please. No life to take.

 Anakin pushed past the Jedi, ready to continue his trek across the Dune Sea.

“So you have admitted the folly of your aggression.”

Kenobi threw the accusation at his back. Only with difficulty did Anakin resist leaping into the fray. His old master always did know how to provoke him.

“Perhaps it is you who should examine your motives, Kenobi,” he intoned, throwing the comment over his shoulder.

He felt rather than heard a shock of frustration move through the Jedi, and the shuffle of boots on sand resumed. Curious, Anakin thought. Clearly Kenobi did not enjoy his company, so why did he keep coming back?

Still the sound of Obi-Wan's footfalls faded as the former Sith crested another hill. Rather than the empty valley he expected, he saw moisture farms, white domes emerging from the sand like humps on a Dewback. As he moved closer, he saw the scoring of blaster fire along one side of the compound and recognized, with a shock, the homestead where his mother had lived the last few years of her life, married to the moisture farmer who had freed her.

Shmi’s emancipation had been a kindness done on a world where mercy was as rare as water, and Anakin’s newly perfect recall informed him that he had not been grateful to Clieg Lars. His response had been one of guilt and resentment, the vicious disappointment of a teenage boy who had anticipated swooping in like a hero to save his mother, only to find that someone else had saved her long ago.

Anakin’s heavy boots put deep footprints in the sand as he strode down the dune towards the Lars home. The place was as still as a painting, a memory existing solely to torment him, and a shock of surprise ran down Anakin’s back when he saw the door to the dome creak open. A small, stocky man stepped outside, his hand shadowing his eyes as he stared up at the night sky, as if he were waiting for something.

For him, perhaps, or perhaps not. Desert hospitality demanded that you extend any invitation to anyone in need. Anakin lifted his hand in greeting and saw the other man do he same. The greeting became a broad gesture of invitation, and the rough-faced human waited with the familiar desert determination, that resigned patience that had carved itself into Shmi’s face over the years.

When Anakin at last entered the compound, he felt his black cape sweep across the courtyard, carving broad lines of dust and grit.

“Well,” the old man on the step grunted. “Never thought I’d see you here again.”

Anakin crossed his arms as he fumbled for a response from behind the blank façade of the mask. His confusion must have been obvious, because the other man snorted with clear contempt.

“Forgot your own mother’s grave, did you? No wonder you never came for your son.”

Anakin’s arms dropped to his sides. “Lars,” he hissed.

“Got it in one. Well, don’t just stand out there in the dark. There’s things out there even you might not want to meet.”

“I have already met them.”

Lars did not appear impressed his bravado. Anakin considered teaching the insolent farmer a lesson, but chose instead to mount the steps, ducking his head to enter the little farmstead where his child had grown to manhood.

There were no surprises, he found, only the cool, mostly underground compound typical of a middle-class Tatooine settler. Despite Lars’ relative wealth, the design was almost as plain as the slave quarters of Mos Espa. No holos or tapestries of print-out posters. No mementos, not even of the boy. But most Tatooiners were like that, scarcely materialistic even among the wealthiest. On Tatooine, a display of wealth was a display of water. Nothing else.

As if reading his thoughts, Owen disappeared into the kitchen and returned shortly with a cup of water. Small, but not small enough to be insulting. He handed it to Anakin, who took it with his gloved hand. He regarded it with bewilderment, wondering how he should drink it. He still had no notion of how to alter his form; the changes seemed to follow neither pattern nor reason. He willed his mask to disappear and continued to stare at the cup through the red lenses of his visor. In the end, he cradled the little cup between two hands. He stared at the luminous glint of the water and longed to consume it. Would it matter here, he wondered, if he simply took off the mask? But then there were the scars, and Lars’ knowing eyes. No, he decided, better to keep holding the water in hope that he might be able to catch a mouthful whenever his form shifted.

But he was so very thirsty.

“You want to see Luke’s room?” Lars asked abruptly, the limits of his tolerance reached now that he had completed his duties as a host.

“Yes.” Anakin bit out the word and followed the man who had, in a legal sense, been his stepbrother. Was it better that something like family had raised his son, he pondered, or did it fail to mitigate the sting?

He thought of Bail Organa, who had raised that other child of his in a fashion so foreign that it was indeed an insult. Even if Luke had grown up deprived of the luxuries his father might have given him, those luxuries had been Anakin’s alone to bestow, and no one else’s. Even now, Organa’s presumption had him grinding his teeth in barely leashed fury. If he had been alive, the Dark powers swelling in Anakin would have been strong enough to flatten the moisture farm in one blow. As if was, he was overwhelmed by familiar impotence, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do to change his fate.

“Here,” Lars said, pushing open a door.

Luke’s room was small, but not so small as to be pitiful. There was one drawing of a ship on the wall, fairly accurate, probably done from images on the holonet. Under the drawing was a little desk with a few circuit board projects resting on it, along with a small tablet computer. To the left of the desk was Luke’s bed, just big enough for one person, and a wardrobe to the foot of it. Everything was beige and white and made of natural fibres. Vader stepped in and ran a hand over the walls, trying to pick up some sensation, some echo. When he found nothing (for this was not truly Luke’s room, merely a construct of it), he moved to the bed. The coverlet was pulled back, as if expecting its former occupant to return any time.

“Is this how it really looked?” Anakin asked

He turned around and saw Lars regarding him with a blank façade. Not quite blank enough, Anakin thought, to hide the furrow of irritation dug deep between the man’s brows.

“As close as I can remember. Which is damn close, these days.”

“Yes,” Anakin muttered.

He turned a circle in the room and listened to the silence of the house and the faint howl of the wind, the slow grind of the desert against the walls of the dome.

“You had a wife,” Anakin intoned.

“So did you,” Lars said, shrugging.

Anakin turned on the farmer in fury, reaching out as once with a clenched fist, bearing down on the man with the Force, only to feel nothing, nothing.

“It won’t work here,” Lars said, looking unimpressed. “But you’re right. Beru was with me in the beginning. She left after a while. There was nothing more here for her. For me…I guess I still deserve it.”

“What do you mean by that?” Anakin demanded.

“What do you think, Skywalker? We get what we deserve, don’t we? Or what we think we do.”

Lars left him there, standing in the centre of Luke’s childhood bedroom, shaking with fury and grief. He had faced the most powerful, the cruellest of men, and this dirt-kicker had just cut him down at the knee.

He took a moment to recover his composure before running from Luke’s room in pursuit of Lars, and as he moved, he found himself changing. First vanished the helmet and its relentless, rhythmic breathing, and then his monstrous artificial height diminished, and Anakin sprinted after his son’s foster-father with all the power and flexibility of his youth.

He burst into the kitchen prepared to do violence and found Lars sitting at the table. The farmer was eating a placid meal of Bantha meat stewed in a spicy sauce. As Anakin watched, Lars leaned into his plate and scooped up the meat with a large spoon. The food smelled terribly familiar, not to mention delicious, and Anakin was embarrassed by the growl of his own stomach.

The water, he realized, was still in his hand, and he drank it with profound relief.

“This was the last thing we ate before he left,” Lars said, pointing at the meat and sauce. “That damn droid of yours ran away, and he went after it. Next thing I know, there are Stormtroopers on my doorstep, accusing us of treason and theft of government property. I tried arguing with them…last mistake I ever made. I worried about the boy, too.” He sighed. “Last thing I ever worried about.”

When Anakin failed to respond, Lars waved a tired hand at the table. “Well, have a seat.”

The former Sith gave a rough shake of his head and fell to pacing. He tucked his arms behind his back, then crossed them over his chest when he came back to the table. Now that his natural height had been restored, he felt paradoxically too large in his own skin, itchy and impatient.

“How long will you stay here, Lars?” he demanded. “Luke is alive. He won’t be returning soon.”

The other man shrugged. “Maybe not. But time works differently here, you’ll find. I saw him once already. Not the boy I knew, but a man my own age, maybe older.”

Anakin leaned in with sudden, ferocious interest. He pinned Lars under his eyes and was again perturbed when the farmer took no mind.

“Time is not linear in this place?”

“Told you it isn’t.”

Anakin slammed himself into the seat opposite Lars, hoping to provoke a flinch. Lars blandly stuffed a piece of meat into his mouth, and Anakin scowled, considering what his stepbrother had said. If time in this realm were indeed malleable, had Kenobi known Anakin’s fate all along? Was that what he had meant by “more powerful than you can imagine,” or had that been an empty boast, as Anakin had always believed, meant to irritate and dig into his memory like grains of sand stuck in his boot, long after Kenobi was gone.

“He said it wasn’t my fault,” Lars said, staring into the distance. “I guess when I can believe it, I’ll leave the farm for good.”

Anakin stood and folded his arms across his chest. What was it Gardulla had said? She had her own fires to face. He ruminated on the matter, wondering if their punishments were indeed self-inflicted. If that were the case, it explained why Kenobi, in his overweening arrogance, seemed to believe that he deserved to exist unmolested in the Light.

Anakin contemplated Lars’ humble dwelling, imagining Lars and his wife raising Luke. The woman would have nursed him as an infant, either with formula or by taking a supplement to stimulate her own native milk production. Luke would have clung to the simple farmer woman for the formative years of his childhood, taking from her the life force that he should have taken from Padmé.  

Anakin heard Lars standing up from the table and turned at once to glower down at him. His mother’s stepson wheezed out a short laugh.  

“Does something amuse you?” Anakin demanded.

“A bit. He’s nothing like you. I used to worry that he would turn out like you. Even before I knew the whole story, I would think about our meeting, about how angry and distant you were, and I would worry about Luke turning out like that. More, after Kenobi told us everything. But I think there wasn’t any reason to be concerned. Luke was always different. A bright child, athletic and clever, but not the boy genius that Mama Shmi used to talk about. Just a good kid with a pretty good head on his shoulders. A knack for math and machinery, which was always useful around the farm. A bit of a dreamer, sure, and if you’d really been dead I wouldn’t have minded letting him off the farm sooner to become a pilot or a navigator, whatever he wanted. As it was, I stayed up late at nights regretting that I gave him your name.”

“That was foolish,” Anakin agreed. “Even if I were truly dead. It was a well-known name.”

“In the Republic. There wouldn’t have been any reason to worry before the Empire extended its reach. Tatooine was no concern to anyone in the Core or even the Mid-Rim. We weren’t part of it when Luke was born. But a few years later we started seeing the first troops in white armour, a garrison in Mos Eisley and one in Mos Espa. There were clashes with the Hutts and casualties among outland mercenaries and soldiers, but the ones who really suffered were the farmers and the slaves.

“The Jawas and the Tuskens knew how to stay out of the way, but the rest of us were grounded, always worried about losing our properties to the army or Jabba’s people. And that was all you, wasn’t it? You couldn’t leave things like they were, be content with having the whole Core as your stomping ground. You had to have this place too. Tatooine had stepped on you, and you had to step on it.”

Lars moved closer, and Anakin watched him come, mesmerized by the farmer’s fearless, righteous anger.

“And the boy. You never raised him. You never gave him anything his whole life but a few moments in the dark with your woman. But you still thought you could claim him. What makes you think you deserved him?” Lars spat.

Anakin tilted his chin back, rejecting the accusation and the implication that he didn’t have a claim to his own child. Bail Organa would probably say the same.

“He is my son, Lars. Not yours. Whatever you did for him wasn’t enough to save your life. Or your wife’s.”

Lars’ lip turned up at the corner, fat and bitter, like a Hutt in a dark corner.

“Whatever you did for him wasn’t enough to save your soul, was it? Murderer.”

The word landed on Anakin like a blow to the chest, and he was so stunned that he failed to register when Lars’ fist followed, slamming into his face with the force of a missile.

Anakin staggered back into the wall behind him. White light spread across his vision and the air opened like a jump into hyperspace. Lars’ face resembled a very satisfied stone, and for the first time since they had met, he felt a flicker of respect for his stepbrother. Perhaps, if he were forced to appoint a man to raise his son, Lars wouldn’t be the worst choice.

“You did as who, walking by night,
Carries the light behind him, where it does him no good,
But is of advantage to those who come after him.”
― Dante Alighieri, Purgatio

Anakin landed on the bridge.

Propelled by the fury in Owen Lars’ fist, his spirit was flung across the universe. Tatooine’s black velvet sky became the harsh, metallic shades of Mustafar, before transforming against into the starless blue-green of Naboo’s bottomless seas. Anakin plunged into the water and watched the terrifying monstrosities of Naboo’s Core zoom past him, their mouths open in search of prey. He flinched away from their teeth, wondering if they might not yet devour him.

After an uncertain passage of hours, the former Jedi burst from the water and landed on a flat, transparent surface, where electric blue lines sketched a sparse outline of a bridge, the narrow span between the light and what awaited all those who had willingly and knowingly given their souls to evil.

For a long time, Anakin stood staring at the impenetrable gloom, contemplating simply stepping into it. There was reason to fight onward – his mother, an inhabitant of the blessed Light; Luke and Leia still living in the world, and possibly Palpatine as well, if Palpatine had not already passed into the darkness—yet Anakin was so very tired. He wondered if he might yet find rest in the Dark.

He was still considering the matter when he heard the sound of water. There were no rails on the bridge, and when he peered over the edge he was dizzied by the immediacy of the ocean roiling beneath him. As he watched, the water began to churn, parting to reveal a window into the living universe. It was not like the last time, when he had appeared before his son as a spirit, briefly transversing dimensions. This was more like watching a holofilm. He saw the back of a Togruta, a woman, fighting for her life, and then the splash when she landed in the ocean. As she sank, her body began to change, growing younger and more familiar.

The Togruta landed on her feet in the midst of a battle. A shock of recognition ran through Anakin. The white helmets on the heads of the soldiers marked clones, not conscripted Stormtroopers, and they fought droids, not men. This was the Clone War, and the Togruta was his former student.

He had not thought of her in many years, except to occasionally reflect on the foolishness of the Jedi who had assigned a child to his care. Not only had they put a largely untrained teenager in the thick of a war, but they had done so despite numerous reservations regarding Anakin’s own character. He thought of what Luke had said to Palpatine: “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” How laughable his son’s claim had been, for there were few less suited to that title than Anakin. And yet Luke—emotional Luke with his many attachments—had become a Jedi, a better kind of Jedi, one who was more compassionate, more understanding, more forgiving, than any Jedi of the old Order.

Perhaps Ahsoka, too, was a better kind of Jedi. After witnessing the weaknesses of her masters, she had walked away from it all. As a young man, Anakin had hoped Ahsoka was satisfied with her choices, but life was rarely so simple. Ahsoka had lost everything, and it seemed that Anakin’s former student was haunted by her past, even as Anakin was by his.

In the window beneath the bridge, he watched as she lived out the war. He saw as she forced herself through the torment of her coming-of-age, a grown woman reduced to wearing the bewildered face of a child. Bearing renewed witness to her struggle, Anakin knew that Owen Lars had been right. One act of mercy, however great a sacrifice, was not enough to grant him an eternity of peace. Yet if he had helped Luke, then he could help another, and must make the effort.

As if the universe were responding to his thoughts, Anakin felt the sudden, reassuring weight of a lightsabre at his belt. He had always felt more at ease with a hilt in his hand and the deceptive lightness of the blade sweeping through the air. There was a reason that Force-nulls often found using a lightsabre somewhere between difficult and disastrous. Without the Force to guide the blade, it must seem as if there was nothing there at all, air meeting air, even as your eyes told you that you were holding a sword. More than one insensitive had been ruined in the quest to wield a Jedi’s sword. Certainly, even attempting to grasp the weapon of a Sith would ensure a bad end for the fool who tried.

Even so, with a lightsabre once more in his possession, Anakin felt his uncertainties swept away, his fears laid to rest. He saw the woman emerging from the cosmic waters, sea foam clinging to her sides and dripping down her back. He remembered the girl he had known, and discovered that there was still some tenderness left for her, a recollection of their shared youth. He saw her disorientation, and the way her body stiffened as she sensed someone behind her.

Ahsoka pulled herself to her feet, her back still facing him.

“Hello, Snips,” Anakin murmured.

“Master?”

Funny that she should still think of him that way, even after everything.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon.” It didn’t seem so long since Endor, but if Owen Lars was to be believed, years may already have passed.

Ahsoka slowly turned to face him. Her bright orange complexion was brown with shock, and she appeared somehow flat, nearly transparent in a way that made him think that Ahsoka hadn’t fully manifested. Somewhere in the world above, she was still alive. Perhaps, Anakin thought, he had been drawn back to the bridge because Ahsoka wasn’t meant to cross it.

“Anakin,” she said. Her voice was stronger, touched with a bit with awe. “You look the same.”

Did he? It seemed unlikely, even if his face was bare. He felt the weight of his years in the corners of his mouth and eyes, in lines on his forehead.

“You look old,” he said, instead of any of that. Honesty demanded energy; it was easier to fall back into the old banter.

“Well, that happens.” When you’re alive. She left it unspoken, and crossed her arms in a way that he recognized, with a shock, as his own habit.

“What happened?”

“You lost a fight.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Trust me.” He said it lightly, although they both knew she shouldn’t. “You lost.”

She looked to the side. “Baylan Skoll.”

Sure. She must think he knew everything that had happened to her in the intervening years, and Anakin wasn’t about to disabuse her of the notion. It was good to have an edge.

“So you do remember. That’s good.” He began to walk towards her, and she shifted, uneasy. That was good, too. The girl still had some sense.

“Why?”

“It means you still have a chance.”

“A chance?”

“To live.”

He stopped just short of her and watched her relax.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Ahsoka insisted.

He crossed his arms. “I’m here to finish your training.”

It was nonsense, but just the sort of thing he imagined a wise, all-knowing spirit would say.

Perhaps Ahsoka still knew him too well, for she appeared sceptical. “It’s a little late for that.”

He shook his head and assumed a grave demeanour, still closing in on her.

“One is never too old to learn, Snips.”

She tensed as he approached, but he subverted her expectations, strolling along the length of the bridge as if he intended to simply leave her there, abandon her in the vast dark. As he expected, it took her no more than a moment to break.

“All right. What’s the lesson, Master?”

Given her situation, he had only one lesson left to impart.

“To live—or die.”

He thumbed the catch on the lightsabre; let it ignite in his hand. It balanced there with ease. He had feared that it would fail to respond without command of the Force, yet he felt it as intuitively as ever. Perhaps, that he had passed from the material plane to become part of the Force itself was why he could not actively wield the energy field. Would a sword use a sword? Could a blaster use a blaster? So too, he did not feel empty or bereft, as he would have had he suddenly been deprived of the Force in his living body. Although he could not channel the energy, he formed part of its makeup. He wondered if that was what Obi-Wan had meant about the latitude afforded Anakin by his “eleventh hour conversion.” Would not a dark soul instinctively be drawn to the darkness? There would be no more choice in it than grains of sand pulled into a desert storm.

In front of him, on the bridge, Ahsoka tensed in anticipation of an attack.

“I won’t fight you,” she said, her voice trembling.

In a flash, Anakin remembered Luke and their last battle on the Death Star.

“I will not fight you, Father.”

But Luke had fought him, and Ahsoka would too.

“I’ve heard that before.”

He swung his sabre in a wide arc and met resistance as it clashed with Ahsoka’s pale blade. There was a brutal joy in this, a simplicity sufficient to drown out the constant roar of his fears and desires. He leaped back into the fray, repeatedly slamming into his former student, driving her onto her heels, only to see her push against him with a ferocity that sparked a touch of forgotten pride. It had been a long time since he had truly taught anyone.

When she struck a blow to the side of his face, he couldn’t hold back a grin.

“Looks like you don’t have much left to offer,” Ahsoka taunted him.

That didn’t mean he was going to let her win.

“I haven’t taught you everything yet.”

Anakin slashed at the crystalline bridge under their feet and felt it crack. He had already learned enough about the malleability of their environment to be sure it would. The bridge shattered like glass, and Anakin saw Ahsoka tumble into the ocean. Only once the waves turned to pink, roiling clouds did he launch himself after her.

When he landed, it was not in water. He saw Ahsoka laid flat on the ground next to him, looking far smaller than she had been. Truly a child again, and far too young to enter the hell of blasterfire and smoke that bloomed around them. These were her memories, and he felt himself pulled into them, repeating actions performed decades before. It took a great deal of focus to centre himself in the moment. He thought it ironic that was the lesson she needed to learn, when it had always been his greatest challenge.

“This is the Clone Wars!” Ahsoka stared at the field of battle, looking dazed and uncertain.

“No kidding.” His old way of speaking came easily here, surrounded by reminders of his youth and he was not repulsed by the casual utterances, the relaxed accent. It was all a part of himself. He could accept that now.

“This was one of our first missions,” he said. “Why are we here?”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s your problem.”

He turned in the opposite direction and started to run. Get her going. Get her thinking like a fighter again. She looked ready to lay down and die, accept whatever fate had in store. To Anakin, who was burdened with more regrets than he could count, her surrender was an insult.

“Gotta keep up!” He blocked blaster fire with his sabre.

“What about my training?” she gasped.

“This is your training!”

Perhaps that was a little too ambiguous, but after the literal trial by fire he had endured in the desert, and the continued, snobbish superiority of Kenobi's guidance, it was nice to hold all of the cards again.

The mist rolled over them, and when they emerged, he came after her. Ahsoka was already sitting with a fallen clone, her tiny hand on the man’s chest. If he left her here, she would die and relive these memories forever. Not for her the punishments of ghosts, he was certain, but the torment of her worst recollections, again and again, and every time as if for the first.

The thought was distasteful, and he found that for the first time in many years, he had no appetite for pain.

“Come on, Snips,” Anakin urged, more gently than he had intended. “The battle’s not over yet.”

She nodded and stood, gazing around her with the shock of a traumatized child.

“What’s wrong?”

“We lost so many,” she whispsered.

“There’s always a price.”

He wasn’t sure if it was the sort of thing he would have said when he was young. He thought of a saying from Tatooine, something he’d heard his mother murmur once, just close enough for Watto to hear, but not close enough for the Toydarian to take it as a slight.

“Take what you want, say the gods, and pay for it.”

“It was my fault,” Ahsoka said, eyes downcast, “They were following my orders. I got them killed.”

Children following children into battle. The clones might have looked like grown men, but not one of them was older than ten. Yes, “take what you want and pay for it.” The Jedi were as much to blame for this as the Sith.

“Come here,” Anakin said, reaching out with his gloved hand to wrap around her shoulders and pull her closer. It was easier to do this now, when she looked so young.

“This is war, Ahsoka.”

The words were pulled from him unconsciously, as if he were reciting a script, perhaps because he was reenacting Ahsoka’s memories.

“As Jedi, it’s our job to lead. That doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes.”

“But out mistakes cost lives. That doesn’t bother you.”

“Of course it does.”

Once, it had bothered him, but that had stopped before the end of the war, before Darth Vader and the Empire. The Republic had carved the feeling out of him until he was as hollow as a nut shell.

“This,” Ahsoka stuttered. “This isn’t what I trained for.”

“Look, when Obi-Wan taught me, we were keepers of the peace. Now, I have to teach you to be a soldier.”

“Is that all I’ll have to teach my own Padawan one day? How to fight?”

“Do you even want your own Padawan?”

She looked at him as if he’d turned into a Wookiee. “Huh?”

“You know, teaching’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Really? What makes you say that?”

“I’m joking.”

He turned a light circle, trying to brush the matter off, but she didn’t let him get away with it.

“You're joking? How can you joke at a time like this?”

“What would you prefer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me. What do you want? You want me to be more serious?”

“I’d prefer it!”

Stupid child. “Listen, I’m teaching you how to lead, how to survive, and to do that you're going to have to fight.”

She seemed to sway in place, and when she spoke, her voice was heavy with future knowledge.

“What if I want to stop fighting?”

“Then you’ll die.” Anakin turned, ignited the lightsabre, and walked into the smoke.

“Come on.”

As he moved, he felt his boots fall more heavily, and the red glare of the visor returned. Low to the ground, his lightsabre shimmered a violent red. A moment more passed, and it was blue again.

He didn’t feel Ahsoka following, but if any part of her still wanted to live, she would.

To Anakin's surprise, it was he who joined her. He breached the fog to find her already fighting, two lightsabres lit and swinging through the air. When she stopped, he strolled to her side and folded his arms.

“I don’t know this battle,” he said slowly.

“This is the siege of Mandalore. We had parted ways by now.”

“Looks intense.”

“It was.”

He couldn’t help the tiny smile that crossed his face. “You did well. You’re a warrior now, as I trained you to be.”

“Is that all?”

“Ahsoka…within you will be everything I am. All the knowledge I possess. Just as I inherited knowledge from my master, and he from his.”

It was true in a sense, however bitter the line of inheritance. She knew all he had to teach her as a Jedi.

“You’re part of a legacy.”

“But my part of that legacy is one of death and war.”

“But you’re more than that. Because I’m more than that.” Hardly much more, perhaps, but it was what she needed to hear. His gift to her.

She turned on him sharply, and he realized that he had once again underestimated his former student.

“You are more, Anakin. You’re more powerful—and dangerous—than anyone realized.”

Anakin looked away. So she would not accept his kindness.

“Is that what this is about?” Ahsoka had no part in the Sith legacy. His allegiance to the Dark Order had come long after her departure. That she raised the subject now sparked an anger in him that he could not suppress.

“If I am everything you are…”

“You’ve learned nothing!”

“Don’t say that!”

“Back to the beginning. I gave you a choice. Live…” he ignited the sabre, and it was red. “…or die.”

She looked away. “No,” she whispered.

“Incorrect.”

He struck abruptly, slamming into her with the remembered force of Vader’s rock-solid blows, and when he easily caught her arm, he bent her backwards, nearly level with the earth. To her credit, she wiggled loose, falling backwards into the fog. 

Anakin remained in pursuit, chasing her out of her memories and back onto the electric blue bridge. The clean lines and glassy surface were once again whole, as if they had never been disturbed. Ahsoka lay on the bridge's expanse, a woman once again, and Anakin found himself relieved for it. He was not above killing children, but he took no pleasure in it. To engage a well-trained opponent was always a treat.

He stalked in low, and felt the air shiver, his form rapidly shifting between that of a handsome young man and the prematurely aged and battle-scarred warrior he had been at the end of his life.

“You lack conviction,” he spat, disgusted to see her still on her back.

Goaded by his contempt, Ahsoka hauled herself to her feet, and there was a spark in her eyes when she engaged him, one that he enjoyed.

“Time to die,” Anakin rumbled, hoping to see more of that defiance.

She clashed with him, then feinted, tricking his sabre right out of his hand and into hers, bringing it to his throat. He felt a little thrill of uncertainty, wondering what would happen if she tried to take his head. Instead of trying, Ahsoka threw his weapon from the bridge with a careless flick of her wrist. They both watched it go sailing down into the dark, Anakin with regret, not knowing if he would find one again. The blade had been a comfort to him.

Ahsoka’s face smoothed out, the fierce grimace of battle departing as quickly as it had appeared.

“I choose to live.”

Anakin backed away, and his footsteps on the bridge echoed eerily, heavily. Unbidden, a slight smile crossed his face.

“There’s hope for you yet.”

There was more he wanted to say, for it may well have been the last time they ever met, but Ahsoka looked away from him, and he felt himself fade from the bridge. It seemed that her desire for his presence had been the only thing keeping him there.

A white mist crept into the edges of his vision, different than before, thicker and heavier, and Anakin was drained of sensation, his body devoid of hunger and thirst, pain or pleasure, as empty as when he had crossed the threshold of death.

“Now what?” he muttered.

Kenobi’s unwelcome voice pierced the veil.

“You did well with her.”

Anakin turned and saw his former teacher approaching with majestic, aged grace, cutting through the fog that clung to him like a second robe.

“Yes. She would have died, if I hadn’t pushed her.”

“And would you have cared, before Luke?”

“Unlikely. But here we are.”

They watched each other across a span of several metres and decades of estrangement. Once, this man had been family, and harming him had been unthinkable.

“Yes,” Kenobi intoned. “Here we are.”

At last the mist began to clear. A fierce halo of gold light burned through the dense moisture, gradually revealing their surroundings. They stood under the peak of a great mountain. Snow coated the stone by Anakin’s boots and behind his back. Somewhere far, far below, he glimpsed a valley. Tiny buildings dotted the hillside, black on white, like the night sky in reverse.

“Where are we?”

“Naboo. Yes,” he said, when Anakin glanced at him in surprise. “Of course, Naboo. It all started here, didn’t it? For all of us.”

In a way it had. The great adventure of their lives. Obi-Wan, Anakin, Palpatine…and Padmé.

As if reading his mind, Obi-Wan nodded. “Yes, she is here. Waiting for you.”

He pointed to the peak above them, a forbidding spear coated in old, old ice. Anakin clutched the length of his dark brown cloak tightly around his body.

“There?”

“Yes, Anakin. There.” Having nothing else to say, Kenobi blinked out sight, as abruptly as a room plunged into darkness by the click of a switch.

Eclipsed by the mountain’s shadow, Anakin stared up at the peak, wondering.

“Thus you may understand that love alone
is the true seed of every merit in you,
and of all acts for which you must atone.”
― Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio

Had Anakin still been a living instrument of the Force, launching himself to the top of the mountain would have been a small thing. As it stood, he was forced to dig his fingers into the first handhold and propel himself skywards. It was a task made easier by the craggy, cracked surface of the rock wall. His ascent was regular, if slow, but the chill bit into Anakin’s fingers, and it was not long before he felt his extremities begin to freeze.

The pain was keen enough to bring tears to his eyes, and the moisture awoke an unexpected sense memory. He had cried after that first slaughter, fulfilled at Palpatine’s command. Later that same day, Anakin’s tear ducts had been destroyed by the fire that had scarred his face to the bone, and he had never wept again in life. That had been its own kind of agony, and he had done his best to forget the keen pleasure and relief of weeping. Now, scaling the mountain at what seemed the very end of the universe, Anakin recalled the refreshing thrill of salt trickling down cheeks that had still been so youthful and full, and the confusion of regret unlocked by surrendering to his darkest impulses.

Yet there had been fierce delight, too, in joining his cause to his dark mentor’s. Palpatine’s policies, his plans for the future of the Republic, were in line with Anakin’s own views in a way that Padmé’s had never been. Even the first blossoming of romance in Naboo’s green and verdant Lake Country had betrayed hints of conflict, when Anakin claimed that “someone” should take complete control of the failing Republic.

Someone wise.

Naturally he had been thinking of his friend and patron, the man who had supported his needs whenever the Jedi would not. Palpatine had purchased things that Anakin lacked funds for; had taken him to exciting places that the Jedi Council disapproved of; even enrolled him in part-time engineering courses at the University of Coruscant. In doing so, the Chancellor had made Anakin more than just a cloistered monk or a dusty gem mined from the Outer Rim. He had made him a true citizen of the Republic.

Above all, Palpatine had been there when Anakin needed him, and while it was true that the Chancellor had manipulated his protégé by shaping Anakin in ways that would later be useful to the Sith, the Order was as much to blame for Anakin's failures as a Jedi. Protected by their political privilege, the Knighthood had taken little care with the emotional needs of the children who had grown under their icy auspices.

Perhaps, Anakin conceded, the rank and file Knights hadn’t deserved to die for the elitism and arrogance of the Council, but neither had the Jedi deserved to continue functioning as a central spoke of the sprawling Republic. If he had the chance to do it again, Anakin considered, if he were miraculously returned to the flower of his youth, he would propose to Palpatine formally disbanding the Order, rather than martyring its members.

The former Knight continued the journey skywards, ignoring the pain in hands and back with full knowledge that any damage would regenerate. Having examined the nature of the Jedi, he now considered the Sith. With the hindsight afforded him by death, Anakin recognized how careless Darth Sidious had become once his goal of empire was accomplished. It was as though, after decades of painstaking planning, Palpatine had lost the capability for diplomacy. Once crowned, he had taken malicious pleasure in thoroughly destroying anyone who dared to challenge his policies. Although Anakin was was forced to concede that Vader, too, had galvanized the resistance against them, with his blunt force tactics and utter absence of finesse. He wondered if a lighter touch might have yielded better results. What was it that Princess Leia had said, that long-ago day on the Death Star?

The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

She had been speaking to Tarkin, but she might as well have said it to Anakin. He heard her voice in his memory, as clearly as if she were standing before him: his daughter, the child he had tortured.

Tell your sister you were right.

A jolt of pain passed through Anakin, and his fingers slipped from the icy rocks. He tumbled through the air, turning in frantic circles as he searched for another hold. His right hand hit the face of the mountain, and he felt skin tear on the sharp edges. Blood painted a broad, bright streak on the cliff as the former Sith slid down like a skier hitting a rough patch.

The sky wheeled above him, and Anakin was gripped by the curious feeling that he was falling in reverse. When he landed, it was with precipitous force. A great cloud of snow flew into the air around him. Had he been truly alive, the fall would have killed him. As it was, he lay on the ground for some time, trying to will feeling back into his limbs. When he finally sat up, he noted that the air seemed very thin, and the ledge his body rested on was less than a metre across. Rising, Anakin found himself clinging to the mountain’s highest peak, and below him were the clouds, trailing wisps of white like hand-worked lace in a Nubian bridal veil.

"Hello?” Anakin watched his breath turn into a cloud of ice, then into tiny crystals that tumbled onto the snow, tinkling like tiny bells.

“Hello?” He called out again and heard shuffling; the unmistakable sound of footfalls on snow. He trembled, as breathless as if a great hand were wrapped about his chest, squeezing.

“I’m here, Ani.”

Her voice was as musical, and as sweet, as he recalled. But when he turned to her, he remembered what he had said to Ahsoka.

You look old.

What had been a wry jab at his former Padawan was true for Padmé . Her body was still slender and her lips full, but there were lines around her eyes and on her brow that spoke of suffering. She appeared a woman who never slept, as if she had closed her eyes for the last time when she had passed from the world of the living. Her grooming, always so immaculate in her youth, had suffered as much. She wore a white gown that might have been radiant if it weren’t so frayed, and her hair fell in matted, dusty ropes, longer than he had ever seen it. Tiny flowers were caught in the tangled strands, white buds that looked like the blossoms from her burial coiffure.

Anakin had seen those flowers on the Holonet, in clips of his wife’s funeral played for months after her death. Then, he had ached to pluck the petals, one by one, from her fountain of dark locks. He felt the same now. Her face was less gorgeous than it had been, but he could not stop looking at her, as if she were a tall glass of chilled water, and he, a racer, freshly returned from the Dune Sea.

He reached to fold her into his arms, but Padmé slapped his hand away.

"Did you really think it would be so easy?"

The sting of the blow lingered longer than it should. Padmé spun around, her gown flaring like an icy cloud before the open mouth of a cave swallowed her body.

"Come, then.” Her voice floated out from the mountain.

Anakin stepped into the cave. First came the dark, then a radiant blue aura that he followed to a pool of water measuring some five metres across. Ringed about by large, glittering crystals, the face of the pool was as smooth as glass, and as undisturbed. Padmé perched on a flat boulder at the far end of the pool, with her dress draped on the blue crystals growing up the sides of the rock. Radiant light from the pool glittered on Padmé’s skin, wiping away some of the lines of age.

"What is this place?"

Anakin’s voice was low but the cave amplified it until it echoed back. He flinched.

"My place,” Padme murmured, her eyes staring past him. “While you continued to live, I watched you from this pool. You and our children.”

The tips of her fingers touched the water, sending a ripple through it. In the pool, Anakin saw something wreathed in blue light: tiny, far away figures that vanished just as quickly as they appeared. Mesmerized, he glided closer until he stood over Padme’s shoulder.  

"Show me something.”

Padme recoiled from the command, moving as far from him as her seat permitted. Still her hand touched the water, where new images began to form. Anakin leaned in— because he wanted to see, he told himself, and not because Padmé’s hair smelled of night-blooming star-blossoms.

The little flowers were native to Naboo’s Southern Hemisphere, where Padmé’s family lived. In the Lake Country, Anakin had watched Padme knitting star-shaped blooms into a crown. The tiny flowers were small enough that no one exported them for trade, but Palpatine had planted them in his Coruscanti garden, and on one of those rare occasions when Lord Vader had visited the emperor in his private apartments, Palpatine had ordered his apprentice to accompany him into that verdant labyrinth. There he had seen the star-blossoms, luminous white petals flowing in a profusion over the garden walls. Palpatine’s hand had touched his arm, guiding him past the flowers, while Anakin struggled to put his dead wife out of his mind.

After that, whenever he pictured star-blossoms, he found them between thoughts of both Padmé and Palpatine, as if each one stood on opposite sides of the garden wall, connected by the spill of blooms.

“Look, Husband.”

Anakin followed the elegant line of Padme’s finger and saw their daughter’s face in the water.

The image was like a low-resolution holopic: faint but clear. His secret child wore the virginal gown that had served as her calling card in the Senate, but she looked the opposite of the fiery junior senator he remembered. Dozens of strands of nut-brown hair poked free from her coiffure, falling into curiously blank eyes. Her body slumped bonelessly against a familiar, shiny white wall.

"The Death Star," Anakin noted.

"Yes.” There was a banked fury in Padme’s voice that drew his attention back to her.

"You've seen this before?"

"So many times, Anakin. Shall we look at Luke?"

The water glittered under the flick of her fingers, and there was Luke, shaking and devastated and barely clinging to the platform on Cloud City.

“I’ll never join you!”

Despite the boy’s determination, Anakin saw the same despair in Luke that he had glimpsed in Leia. Discomfited, he turned his regard to the ebony carapace that had housed his own mortal body, and recognized his monstrosity with a freshness that he had not experienced since he was twenty-two years old, newly, grievously disabled, with his handsome face ruined.

In the pool, Darth Vader clenched a gloved fist. “If only you knew the power of the Dark Side!”

Anakin tensed with anticipation, knowing too well what came next.  

"Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."

"He told me enough. He told me you killed him."

"No. I am your father.”

The whole wretched melodrama would have played to its end, if Padme hadn’t waved her hand to banish the images.

"How long have you been watching this?" Anakin asked.

"Since the beginning. I have seen everything, more times than I care to recall. And yet by the very nature of my existence here, I must recall. I watched your descent into madness and lust for power. I watched our children raised in ignorance of one another because I did not have the strength to stay for them. How easy it was to drift away into the darkness, believing that I would never have to answer for what I had done.”

Anakin scoffed and left the pool to pace a wide circle around the cave.

"What is it you have to answer for?”

"Not as much as you,” she conceded. “My crime was not one of action, but of avoidance, and my punishment for all the times I looked the other way, content not to see the sin. It began when you told me that you had taken your revenge, not only on the warriors of the Tusken village, but on the women and the children. To be angry is to be human, I said, as if you had done no more than smash a trinket against your stepbrother’s wall. I had not witnessed the slaughter, and so I could pretend that it had not occurred. But there is no pretending here, Ani. Here, I have seen the faces of the dead children, have heard the voices of their mothers crying out. I have seen how the parents and grandparents shielded their beloved offspring with their own bodies while you cut them down.”

Padmé fell silent, and her hand lightly touched the pool. There was regret graven in every line of her face.

"And now you know," Anakin said.

His wife released a tiny, breathless laugh.

“I know the games the children played. I know the kind of jewelry the women liked to wear: precious metals and bits of natural, coloured stone they dug out of Tatooine’s cliffs and polished to a high finish. I know the fabric of the gowns they wore in the privacy of their tents.  How they wove the cloth with looms passed down from mother to daughter for half a dozen generations.  All this I know, Anakin.”

Anakin watched her, spellbound by the rise and fall of her voice. He understood from long exposure to politicians that she was building to a dramatic conclusion, but he was still taken aback when she reached it.

“And I know why they took Shmi."

Anakin had never given much thought to the Tuskens' reasons for taking his mother.  To admit that they might have reasons was to admit that they were rational beings, and, for the angry young man that he had been, that was something unimaginable. Now, watching from this cave beyond the circles of the universe, his thoughts became reality, and the water in the pond turned to the burning, golden hills of the Dune Sea. Mos Eisley side, and he didn't know the area very well, but he knew that it was real, because the details on the clothing of the Tuskens were exactly as he recalled.

He watched the desert nomads moving in and out of their tents, collecting water from the hidden places that the humans still couldn’t find. The Tuskens lived in the very heart of the desert. Sometimes the Jawas would pay visits, to buy water and sell equipment. In this way, Tatooine's two indigenous peoples lived side-by-side, with only the occasional skirmish to disrupt their peace. Sometimes these conflicts ended in blood, but most often they were settled by an exchange of goods.

As he watched, Anakin suddenly, vividly recalled a childhood encounter with the Tuskens. When he was barely seven years old, he had given water to one of the sand people. Slavers had captured the desert nomad and held it in a cage while they broke the Tusken Raider for sale, but the prisoner had proven unbreakable. Anakin remembered watching the captive throw itself against the bars until the slavers retreated. The nomad had curled into a corner, only rousing itself when the slavers dared to approach. Filled with fear and pity, Anakin had watched; the next day, he had sacrificed his own small cup of water to the Tusken. The captive had seemed grateful for the child’s sacrifice, offering a comradely yip before tipping the liquid gold through the wrappings that concealed its face.

In the end, it had made no difference. The Tusken had refused to be tamed. One of the slavers shot the Tusken through the bars and then dragged out the body to burn. As a young boy witnessing the incident, Anakin had been overcome, not only with fear and sorrow, but a fierce respect for the Tusken’s independence.

Anakin stumbled back from the pool. He had forgotten that.

"You didn't want to think of them as people," Padmé said. Her voice was distant, gentle. "I didn't want to, either. If I had, I would have to admit that the man I had fallen for was a murderer."

"People commit murder all the time." Anakin forced the words out from between stiff lips. Even to himself, it was a weak excuse.

"What makes you so certain that the people you killed deserved it? Look!"

Compelled by Padmé's command, Anakin watched the days pass by while the Turkens lived as men lived. For they were men, their characters as diverse as those of humans. His eyes followed them into their tents and observed them removing their outer garments. He saw their true faces: canine, as fine and fierce as wild wolves, with sandy-coloured fur and alluring golden eyes.

It was good that they covered themselves so completely, Anakin thought. The humans settlers and the Hutts believed that the Tuskens were ugly, deformed monstrosities that they would as soon shoot as look at. If they knew of this beauty, the slavers would take the sand people as surely as they did Twi'leks, and make them dance for the pleasure of the masters.

"Watch now," Padmé murmured beside him. He tracked her slim brown hands from the corner of his eye. Of all of her, Padmé’s hands had changed the least. They were still replete with such grace.

Anakin looked back into the crystal pool. He saw a cloudless Tatooine evening, somewhere in the deep desert. Like the zoom lens on a camera, his vision expanded to encompass the site of a Tusken camp. The sand people in the camp appeared relaxed, unconcerned, as they went about their day. Abruptly one of the Tuskens stood and pointed into the distance. A flash of light on a dune turned into the glare on a row of weapons as a large group of humans on Dewbacks filed into the camp. Adult Tuskens formed a line, pointing their rifles at the strangers. Anakin counted their numbers and saw that the settlers had done their research; their number was nearly double that of the natives.

The humans were gentle at first, persuasive. They claimed that the Tusken camp was on settler property. The leader produced a bill of sale for the land. When the Tuskens refused to acknowledge the claim, the violence began. The humans started knocking down tents. One of the Tuskens blew a warning shot into the air, and the humans used the excuse to shoot at the sand people. They had blasters, not manual rifles, and they killed a dozen Tuskens in minutes. The remaining Tuskens fled from the water-rich site while the humans took whatever they wanted before burning the tents to the ground.

In the end, Anakin saw, the settlers still couldn’t find the natural spring they coveted.

That night, the Tuskens conspired under the melancholy light of Tatooine’s moons. Those among the sand people who hungered for justice wanted war. Enough of this weakness, they demanded. Enough of appeasement and letting these outer world humans take what was not theirs. Human presence on Tatooine was no more than 400 years old. Tuskens and Jawas had ancestors going back a hundred thousand years. They were the children of the Dune Sea and had always been there.

But the moderates feared reprisals on a mass scale, and the Tuskens decided to forego war. Instead, they planned to take hostages and demand the return of the stolen land. Anakin watched them ride through the desert, picking up unprotected settlers. Shmi, out doing chores, was the last one the Tuskens took before returning to their hidden camp. From there, they sent out the messages citing their demands.

For Tuskens, loyalty to family and clan meant everything. If the situation were reversed, they would have sought a return of their living relations before all else. The humans acted in ways they did not anticipate. They refused to bargain for the return of the hostages, instead attacking the Tusken camp and killing most of the captive humans in the crossfire. Only Shmi survived. Anakin watched her try to escape during the battle and felt a spark of irrational hope that his mother’s destiny might be subverted. But the outcome was inevitable, and the Tuskens took her with them as they fled.

At the new campsite, they tied Shmi to the tent where Anakin had found her. Her injuries, he noted with unease, were not the result of torture, but lingering wounds from the conflict. The Tuskens even gave her water and food. The food was less than what she needed to heal, but as much as they could spare. Having seen to Shmi’s physical needs, the Tuskens sent more messages back to the farmsteads. Cliegg Lars tried to bargain for his wife, but without his legs he was considered used up, a worthless old man, and the younger settlers shouted him down.

The humans gave Shmi up for dead, and still she lived another month before Anakin arrived, slowly wasting away while the Tuskens debated her future. Some of them advocated for taking her into their tribe, while others said they should give her back to her people. Some said it would be cruel to even try, since her people cared so little.

The argument went unresolved. Anakin watched himself arrive, following the thread of his dreams and finding his mother at the end of it. Clutched in her son’s arms, Shmi's head fell back with an awful finality before young Anakin ignited his lightsabre and launched into the camp. He cut down the first Tusken he found, irrespective of age and sex, and continued until the entire tribe lay dead in the sands of his childhood.

Back in Padmé’s cave, Anakin stumbled away from the pool.

"I didn't know," he muttered. "I didn't know. It wasn't them."

Padmé watched him with level brown eyes.

“Nor did I," she said, "but we have a responsibility to seek the truth. And when we don't...we end here."

She swept the cavern with her hand, indicating their surroundings.

"Is this some kind of punishment?" Anakin demanded. "From who? For what?"

"It doesn't matter," she sighed, "I should have known better."

She cleared the pool again. In Owen Lars’ workroom, a young Padme murmured her understanding to an even younger Anakin.

"It's human to be angry," Padmé repeated after her younger self. "As if that were any kind of reason."

"You offered comfort to a friend. You made a mistake! Should you be condemned forever, imprisoned forever, just for that?"

"Just for that?” Padmé scoffed. “That would be enough for a life sentence, if I'd bothered to tell anyone. Accomplice to mass murder.”

"No one would have cared about a worthless tribe of killers on the Outer Rim."

"Except they weren't killers. They fought back when driven to it, but they didn't want or plan to take anyone's life, Anakin!”

For the first time, Anakin heard something other than distant contempt in her voice, but rather than pleasing him, her passion evoked the raw fury that had overtaken him on the Mustafar platform, those many years ago. He was surprised by how immediate his feeling was; for the last decade or more of his life, anger had been a mere tool. His rage had flowed between his mind and the Dark, a means to an end that had rarely touched his heart. Now, he felt like a young man again, one offended by his liberal wife’s lack of understanding.

"Then I suppose my mother was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?" 

His field of vision turned red, and Anakin knew that he had transformed, becoming the dark lord, Palpatine’s iron fist. The steady pull of Vader's respirator filled the air with terrible insistence, but the clench of fury in his chest only grew hotter when Padmé regarded him with neither fear nor surprise.

"I saw this too," she said. “I should have stayed to raise our children, but I gave into despair. I left them to other women to raise. I watched Luke live the life of a settler, unaware of the injustices that permitted him to harvest water from the air. I saw Leia proudly bear the name of another and knew that she would always consider Breha Organa her true mother. I carried that agony with me. I understood that it was my atonement for looking the other way as you embraced fascism and corruption. And when I begged you to come away with me and raise our children together, knowing that you had already murdered younglings in the Temple and young children on Tatooine. Even when I was a child ruler on Naboo. Then I ignored the right of the Gungans to their ancestral lands, only pleading for their cooperation when I had need of their resources. So yes, Anakin. I may not deserve to burn, as you have burned, but I must look long at my failures and weaknesses, for I looked away when I lived.”

Tears rolled down the dust on Padmé 's cheeks, leaving sticky tracks. Mired in helplessness, Anakin listened to the sound of his own amplified breath. When he had lived, his judgment had been the arbiter of lives and destinies, but here, now, he had no more control over where he went than did Padmé. He could not force himself to cross the space between them, and so he looked again into the water. The pool continued to work even without his wife's gaze to direct it, and Anakin was startled when it showed him the face of a grizzled old man who was still, clearly, his son.

“Luke,” Anakin whispered.

The man in the pool looked up.

"Father?"

Padmé gasped. "He can hear you! He has never heard me. I used to plead for him to hear me. Anakin, you must say something to him. Tell him I am sorry! Please!"

Anakin stared into the pond and watched Luke's image flicker and vanish. Padmé, who had stood to lean over the water, collapsed back onto her rock.

“You could have said something.”

Her voice was heavy with accusation, and Anakin was unable to meet her eyes. So often over the years since her death, Anakin had inspected the hauntingly lovely image of her body laid out in her coffin, her curls framing her face in vivid shades of woodland brown, with the roses still lingering in her lips, even days after her death. And those star-blossoms, how magnificently they had glowed under Theed's moonlight! And how gorgeously they had shimmered in Anakin's dreams. But now the skin like silk had turned rough with suffering, and the luminous eyes hollow, and Anakin thought that perhaps he had never really known her. They had been so young when they wed. Every time they had disagreed over the things that mattered most, they had buried their discontent, covered it in kisses and laughter, until, finally, the rift between them could be breached no more.

Following the direction of his thoughts, the image in the pool changed to Anakin’s own youthful visage, twisted with rage and jealousy. Padmé stood before him, her eyes enormous with grief and her belly large with child. Behind her, Obi-Wan Kenobi emerged from the hatch of her ship.

“Liar!" the youthful Anakin screamed. He held out his hand and clenched his gauntleted fist, stopping his beloved's breath.

"And you did it all for me,” Padmé’s spirit said mournfully. "I have seen everything. The dreams. The story of Darth Plagueis the Wise. The killings. All for me, and yet you did not hesitate to destroy me."

Anakin, still unwilling to look into her eyes, looked at the floor of the cave.

 “I am sorry.”

He was indeed sorry. Burdened by the perfect recall of the dead, he found that he could no longer lie to himself. He hadn't done it for her. He hadn’t even done it for Palpatine.

He had done it for himself.

"You could stay with me, Ani,” Padmé said. “It is the least you could do. The least you owe me. I've been so lonely."

There was a plaintive note in her voice, and the part of Anakin that yearned to return to a more innocent time longed to agree. He had once promised to remain by her side for eternity. Now was the chance to fulfill that promise. The love was still there, aching and real, and perhaps that was reason enough. Still there was another part of him that had become too distant from the young man who had sworn himself to her, and that part made him like an explorer on an alien world, something that looked almost, but not quite, familiar, and left him confused and repulsed by the landscape.

Torn between two paths, Anakin hesitated.

On the first path, he threw himself at Padmé’s feet and begged her forgiveness. He might spend eternity staring into the pool with her, even unto the brink of madness, and serve at the pleasure of his queen until she deigned to pardon him for the violence he had inflicted on her and on her children.

On the other path, Anakin left the cave and let the universe reveal his ultimate destiny. He did not know what that might be, but he was plagued by the sense that he had not yet found it.

Balanced on the edge between two futures, Anakin took solace in the distance afforded by Vader’s armour and adornment, and said nothing. Perhaps sensing his indecision, Padmé rose from her place by the pool. Unphased by Anakin’s monstrosity, she wrapped her arms around his neck and gazed up at him with those great, liquid eyes. Like magic, the lines of age and suffering fell from her face, and she was as she had been in their youth: the loveliest of queens, his angel without peer.

"Our grandson has been calling to you,” Padme said, standing up on her toes to whisper into his ear.

"Our grandson?"

He looked over Padme’s shoulder and into the pond, where he saw the figure of a grown man, masked in black and pleading with the half-melted image of Vader's own face. It seemed that Owen Lars was correct, and decades had already flown by in the living world while Padmé, like a sorceress jailed before her magic looking-glass, had watched each moment in real time.

The masked man in the pool touched the melted mask to his forehead.

"Show me again the power of the darkness...Grandfather."

A tremor shook Anakin’s body. "Whose child is this?"

"Leia's son. Manipulated, lied to, from a young age. Much like yourself, and by the same mind."

All thoughts of this strange grandchild, who would certainly have obsessed him had he lived, fled from Anakin. He stumbled back from Padmé, and his cape flared behind him, a dark wave over a moonless sea. 

"That is impossible. It cannot be him. I killed him."

A melancholy smile touched Padmé’s lips. "It wasn't enough. He saw your obsession with our son and anticipated your treachery. His acolytes performed the Sith Rites for him, tying him to the living Force. "

The relentless echo of Anakin’s respirator faltered as he struggled to find his composure. The torment he had endured in making his choice on the battle station, the many times that he had called out into the eternal night for his master— all worthless, futile.

Sheev Palpatine had never been there.

So did my master fill me with dismay

when I saw how his brow was deeply troubled,

yet then the plaster soothed the sore as quickly:

for soon as we were on the broken bridge

my guide turned back to me with that sweet manner

I first had seen along the mountain’s base.

-Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Light from the pond passed across Anakin's face in waves, and he stood dumb with the bitter knowledge of his master’s escape from death. Moments might have passed, or centuries, until Padmé's lithe arms passed around his armoured chest, and she settled her head onto the breastplate, as she had, long ago, in her apartments on Coruscant.

“Hold me, Ani,” she whispered.

Anakin raised his arms to return her embrace, only to stop when she turned her brown eyes up at him, pinning him in place.

“Not like this. As you were.”

He lifted a gloved hand to her cheek. “I am the same man.”

She nodded. “Nevertheless.”

He tried to initiate the change, picturing himself as a young man, straining to turn back the clock, but however fiercely he imagined otherwise, his face and body remained encased in armour.

Gently, he pushed Padmé back from him. “I cannot."

Her eyes narrowed. “Cannot? Or will not, now that you have heard your master’s call?”

As sharply if she had landed a blow, Anakin's turned his cheek. “It is my duty to stop him. For this reason alone, I must go to him.”

“For this reason alone? Do not think that I do not know all that you did for him, the sorry depths of your slavish devotion? What happened to the child who could think of nothing worse than being owned? Not only did you tolerate it; you gloried in it. Do not tell me otherwise!” she warned him. “I have seen it a thousand times.”

He could not argue with her knowledge. If she had watched him in every iteration of his Sith apprenticeship, then she had been there as he revelled in the abyss of his willing submission. He had set himself at Palpatine’s feet and ached for the regal hand to rest on his brow. Perhaps it was his upbringing as a slave that had planted an evil seed of service within him, but if that were so, then it was one that Anakin had found impossible to uproot.

Disconcerted by his wife's insight, Anakin began backing away from her ghost. The expression of stark displeasure on her face grew, and with every step he took she followed him. He felt that he was being tracked and longed to be swept away again by whatever fell powers controlled the spirit world.

“You must not go to him,” Padmé insisted. “You swore yourself to me first.”

“It is not the same. You and I married. I never…not with him.” Anakin heard an uncharacteristic stammer in his own voice. He found himself grateful for the mask that still covered his face, for he was quite certain that he was blushing.

Padmé scoffed. “Did you not guard him as you once guarded me? Did you not serve at his pleasure as you swore to serve mine? Did you not support him when he walked and protect him from the eyes of strangers when he grew weak with age?”

Anakin retreated two more steps, but Padmé continued to advance while her stare grew ever more consuming.

“And did you not adore him like a bridegroom?” she sighed, with the full weight of accusation.

Having no answer, Anakin turned his back to her, and was already halfway to the mouth of the cave before he felt his wife’s slim fingers seize on his upper arm.

“Anakin, what are you doing?”

“I have to go,” he insisted.

“You truly mean to run after Palpatine?”

Her incredulity inspired a powerful feeling of déjà vu. Anakin felt certain that they had already had this conversation, or one very like it, but for the first time the ineluctable memory of the dead eluded him and he stood, forlorn, between what was and what had been.

“Stay with me,” Padmé insisted. “Stay with me and I will forgive everything!”

Tears trickled down Padmé’s cheeks. Anakin freed his arm from her grasp and laid his hand along her cheek as his head tilted down to meet hers. Their foreheads touched and Anakin stared down into the velvet darkness of her eyes. He thought that if they could have stood like this, forever, then he would have stayed.

“I will return to you someday—if I can.”

Ignoring her moan of distress and the curse on him that followed, Anakin broke away from Padmé, retreating to the mouth of the cave and stepping out onto the mountain’s ledge. The whole of Naboo was still spread out below, rendered before his bleak gaze in immaculate detail, but he did not pause to consider it. There was one duty left to him, and it could wait no longer.

Anakin stepped off the mountain.

The open skies over Theed vanished, and Anakin plunged in a profoundly silent grey mist. He tumbled through the appalling void, plagued by the growing suspicion that he would remain imprisoned in this emptiness that reflected the faithless ambivalence of his soul. When he did land, with a sharp crack of bone on stone, his relief was greater than the tremendous clap of pain.

Gingerly, Anakin sat up and found himself surrounded by a more natural grey light. It grew brighter as he watched, creeping across the floor and spilling in from what looked like windows. The light revealed an entirely too familiar circle of seats, set in the hallowed chambers of the High Jedi Council. The chairs were emptier than Anakin had ever seen them. Not a breath of life stirred the silence.

Pacing the room, Anakin inspected each seat, even as the light from the windows grew more golden. In his youth, Anakin had longed to take a seat on the Council, and he been elated when the chancellor had appointed him a member during the final days of the Clone Wars. But while the Jedi had been unable to resist a direct order from the commander-in-chief of the Republic, they had drawn the line at making a twenty-two-year-old Knight into a Master. Looking back, Anakin was torn between acknowledging their wisdom and resenting the slight. While it was true that his loyalties had been divided, had the masters drawn him closer, they might have curried his affection, perhaps even averted the calamitous end of the Order itself.

Anakin stopped at the chair that had once belonged to Master Yoda. It was too small for him, and he slid into the seat next to it as he contemplated the old master’s place. More than any other Jedi, Anakin blamed Yoda for the direction the Order had taken in the twilight of the Republic. The shorter-lived masters could blame a lack of experience for their flawed perspective, but Yoda had been centuries old and must have witnessed the Order’s slow descent into righteous insularity. Unless he had spent the majority of those eight hundred years meditating in a cave, it was impossible that Yoda had not noticed, yet he had done nothing to stop the progression.  Nor had the master made any attempt to offer help or even welcome to a young, newly-free slave who had sorely needed both.

If Yoda had lived up to his reputation for wisdom even once, Anakin might still be a Jedi now.

The soft sound of boots tapping on marble drew Anakin’s attention to the doors of the Council chamber, which eased open to admit a Jedi Knight. Dressed in tan and ivory robes and sporting the short hair and long side-braid of a human Padawan, the young-looking man was still recognizable as Qui-Gon Jinn’s last apprentice.

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin uttered hoarsely. He watched Kenobi walk the confines of the chamber, silently touching the back of each chair as he, too, remembered all that had passed there.

“What are you doing here, old man?” Anakin prompted. The weight of his former master’s silence and the notion that he was being deliberately ignored crawled under Anakin’s skin like an itch he couldn’t reach.

Kenobi glanced at him briefly.  “I have no idea, Darth,” the Jedi drawled.

Anakin leaped from his chair and crossed the space between them in three long steps.

“That is not my name!"

“You’ve displayed no interest in your name for many years. It seems to me that the last good thing you did was to pass it to your son.”

Kenobi's attempt desire to provoke him was so obvious that Anakin was able to restrain his instinctive response, which certainly would have been to set the chamber on fire. Instead, he summoned the icy reserve that had served him so well as a Sith Lord and noted the pensive frown on the Jedi’s brow and the distant look in his eyes, the way they seemed locked on something that only Kenobi could see.

The Jedi appeared deeply unhappy, and not merely perturbed by Anakin’s presence. Indeed, Anakin wondered, if Kenobi found his former student’s company so distasteful, then why did he persist in returning to it? Was it possible that the Jedi had deftly concealed that his choices in this place were nearly as limited as Anakin’s?

“Why are you here, my old master? Come to gloat again over my fall from grace?”

“Fall from grace,” the Jedi scoffed. “You have retained your penchant for poetry, it seems. And no, that sad event is no longer of any interest to me.”

“Sad indeed, Jedi, for my son if not for you, who abandoned me to die despite claiming to love me like a brother!”

Kenobi advanced fiercely on Anakin, forcing him back on his heels.  

“I did love you! That I can admit now, if not then, when my affection transgressed the boundary of minimal attachment permitted between masters and Padawans. What was forbidden was inevitable with you, however much I tried to resist the temptation. But you— you made no effort to resist any of your own temptations! How often did I look the other way when you stood with Padmé, so that I would not see the expressions of passion on your faces, the embraces in corners that weren’t nearly dark enough? It was my leniency that permitted the growth of the children that no gown, however voluminous, could conceal. All this I did for you because I loved you, because I thought that these things would be a balm to your soul and bring you, at last, to something like peace!”

As he raged, Kenobi’s cheeks flushed red and he continued to drive Anakin back. The former Sith made little attempt to resist the Jedi’s pressing stride, for he found himself captivated by the his former teacher’s raw fury, which Obi-Wan had only expressed once before, while the red river had raged, and Anakin burned on the banks of the closest thing a living man might know to Hell.

“But in the end it not the temptation of a lovely woman that destroyed you, as I feared,” Obi-Wan seethed, “but the siren of a sorcerer’s will that twisted you into something unrecognizable. How long were you serving him? Were you already his apprentice when you slaughtered Dooku?”

The last Kenobi asked in a voice filled with despair, and the force of a man who had been brooding over the same question for countless years. He evidently anticipated a violent response, for the lightsabre at his belt leaped into his hand. The cerulean blade sprang to life, and the Kyber crystal buzzed a threat in the air between the two men. Kenobi’s victory appeared assured until Anakin felt his own blade materialize in his hand. He was awash with relief that he had not seen the last of it in the abyss under the bridge of souls.

Kenobi swung his blade with a force that Anakin met equally. The two lightsabres clashed with an inimitable crack that sent Anakin’s memory hurtling back through the decades to relive their star-crossed confrontation on Mustafar. There was a feral spark in Obi-Wan’s eyes that suggested he was thinking of the same thing, but despite the tempestuous path trod by their memories, their surroundings remained unchanged and their conflict made little sound in the dull confines of the Council chamber. The combatants needed no breath, nor did their heartbeats race or their chests heave, and after several aggrieved passes Anakin realized that the duel was utterly senseless. Dead as they were, they would welter in their bitterness and nurse their grudge until the heat-death of the universe.

Obi-Wan threw a vicious overhead strike; rather than block, Anakin let it through his guard. The blow caught him in the head and passed through his skull without impediment. He briefly saw double and had the pleasure of witnessing the Jedi’s dismay from two different directions, only for the images to knit back into one as his head did the same.

Anakin attached his lightsabre to his belt. “Feeling better?” he asked mildly.

His body responded to his serenity, and the armoured Imperial lord became the young hero of the Clone Wars. A dashing curl landed on the brow of the Republic's propaganda poster boy, the one who had seemed to be on more of an equal footing with Obi-Wan, at least on the surface, where his former master hadn’t seen the conflict that tormented him.

Tears painted the rims of Obi-Wan’s eyes red, and he fixed his regard on the lightsabre hanging from Anakin’s belt.

“Shall we continue?” the Jedi Knight asked with abominable courtliness.

“What would be the point of that, my old master? You saw that what happened. This fighting is futile, Obi-Wan. We had to our chances to settle the score. It’s all over now.”

“How wise you’ve become,” Kenobi bit out disdainfully.

“Even a Sith might be wise.”

“Yes, I suppose evil doesn’t entirely preclude the kind of cunning that might be mistaken for wisdom.”

For a moment, Anakin was so full of familiar old irritation that he forgot to hate the Jedi. He remembered what it had been like to recognized Kenobi’s flaws—his fussiness, his occasional bouts of hypocrisy, his self-satisfied superiority—and to love him just the same, as Kenobi had once loved Anakin despite his own shortcomings. It was the knowledge that Kenobi had ceased to love him that had dug a deep core of hurt in Anakin. And having ceased to love him, Kenobi had made no attempt to love even the memory of him. Instead, he had buried Anakin and replaced him with his own child.

As another master had sought to in the end. 

Recognizing that such thoughts could only mire him in disastrous melancholy, Anakin crossed his arms over his chest and summoned the indignant response that Kenobi deserved.

“Regarding your question, I was not “seduced by a sorcerer’s temptation” for more than a day before you found me on Mustafar. It wasn’t temptation that drew me to Darth Sidious, only that he supported me in the battle against my deepest fears. At least with him, there was no need to claim that I was fearless.”

“A day?” Kenobi's voice was a strangled gasp. “You became his apprentice a day before the slaughter at the temple?”

Anakin thought of a dozen reasons that he might offer, words to soften the blow of his treachery and turn aside Kenobi’s grief, but there was nothing that he could say that the Jedi would not see as an excuse.

“A day. He knew of the dreams I’d been having, prophecies of Padmé’s premature death, and he offered me a way to save her life if I became his apprentice.”

Kenobi reeled back, appalled. “And then you took her life yourself!”

“So it seems. Did you not know any of this?”

“I was not permitted to look into the past.”

“I would think for a blessed spirit such as yourself there would be no restrictions.”

Despair passed over Kenobi’s face, and Anakin knew that he had surmised correctly.

“But you are not a blessed spirit, are you?” he said. Kenobi flinched, and Anakin was pleased to see him wither into the white-haired hermit that he had last seen on Tarkin’s Death Star, with a Tatooine farmer’s robes covering his brittle bones and traces of sand caught in every fold of cloth and skin.

“Indeed,” Anakin rumbled, “You are no more blessed than I.”

“Speak for yourself, Darth,” the Jedi scoffed unsteadily.

“I speak for us both, for I know the truth now. I have seen you tied to me, Obi-Wan, though I thought myself tied to you. Every step of my purgatory, you have accompanied me. You had no desire to see me, yet you persisted. And why was that?”

“Perhaps I wished to see you receive the punishment you deserve more than I wished to proceed into the Light.”

“Meaning that you have never been there. Although you shuffled off the mortal coil nearly four years earlier than I. No…you are here because you cannot proceed into the Light. You have your own purgatory to endure. Your own sins to pay for.”

He was close enough to cast a shadow over the Jedi and watch as Kenobi's scowl grew.

“I can feel your anger,” Anakin hissed. “Don’t you know, my old Master, that anger leads to the Dark Side?”

He knew the very moment that Kenobi broke, and was unphased when the old man began to beat his fists against on Anakin's chest.

“It's your fault that I'm here, Anakin! I cannot go back, and I cannot go forward. Why can’t I put you behind me?” Obi-Wan wailed.

Gently, Anakin caught the Jedi’s hands with his own. He searched within himself for the familiar sting of bitterness and found only pity.

“You thought yourself the hero, Obi-Wan, but you told my children lies. You made my death your reason for living.”

“You gave me good enough reasons. As for your children, the truth would have meant their deaths.”

“Do you think so little of me?” Anakin importuned.

“Truly? Yes.”

The familiar pang of hurt returned; patiently, Anakin allowed it to pass, and felt more like a Jedi than he had since before the Clone Wars. He was struck by the irony of his own serenity when Kenobi was still drowning in grief and fury.

“You called me a damned soul, Obi-Wan, doomed to a purgatory of my own making, but your guilt has damned you equally.”

“I am guilty of nothing, Sith Lord! I did only what I must.”

Kenobi broke free from Anakin’s grip and ignited his lightsabre. Unceremoniously, he thrust it into Anakin’s chest, where it passed insubstantially through his robes.

“You cannot defeat me here, Obi-Wan,” Anakin intoned. “The enemy is not in me, but in yourself.”

A primal scream erupted from Kenobi, and he hurled his lightsabre at the back end of the Council chamber. The plasma sword seared a hole through a window, admitting a shaft of brilliant sunlight into the room, yet the windowpane failed to shatter. Only a few slivers of melted transparisteel scattered onto the chamber floor.

Kenobi seemed to realize the futility of his outburst, for he turned from the spectacle with a grimace while mots of dust fell from the ceiling with enviable serenity, twinkling in the space between the two warriors.

“It's as if nothing happened," he muttered.

“You could say that about life. But it meant something to us, Obi-Wan, because we lived it.”

“More wisdom from the Sith." The Jedi scoffed, but there was a tiny smile tugging reluctantly at one lip, just visible under the cover of his moustache, which turned bright and youthful as ginger bled back into the white hairs.

“If you’re uncomfortable with the wisdom of evil, I have also been a Jedi,” Anakin quipped.

“Thank you, Anakin. Although I can’t help but feel that this amount of effort on your part suggests that you’re buttering me up for something.”

Anakin dropped into the closest seat, his legs sprawled in front of him. “Your faith in me is touching, Obi-Wan, but I didn’t actually come here for you. That said, you might be able to help me.”

“Unsurprising,” Obi-Wan muttered. The exasperation in his voice was teasing, nearly fond again, and Anakin wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or perturbed by how Kenobi appeared to think that they had returned to their old equilibrium.

“I need your help, my old master. There is a disturbance in the Force.”

He watched Obi-Wan bury a joke with a visible effort of will. “Tell me.”

“The emperor has devised a method of escaping death. His tremendous powers of foresight, combined with the sorcerous inventions of his own master, Darth Plagueis, have permitted him to remained anchored to the world of the living.”

Kenobi withdraw in shock. His jaw sagged, his shoulders slumped, and he stood in the centre of the high council chamber as if in the centre of a prison cell.

“Everything we did,” Kenobi breathed. “Everything I sacrificed. It was truly for nothing, Anakin.”

“I gave my life to end his. Do not think I have not sacrificed, Obi-Wan, or doubt that I am willing to sacrifice again.”

“How?”

“I must learn how to cross between worlds as you do, to influence the living. Only then can I go to Darth Sidious and capture his spirit.”

“Oh, only that, is it?” Kenobi scoffed. “What makes you think that anyone will teach a Sith Lord how to cross the boundary?”

“Former Sith,” Anakin corrected, “Someone will teach me because there is no one else who can do it. It must be me.”

Kenobi sank down into the closest chair and wiped his hands slowly over his face before looking back at Anakin.

“I learned from Qui-Gon. As he learned it from one of the ancient masters. He was told that it was a reward for his sacrifice. In time, he appeared to Yoda and taught him, who then taught me how to contact Qui-Gon.”

“Then you should have no trouble teaching me, as I plan to use technique against the Sith.”

“I don't believe that I can do this, Anakin. Once, I once thought that I could teach you, and the outcome was catastrophic. No, you must go to my old master and ask that he teach you.  It was Qui-Gon who was there in the beginning. Perhaps only he can help you in the end.”

There was a certain sense to it, Anakin thought. As their spirits traversed the circles of the universe, so did they come full circle in the accounting of their lives.

“How can I find him?” he asked.

Kenobi lifted an eyebrow. “You still don’t know how this place works.”

“I didn’t have a guidebook— unlike some.”

“Just start walking. You will go where your need takes you.”

“It’s that easy, is it?”

“Oh, it’s not easy.”

Obi-Wan caught his eye and grinned with some of his old mischief. It was nothing more than a glimmer, and delivered in a warning, but Anakin allowed himself to grin back before he started walking.

“Goodbye, old friend,” Anakin said. “May the Force be with you.”

He felt Kenobi’s eyes on his back as he walked out the door and heard him answer in kind before the corridor dissolved around him. Perhaps, if they ever met again, it would be without the bitter sting of regret.

Anakin strode down the grand corridor of the Jedi Temple, chased by giggles and flitting shadows. Something was following him, he was certain. As he walked, the long windows to his right darkened and he heard whispers, a voice calling out from somewhere just beyond his sight.

“Master Skywalker…”

It was a child’s voice, soon joined by other voices, all singing his name in an unnerving chorus. Anakin turned at the next fork in the road to avoid them, an effort that proved futile when darkness fell over the hall and glowing dots like eyes began to track him from the shadows. He reminded himself that he was already dead and could not be haunted, but the heart that he didn’t have beat wildly inside of his chest and the breath that he didn’t need came short.

“Master Skywalker…”

“Stop it,” Anakin hissed.

Tiny, tinkling laughter like bells echoed all around him. Thoroughly disconcerted, Anakin broke into a run. He was not ready to face the ghost of the choice that he had made in the Jedi Temple on that long-ago night. He could not bear to look upon the little children, only three or four years older than his own babies— the children that he had murdered.

Anakin raced through the darkness with the tittering and whispering always a step or two behind him, until his pursuers closed the gap and tiny fingers latched onto his cloak.

“Come play with us, Master Skywalker.”

 Anakin slapped the hands away like errant insects, but they were too many. They pulled him down onto the ground, where invisible bodies crowded over him. Anakin could not stop the scream that burst from him. He covered his head with his arms and tried not think of what would happen next.

A man’s voice abruptly broke through the cacophony, shushing and shooing the unseen younglings, who ran away with a patter of feet. Still Anakin dared not look up until he saw light shining on the backs of his eyelids.

“Well, don’t just lay there, Anakin.”

He recognized the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn and gingerly opened his eyes. Anakin stared at the open sky above him and the field of green that stretched in every direction. He did not recognize the planet, but it was indeed Qui-Gon who sat cross-legged next to him. The Jedi Master regarded him openly, curiously, as he had when Anakin was a boy, and not with the condemnation he had levelled at Anakin in the Tusken camp.

Mirroring the Jedi, Anakin folded his legs into a meditative pose, his hands on his thighs. He had not reverted to childhood, as he had feared he might in Qui-Gon’s presence, but still wore the dark brown robes and single leather gauntlet that had been his hallmark during the Clone Wars.

“Hello, Master Qui-Gon.”

“Hm. You’ve changed since I saw you last.”

“For the better.”

“Do you think so?”

Anakin didn’t hesitate. “I do think so. And I think that you agree.”

A dry chuckle broke from Qui-Gon. “You were always too self-aware. I suppose that was why you shocked me. To think that the child who so skillfully guided us through the greed and corruption of Mos Espa couldn’t see clearly enough to avoid his own hubris.”

“A great deal changed between the time that I met you and the end of the Clone Wars.”

“But I am not referring to the end of the Clone Wars. Let us not prevaricate with one another. You became a murderer long before you joined the Sith. I was there when you slaughtered the villagers on Tatooine.”

“I have already paid for my error.” Anakin was overcome with concern that he might once again find himself trapped in the punishing sands of the Dune Sea. He still did not know how or why the sudden transformations occurred, but he focused fiercely on remaining where he was.

Qui-Gon lifted his eyebrows. “Serving a punishment is not the same as making amends. And, yes, you have a great many amends to make for your service to the Sith.”

“This is why I have come, Master Qui-Gon. I need your help to enter the realm of the living. My master has discovered the secret of cheating death. I must exorcise his spirit and deliver him to the Netherworld.”

“And why must it be you, Anakin? You have proven yourself no more trustworthy than Darth Sidious. If I teach you to move among the living, what is to stop you from remaining there with him?”

“As a spirit, passing through the world but never touching it?” Anakin asked. “There is no allure for me in that.”

“That is not what I mean. If your master roams among the living, it is because he has taken possession of either a clone or the body of another. With your strength in the Force, you could do the same and go on to stand by his side for another lifetime. Convince me that you won’t.”

There was no give in Qui-Gon’s face or voice; the last trace of friendliness had dissipated from both. Anakin considered him carefully. He had not spent much time with Qui-Gon, but the Jedi Master, although known to be something a maverick, had a reputation for integrity. Qui-Gon was probably looking for something more than mere reassurance. He wanted a confession, something that he could trust.

The former Sith Lord clasped his hands together and fixed his gaze on his fingers while he looked back through the last moments of his life. He remembered how he had sprawled, wounded and beaten, on the floor of the Death Star throne room, while Palpatine had stood over him with his white face twisted in disdain. As disoriented as Vader had been, he had been aware enough to hear the emperor order Luke to kill him and take his place.

With the perspective that death had granted him, Anakin could see that Luke would never have survived as a Sith. It had always been Anakin’ nature—never entirely light or dark-- that had been the foundation of his shifting loyalties, but his son was pure of heart. For Luke to embrace the dark would almost certainly mean his annihilation.

“I cannot serve him in that way again,” Anakin said, low-voiced. “He destroyed our bond.” He met Qui-Gon’s gaze squarely. “I would have done anything for him—had done everything imaginable for him--and he threw me away.”

Qui-Gon looked at him with something like pity. Anakin tensed, humiliated to have revealed himself so thoroughly to no end. He had nothing left to offer.

The Jedi stood from the rock. “Well, come on, then.”

The former Sith hid his chagrin by tucking his head down and easing into a swift roll. Although he wondered if there were any reason to stay longer, he enjoyed the effortless movement and bounced back up at Qui-Gon’s side.

“It is a joy, isn’t it?” The old Jedi shook his long hair. “To feel all of the pains of the body vanish and still feel alive.”

“I had expected to be consumed by an abyss of darkness, like all Sith. To be here at all…well, I am enjoying the best of it.”

Qui-Gon grunted in agreement. They continued to walk, and Anakin watched as the open meadow darkened into a rocky, desolate landscape. Fine plant life poked up between sharp mounds of stone and dirt, and a distant series of toothy mountains eased into view.

“What is this place?”

“A training ground, or an approximation of one I brought Obi-Wan to after he had completed basic Padawan instruction. It’s a good place to show you a few new tricks.”

Anakin looked at him expectantly. “And will you?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Now tell me why we can’t touch the Force here.”

“We are inside the Force. We cannot grasp it because we form part of its makeup.”

“Essentially. And though the Jedi theory of our time states that there is only one Force, in my experience there are distinct elements within the Force which allow us to access different powers and abilities. The Force of the Netherworld is composed entirely of the Spirit Force, as the ancient Jedi called it. It is with this power that we access visions of the unseen world, that is, the past or future, or events occurring in distance space. And the Spirit Force is also the substance that we, as the spirits of those who were once living, are made of. So yes, we cannot use it.”

“Yet Yoda and Obi-Wan are able to transverse the boundary between the dead and the living.”

“Indeed. And for this, they need the Living Force. They draw on the power contained within the living universe to touch it. When we live, it is the midichlorians in our blood that assist us in this endeavour.”

Qui-Gon seated himself on a large, flat boulder and crossed his booted legs, one over the other. Anakin cast about for a similar rock and sat, cross-legged, on the top.

“How am I to do this if I exist outside of the living universe?”

“I mastered the method in my first years within the realm of Blessed Light, by training with Master from a bygone time. You would not find the technique in any record, but once, long ago, adherents of both the Dark and the Light laboured together to achieve the greatest of ancient works. They contributed immensely to the crafting of the first hyperspace lanes, which required a precision that the technology of the time was unable to achieve.”

“Jedi and Sith working together?” Anakin echoed. It seemed anathema to everything he knew of both Orders. Certainly, as Qui-Gon had indicated, there was no mention of it in any part of the Jedi Archive, nor in the Sith holocrons.

“Not precisely. This was before the great schism that led to the formation of the Jedi Order, which drove practitioners of the Dark into hiding. Twenty thousand years ago, we were using the Force in a way that more closely resembled the organic connection still cultivated by the witches of Danthomir. Their practice was often communal. Energy would be provided by the Dark, intent and focus by the Light.”

“Certainly not an approach that would be endorsed by the Jedi now."

“No,” Qui-Gon agreed. “And it is for this reason that I believe that the Jedi fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the Force.”

Anakin leaned forward. “The Jedi understood it to mean that I would destroy the Sith.”

“And the Sith? What did they have to say on the matter?”

The familiar armour of Darth Vader crept over Anakin’s head and shoulders as he considered his knowledge of the prophecy from the perspective of his Sith forebears.

“The Sith did not have a great regard for that prophecy. Induction into the dark Order is based on personal suitability for the role of apprentice and eventual mastery, rather than raw power, as the most significant Sith works are also usually performed collectively through the Power of Two. You may be surprised to learn that we do not typically perform midichlorian testing on potential acolytes.”

He noted, too late, that he had included himself among the ranks of the Sith. Mercifully, Qui-Gon did not remark on his slip.

“More progressive, certainly, than the last stages of the Jedi Order,” the old master reflected. “I always did say that we had become too hampered by pseudo-science and bureaucracy. Yet surely the Sith must have had some knowledge of the prophecy before Palpatine's time?”

“It was analyzed and documented. The general conclusion among past Lords was that destroying the Sith, as natural counterparts to the Jedi, would hardly lead to a “balanced” outcome. If the purpose of a Chosen One was to bring balance, then it must mean something other than what the Jedi had assumed.”

“As I have come to believe. And Yoda as well, by the way. We’re uncertain whether the prophecy was ever fulfilled, but we do not believe that it refers to the destruction of the Sith. In retrospect, that outcome appears to have been based more on hope than reason.”

Anakin sank into thought. No one had ever been able to explain to him what “bringing balance to the Force” meant. Indeed, it seemed unlikely that the Force had been unbalanced in the first place. How could an energy field that bound together everything in the universe, living and unliving, lack balance?

“First principles,” Anakin intoned, remembering Darth Sidious’ earliest teachings. As he spoke, he could almost hear Palpatine’s slow, rich instrument of rhetoric murmuring in his ear. “Greed is at the root of evil. Let us consider not when and how the prophecy came to be, or what it means, but who would benefit from it.”

Qui-Gon crossed his arms and lowered his chin down. “This is a dark perspective. You suggest that a Jedi created this prophecy for personal benefit.”

“Perhaps not personal benefit. But even the most benevolent individual can become convinced that a deception may yield a positive result. The prophecy was recorded during the last Sith War. The conclusion seems obvious: propaganda.”

“It's out of character for the Jedi to deliberately spread falsehood.”

“You have seen the Council at its worst. Do you not believe that they would be capable of crafting and maintaining a conspiracy? I could tell you of at least once when it happened. The Sith holocrons tell of a time, a century before I joined the Jedi, when a group of Knights were responsible for the destruction of an entire coven of Force witches. They concealed their crime with the help of the High Council. At the same time, two former Jedi apprentices who had not passed the trials became disillusioned with the Order and joined the Sith. One was a formal apprentice, the other an acolyte who served the dark Order as an assassin. The Council knew of these events but did not record them in the Archives. I only discovered mention of them in the Sith records and was able to verify the authenticity of the report by cross-referencing names and dates in the sealed Council records. And as you know, Yoda was on the Council then and would be able to corroborate my account if you asked him.”

“What you say may be true,” Qui-Gon said, sounding troubled. “I have seen the good intentions of the Council outstripped by its ambitions and political concerns before.”

“All of it is true,” Anakin insisted. “Furthermore, the Sith archives record that my birth was not the first time that a child was produced by the action of midichlorians. One of those very same failed Padawans who lived to join the Sith was said to be born of the Force—but not quite as magically as my mother believed. One of the force witches of Danthomir stimulated the action of the midichlorians in her partner, who spontaneously became pregnant as a result.”

Qui-Gon shot him a narrow look. “Someone, a person, was responsible. This does imply that someone was also responsible for your mother’s pregnancy.”

“Perhaps. But if that was the case, I do not know who. There was no mention in the holocrons. I thought for a time Darth Plagueis, who was said to have a profound understanding of the processes of life and death, but my research yielded no results, and my own master had no knowledge of it. But then, the Sith do not record everything. They have always kept some knowledge back, to outsmart greedy students and acolytes.”

Qui-Gon reached out to grasp the thickly quilted coverings on Anakin’s arm. “But if it is true that the “Chosen One” was born of propaganda, and your own birth the result of meddling from a Master of the Force, then the prophecy is meaningless.”

“Meaningless,” Anakin echoed.

When he had stumbled across the account of Osha, Mae and Qimir in the Sith archive, Vader had dismissed the story of the “force born twins” as a fairy tale or an ambitious lie, eager as he had been to remain the special student, the Chosen One. If he hadn’t been so blinded by pride and the longing, in the words of his master, for a life of significance, he might have easily deduced the deception while he lived.

He thought that there must be a way to move through time, to see the last Sith War and confirm his suspicions, but he had no desire to do so. Whether the prophecy was a complete fabrication or the vague product of one seer’s vision was irrelevant, because he no longer cared.

Anakin tensed for an onslaught of devastation, the rage of knowing that he had wasted so much of his life in pursuit of a fool's dream. Instead, there was a sudden lightness, a buoyancy, as he was set free from every expectation that had been laid upon his shoulders from childhood.

The prophecy was worthless. Anakin Skywalker was both as free, and as insignificant, as any other man.

When he spoke, it was with unfeigned certainty.  “You are correct, Master Jinn. Only one thing matters now. Let us begin the training.”

A faint smile quirked Qui-Gon’s lips. “Then what are waiting for?"