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.

Laid prone 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 Anakin saw a shadow projected from the summit of the dune, the shape of a man facing him down.

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

The man shook his head and stayed in place.

“I could really use a hand here!”

Anakin ground his teeth when the stranger said nothing. He put a burst of fury 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?”

Obi-Wan seemed to look through him rather than at him.

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

Anakin allowed himself to be led. His memories remained vague, 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 bulging eyes 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 released his grip and 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 Kenobi and Yoda, whose pace never seemed to increase, although the landscape rapidly transformed. 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. 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, soldiers 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, and Anakin clenched his jaw.

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 knew it were normal, 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 discussed 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 to 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 child and obscured the gentleness of Luke’s expression.

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 with 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 even 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 will 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 and, as Anakin watched, a young woman appeared to beam warmly at Luke. Princess 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 to see them.

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, constructed of electric blue light and suspended 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 was observing 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.

Anakin 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 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 on 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 only vague shadows, 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.

“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. More vague 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 even 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. Yet 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 to pull away from the terrible hands, 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 those 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 the monsters were real.

Something large barrelled into the group of attackers, breaking them apart long enough that an arm was able to squeeze through and pull Anakin out.

“Run, Ani!” Shmi screamed.

He did not question her, running 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 grinned 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 screamed and struggled and clutched protective hands to 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. The former Sith found himself abruptly changed again, 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 making 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 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 man 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 had been devastated by this man, his certainty that he was destined for great heroism. Kenobi had left him a smoking ruin of a being, and never once regretted it. A man who had helped to raise him. A man who had claimed to love him.

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 manifest 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.

“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, he failed to notice a shadow easing down the cliff face. A whisper of movement alerted him at the last moment, and Anakin prepared the only weapon 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 identical to 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 abruptly 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 caught alight, and his breath shortened in a way that felt monstrously 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 simply could not move.

And as the Tusken mothers stared, as Shmi watched with embers reflected in her brown eyes, Anakin Skywalker slowly began to burn. An eerie stillness 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 more 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 theatre scenery, 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 his words.

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 he had been when Vader cut him 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 continued to 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 regularly 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 Tusken 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, one by one, while his former owner howled. The image was so vivid that he hoped it might become reality if he focused with sufficient intensity. 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 yet 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 just 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 could see 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 a sighing wind swept through the camp, 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 the awareness chased him in ways that he had always been able to elude while he lived. 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 was it 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 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. And 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 one last time, 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 terrified by the visceral reality of the fire.  Flames caught on his cloak—no more Jedi brown, but as black, as glossy as the space between the stars-- and climbed up to his shoulders. The fire alighted on the copper curl of his hair, and Anakin felt himself paralysed by a blaze as incontrovertible as the simmering inferno of Mustafar.

Yet even as he was set alight, 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, even when she did not, and the wind picked up the call as he sped across the sand with the laurel of fire 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 terrified, pained and heartsore to continued. He rolled on the desert floor to put out the flames, cringing at the rough, hateful 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 before 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, a victim of the dark power 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. And 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 was abruptly tired, his physical 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 resisted 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 Kenobi, 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 Kenobi’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. Yet 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 seemed utterly still, 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 descend into 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 done 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 an echo 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, baring 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 here 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.

Anakin burst from Luke’s room in pursuit of Lars. As he ran, 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 the power 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.”

Lars waved a tired hand at the table. “Well, have a seat.”

Anakin 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 erstwhile 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 the whole story. 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. But you had to have this place too. Tatooine had stepped on you, and you had to step on it.”

Lars stepped 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 like a missile.

Anakin staggered back into the wall behind him. White light spread across his vision and the air opened like the 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.