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Shivers cracked the ice of his skin as he stared up at the crumbling statues on the steps of the Temple. Not decay alone. Something more than mortar had sustained this place something more than crude matter until recently.
His tightly gathered robe slipped aside as he lifted his left hand, glaring at the cracks in the chrysalis cage no words fit here anymore where liquid flame welled in murky orange. No other wound he’d ever suffered and there have been enough of those had healed anything like this. Something changed on Mustafar. What?
The breeze slipped into his robe and made him start, gaze rising to the Temple’s facade as he tugged it tighter. He knew this place so well. How would it have changed since his last visit, except to crumble?
But something had made it crumble and the fires didn’t take that much. He folded his arms together inside the wide sleeves of his robe and took a step forward. Even in a new pair of boots, his steps made no sound on the stone. Did this imitation flesh weigh that little? It still weighed his spine down the same way flesh and bone had done.
Something dark slipped around the corners of the abandoned Temple. Already the looming building had lost the living glow of a place full of activity, one where life forms gathered and worked and lived. His steps made no sound and yet an echo filled his head has the very place become a ghost as he made his way inside. Not that long ago he’d paced through the corridors with his back straight and shoulders wide. Now his robe folded around the space he didn’t dare occupy. This place no longer welcomes me.
Why should it, after what you brought down on it?
He shook the whispers of some far-flung place out of his ears and paced onwards. Beyond the door, the light dimmed fast. The shimmer in his flesh cleared the darkness for a few paces ahead, but the glow was thin and the shadows were hungry. The place seemed a dusty shadow of his memory but do I see it clearly now even as he strode onwards.
The war drum of the legion’s boots against the floor froze him in the door. No. No one else could be —
No one who still lives, you mean. But you feel like no other Jedi can, Ani. You must realise —
He turned. His robe flared around him as he gulped a ghost Temple for a ghost of an Order, looking up at the high ceiling. As if anything could hide there. As if anything remained to be hidden in this place.
Why did I come here?
The question chased the whispers away. Not far enough. He shook himself and turned to carry on. Into a corpse-littered room unchanged since he’d left it that way.
Mostly Padawans and newly knighted Jedi here. Collapsed in little groups that had gathered back to back, hoping to fend off the clones by relying on each other for support. But each lightsabre could only deflect so many blaster bolts at once. And he’d been there in the lead. So many bore the burn-edged mark of a lightsabre strike. He knelt down to look at one body, a Twi’lek with a Padawan braid of sika beads hanging from a sliding headdress. One he’d taught lightsabre forms to. The cut still as clean and raw-edged as the moment he’d made it. The hot aether of his flesh twisted around his chest, flesh and blood constricted by a shudder in the Force that came close to knocking him over as he stood up.
Streams of something dark and coloured with rage and pain ran over his vision as he drew his robe closer there were ghosts here before I ever killed and pushed himself forward, around the scattered corpses preserved in the stony longevity that had abandoned the Temple itself.
Stasis. You can’t stop change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting. But they’d tried, they’d tried. He froze in the middle of the room. His light dimmed until his vision stretched no further than the closest corpse, four paces away. Darkness seamed this place like the dragon’s fire seamed his skin. But I am no longer afraid…
How sure are you, young one? Was it courage that drew your twisted healing from you on Polis Massa?
He shuddered. No longer whispers from far away. The words were chains stretched out from the depths and heights of the Temple and there is no one here to say them…
Only him. And whatever he carried with him. And the last time he’d entered this place, he’d brought it death.
Death, yet the Force. Chains rattled against the floor as he shut his eyes. Home is an anchor and it will drown you. Where had he heard that? He couldn’t hear it in his mother’s soft voice who needs anchors in a desert like Tatooine and so they faded to dullness among the crowding whispers of… he lifted his hands to his head, pressing against his eyelids.
Cold metal against the burn scars lining his eyes sent rippling shocks through his nerves as he folded together in the middle of the life-drained cavern, hisses that he could no longer blame on serpents filling air that should have been as still as the corpses surrounding him.
The Living Force has abandoned this place, yes. This is natural. You see this, have been trained to see this. Your every teacher told you that life was what mattered. How could you do anything else?
But you feel, son of the suns. You feel like no other Jedi or Sith who taught you could. So reach out, reveal what lies beneath these too-fresh corpses and this too-aged Temple. What did your teachers forget?
Blood red light like a Sith Lord’s lightsabre. The fires of Mustafar lingered in his flesh, still furious, still ferocious. The fire of a star close to burning up, to burning out, to blasting itself out across the void in an explosion of everything it had ever created.
Through a fire of more power than the burning of his false flesh, he let a hand sink to the floor, dragging a heavy chain with it. Beneath the corpses, beneath the Temple. Whose voice had rung out of the darkness? So many hissing whispers, and these ones weren’t like the dragon and its children — too many, too quiet, too far away until they weren’t.
His reaching senses found nothing this place is a void belonging to the Force. But the Force spanned the galaxy, ran through everything. What was he missing?
What did that voice want him to feel?
He tore his eyes open. No chains around his wrists but metal links still clashed against each other as he got to his feet.
It is, it is because I made it so. He’d commanded the clones who’d done most of the killing. His feet dragged along the floor, caught in a sinking field of something warm like fresh blood as he forced himself forward. Ignorance, yet knowledge. This was his work. And this wasn’t the first site of carnage he’d walked across. He’d been a general, Force take his new-formed flesh away and this much death should have left something more in the Force. There is no death, there is the Force.
And yet… all he felt was chains that couldn’t exist around his wrists and a pool of blood that had run dry a week ago around his feet.
No! Anakin, you have to listen. Stop and think. Reach out further. There is more —
All that is left in this place is what remains of his self-destruction. What difference does it make if his mother continues to scream at him now? He doesn ’t even hear.
He hears. He must hear us. If he doesn’t —
Then what? He will continue to fall further through the cracks in the Jedi Temple? Now that it crumbles, he will find what I sought for so long. And once he reaches that well of power —
He killed you as he did me. He is the son of the suns. He will be no kinder than the Force itself can be.
No. I don ’t believe it. Ani. Ani, if you can hear me… remember home. Come home.
The door to the Council chamber slid open, though it groaned with the effort. He forced one foot over the threshold is this where the darkness leapt up to swallow me and stopped there.
Younglings in the same stasis that the corpses in the lower levels had been left in. The one who’d come forward, spoken, asked him what to do — trusted him all this because Sidious lied to me — on his side, eyes still staring across the room.
He took a step forward, meaning to cross the room, but something tugged at his wrist, a tight binding that drew him to the young boy’s side. Two glowing fingers pulled over the boy’s eyelids to close the glassy eyes.
Ani. I told you not to look back.
He crossed the room to take the seat he’d occupied and shut his eyes. There is no death, there is the Force but all he could feel here was death.
How long had Master Yoda sat on this council? His presence in the Force had lingered every time Anakin had entered the room, whether Yoda was there in the flesh or projecting in by holo. In the darkness behind his scarred eyelids he could feel his blood flowing through burnt flesh and life-hot aether alike.
Something has corrupted this place. At the edges of his senses something flickered in and out of sight. A corruption of the Force…
You know, son of the suns. You know what has taken root in this place.
You know, because you brought it with you.
A jolting gasp forced him to open his eyes, brought his mind back to the council room. Dust fell from the roof. He leaned his head back. Cracks ran through the ceiling, a spiralling web of seams. Chains still rattled, shifting the edge of his robe. I am not afraid. The Force shall free me.
Could that voice even come from any sentient being? It echoed from beyond the room — beyond Coruscant’s sun, setting over the silver-cast horizon and casting a spattered self-portrait of yellow and blood across the windows. Like the hissing of the serpents in his chest, so many sounds layered together chaos, yet harmony.
Ani. Listen to me.
I know … I know what you’ve become. What you were when I carried you. I don’t know if I can explain it. To know that so much of you is the raw power in a shard of kyber, pressed onto a human heart… It’s so much more than I ever knew on Tatooine.
But you're slipping away. Don’t let that happen, Ani. Remember home. Come home.
Deep below the Temple… the corruption took root there but his searching slipped away on its edges. He opened his eyes and slumped in the chair, his robe folded around him like he was a child bundled up by his mother against Tatooine’s chill nights.
Even with the Temple itself, once so seething with the Force that it kept him awake at night, become a void, the pulse of a living world filled him. Beyond the window painted with the sunset’s dying colours, the planetary city kept moving. And beyond that how do I feel this much the hum of the city, the Underworld, the racing energy of… more than life. The presence of matter, of something born out of a collapsing star. Any and every insignificant shard of compressed kyber broken apart and flung into the space between stars. Every presence consuming some part of him, tearing his flesh away from his mind. How do I feel this much?
Your mother may not be able to explain what you ’ve become, son of the suns. But you know. You feel like no Jedi or Sith ever could. So feel, son of the suns, son of something far greater than suns. Learn what you’ve become.
Don't think, feel.
Scattered shards of prismatic light against the darkness forced his eyes open. A familiar heat in the air — Tatooine, Mustafar, the fire of the dragon I know these fires so well lurking in the shadows behind the chairs of a once proud, defiant Council.
He got to his feet. Enough.
Ta vara på ditt vatten, Ani.
In the middle of the room — he pushed aside the thought of interrogation after interrogation after demand after reprimand after interrogation — he had to stop, the pooling heat locking his boots in place. As he spun, sought a source for this… this phantom bloodbath as real as his soot-seamed aether flesh, the corpses in their unnatural preservation began to shimmer.
Then, as he watched, to vanish, each fading body yanking at his wrist like these younglings might well once have tugged at his sleeves.
Death, yet the Force. A fire overtook the other glimmers of light — of life — brushing against his skin, against his senses. Bodies faded away to leave clothes behind, and something… called out in the Force.
No longer a void. And all those chains… his gaze fell to his hands. Now he could see the chains, the manacles. So many chains… each one stretching out towards a corpse, or one of the piles of clothes left behind by the Force claiming those that its son had killed. It is, it is because I made it so.
So many chains, stretching out through the Temple. To every Jedi whose death he’d caused.
No. The Force shall free me. He turned away from his old seat — away from that useless chair — and pushed towards the door. So hard to move with chains and blood pooling around his feet and and the weight of all the death he’d caused death, yet the Force. The Force shall free me.
Remember home, Ani. Please. Come home. I can’t stand to lose you again.