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There was a room in the Imperial Palace that no one dared to enter. The highest officials avoided the place like the plague and even Palpatine stayed far away from it. It might have been simple superstition but something about the room was incredibly eerie, even to the people who were entirely force-null.
It housed the broken pieces of what had once been the great kyber arch. In the time of the High Republic, long before the rule of the glorious Empire, the traitorous Jedi had created the strange contraption. It was made entirely out of kyber crystals mined from the old sabers of dead Jedi. It had been a complete waste of material, the kyber could have been used for far more grand projects and once the Emperor had finally rid the galaxy of the traitors, he’d ordered the damn thing destroyed. But when a group of clones had attempted to take apart the millenia-old thing, they’d found that many of the kyber crystals were completely useless- and haunted.
The troopers had reported that they heard screams with every crystal they collected. After several of the troopers had been taken to various psychiatric evaluations, the Emperor had decided to simply let the rest of the kyber arch rot alongside the broken hilts of the dead traitors.
So now, the broken kyber arch was lying in pieces on shelves, next to three broken hilts. One, that seemed to have gathered the most dust, was rather intricate. White and gold, with two contraptions that seemed to have been a crossguard at some point. There was a fissure running through it- like someone had reached in and ripped out the saber’s heart.
Next to it, another hilt was laying, gathering dust. It was a much simpler design, very similar to one that the dead Jedi Anakin Skywalker had once favoured. It too was broken, one part pointing to the first hilt, the other to the third one.
The third one was coloured similarly to the first one, with intricate golden rays running towards the ignition end that was decorated with two metal cross guards that gave the hilt the look of a sword hilt from billions of years ago.
‘Here we are then’, a ghost said. He had pale skin and a dark beard, looking about thirty.
‘I did not think it would end like this’, a second ghost said, her voice soft. She was older than the first ghost, with crinkles around her eyes and her once blond hair nearly completely taken over by grey.
‘At least we’re together’, the third ghost said. He was old as well, his tan skin marred with fine worry and laugh lines, his hair entirely grey.
‘They took everything’, the woman said. ‘Everything we did- everything we sacrificed- it was all for nothing.’
Both the first and the third ghost reached out to hold the woman’s hands.
‘It can’t have been’, the third ghost said. ‘I refuse to believe that.’
‘We still have hope’, the first ghost agreed. ‘We always have hope, isn’t that what we promised, A? Even if we’re here, forgotten. There’s always hope.’
The woman looked up at the two men.
‘For light’, Avar whispered.
‘And life’, Stellan and Elzar echoed.