Chapter Text
Luke looked out over the desert. The two suns were setting red, the sky painted a stunning array of indigos and purples. Wind ruffled at his hair, and he brushed it back out of his face.
“The sunset was beautiful. I wanted to share it with you.”
Luke smiled at Leia. “Thank you,” he said. “I needed this.”
Leia pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “I could feel your distress,” she said simply, though Luke could feel her affection pouring through their bond. She was happy she could help him. “Is something going on?”
Luke sat next to her on the sand. “It’s the Empire,” he said. “We think they are building a massive superweapon, capable of destroying an entire planet in a single shot.”
Shock and horror painted Leia’s face. “That’s…” she shuddered. “Why would anyone build such a thing?”
“Control,” Luke said simply, shrugging. “Power. To rule through fear and intimidation.”
Leia scowled, and looked back out over the desert. She was the most beautiful girl Luke had ever seen in his life, far beyond even the brightest jeweled princesses and ladies of all the Core Worlds. Leia was a desert creature, sand-blasted and bleached and parched and possessing a fierce strength that shone through her entire being. Her eyes were dark gray, like the horizon across from the dawn. She was a storm thinly veiled in the guise of something that looked human most of the time.
The sisters called her Walking Storm Child. Luke thought the name suited her perfectly.
Spritely and quick, she darted around to kneel in front of Luke, a look of delight in her eyes. “I want to show you something else,” she said. “Old Ben said I was finally ready.”
In the way of dreams, the object didn’t really come from anywhere. She simply pulled it from behind her where before there was nothing. “A lightsaber,” she said with almost uncharacteristic reverence. “It was our father’s lightsaber. Ben said that he would’ve wanted me to have it.”
Luke bit the inside of his cheek. “I… I wish he were alive.”
The sisters laughed.
Luke and Leia stared at each other for a moment in disbelief. The sisters had been listening to their conversation, of course. They always listened to the twins. It was just the way they were. But the sisters never really responded. They were so much a part of the Force that they hardly seemed to ever pay attention to anything else, beyond, perhaps, their immediate surroundings and those they called the walking children.
Certainly, the sisters never laughed .
“That was… strange,” Luke said slowly. “Maybe… they laughed because they don’t really understand what death is?”
Leia nodded, the look on her face perplexed. “Maybe we could try asking them?”
“You think they’d answer?”
She shrugged. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”
Luke shrugged back. “I guess.”
As one, the twins reached for each other, linking their hands and minds. The action was simple, like reaching for a glass and taking a drink, something they had done for so long it no longer required real thought. Together, they reached out to the sisters.
The Viem. Beings created to embody the Force itself in physical form. Scattered across the galaxy, buried deep in the wild places, the unknown, the forgotten. Luke felt like there were probably even a few hidden in the Core Worlds, but their song was muffled in the abundance of life on those planets. Luke and Leia had always called them the sisters, though they weren’t entirely sure why.
They had a few guesses, though.
As the twins called to them, the collective consciousness of the sisters seemed to tremble, and then reach out to greet them.
Welcome.
Love. The sisters felt like pure love. Gentleness and warmth and a radiant peace that defied description.
Our walking children.
The sisters didn’t really use words. They sent feelings, impressions and images. Like Leia’s name: Walking Storm Child was an image of Leia striding through the desert, the wind playing with her hair as it billowed into great roiling clouds of sand and dust and lightning, wild and free and carrying her. Like Luke’s name: Walking Star Child was Luke roaming through space, each step carrying him from star to star, the void and ethereal light winding itself through him and around him, his eyes alight with nebula and the burning of suns.
It was difficult to ask the sisters a question. The best Luke and Leia could manage was putting together an image of the lightsaber, a sense of father and death and an attempt at sounding curious over the sound of the sisters’ laughter.
It felt as though it took a few minutes for the sisters’ minds to parse through the message. They struggled in particular over father and death , since they had no real concept of mortality, and sexual reproduction was completely baffling to them. Luke tried again, this time with an image of his mother, her sad smile and kind nature mixed with the sense of being held and belonging.
That got the sisters’ attention very quickly.
For a moment, Luke and Leia thought they would be overwhelmed by the response the sisters sent them. Flashes of images danced before them: a beautiful person with golden hair and eyes like water wandering across a deep sky. Walking Sky Child.
Then the images changed. There was sadness, loss, bound to images of fire and darkness spreading across a great city where the streets ran with blood. Spiraling away from that, the sisters sent a sense of quiet, of waiting.
Sleep. Silence. Healing. The dragon rests. Lingers. Soon eyes will open.
Walking Sky Child will walk again.
Luke gasped, sucking air into his lungs as he sat up, safe in his own bed in the Royal Palace on Alderaan. Trying to rub the last of the sleep from his eyes, he reached out to illuminate the chronometer by his bed. It was still an hour before he needed to get up, but he doubted he would be able to get back to sleep. Not with the image of Leia holding a lightsaber and facing down the Emperor’s Enforcer fresh in his head.