Chapter Text
The Prologue
In the lake-heart archipelagos of my mother’s hometown, Naboo, there is a story passed down for over a hundred years.
When I was about your age, my mother loved to sit on the lakeside terrace, with the cool evening breeze brushing her face, and tell me this story.
Once upon a time, there was a birdkeeper who lived by Naboo’s lake.
He had tamed countless birds in his life—those with bright plumage, those with melodious songs, those that could deliver messages through storms. Yet none of them truly belonged to him. For they would always fly away: when spring came, they followed the monsoon northward; when their wings grew strong, they smashed through the cage door and soared into the sky; sometimes, if the cage door was left ajar, a gust of wind would sweep them away, and they would never look back.
As the birdkeeper grew old, his crow’s feet like gullies carved by lake water, he sat before the empty bird stand and thought: I want to raise a bird that will never fly away.
So he no longer set nets to catch adult birds. Every day, he sat under the old tree by the lake, waiting for a newly hatched chick. Grass grew and withered, flowers bloomed and faded. Finally, one day, a violent wind tore through the treetops, and a warm, bare little creature fell from its nest, landing in the soft grass at his feet.
He cupped it in his palms. The chick’s eyes were not yet open, its tender pink skin covered only in sparse down, and it could only instinctively open its bright yellow beak and let out weak chirps.
The birdkeeper smiled.
He took it home, wove a nest with the softest rush from the lake, and fed it the tiniest insects found in morning dew. Every day, he sat by the nest and spoke to it in the gentlest tone, letting it grow familiar with his voice and scent from the moment it opened its eyes. He never caged it—why would he? The chick could not fly; its world was no larger than this room, no warmer than the palm of his hand. By the time it finally grew wings and learned to flutter them, it was already accustomed to this room, to pecking food from his palm each day, to knowing no other place to go.
Later, the chick matured. Its wings were full, its song clear and loud, and it learned to fly. It could flit from the windowsill to the ceiling beam, from the door to his shoulder—but it never once thought of flying out of that always half-open window.
Some time later, the birdkeeper fell ill. He lay in bed, his breath as faint as a candle in the wind, on the verge of death. The bird landed on his chest and, with its soft beak, gently preened his graying hair, stroke by stroke.
The birdkeeper opened his eyes, looked at it, and whispered: “Do you know? I never caged you.”
The bird tilted its head and said: “I know.”
The birdkeeper asked again: “Then why don’t you fly away?”
The bird fell silent for a moment, then nuzzled his finger—as it had done countless times before—and said: “Because I never knew there was a sky outside.”
The birdkeeper closed his eyes and smiled for the last time.
After telling the story, my mother would always brush my forehead with her cool hand and say, “This is a story about love. True love is not caging a bird, but making it choose to stay.”
I believed her when I was a child. That is, until I left Naboo’s lakes and traveled to Coruscant—a world perpetually swallowed by lights. There, I saw too many birds trapped in invisible cages: Jedi knights whose wings were bound by the Jedi Code, politicians whose edges were worn down by Senate power, countless souls whose tail feathers were caught by the galaxy’s surging desires, fears, and obsessions.
As I watched them crash futilely against unseen barriers, I finally understood the unspoken truth of my mother’s story.
It tells us: when a bird never knows there is a sky to fly to, a cage is unnecessary. It can live a peaceful life, yet it will never understand what true freedom is.
This is the gentlest, and cruellest, thing a birdkeeper can do.
I sit in the highest office of the Galactic Senate on Coruscant, gazing down at the endless sea of lights below, my fingers brushing the old photo album of my mother that I brought from Naboo. I have spent half my life transitioning from a child who listened to stories to the birdkeeper in the story.
And now, sitting atop the galaxy, through the bond of the Force between us, I tell you the truth of this story.
My son, I have finally waited for my little chick.