Post by Darth Kairos on Jun 28, 2015 12:27:42 GMT
((Written in collaboration with Darth Xaos.))
“You’re telling me that you have a way to kill Darth Xaos?” Natasi Daala asked. Luke Skywalker nodded hesitantly. “We may do, yes. We’ve only recently verified that this ritual will work, but it seems we may be able to kill him permanently.”
The Galactic Alliance Chief of State’s eyes narrowed to green slits. “’Permanently?’” she asked. “Is there something that the Jedi Order has kept secret from the state?” “Yes and no,” Luke answered. “We’ve believed for a while now that the man we know as Darth Xaos is not so much a flesh-and-blood man as he is a Force ghost inhabiting the bodies of others. As such we’ve reasoned that even if we were to kill him he would simply switch to another body. However-” Daala cut him off before he could continue. “And you kept this information from the state why, Master Jedi?”
Luke continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “-we had no evidence to support our beliefs,” he finished. “The information we’ve received confirms what we believe, and details a ritual of undoing it.”
The Chief of State stood up, drawing herself to her full height and grinding her finger into the Agarwood desk that had once been Cal Omas’. “Then kill him,” she ordered. Luke shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he explained. “We know the effect of the ritual, but we don’t know how it will take effect. Xaos may simply pass into the Force following his next death, his spirit may leave his body immediately, or it may slowly slip away over time. Further, we haven’t been able to verify the source of this information. It was sent to the Order via the Holonet, but we haven’t been able to track its source. It may very well be a trap.”
Daala brushed off his objections. “Small concerns. I am certain the Jedi, skilled as you claim they are, are capable of fighting through any ambush they lay. How the ritual works and who informed us of it is irrelevant next to its effect.”
“There’s more,” Luke pressed. “The ritual requires the use of massive amounts of negative emotions as a power source. Anger, hate, and most important killing intent – for the ritual to work, the one performing it needs to submit themselves wholly to these emotions and allow themselves to be consumed by them. No Jedi can walk away from that unscathed.”
Daala raised an unconcerned eyebrow in response. “You are speaking of the Dark Side, yes? I was under the impression that the new Jedi philosophy taught there was no Light or Dark Side.” “Not within the Force, no,” Luke agreed. “But the actions we take, the emotions we allow to fuel us – those are the lines that separate us from the Sith of the Brotherhood. For a Jedi to perform this ritual he has no choice but to cross those lines – and then, in the eyes of the public and adherents to the Living Force theory, he has fallen to the Dark Side.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Spare me, Skywalker,” she said. “I have no time for pontification on the nature of the Force and how we regular beings perceive it. The Tion Hegemony and Cronese Mandate are considering following the Allied Tion Sector’s example and joining the Obsidian Union. The Union has solidified its Outer Rim holdings to the Centrality border and their resources increase every day. This ritual will remove Darth Xaos as a permanent threat, yes?” Luke nodded. “Ultimately,” he said. “But killing him now might result in him being seen as a martyr. The Union will fight just as hard in his name.”
Daala leaned forward over the desk. “Irrelevant. He is a problem that must be dealt with, immediately. And as Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance, I order you to deal with him, immediately. Kill Darth Xaos, and cut off the head of the Union before this insurrection spreads any further.”
“And if I fall to the Dark Side in the process?” Luke asked, knowing her answer. Daala merely smiled, a cool thing that did not reach her eyes. “I am confident in your moral fortitude - and in the resolve of your comrades.”
-----
Eleven Jedi Masters sat in a circle in a room at the top of the High Council Tower.
They were Cilghal, a Mon Calamari, Saba Sebatyne, a Barabel, Tresina Lobi, a Chev, and Kenth Hamner, Kyle Katarn, Kyp Durron, Corran Horn, Octa Ramis, and Mara Jade Skywalker, all humans. The circle of seats was broken along one side by a trio of holoprojectors, only one of which was active. It displayed the image of Kirana Ti, a Dathomirian Force Witch who, along with two more Jedi named Streen and Damaya, operated a satellite academy on Dathomir. The two inactive Holoprojectors would normally show Kam and Tionne Solusar, the administrators of the Ossus Satellite Academy.
Finally, first among equals was Luke Skywalker.
Luke finished recounting his meeting with the Chief of State, and uneasy silence fell. Luke took the opportunity to study each Master’s reaction; they ranged from surprise, to annoyance, to uneasy agreement. Only Mara – who had met Luke as he returned and already knew the details of the meeting – kept her expression neutral.
Saba spoke first. “The Chief of State’z demand iz not as unreasonable as many of her otherz.”
Kyp grunted. “At least she’s leaving it to us this time. I’m surprised she’s not ordering us to go in with a fleet.”
“It’s at our discretion,” Corran agreed. He leaned forward in his chair, thinking. “We’ll need to bait Xaos out. Trying to find and fight him in the Union would be suicide.”
“We could ask for the Chief of State’s aid,” Hamner, the Order’s liason to the Alliance, suggested, stroking his chin. “Ask her for military aid and pair Xaos’ death with a massive counterattack. They’ll be demoralised and easy targets.”
Corran shook his head. “Direct assaults on Union space have backfired each time we’ve tried them, and they had less ships then than they do now. The Sith are too much of a wild card” He paused. “But they’re still Sith. We cut off the head, and the body will tear itself apart with infighting. We can hit them then.”
“That requires us to actually kill Xaos,” Kyle Katarn, the brown-bearded Battlemaster of the New Jedi Order, put in. “And Xaos isn’t just some dark acolyte. He’s a trained Dark Lord, and he’s beaten us at every turn so far. We need every advantage possible – fight him on our terms, with superior numbers.”
“Thiz one would welcome the chance to duel with him,” Saba hissed. A few others voiced agreement. Luke put up his hand. “That may not be a wise idea,” he said. “Xaos has an uncanny ability for prediction. If he gleams even a hint of a superior force waiting for him, he’ll bring resources to match it. Sending a strike team against him would result in him simply bringing an equivalent number of Sith.”
Kyp grunted again. “Each of which would likely be a match for one of us.” He was right, of course; in nearly every engagement with the Sith so far, they’d lost. Occasionally to superior numbers, but more often to simply stronger opponents. They’d lost far too many good Jedi that way already – to say nothing of those who had fallen under the sway of Sith teachings. The fact that the Union’s upper echelons had a number of fallen Jedi in them were a testament to the dangers the Dark Side posed, but to more and more they were becoming an example of the power of the Force rather than a warning.
The Council had fallen silent, thinking. Luke waited, thinking in turn, until Mara broke the silence.
“We’re not addressing the big issue here,” she pointed out. She turned to look at Luke. “Whoever uses the ritual falls to the Dark Side. Is that worth losing one of us for?” Her eyes drilled into his. Everyone here knew that it would have to be Luke who confronted Xaos. True, since the Yuuzhan Vong War the Jedi no longer perceived the Dark Side the same way – to the Jedi, light and dark existed within living beings rather than the Force itself – but the results, however you believed they were reached, were the same. And to lose Luke…
“All the more reason to take several Jedi along,” Cilghal spoke up. “If whoever uses this ritual will fall, having several Jedi there may prevent that, or they may be able to bring them back to the light.”
“You told the Chief of State about that, Master Skywalker?” Hamner asked, curious. Luke nodded. He’d left out her response deliberately, knowing it would only inflame the Jedi’s resentment towards Daala’s increasingly restrictive and antagonistic attitudes towards the Jedi Order. Now he’d have no choice. “She said, verbatim, ‘I am confident in your moral fortitude - and in the resolve of your comrades.’”
“Meaning,” Mara added quietly, “That she expects us to kill him if he falls.”
Cold silence descended on the room. But only briefly. Whereas hearing such an implication from Cal Omas would have shocked them, now the Masters only shook their heads in disgust and disbelief. Kyp, Corran and Hamner all exchanged flickering glances. Once, Kyp had existed on the opposite side of a fierce debate from Corran and Kenth, believing firmly the Jedi should answer only to themselves rather than exist under the control of the Galactic Alliance. Since Daala’s appointment, that debate had faded into an Order-wide sense of agreement with Kyp’s general beliefs – but the specifics varied. Some believed the Jedi should focus on removing Daala from power and then place themselves under Alliance control once a more reasonable Chief of State was instated. Others used Daala as a prime example of why the Jedi should answer only to themselves, and should only ever govern themselves as a result. The debate, though quiet, was definitely still present – though it lacked the splintering risk it had once carried.
Again, it was Mara who broke the silence, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. “Daala’s comments don’t change anything. The real issue here is whether or not this is worth the risk of killing Xaos.”
“Is there no other option?” Corran asked, glancing at Luke. “Does the ritual say you have to fall to the dark side in the process of using it?”
Luke paused, thinking. “I only received it a few days ago,” he acknowledged, an idea growing on him. “We haven’t had time to explore alternatives. There may yet be away.”
“Then we need to look into it,” Kyp stated firmly. “We all agree that Xaos has to die, or be otherwise incapacitated. Even if this ritual doesn’t work, we don’t know how his body switching abilities function – he may lose all of his memories, and at the least he will lose most of his skills and combat abilities. If nothing else, we’ll buy some time.”
“Thiz one thinkz incapacitation should not be an option,” Saba growled. “After the atrocitiez he haz committed, nothing lezz than death will suffice.” She cast a meaningful glance at the two inactive Holoprojector. More than a few gazes followed. Luke’s mind’s eye showed him a holograph of Kam and Tionne on their wedding day, and he felt something ache within him. Kam was gone, in self-imposed exile to wrestle with the Dark Side and prevent himself from slipping again. And Tionne…
“Luke and I will begin looking into the ritual.” Mara’s voice broke him out of his thoughts. “There may be something on it in the archives.”
The rest of the Council agreed, and Luke took it as a sign to adjourn the meeting.
-----
“Caffa, Master Skywalker?”
Luke looked up from his datapad. Hathon Izmyt, the new Chief Librarian of the Archives, stood over him, holding a tray with two steaming mugs of caffa on it. Luke thanked him and accepted one, and Hathon turned to Mara, who murmured a note of thanks and put hers down without looking up. With that, Hathon moved away, most likely to help a few confused apprentices back in the public section of the archives.
Luke took the opportunity to sit back and stretch a little. His legs were stiff from sitting, so he pushed his chair back and straightened them out, sipping at his caffa. He would have preferred hot chocolate, but Hathon didn’t know that yet, and Luke had no intention of turning down his kindness. Mara glanced up, saw Luke was taking a break, and promptly followed suit, downing half of her caffa in a few seconds, apparently without noticing the head.
“We’re not making much progress,” she commented, setting it down and pushing the pile of datacards in front of her around a little. Luke grimaced. “I was hoping we would be able to find something in our copies of Palpatine’s Book of Sith.”
“And now we get to sort through all of these.” Mara spread her arms to indicate the datacards on the title. “I had no idea Tionne had collected so much on the Sith. Or that so much survived the War.”
“A lot of it is information on the Sith species,” Luke explained. He blew on his caffa a few times to cool it, and drank a mouthful. “Given how intertwined they are and how ritualistic a lot of the species’ history is, I thought it was worth looking into.”
“I’d like to actually get some sleep tonight,” Mara muttered, downing the rest of her drink and returning to her stack. Luke could sympathise. This was the start of their third day in here. They’d stopped only to sleep, eat, check on the rest of the Order, and see if they could get through to Jacen and Ben on the holocomm. Mara was plainly not enjoying the tedious research, but she had insisted on helping, and she wasn’t about to back out now. Setting his mug down not even half drunk, Luke went back to his work.
It was half the day before they finally had a breakthrough.
One of Mara’s datacards slid across the table to stop beside Luke’s datapad. Luke looked up. Mara had a slight grin on her features, and her relief at finally having found something would have been palpable even without their bond.
“What have you found?” Luke asked, ejecting his datacard from his datapad and sliding in Mara’s. “Not exactly what we’re looking for,” Mara admitted. “But from the looks of it, some background. If it’s right, we might not have to worry about Xaos jumping bodies either.”
Luke scanned through the information. The datacard itself was a translation of some stone tablets covering a period of Sith holy wars somewhere between ten- and fifteen-thousand years ago. Most of it was irrelevant, covering leaders or dogmas or whichever Dark Side Spirit they marched for. What was relevant was the section Mara had flagged, covering rituals. The carvings went into detail about how the various factions had all adopted and modified a ritual meant for the sacrifice of enemy fighter, and how their spirit would be purified to ‘cleanse the taint of false gods’ before they were sacrificed in the name of that faction’s particular deity and sent to Hell to feed that deity’s power.
“It’s a bit of a stretch,” Luke murmured after he had finished reading. “But…it feels right.”
“That’s a good sign,” Mara said. “‘Cleansing the taint of false gods’ is a long shot, but it might work on Xaos. We don’t know exactly how his body-hopping abilities work or where they come from.”
“I think this’ll do it,” Luke said. Somehow, he just knew this was the right piece of information, and that they were going in the right direction. He put his datapad back down, and picked up another datacard. “Now we just need to focus on finding a method that doesn’t involve corruption.”
“Agreed,” Mara said, and then stood up. “You keep going on that. I’m going to go and see if I can get through to Ben and Jacen.” Luke nodded, picked an unread datacard at random, and went back to his reading.
Her summons broke his focus away from his reading after a few scant minutes. Luke paused, concentrating, and felt Mara calling him to come again, the sense accompanied by images of their son. Luke smiled, realising she’d gotten through, and left to join her.
-----
A five-year sojourn to examine the true nature of the Force had been kind to Jacen Solo. Since leaving, he’d matured into a handsome man with a strong beard (though it was currently mere stubble) and a newfound wisdom – and, from his interactions with Ben, he seemed to have regained some of the empathy and kindness he’d lost after his year of imprisonment during the Yuuzhan Vong War.
“Uncle Luke,” he greeted as Luke stepped in front of the Holoprojector. “How are matters with the Order?”
“We may have something important,” Luke answered vaguely. “How was your camping trip? How is Ben?”
“He’s fine,” Jacen said, the slight wariness in his tone indicating he’d noticed Luke’s noncommittal answer. “In fact, he’s right here. Ben, would you like to say hello to your parents?”
Luke and Mara’s son stepped into the frame, dressed in his nightclothes and grinning wider than they’d ever seen him. “Hi Mom, hi Dad!” he said enthusiastically, waving. “Hey Ben,” Mara answered, returning his grin. Luke felt Mara mirror his joy at seeing Ben looking so happy. “Have you enjoyed your trip to Endor so far?”
“I’ve had a great time!” Ben answered happily, directing his grin to Jacen. “Jacen’s taught me how to tie ropes, how to watch animals without them noticing you, how to climb trees-”
Jacen tapped his back, and Ben quickly broke off, looking guilty. Luke and Mara glanced at each other, and then simultaneously raised an eyebrow. “Climb trees?” Luke asked mildly, remembering how big some of the trees on Endor were. Ben toed the ground, not saying anything. Mara directed her ire to Jacen, who had the good grace to shift uncomfortably.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Mara said, breaking the silence. “For now, I’m glad you had fun, Ben.” “Wickett would have been glad to meet you,” Luke agreed, remembering the little fuzzball fondly. At least, fondly except for the part where he’d wanted to eat them. “Ben, I may not be here when you come back. There may be something urgent I need to take care of.”
“That’s alright, Dad,” Ben answered, looking a little disappointed. “Jacen wants to make a few stop-offs anyway.”
“Speaking of – Jacen, we’d like to have a word with you,” Mara said. “We’ll talk to you soon Ben, okay? Promise.”
“See you soon, Mom,” Ben said, giving a little wave goodbye. “You too, Dad. I’ll see you when you get back.”
“Stay safe, Ben,” Luke replied with a fatherly, if apologetic, smile, and watched their son walk out of the projection. They gave it a few seconds to let him get far enough away as not to overhear, watching as Jacen made a little shooing motion to stop Ben from eavesdropping. In the meantime, Luke glanced at Mara. She nodded, confirming the channel was secure. He could tell what she wanted to talk to Jacen about.
“We didn’t want to say anything whilst Ben might here, because it’s dangerous,” Mara said to Jacen. “We may have discovered a way to kill Xaos.”
Jacen kept silent, awaiting further explanation. Luke provided it. “We’ve acquired knowledge of a ritual that may be able to kill him for good. We know he’s capable of switching bodies, and this ritual seems to be capable of preventing that. The problem with it is that it requires enormous use of the Dark Side as a power source.”
“So whoever uses it will fall to the Dark Side as a result,” Jacen finished. “I see the problem. You’ve been looking into alternative ways of using it?”
“Without success,” Luke answered. “We’ve found some history on the ritual that indicates it will work as we think it will, but we haven’t found any possible workarounds yet.”
Jacen stroked his chin, thinking silently. Luke waited, mentally reviewing their information to see if he’d missed anything. Mara was doing the same thing, and did it faster. “We’re going to go ahead with striking against him regardless of whether or not the ritual will kill him,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t work, it’ll buy us time against the Brotherhood.”
“Tell me, how exactly does the ritual describe the Dark Side’s use as a power source?” Jacen asked, disregarding her statement. “Does it specify the individual needs to give in to the Dark Side for it to happen?” “Not exactly, no,” Luke answered. “But it needs a massive source of Dark Side energy to fuel the killing intent inherent in the ritual. It essentially wipes a person’s spirit clean and marks it so that it can be sent straight to Hell.”
“I think you’re looking at this the wrong way, Uncle Luke,” Jacen said thoughtfully. “You need the Dark Side to be a part of this ritual, but you don’t need the Dark Side to be a part of you for this ritual.”
“What do you mean?” Mara pressed.
Jacen gave an enigmatic smile. “I mean that you may want to consider looking at the components of this ritual.” He held up a hand, and ticked off the points as he listed them. “Ritual. Target. Power source. And somebody to perform the ritual.”
The truth dawned on Luke, and he nodded. “I understand,” he said, an idea forming in his mind. Mara caught it less than a second later, and smiled approvingly. “What would we do without you, Jacen?” she said, grinning lightly. “Alright then. We’ll get to work on this. We’ll see you in a few days. Take care of Ben.”
“Will do, Aunt Mara,” Jacen said, nodding. “And Uncle Luke –” he turned to look at Luke directly, and there was an intensity in his gaze that Luke rarely saw. “May the Force be with you.”
“And with you, Jacen,” Luke replied. The hologram flickered out. The two Masters glanced at each other.
“He’s an amazing influence on Ben,” Mara said quietly, her eyes flicking back to where Jacen’s visage had stood. “All this time closed off from the Force, and in the few months since he came back he’s already gotten him to open up to the Force so much.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Luke commented. “The Yuuzhan Vong War changed Jacen so much, and now he’s helping Ben overcome the effects the war had on him.” He gave a bemused smile. “Now if only Jacen would tell us what he’s been meeting with the Chief of State about.” “’State security,’” Mara replied, matching his tone with a hint of distaste and annoyance. “We’d better get the Council together. Kirana’s mediating a dispute between two Witch Clans, so we can meet in the library. We’ll see what they think.”
-----
The main benefit to gathering in the archives was security. Certainly, the Council chambers provided them with privacy, but a meeting in the archives’ private section allowed them to access the information stored there without taking it out. With the exceeding rarity of much of the information housed in the archives, as well as growing security concerns from both the Union and sources closer to home, extra steps were being taken whenever possible. Fortunately, with sound-suppression fields active the Masters could speak without risk of being overheard.
By the time the first of the other Masters had arrived, Mara and Luke had copied the information they had found on the ritual to terminals set up around a circular table, giving the others the opportunity to read it and catch up as they waited for the others to arrive. By the time the last – Kyp Durron – did, everyone save Kyp was on the same page.
Luke opened the meeting. “Mara and I believe we’ve found a way to counter the ritual’s drawback,” he said. “We’ve realised that we’ve been looking at this the wrong way. We’ve been assuming that the person performing the ritual needs to also provide the emotions necessary to fuel it, when in fact the ritual says nothing of the sort. We believe that by using a separate power source for the ritual, such as a Sith artifact, we can utilise the ritual without having the one performing it fall to the Dark Side.”
“That seems like a bit of stretch,” Kyp interjected. “We need more to go on than suspicions and vague wording.”
“There’s nothing in here suggesting that the ritual functions that way,” Corran commented, looking up from his terminal. “What makes you think that this will work?”
Luke and Mara exchanged a feeling of slight uneasiness before Luke answered. “Jacen provided us with the idea. I’ve re-examined all of the information about the ritual that was sent to us, and looking at it in the new light I got a distinct sense that it could work the way Jacen suggested it will.”
Corran frowned. “Jacen? Isn’t he off-planet?”
“He’s with Ben,” Mara answered. “But we contacted him via the Holonet to speak with Ben, and asked for his opinion in the process.”
“His sojourn means that he has a lot of different perspectives on the Force available to him,” Luke explained before any of the others could become offended. A quick probe in the Force told him he wasn’t fast enough. “It was a good idea, as he’s given us the solution we were looking for.”
“That may be so,” Kyp acknowledged. “But have we found anything confirming that the ritual will even work?”
Luke gestured to his terminal. Kyp glanced at his own, scanned it, and looked back up, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not much,” Luke admitted. “But it feels right. I read it, and I immediately had a sense that this was the information we were looking for. I trust the Force.”
“It may not be the only confirmation we have,” Hamner murmured, stroking his chin thoughtfully. Luke turned to him. “Master Hamner?”
Hamner remained silent a few moments, studying his terminal screen intently before finally speaking. “There is a section further down that caught my eye. This ritual – it didn’t occur to me until now. Tionne and I spoke at length of the New Sith Wars during my apprenticeship – I was studying the philosophical differences between the older incarnations of the Jedi Order and the Order as it was when Palpatine destroyed it, you see. About fifteen-hundred years ago, there is mention of a Dark Lord known only as the ‘Dark Underlord’. Tionne’s records were incomplete, but what she had recovered indicated two things: one, that he was a Dark Side Spirit somehow summoned from the afterlife, and two, that he was sent back there by means of a powerful ritual. The description of the ritual here broadly matches the accounts Tionne recovered.”
He looked at the rest of the group, and then met Luke’s gaze. “It’s not much,” he admitted. “But it’s another point in our favour.”
“I think it’s very useful,” Luke replied. “Thank you, Master Hamner.” He swept his gaze around the rest of the Council, and leaned forward. “At this point, however, I am willing to take the chance that the ritual does not work as intended. We have information backing up that which we received, but as we discussed earlier, even slowing down Xaos is worth the risks involved – especially now that we have a way to prevent the accompanying fall to the Dark Side.”
“Which leaves our tactical concerns,” Mara continued for him. She struck a few keys, activating a Holoprojector in the center of the table and displaying a map of the galaxy, with the Union’s territories highlighted in red. “Namely: where do we draw Darth Xaos, how many Jedi do we bring, and to what extent, if at all, do we involve the Alliance?”
Octa Ramis took a small step forward. She inclined her head towards Mara, who nodded and transferred control of the Holoprojector to Ramis’ console. Ramis brought up a map of the Unknown Regions, with a red highlight in the center that Luke immediately recognised as the Chiss Ascendancy.
“We should lure him to Csilla,” she said without preamble. “Csilla, or somewhere else in the Chiss Ascendancy. We can be there under the guise of attempting to negotiate with the Chiss and get them to break off with the Union. With the Chiss there, Xaos won’t bring a fleet of his own with him. We can either bring our own fleet and occupy the Chiss if necessary, or your friend Soontir Fel can run interference and keep the Chiss fleet off of us.”
Luke examined the image of Ascendancy space for a few moments, thinking it over. Then he slowly shook his head. “Under different circumstances, I might agree with the idea,” he said. “But the Chiss are in a delicate position right now. They’re opposed to us primarily because of their Alliance with the Union, not because they genuinely see us as enemies. There’s still a chance for genuine reconciliation with them – we shouldn’t jeaopardise it like this.”
“And I’m not sure the Fels could keep the Chiss off of our back,” Mara added. “They’re powerful, but they’re just one family, a relatively small one at that. And one comprised of humans. And we’d be putting them at risk and asking them to stick their necks out on our behalf, knowing full well the Chiss will likely exile them at best for their role in things.” She shook her head. “No, I agree with Luke. This isn’t what we should do.”
Ramis nodded, glancing around the table. The rest of the Council nodded or murmured agreement with Mara and Luke. Relinquishing holoprojector controls back to Mara, she stepped back away from the table. Luke glanced around, gesturing to ask for any further ideas.
Saba took the chance to step forward. Mara transferred the controls over without being asked. She, rather than a Union territory, brought up Bothan Space.
“Thiz one believez we should lure him with a more entizing target,” she said. On the Rimward side of Bothan Space, the planet Krant began to flash. “The Union iz no fan of the Bothanz, and would sieze the chance to damage them. Krant haz few defencez, and iz a factory world servicing the Bothan forcez. If they received word you were there, Master Skywalker, it would be a tempting target – they could annihilate an important Bothan asset with little risk, and kill you in the procezz. Or so they would think.” She chuckled. “I doubt events will be so fortunate for them.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Kyle Katarn said. “But it’s in Bothan space. Xaos would bring a fleet with him for sure.”
“We could request of the Chief-of-State a fleet to aid uz,” Saba replied. “If we positioned it several systems away, it could ambush the Union fleet and destroy it whilst we finished Xaos.”
“Which would still give it plenty of time to bombard the planet,” Corran pointed out. He shook his head. “It’s too risky. If they land ground troops it could take us months to root them all out, during which time they could do massive damage to the planet’s factories and infrastructure – especially if they’re angry that we’ve just killed their saviour. The fleet too could do a lot of damage in a very short time.”
“The Bothans will never agree to it,” Cilghal spoke up. “The hinge of this plan is the low risk to the Union. For the Bothans, however, there is a very high risk that they will lose an important asset. The Chief-of-State could overrule them, but that would inflame Bothan attitudes towards the Alliance. I do not believe we should generate tension where there is none currently even if it suits our own ends.”
“I agree with Masters Horn and Cilghal,” Luke said. He met Saba’s eye. “I’m sorry, Saba, but I cannot agree to your plan for the reasons they have listed.”
Saba nodded, and stepped back. “Thiz one acknowledgez the faultz in her plan,” she said. “She did not spend satisfactory time on this idea before presenting it, and overlooked them.”
Luke gave her a sympathetic nod, then looked around the table again, gesturing for any further ideas. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mara mirroring his motions, looking for any sign somebody had something to say. When nobody else did, she stepped forward.
“I have an idea,” she said, bringing up a map of the core Union territories on the holoprojector. She selected one planet, and magnified it until the image of it filled the air. “Vjun. More specifically, Bast Castle.”
Luke couldn’t help but feel a small sense of dismay at the idea of returning to his father’s old fortress. Across the table, Kyle Katarn more visibly mirrored his feelings. “Vjun,” he groaned, obviously remembering his visit during the Disciples of Ragnos crisis. “What is it with big dead rocks and bringing themselves up when you never want to see them again?”
Mara rolled her eyes – though Luke felt her touch him through their bond, reassuring him. “I’ll keep it short. Vjun is close to main Union space, so it won’t take Xaos long to get there. There are Union forces there already, so we have less chance of Xaos bringing any reinforcements with him. There are a few settlements there, so we have a good chance of sneaking in undetected. We already know the territory of Bast Castle, so we won’t have to worry about unfamiliar terrain. And it’s not that far from Ossus and Columex, so we can retreat to friendly territory in a hurry if we need to.”
“An infiltration mission, then?” Kyp asked. “No extra forces?”
“I recommend a small strike team,” Mara answered. “Ideally three, no more than five. They can slip in without too much trouble, deal with whoever is in the Castle, and handle whoever Xaos brings along. And there’s one other reason for Vjun too.” She glanced at Luke, and gave a small grin. “A battery.”
“For the ritual?” he asked, puzzled. Mara nodded. “The Brotherhood have a group of Dark Disciples there running experiments. It’s safe to assume they’ll have some Sith artifacts with them – a holocron or two, most likely. We could pull one of our own from the black vault, but isn’t it a better idea to use up their resources rather than our own?”
“Insult to injury,” Kyp grunted. “I like it.”
“As much as it pains me to say it, Vjun sounds ideal,” Katarn agreed. The rest of the Council murmured assent - save Corran, who hesitated a moment before nodding to Mara and Luke. “Then that leaves the question of who will accompany Master Skywalker,” he said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Luke said quietly. “I’ll go by myself.”
“By yourself?” Corran repeated, slightly stunned.
“No offence, Luke, but the odds aren’t in your favour here,” Katarn said. “Xaos has already beaten you once, and he’ll kill you if he gets a second chance.”
“I’m well aware of my past encounter with him,” Luke replied calmly. He couldn’t quite place his finger on why, but his instincts were telling him this was the right approach to take – and he’d long ago learned to trust them. “But there won’t be a second victory.”
“At least bring me with you,” Kyp objected. “If he brings reinforcements with him, I can handle them, but I doubt either of us could take both Xaos and a few of his Sith Masters at the same time.”
Corran had found his voice again. “I’m coming too,” he stated. “You can’t go up against them alone, Master Skywalker. Even a Corellian wouldn’t take those odds.”
There was assent from the other Masters, each of which – save Cilghal, by nature a healer rather than a warrior – argued to accompany Luke. Even Mara was probing his feelings, quietly trying to talk him out of it through their bond and letting him feel her sense of misgiving and concern. Luke let everyone have their say, and then held up a hand for quiet.
“I appreciate your concerns,” he said once the chatter had died down. “But you overestimate Xaos. He is a cunning strategist and a devious tactician, but he’s still prey to the same arrogance that the Dark Side twists everyone into possessing. That arrogance will blind him. As you’ve said, Master Katarn, he already beat me the first time we encountered each other – he’ll be confident the same thing will happen again. If I’m there, alone, he’ll believe he’s the only one needed, and he won’t bring anyone else.”
“And what of beating him, Master Skywalker?” Saba asked, not convinced. “Even if he bringz no-one, that will do you no good if you still fall to him.”
“I won’t,” Luke said quietly, hearing truth in his own words. “I’m going to win.”
The other Masters didn’t respond, glancing uneasily at each other, at Luke, and at Mara, waiting to see if somebody would say something. Clearly, none of them were convinced yet. Luke saw a few eyes fall on Cilghal, who blinked, shifted, and then cleared her throat.
“Master Skywalker trained the majority of us,” she stated. “He has been a student of the Force for longer than many of us believed in its existence, and I need not remind you of his past accomplishments – the redemption of Darth Vader and the death of the Emperor foremost among them. I trust in his wisdom. If Master Skywalker believes he can kill Darth Xaos, I believe in him.”
“So do I,” Mara said beside him. She had withdrawn slightly, guarding her feelings and preventing them from seeping into the bond. She would be talking with him later, Luke knew – but right now she recognised that he wasn’t going to be talked out of this. Tresina Lobi agreed next, and then Kenth Hamner – and, one by one, the rest of the Council reluctantly agreed.
-----
Mara waited until the rest of the Council had left before she finally faced Luke and raised the issue.
“Luke, this is crazy,” she said bluntly, stepping up to him as he finished shutting down the terminals. “You can’t go after him alone.”
“I know you don’t like it,” Luke said gently, turning to give her his full attention. “But this is the best way. It might be the only way.”
Mara shook her head. “Luke, he’s already beaten you solidly once. You only survived that time because we were there to pull you out. If you go after him by yourself, if you lose, we lose you.”
Luke smiled faintly. “Then I’ll just have to make sure I don’t lose.” He sobered, and took Mara’s hands in his own. “I know how you feel, Mara,” he said, letting his calm confidence flow into her through their bond. “Believe me, if I felt I could do it with you by my side, I would. But I can’t.”
“Because you’re afraid he’ll bring backup? That might be a problem for the others, but you know I can move unnoticed. And don’t try to pull Ben on me.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Luke said innocently, chasing the thoughts from his mind.
“Good,” Mara replied firmly. “And you know that if he loses you he’ll withdraw from the Force so far that even Jacen will never be able to coax him out again.”
“And what if he loses both of us?” Luke pointed out. Mara shook her head. “You know as well as I do that if we fight together they can’t stop us even if he brought half his Sith with him. Luke, I’m coming along.”
Luke hung his head, exhaling long and low. He hadn’t wanted to play this card – but there was no other way that Mara would be swayed. Bringing his head up, he rested his forehead against her own.
“You can’t come along, Mara,” he said softly. He squeezed her hands to cut off her response. “No, hear me out. You’re not going to like this, but it’s the truth. We know how skilled Xaos is at using the Force to manipulate another person’s mind. We know what he did to Tionne. Mara, you were an Emperor’s Hand for most of your youth, and his last command chased you for five years after his death. What else might be in there? What if there’s something buried deep, something Xaos can find and use? He could reactivate Palpatine’s command, he could use buried programming to incapacitate you, he could use it to bring you entirely under his control. If he gets the chance, he’ll make me fight you. I just can’t let that happen.”
Mara’s breathing had slowed, and Luke saw her shoulders slump. There was a slight pressure on his forehead as she leaned into him, and then she drew back, green eyes resigned but supportive.
“I really hate it when you’re right sometimes,” she muttered quietly. “Alright. I’ll stay here. But Luke – you better win. You better come back. Or you and Xaos are both going to wish you had.”
Luke smiled, genuinely this time. “I will, Mara,” he assured her. “Trust me.”
“You know I do,” she sighed. “But after this, I’m done sitting on the sidelines. We’re taking them on, together.”
Luke stepped back a little, then gathered Mara into his arms and kissed her. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he murmured quietly.
-----
The freighter that settled down on a landing pad outside the settlement of Resilience was old, battered, and remarkable only in its unremarkableness. It looked just like any of the freighters that plied the space lanes, in this area of space especially, and as such was automatically filtered out and forgotten by the majority of people who laid eyes on it.
The difference between most freighters and this one was that this one was piloted by a Jedi Master, with a small white-and-blue astromech for company.
Luke had had a fair amount of options available in choosing a vessel for this trip. All he really needed was the ability to get there, and enough room to carry Xaos’ body back with him – a choice he had made on his own, as even the body of a Dark Lord was a valuable possession better kept out of Sith hands. That had, unfortunately, ruled out his X-Wing – although an X-Wing would have drawn the attention of the local Union forces anyway. One of the Order’s new StealthX’s could have slipped in undetected, but it wouldn’t have had enough room for the body; and even if it had, Luke didn’t want to risk the Union getting their hands on its stealth technology.
The other Council members had been surprisingly gracious, offering their own ships. Kyle Katarn had offered his aging Raven’s Claw, Corran Horn had offered the use of his wife’s Pulsar Skate – even Mara, in a quiet show of supreme confidence and support, had offered him the use of the Jade Shadow. But in the end, Luke had settled on the Lady Starstorm, an aging Corellian freighter that had seen little use – and, consequently, carried little risk of being recognised.
It was already mid-noon by the time Luke and Artoo arrived at Resilience. Like most settlements on the planet, the town’s building were thick and strong, designed to withstand the acid rain and other ferocious weather conditions that frequently lashed the planet. Home to only a few thousand people, Luke had made landfall here due to its location only thirty kilometers away from Bast Castle. That, as Mara had pointed out, meant that Union soldiers would visit the town with some frequency, and that meant there would be speeders and swoops available he could use.
Lowering the landing ramp, Luke pulled his hood up and smoothed down the false moustache he was wearing to help disguise his features. A face like his was almost instantly recognizable, and he couldn’t afford to be spotted before he’d made his way inside the castle. Gathering his cloak around him, he strode down the ramp and into the city, Artoo trundling behind him.
By late-noon, he had located and rented – at an exorbitant price – a speeder bike, and returned to the Lady Starstorm. Artoo trundled up to him as he was inspecting it, handing him a hydrospanner that Luke used to tighten a bolt that had a dangerous risk of being sheared off in flight. The astromech twittered something, and Luke smiled.
“No Artoo, I don’t think they built these to carry droids,” he said. The astromech blatted in annoyance, and Luke reached over to pat his dome. “I doubt you could keep up, Artoo,” he said. “The terrain’s going to be pretty rough.” A tweedle, and a series of descending whistles. “I know, Artoo,” Luke said gently. “But Bast Castle is no place for a droid. I need you here, to keep watch on the ship and keep her ready to go. We’re going to need to leave in a hurry.” He studied the bike’s primitive flight computer. “Do you think this thing could support a beckon call?” Artoo beeped. “Me neither.” He stood up, wiping grease off of his hands with a rag and placing it down beside the toolbox.
“She’s as good as I can make her,” he stated. Hitting the ignition, the bike hummed to life, floating up to hover a short distance off the floor. Artoo beeped again. “It does sound safer,” Luke admitted. He glanced down the landing ramp, where he could see the dim rays of the sun slinking their way across the landing pad. “Almost sunset. I better get moving, Artoo. Keep the landing ramp retracted – don’t let anybody in the ship unless it’s me.”
The droid twittered an affirmative, and rolled obediently over to the control panel. Luke swung a leg over the seat, and slowly walked it down the ramp, waiting until it had closed behind him before putting both of his feet up, leaning in against the wind that he was about to feel, and securing his hood as best he was able. Mentally rechecking the map of the area he had memorized, he kicked the speeder into gear.
-----
Joran Blaise was a young, fair-haired human male who had enlisted in the Federal Military in the hope of traveling to distant worlds and liberating their occupants from their oppressors. The reality, after half-a-year of service, had proven markedly different – and disappointing. For the past three months, since being posted to Vjun, his world had consisted of a small security bunker on the outskirts of Vjun’s trench network. Four walls, a low ceiling, a heavy durasteel door, a small personnel lift, and a few terminals showing security footage of the outside world.
He’d come to terms with the immense boredom after two months, and now begrudgingly spent his time reading, watching the occasional holovid, casting the occasional glance at the security monitors, and wondering if they were ever going to assign a second trooper to the bunker to keep him company.
On the upside, he’d read through all of the books on his backlog, and his reading speed had almost doubled.
Flicking his eyes to check the security monitors, he went back to his page, engrossed in an epic novelization about Xaos’ mysterious past. Finishing the page and scrolling over to the next, he reached for his cup of caffa – and promptly knocked it to the ground in front as a loud banging emanated from the bunker door. Scrambling around, he checked the security feeds – and saw, to his horror, a dark-robed figure standing impatiently outside. The words of his superior on his first day sprung into his memory – “If a Dark Disciple needs to get in your bunker, one, give him everything he needs, two, don’t get in his way, and three, if you value your skin, don’t make him wait”.
Scrambling to his feet, Joran hurriedly brushed his armour down, hid his book, set his caffa off to the side, and scooped up his helmet and blaster rifle, all in one smooth motion. Praying that he looked presentable, he hurried to the door, punching in the keycode and turning the heavy handle to open the manual locks.
“You should have been watching, you should have been watching, you should have been watching,” he cursed, then cut himself off as the door began to swing ponderously open. Snapping to parade attention, he stepped off to the side and raised a salute.
“My apologies for the delay, sir!” he said hurriedly, praying that he’d only lost a few days’ pay and nothing worse.
Outside the bunker, Luke could feel his hurriedness and anxiety, and mused that it was just as well he wasn’t an actual Dark Disciple. The setting sun at his back had managed to stave off visual detection from a distance, and the terrain mean that sensors hadn’t been able to pick him up. Whilst he doubted he could have gone any farther into the defensive network, it didn’t really matter now; he’d been able to stroll straight up to this bunker unheeded, and inside he could see an entrance into the underground tunnel network.
Luke took a deep breath. He looked the part of a Dark Disciple – now he just needed to act like one. The memory of Corran Horn telling him to act ‘like a Hutt with eyebrows’ flitted into his mind, and he rearranged his expression as best as he was able.
“Finally,” he snapped, sweeping imperiously into the room, trying to use that same tone Leia used when dealing with people she particularly despised. “Were you intending to make me wait until the next acid storm, or were you hoping I would think nobody was home?” He cast a sneering glance around the bunker, and the belongings scattered around. “But far be it from me to intrude on your home.”
The Union soldier stiffened, unable to formulate a response. Luke let the trooper sweat for a few seconds before breaking the tense silence. “Well? Are you going to stand there and hope I won’t notice you, or are you going to assist me?”
“Right away sir!” the trooper said, stepping forward before realising the door was open and turning to close it. Luke gave a wave of his hand, and the door abruptly slid closed and locked itself, causing the trooper to jump. “If you’re quite finished wasting time?” he prompted. The Union soldier spun around, hurrying to the lift and pressing himself to the side to allow Luke to step on. Palming the console, the platform began to descend.
His face showed no hint of it, but Luke felt supremely guilty for acting this way. But it was the best way to slip in undetected – so long as he didn’t run into any of the other Dark Disciples here, his disguise was effectively foolproof. And, this way, he wouldn’t have to fight anybody or use the Force. He kept his face in the same sneer as the lift reached the tunnel beneath, subtly readjusting his hood just enough to let the light reflect off of his eyes and look a little more menacing.
Good thing Mara’s not here to see this, he thought. He said, “Whenever suits you, trooper.” On cue, the soldier hurried onwards, leading Luke through the labyrinth of tunnels and corridors running through the valleys surrounding Bast Castle.
It was fortunate that he did. He caught hints of enough troops and emplacements to give even an Alliance assault force pause, and even with the Force it could have taken him hours to find his way through the maze. It still took the better part of half an hour for the trooper to lead him through the tunnel network to a regular-sized turbolift, whereupon he saluted and turned to leave.
“Did I dismiss you, trooper?” Luke asked, his voice as dangerously low as he could make it without just sounding quiet. The trooper immediately turned back around, even stiffer than before. “What more can I do for you, sir?” he asked, a new quaver in his voice.
Luke took a moment to gaze at him for effect. “You will lead me to the artifact repository,” he said, using the most general term he could to describe where they stored their holocrons without sounding suspiciously vague. He could sense the trooper’s hesitation, and already knew that he didn’t know where it was. Well, he’d known his luck wouldn’t hold. The general dark aura that hung over the Castle prevented him from using the Force to locate the Sith artifacts he was looking for, meaning he’d have to search manually – or else risk being sensed himself.
“Pathetic,” he sneered to the trooper, turning with a billow of his cloak to stride into the turbolift, the door closing behind him. He took a quick moment to check that there were no cameras in the car, and then released a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, letting his shoulders slump from their aggressively squared position. He picked a floor at random from the wall panel, watched the numbers tick up, and then resumed his previous stance and expression, striding out of the turbolift to find another soldier with which to repeat the process.
This time, he had more luck. The second trooper he found led him straight to an antechamber two floors above. The first door he led Luke to was of standard design – but as Luke stepped through into the rectangular room beyond, he saw immediately that the door to the vault itself was made of materials that could put a MaxSec prison to shame.
Taking up the entire opposite wall and guarded by a security camera and roof-mounted blaster turret, the door was incredibly heavy-looking, constructed of black stone, durasteel and, Luke’s intuition told him, most likely a Cortosis underlay as well. A keypad and fingerprint lock was situated in the very center of the door to allow access.
Secure enough to keep people out – but nowhere near secure enough to contain the dark tendrils he could sense leaking out of the room behind. Luke dismissed the trooper, waited a few moments until he was out of earshot, and then quickly made his way back to the turbolifts, taking the same lift up to the floor above.
Using the mental map he had built of the floor below, Luke made his way to what he hoped was the room above the vault – which, to Luke’s surprise and good fortune, was an empty general storage room. Finding a hidden spot behind a wall of crates, Luke knelt, and ignited his lightsaber. Rather than plunge it straight in, he made a quick, though deep, incision along the surface to examine its makeup. The top layer was regular duracrete, and the layer below was the same black stone used in the door – Hijarna stone? – but there didn’t appear to be a Cortosis layer here.
Grateful, Luke lifted his lightsaber and plunged it, with effort, through the floor and stone. To his surprise, no alarms went off as he did so, and he set to work, slowly but surely carving a plug out of the stone below him. It took him the better part of ten minutes – the stone, which seemed identical to the stone that had made up Grand Admiral Thrawn’s fortress on Nirauan, was incredibly dense and difficult to cut through – but when he was finished and had used the Force to lift the plug out, Luke had a hole big enough to fit through. Closing his lightsaber down and returning it to his belt, Luke dropped down-
-And felt his breath catch in his throat. Sith artifacts filled the dark room’s shelves – holocrons, weapons, scripts, tablets, talismans, carvings, medallions – all of them at least a thousand years old, and all of them steeped in the Dark Side. The room was thick with shadows, with no illumination save for a soft, red glow that shone from a raised row of small, triangular pyramids – the Sith holocrons Luke had come here seeking.
Suddenly unsteady, Luke reached a hand out and grabbed hold of a shelf, using it to support himself. Shutting his eyes against the reservoir of Dark Side energy in front of him, he reached inside of himself for calm, regulating his breathing and drawing his presence as close inside of himself as he could.
Something snapped his eyes open again – a feeling of coalescence. Casting his vision down to the floor, Luke saw a small whirl of dust. Concerned, he took a step backwards away from it, and watched as the whirl grew larger, rapidly reaching man-size. The swirling dust dissipated – and in its place stood a shadow. It had the form of a hooded man, face imperceptible – and even with his presence in the Force drawn tightly inside of him, Luke could sense the apparition’s origin in the Dark Side.
“Who seeks the knowledge of this vault?” the apparition asked, voice velvet-soft. Luke responded by taking a step forward. “I do.” The apparition, he gathered, was likely a guardian of sorts for the room’s artifacts, a broader-scale version of the Gatekeepers contained within the Holocrons. Maybe, just maybe, Luke could bluff it.
He set his voice to the most arrogant and haughty tone he could manage. “I seek permission to use one of the Holocrons here, to attain knowledge my Master denies me.”
“Show me your face, Disciple,” the apparition instructed.
Or maybe not.
Raising his hands to his head, Luke threw back the hood of his cloak. The apparition recoiled, retreating to the far side of the room as if thrown by a gale.
“SKYWALKER!” it hissed, whirling dust clouds spinning into place around it again. The shadows seemed to lessen, and it was gone – and Luke heard alarms sound out from the other side of the vault door.
“I guess that’s it for stealth, then,” he murmured, unclipping his lightsaber from his belt and gratefully taking the opportunity to ditch the false mustache. Realising he likely had seconds at most, he strode quickly over to where the holocrons rested on their pedestals. Taking a quick moment to examine them all, Luke picked one out at random and steeled himself. Reaching out with his free hand, he gingerly lifted it off of its pedestal, slipping into the Force to bolster his mental defenses against any attempted intrusions by the Sith device.
There were none. He could feel a dark presence coiling within the device in his hands, but it kept to itself. Slipping it into a pocket of his cloak, Luke started back towards the hole he had cut in the ceiling – and heard the vault door rumble behind him, sliding open to the sound of shouts and the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber. Calling on the Force again, Luke put on a burst of speed, reaching the hole and leaping up and through before they had even stepped into the room.
-----
At the very top of Bast Castle lies a long, stone-floored room.
Forty years ago, the centerpiece of this room would have been a large, matte-black respiration chamber that allowed Darth Vader to take off his helmet and breathe freely. Now, in its place was a large holoprojector. Around the room were desks covered in scattered writings, shelves containing tomes and scrolls, a small bed, a refresher station, and a kitchen area. The room that had once been a home to Darth Vader was now home to the castellan of Bast Castle, a man named Darth Aristo. Some individuals might take offense to Aristo’s residence in Vader’s former chambers; to them, Aristo would simply explain his former status as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice and send them on their way. The fact that Palpatine had never attempted to kill him as he had Darth Vader’s most notable secret apprentice, Starkiller, was never brought up in response. Nobody would dare.
Presently, the Holoprojector flickered to life. Aristo knelt, and bowed his head as an image of Darth Xaos shimmered into being.
“Lord Aristo,” he greeted pleasantly, motioning him to rise. “What news from Vjun? Have the Dark Disciples made a breakthrough?”
Aristo shook his head, rising. “No, my Lord. I bring news of another kind. Luke Skywalker is here, in this Castle.”
Xaos raised an eyebrow. “And what is it he is doing in Bast Castle?”
“He has accessed our vault and taken one of our Holocrons from it,” Aristo explained. “He is presently in the statue room, in front of the ruins of Darth Vader’s statue, studying it. Not accessing it, my lord, merely studying it.”
Xaos gave a sagely nod, and Aristo had the familiar feeling Xaos knew something that he didn’t. “Shall I engage him, my lord?” he asked. Xaos shook his head. “No, leave Skywalker be. I shall depart immediately and show him hospitality myself. Merely prevent him from leaving, Lord Aristo. I am sure you will find he has every desire to stay.”
The Hologram flickered out.
-----
The door slid open, and Luke stepped through, into a scene from the past.
The massive statue of Darth Vader still lay shattered and broken on the floor from when he had pushed it over, during the duel here between several Jedi and a number of Palpatine’s Dark Side Elites. Rock shards, heavier stone fragments – but for the layer of dust on everything, it looked exactly as it had decades ago.
That struck Luke as odd. Why hadn’t they removed it? His father had been redeemed, and cast down the Emperor – and the teachings he represented were, he understood, considered outmoded by the current Sith order. He would have thought the Union would have disposed of the statue’s remains.
An answer occurred to him a few moments later. The castle’s castellan, their intelligence indicated, claimed to have been trained by Darth Vader as a secret apprentice. Perhaps the preserved state of the room was the result of an agreement: the castellan would have wanted it restored, and the Dark Lord would have wanted it removed. Keeping it like this was an effective middle ground.
Cloak stirring up dust as he moved, Luke threaded his way through the ruins of the massive statue and seated himself cross-legged in front of the pedestal. From within his robe, he drew the Sith Holocron out, studying it. Black smoke, invisible to the naked eye, coiled within it, twisting and writhing like an angry serpent. This, Luke knew, was an artifact of evil. The Order had once had several locked away in its collection – most had been lost during the Yuuzhan Vong War, but they still had a few, sealed away deep in the black vaults beneath the Temple.
It was almost a crime to destroy knowledge, Luke thought. But knowledge such as what was contained in these devices only ever seemed to bring pain and destruction.
Turning it idly in his hands, Luke submerged himself in the Force, expanding his senses outwards. In the corridors and hallways around him, he felt nervous life – a few presences in the Force suggesting the Union’s Dark Disciples, but for the most part, he simply felt sentient life. Soldiers, and they had the room surrounded. But they were keeping their distance for now.
“Of course they’re keeping their distance,” Luke murmured to himself. “Xaos will want to kill me himself.”
Returning the Holocron to his robe, Luke folded his hands in his lap, let his head bow, and slowed his breathing. There was nothing he could do, except await the arrival of the Dark Lord.
-----
The massive durasteel doors of the landing bay slid closed, sealing off the dimming sky outside. Dispatched from the Patrol Craft Union-1 in orbit above, the shuttle glided to a stop in the center of the hangar and slowly settled down onto its landing gear, venting steam.
Waiting by the hangar doors, Aristo drew himself up and strode forward to meet the shuttle, and the Dark Lord that was its passenger. Accompanied by an honour guard, he reached the shuttle as the landing ramp began to lower, and automatically genuflected at the presence of a dark figure emerging from the shuttle’s hatchway.
Darth Xaos inhaled as he descended into the slightly less artificial air of Bast Castle. A mild sensation passed over his scalp as his head passed from the shuttles’ atmosphere to Bast’s. The Sith Lord was dressed for battle; clad in his light combat jumpsuit and War Rhino leather coat, both of which had been alchemically enhanced as Dark Armor. At his left side swung his lightsaber and Sith Sword.
He had come alone. It didn’t matter that this was an obvious trap; the bait was just too good to pass up. Besides which, sometimes the best way to deal with a trap is to walk right in to it. Precautions had been made for all eventualities involving a capture scenario and, as for the risk of death? Only the most potent, irrationality-inducing of emotions could lead a person to fear (or hope for) such an outcome.
As Aristo and his entourage bowed before him, Xaos barely took notice.
“Take me to him,” Xaos commanded simply, twinges of anticipation apparent in his voice.
“As you command, my Lord,” Aristo said, rising immediately to his feet. The honour guard spread out in front of them, forming two straight lines between which the two Sith Lords strode. Aristo lead by a foot, waving doors open as they neared them. At his command, the guard remained behind, to stand watch over the Consul’s shuttle. Quiet, but with a simmering feeling of anticipation building in his chest, Aristo lead Xaos to the statue chamber.
-----
Luke felt a twinge in the Force, and opened his eyes, returning to the world from his meditative trance. Inhaling softly, he rose to his feet, drawing his cloak around him. Xaos was almost here – in fact, he was a scant few dozen metres away, approaching the doors to the room. Another, weaker, presence was with him; for a second, Luke grew concerned that the Dark Lord intended to face him with back-up after all, and that perhaps he should have let Mara come along...but his concerns were allayed when the second presence stopped a few metres away from the door.
Luke gathered his cloak around him, lightly brushing the Holocron hidden within its folds to ensure it was still hidden. Ready, calm, and confident, he stood in the center of the room and turned to face the doors.
Xaos waved Aristo away as he approached the doors. He had been able to feel Luke Skywalker since before the shuttle had even landed, but now the Jedi Grandmaster’s presence shone clearly even through the closed portal. Reaching up with both hands, Xaos pushed the doors open with great enthusiasm. Soon a long awaited vengeance would be his.
Marching down the brief aisle defined by the two pillars in front of him, Darth Xaos moved with the posture of a man attending a celebration in his own honor.
“Your sense of humor is improving, young Master Skywalker,” Xaos commented as he began to walk in a circular perimeter around his opposite number, “That the last leader of the Jedi shall lie dead next to the ruined statue of the last Baneite Lord? Ah, what more fitting expression of the Grand Design could there be?”
Luke matched Xaos’ circle, keeping the same distance between them as he spoke.
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Consul,” he said mildly, stepping over a piece of rubble from the statue of Darth Vader. “Even if I die here, the Jedi will live on – and I didn’t come here to die.” He studied Xaos, his weapons, his stance, his presence in the Force, noting how he had come prepared for battle, in armour rather than the dark robes he had worn the first time they had dueled.
“Oh, of course, it doesn’t all end here, today,” Xaos mused, “But you know how reductive historians can be. They’ll look back on this and comment that it was when the Dark Lord slew the founder of the New Jedi Order. To them that will mark the end of the Jedi. But I know that it will take years, decades perhaps, of slowly hunting down your comrades in whatever foul-smelling holes they seek refuge before that happy event truly comes to pass. I expect it to be an amusing avocation after the excitement of utterly crushing your Alliance wanes.”
“Really?” Luke smiled. “Just as Palpatine ended the Jedi? Just as the Sith Triumvirate ended the Jedi? You could slay me here with ease. You could spend a thousand years hunting and destroying, Consul. You could erase all mention of the Jedi from history and destroy artifact even tangentially related to us – and the Jedi would still endure.” He spread his arms. “Of course, all of that requires me to die here.”
“Oh, the Sith Triumvirate,” Xaos crooned in a mock-impressed tone, “So it seems that the Jedi don’t keep themselves as virginally ignorant of Sith history as they like to posture. You will die here today, Skywalker. And the Jedi will be ground into dust. This shall come to pass for it is the Force’s desire.”
Removing his lightsaber from his belt, Xaos activated the crimson blade and assumed the opening stance of Makashi accompanied by the traditional salute. He briefly imagined plunging the weapon into his foe until the letters ‘CIS’ on the hilt pressed against the son of Anakin Skywalker’s chest.
“Come then, Jedi, draw your blade.”
Luke remained where he was, and withdrew his arms into his cloak. With one hand, he patted the Holocron’s pocket to make sure it was fastened closed; with the other, he unclipped his lightsaber, and held it ready for use.
“Is it?” he inquired, still in that same mild tone. “The Force is a mystery to even the strongest of us, and the Dark Side clouds our ability to perceive its will. The more you harness its power, the less you can hear its voice.” An old comparison of Mara’s flitted through his mind – the louder the factory, the harder it is to hear the birds in the rafters.
He took a single step forward, and extended his free hand.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Xaos,” he said gently. “Step out of the Dark. You can be a powerful force for good in this galaxy; all you have to do is listen, and hear, rather than choose what you think the Force is saying. The Order will welcome you, all of you, with open arms.”
“Even now you cannot see, can you?” Xaos responded, not moving from his stance, “I could be a powerful force for good? I am the most powerful force for good! I am the Dark Lord of the Sith, it is I whom has been predestined to bring the rot of the Jedi to an end. It is from your fountainhead that the ills of the Galaxy flow, only Jedi hypocrisy and delusion preserves you from being unable to avoid this truth. And, yes, we must do battle. Only in the furnace of violent confrontation can impurities be smelted from the Galaxy. I do not wish to end this by simply cutting you down but do not think that I will hesitate to do so because you choose cowardice and playing the martyr over the crucible of a duel.”
Luke smiled sadly. “The Dark Side has blinded you after all,” he said, and withdrew his hand.
“Am I speaking Mandalorian?” Xaos demanded, unleashing a burst of snarling lightning with his off-hand. “Ignite your lightsaber!”
With a snap-hiss, Luke’s green blade swept out, catching the lightning along its length. Taking a two-handed grip, Luke held the lightning at bay, and used the lightsaber as a conduit to absorb the killing blue bolts harmlessly into his body for dissipation. Lowering the blade, he held it angled across his chest in a defensive posture, left hand resting on the pommel, blade angled slightly forwards, waiting.
In a burst of Force Speed, Xaos closed the gap. Extending his lightsaber, he feinted a thrust at Luke’s shoulder and slipped his blade under the Jedi’s reflexive block to slash at his right arm. A quick step back bought Luke time enough to shift his guard and deflect the blow – and, twisting his wrists, he caught the tip of Xaos’ weapon before he could withdraw it and levered it down towards the ground.
Instead of pressing the attack, he took a long step back again.
“The Jedi have, and always will, serve the Force,” Luke said resolutely. Freeing his lightsaber, Xaos pursued, following with a crisp thrust that Luke neatly slipped and a second thrust that he brought his saber across to deflect again. “We trust in its guidance, and we’re mindful of the dark – because we know full well how easily the Dark Side can twist us into believing our actions are just.”
He threw out two quick, low-power strikes at Xaos’ saber arm and leg, easily blocked but geared to open a gap in his defences, and followed with a third, two-handed strike at his now-exposed off-arm – but the Dark Lord dodged it easily, stepping smartly behind Luke. Too late, Luke realised the thrusts and blocks had been a ploy of Xaos, teasing him into overextending himself.
Before the Jedi could respond, Xaos raised his hand and used a powerful Force Push to throw Luke clear off of his feet, sending him tumbling through the air towards the nearest pillar. True, the Dark Lord knew he could have tried to simply stab his foe’s back, but that wouldn’t have left time for a reply. And if there was one thing the Dark Lord had fantasized about more often than killing Luke Skywalker, it was telling Luke Skywalker off.
“The Galaxy has suffered through the Jedi’s ‘service’ for far long enough,” Xaos commented as he telekinetically hurled a medium sized hunk of Vader’s statue at the Jedi Master. With a weak Force Push of his own, Luke altered his trajectory just enough to tumble past the pillar and roll to his feet just short of the wall. Tugging at his cloak, he untangled his feet – and leaped out of the way of the chunk of statue, which left an impressive dent where it smashed against the wall.
“Look upon the ends your deeds have wrought. Decades spent struggling, the majority of a human’s brief lifespan, and what have you accomplished? The Empire you sought to tumble still lingers while the bright hope of your New Republic has dimmed into the ennui of the GA’s decadence.”
Getting back to his feet once more, Luke reactivated his lightsaber and held it in a neutral guard, alert for any follow-up attacks. None came.
“I fought against the corrupted bloat of the Old Republic during the Clone Wars,” the Dark Lord continued. “I have seen the ilk of your Galactic Alliance before. Yet, in a few years’ time, I have transformed the poor, oppressed and forgotten peoples of the Galaxy into a movement that every day inches a knife closer and closer to the neck of the sick beast that you have spawned. I have brought hope to the hopeless, dignity to the humble, food to the starving, power to powerless, vengeance to the wronged. What have you done except repeat the errors of the past?”
“You lie to people, and give them a scapegoat,” Luke answered. “Instead of seeking to protect them and bring peace to their lives, you point them at the source of their misfortune, and tell them to take revenge. Everything you have done stands on the back of a thousand years of Sith machinations – a thousand years in which the Jedi safeguarded the Republic.”
His lightsaber still guarding him, he moved forward again, stopping in front of the pillar and using it to protect his back from any surprise attacks or chunks of statue. Bespin had been a powerful lesson to the young Jedi.
“The Jedi are not perfect,” he admitted readily. “We make mistakes. Sometimes, those mistakes create the very enemies we have to later fight against. But we don’t cut down our opponents just because they don’t agree with us. We serve and respect all life – we don’t take it just because it is an obstruction on the road to peace. We fight for that peace, but not for any cost.”
He gave another small smile.
“If we repeat the mistakes of the past, we make them for the same reason our predecessors did. To preserve life. To safeguard civilization. To serve the will of the Force. We will bear those mistakes, and live with them, as our predecessors did, so that we may stand between the people of the galaxy and those who would do them harm. Each time, and every time.”
“Tell the Thuleian family that the food on their table is a product of evil,” Xaos seethed. “Tell the Quarren child who will not have to grow up being told by his teachers how in need his people are of the Mon Cal yoke that his dignity is a lie. Come to Lamus, tell its citizens that their sacred fountain, the source of their home’s life, which was destroyed by Jedi and restored by Sith, should have remained still. Inspect the Union hyperlanes which, before my coming, were preyed upon ceaselessly by pirates but now are safer than any under Jedi protection. Tell the slaves I have emancipated that they should have waited patiently in their chains for Jedi liberation.”
“Your Order may have defended the Old Republic’s leaders, but it did no such thing for that nation’s citizens. Where were the Jedi when Pius Dea crusades killed entire populations? Why did they stand idle and let others fight the Madalorian Wars for them? No, you care nothing for preserving life. You have a mind only for maintaining the cleanliness of your hands; except when it comes to preserving your puppets’ hold on the Galaxy. You speak of the errors of past Jedi as though they were occasional aberrations when, in fact, they constitute the major history of your brethren.”
“Ah, but what a location to discuss history! It contains so much of yours. And merely speaking of history begins to bore me.” Luke doubted that very much. “With your leave, I would like to experience a bit of it.”
Raising his head, Xaos began to bob his neck slightly as he spoke the necromantic evocation in a whisper. His eyelids fluttered as the dark power of Vjun coursed through his veins. Bast Castle had been the site of a significant portion of Xaos’ most successful experiments in Sith Magic – not the least of which was the binding of the wraith he now summoned.
In response to Xaos’ call, a great miasma of greasy smoke arose from the floor and pooled into a bulbous concentration in the air. As the tail fed the tumor more vigorously with Dark Side energy, a pair of twisted arms emerged from the mass. The hands met, forming a haphazard spectral imitation of a lightsaber. In the blade’s pale glow a face pressed its way out of the smoke. Though twisted by years spent in Chaos, Luke recognized the countenance of Sedriss.
Sedriss never did know when to give up, Luke thought, appreciating the irony despite the situation.
With a wail, the ghostly attack dog flew at Luke. Perturbed but nonetheless on his guard, Luke leaped up and back, away from its wild flailing. His feet found purchase on the pillar, and he launched himself off once more, coming down to cleave the specter into twin waves of rolling black smoke – before he launched himself into a desperate tumble, out of the way of a downward slash from Xaos that would have split him in two but instead merely scorched a long line through his cloak.
Xaos pressed his advantage, pursuing Luke to hammer at him with a follow-up blow. The Jedi Master rolled onto his knees and scythed his blade up just in time, catching the Dark Lord’s lightsaber far too close to his face for comfort. Harried, Luke shoved back hard, riding his lightsaber up Xaos’ until he had enough of an opening to get a foot under himself and launch into a sideways roll out from under Xaos.
Not missing a beat, Xaos kept right on him, cutting at Luke’s legs as he leaped to his feet. His defence wide open and his lightsaber too far away to intercept, Luke leaped backwards, clearing Xaos’ lightsaber by scant inches – and then leaped high as Xaos thrust decisively at his torso, backflipping to land on the upper level walkway.
“And in return, you speak to those who don’t already herald you as their saviour,” Luke responded. His tone was reproachful, but he was breathing hard; his cloak was covered in dust, and he slowly traversed the upper walkway as he spoke, buying time to re-center himself.
“Tell the Mon Calamari how they were forcibly thrown from their homes by a species they had finally managed to achieve co-existence with, how those who remained were butchered as the rest were scattered across the galaxy. Tell a young man on Lamus, once mortally wounded by a gundark, that he should have died so that his people might live. Tell the people once preyed on by pirates that they should be grateful you simply took the pirates under your command and gave them new targets, rather than letting them roam free. But…” Once more, he gave a small smile. “You have my thanks for liberating the slaves of the Outer Rim.”
His smile vanished, and he shook his head. “But for all your claims, the Union has solved few problems. You’ve only fooled your people into believing they have.” He lowered his lightsaber a little. “But it’s still not too late to change that. You can fix those issues. You can rebuild the Outer Rim. You can change the galaxy, truly change it, for the better. Step out of the Dark, Xaos. You can bring the Outer Rim back into the light.”
For a moment Xaos’ face reflexively displayed a snarl as he nearly lobbed another piece of heated rhetoric. But, instead, he held his tongue and allowed his expression to smooth as he rose to a full standing position with blade pointed somewhat casually off-center. His voice when he spoke was grandiose, almost oratory.
“And why are you so eager to recruit me?” he questioned rhetorically. “Do you hope that I can reverse your ever multiplying string of failures? If you follow the righteous path then why have all your dreams come to naught? You dedicated your youth to undoing Palpatine's empire and raising up a New Republic in its place,”
Xaos' voice began to swell mockingly as he forged deeper into his reply.
“A republic reborn free of the old corruption that had been the fertile soil for Imperialism. But it is not this dream that you noble Heroes of Yavin have brought into being. You have managed to establish, with shocking efficacy, an encapsulation of millennia of gradual Old Republic decline lasting a mere few decades. Already your legislature has become so hopeless that the citizenry have joyously welcomed Palpatine's less impressive imitator. And, as the Galactic Alliance finishes its production of 'A Brief History of Doomed Enterprises', my Union will expand ceaselessly to fill the newly freed space. You have seen the loyalty and passionate devotion of those sworn to the Unionist cause. It is only your attachment to the shattered remains of hope long grown weary and old that blinds you to the truth. Can you not see the will of the Force playing out before your very eyes? We Sith have been chosen to lead the inhabitants of this Galaxy into a new epoch. The Jedi are but the decaying remains of an order that lost its legitimacy millennia ago. The sands in the hourglass have finally run out for your Order. You do yourself no service by struggling against the inevitable. Simply accept the imminent extinction of your ways and despair.”
“Because you can do good,” Luke replied simply. He stopped where he was, now on the other side of the room. “Perhaps the Alliance will simply become the Empire we fought so hard to free ourselves from. Perhaps the Chief of State will become the Emperor’s position in all but name. But if the fall of the Alliance is the Force’s will – why do you always find the Jedi standing in your way? Why are the Jedi still strong enough to stand against you? How could we rebuild ourselves so quickly after so many losses in the Yuuzhan Vong War?” He shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “What the Alliance has become, is not what it is. For thirty years, the new government has stood. If you want to take the last three of its years as a sign that the whole of it has been a failure, then you should direct your fiery rhetoric towards the historians instead of the downtrodden, and convince them that Palpatine invalidated the entirety of the Golden Age of the Republic.”
He dropped his lightsaber into a low, one-handed guard, and stepped up to the edge of the walkway, ready.
“I – every Jedi, would sooner consign ourselves to oblivion than simply give up on the galaxy when it strays. We are not its overlords – we are its guardians, its advisors. We’ll speak to the people, show them the error of their ways, and help them return to the right path. We will not force them there. And if they start giving up their freedoms, we’ll show them how to take them back. For all the talk of the Union’s freedom, for all its claims that the Alliance is giving its up in the name of security – what you call ‘freedom’ is just the freedom to be dominated and controlled by the Sith.”
“It was never the Jedi who stood in our way,” Xaos responded coldly, “Each defeat was conditioned by betrayal from within. I have eliminated that pesky variable and the New Sith Brotherhood stands united behind a singular purpose. The seeds of destruction were sown long before these past three years. You, Skywalker, have been bound in Jedi lies for so long that you do not understand freedom. True freedom lies in the fulfillment of one's Force-given nature. Your alliances, your republics can never offer this. You seek to unite the species by sedating them with a universal culture of lusterless, rationalistic pacifism. And so, the white-hot passions of the peoples become suppressed and manifest in the internal stresses that will tear the Alliance to ribbons. Yes, we Sith shall rule the Galaxy. It is a part of our nature as the Force's chosen. Yes, all others will bow before us. But in their submission they will lose far less than they do to the doomed imitation of Jedi folly that is the Galactic Alliance.”
In response, Luke gave a wry smile.
“Submission and freedom could not be more separate, Xaos,” he countered. “Listen to yourself. Your ‘white-hot passions’ will just lead to subjugations, the eradications of people’s freedoms and rights. A warlike, naturally aggressive race conquers their peaceful neighbor. They argue that they are fulfilling their Force-given nature, that they are simply following their passions. What does the Union do when the conquered come to them for help? Their nature is one of peace; their passions are for trading and craftsmanship, not war. They cannot follow these under the thumb of their conquerors. What does the Union do? Do you assist them, and order the aggressors to remove themselves, forbidding them from engaging in their passions? Or do you allow the race to be conquered, and have theirs cast aside?” He shook his head. “The Alliance, the Jedi – we don’t suppress people’s passions. We don’t forbid people from following them. Instead, we work to ensure that those passions don’t come at a cost to other people.”
“There is a cost to everything, Skywalker,” Xaos sneered. “And one rarely pays it alone or with only those who have agreed to pay. Every form of biological being persists by devouring other life. You understand little of the very thing you claim to protect. Life feeds on life. And note well that this applies to much more than seeking sustenance. All this is a part of the natural order; as is hierarchy. A strong will with a firm hand on the reins of power is essential to social cohesion. Not only essential but desired by the general populace. This is why the forms of governance you Jedi wish to cultivate inevitably are overtaken; the people yearn for the concentration of power into a single set of hands. We Sith are the answer to the unspoken prayers of this galaxy's population.”
“And,” Xaos added, “In response to your hypothetical situation – which are always much easier than citing actual examples, aren't they? – each species would be dealt with as suits the Grand Design. If both could be integrated into the Union then it would be done. If one needed to fall then that would be done. The Force takes the long view; a few destroyed cultures matter little compared to the benefit future generations will derive from millennia of Sith rule. We do not suffer from the cowardice-induced Jedi delusion of endless peaceful stasis. A Sith knows that vitality and purpose come from constant expansion of power. So too shall the society we create be ceaseless in its conquests. The unification of this galaxy will be but mere prelude to the fulfillment of Sith destiny. There are countless worlds spinning in the universal void and even materiality itself represents but one dimension to be conquered.”
The Dark Lord returned to a battle ready stance. The Jedi Master facing him leaped down from his vantage point, adopting a high guard.
“For too long have the Jedi held back change in a mad quest for a lie. I will cut out this cancer with my own blade.”
“You’ll try,” Luke replied simply.
There was a dark surge in the Force as Xaos took the briefest of moments to focus. Calling on his prodigious talents, he entered simultaneously into a state Force Rage and Battlemind. The deluge of twisted anger, resentment, hate and malevolence was forced into narrow channels by the discipline of Battlemind.
In response, Luke Skywalker called on the Force. Calm and centered, the Jedi Master surrendered himself, and let the Force flow through him. His speed increased, and his reflexes sharpened; he felt strength flow into his limbs, his footing became sure and precise, and a deep, profound calm permeated through his entire being.
Surging forward with that same Force-enhanced speed, Xaos beat at Luke’s blade with furious might. For a change, Luke ran to met him head on, dropping from his high guard into a slash and locking lightsabers with the Dark Lord in a flash of green and red sparks.
But in spite of the utterly berserk state he had summoned within himself, Xaos’ Makashi displayed perfect precision. He broke the saber lock in moments with a swift rotation of his wrist, disengaging the blades and directing a lightning-fast Cho Mai at the Jedi Master’s wrist.
Caught off-guard by Xaos’ raw strength, Luke didn’t fight it; instead he stepped back at Xaos’ disengagement, gaining enough room to nimbly slip the Cho Mai and protect his wrist. Three more heavy blows came at the Jedi Master, and Luke fell back parrying, giving ground but meeting power with power and soundly redirecting every blow.
Xaos’ fury was unrelenting. Each block from Luke served only as invitation for swifter, more vicious attack, while the attempt by the Jedi to disengage and fall back was met with another Force-enhanced charge. Faced with Xaos’ assault, Luke could only continue to retreat; circling so he didn’t find his back pressed to a wall, Luke’s lightsaber was a blur of impenetrable green around his body. Even as Xaos attempted to close in, Luke managed to keep his distance; what he couldn’t parry, he dodged, and what he couldn’t dodge, he stepped quickly back out of the way of.
Then they reached the rubble on the floor, most of it knee high and uneven, and Luke knew that he couldn’t retreat any further. Recognising this fact as well, Xaos pressed the attack. Instead of risking a retreat over the rubble – and likely losing his legs in the process – Luke stood his ground.
Instead of trying to dodge away, the Jedi Master triangle-stepped. Bringing his front foot in line with his back, he brought his lightsaber down from a high guard to parry a Cho Mok aimed at his arm with a twist of his wrists. Bringing his back foot forward and shifting his body off of his center line, he batted away a Sai Tok at his waist with a one-handed drop parry.
He met the Sai Cha that would have decapitated him head on, whipping his lightsaber around fast enough to catch the tip of Xaos’ lightsaber on the base of Luke’s own. Returning to a two-handed grip, Luke levered Xaos’ lightsaber clear and followed up immediately with a fast, one-handed slash at Xaos’ right shoulder.
Smoothly, Xaos brought his lightsaber back on line and parried the slash, riposting with a thrust at Luke’s arm – but the Jedi Master, his plan having succeeded, had already flipped back, clearing the rubble and buying himself a precious few moments. Breathing hard, he re-centered himself, adopting a neutral center-guard.
The Dark Lord, however, was long past the point of indulging the cat-and-mouse game of engaging and disengaging that the pair had been involved up until moments ago. Reaching out his off-hand hand, Xaos inflicted a bone-crushing Force Grip on his opponent’s organic wrist. Feeling the pressure on his wrist rapidly intensify, and seeing a sudden, sickening image of his wrist snapping in his mind’s eye, Luke summoned the Force and redirected its flow, first resisting, then canceling the vice that had clamped down on his wrist.
But in Luke’s momentary distraction, the Dark Lord had acted; using the Grip as a launching point, Xaos seized Luke’s entire arm with a Force Pull that caught the Jedi Master unawares and yanked him through the air towards Xaos. Simultaneously, Xaos charged, lunged, and thrust, his lightsaber poised to impale Luke.
Grateful that only his off-hand was telekinetically held fast, Luke brought his lightsaber fanning across his body in a one-handed parry that knocked Xaos’ point clear – and into the Jedi’s cloak, cutting its lower half into ribbons. Equally grateful that the pocket holding the holocron was higher up, Luke lashed out with a snap-kick that connected solidly with Xaos’ chest.
They hit the ground at the same time, but Xaos landed on his feet as Luke was still rolling to his. Snarling loudly at the kick to his abdomen, Xaos poured that frustration into a blunt application of Force Push that knocked Luke sharply off balance as the latter got to his feet. A quick change of gestures unleashed a flood of Force Lightning, and Luke had just enough time to plant his feet and catch the crackling blue lightning on his lightsaber, redirecting it to scorch the ground in front of him.
With waves of electricity preceding him, Xaos once again charged to close the gap, cutting off his lightning to aim a slash at a wide-open gap in Luke’s defences and remove his right leg. Once more, Luke leaped to the side, losing the rest of his cloak’s lower half and deciding that was preferable to losing the lower half of his torso.
The Jedi stepped back in again immediately, angling his lightsaber forward as he attempted to press the attack before Xaos could regain his balance. Seeing his advance, Xaos quickly made another Grip-Pull, this time centered on one of his foe’s ankles in a trip attempt – but this time, Luke was ready. The moment Xaos extended his arm, Luke summoned the Force again, protecting his ankle as he felt a vice tighten around it – but letting the Pull yank him forward.
He had barely traveled an inch before he redirected the Force and canceled out the Pull on his leg, snapping that foot down to anchor it solidly against the ground and stop him short of Xaos’ impaling thrust. Catching the Dark Lord by surprise, Luke once more caught the tip of Xaos’ lightsaber on the base of his own, giving him enough leverage to force Xaos’ blade to the side, reach his off-hand inside his cloak, and step in.
There was a glint of silver from Luke’s hand, and suddenly there was red in the air. Recognising the pain in his arm, Xaos retreated backwards to inspect the wound. A thin line had been slashed in his saber arm – nothing that the Force couldn’t prevent from hindering him. Luke stood still, now metres away, and lowered the bloody knife in his hand.
In his fury, Xaos barely bothered to pay the product of what he thought was a failed sneak attack any mind. Transmuting his boiling rage into cold contempt, the Dark Lord focused his feelings into a cryomantic spell – and began clogging the joint motors of Luke’s mechanical hand with hard and rapidly spreading ice.
Responding before he lost the use of his hand entirely, Luke switched the knife to his mechanical hand and flung his free hand out. In a moment, an immense pressure had built up on Xaos chest – and the next, it flung him backwards. The Dark Lord recovered swiftly, dissipating the pressure and landing easily – but when he returned his attention to Luke, he saw that the man hadn’t even attempted to pursue.
From within the folds of his cloak, Luke had withdrawn the holocron he had stolen earlier, and now held it in his free hand.
There was no hint of victory in his eyes, or satisfaction. Only a sense of regret and pity, for the man he was about to doom to Hell.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t sway you out of this,” he said quietly, and raised the knife. Flipping it around to a backhanded grip, he drove the blood-stained weapon deep into the delicate inner workings of the Sith artifact, and held it away from his body.
The words he had memorized came easily, even without the Force to help his recollection.
“Qorit. Mrias. Mirtis. Xela. Kraujas. Zudikas. Zudyti.” He didn’t know the words, or what they meant. But he could feel a sense of power welling up as he spoke them, and pressed on. Xaos felt his a vice seize his leg as he darted forward to take advantage of the situation, and now it was the Dark Lord’s turn to trip and catch himself. “Ari niant Chaos, girdeti nun. Nu doz’van malotre sis aukotis, nors tym kash nex z’kaina iv tu’iea akiva. Brauk jiso vele valyti, ir mietas jiso vele vi tu’iea savas. Ari niant Chaos, niss sis grotthu kia tu’iea valda!”
Luke’s lightsaber flared into life, and he tossed the holocron into the air. It arced once, a single, swift strike – and the holocron fell in two pieces to the floor.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then dark, coiling smoke, tinged with red lightning, began to hiss from the halves of the holocron. Luke felt the dark power growing, a raw, primal bloodlust, hungry and eager to consume – and he had no plans to let it consume him.
The Jedi Master reached into the Force, and armoured himself in the Light Side. Exerting himself, he used the Force to hold fast the power forming before him and form an impassable wall between it and himself, the closest target.
Reaching into the smoke, Luke pushed his way past the rapidly expanding hunger, towards the raw malevolence that pulsed at the heart of that dark power. There he found the imperative driving it, the almost sentient-will seeking its prey – and pointed it towards Xaos, implanting a single, easy-to-understand thought in its being:
How about him?
Just as Xaos began the incantations for a necromantic spell of control, the newly freed specter plunged into him. There was a wave of strange, dark energy, coiling black smoke wrapped around his body, and then...nothing happened. Taking a moment for a cursory examination of himself through the Force, Xaos could find nothing altered or amiss.
“I do hope you didn't pay too much for that, Skywalker! Where did you acquire it, a Nar Shaada street corner?” A hearty laugh erupted from the Sith Lord before he continued on to speak in an exaggerated Rodian accent, “Excuze me meeiester, I have ze best dealz for yew. Gen-ooo-ine Sith arty-fax!”
With his foe's attention occupied, Xaos sprung suddenly into a charge, unleashing another series of thrusts and slashes as he neared the Jedi Master.
Luke kept his face blank as his mind whirled. Had it simply been a fake? No, what he’d felt when he touched the phantasm was real. But nothing had happened to Xaos – the man was still unharmed, and his strength in the Force was exactly the same as before. But then what?
The memory clicked into place, and Luke’s mind settled. Of course – they hadn’t known for sure what would happen. Xaos’ immediate death was just the best-case scenario; Luke had been fully accepting of the possibility that there would be no immediate affects, and it would simply prevent Xaos’ body-switching abilities when he died. But still – Luke should be able to feel something, shouldn’t he?
Another second, and another thought – and Luke had his answers. It didn’t matter whether or not he could feel anything – whether or not it had worked, the result was the same. If it hadn’t, taking care of Xaos here would buy the Alliance time, and maybe prompt one of the other Sith to depose him. And if it had worked, Xaos would need to be killed for it to take effect.
Either way, Luke’s purpose was clear.
As much as wanted to take another route, as much as he’d hoped to talk the man out of his course…it was time for Xaos to die.
His lightsaber snap-hissed back to life, and Luke stood calm as Xaos charged forward. At the last moment, he slid out of the way of the first thrust, blocked the follow-up slash, and then parried the arcing cut Xaos masterfully transitioned into. He dodged again, and met the next strike with power, battering it out of the way. Xaos recovered instantly, bringing his weapon up to defend – but instead of attacking, Luke spin, whipping his cloak up. His free hand went to the clasp, unlatching it and sending the garment rippling towards Xaos. Luke followed it, a quartet of heavy slashes from his lightsaber following him.
Having a fair bit of experience in the use of cloaks and coats in combat, Xaos reacted quickly. A light application of Force Push redirected the garment back at its user while a short Force Leap moved Xaos to the side of the attacks Luke was using the cloak to cover. Instead of the Dark Lord, Luke cut his cloak to pieces with his first two strikes – and a whisper of warning redirected his third as the Dark Lord sprung adroitly into action, deflecting a thrust that would have skewered his left flank. Spinning, Luke aimed another quick, one-handed slash at Xaos that forced him back out of distance and gave Luke enough time to take a long step back and resume his guard.
The Dark Lord was filled with boiling frustration as his foe once again managed to disengage and enter a guard. His first instinct was to charge in once more but a strand of cold calculation held back that fury like an akk-hound on a leash. Taking several steps backward, Xaos deactivated and holstered his lightsaber. Bringing his hands up, the Sith Lord concentrated his rage into thick bands of Dark Side energy. As the tips of the thumbs met and the other eight fingers stretched out from the palm to point at Luke, the energy was unleashed in a relentless wave of Force Blasts.
Expecting Force Lightning, Luke staggered back as the first wave of dark Force energy slammed into him. The second bowed his hands inward, forcing his lightsaber dangerously close to his face. Instinctively, Luke let go of the weapon and ducked out of the way, hearing it clatter to the ground far behind him, deactivated. A third blast slammed into him like a starliner, hurling him backwards off of his feet.
Sucking in a deep breath, Luke drew his focus back to himself, and called on the Force. His clumsy flight transitioned into a flip, and he slid a stop on his hands and knees instead of in a crashing tumble. Righting himself immediately, Luke raised both of his hands, deflecting the follow-up blasts harmlessly around him. Three more came at him, splitting down the middle and dissipating to either side of him, before Xaos realised what Luke was doing and ceased the attack.
The Dark Lord seethed and gritted his teeth at the sight of his hated enemy once again surviving a furious assault with only a modicum of damage taken. Luke's strategy of repeated disengagement and defense reminded the Sith uncomfortably of a duel he had fought against Obi-Wan Kenobi during the Clone Wars...a duel Xaos had lost. Ceasing his volley of projectiles, Xaos reinforced the Dark Side energy he had summoned and spread it fully around his body, thus employing Force Hatred.
Sheathed in armor of pure agony, Xaos surged forward with renewed rage and sped to engage in a yet another assault. Conjuring a protective shield of Force energy around his body, Luke snapped his hand out, bringing his lightsaber spinning back into hand just in time to activate and intercept the first of Xaos’ savage cuts.
Immediately, he fell back, bringing his weapon up only to defend, ducking, dodging and parrying the multitude of lightning-fast attacks raining down on him.
Letting his spatial awareness handle his footwork, Luke concentrated on avoiding injury – if even a single cut found its mark, the fight was over. Worse, the raw hatred pouring off of Xaos’ body was beginning to interfere with his concentration, and his connection to the Force. Luke could feel it pressing against his Force shielding, like a constant tide of water – if it slipped through, it would wash over and submerge him, and then he was done. But as things were now, he was only defending until that inevitably happened.
I need to take a risk, Luke realised. Han had always been the gambler of the family – Luke, his brother-in-law’s experience, would just have to trust in his instincts.
Luke fell back another step, parried another blow – and then feinted, hasty and panicky. The feint gave way to another, and then a third, his lightsaber speedily changing direction three times until Luke felt a small gap open in his defences. Xaos noticed it too – his red blade met Luke’s, deftly flicking it out of the way before spearing in towards his ribs-
And Luke practically threw himself to the side, twisting out of the way of the weapon with less than an inch to spare. Shifting his weight onto one foot, Luke snapped his leg out and drove it into Xaos’ stomach once more, then put both feet back on the ground and leaped away. He landed gracefully and spun back to face Xaos, weapon raised in a guard – and his other hand already moving. Raising it above his head, he released a powerful wave of Force energy, throwing up dust and shards of rock from the statue. Reaching out with the Force, he seized the rock shards, along with a few heavy chunks of stone, and sent them hurtling at Xaos.
A brusque heave of air rapidly expelled from Xaos’ lungs as the Jedi Grandmaster’s feet drove into his abdomen and forced the Dark Lord to stumble backwards. As a hunk of rock grazed the side of his head, the incalculable wrath that had been brewing in the Sith for the entirety of this encounter at last overflowed. A low, growling, seething, hissing scream of fury began to build in Darth Xaos’ throat as the Force Hatred he had summoned flowed outwards. Waves of inky purple emanated from Xaos and washed over the room, disintegrating the projectiles hurled at him and filling the entire space with pure agony and destruction.
As the Dark Lord’s howling shout burst forth from where it had been lurking in the depths of his throat, the torrents of Dark Side energy grew brighter and more caustic. Hairline fractures began to appear on the massive transparisteel windows and grew into cracks. Pillars buckled and shook, causing chunks of ceiling to break loose and smash into bits on the floor below.
Darth Xaos’s fury grew greater and greater; soon the power being produced in the Force by his ire was enough to cause the man to slowly levitate higher with each passing second. Xaos’ arms spread wide and he threw his head back as the weightless sensation overtook him. Unable to take any more pressure, the windows burst outwards, their remains raining down in shards on the valleys below Bast Castle. With great patches of the ceiling gone at this point, Vjun’s acid rains had begun to pour into the chamber.
When the Sith Lord had reached a height roughly halfway towards the crumbling ceiling, the room could take no more of his assault. The walls and pillars tumbled inward, crushing the balconies to rubble, and slid downwards to crash into the cliffs on which Bast was built, taking a good portion of the floor with them. At the heart of this continuous explosion the Dark Lord was safe from falling debris; that close to him the intensity of the blasts instantly seared away any mass that dared approach.
But still Xaos raged as acid-laden rains whirled fiercely around him. He raged at every lost love, he raged at every fallen friend, he raged at every betrayal, trauma, indignity, frustration and horror he had suffered during his unnaturally long existence until, at last, he just raged. In the black depths of his fury he became a conduit to the immense Dark Side energy that slithered within Vjun’s surface.
The acid storms grew more intense by magnitudes yet the hellish glare of Xaos’ Force Hatred cast a tint across the globe. All over Vjun livestock flew into an uncontrollable rampage; bashing each other bloody inside the confines of their weather resistant barns. Meanwhile the sickly and aged began to die en masse, their compromised constitutions unable to take the weight of the energies that now pressed their planet’s surface, while infants wailed in an almost-unified chorus of terror. And, above it all, the Dark Lord of the Sith’s scream of pure hatred could be heard. Not only by every living being on the planet Vjun, but also by the most powerful Force-sensitives throughout the galaxy.
Finally, after what seemed to have been an eternity to all those aware of the occurrence, Darth Xaos’ attack subsided. And, as the intense blaze of the bombardment faded away, the newly acquired gap in Bast Castle’s structure became visible to distant onlookers. Landing with Force-enhanced grace on the jagged plateau covered in ridges and rubble that had once been the floor, Xaos slowly rose to take stock of his changed surroundings. The tail of his coat, now in tatters from the corrosive precipitation, billowed behind him on a cruel gale of sharp winds. Xaos summoned his lightsaber to his hand and reactivated it; the unwholesome rain began to reek acridly as it evaporated against the plasma blade’s heat.
Taking in such a tsunami of Dark Side power had turned the Dark Lord’s irises a poisonous yellow and left the whites of his eyes blackened and strewn with pronounced crimson veins. His breathing was ragged and heavy as he wordlessly battered away segment after segment of rubble with the Force in search of the Jedi he knew yet lived.
And as had happened so often before, the Dark Lord was proven right.
Near the center of the room, a pile of rubble began to shake, and then rise. Luke Skywalker raised the pile until he could fully stand, and then cast it aside. Calmly, he surveyed the scene, his lightsaber held loosely in his hand. He was covered in blood and dust; his clothes were torn and mangled, and the acid rain burned against his skin before he summoned the Force to shield himself from it.
Luke’s firm gaze met Xaos’, and he leaped high, out of his temporary tomb to land on an empty spot of ground.
“Don’t you understand, Xaos?” he asked, without any hesitation or hatred in his voice. “For all of your rage, all of your power, all of the destruction you wreak – the Sith will never win. The Jedi will always endure, to stand against you. Every single time.”
With a snap-hiss, his green blade flared to life, and he held it ready.
But Xaos was far beyond words at this point. Any semblance of reason, restraint or sanity had been washed away in the tidal wave of raw emotion that had rushed from his center outwards to shake the galaxy. A contemptuous, deranged laugh was the only response he offered to words that simply flowed from ear to ear without truly registering. He was intoxicated on the after burn of what he had unleashed and saw the man before him as already defeated. Never before had Xaos channeled such an overwhelming manifestation of the Force; there was not the faintest doubt in his mind that Luke had only barely survived the onslaught. And so, raising his hand to gesture towards Luke and sure that all victory required was for him to claim it, Xaos clenched it violently into a fist, seeking to snap Luke’s neck with the remainder of dark power that still sang in the Sith’s veins.
Luke felt another vice clamp down on either side of his neck, and his breathing cut off. That didn’t worry him – he had enough air in his lungs to sustain him. He felt the vice tighten, closing to snap his neck in half – and that didn’t worry him either. Inexorable, insurmountable power pressed against his throat –
- And Luke bathed himself in the Force. He stood in the sunlight, warmth running through his body – and in the face of that light, the darkness bearing down on his throat melted away.
Luke Skywalker began to glow. The currents of the Force shifted, and flowed through him like warm water. His wounds healed, and even the very dust on his body seemed to fade into the light. His perception of the world shifted, and Luke saw the man before him, saw five-thousand years stretching behind him, a thousand torments beating down on him. And he felt pity, and a slight pang of regret.
Lifting his lightsaber, Luke no longer needed to summon the Force. He was the Force, and the Force was him. He simply moved, faster than he had for six years, and launched into a dizzying series of blows, crashing his lightsaber against Xaos’ defence with sledgehammer blows, his form flawless, utterly calm and resolute in the knowledge that he was going to win this fight.
Xaos was almost struck by his opponent’s first blow as what he was seeing took its time sinking in. He couldn't understand how this was possible; he had unleashed the full fury of his might in a display which almost all other Force-sensitives throughout history could only ever envy. He had touched the heart of darkness itself yet Skywalker not only still stood but was assailing him with a renewed vigor that could scarcely be believed. Xaos’ normally crisp and quick lightsaber strikes were left listless and sloppy by his exhaustion. He had given everything already, there was nothing left.
As Luke’s blows began to strike home, Xaos felt his essence bleeding out as it always did when a host body began to enter mortality. But, a moment later, he realized that there was something utterly different this time. It was a sensation unlike any he had experienced before...no, he realized, he had felt this once long ago. He remembered when he had been cast out into the wilds during a harsh winter in his homeland. He had feared that he would die and sought shelter from the lethal cold, a search that ended in his transformation into a spiritual parasite.
Darth Xaos was dying, and he knew exactly why the Force was permitting it.
A giddy elation overcame him as the revelation came. An overwhelming sense of release vibrated through his every fiber; so many burdens too long carried were finally being put down. The flood revivified him and he rejoined battle with the Jedi enthusiastically. Though his blade’s movements were still shaky and imprecise thanks to his impending doom, his insane glee gave him sufficient energy to vigorously spring back into the exchange of blows with Luke.
In his serenity, his absolute conviction, Luke still felt surprise. Because he could feel from Xaos, of all things, glee. He had felt the realization that Xaos was going to lose – but no resignation, or desperation, or terror, had followed it. Xaos’ strikes and cuts were growing sloppier and sloppier, coming slower, but still he threw himself against Luke with unbridled vigor. And even now, an avatar of the Force in all but name, Luke was not omniscient – not for all his wisdom could he determine why.
Green met red, again and again. Luke’s lightsaber whirled around him, sizzling against Xaos’ blade so fast and fluidly it seemed like a literally wall of light had formed between the two men. Every strike that came at Luke he intercepted and turned away – and every riposte, every slash, cut, and strike, found its way inexorably closer to its mark. He stepped forward with every attack, slowly but surely driving the Dark Lord towards the crumbling walls. His lightsaber was a machine, methodically closing a box around Xaos that cut off all of his avenues of escape or counterattack.
On the mental plane the battle was unfolding almost identically. The Sith Lord blindly struck at the Jedi Master’s defenses, throwing brutish application of Force Dominate after artless blow of Force Madness. Here too the Dark Lord’s efforts were utterly in vain. Luke Skywalker’s mind was centered perfectly in luminous awareness of the Force and the techniques with which Xaos had twisted countless minds beyond repair could not so much as disturb the Jedi’s balance. The Sith Lord had wished to take Luke with him as he spiraled into oblivion but, like so many of Xaos’ aims had been, this was just the product of a mind desperately imposing a favorable narrative on to the tragedy it was enduring.
The end came when Xaos, distracted by a hopeless assault on Luke’s psyche, let his guard be pushed far too wide by one of the Jedi’s ripostes. In a single, clean motion Luke Skywalker drove his lightsaber through the center of Darth Xaos’ chest. Not wishing to mutilate his defeated foe’s body, Luke deactivated the blade as Xaos fell to the ruined surface that had been the floor.
Xaos barely felt the impact from his fall; the sensation of the streams of vitality that had been draining from him deepening and widening into rivers was too diverting. A ceaseless buzzing, thumping sound overcame all external auditory input while his muscles twitched feverishly and his vision narrowed to the cold Vjun skies above. His fingers clenched, dragging dust along the ground as spasms shaped them into fists. He coughed and gurgled as a splash of blood was expelled from his throat and ran down the sides of his face. His body grew cold, terribly cold, until he could scarcely feel his own limbs.
Yet the Dark Lord wore a smile on his face. Not a serene smile of acceptance or a satisfied smile of a life well lived but, rather, an utterly psychotic display of ecstasy that twisted his lips from ear to ear. For, in Xaos’ mind, he was convinced, utterly and irrevocably, that this was the fulfillment of his destiny. It had been the Force that had contrived to make him immortal so long ago, he had long believed that. It needed to preserve him so that, in time, he could take his fated role as Dark Lord of the Sith. That thought, that belief, had held him together for years now, freed him from the depths of agony he had once known. And now, the man believed, he had the ultimate proof of that conviction. He had persisted for millennia but, mere years after taking the title of Dark Lord; death’s doors were finally open to him. This was his reward from the Force and it meant that his purpose been fulfilled and the future was now completely sealed.
The Sith had won. Though even the wisest of men might not even suspect it at that time, the Dark Lord could hear the voice of the Force telling him it was true, inviting him to lay down the burdens he carried in its service. There could be rest now, repose amongst the dead. No one, Jedi or Sith, could alter the Grand Design’s immanent fulfillment.
With one final gasp of breath before his eyes went dim and lifeless, Xaos managed to choke out a pair of words, “At…last…”
-----
It begins with a ripple.
Echoing out from Vjun, it carries to all corners of the galaxy in the span of an instant.
All across the galaxy, the Sith feel the death of their Dark Lord.
On Lao-Mon, Lady Rhaenona emerges from sleep with a wail that carries deep into the jungle, her grief raising a thousand wild howls as she writhes and sobs.
On Ziost, Darth Lucifer’s form falters for the first time in decades. A well-aimed kick knocks him off of his feet, and the Massassi barely notices as he falls.
Near Duro, studying a hologram of a Star Dreadnought, Darth Reaver’s normally steady hand slips from the control panel, erasing hours of hard work as the man’s stare pierces far beyond the confines of the room.
On Corellia, a glass of brandy shatters in Darth Marda’s grip, drawing angry shouts from the bartender. Only later would he feel the bloody shards in his hands.
Near Yavin, submerged in a kaleidoscopic haze, Darth Xyrafus feels the ripple slice through him like a blade. Terrible clarity and loyal agony purge the chemicals from his system in moments.
On Korriban, fine tuning his starfighter, Darth Exolus’ hydrospanner slips and falls from his hands to clatter to the deck below. Hours pass before he retrieves it.
So too do the Jedi.
On Coruscant, Mara Jade Skywalker feels relief.
In hyperspace, Jacen Solo feels grim satisfaction.
On the borders of known space, Leia Organa Solo stiffens, then relaxes as she feels her brother’s warmth in the Force. She feels her husband’s concern from the cockpit controls, and gives him a warm smile.
Far beyond civilisation, Kam Solusar feels no measure of peace, or joy. But the absence of vengeful satisfaction in his heart brings him surprise, and then calm, and his path turns again towards the Light.
So too does a Chagrian, with a scar near his mouth and half a horn missing. His lightsaber in hand, he orders his pupils to halt, and revels in the feeling of victory.
So too does a woman, forgotten by the galaxy, now more machine than flesh. Her green eyes blink, and the shift in the Force tells her it will soon be time to act.
And on New Bethrezen, so too does a widow.
In front of her peers and subordinates, she stands, screaming the name of the Jedi Master as the floor beneath her buckles. Anger fills her, and fear fills those around her, as lightning begins to crackle through the air around her. The walls of the room buckle inwards and the windows shatter as she swears vengeance and gives into her hate.
Her screams of rage hide her smile.
-----
On Vjun, Luke stood above the fallen Dark Lord, and bowed his head. The storms outside had abated with Xaos’ anger – the only sounds in the room now were the whistle of the wind passing through the nearly-nonexistent ceiling, and the sound of Luke’s own breathing. The glow began to fade from his skin, and in its place Luke felt a terrible fatigue and exhaustion – but he didn’t miss the glow’s absence. That was the second time now that he had felt so attuned to the Force, and something instinctive told him it would be the last.
It disquieted Luke that Xaos had died so relieved. But, he supposed, the mind of an immortal man simply wasn’t something a normal person could empathise with.
A howl of grief shattered the quiet of the room. Luke spun, reigniting his lightsaber as a Sith wearing crimson armour that matched his lightsaber charged through the doors. His blade met Luke’s in a ferocious blow, but his anger had made him sloppy; Luke easily blocked the blow and countered with one of his own.
The exchange between the two men was furious, but short, a faint shadow of the duel that had concluded moments before. The Jedi Master easily parried every single one of the Sith’s attacks until the man overexerted himself an inch too far. In a blur of green, Luke hacked off his lightsaber’s emitter, and flung the shocked Sith backwards into the wall without a blast of Force energy. Dazed and consumed by his anger, the Sith pulled a knife from his belt and charged Luke again.
Cutting the man down, Luke knew, would have been a simple matter. Most of the Council would have supported the death of one more Sith Lord. But when he realised that fact in a moment of decisive clarity, Luke decided that nobody else was going to die today.
The Jedi let him draw close, then dodged out of the way of his stab and simply clubbed him over the back of the head with his lightsaber hilt. The Sith stumbled forward, giving Luke ample time to catch up, catch him, and knock him out with a stunning blast of Force energy. Luke felt the man slump in his arms, and laid him down on a relatively clear space away from Xaos’ body.
A glint of silver on the man’s belt drew his eye, and when Luke reached down to pull it out and investigate, he found the Force was with him – the small device was an Imperial code cylinder, and given that the Sith carrying it was most certainly an important one its access codes would be high-level. With a sigh of relief, Luke realised how he was going to get out of here in one piece.
The sensation of people approaching from outside the room spurred him into action. Standing, he quickly pulled out his comlink, and slotted the code cylinder into a port on its side.
“Artoo?” he asked, thumbing the comlink on. A series of relieved beeps greeted him, and he managed a smile. “I don’t think I can make it back to the ship, but I’m transmitting some codes to you now. See if you can’t use them to shut down the castle’s defences, then bring the Starstorm out and pick me up.”
The doors slid open, and a dozen red lightsabers ignited in the dark behind it.
“And Artoo? Make it fast.”
-----
Frozen with fear, Joran Blaise sat alone in his bunker.
He knew Lord Xaos himself was in the castle, fighting Luke Skywalker. Everyone on the comm channels has been talking about it. Then he’d felt the storm, and given into the compulsion to hide under his table whilst it raged outside. Now, everything had died down and left only an eerie quiet behind – and had left Joran alone with his thoughts.
He had lead Luke Skywalker himself into the castle. Worse, practically to its most secure vault! No, he hadn’t lead him there directly, but Joran knew that the Lord-Governor, Darth Aristo, likely wouldn’t see it that way. He couldn’t pretend to hide the fact – sooner or later they’d check the security feeds and see Joran leading the Jedi Master in his stupid disguise straight into their stronghold, and then they’d find him, and if he was lucky they’d just shoot him, but maybe they’d fry him with lightning instead, or screw with his mind, and then they’d have him begging for death and if he was lucky they would –
Joran’s head snapped up as a starship roared past his bunker. His existential fears temporarily forgotten, he leaped to his feet and raced to the window, peering out to see an old Corellian freighter speeding low towards the distant castle. That low, they’d be below the castle’s main sensor sweeps – even his bunker’s sensors hadn’t picked it up. This was his chance, Joran realised! It must be more Jedi, coming to rescue Skywalker – if he took that ship down, when the Consul killed Skywalker they wouldn’t even remember he’d lead the Jedi Master into the castle. Maybe they’d even praise him instead, give him a promotion, get him out of this damn metal box and off this acidic hell-hole.
Excited, Joran ran to his weapons panel – and the excitement died as quickly as it had come. His turret was down, presumably knocked out by the fierce storm earlier. Thinking quickly, Joran ran instead to his communications panel. If he couldn’t shoot it down himself, he could at least raise the alarm, save his own neck if nothing else –
His communications were down as well. Swearing, Joran dug out his personal comlink and thumbed it on – and static greeted him. All of their comms were down. Frantic, Joran slapped the emergency alarm panel – and still nothing happened. It was down. The elevator, he quickly found, was down. The computers were down. Everything was down. Even the bloody caf machine was down!
-----
Piloted by a blue-and-white astromech, the Lady Starstorm sped towards Bast Castle. It finally began to rise as it drew near, ascending well into the castle’s sensor coverage – if anything in Bast Castle had still worked, the ship would have set off countless alarms and probably called half of the Union fleet in to subdue the intruder. Unfortunately for the technicians running around the castle trying to figure out why everything with a microchip was offline, the Lord-Governor’s access codes had fallen into the hands of an astromech that had once sliced its way into a Super Star Destroyer and crashed it into an Imperial superweapon.
If it were possible for an astromech to be self-satisfied, R2-D2 could have put an Imperial Moff to shame.
The Starstorm climbed until it rose into sight of the shattered statue room, whereupon Artoo swung the ship on its side and lowered the landing ramp. Despite being used to a starfighter, the astromech nimbly maneuvered the clumsy vessel until the landing ramp was close enough to jump to.
Inside the statue room, his muscles burning with fatigue, Luke Skywalker held off a half-dozen furious Dark Disciples. His green blade formed an impenetrable wall around the Jedi Master, never stopping, deflecting lightsaber strikes, splitting thrown chunks of duracrete and statue, severing hands and cutting lightsabers in half. Fighting exhaustion and on the brink of passing out, Luke Skywalker put up a desperate defence against his attackers.
And unfortunately for the average Dark Disciple, a desperate defence from Luke Skywalker was considerably more than they could handle.
Half a dozen of their peers already lay on the floor, clutching severed hands and limbs or slumped, dazed, against the walls he had thrown them into. Two more joined them in short order when they were distracted by the arrival of the Starstorm, and Luke leaped through the gap in the circle they left behind.
As his boots hit the floor again, the door to what remained of the upper level walkway opened, and blaster fire began to pour towards Luke from the Union troopers who surged into the room. Ducking behind a thick fragment of duracrete, Luke took shelter for a moment to catch his breath. Peeking around the edge of the fragment, he saw the main doors open again to permit the entry of a trio of Union troopers who rapidly set up an E-Web blaster cannon.
Instead of Luke’s cover, they opened fire at the Starstorm, spattering blaster bolts against weak shields Luke knew wouldn’t hold for long. Sensing the approach of the remaining four Disciples, Luke waited until they were almost on him and the blaster fire aimed at him had subsequently lessened before he sprang into action.
Rolling out from behind his cover, he locked his lightsaber on and threw it, sending it spinning around the room to slice through the walkway’s remaining support columns. With a tortured groan of metal, the walkway collapsed, taking the soldiers atop it down with it and crushing the E-Web moments after the soldiers manning it leaped out of the way.
His lightsaber slapped back into his palm just in time for him to parry the first attacks from the remaining Dark Disciples, but Luke’s handy defeats of their fellows had eclipsed their rage at the death of Darth Xaos. They fought hesitantly, and Luke wasted no time in removing the hands of two, the foot of a third, and the arm of another.
The corners of his vision were edging into black, and the entire world was wavering, when he bent down to lift up Xaos’ body and heft it onto his shoulder. That was the last step of the Jedi’s plan - to deny them Xaos’ body, and prevent them from entombing it in the Valley of the Dark Lords. And it was just as well that he did – more and more soldiers poured into the room as he ran for the Starstorm’s boarding ramp, but they were all hesitant to shoot at him, afraid as they were of hitting the Dark Lord’s body.
Only a few blaster bolts chased him as he ran and leaped, the Force carrying him up to the boarding ramp and landing him safely on it. Considerably more joined in as the freighter began to pull away, but the rain of blaster bolts did nothing against the freighter's shields, and the soldiers could only watch as the Jedi Master fled with the body of their Dark Lord.
-----
Laying Xaos’ body down on one of the beds in the sleeping quarters, Luke ran into the cockpit, and was greeted by a chiding series of beeps and whistles.
“Sorry I took so long, Artoo,” he apologized, unable to conceal his smile. Hopping into the pilot’s seat, he took control of the vessel over from the Astromech. “You took down all of their turbolasers?” An affirmative beep. “Alright, keep an eye on the scopes. They’ll be sending fighters after us any-”
An indignant series of beeps cut Luke off, questioning as to whether he thought Artoo was such an amateur as to forget to lock down the hangars and ground the TIE Fighters. Grinning, Luke patted the Astromech on his dome and angled the freighter sharply upwards. “Alright, then we just need to dodge that gunship in orbit and we’re home free.”
They broke out of the atmosphere several dozen kilometers from Union-1, which gave chase at its considerably slower top speed. Unable to catch up, the Patrol Cruiser instead locked on to the freighter’s signature and fired every chased its laser cannons instead, rocking the Lady Starstorm with every shot that glanced off of its shields. But it couldn’t hope to hit the freighter, not when it was so far away, and not with one of the galaxy’s best living pilots at its controls.
The Patrol Cruiser’s captain could only thump the arm of his command chair in frustration as the freighter that had flagrantly trespassed in secure Union airspace jumped to lightspeed. When he later learned the full circumstances of the freighter’s escape from Vjun, his failure to avenge his Dark Lord haunted him for years to come.
-----
Luke only let himself relax when the course to Ossus was successfully laid in to the navicomputer and Vjun was far behind them. When he did, his fatigue finally crashed into him like a wave, and he slumped into his chair, utterly exhausted. It was pure adrenaline that had kept him going after the fight – after he had channeled so much Force power. In its absence, the Jedi Master found himself too weak to so much as stand up. Concerned, Artoo rolled up beside him and beeped. Luke gave the astromech a reassuring smile.
“I’m alright, Artoo,” he told the droid. “Just exhausted. Can you take over the controls?”
The astromech beeped affirmatively, then rolled behind his chair to plug back into the ship’s systems. Luke was content to just sit there, drained. He was getting way too old for this.
They’d done it. At last, they’d done it. Without Xaos, the Union would tear itself apart in months, and the Jedi could focus on dealing with the remaining Brotherhood members when the dust had settled. Luke thought he should feel relieved, even elated – but instead he just felt tired, and more than a little unsettled.
Too many of Xaos’ words had struck close to home.
Luke had spent his entire life since he’d left Tatooine fighting. The Empire, its Remnants, the Shadow Academy, the Yuuzhan Vong, and now the Union. He’d clashed with more Dark Siders than he could count, and found them responsible for, it seemed like, nearly every obstacle the New Republic had faced save the Yuuzhan Vong.
When his father had thrown the Emperor into the heart of the second Death Star, Luke had believed that was the end of the Sith. But always the Dark Side had returned, even ensnaring Luke himself once, before his sister’s love had saved him. This was the fourth Dark Lord of the Sith he’d fought – Darth Vader, the Emperor, and Shira Brie – Lumiya. And when he compared the man he had just killed to the Dark Lords he had faced before, he realised how utterly different Darth Xaos had been. The Imperial Dark Lords had acted from their own self-interests – but right through to the end, Xaos had been utterly convinced that what he was doing was right, that he truly was the galaxy’s greatest hope, that he walked the right path.
And as he realised that, the Jedi’s hope that the Union problem would now effectively sort itself out began to fade. He wondered instead about the people loyal to Xaos – Unionism was only on the rise, and it was spreading across the entire Outer Rim and into the coreward regions of the Slice. The citizens of the Union were fanatical in their devotion to its cause – Xaos’s cause – and the New Sith Brotherhood was no different. If Xaos had imparted not only his beliefs, but his depth of belief to his followers…the Union war was far from over.
Luke wondered then about Xaos himself – his last words, everything he had said to Luke, everything he had done in the Outer Rim, his unshakeable convictions.
In a flash of clarity that cut through his exhaustion, the Jedi Master saw the Dark Lord not as a man, but as a riddle that the Force had presented to him, the leader of the New Jedi Order. And with a sinking heart, Luke came to the conclusion that he had answered incorrectly.
He had tried, with all of his heart, to convince Xaos to step away from the Dark Side, to join Luke and the Jedi, to become the force for good that he so fervently believed he was – and Xaos had thrown the words back in his face.
And how could he not have? Luke realised at last. I came ready to kill him, and drew him into a fight for that very reason. Who would listen to their most hated enemy when you’re both pointing blasters at each other?
Doubt and remorse wove together in his mind, gripping him. Under different circumstances – had they met elsewhere, had Luke not come so decidedly ready to met the Dark Lord in battle, had they ever spoken outside of their duels – maybe it could have all been different.
Maybe Xaos would be standing beside him as an ally, rather than lying dead as an enemy.
Faced with the Sith, Luke had realised, the Jedi were changing – and now he wasn’t sure they were going down the right path. The realization that the rest of the Council wouldn’t have batted an eye at him cutting down a dazed Sith alarmed him, and all of them had dismissed Xaos as irredeemable. Luke knew that not everyone was his father – the Emperor, Exar Kun, they had shown him that not everyone was redeemable. But with growing alarm, Luke realised the Jedi now thought that nobody was.
He’d need to consult with Mara, meditate on this matter, seek guidance from the Force – and then speak with his peers, determine what should be done, find where it had been that the battered-but-hopeful Jedi Order that had survived the Yuuzhan Vong War had grown so cynical.
But all of that could wait until he had reached Ossus, and left Xaos’ body with the academy there for a proper burial.
Luke Skywalker made himself a promise then. So many people, good and honest people, had been drawn into Xaos’ delusions, had come to believe that the Sith way, that war and suffering and subjugation, were the only way to peace. And he knew it was his duty to help them see what was wrong with that ideal. To help them out of the darkness Xaos had left behind, and back into the light.
Luke had failed to solve the riddle that was Darth Xaos. He promised that he would not fail the people that the Dark Lord had left behind.
-----
Mara Jade Skywalker held her son’s hand as her husband’s starship settled down on the landing platform. Coruscant was just edging out of twilight, and the twinkling lights of Galactic City lit up the buildings all around them.
She wouldn’t have admitted it to most people, but Mara was glad Ben was still happy to hold her hand – at nearly seven, and with his ‘awesome cousin Jacen’ influencing him, Mara was worried he’d soon enter a ‘too cool for my parents’ phase.
When the landing ramp lowered, and her husband and his astromech descended it, Ben surprised her again – breaking into a run, he leaped into his father’s armed. Mara grinned, and the quiet worry that she would never see such a sight again faded from her heart. Jogging to join them, she embraced her husband, ignoring R2-D2 beeped with annoyance at being left out.
Perched on his father’s shoulder, Ben was chattering away happily, telling Luke all about his camping trip with Jacen, about the Ewoks, about all the cool things Jacen had shown him like how to make a ladder and how to build a fire and how to fish – and Mara realised hadn’t seen the calm joy present on the farmboy’s face since before the start of the Union War.
Finally, Ben finished, wrapping his arms around his father’s head and hugging him before finally permitting him to speak to his wife.
“There’s a lot we need to talk about,” Luke told her. Mara knew that tone, the hidden urgency and importance it contained – but she just held up a finger, quieting him. “That can wait,” she stated firmly. “You, farmboy, have earned some quality family time with us.”
Luke, who knew better than to argue even if he’d wanted to, smiled, and took his wife’s hand. Together, the Skywalker family – including one loyal astromech – returned to the Jedi Temple.
“You’re telling me that you have a way to kill Darth Xaos?” Natasi Daala asked. Luke Skywalker nodded hesitantly. “We may do, yes. We’ve only recently verified that this ritual will work, but it seems we may be able to kill him permanently.”
The Galactic Alliance Chief of State’s eyes narrowed to green slits. “’Permanently?’” she asked. “Is there something that the Jedi Order has kept secret from the state?” “Yes and no,” Luke answered. “We’ve believed for a while now that the man we know as Darth Xaos is not so much a flesh-and-blood man as he is a Force ghost inhabiting the bodies of others. As such we’ve reasoned that even if we were to kill him he would simply switch to another body. However-” Daala cut him off before he could continue. “And you kept this information from the state why, Master Jedi?”
Luke continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “-we had no evidence to support our beliefs,” he finished. “The information we’ve received confirms what we believe, and details a ritual of undoing it.”
The Chief of State stood up, drawing herself to her full height and grinding her finger into the Agarwood desk that had once been Cal Omas’. “Then kill him,” she ordered. Luke shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he explained. “We know the effect of the ritual, but we don’t know how it will take effect. Xaos may simply pass into the Force following his next death, his spirit may leave his body immediately, or it may slowly slip away over time. Further, we haven’t been able to verify the source of this information. It was sent to the Order via the Holonet, but we haven’t been able to track its source. It may very well be a trap.”
Daala brushed off his objections. “Small concerns. I am certain the Jedi, skilled as you claim they are, are capable of fighting through any ambush they lay. How the ritual works and who informed us of it is irrelevant next to its effect.”
“There’s more,” Luke pressed. “The ritual requires the use of massive amounts of negative emotions as a power source. Anger, hate, and most important killing intent – for the ritual to work, the one performing it needs to submit themselves wholly to these emotions and allow themselves to be consumed by them. No Jedi can walk away from that unscathed.”
Daala raised an unconcerned eyebrow in response. “You are speaking of the Dark Side, yes? I was under the impression that the new Jedi philosophy taught there was no Light or Dark Side.” “Not within the Force, no,” Luke agreed. “But the actions we take, the emotions we allow to fuel us – those are the lines that separate us from the Sith of the Brotherhood. For a Jedi to perform this ritual he has no choice but to cross those lines – and then, in the eyes of the public and adherents to the Living Force theory, he has fallen to the Dark Side.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Spare me, Skywalker,” she said. “I have no time for pontification on the nature of the Force and how we regular beings perceive it. The Tion Hegemony and Cronese Mandate are considering following the Allied Tion Sector’s example and joining the Obsidian Union. The Union has solidified its Outer Rim holdings to the Centrality border and their resources increase every day. This ritual will remove Darth Xaos as a permanent threat, yes?” Luke nodded. “Ultimately,” he said. “But killing him now might result in him being seen as a martyr. The Union will fight just as hard in his name.”
Daala leaned forward over the desk. “Irrelevant. He is a problem that must be dealt with, immediately. And as Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance, I order you to deal with him, immediately. Kill Darth Xaos, and cut off the head of the Union before this insurrection spreads any further.”
“And if I fall to the Dark Side in the process?” Luke asked, knowing her answer. Daala merely smiled, a cool thing that did not reach her eyes. “I am confident in your moral fortitude - and in the resolve of your comrades.”
-----
Eleven Jedi Masters sat in a circle in a room at the top of the High Council Tower.
They were Cilghal, a Mon Calamari, Saba Sebatyne, a Barabel, Tresina Lobi, a Chev, and Kenth Hamner, Kyle Katarn, Kyp Durron, Corran Horn, Octa Ramis, and Mara Jade Skywalker, all humans. The circle of seats was broken along one side by a trio of holoprojectors, only one of which was active. It displayed the image of Kirana Ti, a Dathomirian Force Witch who, along with two more Jedi named Streen and Damaya, operated a satellite academy on Dathomir. The two inactive Holoprojectors would normally show Kam and Tionne Solusar, the administrators of the Ossus Satellite Academy.
Finally, first among equals was Luke Skywalker.
Luke finished recounting his meeting with the Chief of State, and uneasy silence fell. Luke took the opportunity to study each Master’s reaction; they ranged from surprise, to annoyance, to uneasy agreement. Only Mara – who had met Luke as he returned and already knew the details of the meeting – kept her expression neutral.
Saba spoke first. “The Chief of State’z demand iz not as unreasonable as many of her otherz.”
Kyp grunted. “At least she’s leaving it to us this time. I’m surprised she’s not ordering us to go in with a fleet.”
“It’s at our discretion,” Corran agreed. He leaned forward in his chair, thinking. “We’ll need to bait Xaos out. Trying to find and fight him in the Union would be suicide.”
“We could ask for the Chief of State’s aid,” Hamner, the Order’s liason to the Alliance, suggested, stroking his chin. “Ask her for military aid and pair Xaos’ death with a massive counterattack. They’ll be demoralised and easy targets.”
Corran shook his head. “Direct assaults on Union space have backfired each time we’ve tried them, and they had less ships then than they do now. The Sith are too much of a wild card” He paused. “But they’re still Sith. We cut off the head, and the body will tear itself apart with infighting. We can hit them then.”
“That requires us to actually kill Xaos,” Kyle Katarn, the brown-bearded Battlemaster of the New Jedi Order, put in. “And Xaos isn’t just some dark acolyte. He’s a trained Dark Lord, and he’s beaten us at every turn so far. We need every advantage possible – fight him on our terms, with superior numbers.”
“Thiz one would welcome the chance to duel with him,” Saba hissed. A few others voiced agreement. Luke put up his hand. “That may not be a wise idea,” he said. “Xaos has an uncanny ability for prediction. If he gleams even a hint of a superior force waiting for him, he’ll bring resources to match it. Sending a strike team against him would result in him simply bringing an equivalent number of Sith.”
Kyp grunted again. “Each of which would likely be a match for one of us.” He was right, of course; in nearly every engagement with the Sith so far, they’d lost. Occasionally to superior numbers, but more often to simply stronger opponents. They’d lost far too many good Jedi that way already – to say nothing of those who had fallen under the sway of Sith teachings. The fact that the Union’s upper echelons had a number of fallen Jedi in them were a testament to the dangers the Dark Side posed, but to more and more they were becoming an example of the power of the Force rather than a warning.
The Council had fallen silent, thinking. Luke waited, thinking in turn, until Mara broke the silence.
“We’re not addressing the big issue here,” she pointed out. She turned to look at Luke. “Whoever uses the ritual falls to the Dark Side. Is that worth losing one of us for?” Her eyes drilled into his. Everyone here knew that it would have to be Luke who confronted Xaos. True, since the Yuuzhan Vong War the Jedi no longer perceived the Dark Side the same way – to the Jedi, light and dark existed within living beings rather than the Force itself – but the results, however you believed they were reached, were the same. And to lose Luke…
“All the more reason to take several Jedi along,” Cilghal spoke up. “If whoever uses this ritual will fall, having several Jedi there may prevent that, or they may be able to bring them back to the light.”
“You told the Chief of State about that, Master Skywalker?” Hamner asked, curious. Luke nodded. He’d left out her response deliberately, knowing it would only inflame the Jedi’s resentment towards Daala’s increasingly restrictive and antagonistic attitudes towards the Jedi Order. Now he’d have no choice. “She said, verbatim, ‘I am confident in your moral fortitude - and in the resolve of your comrades.’”
“Meaning,” Mara added quietly, “That she expects us to kill him if he falls.”
Cold silence descended on the room. But only briefly. Whereas hearing such an implication from Cal Omas would have shocked them, now the Masters only shook their heads in disgust and disbelief. Kyp, Corran and Hamner all exchanged flickering glances. Once, Kyp had existed on the opposite side of a fierce debate from Corran and Kenth, believing firmly the Jedi should answer only to themselves rather than exist under the control of the Galactic Alliance. Since Daala’s appointment, that debate had faded into an Order-wide sense of agreement with Kyp’s general beliefs – but the specifics varied. Some believed the Jedi should focus on removing Daala from power and then place themselves under Alliance control once a more reasonable Chief of State was instated. Others used Daala as a prime example of why the Jedi should answer only to themselves, and should only ever govern themselves as a result. The debate, though quiet, was definitely still present – though it lacked the splintering risk it had once carried.
Again, it was Mara who broke the silence, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. “Daala’s comments don’t change anything. The real issue here is whether or not this is worth the risk of killing Xaos.”
“Is there no other option?” Corran asked, glancing at Luke. “Does the ritual say you have to fall to the dark side in the process of using it?”
Luke paused, thinking. “I only received it a few days ago,” he acknowledged, an idea growing on him. “We haven’t had time to explore alternatives. There may yet be away.”
“Then we need to look into it,” Kyp stated firmly. “We all agree that Xaos has to die, or be otherwise incapacitated. Even if this ritual doesn’t work, we don’t know how his body switching abilities function – he may lose all of his memories, and at the least he will lose most of his skills and combat abilities. If nothing else, we’ll buy some time.”
“Thiz one thinkz incapacitation should not be an option,” Saba growled. “After the atrocitiez he haz committed, nothing lezz than death will suffice.” She cast a meaningful glance at the two inactive Holoprojector. More than a few gazes followed. Luke’s mind’s eye showed him a holograph of Kam and Tionne on their wedding day, and he felt something ache within him. Kam was gone, in self-imposed exile to wrestle with the Dark Side and prevent himself from slipping again. And Tionne…
“Luke and I will begin looking into the ritual.” Mara’s voice broke him out of his thoughts. “There may be something on it in the archives.”
The rest of the Council agreed, and Luke took it as a sign to adjourn the meeting.
-----
“Caffa, Master Skywalker?”
Luke looked up from his datapad. Hathon Izmyt, the new Chief Librarian of the Archives, stood over him, holding a tray with two steaming mugs of caffa on it. Luke thanked him and accepted one, and Hathon turned to Mara, who murmured a note of thanks and put hers down without looking up. With that, Hathon moved away, most likely to help a few confused apprentices back in the public section of the archives.
Luke took the opportunity to sit back and stretch a little. His legs were stiff from sitting, so he pushed his chair back and straightened them out, sipping at his caffa. He would have preferred hot chocolate, but Hathon didn’t know that yet, and Luke had no intention of turning down his kindness. Mara glanced up, saw Luke was taking a break, and promptly followed suit, downing half of her caffa in a few seconds, apparently without noticing the head.
“We’re not making much progress,” she commented, setting it down and pushing the pile of datacards in front of her around a little. Luke grimaced. “I was hoping we would be able to find something in our copies of Palpatine’s Book of Sith.”
“And now we get to sort through all of these.” Mara spread her arms to indicate the datacards on the title. “I had no idea Tionne had collected so much on the Sith. Or that so much survived the War.”
“A lot of it is information on the Sith species,” Luke explained. He blew on his caffa a few times to cool it, and drank a mouthful. “Given how intertwined they are and how ritualistic a lot of the species’ history is, I thought it was worth looking into.”
“I’d like to actually get some sleep tonight,” Mara muttered, downing the rest of her drink and returning to her stack. Luke could sympathise. This was the start of their third day in here. They’d stopped only to sleep, eat, check on the rest of the Order, and see if they could get through to Jacen and Ben on the holocomm. Mara was plainly not enjoying the tedious research, but she had insisted on helping, and she wasn’t about to back out now. Setting his mug down not even half drunk, Luke went back to his work.
It was half the day before they finally had a breakthrough.
One of Mara’s datacards slid across the table to stop beside Luke’s datapad. Luke looked up. Mara had a slight grin on her features, and her relief at finally having found something would have been palpable even without their bond.
“What have you found?” Luke asked, ejecting his datacard from his datapad and sliding in Mara’s. “Not exactly what we’re looking for,” Mara admitted. “But from the looks of it, some background. If it’s right, we might not have to worry about Xaos jumping bodies either.”
Luke scanned through the information. The datacard itself was a translation of some stone tablets covering a period of Sith holy wars somewhere between ten- and fifteen-thousand years ago. Most of it was irrelevant, covering leaders or dogmas or whichever Dark Side Spirit they marched for. What was relevant was the section Mara had flagged, covering rituals. The carvings went into detail about how the various factions had all adopted and modified a ritual meant for the sacrifice of enemy fighter, and how their spirit would be purified to ‘cleanse the taint of false gods’ before they were sacrificed in the name of that faction’s particular deity and sent to Hell to feed that deity’s power.
“It’s a bit of a stretch,” Luke murmured after he had finished reading. “But…it feels right.”
“That’s a good sign,” Mara said. “‘Cleansing the taint of false gods’ is a long shot, but it might work on Xaos. We don’t know exactly how his body-hopping abilities work or where they come from.”
“I think this’ll do it,” Luke said. Somehow, he just knew this was the right piece of information, and that they were going in the right direction. He put his datapad back down, and picked up another datacard. “Now we just need to focus on finding a method that doesn’t involve corruption.”
“Agreed,” Mara said, and then stood up. “You keep going on that. I’m going to go and see if I can get through to Ben and Jacen.” Luke nodded, picked an unread datacard at random, and went back to his reading.
Her summons broke his focus away from his reading after a few scant minutes. Luke paused, concentrating, and felt Mara calling him to come again, the sense accompanied by images of their son. Luke smiled, realising she’d gotten through, and left to join her.
-----
A five-year sojourn to examine the true nature of the Force had been kind to Jacen Solo. Since leaving, he’d matured into a handsome man with a strong beard (though it was currently mere stubble) and a newfound wisdom – and, from his interactions with Ben, he seemed to have regained some of the empathy and kindness he’d lost after his year of imprisonment during the Yuuzhan Vong War.
“Uncle Luke,” he greeted as Luke stepped in front of the Holoprojector. “How are matters with the Order?”
“We may have something important,” Luke answered vaguely. “How was your camping trip? How is Ben?”
“He’s fine,” Jacen said, the slight wariness in his tone indicating he’d noticed Luke’s noncommittal answer. “In fact, he’s right here. Ben, would you like to say hello to your parents?”
Luke and Mara’s son stepped into the frame, dressed in his nightclothes and grinning wider than they’d ever seen him. “Hi Mom, hi Dad!” he said enthusiastically, waving. “Hey Ben,” Mara answered, returning his grin. Luke felt Mara mirror his joy at seeing Ben looking so happy. “Have you enjoyed your trip to Endor so far?”
“I’ve had a great time!” Ben answered happily, directing his grin to Jacen. “Jacen’s taught me how to tie ropes, how to watch animals without them noticing you, how to climb trees-”
Jacen tapped his back, and Ben quickly broke off, looking guilty. Luke and Mara glanced at each other, and then simultaneously raised an eyebrow. “Climb trees?” Luke asked mildly, remembering how big some of the trees on Endor were. Ben toed the ground, not saying anything. Mara directed her ire to Jacen, who had the good grace to shift uncomfortably.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Mara said, breaking the silence. “For now, I’m glad you had fun, Ben.” “Wickett would have been glad to meet you,” Luke agreed, remembering the little fuzzball fondly. At least, fondly except for the part where he’d wanted to eat them. “Ben, I may not be here when you come back. There may be something urgent I need to take care of.”
“That’s alright, Dad,” Ben answered, looking a little disappointed. “Jacen wants to make a few stop-offs anyway.”
“Speaking of – Jacen, we’d like to have a word with you,” Mara said. “We’ll talk to you soon Ben, okay? Promise.”
“See you soon, Mom,” Ben said, giving a little wave goodbye. “You too, Dad. I’ll see you when you get back.”
“Stay safe, Ben,” Luke replied with a fatherly, if apologetic, smile, and watched their son walk out of the projection. They gave it a few seconds to let him get far enough away as not to overhear, watching as Jacen made a little shooing motion to stop Ben from eavesdropping. In the meantime, Luke glanced at Mara. She nodded, confirming the channel was secure. He could tell what she wanted to talk to Jacen about.
“We didn’t want to say anything whilst Ben might here, because it’s dangerous,” Mara said to Jacen. “We may have discovered a way to kill Xaos.”
Jacen kept silent, awaiting further explanation. Luke provided it. “We’ve acquired knowledge of a ritual that may be able to kill him for good. We know he’s capable of switching bodies, and this ritual seems to be capable of preventing that. The problem with it is that it requires enormous use of the Dark Side as a power source.”
“So whoever uses it will fall to the Dark Side as a result,” Jacen finished. “I see the problem. You’ve been looking into alternative ways of using it?”
“Without success,” Luke answered. “We’ve found some history on the ritual that indicates it will work as we think it will, but we haven’t found any possible workarounds yet.”
Jacen stroked his chin, thinking silently. Luke waited, mentally reviewing their information to see if he’d missed anything. Mara was doing the same thing, and did it faster. “We’re going to go ahead with striking against him regardless of whether or not the ritual will kill him,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t work, it’ll buy us time against the Brotherhood.”
“Tell me, how exactly does the ritual describe the Dark Side’s use as a power source?” Jacen asked, disregarding her statement. “Does it specify the individual needs to give in to the Dark Side for it to happen?” “Not exactly, no,” Luke answered. “But it needs a massive source of Dark Side energy to fuel the killing intent inherent in the ritual. It essentially wipes a person’s spirit clean and marks it so that it can be sent straight to Hell.”
“I think you’re looking at this the wrong way, Uncle Luke,” Jacen said thoughtfully. “You need the Dark Side to be a part of this ritual, but you don’t need the Dark Side to be a part of you for this ritual.”
“What do you mean?” Mara pressed.
Jacen gave an enigmatic smile. “I mean that you may want to consider looking at the components of this ritual.” He held up a hand, and ticked off the points as he listed them. “Ritual. Target. Power source. And somebody to perform the ritual.”
The truth dawned on Luke, and he nodded. “I understand,” he said, an idea forming in his mind. Mara caught it less than a second later, and smiled approvingly. “What would we do without you, Jacen?” she said, grinning lightly. “Alright then. We’ll get to work on this. We’ll see you in a few days. Take care of Ben.”
“Will do, Aunt Mara,” Jacen said, nodding. “And Uncle Luke –” he turned to look at Luke directly, and there was an intensity in his gaze that Luke rarely saw. “May the Force be with you.”
“And with you, Jacen,” Luke replied. The hologram flickered out. The two Masters glanced at each other.
“He’s an amazing influence on Ben,” Mara said quietly, her eyes flicking back to where Jacen’s visage had stood. “All this time closed off from the Force, and in the few months since he came back he’s already gotten him to open up to the Force so much.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Luke commented. “The Yuuzhan Vong War changed Jacen so much, and now he’s helping Ben overcome the effects the war had on him.” He gave a bemused smile. “Now if only Jacen would tell us what he’s been meeting with the Chief of State about.” “’State security,’” Mara replied, matching his tone with a hint of distaste and annoyance. “We’d better get the Council together. Kirana’s mediating a dispute between two Witch Clans, so we can meet in the library. We’ll see what they think.”
-----
The main benefit to gathering in the archives was security. Certainly, the Council chambers provided them with privacy, but a meeting in the archives’ private section allowed them to access the information stored there without taking it out. With the exceeding rarity of much of the information housed in the archives, as well as growing security concerns from both the Union and sources closer to home, extra steps were being taken whenever possible. Fortunately, with sound-suppression fields active the Masters could speak without risk of being overheard.
By the time the first of the other Masters had arrived, Mara and Luke had copied the information they had found on the ritual to terminals set up around a circular table, giving the others the opportunity to read it and catch up as they waited for the others to arrive. By the time the last – Kyp Durron – did, everyone save Kyp was on the same page.
Luke opened the meeting. “Mara and I believe we’ve found a way to counter the ritual’s drawback,” he said. “We’ve realised that we’ve been looking at this the wrong way. We’ve been assuming that the person performing the ritual needs to also provide the emotions necessary to fuel it, when in fact the ritual says nothing of the sort. We believe that by using a separate power source for the ritual, such as a Sith artifact, we can utilise the ritual without having the one performing it fall to the Dark Side.”
“That seems like a bit of stretch,” Kyp interjected. “We need more to go on than suspicions and vague wording.”
“There’s nothing in here suggesting that the ritual functions that way,” Corran commented, looking up from his terminal. “What makes you think that this will work?”
Luke and Mara exchanged a feeling of slight uneasiness before Luke answered. “Jacen provided us with the idea. I’ve re-examined all of the information about the ritual that was sent to us, and looking at it in the new light I got a distinct sense that it could work the way Jacen suggested it will.”
Corran frowned. “Jacen? Isn’t he off-planet?”
“He’s with Ben,” Mara answered. “But we contacted him via the Holonet to speak with Ben, and asked for his opinion in the process.”
“His sojourn means that he has a lot of different perspectives on the Force available to him,” Luke explained before any of the others could become offended. A quick probe in the Force told him he wasn’t fast enough. “It was a good idea, as he’s given us the solution we were looking for.”
“That may be so,” Kyp acknowledged. “But have we found anything confirming that the ritual will even work?”
Luke gestured to his terminal. Kyp glanced at his own, scanned it, and looked back up, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not much,” Luke admitted. “But it feels right. I read it, and I immediately had a sense that this was the information we were looking for. I trust the Force.”
“It may not be the only confirmation we have,” Hamner murmured, stroking his chin thoughtfully. Luke turned to him. “Master Hamner?”
Hamner remained silent a few moments, studying his terminal screen intently before finally speaking. “There is a section further down that caught my eye. This ritual – it didn’t occur to me until now. Tionne and I spoke at length of the New Sith Wars during my apprenticeship – I was studying the philosophical differences between the older incarnations of the Jedi Order and the Order as it was when Palpatine destroyed it, you see. About fifteen-hundred years ago, there is mention of a Dark Lord known only as the ‘Dark Underlord’. Tionne’s records were incomplete, but what she had recovered indicated two things: one, that he was a Dark Side Spirit somehow summoned from the afterlife, and two, that he was sent back there by means of a powerful ritual. The description of the ritual here broadly matches the accounts Tionne recovered.”
He looked at the rest of the group, and then met Luke’s gaze. “It’s not much,” he admitted. “But it’s another point in our favour.”
“I think it’s very useful,” Luke replied. “Thank you, Master Hamner.” He swept his gaze around the rest of the Council, and leaned forward. “At this point, however, I am willing to take the chance that the ritual does not work as intended. We have information backing up that which we received, but as we discussed earlier, even slowing down Xaos is worth the risks involved – especially now that we have a way to prevent the accompanying fall to the Dark Side.”
“Which leaves our tactical concerns,” Mara continued for him. She struck a few keys, activating a Holoprojector in the center of the table and displaying a map of the galaxy, with the Union’s territories highlighted in red. “Namely: where do we draw Darth Xaos, how many Jedi do we bring, and to what extent, if at all, do we involve the Alliance?”
Octa Ramis took a small step forward. She inclined her head towards Mara, who nodded and transferred control of the Holoprojector to Ramis’ console. Ramis brought up a map of the Unknown Regions, with a red highlight in the center that Luke immediately recognised as the Chiss Ascendancy.
“We should lure him to Csilla,” she said without preamble. “Csilla, or somewhere else in the Chiss Ascendancy. We can be there under the guise of attempting to negotiate with the Chiss and get them to break off with the Union. With the Chiss there, Xaos won’t bring a fleet of his own with him. We can either bring our own fleet and occupy the Chiss if necessary, or your friend Soontir Fel can run interference and keep the Chiss fleet off of us.”
Luke examined the image of Ascendancy space for a few moments, thinking it over. Then he slowly shook his head. “Under different circumstances, I might agree with the idea,” he said. “But the Chiss are in a delicate position right now. They’re opposed to us primarily because of their Alliance with the Union, not because they genuinely see us as enemies. There’s still a chance for genuine reconciliation with them – we shouldn’t jeaopardise it like this.”
“And I’m not sure the Fels could keep the Chiss off of our back,” Mara added. “They’re powerful, but they’re just one family, a relatively small one at that. And one comprised of humans. And we’d be putting them at risk and asking them to stick their necks out on our behalf, knowing full well the Chiss will likely exile them at best for their role in things.” She shook her head. “No, I agree with Luke. This isn’t what we should do.”
Ramis nodded, glancing around the table. The rest of the Council nodded or murmured agreement with Mara and Luke. Relinquishing holoprojector controls back to Mara, she stepped back away from the table. Luke glanced around, gesturing to ask for any further ideas.
Saba took the chance to step forward. Mara transferred the controls over without being asked. She, rather than a Union territory, brought up Bothan Space.
“Thiz one believez we should lure him with a more entizing target,” she said. On the Rimward side of Bothan Space, the planet Krant began to flash. “The Union iz no fan of the Bothanz, and would sieze the chance to damage them. Krant haz few defencez, and iz a factory world servicing the Bothan forcez. If they received word you were there, Master Skywalker, it would be a tempting target – they could annihilate an important Bothan asset with little risk, and kill you in the procezz. Or so they would think.” She chuckled. “I doubt events will be so fortunate for them.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Kyle Katarn said. “But it’s in Bothan space. Xaos would bring a fleet with him for sure.”
“We could request of the Chief-of-State a fleet to aid uz,” Saba replied. “If we positioned it several systems away, it could ambush the Union fleet and destroy it whilst we finished Xaos.”
“Which would still give it plenty of time to bombard the planet,” Corran pointed out. He shook his head. “It’s too risky. If they land ground troops it could take us months to root them all out, during which time they could do massive damage to the planet’s factories and infrastructure – especially if they’re angry that we’ve just killed their saviour. The fleet too could do a lot of damage in a very short time.”
“The Bothans will never agree to it,” Cilghal spoke up. “The hinge of this plan is the low risk to the Union. For the Bothans, however, there is a very high risk that they will lose an important asset. The Chief-of-State could overrule them, but that would inflame Bothan attitudes towards the Alliance. I do not believe we should generate tension where there is none currently even if it suits our own ends.”
“I agree with Masters Horn and Cilghal,” Luke said. He met Saba’s eye. “I’m sorry, Saba, but I cannot agree to your plan for the reasons they have listed.”
Saba nodded, and stepped back. “Thiz one acknowledgez the faultz in her plan,” she said. “She did not spend satisfactory time on this idea before presenting it, and overlooked them.”
Luke gave her a sympathetic nod, then looked around the table again, gesturing for any further ideas. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mara mirroring his motions, looking for any sign somebody had something to say. When nobody else did, she stepped forward.
“I have an idea,” she said, bringing up a map of the core Union territories on the holoprojector. She selected one planet, and magnified it until the image of it filled the air. “Vjun. More specifically, Bast Castle.”
Luke couldn’t help but feel a small sense of dismay at the idea of returning to his father’s old fortress. Across the table, Kyle Katarn more visibly mirrored his feelings. “Vjun,” he groaned, obviously remembering his visit during the Disciples of Ragnos crisis. “What is it with big dead rocks and bringing themselves up when you never want to see them again?”
Mara rolled her eyes – though Luke felt her touch him through their bond, reassuring him. “I’ll keep it short. Vjun is close to main Union space, so it won’t take Xaos long to get there. There are Union forces there already, so we have less chance of Xaos bringing any reinforcements with him. There are a few settlements there, so we have a good chance of sneaking in undetected. We already know the territory of Bast Castle, so we won’t have to worry about unfamiliar terrain. And it’s not that far from Ossus and Columex, so we can retreat to friendly territory in a hurry if we need to.”
“An infiltration mission, then?” Kyp asked. “No extra forces?”
“I recommend a small strike team,” Mara answered. “Ideally three, no more than five. They can slip in without too much trouble, deal with whoever is in the Castle, and handle whoever Xaos brings along. And there’s one other reason for Vjun too.” She glanced at Luke, and gave a small grin. “A battery.”
“For the ritual?” he asked, puzzled. Mara nodded. “The Brotherhood have a group of Dark Disciples there running experiments. It’s safe to assume they’ll have some Sith artifacts with them – a holocron or two, most likely. We could pull one of our own from the black vault, but isn’t it a better idea to use up their resources rather than our own?”
“Insult to injury,” Kyp grunted. “I like it.”
“As much as it pains me to say it, Vjun sounds ideal,” Katarn agreed. The rest of the Council murmured assent - save Corran, who hesitated a moment before nodding to Mara and Luke. “Then that leaves the question of who will accompany Master Skywalker,” he said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Luke said quietly. “I’ll go by myself.”
“By yourself?” Corran repeated, slightly stunned.
“No offence, Luke, but the odds aren’t in your favour here,” Katarn said. “Xaos has already beaten you once, and he’ll kill you if he gets a second chance.”
“I’m well aware of my past encounter with him,” Luke replied calmly. He couldn’t quite place his finger on why, but his instincts were telling him this was the right approach to take – and he’d long ago learned to trust them. “But there won’t be a second victory.”
“At least bring me with you,” Kyp objected. “If he brings reinforcements with him, I can handle them, but I doubt either of us could take both Xaos and a few of his Sith Masters at the same time.”
Corran had found his voice again. “I’m coming too,” he stated. “You can’t go up against them alone, Master Skywalker. Even a Corellian wouldn’t take those odds.”
There was assent from the other Masters, each of which – save Cilghal, by nature a healer rather than a warrior – argued to accompany Luke. Even Mara was probing his feelings, quietly trying to talk him out of it through their bond and letting him feel her sense of misgiving and concern. Luke let everyone have their say, and then held up a hand for quiet.
“I appreciate your concerns,” he said once the chatter had died down. “But you overestimate Xaos. He is a cunning strategist and a devious tactician, but he’s still prey to the same arrogance that the Dark Side twists everyone into possessing. That arrogance will blind him. As you’ve said, Master Katarn, he already beat me the first time we encountered each other – he’ll be confident the same thing will happen again. If I’m there, alone, he’ll believe he’s the only one needed, and he won’t bring anyone else.”
“And what of beating him, Master Skywalker?” Saba asked, not convinced. “Even if he bringz no-one, that will do you no good if you still fall to him.”
“I won’t,” Luke said quietly, hearing truth in his own words. “I’m going to win.”
The other Masters didn’t respond, glancing uneasily at each other, at Luke, and at Mara, waiting to see if somebody would say something. Clearly, none of them were convinced yet. Luke saw a few eyes fall on Cilghal, who blinked, shifted, and then cleared her throat.
“Master Skywalker trained the majority of us,” she stated. “He has been a student of the Force for longer than many of us believed in its existence, and I need not remind you of his past accomplishments – the redemption of Darth Vader and the death of the Emperor foremost among them. I trust in his wisdom. If Master Skywalker believes he can kill Darth Xaos, I believe in him.”
“So do I,” Mara said beside him. She had withdrawn slightly, guarding her feelings and preventing them from seeping into the bond. She would be talking with him later, Luke knew – but right now she recognised that he wasn’t going to be talked out of this. Tresina Lobi agreed next, and then Kenth Hamner – and, one by one, the rest of the Council reluctantly agreed.
-----
Mara waited until the rest of the Council had left before she finally faced Luke and raised the issue.
“Luke, this is crazy,” she said bluntly, stepping up to him as he finished shutting down the terminals. “You can’t go after him alone.”
“I know you don’t like it,” Luke said gently, turning to give her his full attention. “But this is the best way. It might be the only way.”
Mara shook her head. “Luke, he’s already beaten you solidly once. You only survived that time because we were there to pull you out. If you go after him by yourself, if you lose, we lose you.”
Luke smiled faintly. “Then I’ll just have to make sure I don’t lose.” He sobered, and took Mara’s hands in his own. “I know how you feel, Mara,” he said, letting his calm confidence flow into her through their bond. “Believe me, if I felt I could do it with you by my side, I would. But I can’t.”
“Because you’re afraid he’ll bring backup? That might be a problem for the others, but you know I can move unnoticed. And don’t try to pull Ben on me.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Luke said innocently, chasing the thoughts from his mind.
“Good,” Mara replied firmly. “And you know that if he loses you he’ll withdraw from the Force so far that even Jacen will never be able to coax him out again.”
“And what if he loses both of us?” Luke pointed out. Mara shook her head. “You know as well as I do that if we fight together they can’t stop us even if he brought half his Sith with him. Luke, I’m coming along.”
Luke hung his head, exhaling long and low. He hadn’t wanted to play this card – but there was no other way that Mara would be swayed. Bringing his head up, he rested his forehead against her own.
“You can’t come along, Mara,” he said softly. He squeezed her hands to cut off her response. “No, hear me out. You’re not going to like this, but it’s the truth. We know how skilled Xaos is at using the Force to manipulate another person’s mind. We know what he did to Tionne. Mara, you were an Emperor’s Hand for most of your youth, and his last command chased you for five years after his death. What else might be in there? What if there’s something buried deep, something Xaos can find and use? He could reactivate Palpatine’s command, he could use buried programming to incapacitate you, he could use it to bring you entirely under his control. If he gets the chance, he’ll make me fight you. I just can’t let that happen.”
Mara’s breathing had slowed, and Luke saw her shoulders slump. There was a slight pressure on his forehead as she leaned into him, and then she drew back, green eyes resigned but supportive.
“I really hate it when you’re right sometimes,” she muttered quietly. “Alright. I’ll stay here. But Luke – you better win. You better come back. Or you and Xaos are both going to wish you had.”
Luke smiled, genuinely this time. “I will, Mara,” he assured her. “Trust me.”
“You know I do,” she sighed. “But after this, I’m done sitting on the sidelines. We’re taking them on, together.”
Luke stepped back a little, then gathered Mara into his arms and kissed her. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he murmured quietly.
-----
The freighter that settled down on a landing pad outside the settlement of Resilience was old, battered, and remarkable only in its unremarkableness. It looked just like any of the freighters that plied the space lanes, in this area of space especially, and as such was automatically filtered out and forgotten by the majority of people who laid eyes on it.
The difference between most freighters and this one was that this one was piloted by a Jedi Master, with a small white-and-blue astromech for company.
Luke had had a fair amount of options available in choosing a vessel for this trip. All he really needed was the ability to get there, and enough room to carry Xaos’ body back with him – a choice he had made on his own, as even the body of a Dark Lord was a valuable possession better kept out of Sith hands. That had, unfortunately, ruled out his X-Wing – although an X-Wing would have drawn the attention of the local Union forces anyway. One of the Order’s new StealthX’s could have slipped in undetected, but it wouldn’t have had enough room for the body; and even if it had, Luke didn’t want to risk the Union getting their hands on its stealth technology.
The other Council members had been surprisingly gracious, offering their own ships. Kyle Katarn had offered his aging Raven’s Claw, Corran Horn had offered the use of his wife’s Pulsar Skate – even Mara, in a quiet show of supreme confidence and support, had offered him the use of the Jade Shadow. But in the end, Luke had settled on the Lady Starstorm, an aging Corellian freighter that had seen little use – and, consequently, carried little risk of being recognised.
It was already mid-noon by the time Luke and Artoo arrived at Resilience. Like most settlements on the planet, the town’s building were thick and strong, designed to withstand the acid rain and other ferocious weather conditions that frequently lashed the planet. Home to only a few thousand people, Luke had made landfall here due to its location only thirty kilometers away from Bast Castle. That, as Mara had pointed out, meant that Union soldiers would visit the town with some frequency, and that meant there would be speeders and swoops available he could use.
Lowering the landing ramp, Luke pulled his hood up and smoothed down the false moustache he was wearing to help disguise his features. A face like his was almost instantly recognizable, and he couldn’t afford to be spotted before he’d made his way inside the castle. Gathering his cloak around him, he strode down the ramp and into the city, Artoo trundling behind him.
By late-noon, he had located and rented – at an exorbitant price – a speeder bike, and returned to the Lady Starstorm. Artoo trundled up to him as he was inspecting it, handing him a hydrospanner that Luke used to tighten a bolt that had a dangerous risk of being sheared off in flight. The astromech twittered something, and Luke smiled.
“No Artoo, I don’t think they built these to carry droids,” he said. The astromech blatted in annoyance, and Luke reached over to pat his dome. “I doubt you could keep up, Artoo,” he said. “The terrain’s going to be pretty rough.” A tweedle, and a series of descending whistles. “I know, Artoo,” Luke said gently. “But Bast Castle is no place for a droid. I need you here, to keep watch on the ship and keep her ready to go. We’re going to need to leave in a hurry.” He studied the bike’s primitive flight computer. “Do you think this thing could support a beckon call?” Artoo beeped. “Me neither.” He stood up, wiping grease off of his hands with a rag and placing it down beside the toolbox.
“She’s as good as I can make her,” he stated. Hitting the ignition, the bike hummed to life, floating up to hover a short distance off the floor. Artoo beeped again. “It does sound safer,” Luke admitted. He glanced down the landing ramp, where he could see the dim rays of the sun slinking their way across the landing pad. “Almost sunset. I better get moving, Artoo. Keep the landing ramp retracted – don’t let anybody in the ship unless it’s me.”
The droid twittered an affirmative, and rolled obediently over to the control panel. Luke swung a leg over the seat, and slowly walked it down the ramp, waiting until it had closed behind him before putting both of his feet up, leaning in against the wind that he was about to feel, and securing his hood as best he was able. Mentally rechecking the map of the area he had memorized, he kicked the speeder into gear.
-----
Joran Blaise was a young, fair-haired human male who had enlisted in the Federal Military in the hope of traveling to distant worlds and liberating their occupants from their oppressors. The reality, after half-a-year of service, had proven markedly different – and disappointing. For the past three months, since being posted to Vjun, his world had consisted of a small security bunker on the outskirts of Vjun’s trench network. Four walls, a low ceiling, a heavy durasteel door, a small personnel lift, and a few terminals showing security footage of the outside world.
He’d come to terms with the immense boredom after two months, and now begrudgingly spent his time reading, watching the occasional holovid, casting the occasional glance at the security monitors, and wondering if they were ever going to assign a second trooper to the bunker to keep him company.
On the upside, he’d read through all of the books on his backlog, and his reading speed had almost doubled.
Flicking his eyes to check the security monitors, he went back to his page, engrossed in an epic novelization about Xaos’ mysterious past. Finishing the page and scrolling over to the next, he reached for his cup of caffa – and promptly knocked it to the ground in front as a loud banging emanated from the bunker door. Scrambling around, he checked the security feeds – and saw, to his horror, a dark-robed figure standing impatiently outside. The words of his superior on his first day sprung into his memory – “If a Dark Disciple needs to get in your bunker, one, give him everything he needs, two, don’t get in his way, and three, if you value your skin, don’t make him wait”.
Scrambling to his feet, Joran hurriedly brushed his armour down, hid his book, set his caffa off to the side, and scooped up his helmet and blaster rifle, all in one smooth motion. Praying that he looked presentable, he hurried to the door, punching in the keycode and turning the heavy handle to open the manual locks.
“You should have been watching, you should have been watching, you should have been watching,” he cursed, then cut himself off as the door began to swing ponderously open. Snapping to parade attention, he stepped off to the side and raised a salute.
“My apologies for the delay, sir!” he said hurriedly, praying that he’d only lost a few days’ pay and nothing worse.
Outside the bunker, Luke could feel his hurriedness and anxiety, and mused that it was just as well he wasn’t an actual Dark Disciple. The setting sun at his back had managed to stave off visual detection from a distance, and the terrain mean that sensors hadn’t been able to pick him up. Whilst he doubted he could have gone any farther into the defensive network, it didn’t really matter now; he’d been able to stroll straight up to this bunker unheeded, and inside he could see an entrance into the underground tunnel network.
Luke took a deep breath. He looked the part of a Dark Disciple – now he just needed to act like one. The memory of Corran Horn telling him to act ‘like a Hutt with eyebrows’ flitted into his mind, and he rearranged his expression as best as he was able.
“Finally,” he snapped, sweeping imperiously into the room, trying to use that same tone Leia used when dealing with people she particularly despised. “Were you intending to make me wait until the next acid storm, or were you hoping I would think nobody was home?” He cast a sneering glance around the bunker, and the belongings scattered around. “But far be it from me to intrude on your home.”
The Union soldier stiffened, unable to formulate a response. Luke let the trooper sweat for a few seconds before breaking the tense silence. “Well? Are you going to stand there and hope I won’t notice you, or are you going to assist me?”
“Right away sir!” the trooper said, stepping forward before realising the door was open and turning to close it. Luke gave a wave of his hand, and the door abruptly slid closed and locked itself, causing the trooper to jump. “If you’re quite finished wasting time?” he prompted. The Union soldier spun around, hurrying to the lift and pressing himself to the side to allow Luke to step on. Palming the console, the platform began to descend.
His face showed no hint of it, but Luke felt supremely guilty for acting this way. But it was the best way to slip in undetected – so long as he didn’t run into any of the other Dark Disciples here, his disguise was effectively foolproof. And, this way, he wouldn’t have to fight anybody or use the Force. He kept his face in the same sneer as the lift reached the tunnel beneath, subtly readjusting his hood just enough to let the light reflect off of his eyes and look a little more menacing.
Good thing Mara’s not here to see this, he thought. He said, “Whenever suits you, trooper.” On cue, the soldier hurried onwards, leading Luke through the labyrinth of tunnels and corridors running through the valleys surrounding Bast Castle.
It was fortunate that he did. He caught hints of enough troops and emplacements to give even an Alliance assault force pause, and even with the Force it could have taken him hours to find his way through the maze. It still took the better part of half an hour for the trooper to lead him through the tunnel network to a regular-sized turbolift, whereupon he saluted and turned to leave.
“Did I dismiss you, trooper?” Luke asked, his voice as dangerously low as he could make it without just sounding quiet. The trooper immediately turned back around, even stiffer than before. “What more can I do for you, sir?” he asked, a new quaver in his voice.
Luke took a moment to gaze at him for effect. “You will lead me to the artifact repository,” he said, using the most general term he could to describe where they stored their holocrons without sounding suspiciously vague. He could sense the trooper’s hesitation, and already knew that he didn’t know where it was. Well, he’d known his luck wouldn’t hold. The general dark aura that hung over the Castle prevented him from using the Force to locate the Sith artifacts he was looking for, meaning he’d have to search manually – or else risk being sensed himself.
“Pathetic,” he sneered to the trooper, turning with a billow of his cloak to stride into the turbolift, the door closing behind him. He took a quick moment to check that there were no cameras in the car, and then released a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, letting his shoulders slump from their aggressively squared position. He picked a floor at random from the wall panel, watched the numbers tick up, and then resumed his previous stance and expression, striding out of the turbolift to find another soldier with which to repeat the process.
This time, he had more luck. The second trooper he found led him straight to an antechamber two floors above. The first door he led Luke to was of standard design – but as Luke stepped through into the rectangular room beyond, he saw immediately that the door to the vault itself was made of materials that could put a MaxSec prison to shame.
Taking up the entire opposite wall and guarded by a security camera and roof-mounted blaster turret, the door was incredibly heavy-looking, constructed of black stone, durasteel and, Luke’s intuition told him, most likely a Cortosis underlay as well. A keypad and fingerprint lock was situated in the very center of the door to allow access.
Secure enough to keep people out – but nowhere near secure enough to contain the dark tendrils he could sense leaking out of the room behind. Luke dismissed the trooper, waited a few moments until he was out of earshot, and then quickly made his way back to the turbolifts, taking the same lift up to the floor above.
Using the mental map he had built of the floor below, Luke made his way to what he hoped was the room above the vault – which, to Luke’s surprise and good fortune, was an empty general storage room. Finding a hidden spot behind a wall of crates, Luke knelt, and ignited his lightsaber. Rather than plunge it straight in, he made a quick, though deep, incision along the surface to examine its makeup. The top layer was regular duracrete, and the layer below was the same black stone used in the door – Hijarna stone? – but there didn’t appear to be a Cortosis layer here.
Grateful, Luke lifted his lightsaber and plunged it, with effort, through the floor and stone. To his surprise, no alarms went off as he did so, and he set to work, slowly but surely carving a plug out of the stone below him. It took him the better part of ten minutes – the stone, which seemed identical to the stone that had made up Grand Admiral Thrawn’s fortress on Nirauan, was incredibly dense and difficult to cut through – but when he was finished and had used the Force to lift the plug out, Luke had a hole big enough to fit through. Closing his lightsaber down and returning it to his belt, Luke dropped down-
-And felt his breath catch in his throat. Sith artifacts filled the dark room’s shelves – holocrons, weapons, scripts, tablets, talismans, carvings, medallions – all of them at least a thousand years old, and all of them steeped in the Dark Side. The room was thick with shadows, with no illumination save for a soft, red glow that shone from a raised row of small, triangular pyramids – the Sith holocrons Luke had come here seeking.
Suddenly unsteady, Luke reached a hand out and grabbed hold of a shelf, using it to support himself. Shutting his eyes against the reservoir of Dark Side energy in front of him, he reached inside of himself for calm, regulating his breathing and drawing his presence as close inside of himself as he could.
Something snapped his eyes open again – a feeling of coalescence. Casting his vision down to the floor, Luke saw a small whirl of dust. Concerned, he took a step backwards away from it, and watched as the whirl grew larger, rapidly reaching man-size. The swirling dust dissipated – and in its place stood a shadow. It had the form of a hooded man, face imperceptible – and even with his presence in the Force drawn tightly inside of him, Luke could sense the apparition’s origin in the Dark Side.
“Who seeks the knowledge of this vault?” the apparition asked, voice velvet-soft. Luke responded by taking a step forward. “I do.” The apparition, he gathered, was likely a guardian of sorts for the room’s artifacts, a broader-scale version of the Gatekeepers contained within the Holocrons. Maybe, just maybe, Luke could bluff it.
He set his voice to the most arrogant and haughty tone he could manage. “I seek permission to use one of the Holocrons here, to attain knowledge my Master denies me.”
“Show me your face, Disciple,” the apparition instructed.
Or maybe not.
Raising his hands to his head, Luke threw back the hood of his cloak. The apparition recoiled, retreating to the far side of the room as if thrown by a gale.
“SKYWALKER!” it hissed, whirling dust clouds spinning into place around it again. The shadows seemed to lessen, and it was gone – and Luke heard alarms sound out from the other side of the vault door.
“I guess that’s it for stealth, then,” he murmured, unclipping his lightsaber from his belt and gratefully taking the opportunity to ditch the false mustache. Realising he likely had seconds at most, he strode quickly over to where the holocrons rested on their pedestals. Taking a quick moment to examine them all, Luke picked one out at random and steeled himself. Reaching out with his free hand, he gingerly lifted it off of its pedestal, slipping into the Force to bolster his mental defenses against any attempted intrusions by the Sith device.
There were none. He could feel a dark presence coiling within the device in his hands, but it kept to itself. Slipping it into a pocket of his cloak, Luke started back towards the hole he had cut in the ceiling – and heard the vault door rumble behind him, sliding open to the sound of shouts and the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber. Calling on the Force again, Luke put on a burst of speed, reaching the hole and leaping up and through before they had even stepped into the room.
-----
At the very top of Bast Castle lies a long, stone-floored room.
Forty years ago, the centerpiece of this room would have been a large, matte-black respiration chamber that allowed Darth Vader to take off his helmet and breathe freely. Now, in its place was a large holoprojector. Around the room were desks covered in scattered writings, shelves containing tomes and scrolls, a small bed, a refresher station, and a kitchen area. The room that had once been a home to Darth Vader was now home to the castellan of Bast Castle, a man named Darth Aristo. Some individuals might take offense to Aristo’s residence in Vader’s former chambers; to them, Aristo would simply explain his former status as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice and send them on their way. The fact that Palpatine had never attempted to kill him as he had Darth Vader’s most notable secret apprentice, Starkiller, was never brought up in response. Nobody would dare.
Presently, the Holoprojector flickered to life. Aristo knelt, and bowed his head as an image of Darth Xaos shimmered into being.
“Lord Aristo,” he greeted pleasantly, motioning him to rise. “What news from Vjun? Have the Dark Disciples made a breakthrough?”
Aristo shook his head, rising. “No, my Lord. I bring news of another kind. Luke Skywalker is here, in this Castle.”
Xaos raised an eyebrow. “And what is it he is doing in Bast Castle?”
“He has accessed our vault and taken one of our Holocrons from it,” Aristo explained. “He is presently in the statue room, in front of the ruins of Darth Vader’s statue, studying it. Not accessing it, my lord, merely studying it.”
Xaos gave a sagely nod, and Aristo had the familiar feeling Xaos knew something that he didn’t. “Shall I engage him, my lord?” he asked. Xaos shook his head. “No, leave Skywalker be. I shall depart immediately and show him hospitality myself. Merely prevent him from leaving, Lord Aristo. I am sure you will find he has every desire to stay.”
The Hologram flickered out.
-----
The door slid open, and Luke stepped through, into a scene from the past.
The massive statue of Darth Vader still lay shattered and broken on the floor from when he had pushed it over, during the duel here between several Jedi and a number of Palpatine’s Dark Side Elites. Rock shards, heavier stone fragments – but for the layer of dust on everything, it looked exactly as it had decades ago.
That struck Luke as odd. Why hadn’t they removed it? His father had been redeemed, and cast down the Emperor – and the teachings he represented were, he understood, considered outmoded by the current Sith order. He would have thought the Union would have disposed of the statue’s remains.
An answer occurred to him a few moments later. The castle’s castellan, their intelligence indicated, claimed to have been trained by Darth Vader as a secret apprentice. Perhaps the preserved state of the room was the result of an agreement: the castellan would have wanted it restored, and the Dark Lord would have wanted it removed. Keeping it like this was an effective middle ground.
Cloak stirring up dust as he moved, Luke threaded his way through the ruins of the massive statue and seated himself cross-legged in front of the pedestal. From within his robe, he drew the Sith Holocron out, studying it. Black smoke, invisible to the naked eye, coiled within it, twisting and writhing like an angry serpent. This, Luke knew, was an artifact of evil. The Order had once had several locked away in its collection – most had been lost during the Yuuzhan Vong War, but they still had a few, sealed away deep in the black vaults beneath the Temple.
It was almost a crime to destroy knowledge, Luke thought. But knowledge such as what was contained in these devices only ever seemed to bring pain and destruction.
Turning it idly in his hands, Luke submerged himself in the Force, expanding his senses outwards. In the corridors and hallways around him, he felt nervous life – a few presences in the Force suggesting the Union’s Dark Disciples, but for the most part, he simply felt sentient life. Soldiers, and they had the room surrounded. But they were keeping their distance for now.
“Of course they’re keeping their distance,” Luke murmured to himself. “Xaos will want to kill me himself.”
Returning the Holocron to his robe, Luke folded his hands in his lap, let his head bow, and slowed his breathing. There was nothing he could do, except await the arrival of the Dark Lord.
-----
The massive durasteel doors of the landing bay slid closed, sealing off the dimming sky outside. Dispatched from the Patrol Craft Union-1 in orbit above, the shuttle glided to a stop in the center of the hangar and slowly settled down onto its landing gear, venting steam.
Waiting by the hangar doors, Aristo drew himself up and strode forward to meet the shuttle, and the Dark Lord that was its passenger. Accompanied by an honour guard, he reached the shuttle as the landing ramp began to lower, and automatically genuflected at the presence of a dark figure emerging from the shuttle’s hatchway.
Darth Xaos inhaled as he descended into the slightly less artificial air of Bast Castle. A mild sensation passed over his scalp as his head passed from the shuttles’ atmosphere to Bast’s. The Sith Lord was dressed for battle; clad in his light combat jumpsuit and War Rhino leather coat, both of which had been alchemically enhanced as Dark Armor. At his left side swung his lightsaber and Sith Sword.
He had come alone. It didn’t matter that this was an obvious trap; the bait was just too good to pass up. Besides which, sometimes the best way to deal with a trap is to walk right in to it. Precautions had been made for all eventualities involving a capture scenario and, as for the risk of death? Only the most potent, irrationality-inducing of emotions could lead a person to fear (or hope for) such an outcome.
As Aristo and his entourage bowed before him, Xaos barely took notice.
“Take me to him,” Xaos commanded simply, twinges of anticipation apparent in his voice.
“As you command, my Lord,” Aristo said, rising immediately to his feet. The honour guard spread out in front of them, forming two straight lines between which the two Sith Lords strode. Aristo lead by a foot, waving doors open as they neared them. At his command, the guard remained behind, to stand watch over the Consul’s shuttle. Quiet, but with a simmering feeling of anticipation building in his chest, Aristo lead Xaos to the statue chamber.
-----
Luke felt a twinge in the Force, and opened his eyes, returning to the world from his meditative trance. Inhaling softly, he rose to his feet, drawing his cloak around him. Xaos was almost here – in fact, he was a scant few dozen metres away, approaching the doors to the room. Another, weaker, presence was with him; for a second, Luke grew concerned that the Dark Lord intended to face him with back-up after all, and that perhaps he should have let Mara come along...but his concerns were allayed when the second presence stopped a few metres away from the door.
Luke gathered his cloak around him, lightly brushing the Holocron hidden within its folds to ensure it was still hidden. Ready, calm, and confident, he stood in the center of the room and turned to face the doors.
Xaos waved Aristo away as he approached the doors. He had been able to feel Luke Skywalker since before the shuttle had even landed, but now the Jedi Grandmaster’s presence shone clearly even through the closed portal. Reaching up with both hands, Xaos pushed the doors open with great enthusiasm. Soon a long awaited vengeance would be his.
Marching down the brief aisle defined by the two pillars in front of him, Darth Xaos moved with the posture of a man attending a celebration in his own honor.
“Your sense of humor is improving, young Master Skywalker,” Xaos commented as he began to walk in a circular perimeter around his opposite number, “That the last leader of the Jedi shall lie dead next to the ruined statue of the last Baneite Lord? Ah, what more fitting expression of the Grand Design could there be?”
Luke matched Xaos’ circle, keeping the same distance between them as he spoke.
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Consul,” he said mildly, stepping over a piece of rubble from the statue of Darth Vader. “Even if I die here, the Jedi will live on – and I didn’t come here to die.” He studied Xaos, his weapons, his stance, his presence in the Force, noting how he had come prepared for battle, in armour rather than the dark robes he had worn the first time they had dueled.
“Oh, of course, it doesn’t all end here, today,” Xaos mused, “But you know how reductive historians can be. They’ll look back on this and comment that it was when the Dark Lord slew the founder of the New Jedi Order. To them that will mark the end of the Jedi. But I know that it will take years, decades perhaps, of slowly hunting down your comrades in whatever foul-smelling holes they seek refuge before that happy event truly comes to pass. I expect it to be an amusing avocation after the excitement of utterly crushing your Alliance wanes.”
“Really?” Luke smiled. “Just as Palpatine ended the Jedi? Just as the Sith Triumvirate ended the Jedi? You could slay me here with ease. You could spend a thousand years hunting and destroying, Consul. You could erase all mention of the Jedi from history and destroy artifact even tangentially related to us – and the Jedi would still endure.” He spread his arms. “Of course, all of that requires me to die here.”
“Oh, the Sith Triumvirate,” Xaos crooned in a mock-impressed tone, “So it seems that the Jedi don’t keep themselves as virginally ignorant of Sith history as they like to posture. You will die here today, Skywalker. And the Jedi will be ground into dust. This shall come to pass for it is the Force’s desire.”
Removing his lightsaber from his belt, Xaos activated the crimson blade and assumed the opening stance of Makashi accompanied by the traditional salute. He briefly imagined plunging the weapon into his foe until the letters ‘CIS’ on the hilt pressed against the son of Anakin Skywalker’s chest.
“Come then, Jedi, draw your blade.”
Luke remained where he was, and withdrew his arms into his cloak. With one hand, he patted the Holocron’s pocket to make sure it was fastened closed; with the other, he unclipped his lightsaber, and held it ready for use.
“Is it?” he inquired, still in that same mild tone. “The Force is a mystery to even the strongest of us, and the Dark Side clouds our ability to perceive its will. The more you harness its power, the less you can hear its voice.” An old comparison of Mara’s flitted through his mind – the louder the factory, the harder it is to hear the birds in the rafters.
He took a single step forward, and extended his free hand.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Xaos,” he said gently. “Step out of the Dark. You can be a powerful force for good in this galaxy; all you have to do is listen, and hear, rather than choose what you think the Force is saying. The Order will welcome you, all of you, with open arms.”
“Even now you cannot see, can you?” Xaos responded, not moving from his stance, “I could be a powerful force for good? I am the most powerful force for good! I am the Dark Lord of the Sith, it is I whom has been predestined to bring the rot of the Jedi to an end. It is from your fountainhead that the ills of the Galaxy flow, only Jedi hypocrisy and delusion preserves you from being unable to avoid this truth. And, yes, we must do battle. Only in the furnace of violent confrontation can impurities be smelted from the Galaxy. I do not wish to end this by simply cutting you down but do not think that I will hesitate to do so because you choose cowardice and playing the martyr over the crucible of a duel.”
Luke smiled sadly. “The Dark Side has blinded you after all,” he said, and withdrew his hand.
“Am I speaking Mandalorian?” Xaos demanded, unleashing a burst of snarling lightning with his off-hand. “Ignite your lightsaber!”
With a snap-hiss, Luke’s green blade swept out, catching the lightning along its length. Taking a two-handed grip, Luke held the lightning at bay, and used the lightsaber as a conduit to absorb the killing blue bolts harmlessly into his body for dissipation. Lowering the blade, he held it angled across his chest in a defensive posture, left hand resting on the pommel, blade angled slightly forwards, waiting.
In a burst of Force Speed, Xaos closed the gap. Extending his lightsaber, he feinted a thrust at Luke’s shoulder and slipped his blade under the Jedi’s reflexive block to slash at his right arm. A quick step back bought Luke time enough to shift his guard and deflect the blow – and, twisting his wrists, he caught the tip of Xaos’ weapon before he could withdraw it and levered it down towards the ground.
Instead of pressing the attack, he took a long step back again.
“The Jedi have, and always will, serve the Force,” Luke said resolutely. Freeing his lightsaber, Xaos pursued, following with a crisp thrust that Luke neatly slipped and a second thrust that he brought his saber across to deflect again. “We trust in its guidance, and we’re mindful of the dark – because we know full well how easily the Dark Side can twist us into believing our actions are just.”
He threw out two quick, low-power strikes at Xaos’ saber arm and leg, easily blocked but geared to open a gap in his defences, and followed with a third, two-handed strike at his now-exposed off-arm – but the Dark Lord dodged it easily, stepping smartly behind Luke. Too late, Luke realised the thrusts and blocks had been a ploy of Xaos, teasing him into overextending himself.
Before the Jedi could respond, Xaos raised his hand and used a powerful Force Push to throw Luke clear off of his feet, sending him tumbling through the air towards the nearest pillar. True, the Dark Lord knew he could have tried to simply stab his foe’s back, but that wouldn’t have left time for a reply. And if there was one thing the Dark Lord had fantasized about more often than killing Luke Skywalker, it was telling Luke Skywalker off.
“The Galaxy has suffered through the Jedi’s ‘service’ for far long enough,” Xaos commented as he telekinetically hurled a medium sized hunk of Vader’s statue at the Jedi Master. With a weak Force Push of his own, Luke altered his trajectory just enough to tumble past the pillar and roll to his feet just short of the wall. Tugging at his cloak, he untangled his feet – and leaped out of the way of the chunk of statue, which left an impressive dent where it smashed against the wall.
“Look upon the ends your deeds have wrought. Decades spent struggling, the majority of a human’s brief lifespan, and what have you accomplished? The Empire you sought to tumble still lingers while the bright hope of your New Republic has dimmed into the ennui of the GA’s decadence.”
Getting back to his feet once more, Luke reactivated his lightsaber and held it in a neutral guard, alert for any follow-up attacks. None came.
“I fought against the corrupted bloat of the Old Republic during the Clone Wars,” the Dark Lord continued. “I have seen the ilk of your Galactic Alliance before. Yet, in a few years’ time, I have transformed the poor, oppressed and forgotten peoples of the Galaxy into a movement that every day inches a knife closer and closer to the neck of the sick beast that you have spawned. I have brought hope to the hopeless, dignity to the humble, food to the starving, power to powerless, vengeance to the wronged. What have you done except repeat the errors of the past?”
“You lie to people, and give them a scapegoat,” Luke answered. “Instead of seeking to protect them and bring peace to their lives, you point them at the source of their misfortune, and tell them to take revenge. Everything you have done stands on the back of a thousand years of Sith machinations – a thousand years in which the Jedi safeguarded the Republic.”
His lightsaber still guarding him, he moved forward again, stopping in front of the pillar and using it to protect his back from any surprise attacks or chunks of statue. Bespin had been a powerful lesson to the young Jedi.
“The Jedi are not perfect,” he admitted readily. “We make mistakes. Sometimes, those mistakes create the very enemies we have to later fight against. But we don’t cut down our opponents just because they don’t agree with us. We serve and respect all life – we don’t take it just because it is an obstruction on the road to peace. We fight for that peace, but not for any cost.”
He gave another small smile.
“If we repeat the mistakes of the past, we make them for the same reason our predecessors did. To preserve life. To safeguard civilization. To serve the will of the Force. We will bear those mistakes, and live with them, as our predecessors did, so that we may stand between the people of the galaxy and those who would do them harm. Each time, and every time.”
“Tell the Thuleian family that the food on their table is a product of evil,” Xaos seethed. “Tell the Quarren child who will not have to grow up being told by his teachers how in need his people are of the Mon Cal yoke that his dignity is a lie. Come to Lamus, tell its citizens that their sacred fountain, the source of their home’s life, which was destroyed by Jedi and restored by Sith, should have remained still. Inspect the Union hyperlanes which, before my coming, were preyed upon ceaselessly by pirates but now are safer than any under Jedi protection. Tell the slaves I have emancipated that they should have waited patiently in their chains for Jedi liberation.”
“Your Order may have defended the Old Republic’s leaders, but it did no such thing for that nation’s citizens. Where were the Jedi when Pius Dea crusades killed entire populations? Why did they stand idle and let others fight the Madalorian Wars for them? No, you care nothing for preserving life. You have a mind only for maintaining the cleanliness of your hands; except when it comes to preserving your puppets’ hold on the Galaxy. You speak of the errors of past Jedi as though they were occasional aberrations when, in fact, they constitute the major history of your brethren.”
“Ah, but what a location to discuss history! It contains so much of yours. And merely speaking of history begins to bore me.” Luke doubted that very much. “With your leave, I would like to experience a bit of it.”
Raising his head, Xaos began to bob his neck slightly as he spoke the necromantic evocation in a whisper. His eyelids fluttered as the dark power of Vjun coursed through his veins. Bast Castle had been the site of a significant portion of Xaos’ most successful experiments in Sith Magic – not the least of which was the binding of the wraith he now summoned.
In response to Xaos’ call, a great miasma of greasy smoke arose from the floor and pooled into a bulbous concentration in the air. As the tail fed the tumor more vigorously with Dark Side energy, a pair of twisted arms emerged from the mass. The hands met, forming a haphazard spectral imitation of a lightsaber. In the blade’s pale glow a face pressed its way out of the smoke. Though twisted by years spent in Chaos, Luke recognized the countenance of Sedriss.
Sedriss never did know when to give up, Luke thought, appreciating the irony despite the situation.
With a wail, the ghostly attack dog flew at Luke. Perturbed but nonetheless on his guard, Luke leaped up and back, away from its wild flailing. His feet found purchase on the pillar, and he launched himself off once more, coming down to cleave the specter into twin waves of rolling black smoke – before he launched himself into a desperate tumble, out of the way of a downward slash from Xaos that would have split him in two but instead merely scorched a long line through his cloak.
Xaos pressed his advantage, pursuing Luke to hammer at him with a follow-up blow. The Jedi Master rolled onto his knees and scythed his blade up just in time, catching the Dark Lord’s lightsaber far too close to his face for comfort. Harried, Luke shoved back hard, riding his lightsaber up Xaos’ until he had enough of an opening to get a foot under himself and launch into a sideways roll out from under Xaos.
Not missing a beat, Xaos kept right on him, cutting at Luke’s legs as he leaped to his feet. His defence wide open and his lightsaber too far away to intercept, Luke leaped backwards, clearing Xaos’ lightsaber by scant inches – and then leaped high as Xaos thrust decisively at his torso, backflipping to land on the upper level walkway.
“And in return, you speak to those who don’t already herald you as their saviour,” Luke responded. His tone was reproachful, but he was breathing hard; his cloak was covered in dust, and he slowly traversed the upper walkway as he spoke, buying time to re-center himself.
“Tell the Mon Calamari how they were forcibly thrown from their homes by a species they had finally managed to achieve co-existence with, how those who remained were butchered as the rest were scattered across the galaxy. Tell a young man on Lamus, once mortally wounded by a gundark, that he should have died so that his people might live. Tell the people once preyed on by pirates that they should be grateful you simply took the pirates under your command and gave them new targets, rather than letting them roam free. But…” Once more, he gave a small smile. “You have my thanks for liberating the slaves of the Outer Rim.”
His smile vanished, and he shook his head. “But for all your claims, the Union has solved few problems. You’ve only fooled your people into believing they have.” He lowered his lightsaber a little. “But it’s still not too late to change that. You can fix those issues. You can rebuild the Outer Rim. You can change the galaxy, truly change it, for the better. Step out of the Dark, Xaos. You can bring the Outer Rim back into the light.”
For a moment Xaos’ face reflexively displayed a snarl as he nearly lobbed another piece of heated rhetoric. But, instead, he held his tongue and allowed his expression to smooth as he rose to a full standing position with blade pointed somewhat casually off-center. His voice when he spoke was grandiose, almost oratory.
“And why are you so eager to recruit me?” he questioned rhetorically. “Do you hope that I can reverse your ever multiplying string of failures? If you follow the righteous path then why have all your dreams come to naught? You dedicated your youth to undoing Palpatine's empire and raising up a New Republic in its place,”
Xaos' voice began to swell mockingly as he forged deeper into his reply.
“A republic reborn free of the old corruption that had been the fertile soil for Imperialism. But it is not this dream that you noble Heroes of Yavin have brought into being. You have managed to establish, with shocking efficacy, an encapsulation of millennia of gradual Old Republic decline lasting a mere few decades. Already your legislature has become so hopeless that the citizenry have joyously welcomed Palpatine's less impressive imitator. And, as the Galactic Alliance finishes its production of 'A Brief History of Doomed Enterprises', my Union will expand ceaselessly to fill the newly freed space. You have seen the loyalty and passionate devotion of those sworn to the Unionist cause. It is only your attachment to the shattered remains of hope long grown weary and old that blinds you to the truth. Can you not see the will of the Force playing out before your very eyes? We Sith have been chosen to lead the inhabitants of this Galaxy into a new epoch. The Jedi are but the decaying remains of an order that lost its legitimacy millennia ago. The sands in the hourglass have finally run out for your Order. You do yourself no service by struggling against the inevitable. Simply accept the imminent extinction of your ways and despair.”
“Because you can do good,” Luke replied simply. He stopped where he was, now on the other side of the room. “Perhaps the Alliance will simply become the Empire we fought so hard to free ourselves from. Perhaps the Chief of State will become the Emperor’s position in all but name. But if the fall of the Alliance is the Force’s will – why do you always find the Jedi standing in your way? Why are the Jedi still strong enough to stand against you? How could we rebuild ourselves so quickly after so many losses in the Yuuzhan Vong War?” He shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “What the Alliance has become, is not what it is. For thirty years, the new government has stood. If you want to take the last three of its years as a sign that the whole of it has been a failure, then you should direct your fiery rhetoric towards the historians instead of the downtrodden, and convince them that Palpatine invalidated the entirety of the Golden Age of the Republic.”
He dropped his lightsaber into a low, one-handed guard, and stepped up to the edge of the walkway, ready.
“I – every Jedi, would sooner consign ourselves to oblivion than simply give up on the galaxy when it strays. We are not its overlords – we are its guardians, its advisors. We’ll speak to the people, show them the error of their ways, and help them return to the right path. We will not force them there. And if they start giving up their freedoms, we’ll show them how to take them back. For all the talk of the Union’s freedom, for all its claims that the Alliance is giving its up in the name of security – what you call ‘freedom’ is just the freedom to be dominated and controlled by the Sith.”
“It was never the Jedi who stood in our way,” Xaos responded coldly, “Each defeat was conditioned by betrayal from within. I have eliminated that pesky variable and the New Sith Brotherhood stands united behind a singular purpose. The seeds of destruction were sown long before these past three years. You, Skywalker, have been bound in Jedi lies for so long that you do not understand freedom. True freedom lies in the fulfillment of one's Force-given nature. Your alliances, your republics can never offer this. You seek to unite the species by sedating them with a universal culture of lusterless, rationalistic pacifism. And so, the white-hot passions of the peoples become suppressed and manifest in the internal stresses that will tear the Alliance to ribbons. Yes, we Sith shall rule the Galaxy. It is a part of our nature as the Force's chosen. Yes, all others will bow before us. But in their submission they will lose far less than they do to the doomed imitation of Jedi folly that is the Galactic Alliance.”
In response, Luke gave a wry smile.
“Submission and freedom could not be more separate, Xaos,” he countered. “Listen to yourself. Your ‘white-hot passions’ will just lead to subjugations, the eradications of people’s freedoms and rights. A warlike, naturally aggressive race conquers their peaceful neighbor. They argue that they are fulfilling their Force-given nature, that they are simply following their passions. What does the Union do when the conquered come to them for help? Their nature is one of peace; their passions are for trading and craftsmanship, not war. They cannot follow these under the thumb of their conquerors. What does the Union do? Do you assist them, and order the aggressors to remove themselves, forbidding them from engaging in their passions? Or do you allow the race to be conquered, and have theirs cast aside?” He shook his head. “The Alliance, the Jedi – we don’t suppress people’s passions. We don’t forbid people from following them. Instead, we work to ensure that those passions don’t come at a cost to other people.”
“There is a cost to everything, Skywalker,” Xaos sneered. “And one rarely pays it alone or with only those who have agreed to pay. Every form of biological being persists by devouring other life. You understand little of the very thing you claim to protect. Life feeds on life. And note well that this applies to much more than seeking sustenance. All this is a part of the natural order; as is hierarchy. A strong will with a firm hand on the reins of power is essential to social cohesion. Not only essential but desired by the general populace. This is why the forms of governance you Jedi wish to cultivate inevitably are overtaken; the people yearn for the concentration of power into a single set of hands. We Sith are the answer to the unspoken prayers of this galaxy's population.”
“And,” Xaos added, “In response to your hypothetical situation – which are always much easier than citing actual examples, aren't they? – each species would be dealt with as suits the Grand Design. If both could be integrated into the Union then it would be done. If one needed to fall then that would be done. The Force takes the long view; a few destroyed cultures matter little compared to the benefit future generations will derive from millennia of Sith rule. We do not suffer from the cowardice-induced Jedi delusion of endless peaceful stasis. A Sith knows that vitality and purpose come from constant expansion of power. So too shall the society we create be ceaseless in its conquests. The unification of this galaxy will be but mere prelude to the fulfillment of Sith destiny. There are countless worlds spinning in the universal void and even materiality itself represents but one dimension to be conquered.”
The Dark Lord returned to a battle ready stance. The Jedi Master facing him leaped down from his vantage point, adopting a high guard.
“For too long have the Jedi held back change in a mad quest for a lie. I will cut out this cancer with my own blade.”
“You’ll try,” Luke replied simply.
There was a dark surge in the Force as Xaos took the briefest of moments to focus. Calling on his prodigious talents, he entered simultaneously into a state Force Rage and Battlemind. The deluge of twisted anger, resentment, hate and malevolence was forced into narrow channels by the discipline of Battlemind.
In response, Luke Skywalker called on the Force. Calm and centered, the Jedi Master surrendered himself, and let the Force flow through him. His speed increased, and his reflexes sharpened; he felt strength flow into his limbs, his footing became sure and precise, and a deep, profound calm permeated through his entire being.
Surging forward with that same Force-enhanced speed, Xaos beat at Luke’s blade with furious might. For a change, Luke ran to met him head on, dropping from his high guard into a slash and locking lightsabers with the Dark Lord in a flash of green and red sparks.
But in spite of the utterly berserk state he had summoned within himself, Xaos’ Makashi displayed perfect precision. He broke the saber lock in moments with a swift rotation of his wrist, disengaging the blades and directing a lightning-fast Cho Mai at the Jedi Master’s wrist.
Caught off-guard by Xaos’ raw strength, Luke didn’t fight it; instead he stepped back at Xaos’ disengagement, gaining enough room to nimbly slip the Cho Mai and protect his wrist. Three more heavy blows came at the Jedi Master, and Luke fell back parrying, giving ground but meeting power with power and soundly redirecting every blow.
Xaos’ fury was unrelenting. Each block from Luke served only as invitation for swifter, more vicious attack, while the attempt by the Jedi to disengage and fall back was met with another Force-enhanced charge. Faced with Xaos’ assault, Luke could only continue to retreat; circling so he didn’t find his back pressed to a wall, Luke’s lightsaber was a blur of impenetrable green around his body. Even as Xaos attempted to close in, Luke managed to keep his distance; what he couldn’t parry, he dodged, and what he couldn’t dodge, he stepped quickly back out of the way of.
Then they reached the rubble on the floor, most of it knee high and uneven, and Luke knew that he couldn’t retreat any further. Recognising this fact as well, Xaos pressed the attack. Instead of risking a retreat over the rubble – and likely losing his legs in the process – Luke stood his ground.
Instead of trying to dodge away, the Jedi Master triangle-stepped. Bringing his front foot in line with his back, he brought his lightsaber down from a high guard to parry a Cho Mok aimed at his arm with a twist of his wrists. Bringing his back foot forward and shifting his body off of his center line, he batted away a Sai Tok at his waist with a one-handed drop parry.
He met the Sai Cha that would have decapitated him head on, whipping his lightsaber around fast enough to catch the tip of Xaos’ lightsaber on the base of Luke’s own. Returning to a two-handed grip, Luke levered Xaos’ lightsaber clear and followed up immediately with a fast, one-handed slash at Xaos’ right shoulder.
Smoothly, Xaos brought his lightsaber back on line and parried the slash, riposting with a thrust at Luke’s arm – but the Jedi Master, his plan having succeeded, had already flipped back, clearing the rubble and buying himself a precious few moments. Breathing hard, he re-centered himself, adopting a neutral center-guard.
The Dark Lord, however, was long past the point of indulging the cat-and-mouse game of engaging and disengaging that the pair had been involved up until moments ago. Reaching out his off-hand hand, Xaos inflicted a bone-crushing Force Grip on his opponent’s organic wrist. Feeling the pressure on his wrist rapidly intensify, and seeing a sudden, sickening image of his wrist snapping in his mind’s eye, Luke summoned the Force and redirected its flow, first resisting, then canceling the vice that had clamped down on his wrist.
But in Luke’s momentary distraction, the Dark Lord had acted; using the Grip as a launching point, Xaos seized Luke’s entire arm with a Force Pull that caught the Jedi Master unawares and yanked him through the air towards Xaos. Simultaneously, Xaos charged, lunged, and thrust, his lightsaber poised to impale Luke.
Grateful that only his off-hand was telekinetically held fast, Luke brought his lightsaber fanning across his body in a one-handed parry that knocked Xaos’ point clear – and into the Jedi’s cloak, cutting its lower half into ribbons. Equally grateful that the pocket holding the holocron was higher up, Luke lashed out with a snap-kick that connected solidly with Xaos’ chest.
They hit the ground at the same time, but Xaos landed on his feet as Luke was still rolling to his. Snarling loudly at the kick to his abdomen, Xaos poured that frustration into a blunt application of Force Push that knocked Luke sharply off balance as the latter got to his feet. A quick change of gestures unleashed a flood of Force Lightning, and Luke had just enough time to plant his feet and catch the crackling blue lightning on his lightsaber, redirecting it to scorch the ground in front of him.
With waves of electricity preceding him, Xaos once again charged to close the gap, cutting off his lightning to aim a slash at a wide-open gap in Luke’s defences and remove his right leg. Once more, Luke leaped to the side, losing the rest of his cloak’s lower half and deciding that was preferable to losing the lower half of his torso.
The Jedi stepped back in again immediately, angling his lightsaber forward as he attempted to press the attack before Xaos could regain his balance. Seeing his advance, Xaos quickly made another Grip-Pull, this time centered on one of his foe’s ankles in a trip attempt – but this time, Luke was ready. The moment Xaos extended his arm, Luke summoned the Force again, protecting his ankle as he felt a vice tighten around it – but letting the Pull yank him forward.
He had barely traveled an inch before he redirected the Force and canceled out the Pull on his leg, snapping that foot down to anchor it solidly against the ground and stop him short of Xaos’ impaling thrust. Catching the Dark Lord by surprise, Luke once more caught the tip of Xaos’ lightsaber on the base of his own, giving him enough leverage to force Xaos’ blade to the side, reach his off-hand inside his cloak, and step in.
There was a glint of silver from Luke’s hand, and suddenly there was red in the air. Recognising the pain in his arm, Xaos retreated backwards to inspect the wound. A thin line had been slashed in his saber arm – nothing that the Force couldn’t prevent from hindering him. Luke stood still, now metres away, and lowered the bloody knife in his hand.
In his fury, Xaos barely bothered to pay the product of what he thought was a failed sneak attack any mind. Transmuting his boiling rage into cold contempt, the Dark Lord focused his feelings into a cryomantic spell – and began clogging the joint motors of Luke’s mechanical hand with hard and rapidly spreading ice.
Responding before he lost the use of his hand entirely, Luke switched the knife to his mechanical hand and flung his free hand out. In a moment, an immense pressure had built up on Xaos chest – and the next, it flung him backwards. The Dark Lord recovered swiftly, dissipating the pressure and landing easily – but when he returned his attention to Luke, he saw that the man hadn’t even attempted to pursue.
From within the folds of his cloak, Luke had withdrawn the holocron he had stolen earlier, and now held it in his free hand.
There was no hint of victory in his eyes, or satisfaction. Only a sense of regret and pity, for the man he was about to doom to Hell.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t sway you out of this,” he said quietly, and raised the knife. Flipping it around to a backhanded grip, he drove the blood-stained weapon deep into the delicate inner workings of the Sith artifact, and held it away from his body.
The words he had memorized came easily, even without the Force to help his recollection.
“Qorit. Mrias. Mirtis. Xela. Kraujas. Zudikas. Zudyti.” He didn’t know the words, or what they meant. But he could feel a sense of power welling up as he spoke them, and pressed on. Xaos felt his a vice seize his leg as he darted forward to take advantage of the situation, and now it was the Dark Lord’s turn to trip and catch himself. “Ari niant Chaos, girdeti nun. Nu doz’van malotre sis aukotis, nors tym kash nex z’kaina iv tu’iea akiva. Brauk jiso vele valyti, ir mietas jiso vele vi tu’iea savas. Ari niant Chaos, niss sis grotthu kia tu’iea valda!”
Luke’s lightsaber flared into life, and he tossed the holocron into the air. It arced once, a single, swift strike – and the holocron fell in two pieces to the floor.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then dark, coiling smoke, tinged with red lightning, began to hiss from the halves of the holocron. Luke felt the dark power growing, a raw, primal bloodlust, hungry and eager to consume – and he had no plans to let it consume him.
The Jedi Master reached into the Force, and armoured himself in the Light Side. Exerting himself, he used the Force to hold fast the power forming before him and form an impassable wall between it and himself, the closest target.
Reaching into the smoke, Luke pushed his way past the rapidly expanding hunger, towards the raw malevolence that pulsed at the heart of that dark power. There he found the imperative driving it, the almost sentient-will seeking its prey – and pointed it towards Xaos, implanting a single, easy-to-understand thought in its being:
How about him?
Just as Xaos began the incantations for a necromantic spell of control, the newly freed specter plunged into him. There was a wave of strange, dark energy, coiling black smoke wrapped around his body, and then...nothing happened. Taking a moment for a cursory examination of himself through the Force, Xaos could find nothing altered or amiss.
“I do hope you didn't pay too much for that, Skywalker! Where did you acquire it, a Nar Shaada street corner?” A hearty laugh erupted from the Sith Lord before he continued on to speak in an exaggerated Rodian accent, “Excuze me meeiester, I have ze best dealz for yew. Gen-ooo-ine Sith arty-fax!”
With his foe's attention occupied, Xaos sprung suddenly into a charge, unleashing another series of thrusts and slashes as he neared the Jedi Master.
Luke kept his face blank as his mind whirled. Had it simply been a fake? No, what he’d felt when he touched the phantasm was real. But nothing had happened to Xaos – the man was still unharmed, and his strength in the Force was exactly the same as before. But then what?
The memory clicked into place, and Luke’s mind settled. Of course – they hadn’t known for sure what would happen. Xaos’ immediate death was just the best-case scenario; Luke had been fully accepting of the possibility that there would be no immediate affects, and it would simply prevent Xaos’ body-switching abilities when he died. But still – Luke should be able to feel something, shouldn’t he?
Another second, and another thought – and Luke had his answers. It didn’t matter whether or not he could feel anything – whether or not it had worked, the result was the same. If it hadn’t, taking care of Xaos here would buy the Alliance time, and maybe prompt one of the other Sith to depose him. And if it had worked, Xaos would need to be killed for it to take effect.
Either way, Luke’s purpose was clear.
As much as wanted to take another route, as much as he’d hoped to talk the man out of his course…it was time for Xaos to die.
His lightsaber snap-hissed back to life, and Luke stood calm as Xaos charged forward. At the last moment, he slid out of the way of the first thrust, blocked the follow-up slash, and then parried the arcing cut Xaos masterfully transitioned into. He dodged again, and met the next strike with power, battering it out of the way. Xaos recovered instantly, bringing his weapon up to defend – but instead of attacking, Luke spin, whipping his cloak up. His free hand went to the clasp, unlatching it and sending the garment rippling towards Xaos. Luke followed it, a quartet of heavy slashes from his lightsaber following him.
Having a fair bit of experience in the use of cloaks and coats in combat, Xaos reacted quickly. A light application of Force Push redirected the garment back at its user while a short Force Leap moved Xaos to the side of the attacks Luke was using the cloak to cover. Instead of the Dark Lord, Luke cut his cloak to pieces with his first two strikes – and a whisper of warning redirected his third as the Dark Lord sprung adroitly into action, deflecting a thrust that would have skewered his left flank. Spinning, Luke aimed another quick, one-handed slash at Xaos that forced him back out of distance and gave Luke enough time to take a long step back and resume his guard.
The Dark Lord was filled with boiling frustration as his foe once again managed to disengage and enter a guard. His first instinct was to charge in once more but a strand of cold calculation held back that fury like an akk-hound on a leash. Taking several steps backward, Xaos deactivated and holstered his lightsaber. Bringing his hands up, the Sith Lord concentrated his rage into thick bands of Dark Side energy. As the tips of the thumbs met and the other eight fingers stretched out from the palm to point at Luke, the energy was unleashed in a relentless wave of Force Blasts.
Expecting Force Lightning, Luke staggered back as the first wave of dark Force energy slammed into him. The second bowed his hands inward, forcing his lightsaber dangerously close to his face. Instinctively, Luke let go of the weapon and ducked out of the way, hearing it clatter to the ground far behind him, deactivated. A third blast slammed into him like a starliner, hurling him backwards off of his feet.
Sucking in a deep breath, Luke drew his focus back to himself, and called on the Force. His clumsy flight transitioned into a flip, and he slid a stop on his hands and knees instead of in a crashing tumble. Righting himself immediately, Luke raised both of his hands, deflecting the follow-up blasts harmlessly around him. Three more came at him, splitting down the middle and dissipating to either side of him, before Xaos realised what Luke was doing and ceased the attack.
The Dark Lord seethed and gritted his teeth at the sight of his hated enemy once again surviving a furious assault with only a modicum of damage taken. Luke's strategy of repeated disengagement and defense reminded the Sith uncomfortably of a duel he had fought against Obi-Wan Kenobi during the Clone Wars...a duel Xaos had lost. Ceasing his volley of projectiles, Xaos reinforced the Dark Side energy he had summoned and spread it fully around his body, thus employing Force Hatred.
Sheathed in armor of pure agony, Xaos surged forward with renewed rage and sped to engage in a yet another assault. Conjuring a protective shield of Force energy around his body, Luke snapped his hand out, bringing his lightsaber spinning back into hand just in time to activate and intercept the first of Xaos’ savage cuts.
Immediately, he fell back, bringing his weapon up only to defend, ducking, dodging and parrying the multitude of lightning-fast attacks raining down on him.
Letting his spatial awareness handle his footwork, Luke concentrated on avoiding injury – if even a single cut found its mark, the fight was over. Worse, the raw hatred pouring off of Xaos’ body was beginning to interfere with his concentration, and his connection to the Force. Luke could feel it pressing against his Force shielding, like a constant tide of water – if it slipped through, it would wash over and submerge him, and then he was done. But as things were now, he was only defending until that inevitably happened.
I need to take a risk, Luke realised. Han had always been the gambler of the family – Luke, his brother-in-law’s experience, would just have to trust in his instincts.
Luke fell back another step, parried another blow – and then feinted, hasty and panicky. The feint gave way to another, and then a third, his lightsaber speedily changing direction three times until Luke felt a small gap open in his defences. Xaos noticed it too – his red blade met Luke’s, deftly flicking it out of the way before spearing in towards his ribs-
And Luke practically threw himself to the side, twisting out of the way of the weapon with less than an inch to spare. Shifting his weight onto one foot, Luke snapped his leg out and drove it into Xaos’ stomach once more, then put both feet back on the ground and leaped away. He landed gracefully and spun back to face Xaos, weapon raised in a guard – and his other hand already moving. Raising it above his head, he released a powerful wave of Force energy, throwing up dust and shards of rock from the statue. Reaching out with the Force, he seized the rock shards, along with a few heavy chunks of stone, and sent them hurtling at Xaos.
A brusque heave of air rapidly expelled from Xaos’ lungs as the Jedi Grandmaster’s feet drove into his abdomen and forced the Dark Lord to stumble backwards. As a hunk of rock grazed the side of his head, the incalculable wrath that had been brewing in the Sith for the entirety of this encounter at last overflowed. A low, growling, seething, hissing scream of fury began to build in Darth Xaos’ throat as the Force Hatred he had summoned flowed outwards. Waves of inky purple emanated from Xaos and washed over the room, disintegrating the projectiles hurled at him and filling the entire space with pure agony and destruction.
As the Dark Lord’s howling shout burst forth from where it had been lurking in the depths of his throat, the torrents of Dark Side energy grew brighter and more caustic. Hairline fractures began to appear on the massive transparisteel windows and grew into cracks. Pillars buckled and shook, causing chunks of ceiling to break loose and smash into bits on the floor below.
Darth Xaos’s fury grew greater and greater; soon the power being produced in the Force by his ire was enough to cause the man to slowly levitate higher with each passing second. Xaos’ arms spread wide and he threw his head back as the weightless sensation overtook him. Unable to take any more pressure, the windows burst outwards, their remains raining down in shards on the valleys below Bast Castle. With great patches of the ceiling gone at this point, Vjun’s acid rains had begun to pour into the chamber.
When the Sith Lord had reached a height roughly halfway towards the crumbling ceiling, the room could take no more of his assault. The walls and pillars tumbled inward, crushing the balconies to rubble, and slid downwards to crash into the cliffs on which Bast was built, taking a good portion of the floor with them. At the heart of this continuous explosion the Dark Lord was safe from falling debris; that close to him the intensity of the blasts instantly seared away any mass that dared approach.
But still Xaos raged as acid-laden rains whirled fiercely around him. He raged at every lost love, he raged at every fallen friend, he raged at every betrayal, trauma, indignity, frustration and horror he had suffered during his unnaturally long existence until, at last, he just raged. In the black depths of his fury he became a conduit to the immense Dark Side energy that slithered within Vjun’s surface.
The acid storms grew more intense by magnitudes yet the hellish glare of Xaos’ Force Hatred cast a tint across the globe. All over Vjun livestock flew into an uncontrollable rampage; bashing each other bloody inside the confines of their weather resistant barns. Meanwhile the sickly and aged began to die en masse, their compromised constitutions unable to take the weight of the energies that now pressed their planet’s surface, while infants wailed in an almost-unified chorus of terror. And, above it all, the Dark Lord of the Sith’s scream of pure hatred could be heard. Not only by every living being on the planet Vjun, but also by the most powerful Force-sensitives throughout the galaxy.
Finally, after what seemed to have been an eternity to all those aware of the occurrence, Darth Xaos’ attack subsided. And, as the intense blaze of the bombardment faded away, the newly acquired gap in Bast Castle’s structure became visible to distant onlookers. Landing with Force-enhanced grace on the jagged plateau covered in ridges and rubble that had once been the floor, Xaos slowly rose to take stock of his changed surroundings. The tail of his coat, now in tatters from the corrosive precipitation, billowed behind him on a cruel gale of sharp winds. Xaos summoned his lightsaber to his hand and reactivated it; the unwholesome rain began to reek acridly as it evaporated against the plasma blade’s heat.
Taking in such a tsunami of Dark Side power had turned the Dark Lord’s irises a poisonous yellow and left the whites of his eyes blackened and strewn with pronounced crimson veins. His breathing was ragged and heavy as he wordlessly battered away segment after segment of rubble with the Force in search of the Jedi he knew yet lived.
And as had happened so often before, the Dark Lord was proven right.
Near the center of the room, a pile of rubble began to shake, and then rise. Luke Skywalker raised the pile until he could fully stand, and then cast it aside. Calmly, he surveyed the scene, his lightsaber held loosely in his hand. He was covered in blood and dust; his clothes were torn and mangled, and the acid rain burned against his skin before he summoned the Force to shield himself from it.
Luke’s firm gaze met Xaos’, and he leaped high, out of his temporary tomb to land on an empty spot of ground.
“Don’t you understand, Xaos?” he asked, without any hesitation or hatred in his voice. “For all of your rage, all of your power, all of the destruction you wreak – the Sith will never win. The Jedi will always endure, to stand against you. Every single time.”
With a snap-hiss, his green blade flared to life, and he held it ready.
But Xaos was far beyond words at this point. Any semblance of reason, restraint or sanity had been washed away in the tidal wave of raw emotion that had rushed from his center outwards to shake the galaxy. A contemptuous, deranged laugh was the only response he offered to words that simply flowed from ear to ear without truly registering. He was intoxicated on the after burn of what he had unleashed and saw the man before him as already defeated. Never before had Xaos channeled such an overwhelming manifestation of the Force; there was not the faintest doubt in his mind that Luke had only barely survived the onslaught. And so, raising his hand to gesture towards Luke and sure that all victory required was for him to claim it, Xaos clenched it violently into a fist, seeking to snap Luke’s neck with the remainder of dark power that still sang in the Sith’s veins.
Luke felt another vice clamp down on either side of his neck, and his breathing cut off. That didn’t worry him – he had enough air in his lungs to sustain him. He felt the vice tighten, closing to snap his neck in half – and that didn’t worry him either. Inexorable, insurmountable power pressed against his throat –
- And Luke bathed himself in the Force. He stood in the sunlight, warmth running through his body – and in the face of that light, the darkness bearing down on his throat melted away.
Luke Skywalker began to glow. The currents of the Force shifted, and flowed through him like warm water. His wounds healed, and even the very dust on his body seemed to fade into the light. His perception of the world shifted, and Luke saw the man before him, saw five-thousand years stretching behind him, a thousand torments beating down on him. And he felt pity, and a slight pang of regret.
Lifting his lightsaber, Luke no longer needed to summon the Force. He was the Force, and the Force was him. He simply moved, faster than he had for six years, and launched into a dizzying series of blows, crashing his lightsaber against Xaos’ defence with sledgehammer blows, his form flawless, utterly calm and resolute in the knowledge that he was going to win this fight.
Xaos was almost struck by his opponent’s first blow as what he was seeing took its time sinking in. He couldn't understand how this was possible; he had unleashed the full fury of his might in a display which almost all other Force-sensitives throughout history could only ever envy. He had touched the heart of darkness itself yet Skywalker not only still stood but was assailing him with a renewed vigor that could scarcely be believed. Xaos’ normally crisp and quick lightsaber strikes were left listless and sloppy by his exhaustion. He had given everything already, there was nothing left.
As Luke’s blows began to strike home, Xaos felt his essence bleeding out as it always did when a host body began to enter mortality. But, a moment later, he realized that there was something utterly different this time. It was a sensation unlike any he had experienced before...no, he realized, he had felt this once long ago. He remembered when he had been cast out into the wilds during a harsh winter in his homeland. He had feared that he would die and sought shelter from the lethal cold, a search that ended in his transformation into a spiritual parasite.
Darth Xaos was dying, and he knew exactly why the Force was permitting it.
A giddy elation overcame him as the revelation came. An overwhelming sense of release vibrated through his every fiber; so many burdens too long carried were finally being put down. The flood revivified him and he rejoined battle with the Jedi enthusiastically. Though his blade’s movements were still shaky and imprecise thanks to his impending doom, his insane glee gave him sufficient energy to vigorously spring back into the exchange of blows with Luke.
In his serenity, his absolute conviction, Luke still felt surprise. Because he could feel from Xaos, of all things, glee. He had felt the realization that Xaos was going to lose – but no resignation, or desperation, or terror, had followed it. Xaos’ strikes and cuts were growing sloppier and sloppier, coming slower, but still he threw himself against Luke with unbridled vigor. And even now, an avatar of the Force in all but name, Luke was not omniscient – not for all his wisdom could he determine why.
Green met red, again and again. Luke’s lightsaber whirled around him, sizzling against Xaos’ blade so fast and fluidly it seemed like a literally wall of light had formed between the two men. Every strike that came at Luke he intercepted and turned away – and every riposte, every slash, cut, and strike, found its way inexorably closer to its mark. He stepped forward with every attack, slowly but surely driving the Dark Lord towards the crumbling walls. His lightsaber was a machine, methodically closing a box around Xaos that cut off all of his avenues of escape or counterattack.
On the mental plane the battle was unfolding almost identically. The Sith Lord blindly struck at the Jedi Master’s defenses, throwing brutish application of Force Dominate after artless blow of Force Madness. Here too the Dark Lord’s efforts were utterly in vain. Luke Skywalker’s mind was centered perfectly in luminous awareness of the Force and the techniques with which Xaos had twisted countless minds beyond repair could not so much as disturb the Jedi’s balance. The Sith Lord had wished to take Luke with him as he spiraled into oblivion but, like so many of Xaos’ aims had been, this was just the product of a mind desperately imposing a favorable narrative on to the tragedy it was enduring.
The end came when Xaos, distracted by a hopeless assault on Luke’s psyche, let his guard be pushed far too wide by one of the Jedi’s ripostes. In a single, clean motion Luke Skywalker drove his lightsaber through the center of Darth Xaos’ chest. Not wishing to mutilate his defeated foe’s body, Luke deactivated the blade as Xaos fell to the ruined surface that had been the floor.
Xaos barely felt the impact from his fall; the sensation of the streams of vitality that had been draining from him deepening and widening into rivers was too diverting. A ceaseless buzzing, thumping sound overcame all external auditory input while his muscles twitched feverishly and his vision narrowed to the cold Vjun skies above. His fingers clenched, dragging dust along the ground as spasms shaped them into fists. He coughed and gurgled as a splash of blood was expelled from his throat and ran down the sides of his face. His body grew cold, terribly cold, until he could scarcely feel his own limbs.
Yet the Dark Lord wore a smile on his face. Not a serene smile of acceptance or a satisfied smile of a life well lived but, rather, an utterly psychotic display of ecstasy that twisted his lips from ear to ear. For, in Xaos’ mind, he was convinced, utterly and irrevocably, that this was the fulfillment of his destiny. It had been the Force that had contrived to make him immortal so long ago, he had long believed that. It needed to preserve him so that, in time, he could take his fated role as Dark Lord of the Sith. That thought, that belief, had held him together for years now, freed him from the depths of agony he had once known. And now, the man believed, he had the ultimate proof of that conviction. He had persisted for millennia but, mere years after taking the title of Dark Lord; death’s doors were finally open to him. This was his reward from the Force and it meant that his purpose been fulfilled and the future was now completely sealed.
The Sith had won. Though even the wisest of men might not even suspect it at that time, the Dark Lord could hear the voice of the Force telling him it was true, inviting him to lay down the burdens he carried in its service. There could be rest now, repose amongst the dead. No one, Jedi or Sith, could alter the Grand Design’s immanent fulfillment.
With one final gasp of breath before his eyes went dim and lifeless, Xaos managed to choke out a pair of words, “At…last…”
-----
It begins with a ripple.
Echoing out from Vjun, it carries to all corners of the galaxy in the span of an instant.
All across the galaxy, the Sith feel the death of their Dark Lord.
On Lao-Mon, Lady Rhaenona emerges from sleep with a wail that carries deep into the jungle, her grief raising a thousand wild howls as she writhes and sobs.
On Ziost, Darth Lucifer’s form falters for the first time in decades. A well-aimed kick knocks him off of his feet, and the Massassi barely notices as he falls.
Near Duro, studying a hologram of a Star Dreadnought, Darth Reaver’s normally steady hand slips from the control panel, erasing hours of hard work as the man’s stare pierces far beyond the confines of the room.
On Corellia, a glass of brandy shatters in Darth Marda’s grip, drawing angry shouts from the bartender. Only later would he feel the bloody shards in his hands.
Near Yavin, submerged in a kaleidoscopic haze, Darth Xyrafus feels the ripple slice through him like a blade. Terrible clarity and loyal agony purge the chemicals from his system in moments.
On Korriban, fine tuning his starfighter, Darth Exolus’ hydrospanner slips and falls from his hands to clatter to the deck below. Hours pass before he retrieves it.
So too do the Jedi.
On Coruscant, Mara Jade Skywalker feels relief.
In hyperspace, Jacen Solo feels grim satisfaction.
On the borders of known space, Leia Organa Solo stiffens, then relaxes as she feels her brother’s warmth in the Force. She feels her husband’s concern from the cockpit controls, and gives him a warm smile.
Far beyond civilisation, Kam Solusar feels no measure of peace, or joy. But the absence of vengeful satisfaction in his heart brings him surprise, and then calm, and his path turns again towards the Light.
So too does a Chagrian, with a scar near his mouth and half a horn missing. His lightsaber in hand, he orders his pupils to halt, and revels in the feeling of victory.
So too does a woman, forgotten by the galaxy, now more machine than flesh. Her green eyes blink, and the shift in the Force tells her it will soon be time to act.
And on New Bethrezen, so too does a widow.
In front of her peers and subordinates, she stands, screaming the name of the Jedi Master as the floor beneath her buckles. Anger fills her, and fear fills those around her, as lightning begins to crackle through the air around her. The walls of the room buckle inwards and the windows shatter as she swears vengeance and gives into her hate.
Her screams of rage hide her smile.
-----
On Vjun, Luke stood above the fallen Dark Lord, and bowed his head. The storms outside had abated with Xaos’ anger – the only sounds in the room now were the whistle of the wind passing through the nearly-nonexistent ceiling, and the sound of Luke’s own breathing. The glow began to fade from his skin, and in its place Luke felt a terrible fatigue and exhaustion – but he didn’t miss the glow’s absence. That was the second time now that he had felt so attuned to the Force, and something instinctive told him it would be the last.
It disquieted Luke that Xaos had died so relieved. But, he supposed, the mind of an immortal man simply wasn’t something a normal person could empathise with.
A howl of grief shattered the quiet of the room. Luke spun, reigniting his lightsaber as a Sith wearing crimson armour that matched his lightsaber charged through the doors. His blade met Luke’s in a ferocious blow, but his anger had made him sloppy; Luke easily blocked the blow and countered with one of his own.
The exchange between the two men was furious, but short, a faint shadow of the duel that had concluded moments before. The Jedi Master easily parried every single one of the Sith’s attacks until the man overexerted himself an inch too far. In a blur of green, Luke hacked off his lightsaber’s emitter, and flung the shocked Sith backwards into the wall without a blast of Force energy. Dazed and consumed by his anger, the Sith pulled a knife from his belt and charged Luke again.
Cutting the man down, Luke knew, would have been a simple matter. Most of the Council would have supported the death of one more Sith Lord. But when he realised that fact in a moment of decisive clarity, Luke decided that nobody else was going to die today.
The Jedi let him draw close, then dodged out of the way of his stab and simply clubbed him over the back of the head with his lightsaber hilt. The Sith stumbled forward, giving Luke ample time to catch up, catch him, and knock him out with a stunning blast of Force energy. Luke felt the man slump in his arms, and laid him down on a relatively clear space away from Xaos’ body.
A glint of silver on the man’s belt drew his eye, and when Luke reached down to pull it out and investigate, he found the Force was with him – the small device was an Imperial code cylinder, and given that the Sith carrying it was most certainly an important one its access codes would be high-level. With a sigh of relief, Luke realised how he was going to get out of here in one piece.
The sensation of people approaching from outside the room spurred him into action. Standing, he quickly pulled out his comlink, and slotted the code cylinder into a port on its side.
“Artoo?” he asked, thumbing the comlink on. A series of relieved beeps greeted him, and he managed a smile. “I don’t think I can make it back to the ship, but I’m transmitting some codes to you now. See if you can’t use them to shut down the castle’s defences, then bring the Starstorm out and pick me up.”
The doors slid open, and a dozen red lightsabers ignited in the dark behind it.
“And Artoo? Make it fast.”
-----
Frozen with fear, Joran Blaise sat alone in his bunker.
He knew Lord Xaos himself was in the castle, fighting Luke Skywalker. Everyone on the comm channels has been talking about it. Then he’d felt the storm, and given into the compulsion to hide under his table whilst it raged outside. Now, everything had died down and left only an eerie quiet behind – and had left Joran alone with his thoughts.
He had lead Luke Skywalker himself into the castle. Worse, practically to its most secure vault! No, he hadn’t lead him there directly, but Joran knew that the Lord-Governor, Darth Aristo, likely wouldn’t see it that way. He couldn’t pretend to hide the fact – sooner or later they’d check the security feeds and see Joran leading the Jedi Master in his stupid disguise straight into their stronghold, and then they’d find him, and if he was lucky they’d just shoot him, but maybe they’d fry him with lightning instead, or screw with his mind, and then they’d have him begging for death and if he was lucky they would –
Joran’s head snapped up as a starship roared past his bunker. His existential fears temporarily forgotten, he leaped to his feet and raced to the window, peering out to see an old Corellian freighter speeding low towards the distant castle. That low, they’d be below the castle’s main sensor sweeps – even his bunker’s sensors hadn’t picked it up. This was his chance, Joran realised! It must be more Jedi, coming to rescue Skywalker – if he took that ship down, when the Consul killed Skywalker they wouldn’t even remember he’d lead the Jedi Master into the castle. Maybe they’d even praise him instead, give him a promotion, get him out of this damn metal box and off this acidic hell-hole.
Excited, Joran ran to his weapons panel – and the excitement died as quickly as it had come. His turret was down, presumably knocked out by the fierce storm earlier. Thinking quickly, Joran ran instead to his communications panel. If he couldn’t shoot it down himself, he could at least raise the alarm, save his own neck if nothing else –
His communications were down as well. Swearing, Joran dug out his personal comlink and thumbed it on – and static greeted him. All of their comms were down. Frantic, Joran slapped the emergency alarm panel – and still nothing happened. It was down. The elevator, he quickly found, was down. The computers were down. Everything was down. Even the bloody caf machine was down!
-----
Piloted by a blue-and-white astromech, the Lady Starstorm sped towards Bast Castle. It finally began to rise as it drew near, ascending well into the castle’s sensor coverage – if anything in Bast Castle had still worked, the ship would have set off countless alarms and probably called half of the Union fleet in to subdue the intruder. Unfortunately for the technicians running around the castle trying to figure out why everything with a microchip was offline, the Lord-Governor’s access codes had fallen into the hands of an astromech that had once sliced its way into a Super Star Destroyer and crashed it into an Imperial superweapon.
If it were possible for an astromech to be self-satisfied, R2-D2 could have put an Imperial Moff to shame.
The Starstorm climbed until it rose into sight of the shattered statue room, whereupon Artoo swung the ship on its side and lowered the landing ramp. Despite being used to a starfighter, the astromech nimbly maneuvered the clumsy vessel until the landing ramp was close enough to jump to.
Inside the statue room, his muscles burning with fatigue, Luke Skywalker held off a half-dozen furious Dark Disciples. His green blade formed an impenetrable wall around the Jedi Master, never stopping, deflecting lightsaber strikes, splitting thrown chunks of duracrete and statue, severing hands and cutting lightsabers in half. Fighting exhaustion and on the brink of passing out, Luke Skywalker put up a desperate defence against his attackers.
And unfortunately for the average Dark Disciple, a desperate defence from Luke Skywalker was considerably more than they could handle.
Half a dozen of their peers already lay on the floor, clutching severed hands and limbs or slumped, dazed, against the walls he had thrown them into. Two more joined them in short order when they were distracted by the arrival of the Starstorm, and Luke leaped through the gap in the circle they left behind.
As his boots hit the floor again, the door to what remained of the upper level walkway opened, and blaster fire began to pour towards Luke from the Union troopers who surged into the room. Ducking behind a thick fragment of duracrete, Luke took shelter for a moment to catch his breath. Peeking around the edge of the fragment, he saw the main doors open again to permit the entry of a trio of Union troopers who rapidly set up an E-Web blaster cannon.
Instead of Luke’s cover, they opened fire at the Starstorm, spattering blaster bolts against weak shields Luke knew wouldn’t hold for long. Sensing the approach of the remaining four Disciples, Luke waited until they were almost on him and the blaster fire aimed at him had subsequently lessened before he sprang into action.
Rolling out from behind his cover, he locked his lightsaber on and threw it, sending it spinning around the room to slice through the walkway’s remaining support columns. With a tortured groan of metal, the walkway collapsed, taking the soldiers atop it down with it and crushing the E-Web moments after the soldiers manning it leaped out of the way.
His lightsaber slapped back into his palm just in time for him to parry the first attacks from the remaining Dark Disciples, but Luke’s handy defeats of their fellows had eclipsed their rage at the death of Darth Xaos. They fought hesitantly, and Luke wasted no time in removing the hands of two, the foot of a third, and the arm of another.
The corners of his vision were edging into black, and the entire world was wavering, when he bent down to lift up Xaos’ body and heft it onto his shoulder. That was the last step of the Jedi’s plan - to deny them Xaos’ body, and prevent them from entombing it in the Valley of the Dark Lords. And it was just as well that he did – more and more soldiers poured into the room as he ran for the Starstorm’s boarding ramp, but they were all hesitant to shoot at him, afraid as they were of hitting the Dark Lord’s body.
Only a few blaster bolts chased him as he ran and leaped, the Force carrying him up to the boarding ramp and landing him safely on it. Considerably more joined in as the freighter began to pull away, but the rain of blaster bolts did nothing against the freighter's shields, and the soldiers could only watch as the Jedi Master fled with the body of their Dark Lord.
-----
Laying Xaos’ body down on one of the beds in the sleeping quarters, Luke ran into the cockpit, and was greeted by a chiding series of beeps and whistles.
“Sorry I took so long, Artoo,” he apologized, unable to conceal his smile. Hopping into the pilot’s seat, he took control of the vessel over from the Astromech. “You took down all of their turbolasers?” An affirmative beep. “Alright, keep an eye on the scopes. They’ll be sending fighters after us any-”
An indignant series of beeps cut Luke off, questioning as to whether he thought Artoo was such an amateur as to forget to lock down the hangars and ground the TIE Fighters. Grinning, Luke patted the Astromech on his dome and angled the freighter sharply upwards. “Alright, then we just need to dodge that gunship in orbit and we’re home free.”
They broke out of the atmosphere several dozen kilometers from Union-1, which gave chase at its considerably slower top speed. Unable to catch up, the Patrol Cruiser instead locked on to the freighter’s signature and fired every chased its laser cannons instead, rocking the Lady Starstorm with every shot that glanced off of its shields. But it couldn’t hope to hit the freighter, not when it was so far away, and not with one of the galaxy’s best living pilots at its controls.
The Patrol Cruiser’s captain could only thump the arm of his command chair in frustration as the freighter that had flagrantly trespassed in secure Union airspace jumped to lightspeed. When he later learned the full circumstances of the freighter’s escape from Vjun, his failure to avenge his Dark Lord haunted him for years to come.
-----
Luke only let himself relax when the course to Ossus was successfully laid in to the navicomputer and Vjun was far behind them. When he did, his fatigue finally crashed into him like a wave, and he slumped into his chair, utterly exhausted. It was pure adrenaline that had kept him going after the fight – after he had channeled so much Force power. In its absence, the Jedi Master found himself too weak to so much as stand up. Concerned, Artoo rolled up beside him and beeped. Luke gave the astromech a reassuring smile.
“I’m alright, Artoo,” he told the droid. “Just exhausted. Can you take over the controls?”
The astromech beeped affirmatively, then rolled behind his chair to plug back into the ship’s systems. Luke was content to just sit there, drained. He was getting way too old for this.
They’d done it. At last, they’d done it. Without Xaos, the Union would tear itself apart in months, and the Jedi could focus on dealing with the remaining Brotherhood members when the dust had settled. Luke thought he should feel relieved, even elated – but instead he just felt tired, and more than a little unsettled.
Too many of Xaos’ words had struck close to home.
Luke had spent his entire life since he’d left Tatooine fighting. The Empire, its Remnants, the Shadow Academy, the Yuuzhan Vong, and now the Union. He’d clashed with more Dark Siders than he could count, and found them responsible for, it seemed like, nearly every obstacle the New Republic had faced save the Yuuzhan Vong.
When his father had thrown the Emperor into the heart of the second Death Star, Luke had believed that was the end of the Sith. But always the Dark Side had returned, even ensnaring Luke himself once, before his sister’s love had saved him. This was the fourth Dark Lord of the Sith he’d fought – Darth Vader, the Emperor, and Shira Brie – Lumiya. And when he compared the man he had just killed to the Dark Lords he had faced before, he realised how utterly different Darth Xaos had been. The Imperial Dark Lords had acted from their own self-interests – but right through to the end, Xaos had been utterly convinced that what he was doing was right, that he truly was the galaxy’s greatest hope, that he walked the right path.
And as he realised that, the Jedi’s hope that the Union problem would now effectively sort itself out began to fade. He wondered instead about the people loyal to Xaos – Unionism was only on the rise, and it was spreading across the entire Outer Rim and into the coreward regions of the Slice. The citizens of the Union were fanatical in their devotion to its cause – Xaos’s cause – and the New Sith Brotherhood was no different. If Xaos had imparted not only his beliefs, but his depth of belief to his followers…the Union war was far from over.
Luke wondered then about Xaos himself – his last words, everything he had said to Luke, everything he had done in the Outer Rim, his unshakeable convictions.
In a flash of clarity that cut through his exhaustion, the Jedi Master saw the Dark Lord not as a man, but as a riddle that the Force had presented to him, the leader of the New Jedi Order. And with a sinking heart, Luke came to the conclusion that he had answered incorrectly.
He had tried, with all of his heart, to convince Xaos to step away from the Dark Side, to join Luke and the Jedi, to become the force for good that he so fervently believed he was – and Xaos had thrown the words back in his face.
And how could he not have? Luke realised at last. I came ready to kill him, and drew him into a fight for that very reason. Who would listen to their most hated enemy when you’re both pointing blasters at each other?
Doubt and remorse wove together in his mind, gripping him. Under different circumstances – had they met elsewhere, had Luke not come so decidedly ready to met the Dark Lord in battle, had they ever spoken outside of their duels – maybe it could have all been different.
Maybe Xaos would be standing beside him as an ally, rather than lying dead as an enemy.
Faced with the Sith, Luke had realised, the Jedi were changing – and now he wasn’t sure they were going down the right path. The realization that the rest of the Council wouldn’t have batted an eye at him cutting down a dazed Sith alarmed him, and all of them had dismissed Xaos as irredeemable. Luke knew that not everyone was his father – the Emperor, Exar Kun, they had shown him that not everyone was redeemable. But with growing alarm, Luke realised the Jedi now thought that nobody was.
He’d need to consult with Mara, meditate on this matter, seek guidance from the Force – and then speak with his peers, determine what should be done, find where it had been that the battered-but-hopeful Jedi Order that had survived the Yuuzhan Vong War had grown so cynical.
But all of that could wait until he had reached Ossus, and left Xaos’ body with the academy there for a proper burial.
Luke Skywalker made himself a promise then. So many people, good and honest people, had been drawn into Xaos’ delusions, had come to believe that the Sith way, that war and suffering and subjugation, were the only way to peace. And he knew it was his duty to help them see what was wrong with that ideal. To help them out of the darkness Xaos had left behind, and back into the light.
Luke had failed to solve the riddle that was Darth Xaos. He promised that he would not fail the people that the Dark Lord had left behind.
-----
Mara Jade Skywalker held her son’s hand as her husband’s starship settled down on the landing platform. Coruscant was just edging out of twilight, and the twinkling lights of Galactic City lit up the buildings all around them.
She wouldn’t have admitted it to most people, but Mara was glad Ben was still happy to hold her hand – at nearly seven, and with his ‘awesome cousin Jacen’ influencing him, Mara was worried he’d soon enter a ‘too cool for my parents’ phase.
When the landing ramp lowered, and her husband and his astromech descended it, Ben surprised her again – breaking into a run, he leaped into his father’s armed. Mara grinned, and the quiet worry that she would never see such a sight again faded from her heart. Jogging to join them, she embraced her husband, ignoring R2-D2 beeped with annoyance at being left out.
Perched on his father’s shoulder, Ben was chattering away happily, telling Luke all about his camping trip with Jacen, about the Ewoks, about all the cool things Jacen had shown him like how to make a ladder and how to build a fire and how to fish – and Mara realised hadn’t seen the calm joy present on the farmboy’s face since before the start of the Union War.
Finally, Ben finished, wrapping his arms around his father’s head and hugging him before finally permitting him to speak to his wife.
“There’s a lot we need to talk about,” Luke told her. Mara knew that tone, the hidden urgency and importance it contained – but she just held up a finger, quieting him. “That can wait,” she stated firmly. “You, farmboy, have earned some quality family time with us.”
Luke, who knew better than to argue even if he’d wanted to, smiled, and took his wife’s hand. Together, the Skywalker family – including one loyal astromech – returned to the Jedi Temple.