Legacy IV

Chapter 1

Cliegg Lars was a man in love.

Not for the first time, of course. No. Like many, he had first been smitten by Love's bitter shafts as a young man, in the days when he dreamed that life would hold more for him than moisture farming on a miserable, economically depressed dustball in the godless Rims. He, like most young men, had been a rebel against the strictures of his allotted destiny – and in the Core he had found disillusionment and Alka. The former had broken his heart: the wastelands of the glittering Core worlds were inner, rather than outer, deserts of the spirit - more arid in their own way than Tatooine's Dune Sea. The latter had mended his aching heart: in Alka he had discovered that love was an oasis more precious, more paradisiacal than any mirage spun of heat and delusion.

When Alka gave him a son – that would be Owen, now a young man himself – he had thought his happiness complete.

Until she died. And that was when he had sworn off love and his dreams of rebellion, and returned to Tatooine – to lick the bleeding wounds of utter defeat and seek for understanding in sand and endless sky, in nature's miserly parsimony, in submitting docilely to the burden of his inherited role.

In the desert, there was room enough to accommodate even the most infinite sadness; under the glare of two suns, there was no time to contemplate it. And so, gradually, he had adapted to his destiny, and raised his son to be steadfast moisture farmer like his father, and his father before him. Neither rebellion nor love had persecuted his placid inner realm for this long, long decade and more.

Until now. And for Cliegg Lars, now had a pair of eyes in which tender compassion was distilled into a deep soft brown like the exquisite fungus that appeared, miraculously, upon the desert's sands after dewfall. Mannah, the natives called it. Heaven's bounty. The woman was an angel descended, gift and bearer at once. Her name was Shmi Skywalker. And she returned his love, in equal measure. There was only one, fatal, problem.

She was a slave.

Torbb Bakk'ile had no love for piracy.

She did not hate it, per se; a Jedi Knight shall not know anger or hatred. And Torbb, a solid ten years into her Knighthood, and in the fourth decade of her eventful life, was wise and experienced enough to know that conformity to type was itself the greatest form of courage. Passion -and sometimes even compassion - tempted the heart to find exception in personal circumstance, and dispensation in such exception. For any individual to foreswear the seemingly innate privilege of uniqueness, to admit that this or that outrage, this or that suffering, held no priority over any other in the universal order of things… that was courage.

It was renunciation. It was detachment. And it was the only sure, if precarious, path between the equally fatal abysses of love and hate.

In the end, these two lay perilously close – so intimately nestled together that some philosophers have supposed them indistinguishable in root and essence, so volatile and ambiguous that they easily transmute one into the other, as fluid and treacherous as quicksilver itself.

"But Master Seva does not agree," her current traveling companion observed, in a mellifluous tone that suggested mere academic interest.

Torbb was not fooled. "You waste time reading obscure tractates on the nature of love?" she scoffed, good-naturedly, crossing one enormous leg over the opposite knee, dark cassock-style robes falling in heavy folds about her gargantuan boots.

" Only so I can waste more time arguing about it with Master Jinn."

Obi-Wan Kenobi was an enigma, more often than not; whether this last remark was a mere verbal parry, rebuffing her implied censure, or whether it were a frank admission of lasting and deeply personal interest in the subject, Torbb could not say. The young Knight – barely old enough to hold the rank, but serious enough in said vocation to rival any dour and ascetical elder – moved through conversations like a duelist, feinting and reversing, melting away from direct attack then suddenly thrusting in for a whiplash strike. Forthright to a fault – as her contemporaries and especially the junior members of the Temple community had intimated – Torbb found her companion's elusive style strangely appealing, a comfortable counterweight to her own nature.

"You two bicker like a pair of old biddies," she scoffed. "I wouldn't tolerate it if I were in Master Jinn's shoes, Kenobi."

A sly shrug met this recommendation. "Ah, but the student must teach the master, or the pairing is not right."

"I thought you weren't his padawan anymore?"

"No… but there is some remedial teaching still left to do. And far be it from me to shirk any duty, however odious."

Torbb Bakk'ile guffawed heartily at that , glossy black topknot swishing over one burly shoulder as she leaned against the passenger compartment's bulkhead. "Tell me what Master Seva says, then, since listening to yourself talk is part of duty now."

Obi-Wan raised both brows, acknowledging the jest without admitting to the hit. Sprawled on the single inset bunk, hands propped idly behind his head, one knee bent and the other boot-tip contemplatively tapping the wall paneling, he presented a picture of careless relaxation unexpected in a man presently embroiled in a pirate hunt.

But that was Kenobi for you, all over again. Torbb shifted, impatient, expecting a gentle jibe in return.

Instead, she received a quiet and sober answer. "He says that love is entirely prior and superior to hate, which is nothing but its privation and reflection; and also that of the two, love brings greater strength, deeper understanding … and more profound suffering."

Torbb pursed her lips. "Wise man, your Master Seva."

She had never been much one for philosophy classes as an initiate or padawan. And she had little time for them in the present moment, either. For now, she had a job to do, one both destined and unspeakably distasteful.

But a Jedi does what she must. And in this case, she would have no other living being do it in her stead.

Anakin Skywalker loved his mother.

Not just in the way that any eight - almost nine- year old boy loves his mother. His love was a thing palpable, an armor and mantle that he shaped about her soft shoulders, wrapped in heavy folds of need and fierce protectiveness about her slight frame. It was his love that fended off predators, stayed Watto's whiphand, barricaded them from starvation and privation, kept Shmi happy. She needed him.

And he needed her, more than any child ever born had words to express. Shmi was the gentle womb sheltering him from that which lurked beyond, a cruel world figured and signified by Tatooine's wastes and villanies – the reaching maw of Fate slavered for him, open-jawed and hungry, eager to consume him and render him other than himself, hammer him into some new and awful form upon an anvil of destiny. He knew it, he dreamt it, he felt it in his bones.

And when Anakin had premonitions, they came true.

Which is why he protected his mother with his love. It kept her safe from all the bad things that constituted the galaxy at large, and it kept him safe from those same depredations, those cruel exigencies masquerading as mere chance. He knew that he was Special because she told him so every day. He wished that he were not. But he was also thankful to whatever nameless power had rendered him so, for the curse was also a blessing, the brand of his shame a weapon in his hand. He was gifted, and he would use that gift to stop bad things happening, to ward off the debt collectors sent to demand payment for his secret, awesome, inheritance.

The only problem was that it didn't always work. He was only eight –almost nine- years old, after all.

"Mom. Mom! What's wrong?"

Shmi seldom wept in his presence; when she did, it was terrifying.

A sun-weathered hand pulled him into the most familiar, the most blissful of embraces. "Oh Ani." Warm breath against the top of his head. He buried his nose in her bosom, smelling the dusty linen of her shift-dress. "Bad news. Watto has declared bankruptcy. He will have to sell everything."

Anakin frowned. Watto was a greedy, ill-tempered sleemo whose gambling addiction kept him on a giddying cycle of disaster and sudden redemption. Bankruptcy had threatened to take his junk-dealership more than once, even within Anakin's memory. "That happens all the time."

"No." Shmi's grip tightened. "This is different. I heard them talking in Mos Espa. The Hutts are sending an enforcer."

That was bad. Watto must really be in trouble with the planet's vermiform crime bosses this time. And selling everything meant… "He's gonna sell us too, huh?"

"He'll have too."

But that was all right. Watto was a cheating, lying, cowardly barve – but for some inscrutable reason, he was decent to his slaves. Besides owning them like chattel in the first place, of course. "We'll be together," he asserted. And he would always protect her.

But Shmi's arms grew rigid around him, and she began to weep in earnest. "Oh, Ani, you don't understand. When Gardulla sold us, you were a baby.. you needed me. They kept us together. But Watto has been bragging about you for years – how you can fix things, how clever you are… oh, ma buki - I can't – "

Anakin's heart thumped against his ribs, defiant and appalled. They could be separated? Forever?

"NO!" he hollered. "I won't let them!" He would kill whoever tried to wrest them apart, he would –

"Shush, shush- we can't –"

"Yes, we can! I'm not losing you, Mom! I'm not!"

And to prove the point he tore himself from her trembling grasp and hurtled into the darkened streets outside the slave quarters, a furnace like the liquid heart of a sun kindling beneath his ribs. Heat rose off the packed stone road to meet him; sand eddied in furious curlicues at his feet. Fire. Fire. Fire.

I am not a slave. I am a person!

His protest rose to the star-dusted heavens. Regal, aloof, the thousand million points of light peered down at him, immovable and serene. Out there, far away, lay the Republic, a fabulous conglomeration of free worlds where slavery was illegal, where wealth ran in the streets and water fell from the sky. Gorgeous people populated its paradises, and heroes with laser swords and magical powers righted its wrongs. Starships flitted from one glittering island of life to the next, flocks of silver birds winging on high among the empyrean clouds of milk-white. All this happened without him, in ignorance of his very existence. The thought was crushing.

I am a person and my name is Anakin!

But the stars made no answer, offered no comfort that night. Or the next. Or the next.

Hatred, like its feeble counterpart love, demands a period of courtship.

Where love inspires a sweet yearning, a melting surrender of self , a reigning passion profound enough to drive away all other appetites and even sleep, hate does more: its first taste is like infatuation, titillating, intoxicating. From thence it deepens, burning into the flesh and the heart like a boring beetle, waxing into a yearning of bloodlust sufficient to subsume every other passion into the bonfire of its obsession. The object of hatred is a kind of beloved, a coy and elusive prey, a thing to be seduced, degree by slow degree, into hatred's smelting-furnace, into the embrace of final extinction.

Like a lover in the flush of longing, the hunter cherished the image of his chosen victim- the worthy opponent, the equal match. Ambition fired his longing, for he had labored long and endured great suffering to come this far, within reach of the most coveted rank and title in all the galaxy, the blackest mantel of an occult royalty. He had once possessed another name, now forgotten. Nameless, though his flesh was scarred and desecrated by obscene nomenclature, forbidden oaths painted upon his skin in ash and blood, he strove to merit a better and new title.

He would be Darth. Lord. Master. Conqueror. Vengeance embodied.

To be so anointed, he must pass his Trials; among the tasks appointed to test his mettle, to plumb the pure depths of his hatred, was this: the wooing of a perfect enemy, a child of Light to be tempted and overthrown, seduced and owned – and then sacrificed upon the pitiless altar of darkness. To corrupt a Jedi was to kill him twice; physical death mattered little once the spirit had been violated.

The very thought sent a shiver down his spine,

And in the accomplishment of this task there lay another: for his Master – cruel slave driver, fearsome deity, center of his pain-filled universe – had sent him upon another quest, a hunt for something Special. A child, scryed as though through dark glass, a prodigy born to lowliness, destined to greatness, the fulcrum and tipping point of this age, of the next. A being with no name, as yet.

Like the hunter, this child waited to be given his proper title. He waited for power, for true freedom.

This unknown child and this chosen Enemy both waited. They hid, they fled, they eluded capture. But not for long. Their time was coming, their reckoning grew nigh. The hunter had scented the ethereal wind and found the Dark currents eddying, pooling, coagulating, about a singular Place. Like lovers magnetically drawn to a secluded grotto, the Enemy and he crept nearer, nearer, closing in upon the quarry, upon one another.

The hunter licked his tattooed lips and groaned deep in his throat. Soon. Not soon enough.

But soon.