NOTES: Not as happy with this as I could be, but I don't want to over-edit it either. So, please enjoy a return to Vader's perspective, in which our favorite Sith Lord competes for gold in the Philosophical Olympic category of Rationalizing Like Hell. Among other things. ;-) As several readers have pointed out, Padme will NOT be happy once she's back on her feet.

Hopefully any flaws I perceive are just me being fussy- I do hope you enjoy!
Just a head's up: this section does briefly deal with a few medical/biological issues associated with pregnancy. For further details, check the end notes.

Afterimage 4/?
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory (garnettrees)

'I have the power to save the ones you love,' the deceiver had said, far too recently for his pretense at forgetfulness to be anything but an insult. Snake-tongued seller of wells on a waterless world! How quickly his promises degenerated into ambiguities. 'To cheat Death is a power only one has achieved...' Any hope offered fell apart the moment it was grasped in the hands of a man who, appropriately, no longer exists. 'If we work together, I know we can discover the secret...'

The truth is, Plagueis failed- catastrophically so- before he ever succeeded in his unnatural aims.

Wherein lay the madness of the ancient Sith, then? That he made the blasphemous attempt to begin with, or that- seeing the horror and heartache he raised- he was willing to try again?

Less than a ten-day after resurrecting his wife, Vader lingers by her bedside, watching the barely perceptible rhythm of her breathing and the play of shadow across her face. Only hints of dreaming- none of it well-omened- can be seen through the ice of her sedated repose. When Padme does wake, she is quiet and stoic, miserable in a way discernible only to one who has himself felt the slow poisoning of reality by hallucination. She is in pain, in agony the likes of which he once authored against her and swore to perpetrate no more. Inescapably, physical attrition is turning the tide of this war.
Turning the tide against him.

He stands presently, therefore, on a metaphorical precipice from which all

(the blood, the vows broken, the screams of children and the searing coals placed each one against his flesh)

his great effort and sacrifice might still result in loss.

Vader's problem is not- thank all dark forces, and even neutral ones- that which doomed Plagueis' initial attempt. That peril he has avoided entirely, having benefited from his predecessor's necessary trial and error. He has bested the adversary, taken back that which Death had no right to take or keep. In the tradition of the best Mos Espa grifters, he has robbed the thief. But what that bitch-goddess releases with one arthritic hand, she grabs back coyly with the other.

Unlike Plagueis, there will be nothing left for Vader if Padme is lost. No pale reflection of a true image to settle for as second best. He has cast aside name, history, and- most frivolous of all- the identity of his master, all for this. In a Lightless universe (he cares not one jot for the more positive component of the Force; what concerns him is another source of illumination altogether), only the cold pursuit of power would remain. The vacuum in which fire cannot burn.

('For what,' asks a small boy who never existed, erased from history by hills of magma heavier and more damning than the Dune Sea, '_what_ good is power, if there is no one to protect?')

His wife's case is not precisely analogous to the galaxy's single previous example of successful resurrection, either- something Vader would do well to remember. After all, Darth Plagueis' second 'subject' had only been dead a few days though, conversely, preserved with medical resources far more slim than his erstwhile successor has access to. As for that other, the first and most precious being whom the sorcerer had, in his haste to rescue, ultimately failed...
No. No, Vader will not think of it.

Nor will he think of aught but bringing Padme through this latest of many trials, of the larger subterfuge by which he means to shield her so she may strengthen and recover. There is more arrayed against him than mere violation of natural law. He knows quite well the Palpatine's malign, rummy eye is upon him. It is ever so, given the fate of all Sith apprentices to either usurp their master or die. After so much faithful time on Coruscant by (her) the Emperor's side, his absence is a notable thing. His supposed errands- wholly but convincingly invented- are of a brief duration, and his Master will have noticed the brief but profound upheaval in the matrix of the universe, besides. Even the dullest potential will have sensed it, if any are left to do so. The Sidious can no doubt see the tear- nothing can be done about that. What is paramount now is that he cannot presently see (and therefore must be kept from seeing) that it is Padme who has emerged, whole and untainted, in the wake of this disturbance.

Her essence- that spark of opal flame Vader so contrived to snare- remains thankfully undamaged. She is as she has always been: determined, insightful, simultaneously keen of mind and intuition, balancing intellect on the pivot of her hidden heart. She knows her own mind, if not its contents. In those first few days (and even now, through her suffering), she proved to be every atom the woman who so easily drew his natural fealty before the Jedi had even been a possibility. It is her hand that rests against the pathetic remnants of his organic being; her eyes which, though fearful, give the beast-automaton he has become just enough grace to truly earn her trust. The part of her which has always known him responds even now, and the searching, bemused smiles she once sent him covertly have made their reappearance. In time- that is, the Time Before, another man's ancient history- she gradually came to understand much of his heart and mind. It was his initial childish ardor that had perplexed her somewhat and, lacking any way to articulate that old certainty to her, he swiftly allowed it to be overshadowed by the passion of a man.

No longer that child or that man, he cannot reveal himself to her. At present, such transparency would have no meaning. Any details of her life he shared with her would be like second-hand breath- rodded of vitality, and quite possibly poisonous. Her history would seem only a rumor, tragic anecdote, or only a story concocted by finger-waving grandames.

The time for her to know who has wrested her from Death is only the most distant notion, and if that metaphor seems to imply she is only a possession,

('Jealousy, fear, possession- of the Dark Side, are they.')

that is not his intent. One can no more say Padme has ever lacked will than one could claim the suns lack heat. She is merely trapped in potentia. Without knowledge, and the feeling behind it, one cannot give allegiance.

(Surely she would not- she _could not_- pit herself against him in the matter of her own existence?)

Having been in part the hand

(which cast its ghostly counterpart to crush and stifle the throat he'd once so devotedly kissed)

that helped prematurely end her life, Vader does not quite have the hubris to use the term 'rescue' in regards to her resurrection. She might think him a torturer if she knew, for her eyes beseech him when obscuring clouds of pain lift enough that she is conscious. Her gaze implies that she is at his mercy, begging that he end her torment somehow. She treads agony as she once did the waters of Naboo. No longer laughingly, daring him to follow and coaxing him to swim. Instead she is tiring, disappearing beneath the waves more often, and for intervals of increasing length. He fears he is left trying to aid her with a double-edged sword. Hilt-less, he holds it out to her, but there is no way she can grasp it without maiming her hands.

('Hate has one edge, love has two.')

No Jedi saying, that- the Temple had no aphorisms about love, though Force knew they had maxims to spare otherwise. It is Padme's voice, of course; Padme reading from some weathered tome, stroking his hair with her free hand, calming nerves exhausted but too restless to sleep. Her presence has always been soothing, just as his dreams have ever been uneasy things in one way or another. Now, poured into this suit like charred fragments into an urn, he does not truly sleep at all. His mind rests, as all sentient beings require, but he cannot reach the deepest levels- that which the medi-droids call 'delta-wave'- for more than a handful of minutes at a time.
They say such deprivation can cause madness. For him, it is a relief.

('Dreams pass, in time...'

'Anakin, no!'

'You die in childbirth.')

Fool of a boy he had been, to heed Obiwan's trite advice when his mother's life might have been saved. The Force echoes as it organizes events towards their potential conclusions and so, while the future is always in motion, the number of permutations is finite. Vader does not believe in 'destiny', but even he cannot deny the gravity which seems to hold certain inescapable occurrences in place. The moment Padme died, it became incontrovertible that she would again live. He will set worlds turning at a brush of her fingertips, lay whole star systems at her feat. Still, he cannot bring back the child she so anticipated, though he knows- is resentfully certain- she would summon the sheer determination to live for it.

'But I am here,' he thinks during the long static of respirator cycles. 'You would not take my hand before, but take it now. I will answer to that other name one last time, if you will only look and see that the fire could not burn away the part of myself I pledged to you.'

She would recoil- she would. He has seen her endeavor to hide the instinctive flinch his appearance and aura of darkness summon. The obfuscations are necessary and, (if) as she lives, they will likely grow into outright lies. There's a certain freedom in that- in razing to the ground all that came before.

Never mind the Jedi and their dross about the shackles of deception. Vader knows the Truth can be a cage as well.
After all, he's living in one.

"The pride of the Jedi," Emperor Palpatine often remarks to his apprentice, "was their undoing."

Enjoying, no doubt, the double meaning hidden therein; that the child Qui Gon had championed as the Chosen One, had rescued from the far and dusty corner of the universe, became the mechanism for their destruction. Vader knows that, despite Master Jinn's endorsements, he was never the pride of the Temple. His Sith mentor is well aware of this too, but Sidious is a creature willing to make factual sacrifices for historical aesthetics. The newly released twelve-volume chronicle of 'The Savage Pre-Imperial Centuries' is proof enough of that.

It is somewhat cheering that Palpatine's sense of the dramatic has sown the seeds for his own undoing.

When his new Master first gifts Vader with the world of Vjun, his surprise is so great he has no hope of hiding it. He must grovel, then,

(a distasteful task, but an art every slave must effect with an apparent sincerity almost as strong as their duplicity)

and confess that a creature of such lowly birth and so few possessions would, of course, experience shock and disbelief when presented with so generous a gift. Privately, he thinks back to the evening in Palpatine's personal box, when the then-Chancellor first spoke to him of Plagueis. That night the entertainment fare had been Mon Calamari water ballet, but the Emperor has a marked taste for any form of 'refined' theatrics. Opera, shadow theater, silk-mask pantomime, the swaying melodies of Twi'lek courtesans, and the polyvalent organ fugues of the nearly extinct Ortolan- Sheev Palpatine is a connoisseur of them all. Such entertainment seems to be one of his few indulgences, aside from political manipulation and the occasional active participation in the lengthy torture of some underling or another. 'It is important to continue getting one's hands dirty, now and again.' (To say nothing of what happened to the Corellian soprano who sang 'Dusk of a Thousand Suns' ever-so-slightly off key.) What, indeed, can keep the most powerful man in the galaxy sufficiently occupied? The Emperor adores irony; he loves to impart loathsome knowledge, witness intimate betrayals, and set in motion dark curses disguised as gifts.
When money and political power have been achieved, only the elemental and ephemeral prize of manipulation retains luster.

There is only one true remaining structure on Vjun, and the name of this crumbling castle ruin pricks a sense of stillness under Vader's armor when first uttered in his presence. Bast, the name of the anachronistic fortress is Bast. According to the small lingering population of miserable natives, the hulking structure has always been called so- from time out of mind. The world itself is nothing but poison now, with pools of liquid methane and an atmosphere possessing just enough oxygen to deliver a stealthy collection of fatal contaminants to any soul foolish enough to accept it at face value. The dwindling communities take shelter in pressurized tunnels beneath the slag-ore hills, relying on aging life-support, maintaining the crumbling edifice like serfs, and telling stories of when their world was green and vibrant. Naboo, riddled with atmosphere-shredding bombs and seeded with bio-weapons, will not doubt be very similar in a few hundred years.

Palpatine lets it be known that the aesthetic irony amuses him- a poisoned, breathless world for his twisted, laboriously breathing right hand. Yet, from the moment the word 'Bast' becomes associated with the gifted planet, Vader begins to suspect the old bastard's private mirth may stem from a far deeper source. This second pseudo-life (the Force?) has granted Vader several strange little boons in its short span, and here is a lock for the seemingly innocuous key he found amidst the Jedi archives. A name, a name; what's in a name? Something, clearly, for the Emperor says only 'the fortress', 'the castle', and- with a hint of mockery- 'your home'. Never once does he give the title, though all the locals know it and it is clearly listed on the deed.

'Speak not of devils,' a young slave-boy's mother once whispered, 'for they hear quite clearly when you call their name.'

As revelations go, it is so slight as to be almost beneath consideration. Nothing of any former owner remains in the castle, for Palpatine is no fool. Vader himself brings nothing save a few droids and the hyperbaric chamber necessary for his health. It is a duty visit, an inspection. Leaving her with only automated guardians and security systems on what is essentially the Emperor's planet is difficult to bear, but to do otherwise would garner uncomfortable scrutiny. Yet the name of the crumbling edifice must have meaning, aligning as it does with too many other 'coincidental' facts. There is the single mention of the out-cast Jedi's daughter, the presence of Vjun within the regions of space decimated by plague, the eponymous title taken up by the Sith Lord, and Palpatine's tacit admission that the planet had been his long before Imperial takeover. It is less a matter of property (carefully hidden in various shell companies, since Sidious knew exactly what sort of resources a 'senator'- and later, Chancellor- should have) than it is a trophy. Vader's new Master clearly led many lives before he clad himself in the identity of Sheev Palpatine, and old habits are hard to break. Not unexpectedly, the preliminary search of the edifice and surrounding environs proves fruitless, as do the second and the third. The Sith apprentice visits between campaigns; brief sojourns, since duty often requires he be at
(her)
his master's side.

In this manner, his consignment to purgatory reaches a Galactic standard year. A year since he last stood or breathed freely, since she breathed her last. The stasis pod will not hold indefinitely- such is beyond even the most advanced of current medical technology- especially given that, in this case, it was employed without a spark of life remaining. The... body

('Is only a shell,' Ki-Adi-Mundi frequently intoned, 'your soul, the animating fire of the Force, is independent of this material structure.')

will last another twelve months, perhaps fifteen. Time, the illegitimate and incestuous brother to the Death-Bitch of Tatooine, is hot on Vader's heels. It seems Windu was right, and the two really are the same thing- or else, conjoined twins.

Despite the obvious metaphysical aspect of life among the Jedi, neither Vader nor the man he was have ever been philosophical creatures. His sense of the spiritual is that of the rustic, the nomad; superstition, vague feeling, and the overall conviction that religion and everything associated with it have no real place in the practical, day-to-day operations of the universe. If the gods are cruel, what of it? To eke out an existence on a planet so antithetical to life, one must accept that as a given and move on. Let perfunctory abasements be made before any idol and then forgotten before one even rises from the sand for, if the beings they represent do chance to exist, who knows what their capricious whims might be? Best not to dwell on such things.

As a Jedi, Vader respected the Wookies, and he continues to do so though their species exists now only in the tenuous diaspora of the enslaved. Brave warriors, ruthless but honor-bound, whose self-reliance precluded religious specificity. As those hirsute beings had their mighty yet inconstant forest spirits and the Mon Calamari their inarticulate notions of intelligent god-waves, so too did the sparse philosophy of Tatooine align with its environment until it became no more remarkable to its believers than a rock or a rhonto. This rendered Qui Gon's more occult arguments before the Council rather meaningless to the slave boy he'd rescued, and no amount of tutelage, emphasis, or mediation ever convinced Anakin Skywalker to truly value the esoteric side of the Force. In his heart of hearts, he has always been a mechanic. Blue-prints, gears, and fuel concern him- function, followed by form improving said. As long as the machine runs, has purpose, there need be no question as to why it was built.

This is an outlook the Dark Side responds to eagerly as it twines about him, readily summoned and almost ecstatically employed. The finer details and strategic foresights which once escaped him are elusive no longer, and the impact of his will has multiplied ten-fold. He is now the Force-wielder (though certainly not the Jedi) he always felt he should have been. Perhaps responding to this ardent symbiosis

('Parasitism', scolds the voice of Kenobi, who presents his former apprentice with the opposite problem of not _staying dead_)

it is the Dark Side itself that gifts its newest son with the next existential key. One might chalk it up to coincidence, or larger patterns of the Force; in truth, it matters not. Padme would call it a 'confluence of events', a natural intersection of lives and circumstance which- while one might never know if they would come to good or ill- are simply meant to be.
Having been both the victim and beneficiary of such, Vader cannot wholly discount this.

On the edge of the Rishi Maze, skirting that unknown void which lies beyond the Outer Rim, there are many worlds which have no name. Perhaps some once had claim to titles, the endowment of designation. If so, their people have gone or died off, or committed martial suicide. No stretch of the imagination is required to summon that sort of history for many of these planets and moons, whose thinning atmospheres or tumultuous tectonic activity render their landscapes in nightmare smudges of ebony and soot. Others are acidic wastelands, cursed with toxic rains, merciless winds, or rivers of liquid methane. They are ruined worlds, the ancient predecessors of Vjun and now Naboo- the later of which the Emperor has pumped full of chemical putrescences that will render her completely uninhabitable within the decade. There is little in this out-dated quadrant of space to concern the great Sith Lord or his apprentice. Kumino no longer retains its pivotal importance, though the planet still churns out fodder for stormtroopers at fairly regular intervals. No longer masters of cloning with wares up for sale, they are only dutiful stewards of a great machine which practically runs itself. Already tenuous numbers dwindled by deliberate extermination, the remnants of the gentle and starry-eyed race will continue manufacturing their final model until they- and the need for their services- at last become extinct.

Vader has considered the watery world beneath notice from the very beginning of his quest, though many would have been tempted by Kumino trade. Blasphemer and idolator that he is, he retained even in his most acute grief sensibilities which still demanded adherence to the ultimate taboo. He wanted no blank slate or simulacra, could not even tolerate its contemplation.
No. He knew from the start that She must be retrieved from dispersion in the Light he now shuns, and which never deserved her anyway. What would be found must rise from the ashes of what had been lost. There was never any other choice, treacherous though the path might be.

And here it lies spread before him, a piece of mortality's puzzle box that falls into his lap just as the clock begins to tremulously wind down. A living world on the edge of Imperial Civilization; cobalt blue with massive seas, tenanted by only slightly less cyclopean beasts. White chalk cliffs cluster together, pitifully guarding the remaining landmass, themselves weathered with clinging succulents. Deep, unlighted forests shelter behind them, the only denizens of the inland being the insidious fungi, carrion eaters, and gleaming carnivorous plants of which they are composed. The oceans churn with towering organisms rendered murderous by sheer size, and barely a standard klick of remaining surface fails to crawl with life. Stand still too long and even the unhealthy vegetation becomes a threat.

It is to this twisted sphere of life that Vader tracks- and eliminates- two of the last five Jedi unaccounted for in the Galaxy. Effectively dead since Palpatine enacted Order 66, the Jedi still have a lengthy history and a place in legend. Sidious knows it is not enough to slice the head from the body of such a broad and well-founded organization. He would do well amongst the Sand People, if his fastidiousness could tolerate such lowly beings, for the villains of Vader's home world have their own cardinal rule. Known to exploit those few fertile females unfortunate enough to be captured, they never the less put to the sword any male issue from these forced unions, to say nothing of the outlander man-flesh they consume for its mystic properties. 'Let none rise to seek vengeance in the name of his father, or in the name of his mother's father; leave no seed fall by the wayside, unless you reap your own blood without complaint.' (And who could doubt the truth of it, when a mother's son had run the sands red with fury that cauterized more profoundly even than his weapon?) On most days, Vader finds enough credulity within himself to believe- to will- Kenobi dead. The life of Yoda, even in the seemingly secure days of the Order, has long been guttering on its wick. Time will do the work the lightsaber is forbade, though he is not above hoping the task might still fall to him. The Emperor has decreed that no living expression of the Light may remain, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant the talent. He has even instituted subtle testing during primary education, to identify and subtly 'remove' the threat of Force-sensitives born after the purge.

Thus the current fugitives whose scent the apprentice follows are padawans of later age and unremarkable gifts. Two of them, no doubt told to run as their masters embraced off-world martyrdom for the sake of buying time. That they've managed to last this long is a miracle in and of itself. They have even less skill for concealment and espionage than they do in martial applications of the Force. Reliance on their familiar and tell-tale weapons has prevented them from truly taking advantage of the lawless outworlds. Fear of the Empire extends light-years beyond its infrastructure, and many would sell the hides of their own kin in these desperate days.

With these two pathetic anachronisms are three children, sensitives with no training, all of them holed up in a miserable, bizarre bunker which may once have been the home of smugglers. The single squadron of stormtroopers the Sith brings with him is laughably excessive, and the lone flagship in orbit merely a means of transportation. Like all Star Destroyers, it is equipped with space-to-surface lasers and bombardment drones, but there is no need to burn the entire engine when only a gear or two must be plucked. Let the Emperor gaze on diagrams with gleeful avarice while he plots to destroy entire planets with a single ray of heat and fission- accomplishing such a feat has never seemed particularly impressive to Vader. Behind the scientific and technological rigor involved, what does it prove? One can hardly go about destroying every planet which rebells or merely serves as a useful example. With a high card like that, you can end up backing yourself into a corner rather quickly. Unless you're content with ruling the astroid-pocked ruins of a galaxy, that is.

The ruins here, on this world, are somewhat challenging to find. At least there's that- some evidence of strategic competence at last. The bunker may not, after all, have been the home of smugglers. Once found, application of more detailed ground-penetrating radar reveals its bones spread deep underground, a labyrinth of empty arteries which more likely served as some sort of military base before the planet was abandoned. The maze works just as well for Vader as it does against him, and the undesirables die, one by one. Only the last- a female whose face is likely made familiar only by the look of despairing horror- requires any real effort. She falls like all the rest, but more admirably; she does not spit or beg.

Once this task is discharged, only three public enemies will remain. One is an old archive cleric rumored to have been spotted on Malestare. Like Yoda, age and ill health may kill her before Vader can be bothered. The old Master himself, along with the traitorous Kenobi, remain unaccounted for. Even the Emperor cannot sense the ripples of their presence in the now ink-black pool of the Force, though the spavined dictator would never make such an admission aloud. As such, even intimating their continued existence is a heresy the Palpatine will not stand. Both the Sidious and his new apprentice stand ready and wary, each seeking vengeance for reasons the other assumes they understand. The tricks, the obfuscations, the leveraging of what is precious for their own petty ends... both surviving Jedi have much to answer for. Vader holds in reserve very particular rage to be wielded against Kenobi, and not only for the ruins of the healthy body he himself must now haunt. His former master became a pilferer of corpses, it seems, having turned Padme's... shell... over the Naboo after destroying the remains of her stillborn child. The hospital-ship records- and the methodical torture of Bail Organa-revealed the latter crime, though it seems the Naboo intended to give the impression their beloved queen would be interred still with child. It is an inconsistency which Vader finds himself turning over from time to time, aware only of the place where two supposedly compatible pieces do not fit end-to-end. Odd, but hardly the basis for a conspiracy theory. Just one more ruse, of which the Naboo were notoriously so fond. Many are deceivers, and Vader is well content his new life affords him the redemptive honesty of direct aggression. Organa broke eventually, still obviously ignorant of the child's full parentage, and was returned to his wife and their own squalling infant at the Emperor's sufferance. The Jedi perpetrator faded, having set out with no flight-plan and no nav computer to be traced.

Vader cannot expect to sense his former Master if the Emperor cannot and, on days when his certitude in Obiwan's death is not quite satisfying enough, tells himself he need only wait for the inevitable mistake. What he can sense now, standing on this nameless and riotously organic world, is an energy so potent as to be vertiginous. Unlike the other fools, his final quarry did not run further down into the strange shafts of the makeshift hideout. 'A cave is a grave' is actually one of Padme's maxims on strategy, passed down from a professor whose long history included many run-ins with spice smugglers. No, the final female padawan fled into the forest, for all the good it did her, and now lies in three pieces in the glittering blue-black mud. Open now to the malignant, almost vegetable sentience of the surrounding wood, Vader senses something so like a presence that he actually turns to track its motion. No predator or animal of the underbrush has moved on the periphery of his vision, only the faintest tendrils of mist from between the trees. Bark like ebony lacquer, row upon sinuously warped row standing in formation as far as the eye can see. Between and around these leafless sentinels are scattered half-translucent blue foliage, creepers like the pale and desiccated arteries of vampires, and jewels of fungi whose vivid color boldly attests their toxicity. Nothing, not even the sparse and skeletal flower buds, deigns to even nod in the chill breeze.

In the next moment, it is as though a veil has been lifted- momentous, but also thin and utterly inconsequential. The shift reveals a scene so radically altered that it at first seems exactly the same. It is the malignancy- power that palpitates like living flesh- now unvarnished in every root, rotting leaf, and fall of shadow, that renders the forest anew. He recognizes it immediately in this state, would have known instantly what it was even if he had not possessed the nomenclature. For the first time in almost a decade, Qui Gon's voice swims from the stagnant pools of Anakin's memory and- more exceptional still- is acknowledged by Vader.

'A vergence,' the echo whispers. 'A vergence in the Force.'

Standing amidst the slain refuse of would-be Jedi, something within the Sith stills in recognition and then rallies. For just a moment, the merciless clock at his back- a harsher whip hand than Palpatine could ever hope to be- marks time more quietly. Thoughtfully, the Sith bends to more closely observe the severed hand and forearm of the fugitive padawan, visually examining it with the sharp interest born of new perspective. All around he can sense a stirring, the magnetic power cooling flesh holds over those with a keen instinct for the newly dead. Some of this interest comes from lower lifeforms- insects, carrion reptiles like mynoks- but a large portion comes from the forest itself. The vagaries of this collective consciousness are a conduit for an entity still more obscure. A vergence can be a person, yes. It was once suggested he might be one himself and, if Jinn was right about anything, it was only that the miserable slave boy was Chosen. No one had ever really bothered to consider what he had been chosen for. But a vergence can also be an object (and there are legends of crystals that function in just that fashion)... or a place.

Turning his attention once more to the remains of the fallen padawan, Vader witnesses a remarkable thing. The severed arm and torso of his unworthy adversary are cool and still, white mold already blooming eagerly on the extremities, like flakes of snow. Yet there is also a faint luminescence curling upwards from the corpse, twining into strange patterns not dissimilar to those woven by the pipes of Mos Espa's weed-dens. It has a greenish-blue cast, very pale but also painful to look at, as if the eye is being assaulted by more than just light.

More than light... life.

Every midichlorian in the girl-warrior's body is dying, released by the cellular decay that begins as blood settles and the bowels release. This place is so primed to consume anything- everything- that the fleeing energy of the Force is actually visible! The concept is not an entirely new one; padawan learners were encouraged to develop an awareness of the aura surrounding any strangers they encountered. Yet even the most adroit rarely moved beyond 'feeling', more the vibration of a dowsing rod than any actual sight. This new phenomenon gives Vader pause, but a cycle through each of the spectrums available to his lenses reveals that _something_ is happening. The readings on most are marginal, so strange or isolated that interpretation is useless, and only that setting analogous to human sight registers an actual image.

Undeniable, all the same. Though vergences do not necessarily have allegiances, this one clearly does. Like the Dark Side as a whole, it is the ultimate parasite, feeding off anything- including itself. Small wonder the smuggler's base- if that's what it was- is abandoned. Given enough exposure, even a nonsensitive would be vulnerable to the capricious energies present: insidious whisperings in the brain, shadows lingering behind the eye, dreams to make the blood run cold. Indeed, had the Sith Lord not come to dispense with the fugitive brats, they almost certainly would have run mad and eventually destroyed themselves. Such happy intuition they must have thought themselves to have, when they heard the vergence calling to them! A sarlaac in its pit, ancient and well-practiced. It recognized their loyalty to the Light and so knew them to be prey.

As the pounding of pulse and adrenaline from battle ebb away, Vader feels it recognize him too. An heir of perfect darkness, opposition to Light so absolute that even the twin suns of his home world and the expectations of a Chosen One could not burn it away. Alone with his kill, Darth Vader bows his head ever-so-slightly, a diffuse but respectful sort of greeting.

'Yes,' the mephitic forest whispers to him. In a language below language, in the lexicon of his childhood nightmares; 'Break, raze, ruin; perpetuate the self by this destruction.'

The ghostly Force-light is gone now. Dark aerial beings with damp, loathsome fur swoop down from the warped trees, feasting with mouths- two of them, ringed with innumerable teeth- on either end of their snake-like forms. Small bush-dwellers scuttle forth from beneath the shadows and piles of rotting leaves, squealing voraciously and trying to gnaw the tails of their flying competitors even as they feed.

'I know the blasphemy that rots yours heart, my son.'

It is not a real voice, Vader knows, and it never will be. Just as visions deal in treacherous imagery and symbol, so too does the mind translate the metaphysical into some sense the mundane can grasp. He is talking to himself. There is voice or image here that he has not brought with him.
As to what might employ those things in order to make itself understood...

The Sith remains receptive but wary, 'listening' with all the terrible concentration learned from too much wakefulness and a world seen only through the vizor's monochrome lens.

'Soon.'

He can almost see her lithesome form, lush in dark brocade, aglow from the firelight and his own young man's passion. The shape of her is echoed in every slick, obsidian tree. So too is the final demise which awaits her, pacing restlessly outside the stasis pod as he will not allow himself to do. Death in the Nubian guise, serpentine prince whose kiss will corrode the remains of her shell to dust. Within the palsied trees, hints of her skeleton flicker- whiter than sand washed by time, the skulls perpetually grinning and insane. By trick of branch and shadow, she is showcased in every stage of decay.

Lashing out in anger, Vader bends these mockeries with the Force of a sandstorm's wind. There is fear in him, too, but anger has ever been his method of expressing any terror- an acid that swallows up weakness without a trace. Lifting his arms to do more purposeful damage, to flatten every chameleon column, he pauses only when he senses his intended victim's grudging respect. Such an appeal to vanity will not stay him long. They are two wary predators, all frothing fangs and heaving sides, essentially staring one another down. It matters not that one is older, more ineffable; the other young and potent.
In a way, they are evenly matched.

Even a bee can more a rancor. The destruction Vader can wreck is greater even than the lasers of his orbiting Star Destroyer- though he is not very far from wishing to use those as well.

Charily, he is acknowledged. And provided with an answer.

It is not a deal- not some dark bargain exchanging esoteric knowledge for living sacrifices and libations of blood. The death of the padawan has nourished the vergence, true, but it is old- this place where reality thins- and it has the patience of those things which exist almost outside of time. Yet, seeing as it does beyond Vader's range of view (seeing the past and future simultaneously, if the most occulted of Jedi teachings are to be believed), it has little tolerance for 'ignorance' in matters completely obvious to it. The vergence's final attitude towards the encroaching Sith is that of a passing critic for a novice artist in the street. The ancient whose claws adjust the student's grip upon an instrument; the annoyed onlooker turning up the resolution on a holoproj.

Acerbically, it guides the mortal's train of thought in some inexpressible way, and Vader warily allows this.

'Look.' Instructing, but also laughing, using Padme's voice and enjoying some cosmic irony only it can appreciate. He remembers a snatch of the poetry she once read to him: 'the moving finger, at the loom, cannot repair that undone too soon'.

Though it is severed and without life-blood, Vader watches as the padawan's lost hand clenches and unclenches several times, at last folding itself into an unforgiving and impossible fist.

.

.

NOTES:
[+] The line of poetry Padme reads is inspired by Omar Khayyam's vastly superior piece:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
I always feel weird about mixing classical references in the GFFA, though making my own poor substitutions isn't much better. ^^;

As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read my story, and I would love to know what you think! ;-)