"Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you."

L. R. Knost

Star Wars: Grave of Empires

Shards of Eskil:

Insidious

The man who'd made him with his mother did not look like a dangerous man.

He was soft-spoken, cultured, and much older than most human men when they became fathers. There was a way about him that always made him seem so reasonable that it deflected criticism and there was a quiet confidence in the way he conducted himself that inspired trust.

These things were all true.

They did not mean he was not a monster.

All Eskil need to do was to look at his mother, whom he loved but did not respect, for who admired broken things?

Whatever Thren Syzygy had been before she fell under Darth Sidious's sway—and the man did like to recount her glories, as if he'd come to own them when he'd brought her low—she existed now as the guttering embers of a dying star. If Eskil loved her, he also resented her for her weakness.

Resented her for being the restraint that kept him within the emperor's orbit.

Not always—it was a slow thing, this understanding. Even of what his mother was—and was not.

It would not begin until his world became wider than himself and his mother and the solitude of study on a planet of ruins underneath a red sky.

Until then, he had no point of reference for monsters, outside the apex predators that his mother pitted him against for his blooding.

A blooding set a child against sentient prey and gauged whether or not they were worthy of the teaching. This was a sacred rite of the sect of his mother, just as the exultation—the first slaughter of a sapient being—was.

The latter was the first time he saw his father in the flesh.

Before that it had always been holos and hollow promises and sometimes, a crawling sense of something in his head, which made his mother's lips go thin as she advised that it was foolish to fight against the Lord of the Sith.

This was strange advice from his mother, who had raised him in the fullness of ferocity and skill that were the marks of a darksider. Raised him to believe that one should never be quick to kneel or relent.

But not, apparently, to aspire to rise as a Sith.

When he had asked his mother why this was, she directed his gaze to the night that mantled the planet.

"Do you see all the space between the stars, Eskil? How small the lights seem, caught in the vast dark? There are many ways of being in the dark. Of thriving in it. The universe is always in motion—the strength of your path is in the strength of your will, the practiced excellence of your end-bringing, and your command of the Force. Not in how many beings you can make call you "Master". To take the throne of the Sith—to earn the right to call yourself a Sith Lord—is to make an enemy of all the galaxy, both light and dark. Patience is a weapon." Eskil caught a glimpse of her then, the powerful woman who might have once resented being made to kneel, but that glimmer snuffed out at her next words. "Submission is a protection."

Eskil kept her words in mind as his father's ship descended, but in the deep places of his mind, where he was restless and hungry for things he didn't understand, he was not ruled by his mother's admonition—and he knew he would not be able to keep his wild dichotomy of feelings hidden. If he desperately wanted his father's praise and acknowledgement, he equally resented being sequestered from the galaxy he was beginning to sense in the moments when his mind and his body stood still and he could feel the Force flow around him. Through him.

Usually, he did not hide things from his mother—he had little self that she had not shaped—but she encouraged him to seek out the dangers of the deep tombs and there were more things in them than deathstalkers nests and traps set for the unwary. There were shadows and whispers—memories ill-disposed to fade—that tried to creep into his consciousness. Made him see things, hear things—tried to hiss secrets in his ear and tell him stories dredged up out of the ruin of ancient glories.

He'd learned to hear these spirits without being ridden by them, though most were too faint to keep their grip for more than a few heart-stopping moments, and he called to the Force in the same way he'd learned to call it in dark rooms lit only by old malice.

Hide me, he thought, protect my self from outside influence.

He felt the Force as it shifted inside him—he had the sense that this stillness that he'd learned in fear and desperation wasn't like the other abilities he'd honed, which came from a place of power and not pleading. Eskil hoped his father did not notice—his mother hadn't, or hadn't said if she did, but then she'd never tried to seep into his mind from half a galaxy away either.

The first beings to come down the ramp were humanoids in red armor, with long capes and twinned weapons. They moved in eerie synchronization as they parted to allow the slow passage of a figure shrouded in a heavy cloak. The face beneath the hood almost did not look human, no matter what his mother claimed, but the eyes were Sith eyes and the presence in the Force was a familiar one.

This was the Emperor, then.

He was studied in his turn and Darth Sidious glanced over at his mother, who had bowed her head in deference from the moment the ramp had begun to lower. "It seems you have done a fine job in raising this one, Thren. I like the look in his eyes. I'm very pleased."

"Thank you, my lord," his mother murmured.

In hindsight, Eskil supposed he had been pleased. The Force did not always flow true in blood, the way many things did, and a long time after he would remember those words and come to suspect that perhaps there had been less able experiments that were culled without any compunction for the fact that they too had been his own children. But that was for later, when he began to wonder what a man like Darth Sidious wanted a child for.

Fear kept his thoughts shallow on that day, however.

Not of the Emperor. He was not wise enough for that yet and the idea of Empire was a distant one shaped only by his mother's stories—and she had not left this planet in his lifetime.

He was only afraid of disappointing his father.

Darth Sidious turned to his guards and murmured, "Bring out our guest," before he turned his attention back to Eskil. "Come closer, child," he invited.

Eskil did as he was bid, watching in his peripheral vision as the red guards dragged a struggling humanoid down the ramp.

"Yes. I think you have a very good chance of living up to the promise of your name," he said thoughtfully. "I have brought you a present for your exultation," he told him. "A most worthy foe. A Jedi, in fact."

A beckoned with his hand and the guards shoved their captive forward, his coerced footsteps sending red dust dancing in the air. His eyes darted between Eskil and the Emperor.

"This is a child," he protested. "What are you asking of me?"

"This child is a Sith and exceptionally strong in the Force. I think you will find him quite equal to you, if his mother is to be believed."

"Eskil will not fail," his mother promised solemnly.

"I should hope not," Darth Sidious replied blandly. "Thren, you will join me in my ship. Guards, remove the Jedi's restraints."

He produced a lightsaber from the depths of his robes and handed it to Eskil. "You will return this to him before you begin your hunt," he said. "There is little skill to be shown in slaughtering an unarmed foe. Though it is not wise to underestimate a Jedi, armed or otherwise."

"He's a child," the Jedi said again.

"After today," Eskil told him flatly, "I won't be."

He waited with restless anticipation for the Emperor and his mother to leave, before he returned the Jedi's weapon to him, crossing the red earth to do so.

The Jedi looked down at the lightsaber in his hand, his expression grim. "You don't have to do this," he said.

Eskil's brows furrowed. "No," he agreed. "There is always choice. But do you have the power to make it for me, Jedi?" he asked as he pulled up the full hood that offered protection from the glare of the relentless sun. "You do not. I am honored to match myself against your strength. You may feel however you like about it."

He unclipped his own saber from his belt. The call of the kyber within resonated up his arm, reminding him of the certainty of his own strength.

Jedi lived in cages of doubt. Sith were free of this fear of themselves—Eskil was allowed to revel in his own strength. A red blade singing under a red sun was a joy and there was lightness in his steps as he began to prowl in a wide circle around his prey.

He watched him like he watched the beasts he hunted, both with his eyes and with the Force that was within and between them.

There was no joy in the Jedi as he ignited his own blade. Resignation could be read in the grim set of his lips, determination in the tightness about his eyes, but it was clear that combat did not make his heart dance.

Eskil pitied him ever as he darted in to test his defenses, the red dust rising as a cloud around them as his deft footwork was matched by defensive saberwork that still had more flourishes than his own pared-down and aggressive style.

Sandeels were not particularly impressed by the ability to twirl one's saber artfully, after all, even if one did happen to meet them in the open instead of having all thirty-plus feet of them electrify the sand on which you stood.

Eskil was not yet full-grown—he had neither height nor reach on his opponent—but he was not reluctant to kill his foe.

The Jedi was and was weakened for it.

Eskil was not quite his match, saber to saber, not while the Jedi was fighting defensively. He largely ignored the conversation that the other male was trying to hold with him—he took a risk and tried to slide beneath the Jedi's guard, but his opponent merely propelled himself up and safely out of range of his lightsaber and took off sprinting toward a nearby ruin.

He could not help the delighted laugh that spilled up out of him.

It was not so ironic as a hunt through the valley might have been, but his already pounding pulse leaped at excitement of the chase. His pursuit was immediate and he drew on his connection to the Force to speed his steps, almost overtaking the Jedi before he even reached one of the crumbling walls.

As they passed the first wall, looming on their right, Eskil switched his saber to his left hand and slapped the palm of the other against the sunbaked durocrete, feeling in that instant all the microfractures that would eventually return them to sand. He made them explode instead, hurtling toward the Jedi, who was forced to whirl on his heel and defend himself from the largest pieces of debris.

After that display, the Jedi seemed even more reluctant to let him close the distance between them, attempting to use the ruins to his advantage.

He had at least stopped attempting to tell Eskil that he did not have to do this.

"Your mother said your name was Eskil. The Emperor said you would live up to the promise of your name. Do you even know what your name means?" the Jedi shouted at him in a last desperate attempt to distract him when he finally cornered his prey.

Eskil ignored him, breaking their bladelock and blasting him back with a raw wave of Force energy, the Jedi's body making a meaty thud as it rebounded against the durocrete.

"It means 'vessel'," the Jedi gasped as he lay sprawled before Eskil.

Eskil only blinked and drove his blade through his skull.

A/N: In order to clarify, because I saw some confusion from the first reviews, the Shards of Eskil chapters will be a series of prologues about Rey's parents, because I feel you have to meet people for more than four seconds in flashbacks to care about their fate and because this whole thing was very murky in canon. As far as I am aware, neither of them have canon names, but as you might be able to guess from Eskil being Sheev Palpatine's son, he is also Rey's father.

On another note, the sandeels were inspired by a piece of concept art by John Seamas Gallagher.

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