Fanfic challenge from author Marriella-The Bullet- as quoted and sometimes paraphrased here:

The Sith Challenge

Luke gets turned to the Dark Side by someone other than the Emperor or Darth Vader, and now Vader wants [to get his son, but his son's loyalties are to his other master.

Time Frame: Luke can be anywhere from fifteen years old to seventeen when this takes place. Apparently, before ANH.

Type:...[no limit on whether Luke stays on the Dark Side or not...

Notes: I don't want anyone out of character...

Convergence: Prologue

Darth Sidious did not save me out of loyalty, comraderie, or any sort of love. He wished to test his new machines.

One could have seen it if they looked. Always he strove in the seemingly incongruous medical field for better droids, better medicines. Bacta, bota, raw alazhi. After me, the signs increased. He was waiting to rescue his successor.

Each life he saved he left to rot. The droid general? Bait. The Padawan? Droid...

The Zabrak? Revenge. Patience and revenge.

Graduated ministrations replaced my entrails with plastic and new coils. I can move still, though differently. There is a ring of twisted flesh above my hips, and some of the skin has grown in tan. This exterior though is a palty insignficance.

He thought I would not move alone, and for long years he was right.

chapter I

"If a tyrant or ruler, his search for the father will lead to the invisible unknown from which he will return as a lawgiver. If a world-redeemer, he will learn that he and the father are one."

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With One Thousand Faces

Luke Skywalker, almost sixteen years old, saw the pale dust on the horizon and thought the worst. Of course it would be his friends on their skyhoppers,come to gloat about having gotten their road licenses while Luke's aunt and uncle disallowed his own. No matter sometimes; the teens had always flown the skyhoppers in the canyons, a sport requiring much more skill than that needed for navigating traffic in a landspeeder. Fifteen was the legal age, and any teen seen in a town, even tiny, rather pathetic Anchorhead, would come head-to-head with Imperial law if caught driving without permission. Either paperwork or mechanized galavanting were frowned upon by Owen and Beru.

Farmers' attitiudes, Luke thought, accusing his relatives of lack of ambition and creativity as he often did. They lived without dreaming either of fighting spaceships or of having a day with friends...

Luke turned the spigot on the vaporator and the water container automatically sealed with a secure popping sound. He picked up the two containers he had gathered on this sweep near the homestead and kicked the treadwell to remind it to move. It rolled along ahead of him singlemindedly, the green and white paint on its chassis and spidery legs chipping and as dull as anything else baked by Tatooine's suns. As dull as Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen's imaginations, and as dull as Luke felt his would be if he did not get away from this region soon.

The dust from the distant craft faded away from the horizon and Luke's thoughts as he trudged back to the homestead.

The treadwell twitched, sensors mistakenly tracking the sandflies buzzing under the open-roofed homestead, as Luke linked his water containers to the cistern. The reservoir, the unofficial center and hearth of the underground house, was topped with its own large vaporators. Luke knew it well, and in his generally peaceful existance nothing had shattered the illusion of home as safety, whether from Tusken Raiders or from teenage drama. He had a definite sense of unease, though, as the droid whined off after a noisy fly. Owen and Beru were around somewhere. The air, though, felt disjointed, dead...

Clattering came from the kitchen. Luke finished siphoning the water and walked to his right and down the slope toward the oval-roofed kitchen. Just to check on Beru. Just to be sure.

But it had been Owen in the kitchen, and suddenly nothing was sure. Not the species of the man in the kitchen, not the pallor of Owen's face, not Luke's frozen stare which, certain, tried to prod his stunned brain into running for the rifle.