Mustafar. This serene planet, the retreat for the most romantic in the Outer Rim, bathed in flowers and vines, had once been the very place some would considered hell. A fire ball of molten lava, dark castle in the distance and the horizon ripped apart by lightnings. Would you believe that? Or do you think it's a myth? The problem with myths is that, after so many millenia of civilisation, we are unable to determine which ones of them were entirely made up and which were based on real events.
Don't let anybody tell you that there had been one of those terraforming projects going on. Don't let them, because it's a spacer tale and it will never be true. Don't allow them to poison you, just because they are scared of what they don't understand.
Don't let anybody tell you that the burning red flowers you know as Drops of Mustafar are heart-shaped, and not shaped like two conjoined drops of lovers' blood. Then again, from a certain point of view, they are both. Some loves stop the brightest burning of the hearts and leave a jam in the bloodstream.
Love is in the stars, love is stars, love is gained and lost in the stars. Love matters because love is matter. And stars are the brightest of the matter there is. Sometimes, the stars go nova and swallow whole systems. That is when madness, lack of trust, unfounded jealousy and the anti-matter prevail.
...
This story is as old as time. We have been charting and exploring space for fifty thousand years now and only one or two out of quadrillions of us currently living will be remembered in one millenium's time. Is that immortality? Or is it a curse cast upon those notorious enough to remain etched in the skies, forever?
The tragic lovers I wanted to tell you a story about, they lived somewhere along the way between the early years or hyperspace age and now. Perhaps even halfway. They are not two among quadrillions, they are more like that group of explorers whose carcasses now float somewhere in the intergalactic space, those foolish enough not to understand that two galaxies could only drift further away from one another and that, the further you go, the faster they disappear.
His hair was like the sand, his eyes were like the blue of the bluest seas and he was poor. Her hair was like the trunks of the trees, her eyes were dark like the night sky and she was rich. She chose a life where others would carry her across the obstacles, he chose a life where he had to blast the obstacles himself. Or maybe their lives and their destinies were chosen for them? Strange is the will of the Force.
She fought with sophisticated words, he fought with sophisticated weapons. But she was not a conwoman and he was not a warlord.
She always had lawful power over him, but she was afraid to use it.
He always had physical and emotional power over her, and there came a point where he was not afraid to use it.
She was not afraid to die.
He was not afraid to kill.
Still, she had no idea that he would die and he had no idea that he would kill.
His fragile and turbulent inner self told him that she was in danger, he had nightmares where he could see a hand directed to her neck. He would not have believed the truth, if the futures had stopped moving for once and if he could have seen the other side of the story - himself stretching out that open hand towards her.
Neither of them knew that love could kill. Neither of them knew that love could trap your body and rob you of your soul.
Once he realised what he had done and that she had died at his hand, he was but a shade of black, a personification, embodiment of anti-matter. All of his limbs were gone and he had to keep himself alive, for many more years to come. He looked through what were no longer his eyes, at the anti-matter of his heart, swallowing world by world.
Yes, love is dangerous. Love has broken the most durable of the fortresses.
And in a way, he became his own fortress. He was a walking, black wall.
She was placed in water enriched by chemicals, on a bed of floating flowers, made to look as if she had still been alive; and then buried in a tomb. It was not in her people's nature to bury, it's like they did not want to part with her embalmed body and keep her forever beautiful. The little moles on her cheeks were not to decompose.
He had to be placed in water enriched by chemicals, hanging like the last leaf from a stalk, in order not to become his own tomb. It was in his servants' nature, to catter to him, even when they did not want to look at his emaciated body, they had to keep him alive. They had no ideas that he had ever had hair and that it resembled the colour of sand.
There was this one time he visited her grave. It took him a moment to remember why he was there in the first place, because his memories had started to disappear, the anti-matter was swallowing them. What he had become was doing its best to suffocate what he could have been.
He brought one of the white flowers to his fortress on Mustafar, where he would retreat every now and then, to be a prison within a prison, a wall within a wall. He wanted to be there more than anywhere else – there lay his limbs, petrified until layers and layers of lava. There lay his heart, which he had abandoned the moment he had killed his lover. That was the only place allowing him to remember his past.
And then, quarter a century later, or so they say, he died, above a world not far away, a world bathed in forest greens and cloudy silvers. His body was given to the fire and the only thing remaining of the wall was the very coating.
That was the day of love's seemingly final redemption. Little did love know that it had to come a long way until it will have truly been redeemed.
And that was the day Mustafar began cooling down. Its fire died with its master and its slave, and the love remained embalmed as the lava turned to rocks, forever. Eventually, the fortress lost the battle with time and the white flowers, preserved in the same chemicals and water mixture as the dead woman's body, grew out on vines resembling stalks and brought the dark structure down.
The white flowers travelled until they reached a clearing. From the other side of the now-pleasant world along came the red dust, the only thing remaining from what was once a fierce fire. One day, they united and the white flowers and red dust became red flowers, shaped like two drops, or a single heart.
This is why they call them Drops of Mustafar. They have these barely noticable, stitch-like black lines in the middle of the heart, the stitches that bring the two drops of love and blood together, like they could not bring the two lovers.
And that was the only place where they could get together – in flowers, and in a song, a story.
...
So, the next time you pick a Drop of Mustafar, remember this, think of its red-orange colour resembling lava, its fragrant black seeds. Stop and smell them. Is your love worth the while? Will the flowers grow from the volcanic stones and will they resemble drops of blood and always grow in pairs? Or will somebody just deliberately step on them, maybe even you?
Choose your lover wisely. Choose your path wisely. Or you might just be doomed to eternal life of suffering where, no matter how much others say you redeemed yourself, you might end up with a planet-sized memory of your least favourite mistakes.
Choose the soft-spoken, quiet one in the back of the shuttle. Choose the one whose face turns into a gigantic smile each time they see you. Choose the one whose hugs are always warm, yet never feeling as if they wanted to crush your bones. Choose those whose passionate kisses won't feel like they're suffocating you – you will certainly feel breathless every now and then, but you should only feel breathless when you're happy and turn rosy, rather than a whiter shade of pale.
Love is forever, but some forevers are a rough trade. Let your heart guide you, but do not let it bleed. For nobody will be able to see that those are drops of you and not Drops of Mustafar until it's too late. Your heart is the quarry, but your soul is the miner.