A/N: Just one more of these prequels to go—they're a trilogy, because of course they are.

Chapter Two

Shards of Eskil

[Starfall]

Having been kept isolated for so long left Eskil raw to the roiling, seething masses of sapient life beyond Moraband. Their intentions pressed against him as he walked through them, apart from them, his youth hidden behind red armor and the presupposed oath of silence that accompanied that armor keeping him from being questioned as he moved through the halls of palaces and planets and starships in the Emperor's wake.

If he had felt himself trapped before, it was nothing to how he felt now in the sterile corridors and empty opulence of his father's throne room, watching the military pantomime that played out around him.

He was a beast in a cage.

There were others, he discovered, Force-sensitives under the employ of the Emperor. His Inquisitors and his Hands. With them he hunted such Force-sensitives as did not serve his purposes and Jedi without exception. Eskil wondered about why he was not put to such use—he could feel the sharp edges that had been so carefully honed being ground to dullness with the monotony of his days, but the Emperor gave such reasonable explanations he had no real ground to refute them.

He was naïve, inexperienced in the ways of the wider galaxy, and should take some time to accustom himself to living amongst Coreworlders before his father would feel comfortable sending him out on such missions. After all, in large part the Empire's methods remained so military because many parts of the galaxy clung tight to a legacy of crime—and whose syndicates had become so entrenched under the Republic as to be almost empires of their own. They represented a very different kind of danger than the kind his childhood had prepared him to face.

Eskil had never met a problem that couldn't be solved through sufficient destruction, but these worlds were not his. If he was naïve, there was nothing wrong with his capacity to learn through silent observation and he had the patience of a desert predator. He would wait.

For now.

So Eskil had to content himself with the unsatisfactory repetition of forms in empty rooms and the unstimulating combat offered by training droids.

This was not how he had understood being Sith.

Is this freedom? he thought as he watched in silence as Darth Vader went to one knee before his master.

There were other Force-sensitives in the Emperor's employ.

There were none like Vader.

Despite being as much machine as man, Eskil had never sensed his like in the Force. He'd understood in an instant that he was more dangerous than any creature he'd ever cut down on Moraband and yet Darth Vader deferred easily to his Emperor and lived a life of almost startling austerity, absent the fierce joy of life that characterized his mother in her most wondrous moments. Even the pride of strength was muted in him—he treated it almost like there was no glory or gladness to his power.

Eskil couldn't understand where his passion lay, the well of his strength as a Sith, and sometimes when he looked on the mask that hid the man beneath, he could almost hear his father whisper wrecked, ruined like a man grieving.

He let him whisper. Darth Sidious ruled others through words, but Eskil had found his promises empty since he was a child.

As time crept by, his suspicions solidified to an understanding of why Darth Sidious kept him close.

Despite every sign of loyalty, his father did not trust his apprentice, which might have been the most Sith thing about him. Eskil found the Rule of Two and the lack of true bonds practiced by the Emperor's sect to be as strange and restrictive in their way as the tired dogma of the Jedi Order.

The Sith religion as Sheev Palpatine practiced it sacrificed everything for power.

The Sith religion as Thren Syzygy taught it gave one the power to have everything.

Eskil had never imagined that there existed a Sith as passionless as the Emperor, but it was impossible to deny that there was something mesmerizing about the way he treated the galaxy as his own dejarik board—the way he raised his voice instead of a saber and still struck down uncountable beings. He was obsessive, yes, but it was the cold and endless hunger of collapsed stars, not the blazing thing that still smoldered inside Darth Vader's mechanical shell.

Not the wakening force inside Eskil, which had been only energy and potential until he realized what the promised freedom of the Sith might mean against the vastness of the galaxy.

For him freedom wasn't bowing and scraping before his father—it wasn't in service and it certainly had little to do with bringing order to the multitudes he neither knew nor cared to know about.

Eskil was allowed to return to Moraband on occasion and he unobtrusively watched the pilots of the starships in the slight hope that piloting was something that could be learned through observation, but neither the pilots nor the ships themselves ever ferried him there twice.

It didn't matter. He had never lost that sensitivity to other minds and these beings were accustomed to following orders. He could force his will on them.

First, though, he had to convince his mother.

"The Old Republic couldn't do it at the height of their glory and the New Republic didn't dream of it in the depths of their folly. This Empire will never, not even if it exists for a thousand years, be able to bring every planet in this galaxy beneath its boot. We can go. We can leave. We can be free," he insisted. It was the closest someone raised as he had could come to begging, though he'd seen examples enough in his time with the Emperor.

"Moraband made us strong," he whispered. "You made me strong. But that strength is mine and I won't waste it waiting on his favor. My desire, my will, is my own. And I am more than an extension of him. So are you. You are more than this," he said, hand sweeping out to encompass the ruins of a dead empire.

His mother's grave expression didn't shift. "Perhaps that is true of all the smugglers and spicerunners and general scum of the galaxy, but you're more a fool than I raised you to be if you don't think he doesn't have tracking fobs prepared."

"Let them follow." Eskil smiled for the first time in many days at that idea.

There was a brief spark in Thren's eyes, but she sobered so quickly it was almost as if had never happened. "It's not about the distance in parsecs, it's about the distance in here," she said cuttingly, pressing her index and middle finger to his forehead. "There's no escaping him there."

"They're just words, mother. Just whispers. Nothing worse than what you hear in the tombs."

There was a hardness to the line of her jaw as she bit back her words and shook her head. "Enough," she said sharply. "Enough," repeated more softly.

That was her refrain even as the years wore on and wore on them both, Eskil becoming more jaded and bitter even as his father began allowing him certain freedoms and alluding, upon occasion when Eskil allowed his discontent to become obvious, to the terrible things that could befall a Force-user outside his graces.

All cloaked in his talk of a better galaxy under a firm guiding hand, of course, and the threat never to Eskil.

Darth Sidious had engineered him a very obvious weakness—Eskil did not know if he intended for him to overcome it, the way it was whispered that he had overcome the master to whom he owed his own power, or if it was simply a matter of convenience, a failsafe like the behavior modification chips of the Clone Wars.

Enough was enough.

Not for him. He could have gone on bearing it, hoping silently for the success of the rebellion or the ambition of his apprentice or some shatterpoint in whatever hold his father had over his mother.

Thren Syzygy walked her own path, shadowed and small as it had become at the end, and perhaps he would never understand what bound her to his father or her choices, but they had been hers.

Her sect had rites for all the hours of mortality, for the rise and the fall both. Darklighters did not fear death, not as Darth Sidious did, but they disdained to die in peace—they called it the ascension, the last magnificent clash of one's strength against a beast in an echo of the blooding of their childhood, if there was no sapient opponent worthy of their death.

Eskil felt the moment of her resolve and glimpsed her silhouetted against the red sun before she began to slide down into the telltale depression of a grandmaw's nest.

He heard the hunting shriek half a galaxy away before he was anchored again in his own body, rage spilling up and seeking expression in action. In that moment, he felt as if he could reach out and touch the cold metal that caged him and tear apart this entire station.

Through the haze of his pain, he murmured the words that had been repeated to him endlessly in his childhood. "The Force is with us," he acknowledged.

It was certainly no matter to gain access to an officer of sufficient rank and convince him that there was an urgent matter that required his presence on one of the Core Worlds. Eskil masqueraded as one of the innumerable attachés that served the officers, almost as faceless to those of rank as stormtroopers and far less conspicuous alone.

On Kuat he stowed himself away on one of the massive freighters that regularly traveled along the starlanes to repair and resupply Imperial interests in the Mid Rim.

It was only after crushing the will of several captains of increasing dubious transports and stepping foot onto the soil of a planet in the Outer Rim Territories that he felt himself beyond his father's reach.

He didn't—couldn't—trust it, though.

Freedom is a lie.