Making of the Master
(Synopsis: both Luke and Ben are one step closer to becoming the Masters they wanted or needed to be. Rey wakes up to a feeling something terrible has happened. Also, the final chapter.)
The Starkiller Base – Kylo Ren inspects the new, yet distinctly familiar orb in construction as they are being pulled into its belly with a powerful tractor beam. It is imposing, although strangely quaint as well - only this time, its size surpasses multi-fold even the Second Death Star.
Inquisitor that served Snoke for many centuries now is sliding peacefully before him, completely self-assure and content in his own supremacy. This change in power dynamics certainly didn't please him – but he was for now standing delighted at the fact that his potential opponent was so, as he put it, untried.
Snoke's face is disfigured, although something about the ancient creature tells Kylo Ren he was once a beautiful one. His disfigurement has something to do with the Light Side and with the Jedi – no wonder the creature harbors such intense hatred for the order.
"Knights of Ren," Snoke says in his frail, old voice. "Welcome… at last. Old things always have to make way to the new ones. That is the only way to progress."
Inquisitor stands at the side with a sort of idle arrogance and complete assuredness. The saber he gave Kylo Ren is an ancient one – a Mandalorian design – but it changed its owner many times over and laid unused for at least a century before his hand touched it. It is a bunch of technological rubbish that spits and coughs plasma beam – the Inquisitor was allowed to pick it himself. It was a statement. A warning. I've seen many hot-heads like you, boy. No need to waste kyber crystals on disposable goods.
It gives the Jedi Killer an idea, if the violent electrical storm in his brain can be called one.
"If I may have the liberty, Supreme Leader," Kylo Ren replies coyly and makes a low, ceremonial bow before Snoke.
The alien is apparently slightly startled when he reads Kylo Ren's intent, but obliges to him readily.
"Of course, Lord of the Knights of Ren," he responds and makes a hand gesture of approval.
Before he has time to raise his light-saber or to beg, the Inquisitor is gutted from waist to neck with a single violent blow of the lightsaber.
Not so bad for a Mandalorian design after all, Kylo Ren muses as he rose the imperfect beam to his face. Through its amber-hazed light, his peripheral vision sees his Knights. The bastards probably counted on Inquisitor to make a much needed buffered zone between them and him, the madman.
The blood gushed and splattered over the floor, walls and the surrounding Knights of Ren – the sheer speed and brutality left them stunned. No brotherhood and no camaraderie bind them, they realize it only now in its full extent – only hatred for the Jedi and unbridled lust for power.
Snoke smirks.
"Next time," he says wryly. "Do it… cleanlier."
His feet dangling over the floor, he feels the life is being drained out of him.
Snoke was never explicit about the details of his training, but this doesn't come as surprise. He'd gladly scream his pain for the whole galaxy to hear, but then his darkening brain remembers everything. Every single detail of the slaughterhouse. Jessa's silent red eyes pleading with him.
Instead of howling his pain out, he remains mute, like her.
Snoke releases the grip and he falls like dead weight on the metal floor. With peripheral vision, he sees Irin. He would expect that punk to gloat over this, but no – he is almost as pale as he is. Then he folds in two and vomits violently at the sight. Other Jedi turncoats are not far from, as testified by their pasty faces.
This is what you wanted, brethren, he says to himself. The cold metal floor feels like that Twi'lek's embrace.
Even Snoke shows sign of surprise and satisfaction.
„Good, young Master Ren," he says, reclining in his vast throne. „That was very good indeed."
He has a second to recuperate before the lighting strikes him down and pulls him under, deep into the Dark Side. There is no other way to survive this, if he wants to survive at all, that is. He wanders into the darkness and dwells there, feeling every cell of his body transforming into pure pain.
The Light Side is shut off for him, he can sense it acutely. Like pulling out all of his teeth at once, without the painkiller. Strangely enough, the darkness now seem so welcoming. An escape from the pain of the living.
I will not survive this, he thinks and finds a perverted sort of contentment in this. But Snoke catches on his resignation and subsides. Kylo Ren feels as if his whole skin has been ripped off of him in one blow.
„Oh, no," Snoke sneers at him. „It will not go the way you think. I will keep my end of the bargain. Rise, Master of the Knights of Ren."
The creature is mad, he thinks. Completely demented. I can't get up.
The Force from the Dark Side user lifts him up to his feet. He staggers and falls on his one knee. A true knight, indeed. Blood drips from his nostrils and he smears it lazily across his face. Its taste is putrid and it wakes up his senses.
But Snoke will not spare him one single blow.
„Luke," Snoke says. „He is alive, Master Ren."
The misshapen giant's words are both those of mockery and threat. He is both dissatisfied and enticed. He sees the master Jedi and his former pupil almost as nothing more than two rabid curs ready to rip each other throats off.
„That is impossible," Kylo Ren says in hoarse, dark voice. „I saw man burried under tones of stone rubbles. I burnt the temple and all its surroundings to the ground. No one could have survived that. Not even him."
Another bolt strikes.
„Do you question my authority?" The voice growls, dissipating into millions of shrieks. „Or do you protect your uncle still, Ben Solo?"
He is an animal being flayed alive in millions of agonizingly slow motions.
„No," he screams back and this is the only truth he is certain of. „Luke Skywalker must die."
But as the words leave his lips and as Snoke loosens his grasp, something inside him ignites. A faint memory, and the faintest of lights – at first, he remembers Leia. The whole planet he's on is one giant weapon built with the sole purpose of destroying the New Republic. He mourns her and her defeat, but her mind is closed for him. She considers him dead, as she considers her own brother.
This light is that other light. Her – the girl. His mind is probably that broken that he hallucinates, seeing her as she enters the Throne Room, comes to him, and then kneels. He closes his eyes tightly, and then re-opens them. But she's still there.
Illuminated by the same old light, her features solidify before him and he observes her brown eyes with fireflies of gold and emerald: brave, strong and merciful, pleading with him. Wide sun-kissed face with chiseled, noble features: a face that inspires only trust and hope.
"Ben, please, no," she says, looking down at him, beautiful doe eyes misted with tears of sorrow and compassion. Someone could mistake her appearance for a soft one – but there is a definite strength within her that draws him in as much as her compassion and her tears.
But as soon as he reaches out with his hand to her, she's gone – out from the room and out from his memory.
Snoke makes a grotesque grimace on his otherwise solemn and even attentive face – a grimace Kylo Ren fails to acknowledge, his mind suffocating in red fog.
Despite all the terrifying torture he endured, he struggles to his feet and howls:
"The saber is tainted and weak."
Is he referring to himself? He can't say.
"I need to bleed it… again."
Now he is definitely talking about himself. He needs war. He needs to bleed… again. His knowledge of bleeding the light saber from the Dark Side influence will now serve in reverse.
"Of course," Snoke says.
His training has only just begun.
This is not an afterlife. This is his tomb, and he's buried alive.
Remembering only vaguely what has happened, he finds his mind a place of roaring dissatisfaction at the fact that he is, indeed, still living.
He has no other choice now but to break free, his self-preservation instincts taking hold over his concussed brain.
Using all his strength and all his focus, he makes a slow and painful ascend up to the surface where once his nephew's hut was.
The long night of the planet is so pitch-dark that, for a brief moment, he thinks he's still underground. The air is changed, but it's even worse than that underneath him, under the rubbles and collapsing dust – acrid smoke filling the atmosphere and his strained lungs.
The Jedi master scrambles to the sight of the old Temple engulfed in soaring flames. Confused, weakened by three-days long dwelling under the earth, he can barely grasp the whole scope of the immolation that occurred. But soon, all the tragedy comes flooding in – almost half of his students are killed in cold blood and by Ben's hand, and then incinerated in the fire. And his Tatooine favorite lies in deadly calm of the ocean. The rest have sided with Ben Solo and left the planet in haste.
He tries to make a painful yell of a wounded animal, but his injured and dry throat makes no sound.
He falls to his knees, eyes full with thickened tears of an old, helpless man and with the dust and ashes that swirl around him.
There is no living soul on the island. Leia – his heart breaks in an instant as he remembers his sister. He failed her. He failed her completely and beyond redemption. He can't go to her – what would they have to say to each other? Considerable time shall pass before any news of the destruction reach her and the rest of the populated galaxy. This is an advantage – if there is any advantage he can even think of in this moment – one he can't pass.
The old familiar buzzing comes from his side – his old droid, R2D2, comes rolling in. Bitter, faint smile escapes Luke.
"The X-wing," his voice crackles and fades, but the machine is knowledgeable. It made sure to move the X-wing from its former location before the traitors could grab hold of it. It's untouched.
He thinks of his students' sabers, but his own resignation decides instead of him – may they rest here, scattered, destroyed or forgotten where they are. If the Force wills it – and he smiles again, almost deranged and with outmost bitterness – they will be found again and by worthy set of hands.
R2D2 kept the catalogue of all of his maps and all of his findings on the first Jedi temple on the Ahch-to, planet rumored to be located somewhere in the Unknown Regions.
"We must hurry," he whispers to the droid who whistles back long and sorrowful.
"I know", Luke says. "I'll leave you with the Resistance. You'll be safe there."
Priming his X-wing, Luke answers to his inquisitive droid:
"No, not me. I have to leave. It is the only way."
He has no time for sardonic introspection. His hideous arrogance is standing naked before him – the same old arrogance, the Skywalker arrogance that gave birth to the most powerful Sith in the galaxy. I failed him, he thinks. I failed them all.
I will shut myself from the Force. It can be done with appropriate meditation on Ahch-to, if the legends are true.
The Darkness can't strive without the Light – without it, it will soon die out. Force will not allow such imbalance.
He dares not to look back as his X-wing hovers over the desolate temple island.
At the other side of the galaxy, somewhere in its backwater regions, a girl, a part of an exploited scavenging population, wakes up in the middle of the night in cold sweat to a distinct feeling that something truly terrible and truly tragic has happened somewhere and somehow.
Despite her tender age, she's strong, daring and used to day-to-day danger. She is no stranger to killing in self-defense, which gives her something of that much needed bad reputation on Jakku: but this sensation leaves her trembling under many woven blankets that shield her from the freezing cold of the nights in the desert.
It's her parents, perhaps – but as she thinks of the possibilities, her eyes start watering on their own. No, it must be the exhaustion and grueling routine, nothing else. A routine ever so grueling that it even silenced the voice – that voice.
She makes herself go to sleep again, discarding her terror as nothing more than an illusion of her tensed nerves, but she remains awake right up until the dawn, and perfectly incapable of dozing off for even fifteen minutes.
Pressing her temples, she tries to remember the words, the voice and all its sensitive and kind modulations.
"Wait for me here, sweetheart. I'm coming back for you. I promise."