And here we come to a tipping point. All I'll say about this one is that I'm rather pleased with it, and if you aren't getting Mortis vibes, I've done something wrong.
The throne room darkens beyond all natural means, the temperature dropping so fast that the humid air is instantly transmuted into mist and frost, while the stones crack and groan as they resonate to the echo of an unearthly scream, one that has to have shattered every glass and crystalline substance in the palace. Even wood and durasteel are not immune, snapping and ringing and juddering as they try to shed the vibrations.
The world itself feels peculiarly heavy, condensed, the air filled with something indefinable that makes it hard to breathe, as an awful silence falls, broken only by last tinkling sounds of falling glass and distant explosions from the battlefield – and even those sounds are soon smothered.
No one has moved. Even the droids seem paralysed. Instead, all stare, frozen, at the slumped and kneeling figure of the Witch of Tatooine.
Gunray, damp skin pale with cold and sheer terror, opens and closes his mouth, then finally gets together enough vocal control to stutter a killing order.
The droids level their weapons at the slim, bowed figure.
Slowly, she breathes in.
The droids begin to drift into the air, slowly, leisurely, as if gravity has suddenly been deactivated, rolling and spinning helpless on their axes in every sign of mechanical panic. As they do, every bolt and screw and magnetic clamp begins to detach; in a handful of seconds, several dozen of the finest battle-droids money can buy become nothing more than a very expensive cloud of parts.
Just as slowly, she breathes out.
The parts fall as metallic rain onto stone floors, with a deceptively cheerful tinkling noise.
Gunray turns to flee. His adviser, Rune Haako, displaying far superior survival instincts and mobility despite his robes, has already almost reached the far door.
The door shuts. Locks. And then, for good measure, merges with the frame and the walls. Haako keeps hammering on the door, screaming for help, for all the good it will do.
And still, the Witch has yet to even move.
Now, she does, one thin, pale hand lashing out like a lightning bolt, curling into a claw.
Gunray stops, frozen between one step and another. The hand turns, and so does he, whimpering and rigid with fear, as he is pulled inexorably across the icy floor. Padme had been a little ahead of Rachel before the collapse, then thrown to one side by the sudden explosion of… grief? Rage? Whatever it had been, she knows it is something else now.
The Witch's head rises and sickly yellow eyes full of hatred lock onto the Viceroy. As they do, they darken further, into a dark orange, a bronze sheen, and then a deadly blood red.
They are not the eyes of a person.
They are not the eyes of an animal.
They are the eyes of something that, Padme knows in her bones, the Galaxy is not supposed to have seen in a thousand years.
The Witch does not simply stand, but slowly flows to her feet with an impossible liquid grace. As she does, her very clothing ripples and shimmers like flames in distorted glass. By the time she is on her feet, the robes of a Jedi Padawan are gone, and in their place are fearsome red-gold flames that swirling around her and cling to her skin in a raging and eerily silent inferno.
They almost seem like an illusion, but no; her hair, loose from its braid and falling to her waist, ripples and rises slowly in the updraft of heat that otherwise does not touch it, amongst flames that it blends and flows among. That protection is not extended to anyone or anything else, either.
The stone beneath her bare feet cracks and hisses and screams at the contrast between the polar cold and the solar heat, the rest of them have to scramble out of the thickening clouds of steam and mist produced at the shear point between the two, and Gunray… Gunray is no longer merely sweating with fear, but almost boiling on the spot as he is dragged in front of her. Despite the fact that she's notably the shorter and slimmer of the two, she seems to tower over him, and her eyes, the only cold thing about her, red as blood and full of frozen hatred, bore into him.
She is no mere Jedi, or even a Sith. She is an image of terrible splendour that would have inspired worship in days of old; carved from ice and robed in fire, a burning light surrounded by shadow and ice, with eerie beauty distorted and enhanced by almighty wrath. Her presence alone is enough to seemingly break the world.
No, Padme realises, as those eyes grow deeper and darker, to black, then all the way through to the solid white of a star's heart. She is wrong, in one particular.
The past tense is not appropriate.
And doesn't Gunray know it. He falls to his knees, to plead in supplication, then screams at the temperature contrast and springs back to his feet, babbling and begging, ignoring how the knees of his robe are simultaneously falling to frozen shards and smoking with heat.
And still the Witch maintains her awful, awful silence. Even the explosions in the distance have stopped, though what that means, Padme does not know – she fears the worst. In the meantime, she watches as the attendant flames wrap tighter and tighter around their mistress, solidifying and changing hue, becoming skin-tight clothing that same blood-red as her eyes had once been, so dark it is almost black, contrasting with fearsome golden gloves from fingertips to forearms, golden boots to her upper thighs, and a sash that dances and flickers like a tongue of fire.
Her chest bears a burning golden sigil, simple and roughly triangular, the tip starting beneath her breasts, travelling over and between them, to reach from near shoulder to shoulder. Her hair continues to twist and swirl in the updraft of now unseen flames. Her face has the remoteness and cold, deadly beauty of a glacier.
She is awful, Padme thinks, and she is awe-inspiring.
And she is in pain.
"You," she whispers, voice choral and sepulchral. "You!"
Gunray is beyond words now, blistered and shrivelled by frost and fire and mere proximity to such wrath, which even semi-directed seems to tear at his soul like a Tatooine sandstorm. He whimpers another wordless, pathetic plea for mercy.
"Rachel," Padme manages, her voice a rasp. It feels like eons since she spoke. Later, she will realise that it has been barely a minute. "Rachel!" she tries again, louder and clearer. She is the first to manage to force herself to speak. Haako is cowering by the door. Her troops have largely frozen in place – Panaka and her handmaidens, loyal to the end, have stayed closest to her, even if what they see is plainly terrifying them. It is terrifying her, too.
But she is their Queen, and she has other priorities. Terror must wait its turn.
The Witch shows no sign of hearing. She makes a peremptory gesture, a mere flicker of the fingers, and Gunray soars across the throne room to hit the far wall with an ugly splatting sound, before sticking there. Padme would assume him dead if she could not tell that nothing so kind is planned for him.
"Always there are people like you," the Witch hisses, stalking forward, carelessly of the cracking stone and sublimating ice beneath her, the fog that follows at her heel like a faithful hound. "Vultures, worms, maggots! Rich and powerful, greedy and fearful, always seeking control, finding a weakness and eating away at it, profiting off of suffering, growing fat on the flesh of the innocent dead. You bring death because it brings you money and you never care! You live, you always live, and good people always die! Where you cannot find an excuse you make it, you create a problem to solve it, you will never have enough and you do not care how many die because to you they have no value, because they aren't money, because they aren't yours, because they aren't you!"
Her head shakes violently, and she stops, a sudden moment of lucidity amidst the semi-coherent tirade.
"Always," she repeats, softer, clearer, with a pulsing fury. "No matter how far I go… there are people like you. Different faces, different ages, different worlds, different species, all the same. Smug, vicious, greedy, and arrogant. You think because you have wealth, you have might. You think because you have might, you have right, divine right, to do as you wish with other beings. Money, lives, and worlds; take and take and take some more. You think you have the right because you have the might to do so."
She crooks a finger, and Gunray drifts down, barely able to breathe, until they are almost within touching distance. He hangs there like a grape about to drop into a furnace. She whispers, soft, almost a caress, with an edge of purest malice.
"Do you think you have the might now, little man?"
Her blazing empty gaze locks onto his, drawing him in, he is unable to look away. Padme, meanwhile, has managed to stand and is determined to intervene. Whatever punishment she wants for Gunray, whatever he deserves, even the darkest parts of her will not stand for this.
"Your majesty!" Panaka hisses, voice low and urgent. He need not bother with quiet – the Witch is consumed with her fury, she has no concern for them.
"She is out of control, Captain," Padme replies curtly. "I have to try." Before he can suggest she wait for the Jedi, or let the Witch just vent her rage on Gunray, she levels a hard look at him. "She came here for the sake of all of us, for a world and a cause not her own, for people she hardly knows, and something happened to her." She looks up at the nightmarish tableau. "It has to be the Sith, the man with the red lightsabre. Something similar to this happened after they fought on Tatooine."
"Then it is a Jedi matter," Panaka retorts. "And we should secure the palace in the meantime."
He pales as he looks at the dangling Gunray, who is now transfixed, wide eyes widening further. Padme knows that his captor is a telepath. She is probably looking for answers. Or Padme hopes she is. The alternatives really don't bear thinking about. Whatever it is, Padme doubts that she is being kind about it.
Panaka is right, technically speaking. At this point, she can easily believe that only a Jedi Master could calm – or even stop – the palpable storm of fury up here. This is something well beyond her knowledge or experience, or that of any non-Sensitive. However, something is telling her that this cannot be left to the Jedi, that something downstairs has gone horribly, horribly wrong and they will not be able to help.
It is more than that, however.
Panaka just looks at the Witch – who had until only a handful of minutes ago been a very human friend and ally, if a powerful one – and sees a potential threat to his Queen. A creature out of the darkest nightmares, at best a force of nature that one should devoutly pray would carry on by and leave one untouched.
Padme? Truth be told, she's probably the only person who doesn't see that.
Oh, she sees rage and power and a horrifying darkness.
But she also sees pain; pain and grief and terrible suffering.
Beneath all that… she sees someone who needs help.
She is Padme Naberrie, elected as Queen Amidala of Naboo. She may not be able to do anything here.
But she would not be who she is if she did not try.
She steps forward, preparing her best oratory to get the Witch . And as she does, her foot clatters against a discarded wooden staff, curiously untouched by cold and by heat.
On instinct, she reaches down and picks it up. It seems to have ignored the unnatural temperature changes entirely. Something gleams in the carvings, like starlight on the lakes of Varykino. Near the head, that strange stone sits, emerald swirled with gold. It sings to her in a music that she could not have put into words, a music that she has never heard before and may never again, one that in another moment would have made her weep from its beauty. But now is not such a time, and the song is urgent, urgent and desperate.
Slowly, she takes hold of it.
And gasps.
OoOoO
Sidious feels it; the initial shock, a disturbance in the Force, then something far more significant, far vaster than the Dark Side merely claiming the life of a Jedi. From halfway across the galaxy, he feels it, and he suppresses a smile of triumph. Death has claimed one Jedi, and another has Fallen. Quite spectacularly, by the feel of it. Under other circumstances, he would bask. As it is, he resolves to enjoy the feeling later.
He is hardly the only one to notice, and he feigns confusion as every Jedi in the Temple from the younglings to the aged Masters stops in their tracks, feeling what follows just as he does.
It had taken a little fast talking to get him in, but he'd managed it. Along with, as it happened, a few hangers on, including that old fool Valorum, the reliable Amedda, and his failed rivals for the Chancellorship, Bail Antilles and Ainlee Teem, as well as their most senior aides. Those, in other words, he had posited as likely targets for Trade Federation assassins. Maul's failure on Tatooine had been regrettable (infuriating), but he has to admit that it has borne unexpected dividends.
"Whatever is the matter, Master Jedi?" he asks in innocent concern.
"A disturbance in the Force, Chancellor," Windu says, steady and controlled as ever, despite the fact that younglings are fretting and elders are staggering. "Nothing for you to be concerned about."
On one level, Sidious admires that control. Windu's natural affinity for the Dark Side and exceptional self-discipline would make him a fearsome Sith if he was ever turned. On another, he feels only contempt. Windu has looked at the Dark Side and turned away, choosing instead the path of weakness, even altering Juyo into Vaapad to create a pathetic facsimile of wielding the Dark Side's power. His steadfastness in the Light is irritating – not immutable, far from it, and his stubbornness is quite, quite useful in its own way, but turning him is probably not worth the risk or the effort.
"Goodness me," he says, frowning at the display before him, idly keeping a metaphorical ear out for any who resonate strongly with the Dark Side, who will stand out after the turmoil. There are a couple. Interesting. He makes a note to investigate. He has uses yet for Maul, but one needs many tools for many purposes. "It isn't anything to do with the events on my homeworld, is it? I cannot think of anywhere else that is currently facing such dire circumstances…"
Windu's expression is stony and Sidious hides his amusement behind a façade of bemused concern. The answer should be entertaining. Jedi are not meant to lie, after all, and Windu is a stickler for such things.
The Master of the Order begins to reply, then stops, as suddenly, every Jedi in the Order snaps around towards the Initiate dormitories, in response to an utterly colossal surge of power. It leaves Sidious breathless, like the bow-wave of an explosion, and he finds himself almost stumbling. He has never felt anything like it, not even that Fall just now.
Which actually begs a few questions – Kenobi is decidedly above-average as Jedi go, but it would take someone of Yoda, Windu, or Dooku's magnitude to Fall so hard. Ah. Of course. The girl. She is strong, isn't she? His Master's interest is not without merit, it would seem. And yet the source of this is more so. He smiles on the inside. And he knows exactly who it is.
Meanwhile, Windu's eyes have widened, but he doesn't lose his calm, or even turn instinctively towards the vast beacon in the Force. Sidious is, begrudgingly, impressed.
"Chancellor, Senators, if you'll excuse me. One of our Initiates has just had a… strong reaction to the disturbance. We, the Council, need to deal with this immediately. Among younglings, reactions can breed further reactions."
"Of course," Valorum replies firmly, as if he is still Chancellor. Sidious makes a note to have his reputation further shredded over the coming years for that impertinence.
"Your duty is to your young ones, Master Windu," the young Alderaanian senior aide – Bail Organa, rather than Bail Antilles – says with understanding. "We quite understand."
"Indeed," Sidious adds. "I am sure we will be quite safe with your fellow Jedi."
Windu nods curtly, then leaves at a Force-enhanced stride that stops just short of being a run. As soon as he turns a corner, it becomes just that. My, they are feeling worried, he thinks.
He takes a seat on a nearby bench, taking the opportunity of a solicitous young Knight to smile, and with a few words encourages chatter and speculation about what is happening. Young Jedi are often very serious, but a few words here and there, a little ego stroking, and one hardly needs the Dark Side to open them up. They start to talk.
Their first word is: "Skywalker."
Oh, this is very good.
OoOoO
Mace barely manages to slow before he bursts into Anakin Skywalker's current place of residence. They haven't yet decided exactly how to place him, or, frankly, what to do with his mother, especially since his sister is also going to be studying with the Jedi. Prior practice would have involved finding her employment elsewhere, but Mace is grimly aware that that is not likely to go well – and frankly, given that she has only recently been freed, it would be downright inhumane. Further accommodations will have to be made.
That, however, is a headache for the future.
The immediate headache is the borderline storm in the Force whirling around and emanating from Anakin Skywalker. The boy is sitting down, visibly in serious discomfort, his mother doing her best to comfort him.
"What's going on?" he asks bluntly, directing the question at the nearby Creche Master, the only being in the room bar Anakin and his mother. One who has, judging by their ginger movements, recently been catapulted against a wall by an explosion of the Force. They must have evacuated the others and attempted an intercession. It had clearly not gone well.
"I don't know," comes the frank reply. "A few minutes ago, he was fine, then he was worried – he said something about his sister. Then, he screamed, he began to babble in a language I have never heard anything like, disjointed words here and there, and –"
There is a sudden pulse of cold, the shadows thickening in the corners of the otherwise well-lit room to cast it entirely in darkness as it emerges, emanating from Anakin Skywalker, huge and furious and lashing out blindly in pain and fury to earth itself where it would. Mace braces himself to shield the rest of the Dormitories, the Creche, the entire Temple from it, just as the other Knights and Masters are – and then it vanishes as quickly as it comes as the little boy grits his teeth and clenches his hands into fists.
Mace stares at him for the blink of an eye in utter astonishment. The Darkness wasn't emanating from Anakin – it was coming through him. And he's just reeled it in through sheer force of will. He's trying to shield them, he realises, in a mixture of wonder and horror.
This also, he realises, as the small boy rocks back and forth with a moan, is coming at no small cost. That darkness, that ferocious storm that struck out, he's containing it. To protect them.
Mace is horrified. He is also impressed.
By this time, the rest of the Council save only for Yoda have arrived, drawn as he is to the heart of this. Skywalker will need them all. As one, without any discussion required, they kneel around the little boy in concentric circles, containing his mother in the process, and lay a hand on his shoulder or the shoulder of one who is reaching forward.
As one, they extend their presence in the Force, wrapping him in the Light. It is not easy – the biting cold of the Dark Side, mixed with an incandescent fire lashes and tears at them, trying to pour through a crack in Anakin's defences, through his mind, through to them. But eventually, they manage to stem the tide. The boy lets out a shuddering gasp, and slumps like an unstrung bow, tension leaving him. His mother gathers him in her arms, then her gaze turns to Windu, who can feel it, and the silent question, even with his eyes closed.
"Something's attacking Initiate Skywalker," he says crisply, then clarifies. "Or attacking the Temple through him." He pauses for a split second, then decides that frankness is best policy, and opens his eyes, transferring his gaze – though little of his focus – to Shmi Skywalker. She deserves his honesty. "He mentioned his sister."
She nods. "Qui-Gon as well," she says. "Anakin was not very clear, but I believe that something has happened to Qui-Gon. After that… also to Rachel." She glances briefly at the Creche Master. "He was speaking in Rachel's native tongue – words, here and there. I do not speak much of it, though I recognised some. They usually follow her nightmares."
Mace nods grimly, a picture starting to form. Qui-Gon is wounded or worse, most likely worse. Padawan Kenobi's status is unknown, but unlikely to be any better. The Sith – and that is exactly what they are dealing with, there can be no doubt – has free rein to attack Rachel's mind; a very powerful mind, yes, somewhat trained, and strong. Strong, but terribly, terribly brittle.
They should never have let her go.
Her mind is riddled with vulnerabilities, so much so that he had practically seen Shatterpoints around her psyche. The sort of vulnerabilities that a Dark Jedi could tear wide open, let alone a fully-fledged Sith Lord. One who is almost certainly torturing her at this very moment, pouring the Dark Side into her head and using it to amplify every one of those stained glass memories, to slice into the wounds the emptiness had left behind.
No wonder her brother had screamed.
He releases his anger and self-recrimination. All they can do is deal with the situation they have.
He practically feels Shmi Skywalker's gaze burning into him, full of questions, and he buries his guilt, preparing instead to explain as briefly as he can, marshalling his thoughts.
Then, the damnedest thing happens.
"No. You've got it all wrong."
Mace blinks and looks down at the very serious looking Anakin Skywalker.
"Excuse me?" he says, surprised as much as anything else.
"It's not the dark man," Anakin says. "The one with the red laser swords – lightsabres. It's not just him."
Mace feels a moment of pure dread.
One of the last pieces of Sith doggerel that had emerged from the death of Skere Kaan's Brotherhood of Darkness, a concept of the Sith created by Darth Bane, who survived Ruusan, at least for a while. A century and a half ago, Kibh Jeen, a Padawan, had fallen and become a Dark Jedi warlord. His last words had been a motif that Jedi Shadows and discreet researches had turned up in the darker corners of the galaxy time and time again, among those who either admired the Sith or aspired to be them.
Dark siders one and all, they had been pale shadows of a true Sith, though dangerous enough, and there had been enough consistency in what they said that the Council had come to believe that the last surviving Sith had followed Bane's creed.
"Two there should be; no more, no less. One to embody power, the other to crave it."
There is no reason to believe they do not still follow it. By all description, this Sith is young. Powerful, deadly, but young and raw. He is acting boldly, openly; disturbing in itself, in how confident it implies the Sith must now be, but also hinting that he is the Apprentice, not the Master. It makes a horrible kind of sense, a matter of predatory opportunism – someone as powerful as Rachel, vulnerable in the midst of a battlefield, ready to be broken, ready to be turned... confident as the Sith clearly are, they would have no hesitation in pouncing on such an opportunity.
He thinks of that remarkable, powerful, brittle girl in the hands of a Sith Lord, a Sith Master, and he closes his eyes.
What have they done?
"Who is it, Ani?" Shmi asks, prompting gently.
"It's Rachel, mom," the boy says, in a wavering, miserable voice. "Something happened to Qui-Gon, something bad, and it hurt her and now she remembers everything. It's all come back and it hurts, it hurts so bad, and she keeps falling and she can't stop and I'm trying and trying but she's hurting so bad that she can't hear me, she won't listen!"
Mace's eyes snap open, the variables changing as he parses this. It explains a great deal. It is also not much less awful than the alternative that he had imagined. Force, if what they had felt earlier was just the overspill of Rachel Summers' Fall, pouring through her connection to her brother, what he has not managed to shield them from… what in the galaxy is happening on Naboo?
"Hear you, she cannot."
Master Yoda arrives what feels like an eternity after this all began, not at a sedate pace, but a steady one. He radiates calm surety in the Force, unfazed by the sheer power at work, or the earlier darkness. Something deep blue gleams in his free hand as he scuttles over and flips into the middle of the circle with textbook Ataru grace, landing neatly in front of the small boy, steady swamp green eyes meeting troubled and tearful sky blue. He lays down his stick and takes Anakin's hand, gently unfolding his tightly clenched fingers.
"Lost, she is, in darkness and pain," he continues solemnly. He places the object in Anakin's hand; a blue stone swirled with gold. Just like the one on Rachel Summers' staff. "Yours, this is. A gift, it was, and in her care it has been. Ask me to keep it for you she did, until the time came." He folds Anakin's fingers closed. "Come, the time has. From fire, this comes, from light. Light your sister needs. Light you have. Brighter, now you will shine. Show her the way out."
Anakin swallows, and Mace cannot blame him. Talking down a Fallen Force user is not a venture of the faint-hearted – and that's if it's even possible – let alone one this powerful and this lost. Even allowing for the strong connection between the two of them, one that can just as easily backfire, it is an endeavour for the most experienced Masters.
Anakin is a nine year old boy.
And Yoda is looking at him without a shadow of a doubt that he can do it.
His mother speaks softly to him, words that Mace doesn't catch, in a language he does not know.
The small boy takes a deep breath, firms his expression, and nods. He tightens his grip.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then, the stone… it doesn't chime, or ring, as some kyber crystals are known to do. It does something else.
It starts to sing.
Soft and mournful, yet strangely soothing, the song grows louder and more clear, rolling out over them, warm and gentle and all-encompassing, as peaceful as the Force itself. Where the Darkness of before had lashed out in a wild storm, where the beacon had flared, this rolls outwards like a ripple in a pond. And where it passes, the shadows retreat, the colours are brighter, and the light is softer. Everything is smooth again.
As it does, a pale silver-blue light, the colour of lightsabre, shimmers around Anakin, whose expression is now one of unearthly calm, and his eyes begin to cloud over.
Soon, the sky blue irises are gone; in their place a deep midnight sky. And on that sky, garlanded like gems on velvet, a field of stars.
Mace stares, only a lifetime of intense self-discipline keeping him from slipping out of the meditation entirely. Dread, no matter how quickly released or suppressed, is gone. In its place… is nothing short of wonder.
First the fall… now the rise.