Author Note: Due to finally figuring out a proper plan for that original novel I kept putting off, my fanfic writing pretty much fell off the face of the earth recently. Alas, my creative process seems doomed to always be a little haphazard. In this case, that means I went and wrote up the premise for a Star Wars story I've been vaguely imagining. Well, my version of a well-known premise anyway. You've probably seen it a lot of time before. It's something of a guilty pleasure, I'll readily admit.

I probably won't follow up this on too soon, if ever. But who knows what will happen?

Sons of Suns and Sands

Prologue: The Ones

"-. .-"

The Architects mastered the galaxy but were somehow wiped out to the last three by one woman. The Kwa used their insurmountable advantages to go around mentoring younger races, yet were somehow wiped out to the last tribe by the first client species that turned dark. The Rakata Infinite Empire collapsed when a deadly plague mutated and supposedly changed their genetics so they could no longer wield the Force. The First Republic bloomed into a jewel of enlightenment that peacefully absorbed even proud rivals like the Azure Imperium, yet it splintered and declined because the most prominent force sect consistently failed to overcome its single-digit percentage of renegades. The Old Republic got regularly keelhauled by its other half, then by every splinter faction that happened to get backing from a darksider. The Republic bore centuries of war to pick up the remains, then wasted the Great Peace because the ones who won it decided their victory wasn't bitter enough without crippling themselves and their descendants in perpetuity. The Galactic Empire ostensibly aimed to defend the galaxy from outside threats, but it didn't even last one generation because of self-sabotage. The New Republic put itself back together piecemeal, but turned on its patrons even quicker than the Old because of hurt feelings. And when the outside threat did finally start to do things, the Yuuzhan Vong didn't last as a threat for more than five years.

"Frustrated?" Ben asked.

"Disappointed."

"Not by the failure of the Dark, surely."

Luke watched the man. Flakes of glowing sand whisked through his form as the wind sung through the endless desert. The flakes of light glinted softly midst red hair. Flickered in and out of his beard in the shade. Luke strongly considered joining him under the infinite wroshyr. Just sprawl in the grass with back to the tree and his feet in the pond. Bask in the man's peace for a century or three. But he'd already done that for the years it took his sister to join the Force, and Luke was always more of a man of action anyway. "The repetitiveness."

Ben hummed.

"It's a cycle." Luke spun a golden sand grain around his finger. "A cycle that keeps growing shorter. And it always starts and ends the same way. It always goes back to some busybody darksider breaking everything in sight because they're stronger than everyone else combined."

"How are things now?"

"How do you think?"

"Not as bad as Leia's hallucinations."

"Aright, not that bad yet, but it's just a matter of time."

Luke idly wondered at how he was less optimistic now than when he was alive. When he finally joined the Force, he was… alright, he was mostly looking forward to reuniting with whatever loved ones were still coherent enough in the Force to pass as people. But he was also looking forward to seeing how the Jedi and Sith would rebuild after all the effort he put into reconciling them. He wasn't one to brag, but he'd scoured the galaxy for every force tradition he could find. Used all the collected wisdom to fill the chasm between the Jedi and Sith philosophies. Even demonstrated the benefits by becoming, reasonably speaking, extremely powerful. When he closed his eyes surrounded by a score of loved ones and reformed enemies, Luke had even had the vague notion that the Jedi and Sith could fully reconcile. Maybe even manage to fill the role previously played by the Ones, somehow. If they even needed to. Whatever it was.

It wasn't a naïve belief – the sheer chaos that increasingly overtook the galaxy during his 138 years of life had forced Light and Dark side cooperation more times than during the Republic and Old Republic combined. The incentive for it grew increasingly quickly the more time passed as well, to the point where there was no shortage of truces and alliances, called by not just Jedi but the Sith themselves. After all his and his children's achievements, Luke had been quite willing to trust that they'd figure out the path even if he couldn't see it himself. The next generation was supposed to surpass the old, wasn't it?

Unfortunately, he'd done all his work without full awareness of a critical detail that underscored all aforementioned grand failures of the past.

"Midi-chlorians."

"Yes," said the old master. "They've backfired rather splendidly, haven't they?"

For someone who spent most of his afterlife haunting old sages and young prodigies to recreate Force secrets and techniques from first principles, Obi-Wan Kenobi accepted the impending collapse of natural law with remarkable aplomb.

"I already told whoever I could among the living," Luke said.

There was no change in Ben's personal heaven.

Luke stretched out of his cross-legged position to spread out on the sand, watching the twin moons and suns. "It's too late."

"Don't feel too bad. It was already too late by the time you were born."

Luke hummed.

Midi-chlorians. The cause of force sensitivity? Kyber and plasma lifeforms beg to differ. The voice of the Force? Kyber and Force Ghosts beg to differ. The source of life? Kyber, plasma lifeforms, silicon lifeforms, barren force nexuses, Yuuzhan'tar, Zonama Sekot, and the Yuuzhan Vong beg to differ. Symbiotic? Only in the loosest interpretation of the word.

Luke didn't hold it against the Architects too much. They were dealing with mass culture shock among the first interstellar species, roaming hyperspace monstrosities, an extragalactic swarm of force-null barbarians, and Mnggal-Mnggal. When you're staring down all these fires, both in the present and the future because you have the motherlode of all prescience, it's hard to look badly on a super-spreading parasite whose simplistic hive mind enhances empathy and encourages cooperation with other hosts for the low price of 95% of your Living Force.

What Luke did hold against them was hoarding the knowledge about their true nature and how to safely purge them. It ensured that the only ones with a chance to disrupt their function were those strong in the Force that indulged the energies and emotions antithetical to the creatures. That was why darksiders – Sith – got so much stronger so easily. The Dark Side wasn't more powerful, but darksiders did free more of their Force ability to work with. Little wonder the Infinite Empire went full genocide on the Architects and all their loyalists after they realised what had happened. If the Rakata hadn't gone on to become oppressive slavers, they quite likely would still be ruling the Galaxy. Unfortunately, like any good maladaptive core belief except ten times faster, the Dark Side does corrupt. Meanwhile, the Force sensitives with a claim to common sense didn't know they could just burn out the things to overcome the crazies working towards total societal collapse every other decade.

The most galling thing was that when the Sith said 'the Force shall free me,' they were right.

There didn't even used to be such harsh divide between Light and Dark, the Je'Daii used to have the right of it, but that changed because of the midi-chlorians too. Maybe it wasn't the only cause, the Architects certainly meddled in a lot of other ways, but the mass consensus propagated through the midi-chlorian galactic hive mind certainly didn't discourage the violent rupture in the Netherworld. That the last three Celestials even needed to mantle the Dark and Light sides of the Force made that clear. Luke respected them for taking responsibility, but not as much as he was irritated at being denied relief at them no longer being a problem. He and his family already had to deal with Abeloth, but now it turned out the Force didn't really need her to be out of balance with the material world.

The Living Force was empowering and protecting life based on the unwitting consensus of midi-chlorian carriers rather than natural law, resulting in food chain disruptions, spontaneous super-plagues, and stranger things like species whose toddler stage lasted decades even though such races would normally be naturally selected out of existence within a year.

The Cosmic Force was strained supporting the mindless galactic hive mind. This meshed very badly with the high-dimensional strain placed on the Force by the increasing deterioration of the Architects' super-stellar engineering, leading to inconsistent effects on the laws of physics. Artificial systems like Corellia and the Hapes Consortium. The clusters of artificial black holes like the Maw. The circumferential hyperspace barrier. The immediate result being that probability was being messed with and antimatter was being generated at random, which often meant that people with high force sensitivity tended to be brain-bled or exploded without warning. And that was just one of many anomalies. Looking beyond the Netherworld to the material universe, Luke could already see haphazard changes in gravity and the lifespan of stars, to say nothing of hyperspace.

Then there was everything the dark shades in the Chaos Nether kept doing. Or trying and failing ever since a certain not-so-chosen-one decided he needed an outlet for all his… misgivings.

Luke watched as the sky began to play out his visions of the worst case scenario. Tatoo I went cold. Tatoo II went supernova. Space shimmered in all colors of the electromagnetic spectrum as hyperspace went haywire. Ashla went black. Bogan turned puce.

"It won't be anything so dramatic," Ben mused as the sky cleared to show Centerpoint Station stretched like melted plastoid.

Luke's mouth twisted wryly. The network of artificial black holes exploded in a fury of space-time that he had the dubious honor of being able to visualise in its full eldritch glory.

"Really, Luke," Ben 'reassured' him. "At worst there will be temporary societal collapse and unavailability of hyperspace travel before things settle down again."

"Yes, what's a few myriad dead star systems and mass extinctions in the grand scheme of things," Luke said as dryly as the desert around them. "And I wouldn't call a thousand years temporary."

There was silence between them.

In the end, Luke proved to have the lesser patience, as usual. "So. Any ideas?"

"Wait for the dust to settle and reincarnate as the benevolent God-King of the new age."

Luke burst out laughing.

"If you're somehow worried about doing badly even though you are the literal soul of goodness, you are free to conscript some of us do-nothings as advisors, but you'll hardly need it."

"Hahaha!" Luke laughed. "Ar-are you sure about that?"

"Power doesn't corrupt, my boy, it reveals."

Luke rolled onto his side and kept laughing. Ben was so nonchalant about it, but of course he would be. Even when he was completely serious.

Ben's personal heaven turned pleasantly cool as he basked in Luke's good mood. The man was satisfied with so very little.

Luke Skywalker felt oddly wrung out by the end, and also settled in just the way he'd hoped when he came to visit. He rose from the sand to stand over the sitting man.

Obi-Wan Kenobi finally opened his eyes. Luke gazed into them. They were the only source of blue in that heaven, bright and full of life like they'd never been before death. They watched him like he was the answer to everything.

For the first time, Luke Skywalker thought he might live up to that faith. "I'm thinking there might be another way to relieve the Force of all this nervous energy. Would you like to know my idea?"

Your father wouldn't ask, Luke braced for him to say, but no. Obi-Wan had been too wise for that even before he became one with all the Force's wisdom.

Such as it was.

"My dear boy," the man said instead. "I'll always listen to you."

Luke didn't say anything though. Being one with the Force meant you had much better, quicker options.

The world flickered from dawn to dusk and dawn again as Obi-Wan Kenobi finally faced something beyond even his composure.

"Oh dear," he murmured, eyes alight with astonishment, admiration and lust for life. "I do apologise, your holiness. I would never, ever have suggested you settle for anything as trifling as galactic imperialism if I'd known you meant to become God."

"-. .-"

When in doubt, deploy God.

There wasn't much doubt in the Netherworld, but the Corellian saying held true regardless for one simple reason: there was no doubt only because of the certainty that deploying God was the only recourse left.

There were plenty of ghosts who wanted to rule. Luke knew them all as he travelled through the layers of the Netherworld, from the province of spirit towards the planes of matter beyond the shadows. The journey was light on his soul at first, like flying through space amidst the stars, but the ease didn't last even a tenth as long as it used to when he first joined the Force at the end of his life. The Force was in tumult, and it became more and more wild and heavy the deeper he sunk towards the Chaos-In-the-Dark. He dove and strode and brushed by and flew past, through and upon the myriad worlds of dreams and self-contained egos. The Lights paid him homage. The Greys watched his passing without care. The Dark shied away from him. The Sith flinched as he neared. Luke had long since faced all the fake beliefs and delusions of each and every one. In no case was he the one who got the worst of the experience. Of the many that existed when he died, there were barely a tenth still holding to their delusions after his communion with them laid bare their foolishness for everyone and themselves to see. Still, he spared a passing thought to sense if… and there he was, his nephew, still unable to find peace.

Luke hadn't exactly been thrilled when Mara Jade chose not to wait for Ben to join them. Chose to follow in Qui-Gon Jinn's and Yoda's footsteps and become one with the Force instead of preserving her individuality. But he understood her choice to not be a helpless bystander to the consequence of the Force in Imbalance. He let her go because her choice had been for peace instead of fear. Unfortunately, Leia's lineage seemed determined to go the other way whenever it was most dramatic.

His nephew's soul world looked less like a star and more like a grey, frail bubble liable to burst at the first wind gust. And yet the boy chose to dive deep into the lightning-teeming Chaos instead of letting him get near.

Oh Jacen, you foolish bleeding heart.

Luke shot straight for and past him, paying the ripple of startled shock no mind as he proceeded to his real destination. There would be time enough later to pay another visit to the self-imposed prison of his fool nephew. Seriously, what had that boy been thinking? Did he really believe that ignoring the consequences of his grandfather's actions meant he wouldn't be subject to them himself? He knew from the start he was going to walk in his footsteps completely. Anakin Skywalker slaughtered thousands of people to save one person, and look how that turned out. He was left a broken man with nothing to call his own save the void. And the boy had the gall to claim he did it so Luke himself wouldn't fall in his place. Luke wasn't arrogant enough to think it impossible, especially with what he knew now, but he'd already gone and fallen to the Dark years ago, and he got over it within weeks! He certainly didn't need his twin sister to come and murder him!

Luke gave Chaos his irritation and descended another layer towards the material world while the dark shades fought over his scraps.

Sometimes he resented Vergere for choosing to fade before Luke passed on, but he'd long since decided she was no excuse. Jacen would just have to take responsibility for his own actions. If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do. Remember that, fool nephew? How did you forget the care you had for your fellow Jedi, and even your greatest enemies, that led you to defeat the Yuuzhan Vong and teach them a better way of life?

"And are you any better?" The ghosts hissed in his ear through a thousand tongues of sulfur and ash. "You keep losing your best students to the Dark Side, Jacen's fall took someone very precious to you away, and your speech on Zonama Sekot had nothing to do with the Vong you were fighting. The Force has a will, and it's when you act against that will that you cause Chaos, isn't that what you said? Why lie to yourself, even now? Submit to the Force's will. The Force's will is our will!"

And soon it will be my will. "Be silent before I turn you into carrion."

There had to be something deeply lacking in you for your deepest foundational desires to so easily be lost in a collective of ideological self-sabotage. No single voice should be able to drown out so many hundreds shouting at once. But lo and behold, his voice alone was enough.

Luke Skywalker touched down amidst dead earth and crumbled masonry. All around him were piles of fallen rock. Far away, the crystal that once hovered above the monastery lay fallen and shattered.

"Son."

"Father."

Anakin Skywalker looked at him with unclouded blue eyes. "I hope you have good news, because mine's all bad."

Luke looked past the man. "How is she?"

"Worse. She's not even scrying anymore. She's lost in her own mind, going in circles, replaying the same history over and over again as if enough simulations will miraculously birth a solution. Her story and yours, but with increasingly insane actors. The only change even remotely resembling reality is that everything is bigger and more breakable. All the while, the good in her life is murdered or worn down to such a pathetic shell that she hates it, and hates herself for hating it. Even this pretense is starting to fray now."

Luke stepped up. "How so?"

"This latest delusion," Anakin gestured sadly at her. "She stole your Ben for herself, gave him Jacen's fate by having you try to kill him in his sleep-" excuse her? "-made him murder Han in the opening hours, made Ben almost murder her, came back to life with just enough addled wits to cover for the stand-in who'd gotten nine tenths of her allies killed, made you kill yourself for nothing, and now the fate of the galaxy rests in the arms of Palpatine's granddaughter-" say what!? "-who keeps failing to put the galaxy before her whirlwind romance and will probably need Leia to call up all the Jedi in history to let the poor thing win even though she has all the Force powers ever."

"… That's ridiculous." Luke said faintly. "Is it even her thinking up this nonsense? I thought you were shielding her from these demons."

"I am, but she's, reasonably speaking, rather powerful now." Which was a polite way to say there was only so much even he could do against someone who'd drunk from the Font of Power and bathed in the Pool of Knowledge. "I can't do much when she reaches out to them for 'inspiration.'"

The Dark Side is a path to many abilities, some of which are definitely unnatural.

The Son beheld the Father.

Then Luke smiled and in an instant shared his plan with the entirety of the Force.

The Force lurched in disbelief at his sheer audacity.

Anakin gaped.

Luke pat him on the shoulder. "Do shine a clear Path, eh father?" Then he stepped past him, went to one knee next to the Font and drank in the might of past, present and future.

"You're more brazen than I ever was," mused the unchosen as he understood and accepted his role immediately.

The good were shocked. The grey were shocked. The dark were shocked. All but a handful panicked and tried to do something without knowing what.

"You fool!" Leia shrieked as she jumped to her feet. When she whirled to face him, her eyes were red on black. "Even now you'd put your hope in them!? When they targeted toddlers and infants and had guidelines on how to take a child without resistance from their parents! An honest-to-goodness manual! They dress up with pretty words how to separate families forever and ensure zero contact from either side!"

Luke rose and faced her mildly. "Perfection of method equals neither malice nor sin." Child-stealing Jedi, honestly. Her mind really was compromised if she latched on such nonsense. "How could the Jedi have ever believed in a Republic and her people if they couldn't connect on the most basic level?" Also, tactics. When times are hard, you fall back on the methods that are most reliable.

"A thousand year-long downward spiral can't excuse what the Jedi became!"

"Neither can I. Neither can you." Luke walked towards her while the good and grey and evil swarmed the dead nexus. "They suffered the consequences. The Jedi were slaughtered to their youngest save the two of us. And when the countless deaths and the horror of the Dark's total victory sickened the Force itself, the Jedi on their own chose to defy what they had taught and been taught when times were most difficult. They had just seen everything destroyed by one man's attachment to one single person, but instead of taking it as proof of their millennium-old beliefs, instead of raising the twins as clean slates into warriors pledged to their doctrine, they put their trust in love and family and created us."

"And what did we achieve that was so wonderful!?"

Luke absently pitted his will against the increasingly rabid ghosts trying to barge into his business. He waited for Leia to acknowledge her own truth.

"Nothing, Luke," Leia despaired, drawing on herself as he neared her. "All we did isn't worth anything now."

"We all lose eventually, Leia." Luke laid his hands on her shoulders. Even mad with grief and despair she was delicate as a flower. "We can do everything right and still lose. It's the nature of life. Somehow, to someone or something, we lose. We just have to try and make a difference before we do. And if we fail, we learn our lesson and try again."

Leia brought a hand to her mouth and choked back a sob. "What would Yoda say if he heard you now?"

"Yoda was wrong."

Leia blinked, astounded.

The Brother embraced the Sister, pressing his forehead on hers while his arms went around her and he jumped.

They fell in the Pool of Knowledge together.

The Cosmic Force hung behind the physical universe with a twang. The Living Force pulled against its own threads. The Netherworld skipped the next thousand years it should have taken to descend the rest of the way into Chaos. The Force around him and further all the way to the edge of the galaxy convulsed. All spirits but two lunged for him, pouring all their will and strength to shout, stop, flee, help, ask him what, how, why, what, what, what are you-?

That was fine. It didn't matter what power they tossed around as long as it was power.

The Force came to life around him, a twisting, tangled latticework of trillions of hearts and sparks of light and shades of darkness, weaved deftly through countless motes of dust connected only by the synaptic bond of motion and entropy. Each star and world and living thing became known to him, each a system of nerves and particles he could put on a new path with a flick of will, as helpless to him as to their own natures. The universe was changing despite itself, and he could see where it changed but shouldn't. The Force was the inescapable power preceding natural law, but it no longer reflected the rhythm of motion and life as it should in return. A man on Byss grew younger instead of old. A river on Naboo flowed upstream. A bell on Tython tolled without being swung. A wroshyr tree on Kashyyk was rotting from the outside in. The universe ached with violent inverted reactions and the pain of all souls alive and dead.

The emotion of a trillion trillions filled him and he knew without doubt that there would never be more peace and plenty than pain, suffering and death. He knew then, without doubt, why none since the oldest days had drunk from the Font and bathed in the Pool without falling. There was no deeper one could fall. The darkness was already there, at rock bottom.

And there it would remain. So what if reality never lived up to hope? It never did, no, that wasn't the reason.

The thread of his life unspooled from him, and Luke could see his own presence, his sisters' presence, his children, grandchildren, his family all. Their presence stretched for years and centuries into the future through all their achievements and events they had set in motion until hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of planets bore the mark of their life, and so there was no death. Luke Skywalker. Leia Skywalker. And the first of only two ghosts that hadn't lost their cool.

Anakin Skywalker. He was a vast tree with only half its roots for he sprung from the Force's own disdain towards hubris. His existence sprung forward in time, a scythe that cut ten thousand others, a lynchpin from whence flowed all of those who were now great and brightest. The blackest Dark. The brightest Light.

Luke reached out for the only other soul that hadn't panicked. The subtle shine that underscored all of the brightest lights. He reached out with soul and will and all the might of the Force at his beck and call and found no purchase. Good. Putting all of the Galaxy's hopes into someone still liable to dance to someone else strings was just stupid.

Fortunately, Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn't too shy to ask for directions, and he knew the path of his first apprentice exceedingly well. He travelled the latticework from tip to root, every thread and branch pulling back on itself in his wake because the Father was neither the action nor the hand. He was the Path.

Anakin Skywalker gave a deep sigh of relief and faded.

But mists of time and a Sith master's pride lingered, so Luke shrugged and guided Obi-Wan Kenobi all the way to their roots as well.

The Force frayed. The latticework of ages was irrevocably unravelled. All that was left was Natural Law, the leftover Power of ages undone, and Time that must go on even if it means reknitting the loom of ages to reflect what it looked like a century and a half prior.

The universe ached, but it would heal.

Leia watched him in wonder. "Brother…"

"Sister."

Her eyes glittered, red and black seeping out to nothing in the water. "You're so bright."

Luke laughed joyfully and emerged from the Wellspring as the planet of the dead came to life around him. With every sound he made, the world birthed a myriad forms of life that cried their lust for life and came to bask in the brightness of his presence, for the Force was in him and the was the Light.

"Luke," Leia whispered, clinging to his brightness and his warmth. Her skin was fair and smooth again, and her eyes were of a goddess and a queen, bright and golden instead of black and bloody with mad desperation. "How?"

"You forgot agency, my precious sister. All the power and knowledge in the universe isn't there to solve your problems, it's for you use to achieve your own dreams. There isn't enough power in the whole universe to make the best of all the knowledge out there, you shouldn't have bathed in the Pool without accepting that reality. You shouldn't have drunk from the Font without having a clear vision already your own."

Leia closed her eyes and sunk her head in his chest. "So in the end, he was right. There can be no light without darkness."

"Now you're just being silly."

Leia blinked and looked up in astonishment.

"There can be no light without darkness," Luke said flatly. "What a silly idea! Darkness may be defined as the absence of Light, but Light is always Light. A sun blazing within the expanse of eternity, the world engulfed in the endless dark of the unknown future while the light shines brightest, that is Balance."

Finally, finally, Leia laughed for the first time in a hundred years. It was a beautiful sound that sent the stagnant life around him to run and bray and hunt.

It was later, after the myriad life around them began to figure out the mystery of the circle of life, that the Wellspring finally heard words spoken again.

"What now?"

Luke Skywalker pondered the Netherworld with all its shades and ghosts that had conspicuously not disappeared from existence. Then he looked beyond it. He felt Leia right beside him as his attention travelled beyond the shadows to the world on the other side of the Monolith, through the Cosmic Force and the Living Force. All the way to Coruscant, where a twelve year-old initiate came awake in his bed, placidly inspected his surroundings, got out of bed and began typing his advance notice that he was leaving the Jedi Order.

"Now," the three of them spoke at once. "Time to get to work."