Legacy 4

Chapter 11

The krayt dragon's death cry was a burbling ululation, volcanic froth pouring from its slit throat, blackening sand and scale, steaming life pooling amid the claw-churned valleys of sand.

The Watcher flourished his blades, their twin red tongues disappearing into the hilts, leaving behind the acrid tang of ozone, of scorched air. He bared his teeth in a silent leer, watching the arrogant beast, king of the desert, writhe and grovel at his feet, power brought low before Power, strength and majesty before Hate. When at last the sinuous body stilled, its final spasms shuddering into eternal rest, he turned and tramped away, taking up post upon his chosen promontory among the black hills. Soon , the carrion scavengers would come, the large and the small, the winged and those that marched billion-fold from their hives beneath the sand, to reduce the corpse to a pale architecture of bone and clinging sinew, another wind-smoothed sculpture to grace the desert's terraces. And in the morning, such commotion would attract others, the next worshipers at death's ravenous shrine.

He had but to wait. His own prey, his Chosen, drew nearer – was even now upon the wastes, stealthy and cautious, aloof, impregnable. For now. His time was coming.

And – as he watched the first bold flesh-eaters crawl from concealment and pick at the fallen dragon's cadaver, under cover of utmost night – he felt another presence wandering the desert's empty halls. The Child. The prize demanded by his master, the single grain hidden in a mountain of living chaff. Oblivious, preoccupied, unwitting, the foolish babe careened toward its destiny, toward the uprooting and reversal of its every certainty, a tiny coracle caught in the thundering whirlpool of fate, at the center of which howled bottomless Dark.

The Watcher rose and prowled along the sheltered ridge. It was, perhaps, time that he and this… child… become better acquainted.

At midnight, Qui-Gon Jinn bolted out of a light trance into utter, pulse-stopping certainty that something was not right.

He had tucked himself beneath an eave just outside the slave quarter, a sentinel's post that allowed him to invisibly monitor the entire clay-baked compound. Not a soul had crept past his guard into the humble dwellings beyond – it would require a master Shadow to elude detection, to sneak past such a guardian without leaving the faintest ripple in the Force.

His hand went of its own accord to the commlink on his belt.

A moment later, a clearly aggrieved voice answered. "….For stars' sake, Qui-Gon."

Relief blotted out irritation. "Is all well?"

Obi-Wan snorted. "I don't know. Is it?" his voice was husky, sleep-bleared. Grimacing, the Jedi master realized that the bond between them, never attenuated by the formal severance of apprenticeship, guaranteed that something of his own mood must have bled across psychic barriers, stirring the younger man into similar unease.

"I don't know," he replied, truthfully.

"Well, that clears matters up," came the facetious retort.

"Where are you?"

"Torbb and I are aboard the shuttle."

Qui-Gon reached into the universal light, casting out an impalpable net over the whole quarter, the hundreds of lives sheltered beneath its domed roofs, the restless, the squalid, the desperate, the resigned, the peacefully asleep… and…

"The boy is missing," he realized, with a jolt of apprehension. How had Anakin got past his guard? Was it even possible for an untrained youngling to shield so effectively? What did that mean?

"The boy," Obi-Wan repeated, blankly.

Impatient, the tall man swept his awareness out further, trawling the immediate vicinity; Anakin was not hard to locate, in any milieu.. though if he could disappear with such skill….

"You mean Anakin?" his young counterpart groused, edgily. "Master –"

"He managed to leave without drawing my attention."

"How?" Obi-Wan demanded.

"I don't know."

"Well. You're a veritable font of illumination tonight."

"Listen to me. He's gone – probably into the desert. He's obsessed with this upcoming podrace, and may have a vehicle. You need to find him."

There followed a significant pause – no more than a heartbeat's silence, a mere indrawn breath that would register as nothing to an outsider, but which screamed throttled vexation to Qui-Gon's finely attuned senses. "Very well."

"Thank you." They could argue about it later; for now, the Force was howling with danger. They needed to locate the boy and get him to safety. "I'll search the township and surrounding area."

"If he's out here, we'll find him," Obi-Wan promised. "…and give him an earful."

Speed.

Sometimes, when life was coming at you fast – when Hutt crime syndicate enforcers were knocking at your door, when a death threat was hanging over your mother's head, when it looked like you might be separated from your family forever, when all your dreams and ambitions were ruthlessly circumscribed by the fact of slavery- sometimes, the only way to face your problems was to outrun them. Anakin caught his tongue between his teeth and hunkered down lower behind his hack-job podracer's rattling viewsheild. Grit and dust whirled past him, a vortex of angry heat and noise kicked up behind the twin engines yoked to his flimsy chariot.

The pod was faster than fast – it was the Best Ever Built. It was a conveyance fit for a hero. Well, mostly. He would prefer it to have a better paint job. Gold and black, maybe, with chevrons and stripes and some kinda insignia worthy of a hero or a knight. As it was, the pod was welded together of various scraps and salvaged pieces, some of them from unlikely sources. But as an engineering project, it was without rival. He'd seen plenty of racers before, and he'd pored over all the manuals he could get his hands on. But beyond that, he just knew this one was the acme of its genus, a thing so light, so overendowed with thruster amplifiers, that it teetered on the knife's edge of impossibility. One change to its design and it would topple into failure. There was no improvement to be made because he had taken the machines essential nature to its inherent limits, by an infinitesimal calculus of raw speed.

This time he wasn't only going to outrun his problems, he was going to race them. And win. He would come out on top. Victorious. Free. A hero, a champion.

The pod hurtled along his chosen practice course, the timer counting off the microseconds as he took careening turns and hugged the sides of steep canyons. A test run in pitch darkness might be "dangerous" by some folks' standards, but it also ensured privacy. There was no way he was gonna let that sleemo Sebulba catch sight of what the competition had in store; the nefarious Dug was well known for sabotaging his primary competitors, often to fatal effect.

He had just run through a narrow rock formation affectionately termed Hell's Gauntlet, and was heading into the open wastes to test out the stabilizers at velocities over three hundred k, when he felt it. Hairs rose at the back of his neck, despite the thick layer of sweat accumulating between his shirt collar and the back flap of his crash helmet. His stomach flipped over, and he slowed down a bit, coasting along a tall sand-drift and checking the primitive forward sensors.

A Tusken raiding party would be bad – not that he was worried. He was way faster than any dumb speeder or bantha caravan – though a stray blaster bolt to his engines could be disastrous. If he disappeared out here in the desert, without Mom knowing where he was…. he swallowed. Maybe he shouldn't have left without telling anyone. He'd even managed to sneak past Mister Qui-Gon, which seemed like a pretty wizard thing to do, if you thought about it. A Jedi was serious business. But if there was trouble out here…. It might be better to have one on his side.

The heat-readings showed a lot of life forms, but not Sand People. Just a choobazzi lot of scavengers over the next big swell, like enough to eat a whole herd of dead banthas. That was kinda weird. It intrigued him, even more than the strange tingly feeling going up and down his spine. Something important, something…. big…. was going on out here. He could tell, somehow.

Cutting the thrusters to quarter speed, he skimmed over the shadowed sand, creeping closer and closer to the object of his fascination.

And the one silently, eagerly, Watching him.

"Tell me again what I'm looking for," Torbb Bakk'ile's static-ridden voice crackled over the 'link.

"Youngling: human, male, blond, eight or nine years old, with a propensity for unauthorized nocturnal excursions. You'll know him if you spot him."

The gigantic Knight muttered something under her breath before replying. "Well, no sign of the little blighter on my end. You, Kenobi?"

"Not – wait a moment." Obi-Wan made a last adjustment to his macrobinoculars and zoomed in again on the northwestern quadrant. There, mysteriously erupting from the dunes, was a long rooster-tail of dust, the telltale signature of a repulsor vehicle passing at high velocity. "Stars' end," he griped. "Never mind. I've found him. I'll send you coordinates."

"Oh good, I was starting to worry that I might actually get some sleep tonight."

He cut the link, smirking a little at Torbb's sarcastic appraisal of the situation. Qui-Gon's latest pet project was, in the characteristic manner of all such pathetic life forms, causing a wide ripple effect of inconvenience. Some things never changed.

He slung one leg over his idling gravbike and revved down the sharp incline, toward the open desert floor below. The sooner they tidies up this particular mess, the better, in his humble opinion. Because, besides the predictable degree of annoyance caused by his former mentor's current adoptee, he had an inchoate sense of disaster looming ahead, of playing with volatile elements over an open fire.

In short, he had a bad feeling about this.

It was a krayt dragon carcass.

Already half-consumed, white bones protruding from flaccid scaly skin, tendon and ligament hanging from the buttresses of its skeleton, the thing appeared a long coil of decay, broken upon the barren waste. The stars peered at the grisly spectacle without pity; the night wind caressed the fluttering shreds of flesh like so many pennant flags. Over the whole wreckage swarmed an army of gnawing, tearing, munching scavengers, glutting themselves on this unprecedented bounty.

Anakin brought the pod to a standstill and hopped over the side.

"Rugged," he breathed, awe-stricken. He had never seen death on such a grandiose scale, the ruin of anything so tremendous. Its blood still clotted the air with an iron tang, with a sticky-sweet armoa, repulsive and tantalizing at once.

There was something…. glorioius…. about the demise of such a monster, the downfall of such primordial greed and power. There was hope. Even the desert's mightiest predator could fall; why not then Jabba, his minions, Sebulba, Watto, all of them? Slavery and poverty themselves might be overthrown, suffering and oppression of every kind annihilated – brought to ruination and end, left to rot upon lifeless, ever-shifting sand.

Perhaps speed was not the only solution. Perhaps there was another way….

"Power," a deceptively soft voice said, directly behind him.

He pivoted on the spot, heart leaping against his breastbone. The scavengers scuttled and flapped away, abandoning the feast in a wild stampede. The wind itself ceased, holding its breath.

He looked up, up into an alarming face, one scrawled and painted, black upon red. A wreath of horns crowned the newcomer's head; his eyes glinted lantern yellow beneath furrowed brows. Black shadows wrapped themselves about him, a lord's mantle.

"Power," the stranger repeated, indicating the krayt with a nod of his head. "There is also the way of power."

"Who…who killed it?" Anakin asked, as though in a waking dream. He already knew the answer.

The painted stranger smiled, mirthlessly. "I did," he replied, simply.

Limbs rooted to the spot, mind all but numb with shock, Anakin watched the mesmerizing figure prowl slowly forward until they were but an arm's length apart. Beneath the heavy folds of his cloak, a silver weapon hilt glinted.

"Are.. are you a Jedi too?" the boy stammered out, his belly fluttering, his pulse drumming in both ears.

Revulsion ghosted over the krayt-slayer's features. "I am something better. Something more courageous."

Stumbling backward a single step, the boy scowled. "Jedi are brave!"

"Not brave enough to strike down their foes," the tattooed warrior sneered.

A Jedi's mandate is not to punish evildoers but to keep the peace. There is a significant difference.

Anakin swallowed, unable to drag his gaze from the Zabrak's boldly patterned face, the sigils traced over his skin in blood red and night-black, the horns thrusting from his skull like accusing fingers. "Uh…."

"You have foes," the stranger observed, quietly. "I can teach you to fell them. To end them. Come with me… is that not why you came here tonight? To find your destiny?"

Anakin's lungs seemed to squeeze tight, constricting his breath, cutting him off from the cool wind. A pounding silence closed in round him, an awareness of his utter solitude, of the desert's emptiness, of the krayt's reeking corpse, its spilled and ravaged guts laid out upon the sand like so many cherished secrets, so many hidden ambitions and fears. He licked his dry lips and peered up into a pair of jaundiced eyes, lamps burning amid pools of jet black.

"I…. what about Mom?" he peeped out, reeling in uncertainty.

"Come with me," the Zabrak repeated, extending one gloved hand. It was not an invitation, but a command.

And then another voice cut across the deafening silence, carried clarion-pure down the echoing dunes. "Anakin!" it cried. "Anakin, stop!"