Chapter 29
Darkness at the Edge of the Galaxy
Drukath Bin-Jho awoke that day with no sense of the impending doom. He rose from his bedroll, the only concession the Academy instructors would make to the comfort of their students, thinking only of the tasks and lessons of the day. Each day on Korriban contained its own mixture of oppressive drudgery and terrifying violence, sometimes visited on students, sometimes committed by them. Drukath wondered what forms each would take today.
The classes were typically the source of the drudgery. Week upon week of the study of the history of the Sith, and the history of the galaxy from the Sith perspective, did nothing to make him stronger. He felt he knew the purposes of such courses. They were propaganda just as much as the standard histories of the Republic taught across the galaxy had been. But Drukath felt he was beyond such things. He was committed. He did not need to be convinced. He needed to be taught the ways of the Sith, so that he could take his place in the galaxy as one of the chief servants of the glorious Dark Lord of the Sith who now ruled it.
The novelty of his ambition did nothing to weaken it. Drukath had been found by agents of the Emperor some years before, and it had been they who had informed him of his abilities. He had been taken from his family and sent to a variety of training facilities which had seemed to him at the time more like prisons. Only through the teachings of the instructors had he come to see that his sadness at losing his family was misplaced. They did not matter, only he did. They were powerless and weak. Their only importance was in having created him. Only the strong mattered in the world. It was for the weak only to provide service to the strong. And he was now among the strong. It would only be a few more years before he would take his place among the Emperor's most loyal servants; the Sith Eternal.
He had graduated from his earlier training sites, all of them former strongholds of the ancient Sith Empire. Ziost, Dromund Kaas and now the final academy on Korriban. The planet had regained its former, true name. No longer the Moraband of Republic maps designed only to hide the glorious past of the Sith. Drukath Bin-Jho would soon be granted investiture, and leave this world behind to make his way to the hidden fortress of the Sith, the planet so secret it appeared on no maps. Even its name was not spoken. Those who went almost never returned, and only a fool would try to pull information on the planet from the minds of few who did. The weak did not survive that place.
After taking his morning meal, a small biscuit smeared with nutrient rich paste, Drukath made for the main hall. Every day began the same way, with the litany of pieties. All had to attend, no matter how often they heard them. Conscious of the fact that many of the students had by now already virtually memorized the words and that the speech by the head instructor had lost for them its ability to draw their interest, the instructors had instituted a harsh punishment for any failure to listen attentively. There was one punishment for all infractions at this place, and it did its job. Drukath made sure never to be late, to never yawn, to never speak to a fellow student, to never look around for something else to occupy his mind. He had seen what came of such things. Anyone weak enough to lose control of themselves due to something as trivial as boredom deserved to die screaming, he thought to himself.
Drukath took his place in the small crowd of students. There were approximately 30 of them in the Academy at any one time, in ages that ranged from early teens to early twenties. They gathered together at the bottom floor of what appeared to be a very tall silo which narrowed towards the top, where a small hole let in a narrow shaft of the dull light of the Korriban morning. The room went a dozen floors up, ringed by balconies from which anyone could look down upon them, though the instructors usually recited the litany from the second floor. Like most of the hallways and rooms of the Academy those upper floors were shrouded in darkness, with only the small floating orbs that could be found throughout the Academy giving any light at all. There were just enough of them to see where the balconies were located, and to make out the black robed figures of the Academy's teachers, but little else.
Drukath stood at attention waiting for the Master of the Academy to begin speaking. He would tell them all about how they were living in a new age of the Sith. How the Rule of Two had achieved its purpose and then been discarded. The Sith had emerged from the shadows, and destroyed the Republic and the Jedi, as Darth Bane had intended. All those years of training, of preparation, of learning, had done what was necessary; they had brought the galaxy Darth Sidious. Now that he had the galaxy in his grip the Sith could grow once again, all serving one will. Peace between Sith would be preserved not by artificially restricting their number, but by the power of the Dark Lord, a power none could hope to stand against.
He had heard it thousands of times before. The Master of the Academy had only to start the ceremony and the rest of them could get on with their day. But he did not. In fact, in the place where he normally stood there was no one. The other instructors were present, all in their assigned positions, but the Master was missing. Drukath apparently had noticed this before the others. It was a few moments after he had started to wonder at the delay that the rest of the students began to murmur. This drew a sharp rebuke from one of the instructors.
Several minutes of dutiful silence followed before that same instructor stepped forward to begin the litany. "Our Master has been delayed, but your work cannot be. So let us begin. Peace is a lie, there is only…," he said, unexpectedly trailing off in the middle of the first line of the Sith Code, the mantra that began the ceremony. Drukarth stared intently at the instructor's face, and saw a look of puzzlement turn to one of worry, and then to fear. He opened his mouth to speak again but whatever he planned to say was interrupted by gasps from the instructors and the students. From the highest levels of the room, something was falling, a mass of fabric that clearly concealed something else, for it fell far too quickly. By the time it made it halfway down, it was clear to all that it was a body.
The body hit the floor and blood, along with a few less easy to identify, but vaguely liquid, parts of his body splattered out from the point of impact. Drukath could not help but notice some of his fellow students wiping the mess from their robes rather than being focused on what had led to the Master of the Academy, for that is surely who this was, falling a dozen stories from the top level of the hall. The instructors seemed to be more focused on what mattered, for they were looking up, rather than down at the body, something Drukath noticed because he too was trying to see the floors above. The contrast between the darkness of the facility and the light from the hole in the roof, despite how dim and red the light on the surface of Korriban was, made it difficult to make anything out. And so it was that they heard the intruder before they saw him, when his lightsaber activated somewhere above them. A dark shadow moved across the light from the aperture, and began to fall toward them. To the horror of all who watched, this dark shadow held a lightsaber in his hand, and it was not red.
Many hands reached out at once from below, channeling the Force towards this attacker, but he cut through this assault with ease. To Drukath it felt as though he had tried to push against a mountain or a giant wave. He was not even sure he, or any of the rest of the students and instructors, had even slowed the attacker down. When the Jedi, for this surely must be what the attacker was, reached the bottom level, the power he had been directing through their attacks hit the ground with such force that Drukath could feel the wave of energy ripple through the stone as it cracked. Knocked from his feet like all the other students, Drukath landed on his back and began to immediately scramble away from the attacker. The students closer to the center of the room had no time to do so and the Jedi began to cut them down with mercilessly efficient strokes of his blade.
All the students carried melee weapons of some sort, though most were not permitted the honor of a lightsaber. It likely would have made no difference however, as he didn't even need to use his own blade to block their attacks. Whether he was using the Force to amplify his own speed and strength, or using it to slow the movements of the students Drukath could not tell. He only knew that every swing and every thrust by the students was too slow to force the Jedi even to parry. His blade he used only to slice and skewer their flesh. For a moment Drukath had the bizarre thought that the Jedi's movements were quite graceful.
While the Jedi danced his way through the slaughter, the instructors of the Academy were not idle. Several jumped down to the lower floor and activated their lightsabers, which all of them had earned the right to carry, while the more senior faculty fired lightning from their hands towards the Jedi. These bolts of blue and white and purple lightning did not reach the Jedi though. It was as if there was some invisible metal rod attracting the lightning to itself. An orb of the Force energy was collecting in the middle of the room, several feet above the head even of the Jedi, who Drukath could see was quite tall. He could discern no other detail about the attacker however, covered as he was by a heavy black cloak and hood.
The teachers were at least able to lock blades with the attacker, but they accomplished little else, for he was too fast even for them. He was, while engaging six of them at once, able to kill several more fleeing students. Eventually the only living beings remaining in the room were the Jedi, the teachers and Drukath, who lay near the outer wall, transfixed by the display of raw power. The teachers had taken up positions surrounding the Jedi, who stood in the center of the room. Between them the floor was covered by the bodies of the fallen. The teachers still on the balcony had stopped their lightning assault, and looked on with worry at the ball of white fire the Jedi had created from their attack. The younger teachers advanced with their sabers held aloft, stepping over the corpses of their students and closing the circle on the hooded figure who held his saber pointed down in front of him, its point barely touching the stone floor.
The Jedi looked up towards the teachers on the balcony, and one of them, gifted perhaps with some measure of foresight, had just enough time to shout "Run!" before, with a swipe of his hand, the Jedi sent all the Force energy he had collected back from whence it came. The light from the discharge was blinding, and Drukath, who was halfway to standing up, had to turn his face away. So great was the power directed at them that Drukath was able to hear the bodies of his instructors hit the walls behind them even through their screams. They bounced off the walls so violently that several of the teachers from the balcony above joined their younger colleagues and students on the floor. Drukath, while not struck by the energy blast, had been knocked off his feet again by the wave of heated air that accompanied the massive discharge. He considered running, but morbid curiosity led Drukath to turn back towards his teachers to see the awful effects. One of them, he could no longer tell which it was, lay before him. Beneath the hood was a face without eyes or skin, only smoking flesh that had been burned black.
Drukath looked up from this horror to see the Jedi reaching out with a gloved hand towards one of the passages leading from the room. The students who had been either too cowardly or too intelligent to fight the Jedi had rushed through that passage less than a minute before, but Drukath felt there was no way the Jedi could be attempting to pull them back. To pull another Force user who was doubtless going to fight back, and who was so far out of your line of sight was beyond the ability of anyone. But his doubt did nothing to stop one of his classmates appearing in the dark passage, hurtling towards the waiting Jedi who, in a smooth, efficient swipe of his lightsaber, decapitated the young man. The Jedi repeated this feat over and over, needing only to turn slightly so he could kill the students coming from every passage out of the room. All the while Drukath lay unmoving, hoping his presence would be overlooked. Eventually the distances must have become too great even for the Jedi's power, and he walked down one of the passages to pursue his quarry.
Drukath took the opportunity to get up and run. He had only a vague idea of where the shuttles on Korriban were located, and less of an idea of how to fly one of them, but he reasoned that his chances of successfully piloting a shuttle off world, or successfully finding the autopilot, were higher than his chances of staying alive in the Academy. While the attacker was busy chasing down the few remaining students, he would make his way to the surface and then try to find the hangar. It was located in a series of caves completely disconnected from the Academy; the idea being that if someone tracked a ship to Korriban they would be able to find the hangar but not necessarily the school. The hangar was kept small and technologically unsophisticated to make it appear as though it was a pirate base, but there was a shuttle capable of faster than light travel kept there so as to see to the needs of the students and teachers. Drukath had only seen the path from the hangar to the Academy once, and that was the night of his arrival years before. But he felt he had a good idea of the approximate height of the mountain the hangar was built into, as well as how long the walk was.
When he reached the surface he realized his error. As he emerged into the morning sunlight he got his first look at the sky in more than a year, and it was filled with ships. At first he thought he was saved, for the ships appeared to be Imperial, but after a few moments his hope faded. He had thought at first there were three Star Destroyers flying low in the sky above him, but on closer inspection he realized there was only one. The other two had similar shapes but were subtly different. He had been tricked into thinking they were Star Destroyers because they looked so familiar, and after looking at them for a while he figured out why they appeared so. They were Republic ships from the Clone Wars. He had seen one above his home planet when the CIS droids had come to enforce Separatist rule there. The clones had showed up and cleared them out. But the Empire had not used such ships in years, so this could not be the Empire. Even the genuine Star Destroyer had some strange painting on its underbelly and he had never heard of such things being done to Imperial ships.
These were Rebels. He had heard of Rebel fleets in the Outer Rim, but had not thought it possible for them to be so bold as to attack Korriban. The Esstran Sector was heavily patrolled by the Imperial fleet. How could they be here? As he puzzled over this he saw strange twinkling lights emerging from the ships. As someone who had only ever dreamed of fighting in a real war it took him quite a long time to figure out these were troop transports and that the enemy was heading towards him. Knowing that there was no way the little shuttle could make it past such a fleet, Drukath decided to hide on the surface. But being both scared and more than a little foolish, he did not think about the fact that all the troops were headed to where he was currently located, and so he looked for the closest hiding spot he could find rather than fleeing the area entirely. Spotting a cluster of large rocks on the top of a nearby hill, he made for it, intending to hide between them. His thought was to simply wait for the rebels to do whatever they intended to do on Korriban, other than killing all the Sith, and then either use the shuttle to escape once they left, or, if the shuttle was destroyed by the rebels, to wait for Imperial forces to arrive as part of a patrol or to investigate why the Academy had gone silent.
But as the rebels disembarked he saw that they were being very thorough when it came to scanning the area. The rebels he could see had arranged themselves in small groups that in turn seemed to form a curved line through the rocky desert of Korriban. It was only once they had completed their initial scans and started to move that Drukath realized they had formed a circle around the Academy and were tightening that circle as they advanced. He knew he would be discovered. He thought for a moment of trying to fight his way through the cordon the rebel troops had created, but then what? He still could not get off world, and once they knew he was out of the Academy they would probably eventually find him. But if he stayed where he was then they definitely would find him; his location hiding him only from their eyes and not their scanners. The only alternative seemed to be going back into the Academy, where the Jedi hunted.
But perhaps he was gone, Drukath thought hopefully. If he came there to kill the Sith present then he might already be done, given the pace at which he had been moving. The Academy also had far more places to hide effectively. It was a maze of tunnels and passageways. There were heavily protected rooms where secret devices of the Sith were kept. Perhaps they would also be barriers to scanning. Drukath was still deliberating about the best course of action when he felt himself lifted from between the rocks by an unseen hand around his neck. He went six feet into the air and then came to a stop, his feet dangling beneath him. His body was rotated by the force holding him until he saw the Jedi, his hood now down, revealing the face that Drukath knew well from holonews reports he had seen as a child. General Skywalker.
"There you are little Sith," Skywalker said while still holding him aloft. Drukath could breathe, but only just barely, and the partial choking he was experiencing had left him light headed. As he dangled there, wondering what Skywalker would do to him, and why he hadn't killed him yet, a rebel soldier walked up from behind him.
"We have located all the entrances to the facility Commander," the voice said, the voice that Drukath, like so many others, recognized from the years of war.
"Then send the droids in and have them confiscate everything," Skywalker said.
"Everything sir?" the clone asked.
Skywalker relaxed his grip on Drukath, though he did not release him, and turned towards the trooper. "Is there a problem?"
"No sir!" the soldier said nervously. "It's just…I thought we were on the clock."
"We are. You should make sure the droids move quickly," Skywalker said, his voice cold and threatening. Despite his desperation and fear Drukath marveled at the fact that Skywalker could casually hold him in place without seeming to be directing any attention towards him. Drukath was pushing, with both his body and the Force, as hard as he could to escape the Jedi's grasp, but could do nothing.
"Yes sir!" the clone said, saluting smartly before jogging off, likely to deliver the orders he had just been given.
Skywalker waited for a few moments and then, without turning to look at him, asked Drukath, "What shall I do with you then?"
"I can help you. I have information…," Drukath said, his voice a raspy whisper because of the grip Skywalker still had on his throat.
"In exchange for your life I imagine?" Skywalker asked as he turned around to stare into Drukath's eyes.
"Yes," Drukath answered.
Skywalker smiled and said, "Do you think you have information the Master of this place did not?" Seeing Drukath's eyes widen in fear only made Skywalker's cruel smile broaden as he continued to speak. "We had many hours together, your master and I, and he was very motivated to tell me what he knew. At the end he was repeating himself, and luckily your little morning ceremony gave me a reason to bring an end to the conversation."
"Please…," Drukath begged, his sentence ending not because he could not breathe but because he knew nothing to say.
"But you are in luck, little Sith," Skywalker said. "Abandoning your fellow students has saved your life, just as you hoped it would."
Drukath's flicker of hope was snuffed out when Skywalker's lightsaber clicked on and he said, "I want someone to tell Palpatine what happened here, and since you are the last of the students alive, it will be you. But I can't have you interfering in our work here. So…."
Rather than finish his thought, Skywalker swept his blue saber across Drukath's body, and in an instant his legs were separated from him and fell to the ground. His arms were pulled away from him and stretched out from his torso and Skywalker made an arc of blue light around Drukath, taking both arms as he did so. Then, at last, he let Drukath go.
Drukath's agonized screams filled the ears of the clones as they set about entering and then emptying the Sith Academy on Korriban. He was still rolling around helplessly in the sand when the last of the droids, all recommissioned CIS battle droids, emerged from the tunnels that led up from the school. The interval between the departure of Skywalker's fleet and the arrival of the Imperial one felt like days to Drukath even though he knew, or would have known if he had been capable of thinking clearly, that it was only hours. The Imperial troopers found him mercifully quickly after they arrived and got him in a medpod so he could be transported to meet the Emperor. Once he was in the Dark Lord's presence he did as Skywalker had meant him to do, telling his master all he had seen, all that Skywalker had done. But it was not Drukath's words that communicated the message Skywalker was most interested in sending. It was rather his wrecked and deformed body which bore witness to what Palpatine's enemy had become, and it was this testament to Skywalker's will and potential for cruelty that Palpatine focused on as Drukath told his story. And just as Skywalker intended, the fear grew in Palpatine's mind. That Palpatine knew Anakin's intention was to cause such fear did nothing to change the effectiveness of the message.
In the World Between Worlds Rey found herself gripped by anxiety. The years spent watching Anakin and the world he had made had never been calming; the rise of the Empire made that impossible. But there had been moments of joy and of hope. The immediate aftermath of the assault on the Temple, the years spent on Atollon when Luke and Leia were small, and even the first years Anakin had spent building his faction after leaving the Jedi. They all left Rey feeling as though things would work out, that the sacrifices she had made to give Anakin this chance would not be in vain.
But it had been a long time since she had been able to muster much hope. In her years on Tatooine listening to the ghost of Anakin Skywalker tell her about his regrets, his perspective on his own failures, he had one central idea. For all the other motivations he had to become what he became, he had decided that loneliness was the key one. He had grown up with a mother, with friends, with a community and was then made to take on the life of a Jedi, a life with no family, with colleagues instead of friends, and a community that spent most of its time apart from each other. It was, he had said, worse for him than for others, because he was burdened with being the Chosen One. Growing up in the Order he had only one person with whom he had a genuine relationship, Obi-Wan, a man who should have been his friend, but was forced to be his master. A man barely through his own trials, not ready for the burden of guiding another through maturation, but for all that the only member of the order for whom Anakin had felt any warmth.
Then Padme had come into his life, and the intensity of his feelings for her had made Anakin obsessive. His marriage to Padme had become the first normal relationship he had been in since the one with his mother, and had been forced to bear the load of all that pent up loneliness. This desperate need to have Padme in his life had been the lever that Palpatine had used to control him, to destroy everything else in his life. If Padme had lived, if his friendship with Obi-Wan had not been poisoned and destroyed, Anakin had said, everything would have been different.
But now, in this new world Anakin was making, he had everything. He had his wife, his children, genuine friendships with other Jedi like Obi-Wan and Ahsoka which had deepened after the rigid Order had been remade into something more like a family. And he was throwing it all away. His hatred of Palpatine, an emotion that had grown powerful even in his actual past as Vader, had become all consuming. It had become entwined with his sense of his own destiny as the Chosen One. If he could kill Palpatine and destroy the Sith then it would have all been worth it, this new Anakin told himself. His lost childhood, the death of his mother, the fall of the Republic and near extinction of the Jedi. All of them could be made sacrifices to a greater good if only he could achieve that greater good, by burning the darkness out of the galaxy. And it was as a cleansing fire that Anakin saw himself, a destructive light to balance against the sustaining light of the Jedi.
But to Rey, watching from afar, Anakin had become a darkness more powerful and more ravenous than even Palpatine; a darkness consuming all the other darkness in the galaxy. Palpatine would be the last to be consumed, but if that should occur without any change to Anakin's trajectory then all that would remain was a Dark Lord of far greater power and cruelty than even the Emperor, of this Rey felt certain. And time was running out. Anakin's power had grown beyond anything he had achieved in his actual life, beyond anything any Jedi or Sith had ever achieved. He had been stronger than Palpatine when they met on Eriadu, and Rey could tell, as she watched him wipe out an entire Sith Academy, that he was far stronger now. He was close, very close now, to achieving his goal, and he could not save himself from the costs that success would entail.
But while Rey saw no hope in Anakin himself, she could see the glimmers elsewhere. Despite running away from his friends and family to fight his war, they were still alive, and he still loved them. There was still a chance for that love to save him, to redeem him, to turn his power away from mere destruction. Rey would look for the opportunities to turn him towards the light, but the people of this potential world, this world not yet real but struggling towards being, would have to provide that opportunity.