Chapter Nine – Dead Worlds

"Can you please talk to me?" Rey called out in the cockpit. She was several hours into her flight from Chandrilla to Lothal and the mood she had brought with her from her meeting with Mon Mothma would not allow her to sleep.

"What would you like to discuss Rey?" Anakin's voice said, sounding to Rey as though he was in the cockpit with her.

"We need to plan for Mortis," Rey said.

"Alright," he replied.

After waiting a moment for him to say more Rey asked, "Well do you have any suggestions?"

"About what?" Anakin asked back.

"About Mortis!" Rey shouted into the empty cockpit.

"What about it?" Anakin asked.

"Are you being infuriating on purpose? You've been there! You know more than me about it. What are we going to find there? What do we have to worry about? How can we prepare for it?" Rey asked, exasperated.

"I don't know what we will find. If the First Jedi was right we are going to be accessing Mortis in what would be its past. We don't know how far back in the past though. I arrived there in what I assume were its last days," Anakin said. "When Obi-Wan, Ahsoka and I arrived there were three beings living there, the Father, the Son and the Daughter. The Son was already well on the path to the Dark Side, the Daughter already a creature of the Light. The Father was weakening, unable to keep the Son in check. He wanted me to replace him."

"There were three of you and three of them?" Rey asked.

"Yes," Anakin answered.

"An older man, a younger man and a younger woman showed up and found an older man, a younger man and a younger woman?" Rey asked in even greater disbelief.

"Feel free to go all the way to your point Rey," Anakin said testily.

"Just seems like you were meeting a version of your own group," Rey said.

"Obi-Wan wasn't my father and Ahsoka was not my sister," Anakin said, somewhat annoyed.

"You killed her right?" Rey asked. "You said you killed Ahsoka."

Rey waited a while for Anakin answered and was about to speak again when he said, "Yes."

"And how did the Daughter die?" Rey asked.

"The Son killed her," Anakin said, "without wanting to."

"And the Father sacrificed himself to defeat the Son?" Rey asked.

"Yes," Anakin said. "To allow me to kill him."

"And how did Obi-Wan die?" Rey asked.

"He let me kill him," Anakin said.

"So that…," Rey started to say.

"I get the point Rey!" Anakin said sharply, leaving Rey to wonder whether a ghost could shout.

"So how do we know that what you saw on Mortis wasn't just a kind of reflection of the three of you? An allegory for your future? How do we know these beings are real?" Rey asked.

"I…I don't know," Anakin answered. "I only know this is the one way to do what you want to do."

"Am I the only one who wants it?" Rey asked slyly.

"We both want it. You are the only one sure it is a good idea," Anakin answered.

"Good enough for me," Rey answered. "Do you have an idea where to go on Lothal, once we are there? What to do?"

"I haven't been there for some time," Anakin said.

"Let's start simple. Where should I land? We are going to be there soon," Rey said.

"One place is as good as the next I suppose," Anakin said. "There was a Jedi Temple there once, but it wasn't very important, and I don't recall where it was."

"I am asking you what city I should go to!" Rey barked, growing tired of Anakin's occasional lapses from practicality.

"There are no cities on Lothal," he replied gravely. "Not anymore."

"I thought you said there was an Imperial factory there," Rey said, expressing her confusion.

"There was. The cities that existed before the Empire arrived were liquidated. Their residents were concentrated in the capital city, so as to expand the workforce and make them easier to monitor. There was a rebel cell based nearby, I think I told you. Well, after Thrawn died pushing them off Attolon, they escalated issues on Lothal. A little after the Battle of Yavin there was an attempt made to destroy the Imperial Occupation Facility by launching it into space and detonating it over the ocean. The plan went sideways, and it detonated only a few seconds after taking off. The city was wiped out as were all the Rebels except General Syndulla, who had been providing air cover," Anakin explained. "The surviving citizens of Lothal tried to make a go of it, but couldn't make it work. The planet has been uninhabited for decades now."

"Poe talked about Hera Syndulla. Admired her," Rey said. "She was at Exegol."

"She had a talent for war, but Lothal suffered for it," Anakin said.

Rey leaned back and thought that what had happened to Lothal was more Anakin's fault than Hera Syndulla's, and that the suffering of its people was another entry on the list of reasons she had to see her plan through. The doubts Anakin was expressing were simply his fear of making things worse, the all-consuming fear which both pulled him towards Rey's plan and away from it. The other Jedi whose spirits had lingered in the physical world had been able to do so, she knew, because they had transcended. They had reached a higher plane of understanding and awareness. But Anakin? Anakin, she was convinced, stayed behind because his guilt was too heavy for him to carry with him, into the timeless beyond of the Force. She would need his help along the path she had decided on, just as he needed her help to take the first steps.

Far earlier than she anticipated the alarm sounded, letting her know they had arrived in the Lothal sector. It was only then that Rey realized she had gotten what she wanted, a dreamless sleep before the trials that awaited them.

"Where was that old Jedi Temple?" Rey called out to the emptiness around her. She waited for Anakin to answer, not knowing whether the was thinking or whether he had not been listening.

"I don't remember exactly. In the northern hemisphere. Not close to the former capital city but you could reach it by ground travel, so on the same continent," Anakin's voice said.

"That doesn't give us much to go with," Rey said while looking at the map of Lothal. The capital city was built on the largest continent on the planet and would take many months to survey.

"If it is the will of the Force that we find them, it will show us the way," Anakin said. Rey knew he was right. She did the standard breathing exercise she had learned from Leia years before. She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind and felt the planet approaching. Her eyes stayed closed as she entered the atmosphere. She turned the stick wherever felt best at the moment, and let the Force point her in whatever direction it wished. She turned this way and then that until she could feel the Temple's presence. She opened her eyes and looked down to see her ship passing swiftly over the ocean, approaching the ruins of a city. It looked as though it had once been very compact and densely built, but now the only buildings still standing were found in its outermost ring. In the center of the city was a great blackened crater within which the burnt out shell of a huge domed building which seemed to have fallen on its side. The ruins of other buildings lay splintered and shattered all around it both within and beyond the crater. Lothal City, or what little remained of it. She passed over the ruins of the city quickly. A long road proceeding from the city center ran beneath her X-Wing as she approached a lone communications tower in the distance. At some point the top of it had been blown off. As she left it behind she could feel an echo of sadness, the last trace of a voice from long ago, screaming something she could not make out. This was a planet of the ghosts of dead heroes who had sacrificed everything, and saved nothing. I will save you, she thought to herself as her ship shot across the empty sky, I will save you all.

When she arrived at their destination she realized that a conventional survey would have had no chance of finding the place. The only sign of a temple was a conical stone protruding a few feet from the ground, a stone which blended in almost perfectly with the rock formations that dotted the plain. She landed her X-Wing nearby. As she stepped out of it she realized that one way or another, she was never getting back into it. She looked up at it as she stepped off the last rung of the ladder. This was the ship that had destroyed the Death Star, that had carried Luke Skywalker from one end of the galaxy to the other. She kissed her fingers and then pressed them against its hull before jumping onto the ground beneath her.

As she walked towards the Temple, Anakin Skywalker's ghost appeared next to her, matching her stride and the intensity of her concentration on the object before her.

"Is it underground?" Rey asked.

"I don't know. I don't remember," Anakin said.

"Did you ever learn about this place, when you were a Jedi?" she asked.

"I don't know that this place was ever important enough to learn about. After the Inquisitors found it on Lothal I researched it a bit, because I was already on planet spearheading the hunt for the rebel Jedi," Anakin said.

"Why did they merit your attention?" Rey asked.

"There weren't many survivors of Order 66 around by then, so two Jedi in one place was a considerable issue all on its own, especially because the older of the two, Kanan Jarus, had trained the younger, Ezra Bridger. And then there was the fact that they had killed my Grand Inquisitor and attacked my personal fleet at anchor above Mustafar. I was angry," Anakin answered.

"Do you remember anything about the Temple from when your servants found it?" Rey followed up.

"I had gone looking in the old records. The Holocron was closed to me of course, but a large part of the old Jedi Archives was still available. The Lothal Temple was founded by mystics. Their claims about the site didn't make any sense to the Jedi of their time. Incoherent dreamers, but enough of them to build the Temple, which was abandoned after they died," Anakin explained.

"You don't remember anything of what they said about it?" Rey questioned as her frustration grew.

"Just that they said they were trying to call forth something…," he said.

"Something," Rey repeated.

"The Bendu," Anakin said.

"The balance," Rey said. "But nothing about how to get in to the Temple?" She came to a stop after asking this question and looked at the stones scattered around the cold and quiet grassland.

"You lift it," Anakin said. "I remember now. You lift it out of the ground."

"Alright, here it goes," Rey said. She reached out with the Force and made contact with the exterior of the Temple. It was large enough that she realized it would be impossible to raise it. Luckily, she realized, there was a section of the Temple that was designed to be raised and lowered, but every time she tried to do so she hit an obstacle. It was as though the Temple itself was fighting her.

When she told Anakin that he said, "I wonder…," before doing something that left Rey somewhat disturbed. He stepped into her, so that his ghostly form seemed to overlap her body. But more than that it was as though he was opening his mind to hers, baring his thoughts and feelings. It lasted for only a second, and the Temple entrance began to rise out of the ground almost at the moment his presence departed from her again. But the moment's connection was, for Rey, nearly debilitating. She had known grief in her life. Her parents, Luke, Leia and Ben, and then most recently Poe and Finn had left her no stranger to the feeling. Sometimes the sadness felt like a cord tied around her neck, and it took an intentional act of will just to breathe. Anakin's grief she found familiar. But there was so much more there, so much she had never felt before, or had at least never felt to the same extent. Shame, regret and a depth of self-hatred she could not have imagined.

"Some places in the Temple on Coruscant were constructed so that they could only be opened by two working together. I thought that perhaps this place had a similar protection. It seems I was right," he said. Looking at her stricken face he continued, "I am sorry if that was jarring. For it to sense me here I had to make myself known through you, and that was the quickest way. Are you alright?"

"Yes…yes, I…I just wasn't ready," Rey mumbled. She wanted to say something to him, to provide some solace, but she could think of nothing to say. He knew his sins better than any, and nothing she could say could change what was true. She just couldn't imagine holding onto life when afflicted with such feelings. Perhaps that was the true nature of his strength, she thought to herself, to carry on in the face of internal agony. The thought struck her as familiar somehow, but she could not remember why.

"Are you ready?" he asked her as he gestured to the opening that had been revealed as the cone of rock had twisted towards the sky.

"Yes," Rey said softly. "Let's go." Together they walked into the Temple, and found an empty room with regularly spaced columns and passages branching off from it.

"What made you decide to come here?" Anakin asked. "To the Temple I mean."

"I figure if Mortis showed up here once, and there was an old Jedi Temple, it was likely that the two had something to do with each other. And maybe that meant that the best place to access Mortis was the Temple. Also I had no other ideas," Rey explained.

"So shall we give it a try then?" Anakin asked.

"I don't even know how to go about it," Rey said.

"She said they would answer a call. A call in the Force. I think maybe if you channeled a great deal of Force energy through yourself, then, assuming this is the right place to do this, maybe they would feel it," Anakin said.

"Do you think you could help with that?" Rey asked.

"I don't know. There is a sense in which I must be using the Force, I suppose, to move my consciousness from place to place as I do. But I can't affect the physical world, not without using your power to do it," he said.

"Well," Rey said as she sat down and crossed her legs, "do what you can."

Rey closed her eyes and reached out with the Force to expand her consciousness first throughout the room she was in, then throughout the entire Temple complex, then out over the empty plains of Lothal. Soon her awareness spread over the whole planet. She was not aware of everything going on there of course, but she could feel the perturbations in the Force, or would have had there been any. While there was life on the planet, it was not abundant and none of it had the level of sentience necessary to feel the Force, much less use it.

So she cast her mind out further. As the sphere of her awareness grew it also because less precise. She could feel the nearby planets, including one with more life on it than Lothal. She focused on it for a moment and found a planet of huge coral growths comparable in size to the trees of Kashyyyk. Convorees roosted in the highest coral plates, while small, shelled creatures Rey didn't know the names of hid at the base of the coral trees from the huge spiders that roamed the land. There was nothing on the planet that used the Force, though Rey lingered for a while, sensing the graceful movements of the convorees. She smiled before forcing herself to move on from the delightful creatures. There had been no birds on Jakku, and she had always found them fascinating since leaving the planet on which she grew up. The first place she had the chance to sit and consider them was Ahch-To as she waited for Luke to give in and train her. She had remembered thinking how lovely it would be to glide on the air, to be free from everything, even the ground. But she was not free, and there was work to be done, so she returned her concentration to her task.

Her awareness had expanded to the point where it started encompassing more planets than she could hold in her mind all at once. It was not long before she reached the first world inhabited by intelligent creatures. The Force was present in all living worlds, but it shone more brightly on worlds of sentient, intelligent beings. On the other hand the edge of the galaxy, and the dark emptiness beyond began to intrude on her consciousness. She turned her mind away from that seemingly limitless beyond and pushed her mind inward, towards the center of the galaxy. As the scope of her awareness widened she knew the amount of Force energy moving through her was increasing. There were, she knew, limits to how far she could push this exercise. She was intent on pushing herself further than she ever had before, but she was already struggling. Her frustrations were mounting as she felt Anakin's presence enter her mind. His consciousness, she knew, being no longer tied to a body, was in a sense already stretched out over the whole of the galaxy. All along the edges of what she could sense she felt him pushing the horizon of her mind outward. Her mind was already expanded beyond anything she had ever done before, and she could feel the billions upon billions of sentient beings. They were like grains of sand in the desert. She could sense where there were more or less of them, but making out a single one was impossible.

When she had reached what she decided was the limit of her ability to stretch her mind outward, she decided to add a new task to the exercise. In the years of her training on Ajan Kloss Leia had taught her how to reach out to the minds of her fellow Resistance fighters, to calm them, to fill them with hope and confidence. It was, Rey had learned by reading the ancient Jedi texts, a version of a technique called Battle Meditation, in which a single Jedi was able to improve the tactical decision making, reaction times, and morale of an entire fleet or army. So Rey did what she had been trained to do, and spread that feeling of hope and calm outward to all the minds she touched. The reach of her mind was so great that her influence on each one of them was so small as to barely be noticed. But across a large section of the galaxy people found their burdens eased, their fears quieted, and the worries allayed, if only a little. It was like the feeling a person gets when the sun comes out unexpectedly to warm them on a gloomy day, and it was had by hundreds of billions of people. It was, without question, the greatest employment of her abilities that Rey had ever managed. She had become a vessel for the light side of the Force in a way that few beings had ever managed. It was, in its way, the exact opposite of what her Grandfather had done generations before, spreading the darkness over the galaxy.

And it had its intended effect. With her eyes closed Rey could not see the Temple responding to what she was doing, but her use of the Force was resonating with it, as though it were a giant tuning fork. It was both amplifying her power and affected by it. The walls began to glow from hidden seams in the rock, and the roof of the chamber in which Rey sat started to change color. From the dark brown of the stone it slowly changed into a swirl of blue resembling very much the appearance of hyperspace. Rey felt the air starting to swirl around her and could hear Anakin calling her name. Then she felt as though she was being pulled upward, towards the ceiling. Even so she did not open her eyes, not wanting to break the connection she felt at that moment to all those people. She had never felt anything like it before. Billions of people noticing the slight change in their own mood, the small step towards hope, all saying, in their own way and whether they were aware of it or not, their own thanks for the moment. Rey wanted to stay there in that moment, connected to all those beings, swimming in the moment of joy she had given them, however small it was.

But it was not to last. As the pulling sensation grew stronger she found the connection breaking. It was not as though her mind was pulling back, but more that the galaxy itself was disappearing. She felt the pull of gravity change for a moment, briefly becoming weightless and then terribly heavy before it settled again into something like the normal range for human inhabited worlds. But the galaxy was gone. It was as if around her for thousands of light years, there was nothing.

She opened her eyes to behold the world of Mortis. She was sitting on a cliff overlooking a forest of dead trees. Huge blocks of stone seemed to have fallen into the forest, from where Rey could not tell. Everywhere she saw the signs of decay and death. In the distance she could see two crumbling towers. For a moment she thought she was alone, but when she turned around she saw Anakin standing behind her. At least she assumed it was Anakin. It was a figure standing in a long dark brown robe, the hood completely obscuring the face. But it felt like Anakin. He was no ghost though. As in the library of the Great Holocron, and the vision on Tython, here on Mortis he was as real as she was.

"Anakin?" she asked gently.

"I thought, if we are really going to the past, it would be important to make sure I don't look the same as I did the last time I was here," he said.

Rey looked at the darkness beneath the hood and thought to herself that it was not the first time the darkness had served him as a mask. But all she said was, "Sounds smart."

As she turned back to look over the cliff he walked to her side.

"I am guessing it didn't look like this before," she said.

"No. The place was full of life and wonder," he answered. "I suppose this is what came of the three of them dying."

Rey nodded. "Any idea where we should go? I mean, once we were here it was supposed to be the case that we could reach them. If this is after they died, then shouldn't there be a way to go back?"

"I am not sure, but I have an idea," Anakin said before jumping off the cliff without warning. He did not fall quickly however, but used the Force to slow his descent, landing gently on the ground below before looking up at Rey and beckoning her to follow him. Rey sighed and shook her head though she did note with interest that here on Mortis Anakin was not only seemingly a physical being again, but could use the Force. She looked over the cliff and realized she had never jumped that far down before. That Anakin had managed it was hardly a reassuring thought. He was dead, whatever corporeality Mortis was giving him now, and he was, of course, the Chosen One. Or maybe a Chosen One. Rey had never quite made up her mind on that. Either way, the Force itself had never decided to create her, and she was not at all confident her power, prodigious as she knew it was, allowed her to do what Anakin did.

So instead Rey turned the long fall into a series of shorter falls, jumping not all the way to the ground but first to one cliff and then another until at least she joined Anakin at the bottom. When she stood up from the crouching position in which she had landed she heard Anakin laugh. The laugh was not unfriendly or mocking, but rather a laugh of joy. Anakin was enjoying his re-acquired physicality, but to Rey his voice sounded deeper than it ever had before. It was deeper even than the old holovids she had found of him when he was a Jedi General. She wondered whether this was part of the mask.

The two of them walked for a long time with Anakin in the lead. When Rey asked how long it would take Anakin replied that he was not sure, since the last time he had been to Mortis he had used a bike to make the trip to where they were going. When she asked him where that was he said, "To the heart of the Dark Side."

Rey stopped in her tracks, reminded of the cave on Ahch-To. "Why?" she asked.

"Because there the Son showed me the future once," Anakin said as he walked on.

"What did he show you?" Rey asked without taking another step.

When Anakin realized she was no longer following him he turned around and said, "Vader."

"You knew?" Rey asked, shocked at this seeming revelation.

"The Father took the memory from me, or blocked it maybe. I only remembered it after I died," Anakin explained. "But the future was there to be seen, and it was in his cave. If there is a way through time, I think it will be there."

"If there is a source of the Dark Side shouldn't there be a source of the Light?" Rey asked.

"I suppose there must be, but I never saw it. The Daughter showed that to Obi-Wan," Anakin answered.

"Then maybe we should try to find that," Rey suggested.

"We just want to find a way to get to them, before all this happened. We just need the source of the power. What does it matter which way get it?" Anakin asked.

"I would think you, of all people, would know that it matters," Rey said firmly.

Anakin looked at her for a while in silence. Or at least that is what Rey assumed was happening, since his face was lost behind the shadows of his hood. Eventually he gave her a nod so slight she barely saw it.

"The Father's monastery, you remember which one it is?" she asked.

"Yes," Anakin said.

"I think we should try there," she said.

"Why?" Anakin asked.

"You said the Son represented the Dark Side, and the Daughter the Light? So the Father was the Balance?" Rey asked.

"Yes," Anakin said.

"And he was the source of their power?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Then if there is a way through, I think we will find it there," she said.

"Very well," Anakin said. He turned around and started towards one of the two towers in the distance.

Rey did not follow immediately. She remembered Luke's horrified reaction on Ahch-To to her making a similarly unhesitating move to the darkness. She would have thought such things behind Anakin Skywalker, but once again the easy path called to him, and once again he had followed that call. Could she trust him in this place, now that he had some level of power back? Was the contrition and regret she had become familiar with over the years nothing but an expression of the sadness his ghostly life forced on him? Who would Anakin be now?

Lost in thought, she had allowed Anakin to get quite far out of her. He was walking fast, impatient to reach his destination. Was that because he wanted to get to the Mortis gods? Or was it because he wanted to prove that the Father's monastery was the wrong place to look, so that he could convince her to try the Son's cave? Doubts danced through Rey's mind as she started jogging after him, but the most prominent of them was whether she had made a mistake bringing him here. Was it a mistake giving him power again? He had proven that he was only willing to give it up for his children, and now his children were gone. His whole family was gone.

A strange thought occurred to Rey as she ran. A small voice in her head said to her that she would have to be his family now. He had fallen before, but he hadn't had someone to watch over him. Padme had been someone he had to save, not someone to listen to. The other Jedi were people from whom he was hiding the most important part of himself. He had been left alone with Palpatine. But if she stayed with him, maybe this time would be different. She took solace in this thought, and the doubts subsided somewhat, though they did not vanish entirely.

They walked a long way in silence, Anakin maintaining his brisk pace and his sizable lead on her. For most of the rest of the walk Rey just tried to think about something other than her doubts about Anakin. It didn't take long for the crumbled monastery to appear through the empty branches of the dead trees. Rey found herself wishing she could have seen Mortis before everything in it had died, and then remembered that they were on their way to do just that. It took more than an hour for them to reach the monastery after Rey first saw it, due to how large it turned out to be. When Rey realized they were going to have to walk up what amounted to a mountain just to get to the front door she sighed audibly.

"That's the spirit," Anakin said sarcastically as he started up the path. Rey was halfway up the mountain herself when she realized that the sun had not gone down, despite it having seemed to be late afternoon for hours.

"Does time stand still here?" she called up to Anakin.

"It didn't last time. Last time days and nights were absurdly short," Anakin answered. The steep uphill climb had not slowed him down. It was as if he had decades of stored up energy, and was relishing the opportunity to use it now that he was embodied once again.

"Do you think it has something to do with them being gone?" Rey asked.

"Yes," Anakin said. "The Son ruled the night, and the Daughter the day."

"And now it is perpetually late afternoon?" Rey asked. "Does that mean the Light side of the Force is winning?"

"Maybe," Anakin answered. "Or maybe it means the Light is about to die. Keep up."

Rey asked no more questions until they reached the doorway to the monastery, where Anakin awaited her.

"Are you ready?" Anakin asked.

"I don't know what I am supposed to be ready for," Rey answered.

"Neither do I, I suppose," Anakin said. "The place seems to be falling apart."

Rey looked up and saw just how right he was. One of the central towers rose far higher than the other, but both were clearly shorter than they had once been, capped as they were with uneven masonry. Rey thought she could make out where the bits which had fallen off had struck the rest of the building.

"Well if we don't know what's coming," Rey said, "we might as well find out."

Anakin smiled and with a flick of his hand opened the large doors before them. Beyond them there was only darkness, save for a single shaft of light that appeared to be coming through one of the holes in the roof. It illuminated a throne at the end of what Rey guessed was a long walkway, though the darkness and gloom made it impossible to tell. A few moments after walking in Rey's eyes began to adjust and she could see the path before her, leading to the dais and the throne. On either side was a fall into murky darkness.

"What's down there?" she asked.

"I don't know," Anakin said. "I can't sense anything down there, can you?"

"No," Rey said.

"So now what? Explore the place?" Anakin asked while looking around.

Rey's eyes did not leave the darkness beneath the walkway. It was true that she could not sense anything in that abyss, including a bottom to it. But nonetheless she felt herself being pulled towards it. Or perhaps more accurately she no longer felt pulled anywhere else. Since conceiving of this plan years before the feeling that she must embark upon the journey had grown, pulling her always away from whatever she was doing. The feeling had not gone away when she and Anakin had set out on the journey, it had only grown stronger. Traveling to Mustafar had felt right, had felt like she was moving in the direction she was being pulled, but the pull was still there. The pull had been strong enough to break through even her grief over Poe and Finn, helped no doubt by the fact that if the plan was a success she would be able to undo their deaths. It had been there on Lothal, and even after their arrival on Mortis. It had been with her through the climb to this monastery. But then, while looking into that darkness, she realized the feeling was gone. She was no longer being pulled, for she had arrived.

"I am going to jump in," she said calmly.

"What?" Anakin snapped. "That's a terrible idea!"

"Maybe," Rey replied, her eyes still cast downwards. She was moving towards the edge when Anakin's hand grabbed her arm.

"Stop it! Whatever you are doing, stop it!" he yelled.

She looked up at him, feeling as thought she could just make out the black mask of Darth Vader in the darkness beneath the hood. She placed her hand on the side of his head, feeling the rough wool of his cloak, and the helm beneath it. Vader is the mask he knows, she thought to herself. "It's going to be alright, trust me."

His grip loosened at the unexpected display of tenderness and when it did she stepped backwards off the walkway. Anakin's hand shot out to catch her, just missing her as she fell into the shadows. For a moment he stood there in shock. When he thought about Rey facing whatever was down there alone, his shock turned to shame. He had let too many he cared about face the darkness alone, and he would not allow it to happen again. He leapt off the walkway and let the darkness take him.