ℝ𝔸𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ𝔸𝕃 ➵ o. kenobi {my only hope; book 1}

【 PROLOGUE 】

Dearest Sister,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. I miss you dearly, and it's harder than ever here now that you're gone again. I do love your visits; I hope you can come back sometime soon. I do acknowledge that you have training to keep up with, but being the queen isn't easy, and every time you're here, a little bit of that stress is released. I wish a lot of the time that you were still here as one of my advisors.

Now is one of those times. Something is happening--I can feel it. People are dying. My advisors are trying to tell me that it's just a fluctuation in the average death rate, but Governor Sio and I know differently. I have not the knowledge of the Force that you do, and I may not be sensitive enough to use it as a talent, but I was born with some of it in me. I can feel things that others can't. And in this case, I can tell that the deaths aren't normal. They surround the presence of evil.

I need your help, Emeré, I implore you. Come back to Naboo and help me figure out the source of this evil before it's too late. I can't keep letting our people die like this. You must help, for the good of our people, for the good of our country and our home.

Love Padmé

I re-read the letter for what has to be the thousandth time. By now, I had the whole thing memorized, the urgent scribble all too familiar.

"I implore you," I said aloud, tracing over the words as I read them. My sister never begged. She hardly ever asked for help. Something had to be going on for Padmé to send this all the way from Naboo to Coruscant, just for me.

Of course, the Jedi Council has demanded that I not respond. They'd given me strict, explicit instructions to destroy the letter. They were convinced it was some sort of trick, a forged letter to lure the Jedi to Naboo only to be ambushed. Everyone knew of the current blockade on Naboo by the Trade Federation--it was all anyone who was anyone from Coruscant was discussing lately.

But I knew the Jedi Council was wrong. There may be a blockade on the planet, and there may be an ambush waiting, but I knew this letter was truly from Padmé's hand, and written from her own mind. I knew my sister's handwriting better than I knew my own from all of the letters she'd sent me over the years, and this was it--her hasty but neat scrawl. And even if someone had forced her to write a letter to me, they wouldn't have known to include the only secret Padmé and I shared--that the Force lived within her, too.

I leaned back in bed with a huff and stared out my window. Several cruisers flew past my apartment, shaking the windows, and I cringed momentarily. I'd gotten used to the bustle and constant movement of the planet after having lived here for nearly fifteen years. I thought back to my letter from my sister. Our people, Padmé had said. Our home. After living here for so long, Naboo didn't feel much like home anymore. The serenity of my birth planet was a far cry from the tumult of Coruscant... and if I was being honest, I much preferred the latter. But did that mean I wanted to sentence Naboo to a terrible fate? To let its people keep dying, with no one willing to help? No. I'd been trying to convince the Jedi Council for weeks to send someone out there, just to survey what was happening, to find out if Padmé's suspicions were correct. But they were unyielding.

A knock at my door jolted me from my thoughts and I sat up in bed quickly, throwing the letter into the top drawer of my bedside table. As my door cracked open, I leaned back casually and glanced over at whomever was entering.

Thankfully, it was only a messenger droid. If it had been anyone else, especially a Jedi, they would have seen through me straight away. But droids weren't the best at sensing and deciphering human behaviors, which meant I was in the clear.