━━━━━━ ༻ 🌅 ༺ ━━━━━━
" the path to eden "
...
━━━ ༻ CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE ༺ ━━━
PERHAPS THE SINGLE most difficult stage of attunement to the Force is to accept everything has an ending. Ironic as it may be for something so ubiquitous to existence to present itself as the most unbearable truth to acknowledge without the birth of a poisonous desire also altering it and bending it before a false idol of pseudo-immortality, most sentient life fears 'the end' from the moment of their birth until perhaps all their life is spent. Before one can even define what life is, they are naturally afraid to lose it. An original sin.
As a doctor, Cay Lanshee's first duty was seemingly indistinguishable from an ideal neutrality: his hands dripped in blood trying to preserve life while his soul had to maintain itself numb to the unavoidable passage of death beneath his touch, if he wished to continue performing his dirty, yet virtuous duty. But when his ears filled with the agonizing screams of hospitals overflowing with patients until he could no longer remember what silence even was, seeing death as anything other than its facet of ugliness bringing rot and decay became impossible.
The Thathian plague.
Within twenty four hours from that asteroid mining shipment making it into refineries all around the planet, the greatest cities of Thathea became unrecognizable.
To this day, Cay Lanshee could not forget the disfiguring symptoms striking some people so horribly that they fell where they stood upon inhaling the toxic vapors, skin melting off of their bones and eyes popping out in a green decomposition.
Thathea used to be known as the most prominent asteroid mining planet for a whole sector of the galaxy, exporting to almost all civilized systems in its vicinity and even all the way to the center of the galaxy too. After all, their planet was a survivor in the vicinity of an asteroid belt that entrapped almost every debris that could have passed their system; they were living besides the riches of the universe. Every city on Thathea had itself a refinery and the politicians of the planet helped rise an economy that put even Coruscant to shame. So many business partners made their profit into an endless stream, but when the plague hit... They were alone.
Their scientists explained that some rare gas in their atmosphere, previously undetected, reacted in contact with the vapors released by that last asteroid's outer shell, creating a poisonous gas. Children and elderly were the first victims. Mountains of corpses forced all factories to shut down and be buried in concrete. Though scientists neutralized the gas within days, the people carried the disease. A once prosperous planet's population had decreased exponentially until the vast majority of its cities were cemeteries. And they had no cure for those who remained diseased. The few exceptions of immune people did nothing towards solving the mystery of stopping the spread of the plague, of returning the sick people to normal so they could board the evacuation ships when the boarding would begin. Try as they might, the best the doctors could do during the Thathian plague was prolong life while well aware death will claim what it's due.
Amidst the swarming wails on which their extinction was heralded, Cay Lanshee thought of his immunity to be a cruel, cruel joke. He himself embodied a blasphemy by how ridiculously useless his knowledge has been made by the catastrophe ending the Thathian glory.
"Doctor Lanshee!" Hearing his name get called finally made Cay blink the haze off of his sight and realize he has been staring into the waiting room turned treating center, a place where, like all other wards the hospital disposed of, the floor's whiteness had been buried under a thick presence of malaria, a putrid yellow stain spotted by disgusting greens. He inhaled sharply the salted air and turned around to see nurse Bellore running across the corridor, as much as running could be achieved on a narrow path made even narrower by the patients who were unlucky enough to get access to no bed as the disease torments them away. She didn't bother with running all the way either; as soon as Cay lifted his eyes, she stopped breathlessly, "It's Riya."
Memory had been maimed in such carnal fashion by pain that it failed to fill Cay in on how he got by his wife's side. All that mattered for him to know was that he had reached the ward she was kept into. His heart was fighting for its beats fearful that it might not receive that luxury of liveliness, not because of Riya's general effect on his palpitations, but rather because between him and her improvised bed on the floor stood an ocean of other patients all moaning and groaning away the last seconds of their lives. Almost thoughtlessly, Cay stumbled his way around the death and suffering, until his knees bruised in a final fall by his wife's side.
Shivering hands reached out embracing the bloody decay of her flesh; there was no dirt she could bring that his gloves wouldn't have seen before and there was no filth disease could turn her body into that he would be appalled of to such extent that he'd deny them both the bare minimum of comfort that was holding her hand. Her skin had been blistered by the infection, destroyed on a cellular level in a nature similar to the decimation that only radiation could cause. Features have been irradiated, expression eradicated to a default of agony, such that if one was to look upon a thousand bodies before dumping them in one of the many pits in the dead cities, they'd see a thousand people whose only distinction lay in their clothes.
"No...," his voice was mutilated to a whimper. "I... told you to watch her during my shift-!" He choked on his words, though he wished he could spur on the temptations of anger rather than let himself soak and simmer in the prolonged sorrow.
"Her condition...," Bellore shook her head, bearing the sight of Riya's chest faltering across her heaved breaths no more than Cay could. "I called for you as soon as it..." With hesitation, she corrected herself away from a second attempt at bringing up excuses, "I'll give you some room."
"No," the doctor's voice tore open his tone of denial. "No," he shook his head. "We can save her... I must..."
"Cay...," Riya's voice ghosted from underneath the monstrous skin the disease had washed over her once famous beauty. Her hair, which Cay could only remember vaguely for its silky nature undulating darkness as mesmerizing as the black holes in their reality bending dance, was all gone. Her eyes had darkened with sickness mere days ago, forcing Cay himself to surgically remove them in order to delay the spread of the disease to her brain. Yesterday's mercy was today's regret: he stared into the holes he carved on her face, two gaping pits amongst the piercing ravenous marks the plague ate into her cheeks and forehead. Each corpse was a losing battlefield and his wife was no exception. Whatever was left of her had been tortured into a ghost strapped to hellish pains, a mirage of hope that he clung onto out of inertia alone, out of denial.
"Please...," she begged, voice screeched and shaking. She begged for the end, marking Cay's most significant brush with the reason laying the foundation to his skepticism towards the perfect balance in the Force being achievable. One had to trust fully in the Force's will, without fear or doubt or anger, if one hoped to reach that highest connection to its infinities rhythmically spinning life in the galaxy. But to trust in the Force entailed to trust that even suffering and death play a part in the grand scheme, and that was the one thing Cay could not simply accept. Not while ironies like learning he could heal through the Force only after he's lost his beloved wife existed.
Some of his belief had been restored when Eden was brought into his silent, reflective life. Years worth of meditation in all of the most potent Anopian temples were put to shame by a child of miracle whose attunement to the Force, albeit cruel to her physical vessel, was the embodiment of the balance glorified through the ages until it became a religion soaring for a higher existence. There were days when he felt like he was watching the Force come to life before his eyes, that rather than a miraculous child in whose he had to correct perpetually ever seeing him as a father, he was witnessing some saint-like creature in its becoming, a manifestation of the Force's Will that was learning how to live.
Through her, Cay Lanshee was able to see reason: had the plague never happened, he would have never sought to look further into the dark powers of the Force and thus, would have never winded up on Anope, where his discovered skill healed Eden every time her physical weakness got in the way. His existence had a purpose and part of his humanity was to recognize that because of that, it became easier to accept the finality of death, or at least pretend like he could. Beings of sentience tend to doubt because they are dependent on reasoning, when in fact very little owns such explanations.
His balance had never been truly achieved and the older Eden got, the more she would dismantle his illusion, reminding him of just how very frightened he was of becoming a victim to the end once more. Time and time again, everything she did was a challenge to his faith and to that, he could not find a reason, nor a fabled explanation, until Master Yoda called him in the night. Two months ago.
In the aftermath of their conversation, a confining silence lingered, undeterred by the existence of a time pressure weighing on both their shoulders.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" Cay broke that mortuary silence with a dulled question.
"Of the prophecy or the siege on Anope?" Master Yoda responded with a question of his own, chewed on so calmly that he scarcely even flinched a sign that he would consider this continuation of their conversation to be significant enough for his eyes to open again and to breathe out of the meditative state in which he saw fit to descend during their quiet reflection.
"Both!" Cay raised his voice.
"Right for you to know the time was not."
"And now that it's too late to stop any of this it's the right time for me to know?" Cay's outrage ruled his tone under the stinging signs of sarcasm. "You could have told me...," he whispered, throat unable to sustain the loudness of rage without a break. "All those years ago, you could have told me who I was raising her to be!"
"Right the time-"
"Don't say it. Don't hide behind the 'right time' or so help me!" he gritted his teeth to a creaking break into his furious words then sighed. His head bowed in defeat over the fact, "How do you know all of this anyway?"
Yoda hummed to himself, "Years ago, know about this I did not. The lesson behind the prophecy's challenge learnt I have since, through reflection. The first teaching: in the Force trust we must. No doubt. No fear. Only faith. The key that is. To peace, to balance, to a new age, where our role to fruition has been brought." After a deep inhale, followed by a sigh equal in its depth if not perhaps longer, Yoda opened his eyes, staring however at the floor. "Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Seeing the future incites fear. Knowing the future seeds doubt. Killed an innocent I almost had due to this poisoning doubt clouding the Force's Will to me. Blinded by fear the Seer has been too, seeing only the tragedy of the future, not its glory too. The future shows you the endings, not the beginnings."
"So it's true then? The Jedi will perish..."
Yoda raised his hand, "Go you must. No more time to waste. No goodbyes."
"And what do I do?" Cay responded instantly, driven by a stagnant confusion lurking underneath the anger it stirred to surface on the pretense of injustice. He raised tall to his feet, a futile attempt to make himself feel a little less smaller in the face of the grand powers maneuvering life in the galaxy. In the eyes of the Force's will, he was a diminished pawn, a conduit whose only purpose was being used. "Anope is being destroyed. Anakin and Eden will-"
"You will do what must be done," Yoda interrupted sternly. "May the Force be your guide."
Two months had deformed themselves into a marker to the most torturous of faith's tests. Doubts crashed upon Cay's soul, drowning him in dark waters, clogging his nostrils in the burns of hate. And he swung himself across the unsteady pole that fate had laid before him, remembering too much from the endings he had seen not to become a shadow haunting the holy lands under attack from the cold enemy. Fire rained from the sky and his trembling hands could not hold together all the temples that came crashing down. Perhaps he's lost his mind sometime in that war, perhaps he's seen so many Emissaries die that his thoughts scattered and he started imagining ghosts. For a moment he thought he saw the Gihec temples filled with life again; he thought he stumbled in some undiscovered region, where the Gihec were alive and celebrating in a big festival lighting all their fires and making the mountain crests shine with life.
Amongst their joy, he sat, tears pooling to his chin, hiding pearls into his dark beard, and he watched, as he could do nothing more, how the Gihec danced and laughed, until he could contain that simmering question in his chest no more. "Why?" He uttered, but the question was not even towards these ghosts, but towards the Force showing them to him. It was a longer question too, though a single word was all he could mutter. Why is the end necessary? Why do you allow death? Why-?
"How would you know when you're alive if you never die?" Riya sat down beside him on the hard cold rock amidst the ghost town glowing blue and red underneath a starry night set on fire by the Separatist ships crashing through the atmosphere. Her voice materialized across a sigh and she continued, eyes lit with the dances of the Gihec, "How would you know to appreciate what you have if you knew you could never lose anything at all?" She inquired a second time, a gentle smile dancing across her features, returned to their gentleness of old.
"How-?" With his eyes flooding tears, Cay could not help but choke on his words. Though his hand had the instinct of reaching out, he stopped himself before he could watch his palm pass through Riya and thus break into total disillusionment from his foolishly hopeful lies.
"I'm not a ghost," she reassured him before doubt had the chance to cloud his perception and deny this apparition from even being possible.
But if she wasn't a ghost, Cay could not comprehend anything else but that he was staring at the proof of his madness. So he hiccupped through the streaming tears, "I thought I'd forgotten your face..."
"You have," Riya nodded, apologetic. "But that's alright. The Force remembers us all, so when we need them most It can give us back those memories fear and pain have devoured." With a soft breath, distantly reaching from beyond a veil of the unknown, she let the quietness embrace Cay's sobs. "It's time...," when she spoke again, her voice blended into an explosion up above, startling Cay to his feet.
"Eden...," he breathed out, eyes exchanging tears so they may fill with the glows of Separatist starships breaking apart on the Anopian sky darkened already under the nuance of an nearing eclipse.
"We never had enough time," Riya soothed his passage from darkness back into the light, standing beside him. "I'm sorry about that. I'm so sorry for what you've endured to get here and for what you'll have to endure still. But she needs you now, more than ever. And we need her to herald in the new age across the galaxy and into the universe amongst which we roam."
With a question arching between his brows, Cay turned around and faced the ghost town staring back at him. Translucent memories, a forest of blue glows towards which Riya stepped, thus distancing herself from him. "It's time." Her voice got lost into a choir, her lips unmoving from their gentle, apologetic smile. "You'll know what needs to be done."
The path has never been clearer.
Even as the forest has been deformed to a mutilated kingdom of ash that struggled to maintain the shapes by which wandering souls used to guide themselves to traverse its thickness, Eden walked alone and unbothered by the decay and death surrounding her, for her hand was holding the memory of how it all used to be. The path from the Great Desert to the Omni Sanctuary was still there, remembered not only by her ludicrous pilgrimages treasured within her mind as days of glorious peace, but also by the air, aching and mourning the fragrance of what had been destroyed overnight by darkness and what will forever be missed by the soil meant for softness, not this rigid cold.
Standing only half as tall as it used to, the Omni Sanctuary's ruin revealed itself onto Eden's path as a towering shadow of the darkening crimson weeping upon the ground. Her home. Though she righteously identified the sight before her as her home, this cracked and crumbled state it was into looked as nothing more than a cheap imitation of the once cold but sturdy temple representing a dogma to the faith of the Force, canonizing its vigor in the face of the one greatest enemy anything ever has -time- as well as the great adversary only the confidants of the Force can grow to know for their truest cruelty. Challenged and defeated, the temple now laid itself bare as the witness to the cost of war who had turned both cheeks to the slaughter, staying true to its ancient virtues. Its potency laid scattered across the domes of stone whose hieroglyphs have not yet been shattered to oblivion. Forced to whimper their lessons and mourn their once grand stand, the staircases were drenched in memory, the walls that stood still were silent in dignified expectation that they too should soon follow their fallen brothers and sisters, to return to dust and dirt and pebble.
It came as no surprise to Eden that the only path through the Omni Sanctuary still intact led her to a balcony upstairs, from which she would have once been able to see the Great Desert and its golden dunes, but now she knew she'd witness instead the scarlets of a ring of fire dancing across a wasteland. Her last look at her home. Or so her vision hoped of her to believe.
Towards that demise, she walked alone with her ghosts. The ghost of her mother's words became her veil. The ghosts of the High Emissaries she could feel the blood of sinking into the ground of the planet, her people whose graves will not be dug and whose bones will wither to be stones marking places where temples used to be. The ghosts of civilizations that walked this earth, they carried her shadow up round staircases, in a rueful silence.
At long last, a mountain had been lifted off of her heart and she could breathe through the thin air. Was she the last to remember what the Force's purest strength felt like? Would her skin become the last to be graced by the true light? Upon the trail of those inquiries left to phantom behind her dark pearls, Eden found herself worthy of sackcloth and ashes for having renegated reason for the swiftness of fear's promise to righteous anger. Her path has never been clearer than it was then, on a planet in ruin, in a home that has lost its sanctity to cruelty.
Though at the end of the corridor there was one more staircase for her to climb before meeting her fate, Eden's step halted. This corridor, half collapsed to the left, where its windowless arches crumbled to the ashen trees of the Echo Forest and where from the pillars of which, none had remained hole. This hallway whose roof had been pierced by shrapnel and whose mosaic had rained upon the floor to never be seen again in its full glory, was no ordinary corridor. Before its ruin, Eden stopped in shortness of breath and smiling wonder, remembering a youthfully restless blue night. By the cold caress of a draft blowing from the forest within the hallway, she recalled the hurried whispers, the flush of her cheeks, the coy smiles Anakin had shamelessly shown her... Before such images of old, her right hand climbed to her neck and rested upon the anchoring presence of her necklace's wooden pendant.
An exhale faded the memory of pulling Anakin inside her room to reveal instead the lonesome and old door awaiting her. Her door. That ghost from a life lived in constant and innocently oblivious wonder of what the galaxy might hold, that whisper from a past where her lack of belongings rooted sadness within her soul in the same way that missing the simplicity has haunted her since she left, it called onto her now, wrapping a string around her wrist until her left hand connected with the handle and with a flick from her wrist, she released the creaks of the door's hinges upon the length of the corridor. The door slid open and welcomed her home.
She expected to meet a fair child on top of her bed, staring at the ceiling. Though she knew not what she would have told herself should those eyes look upon her in wonder, Eden wished she could have stepped into that memory of childhood and stayed there, silent. Instead, the room was a ruin. Its ceiling had been blown off with half the room collapsing into the forest below. Her bed was splintered beneath a boulder marking the point beyond which nothing remained by the sight of the stilled echoes wearing their ash. Dust had scratched off the hieroglyphs painting the walls and the floor, but stepping inside the room and looking to the left, Eden was relieved to see her soldiers and their table had survived the massacre.
Relief riddled her sigh which followed. Letting go of her necklace, Eden returned to the table after so very long, assessing that all her wooden soldiers were alright, albeit in a total disarray across the surface, fallen one over the other. Of course, she already knew a single soldier would be missing from the assembly, but that known impossibility of complete fulfillment did not set her back on her quest to restore the order amongst her first -her only- and most treasured toys. Careful, she lifted the first soldier up.
"Anakin," Sheev Palpatine greeted the first to enter his office with a smile. "And Master Kenobi," he added rather perplexed, though his act was there merely to mock how long it took the Jedi to see through the lies. Palpatine shone his smile with evergreen calmness, dripping honey upon his naïve façade, otherwise sweetening already his words closer by syllable to an outright ridicule, "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
The path has never been clearer.
Anakin knew exactly what he had to do and he knew precisely how fast he was required to act as well. Each of his actions was timed by the second. A second and a breath to reach the middle of the chamber. By the time his steps passed that center, he had already unclipped the lightsaber from his belt. Then, before Palpatine could even react to the action that had widened his eyes and flattened his palms on the surface of his desk, Anakin switched on his saber and extended his left hand forward. The massive desk was ripped off from underneath the Chancellor's hands, pushed into the left side of the room and finally, Anakin closed in across a field with nothing but steps separating him from his goal. Two steps. He raised his lightsaber at a man flinching to raise his hands in self defense. One swing and it would all have been over. The blue stream of energy fell down within the second, but Anakin froze amidst both the attack and his preparatory grimace before completing the descent.
Looking up, ever so slowly, Palpatine could sense as tangible as a blade drawing blood the burning centimeters of thin air standing between him and death. He sought to look Anakin in the eyes, though more for the sake of maintaining the role he had to play in order to slither this far up underneath the Republic's skin, rather than for a curiosity of learning why he was not yet dead. Fact was, Palpatine already knew what he would find dwelling in those blue eyes: fear.
Despite the initial surprise that Anakin would make it this far down the righteous path, Palpatine had no doubt his heart would waver before striking him down as swift and certain as a man not tainted with darkness, but rather akin to it. A single strain of hesitation in his soul was enough for Palpatine to latch onto and twist to freeze the Jedi Master where he stood and to find doubt in such a man was no true challenge at all. No man indoctrinated to the faith of the Force could ever be driven so far into the dark that they met the edge of the cliff beyond which laid only the voided shadow of a promise and jumped right into their perdition, without a stop, without a gulp, with a tear or a last word thrown back over the shoulder for a final glimpse at the light.
Thus, Palpatine would argue no Sith Lord should ever grow in their pride such that they thought themselves superior to the nature of life: what was once in the light, will always hesitate before diving into darkness, just like what has been raised in darkness, will always hesitate before stepping into the light. Therefore, the key to an unwavering Sith remained to grip someone so tightly in tenebrosity that they would fail to remember ever having known the light.
Sheev didn't recall the light anymore. A great blackness dulled his early years into a confused blur from which his rise as Darth Sidious marked the true beginning of his life. Despite having grown used to it through his work as a Senator and then Chancellor, even calling himself by his birth name often seemed strange, unfit. He liked to believe that this name -Sheev Palpatine- belonged to a puppet he maneuvered when it suited him best and that this puppet's feelings were fabrications, stirred by his own mind for entertainment: he never meant his out loud dreaming of a childhood on Naboo while seated in the garden with Eden, for that Sheev was a tool to which he alone was Master.
Because of their earlier talk, Obi-Wan had walked into that office convinced that he was ready to bare witness to the path Anakin has elected as the right one to take, however something in his aged apprentice's swiftness of action, in the lack of a discussion and peaceful mediation, chilled the Jedi to the bone and then a little deeper, until his very marrow ached under a frostbite of terror. For a moment, he had been paralyzed into feeling as if, instead of shepherding in the end of the war, he had been instead fooled into becoming the future deponent of the unleashing of a new monster of eldritch terror whose first meal he would see devouring there and then. But as fast as that cold moment washed over him, the foam cleared out: Obi-Wan caught sight of the Chancellor's attempt to raise his hands defensively, thus the virtuous nature within him sparked alive sufficiently to flinch his left hand upon his lightsaber. There, the coldness of the metal froze him once more and with the return of his frightful paralysis, thankfully, Anakin stopped himself from killing Palpatine too.
Only Anakin did not wish to stop and he certainly did not understand why his body had suddenly grown still, why his arms did not answer his conscious commands and why this numbness grew the deeper he glared into meeting Palpatine's eyes. A breeze of static noise stung underneath his skin and violated his free will to such an extent, he had no choice but to fear. He feared for his mind, for his integrity, for everything that made him who he was, and within that fear, he found the paralyzing root: his mind had been penetrated by a feeling he already knew the sensation belonging to the other end.
A sigh of relief traversed a shiver of relaxation across Obi-Wan's body, dissipating the tension built up in his stance until even his hand loosened up its grip from around the hilt of his lightsaber. Believing with all his heart that Anakin has changed his mind in regards to his approach, Obi-Wan found strength to step forward. "Chancellor," he spoke, taking his turn on solving the matter, "in the name of the Republic, you are under-"
Palpatine raised his hand and cut off the Jedi, plucking the lightsaber out of his grip and tossing it aside -it slid under a couch crammed to a corner of relaxation besides a small collection of leather bound books. His fist closed and with it, the door to his office shut. Despite each motion of decisiveness radiating through the Force as a bleeding lash, his gaze stilled itself firmly on Anakin's, showing no sign of wishing to part with that established superiority, not even for the sake of indulging himself in a manhandling he surely enjoyed: Obi-Wan felt an air-knocking push slam him in the chest and pin him to the door. Finally, Palpatine could argue, on the background of Obi-Wan's groans of pain, that perhaps he simply liked to watch the tragedy in Anakin's eyes unfold a little more: there was nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a humble man be reminded of his ant-significance in the world of giants.
"Turn off the lightsaber," the command blasted into Anakin's mind though not a single flinch had parted Palpatine's lips beyond a smile. Even with his most strenuous striving at play, bringing him kneel-inducing pain equivalent to what he thought would be the sensation of driving hot iron through someone's temple with the goal of piercing through the skull and the brain, until it came out on the other side, his finger slid across the switch eventually anyhow.
"Quite miraculous," Palpatine stood up once the danger of the lightsaber was gone, looking down upon the knelt boy, "these powers Anope has hidden from the rest of us. Isn't this the epitome of hypocrisy? To come here and preach in front of the masses that the temples should be open to everyone, all the while the most terrible powers are tucked away and hidden religiously, greedily even from the whole galaxy's waiting eyes. After all, who wouldn't want to keep all to themselves the power to take away free will for example?"
"Get up," a second command thundered blacking out aches into Anakin's mind, making it so that in the aftermath of the darkness that spotted his sight, he gazed puzzled upon the view from the window of the Chancellor's office. His body, straight in posture, trembled in its forced stiffness.
"I have had my attempts to mimic such an ability, as you may be able to tell, through gimmicks such as the Grand Army of the Republic. It's amusing, how easy it had been to inject the enemy into hearts of frightened parties and politicians, how very unchallenging it had been to militarize this supposed democracy, a gathering of buffoons, then train my greatest weapon through my greatest enemies. Isn't it just so laughable how fast you Jedi have given in to your true and ugly nature the second war was an option? I wonder how far I would have been able to push this pathetic remanence of an Order had that young girl not shown up."
An explosion ruptured the night horizon of Coruscant at which Anakin was coerced to stare. Vibrating dully into the floor, the Jedi Temple was set on fire and Anakin could do nothing but hitch his breath. From every fiber a restless attempt blazed its determination to pluck out that parasite from his mind, yet he was left baffled at the sturdiness of the wall blocking his way to freedom. It shouldn't have been possible, he couldn't help but cry out in the little corner of his mind he still had for himself; in there, he was holding the door to protect a fracture of his consciousness. During that escape from the Animus Post, he too had felt this power's taste, and even with Eden by his side, it was a strain to control that animal with not nearly enough erratic behavior to make up for its lack of sentience. It shouldn't have been possible, yet here he was, in the shackles of a Sith Lord he had been enough of a fool for so many years to call a friend.
"No!" Obi-Wan shouted. "What have you done, you monster? There are children in that temple-"
Even as his Master's voice was abruptly cut off, Anakin could not flinch an inch around to check on him. His eyes ached, begging for a blink and even that had turned into a luxury for which he wept outside of his control.
"But to use the Force for such a vile act...," Palpatine continued with a gradual sigh twisted around his words. His voice had turned horrid with satisfaction, perhaps from watching the fire consume the Temple ahead, or maybe as a precursor to the patronizing touch his hand left on Anakin's back. "It's one cruelty not even I thought to have been possible. One sadist act for which I must thank only Eden's hypocrisy for ever mastering. Had she not left her planet... much would have been different now." He patted Anakin's back, "I digress. You are not here to hear my appreciation for your wife's formidable, yet gullible influence on this game. After all, time is not on your side, my puny pawn in the prophetic game of the most cruel Master. The Force has dealt you a merciless hand and you come to me in your hour of need for, as its obedient fool, you realize now you've sent your love in the hands of certain doom. If only you had learnt to listen to your visions rather than bend your ear to your blind faith in the unseen. If only you had been told sooner that the Force is unpitying and dissolute, and unless we bend it to our will, it will tear us apart for fruits we won't live to enjoy."
Anakin's progress in freeing himself from the Chancellor's grip on his mind was starting to move backwards, because the stronger he fought, the more he felt was being corrupted by the rotten slithers of the Sith's thoughts. So much of his mind was opening up like a gushing wound for his swarm of insects to dig into and tear apart.
"I feel your anger, Anakin," Palpatine hummed, "but I assure you, I did not plan for Eden to be in the crossfire of my ascension to the lead of my new Empire. Yes, you are correct, I did start this war. It was a necessary action to frighten compliance into the idiots we elected to represent our Galaxy in the Senate. Yes, I did use my dumb son too and for the first time since he was born, he was actually good at something. Until, of course, he proved to me a final time that he was an expendable moron. While I ordered Eden to be kidnapped, I never approved of him torturing her, which is why I allowed your escape to happen in the first place. You see, I need her, perhaps as much as you do too. When the waters calmed and we raised into the new world, she would have been the last effigy of a mythical people. We would have held the politics, the army and she would have helped us hold the people. Forever."
Choked out and through gritted teeth, Anakin whistled his bitter question, "We?"
"Well, yes," the Chancellor was quick to answer. "Though you must take me for a liar, I have never been anything but honest to you, especially about the potential I think you possess. You must be wondering by now how is it that I am capable of withstanding your constant tries of pushing me out of your mind, but the ugly truth is... my path has always been stronger than yours. Look at it this way," he urged him with another dragged out pat on his back, "when a dark cloud passes upon the sky during the day, it casts a shade on the ground. The same cloud passes the same sky during the night, but the ground remains unchanged in its darkness. Light is so easily corruptible, because it is the darkness towards which it strives. And this is only a fragment of the power you can achieve through the Dark Side of the Force. Remember the Tragedy Of Darth Plagueis?"
After a moment's waiting, he sighed pleased, "Of course you do. And I am certain you've seen what your dear wife's friend was capable of doing. Force Healing, Anakin. Through the power of the Dark Side, that ability is the path to immortality, the only way to preserve the ones we love for eternity. To give life to what is dead, to take from the undeserving and give to those who should have had more time." Palpatine paused once more to breathe in a triumphant smile, "I ordered the attack on Anope knowing the Jedi Masters will be sent there to protect their secrets. It felt fitting for them to die surrounded by their sanctimoniousness. However... you are the one who sent Eden there too, despite knowing better. We all make mistakes when we trust in the unseen to care for our feeble existence. I won't even bear a grudge for your blind attempt to strike me. Stand by my side, Anakin, and I will teach you the ways of the Dark Side, I will teach you how to save Eden from the death you've sentenced her to."
Anakin's breath hitched, incapable of looking anywhere else but ahead, at the burning Temple. He's stared for long enough, with poison his ear and thorns bleeding his mind, that he thought he could hear the screams of the padawans, of the younglings. And he felt dirty and corrupt himself for even considering Palpatine's words for anything other than foil of evil. But he couldn't help it... he couldn't help but imagine Anope reduced to ash and Eden, a fair angel, walking through those ruins, with a clone who might turn on her, with a crazed Seer out for her blood. What was he thinking, sending her there alone? A dark cloud blocked out the light from shining upon his path.
Eden exhaled, her shoulder light of burden and her hands grateful to lean her weight on the railing of the balcony she ought to reach. There was a certain beauty to the tragedy that had reduced the horizon to wasteland before her eyes, one over which the undulating crimsons of an approaching eclipse created the illusion of post mortem movement of nature. The macabre and gruesome treatment her home has received was not what had momentarily astonished Eden to a breathless silence, but instead the resilience with which this massacre of purity was painted. Those solitary trees still standing, the unchanged golden dunes spreading over the hurt forest and seeking to mend its wounds the best sand ever could. That golden grain, now illuminated into scarlet, was absorbing the gray and the black, consuming that heretic intruder from lingering in its committed sacrilege. Though quiet, the planet too was fighting back in its own way. The High Emissary way.
The ignition of a lightsaber burned blue light way beneath her gaze, bound to fall and witness what she's already seen in plaguing dreams: the saber's energy stream cut through her chest, held by someone breathing fanatically behind her.
"I do not know what is more absurd," Eden murmured slowly, voice distant. "That you thought showing me this moment in nightmares and visions was a good prelude to this plan unfolding exactly as you told me it will," she turned around, lightsaber passing through her translucent body like a knife through fog, cutting nothing at all, "or that you learnt Force Projection off of my scrolls, yet forgot I am the one who wrote those discoveries down in the first place?" Before her form's ripples led the illusion to crumble into a complete disappearance, she refused to deny herself the chance of staring deeply into the corrupted blindness nested into the eyes of the first monster she's ever known, the fight that has been waiting for her since forever.
The Seer hissed, sensing through the Force alone that her perception had been toyed with. She rectified her posture and lowered the saber, "I got you where I wanted you, didn't I?"
Though her path remained clear, nothing could have ever prepared Eden for facing the haunter of her childhood, the dark cloud that has shaded her life with fear and doubt, with her hands familiar to the powers she could conjure and will in her aid. It crossed her mind that she could be cruel and it would be swift and deserving too. That she could turn to deception and illusion until she was right behind the Seer, until her palm flattened on her back and she stopped her heart dead in her chest. She could make that organ bleed, melt across her ribs and leave a void between her lungs. Or she could touch her and force her to live a thousand years in a matter of seconds, to feel the old age seep into her bones, tear her cells apart and leave gaps in everything that makes her whole as the cheap imitation of human that she is.
But with a grit of teeth and a tension in her jaw, Eden stepped away from the wall holding up the entrance of the balcony and resorted to only readying her grip on the lightsaber she kept from her duel with Raylum. "This is your last chance," she spoke with every ounce of her being struggling to keep at bay her dark thoughts. "You've been led astray from the Force by your fear. Surrender now, and I will help you see-"
"Enough!" The Seer shouted, turning around. "I will not let you drill your destructive words into my mind, you devil! What I have seen is the truth and though none of you believed me, I know it to be true, I sense it to be veracious and pure. Your cruelty has a toll of thousands already and yet you stand here speaking as some saint? I have seen your true face in my visions, the behemoth that you will become to this world. Your words will proselytize the Galaxy and your degenerate gluttony will fall insatiable with their minds alone, so you will conquer what lies beyond our world until the whole Universe is devoured under your barbaric religion, screaming warrior chants with red veils of fabricated truth. So no! I will not hear the words of a High Emissary spoiled into the darkness of the world, a false idol that has already doomed so many lives because little Eden wished to have it all. Whatever your mind conjures, I will not fall for it, because while the truth has taken my eyes from me, it gave me a sense... You've come here to kill me and that... that tells me all I need to know about your true nature."
"So be it," Eden dismissed, igniting her saber.
The Seer's mad smile widened to an uncanny point beyond which her whole face would have contorted to a realm of cosmic terror. "I've heard the Jedi trained you so I hope you don't mind I took the liberty of exploiting the generous gift of the Order...," her chuckle darkened by each hiccup in its fluctuation, fading only as the sound of steps thudded behind Eden, to join them on the balcony. "You may have written those scrolls, but I have reached limits to your beloved technique that you could have never even dreamed of." She waited to hear Eden's breath hitch as she turned around and saw more than half of the High Council surrounding her, lightsabers at the ready, their eyes blanked to white and their faces devoid of emotion and volition, before continuing. "My mind has been splintered across the Force and into theirs. I exist in all of them," the Jedi's voices joined in a choir, blending louder over the Seer's voice, "I see what they see. I know what they know. I wield the power they wield. If you want to kill me, you'll have to kill them first."
"Can't you see what you're doing?" Eden shouted one last time to beg reason back into this discussion, to delay the storm a little longer. She felt the tickle of sand on the small of her neck, on the tips of her fingers, but bit back the smile that sensation's presence elicited within. "Can't you tell that you've enslaved yourself to fear so keenly you are driving your worst nightmares to fruition? You're making me kill the Jedi Order-"
"A High Emissary would never strike them down," the Seer responded through the voices of the Jedi, making Eden puff into her stance's relaxation.
She lowered the tip of her red lightsaber to point towards the ground. "You're right," she mumbled as her thumb slid across the switch, terminating the red glow she brought on that balcony. "Now," she gave the command for Bryyk and readied herself by clipping her lightsaber back to her side. From atop one of the trees still standing on a higher point of the Echo Forest's plateau, Bryyk shot an electric charge that whistled through the air and wrapped itself around the confused Seer, shocking her to the ground. The splinters of her mind controlling the Jedi ached to paralysis as well, stunning Eden's adversaries sufficiently for her to spread her arms to the side and complete her pull through the Force. "Brace yourself," she breathed out a final warning to her companion.
In a mounting roar, through the shape of sandstorm, the Great Desert lifted all at once from the dunes on the horizon, bursting over the corpse left of the Echo Forest. Within seconds, the desert swallowed everything in its path, devouring the Omni Sanctuary whole and locking behind the scarlet veil of interminable teeth whose whirring encapsulated the atmosphere. Only fugitive grains of sand thinking themselves snowflakes dared caress Eden's skin. Around her, creator to this blinding tempest, a cupola of undefiled air formed, allowing her the piece of mind of kneeling down without being brazed by a thousand cuts. There, in her refuge from the storm, with her hands gripping her knees, Eden closed her eyes and passed her consciousness into the conduit she had channeled over the scene: the rapid murmurs of a thousand bees that she'd often have to contain herself into during such Force Projection attempts has been replaced by the buzz of the sandstorm, into which her energy blended instantly.
All at once, she became aware of everything around her, for miles and miles. Her mind stretched itself like a silky fabric, undulating in a mimicking of the ocean over the whole of the sandstorm's domain. She could feel it in her numbed body how the grains of sand invaded corridors below, how their tentacles of time sullied scratches upon the walls. Before she concentrated her energy back to the balcony, the last glimpse she saw was of her table of wooden soldiers and how the storm avoided knocking them down.
Alas, the most important of her observations was to finally recognize the Masters that the Council has sent to defend Anope, the Masters whose minds have been tarnished in the Seer's mindless desire of corruption. In a breath, Eden identified Plo Koon, Saesee Tiin, Shaak Ti, Kit Fisto, Oppo Rancisis and even Adi Gallia.
Time was too precious of a currency to the success of her mediating attempt for Eden to consider waiting any further before penetrating the first mind otherwise poisoned by the Seer. Given how thinly she had already stretched herself to eliminate the Separatist danger from orbit, she approximated her energy levels were set on a path to certain depletion, making whatever she had to do exist under the marker of hurry, as well as the one of efficiency. She chose to slip her consciousness into Kit Fisto's mind first, not because she didn't feel Plo Koon being much closer to stumbling upon her in the sandstorm, but rather because, in a calculation of a risk, she would have much rather clashed lightsabers with the latter, rather than with Master Fisto.
To claw your way into a sentient being's mind was a massacre, a slaughter that left behind wounds which, in an attempt to mirror the miracle of evergreen trees, would remain bleeding for ages, crying the defamation of autonomy their becoming bore witness to. Each of the minds Eden was surrounded with has already been impaled by the Seer in a brutality fragrant in choirs of echoes hissing out warnings and omens of terror. Following the wails of exploitation and the gore of its sin, Eden slithered down the path perforated through Kit Fisto's thoughts until her energy lit itself within his mind as the veins on the back of a leaf. There she pulsed life until her hitch of breath revealed sensations -Master Fisto shivered down to his knees-, emotions -a gasp crippled itself out of him- and vivid images that, relived, forced him to scream, paled eyes wide and gazing upwards at the cyclone of sand, welcoming the pain as well as the return of the real color his eyes bore.
Inside his thoughts, Eden stringed together memories of Glee Anslem, his home planet, of the underwater cities shimmering beneath the light spectacle of blinking rays, and of the belief he has long since forgotten, in the Ocean Spirit and the balance it brought to their water world.
The Seer scrunched herself in pain on the ground, feeling her corrosion of thought burning off the scalp of Master Fisto's consciousness. The latter's palms braced the concrete of the balcony's floor breathlessly, liberation exhausting him to a trembling fit from which he could not stir himself to even distinguish between what was real and what was not: should he believe that he was young again, swimming in the ocean of his homeworld with the Ocean Spirit herself besides him reassuring him that she bares no resentment of his abandonment for chasing the Force's faith so far away from the waves and the cities of his people, or should he believe that he stood pillar amidst a roaring sandstorm drenched in a fiery red, a place where he had been enslaved by a crippling darkness that told him on the voices of perdition that he must swing his justice to take a life he had grown to cherish? Neither images seemed real and in neither of them he found himself truly anchored.
That was only one out of six minds.
Eden's head bowed, struggling to maintain her sense of her own self in this straining havoc, yet already reaching out to slither up inside the next consciousness. Just as her energy approached Plo Koon, another electric charge flew through the storm and shocked him to the ground. He had gotten far too close to her and Bryyk, having activated the thermal read on the visor of his helmet, was taking no chances on his task of making sure no one approached her before she had completed her task. With him sniping hostiles down and the storm raging about, this was supposed to be a foolproof defense, but they should have known better than to underestimate just how fast Eden's body will suffer the consequences of a wandering spirit, of an outside-dwelling soul.
"Your heat signature is dropping, ma'am," Bryyk spoke into the coms, yet his voice fell into the background for Eden as she left a third freed mind behind. She couldn't even distinguish the Seer's screams of agony anymore. Each mind freed was a piece of her soul ripped to an early death and her body too felt the consequences of hosting only splinters of a spirit within its carcass.
There was something apocalyptic in the way the scorch of the storm suffocated them all. A senseless gluttony that feasted ravenously upon the fears fatiguing the released Jedi Masters. Or perhaps an unseen mirror the heart of its creator: Eden's eyes were paling, her skin was growing cold and in a oracular uproar, the storm was turning deadly, destructive, a cataclysm enraged to feel the reigns of its mother lay loose with each soul she purified, each life she saved despite hers joining in with the awakened dunes.
"Eden," Bryyk kept calling her name once each Jedi she brought to their knees took a shade of warmth away from her image seen through his visor. "You've saved plenty of them. They're not worth your death-!" The exclamation stuck in his throat as he watched the last Jedi Master collapse and with them, Eden's heat signature disappeared too. "Eden? Eden, do you copy?" Bryyk corrected his posture to sit upright. "Where did the Seer go?" he inquired himself as he failed to recognize that one heat signature which was holding on to the edge of the balcony too.
He leant forward, squinted, and finally distinguished one faint heat signature approaching the spot where Eden, frozen over amidst the sandstorm, laid still. "Not on my watch, you witch," Bryyk lifted his rifle and flicked his finger to switch to lethal blasts before he fixed his aim and took the approaching heat signature in his visor.
"Don't shoot," a voice of ghostly familiarity whispered in a chamber of echoes around Bryyk's head, making him flinch off target right as his finger pulled the trigger.
"Crusher?" he looked around, winded to have heard the voice so clearly carried through the storm, yet see nothing now that he studied with gaping eyes his surroundings. "Was that you?"
The blast missed Cay Lanshee, but though he was startled by the idea of a sniper lurking somewhere in this dreadful storm soaked in the frequency belonging to Eden's formidable attunement to the Force, he was far more frightened by the squinted sight he gained of her. Collapsed on the ground, her skin was being cut by the restlessness of billions of sand grains in their soaring flights. Oh, that porcelain skin... How pale it had turned, bruising in neglect by the absence of a soul to hold the body within a meaning. Her lips turned prune and tears ran cold, ice brazing her cheeks.
Before he could control himself, Cay Lanshee's knees struck themselves to the ground beside her and she picked Eden to lay on her back. "I got you...," he mumbled as his left hand became her head's pillow and his right sought a pulse upon the fragile skin of her neck. Her liveliness was so faint that had his fingertips been any more calloused, it would have escaped his sensible touch. "Always stretching your luminous soul in a mindless rupture." Cay lowered his right hand to her chest, spreading his palm and commencing his technique of Force Healing, though without a single flower in sight to pay the price. "But it's never been mindless, has it? You've heard the breath of the Force when you were born and you've listened to it since. It's been speaking through you, echoing in your actions, and we were fearful, fearful fools who did not listen, who refused to see."
"Dad...?" Eden opened her paled eyes to a blurred vision closer to death than to life itself. She thought she heard her heaven, she thought she heard the meadows of the Echo Forest come back to life and hold her hand as a child once more. The radiance of her childhood laid within reach as a promise, its innocence caressed her cheeks in relieved tears, stringing her to feel the grass beneath her, the safety of Emissary Lanshee by her side. She's forgotten her earliest years on the planet and how gullible she was to hold his hand and call him 'father'; such memories have been dug into her subconscious, forced to seed in their exile a restful gap where a family should have been. But now she remembered. Oh, the warmth of recalling she's been loved.
"I'm here...," Cay Lanshee smiled down at her. "I got you, my little miracle. Your days are not yet spent and if I can do anything for you in this cruel life, I will give you more time. More precious seconds to have your fears, to conquer them, to gain your joys and watch them grow... To raise on the steps of your glory and see the world shape underneath your touch into the one you've always dreamed of. The world you deserve to see. Your paradise awaits. You've earned its peace, its balance. Teach that world, like you have taught me, the language of your faithful kindness, of the eternity promised in the light. No one stands alone against the darkness..."
Anakin broke free and Eden gasped back to vibrant life.
The storm stilled itself. Cay Lanshee had gathered the threads of strayed energy Eden had twisted in the sand, arranging it back within her healed body. It was for that that she almost did not recognize him as she sat up with a ghost of rust beside her, smiling content as the decay decomposed to dark dust his eyes too.
At the mark of the second in which her eyes widened in realization of what had happened and what had been sacrificed to wake her from the cradle of demise, the eclipse completed and a crepuscular darkness fell over the quiet desert beneath its circle of fire.
The necklace around Eden's throat felt heavy and an instinct wrapped her hand around her saber, coercing her to ignite it despite its brightness stinging her eyes already purged by tears.
Blue crashed with red furiously as the Seer limped forward, animalistic growls on her bruised lips. Though kissed by death and maimed into a corpse crawling on the margin of a closing grave, terror pumped her heart into a blasphemous determination to take a life with her.
Eden crawled backwards, choked in her fragmented mourning while the Seer crawled herself through the blown ashes of her father. A second clash of their lightsabers blinded them both, forcing Eden all the same to reach her left hand forward, join the other on the hilt of the lightsaber resisting the growing pressure. She had to get up, but using the Force against such a corrupting power was a death sentence and doing so without breaking her guard was either way beyond her skill. Her heart's aches had her pant wearily.
Driven mad, the Seer hit the blue beam down upon the blocking red held by the girl. Again and again, and again - she knew eventually her body's weakness will have to falter her defense and in utmost greed, she let out a battle cry and grew the erraticism of her attack still.
Eden could feel her arms grow numb, her muscles cry out their last stance. She doubted she could hold her lightsaber up any longer.
A blast sunk into the Seer's back and she gasped down to her knees with smoke rising to darken her an illusion horns. The stolen lightsaber fell from her hand, but Eden did not let go of hers to scramble to her knees and catch in the palm of her left hand the side of the disarmed enemy's face.
The Seer returned to an awfully familiar place. "I can see?" she puzzled herself with the sight hazed in light of the beauty of the main staircase of the Omni Sanctuary, one that was now a destroyed ruin, but once had been a marvel of architecture, covered in cuneiform and hieroglyphs worth entire domes of thousands of pages, all carved in spotless marble, cold and dignified, never surrendering to the passage of time and the touch of dust. "How-!?" The question could not be completed as the Seer turned around and saw the child for the first time. The monster she's been looking to kill, the monster that haunted her mind for years, and this was the first time she saw her. A fair child with auburn hair and starry freckles across her cheeks. A small girl with little, frail hands and gentle skin.
A sudden tug compelled the Seer to look down and see the hands of the girl hold onto her robes. The Seer was standing on the edge of the last step of the staircase, leaning backwards. "No...," she breathed. "Wait-!"
Eden let go.
As the last grain in the hourglass of the Seer's life fell with her, time bent to the illusion of slowing down, allowing the strands of her dark hair to pass before her eyes and each time they undulated over the Seer's vision of the girl atop the stairs, the child grew a little older. Breathlessly, she saw her now, the cold eyes filled with tears, the sunset hair falling in waves and shining in a galaxy of stars made of sand.
Then she dropped.
Eden drove the red lightsaber through the Seer's heart, turning herself an altar upon which the sacrifice was made; a life that should have ended ages ago, had finally been spent.
With the last seconds of the eclipse drawing themselves out, Eden let the corpse lay on the ground, besides the saber, besides the ashes that she watched over as she stood. With a hand over her stomach, with the other over her necklace, she wore the circle of fire as her halo, the first sight after the storm that the Jedi saw. Only they weren't exactly Jedi anymore.
Everything has an ending. From the smallest mollusk in the great oceans of the galaxy, to the oldest creatures that have seen the rise and fall of civilizations; no man, no government, no idea stands above the way life was intended to be lived. Everything with a beginning is made to have an end which is why the clouds blocking out the sun does not make day into night forever. Every storm passes, every darkness is followed by the return of light and though fear may be with us forever, faith is an everlasting candle that warms our hands and reminds us that there is more to life than the lonesome shadow where contours of existence blur together and we feel so lonesome and forgotten.
Two months have passed and though she had fears her near death affected her child, Eden's pregnancy finally started to show. She moved a little slower, cried more often than she would have normally had, but the more time she spent pondering the future their child was bringing, the more certain she was of the nature of this miracle growing within.
That particular day, hurrying across sunset brazed dunes outside the entrance to the Desert Temple, she felt the blessing had turned clearer still. It's been two months of constant dreaming of this moment, of this last reunion. Finally, their arms wrapped around each other again and they could breathe, accept that the pain was over, that the longing could stop and that their heaven was here. Anakin has returned to her.
"The war is over," he breathed out, fighting against the weakness that dare tear him apart until tears rained on his cheeks and his knees wobbled unsteady. Memory laid heavy upon his shoulders for two months and for twice as many years, he knew he would not forgive himself for having hesitated so long under Palpatine's control that day. He won, but he felt stained by his failures for a torturous bundle of weeks rippled across sleepless nights where he asked penance for considering that evil man's offer. He sought forgiveness from himself by hunting down the clones, freeing them of the same enslavement that had been the last weapon against him too, then he took his lashing a step forward and wiped the political board of the galaxy clean of Separatists.
But he fooled no one: the true punishment he elected for himself was not returning to Eden sooner, yet instead exiling himself away until his hands felt holy again, worthy to hold her.
"I know," Eden inhaled his scent and closed her eyes to rejoice in her heart being whole again. "I know, my love... You've been so brave-"
"A coward," Anakin leant back, no longer able to hide his shame. "I let Palpatine tempt me and... and even after I took his head, he was under my skin, seeding lies and darkness. I couldn't come back to your side with my mind in shambles. So I fought, because fighting is the only way I knew how to purge myself from those thoughts that I have failed not only myself and those who died in all the temples his heresy burned, but you as well. Our cause. Our dream. Our son..."
"Son?" Eden tilted her head, then followed his barely dropped gaze down to her belly. "Well," she chuckled, "that ruined the surprise."
"Sorry," Anakin muttered. "I've been having dreams lately."
"One eye haunted by the future," Eden lifted her hands up to hold both sides of his face while Anakin's own palms, in their shivering deprivation, sought to return where they belonged, resting on her waist. "One eye haunted by the past. Bring them both back to the present and look at me now," she waited to see the glassed azure of his eyes answer her call before she continued. "It doesn't matter if you were tempted, Anakin. Just like it never mattered to me if you were a Jedi or not. I look at you and I see a man who brought peace to the galaxy, a man who took a fallen Republic and raised it in an Empire."
"You heard about that?" Anakin stepped closer. How could he have forgotten how safe he felt besides his wife? His belonging has always been there and it was not through the fire of battle that his hands would turn holy, but across her skin where purity was waiting for him to get claimed again. He should have known that warm feeling on his shoulder was her presence. He should have been there, but he felt she was not upset that it took him two months to arrive.
"I see a man who walked through the darkness, back into the light. I see my first love, with curious eyes and sand in his hair. My husband, whose heartbeat matches mine and whose arms will always be my home. I see the father of my son, who went to war and made the world safe again for us. I see Anakin Skywalker whom I've missed and I am glad to be with again, but who I never doubted would return."
"And I see paradise," Anakin lifted his right hand on the side of her face and held her there. The tip of his nose tickled hers. "I look at you and I see eternity, in all its unfathomable splendor. The sight of you is a reminiscence of an eternal sunset, where the world is mellow and at peace, a little drowsy, inching closer to its rest as the sky paints its best colors in mesmerizing patterns dripped in auburn golds. I look upon you and I am left breathless to find myself at home, to know myself free and loved. I see the only love my lips have been shaped to adore, the ethereal holder of a name that has hoarded itself on my tongue since before my memory was whole. My dear angel, my warmest starry night, my guiding light through peril..." Anakin peppered a kiss on her left cheek- "My wife," then on her right. "The Empress to my Empire."
At last, their lips met.
The rearranged stardust within them reignited their desire, and they clung so desperately to their songs of bliss -those enchanted moans as faint and tender as the ringing of the bells in a temple beneath clear waters-, trying to fit surrounded by the ichor of the heavens all the moments they have missed to share in this love upon the language without words, hidden in a movement inching ever closer. Woven into each other was how they were meant to live, prying away seconds into their bouquets of infinity.
All the questions that remained felt dulled in the presence of their reunion. None of those inquiries of the future of the Jedi could possibly wound them now that their hands have joined. But even without being asked about it, Eden knew to answer and lead him, as she did once all those years ago, down into the temple. "Sometime after the Seer stole from this temple, an earthquake struck it and reopened the path to the chapel."
"Your favorite room," Anakin nodded, remembering. "You can finally introduce me to it. Too bad we're already married, though I do not mind officiating it twice for as long as we continue the kiss we started on the dunes."
"As much I would in fact enjoy hearing your flirt proceed in turning my stomach into butterflies," Eden was unashamed to smile through her blushing, "I want to show you not only the chapel, but what lies beyond it. One of its walls collapsed too during the earthquake and revealed an altar with inscriptions. It's older than everything else in this temple, which could only mean that Lua and Jao built their home around it."
"What do the inscriptions say?"
"You'll see," Eden shrugged innocently, hurrying their steps down the narrow corridor.
"Need I remind you I am not as passionate as you about dead languages?"
"Trust me," Eden giggled, shaking her head, "once you see this altar, you'll understand. They all did." She dragged him along and within the second, her steps slowed into a larger room, with low ceiling.
"Oh," Anakin was startled by the strength of the energy lingering in the air. "It does feel like an immediate hug."
She hummed in approval, but urged him to turn towards the collapsed wall either way.
Candles have been lit all around the chapel's margin, but none was placed inside the altar room. Frankly, none of the High Emissaries who survived or the Jedi Masters that have become dedicated disciples since dared step inside that antechamber revealed by the earthquake, so now Eden had to momentarily let go of Anakin's hand to collect one of the candles. Only once she was by his side again, Anakin approached the patch of darkness torn into the stone wall. Eden lifted the candle and shone its light upon the wonder. The sight took his breath away. It took hers too, though she's seen it so many times.
With tears in his eyes, tears of true delight and jubilation, of an ascendancy of cosmic revelation, he turned to look upon Eden, where he found her smile to be a confirmation calling for a second kiss, this time holding reins to a passion ablaze, a conquered fire. The path has never been clearer and the road ahead was a road they walked together, hand in hand. Emperor and Empress of the First Galactic Empire.
. . . YOU HAVE READ . . .
━━━━━━ ༻ EAST OF EDEN ༺ ━━━━━━
Thank you to everyone that has read so far, to everyone that has stuck all the way through and has supported me in completing this story so worthy of a finale such as this one.
166k words later, I can say, with a hand over my heart that I am wholly proud of the story I have told, of the characters I have created and the meaning I have conferred through them.
Though this story started innocently as a messianic metaphor hidden beneath a plot of adorable love that brings reassurance and comfort and acceptance, I feel that it has gained since a mind of its own, becoming a medium in which I subconsciously poured my own belief and my gratitude towards how that faith has rescued me from my darkest years.
In the end, the key is not to expect to live a life without fear and doubt, but rather to accept that both of those emotions are often liars, because once you see that, you will walk back into the light yourself.
This is the last chapter (yes, I said I would have an epilogue but I ended up writing it in this chapter so this is now the final chapter sorryy) & yes, it's a bit of an open ending too, because in the end, I feel everyone will be drawing their own conclusions, leaving here with their own feelings and last thoughts.
( thoughts I would love to hear by the way )
I hope you enjoyed this book <3
Thank you for giving my work a chance
Until next time...
Signed,
Izabela aka llxcifers