democraciia.

              THE TWINS EVOKE SOMETHING primeval in her. It inspires a bold, unrestrained sense of necessity that has made survival easier. She would do anything for them, including live a life akin to confinement. Their very existence is a cage, one built around her with her consent, to which he holds the key to it. This, too, she handed off without any qualms to be had. Yet, motherhood suits her in this way. It gives purpose to the bars around her, to the days that tick by without occupation. She is as much a guard as a prisoner, watching over them with an unblinking stare. Even when they are out of reach, she feels them.

              Elsewhere. Where they belong. How sad that you don’t know. These responses, she rejects summarily —— sharp, hardly conciliatory, made of bad faith. ❝ I’ve left them at home, on Naboo. ❞  She stares at the mirror as she answers. ❝ This is no place for them, not now. ❞

              With deliberate steps, she moves from the counter and walks to the windows. The view outside is as mesmerizing as ever, but the discontent it provokes has grown deeper. Yet, nothing here is any more encouraging. Even behind closed eyes, she sees an unending reel of possibilities just far enough beyond reach to inspire gloom. Her hand presses against the cool glass, fingers tapping lightly the tune of a lullaby she has sang to the twins for years.

    ❝ I  know that you have no reason to trust what I’m saying, but … It’s rotting. Worse than before. It all looks the same, deceptively unchanged from years ago —— a lifetime ago, really —— ❞  Words have never failed her, and yet she knows they will never communicate to him what she needs to say. Their most consequential exchanges have always gone unspoken. ❝ It’s unstable, a weakness. ❞  The tapping of her fingers stills. ❝ Can you see it? This place has always been filled with vultures, those politicians you hate so much. So little time has passed since you dethroned him, and they’ve made the most of it. Pillaging, plundering, destroying. All behind your turned back, in your absence. Maybe even in plain sight. ❞   

             The words flow from her, descriptions of the story she has pieced together from reliable whispers, her own observation, experience. Though it stokes an anger nestled deep, a righteous rage smoldering for all of this time, her tone is far from accusatory. This is no rant, but a bitter declaration. She turns, shifting her gaze from a view concealing its transformation to her monster-husband who makes no effort to hide his. This honesty hurts no less.

   ❝ Are you content to preside over a hollow empire of ashes? Because that is what this will become, even if you believe it to not be already. That is no place for Luke and Leia. ❞ 

     ❝ THEIR PLACE IS by my side. They must be trained. ❞ He speaks && the Force shivers, receiving his words as a suggestion. What power might be amassed from destruction that reality does not just bend, but crumples to his will? No one else would dare deny him, nor would they be able to with those strange, light-swallowing eyes upon them. Irises like infernos, blazing against gloomy whites. ❝ You cannot come here offering your help && still deny me access to my own children. ❞ His rage is a finely-tuned thing now, practiced && undiluted; the wick from which his cold flame burns. 

               Vader retreats from the window, stalking farther into the apartment with the lasered focus of a hunting nexu. That dark cape flickers in impossible angles behind him as he explores. Stars wink in the darkness of his silhouette, alongside eyes && spiraling ranks of sharpened teeth. Shards of an unmade universe drip from the mouths that unzip at his shoulders; monstrous pauldrons that snap && whine before rolling over into nothingness. 

               The apartment is small, austere && full of sharp edges. Not a place for raising children, nor to hide them. Whatever she hopes from him, && her time spent here is temporary. Unless. 

               Unless.

     ❝ I never wished to preside over anything. ❞ Even then, when he’d offered her the galaxy, it had been an act of desperation. He would have said anything to stay her leave. Done anything. All he’d ever wanted was for her to be safe. && now he’s become the very thing she hides from, a dementation of his former self. Arranged himself into a hall of mirrors, each reflection more warped than the next. He’ll reach the final frame && no longer see himself staring back. Perhaps that’s what this moment is, since the mirror can no longer hold his image. 

               If this is to destroy him, she’s the only one who can hold it at bay. To tame the chambers of his snarling heart is no simple feat. Even more difficult is the task of orchestrating an empire from the graveyard Lord Vader’s made of the government.  

     ❝ I presume you have a title in mind, from where you will help. ❞ He’d refused her the occupation of senator during their initial schism. A petty stab at her freedom for separating them. But her willingness to face him has earned his respect, && the long lost echoes of their love rise, unbidden, to the surface of his thoughts. 

               In my unmasked eldritch Vader verse, his right arm has begun a strange technological transformation. It glows with eerie red light && appears connected to his arm through a strange black biological armor that’s begun to spread across his chest. The fingers have sharpened into jagged claws that bend unnaturally around his saber when he wields it. In the rare moments he needs his weapon, it becomes fused to his right hand through the same liquid black armor that encases the hilt. Vader’s not sure what will happen when the biological shell completely covers his skin, && has done extensive research to try && find a way to preserve his body. 

arielshepard.

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

Angles like teeth, mathematically impossible & constantly shifting, breathing, from one degree to another with ease, points that congregate around Anakin’s head. Like a crown, like a halo, like a set of jaws closing in, like a rope ready to separate his human flesh from his insides. ( Violently. Violently. Violently. ) Reality distorts around the Emperor, wounds in spacetime in the form of strange shapes not meant for organic eyes, strange shapes not meant for organic minds, strange shapes that crawl into his cells where they sink into his subatomic material. There is the sound that pours in with the darkness, the noise that makes a home out of his skull & the soft grey matter it holds, a piece of cosmic code, a frequency that birthed viruses.

There is a constant sound, uttering ineffable names, holy names, sacred names of things that cannot be described by organic tongues. Another hum coalesces into existence, a multitude of voices that utter, that drone a single word over & over, louder & louder & louder until it is deafening, until it is all consuming: 

AYIN. AYIN. AYIN.

The last song sung when the last organic lifeform is harvested, when the republics & empires have been made into empty & rotting arcologies, shall be an hymn for entropy, a hymn for the nothingness, a hymn for machines & exalted daughters, a hymn for cherished sons. A hymn that is a dirge for Anakin Skywalker, for his blood. A requiem for this galaxy. 

The ghosts of the long dead Sith begin to whisper again, underneath the layer of droning, the loud noise of nothingness. They are a cacophony of whispers that spread like the darkness, that spread like those viruses & lines of malicious code that warp these ancient places. ( I SHALL NOT REST UNTIL I SEE HER. I SHALL NOT PERISH UNTIL I SEE SHE WHO BLESSED US, THE SITH. ) Whispers that claw & worm up the walls, the decay of old Korriban, the space of memory filled by the maddening silence of the march of ages. They whisper to fill the emptiness, words pulled from endless dreamscapes & nightmares dictated by something awful, pulled & formed & shaped & dictated by her.

❝ Through your blood I shall raise up a generation of prophets that will herald the cycles of extinction, ❞ she says, the weight of her voice causing the weave of spacetime to sag, to bend & weep in agony from every spoken syllable. Her daughters repeat her words. They are smiles of metallic teeth, speaking in tones of hisses & shrieks & the all consuming dark. ❝ You shall be rewritten. You shall be reshaped. You shall be my instrument. ❞

               HER VOICE RENDS him, tears him from vigilance. His weapon forgotten when he presses his palms to his ears in some desperate attempt to muffle the reality-warping melody. Though the pain is immense, no blood escapes his canals; what would deafen others only debilitates him. The sounds settles within, reshaping his ear drums with savage efficiency. What was once an indiscernible screech becomes a siren’s call for his soul, && Anakin finds himself on his knees before her. 

               The crown of thorns she crafts around his heavy head glows with inverted starlight, a rightness he has never known scratching at his bones. Prophet, destruction, a shepherd for a new age in her name. A name that splits his tongue down the middle until he can pronounce it in her mother language. The forked end escapes his teeth, horror spiraling in his eyes as he watches himself be remade in her image. His scream filters through several planes of existence, the inhuman aspect of his DNA singing as it is finally given free reign. 

     ❝ N— no… ❞ A protest, his voice sinking into atonality. A metallic tinge already twisting into his words. Anakin claws at the roving marble beneath his feet, his reflection crackling in the lacquered flooring like firewood. Bringing himself to his feet is nigh impossible, && it’s only when he stands straight again that his spine seems to give out. CRACK. Spikes climb out along his back, the sharp points tearing his robes. Malignant code dyes the tips a shining black, darker than the empty places between planets. 

     ❝ S-s-stop… Hurts… ❞ Teeth grit together hard enough to clap them clean out of his skull, the shattered remnants spit at her feet in bloody gobs. Fangs spear out from his gums in their place, tears welling up in Anakin’s eyes. ❝ P-please… ❞ He has not begged for mercy since he was a child, since he was under the hand of slave master. 

               But even in the midst of all this agony there is some unspoken part of him that thrives, the Force born son finally unbound from his mortal coil. Incandescent, deconstructed && built back up again to be so much more. She invades every inch of his flesh, growing off of it like a fungus.

jedicoded.

                                                      ^{IT WAS A HORRIBLE PLACE  for any sort of recovery - the atmosphere hardly lent itself to a peaceful state of mind … but even if they were in the Halls of Healing within the Jedi Temple itself   ( even the thought of that place he’d called home for so long sends a shiver of pain down his spine - he longs to return, he knows he never will )   he doubts that Anakin could find peace. He doubts that he, himself, could find peace. There has been too much damage done. Irreparable damage.} 

     ^{Oh, my brother, what have you done? To yourself? To us? To the galaxy?}

     ^{He watches as the boy he’d trained   ( no, raised )   writhes under the grip of the Force - he watches as Anakin spits out his vitriolic hatred & is consumed by crippling grief. But his heart has been broken so many times that it cannot break again. He simply sighs, leans back on his heels, & waits for the storm to pass.} 

     ^{It’s your fault she’s dead!   he says, & Obi-Wan nods. It is his fault, in a way. While he cannot be held responsible for Anakin’s choices, he can be held responsible for Anakin – if he had been a better teacher, who knows what might have come to pass? But regardless, he takes a small comfort in the fact that Padmé, while hurt & recovering, is not dead   ( but Anakin must never know - I cannot tell him, & perhaps this is the cruelest thing I must do, but it is necessary ).} 

     ^{Anakin’s sobs of fury muffle his words, making them nearly intelligible. Obi-Wan knows that now he will be able to change the bandages with less of a fight. He moves forward & begins, calloused hands acting with a gentleness he wishes he did not have.}

                BENEATH HIS UNRIGHTEOUS, blistering anger, there is only exhaustion. How long can he fight the inevitable? He is at Obi-Wan’s mercy, absolutely. Frustration strikes from all the erratic crisscrossing paths of reality. Even if he could fight the other man off, would he really want to? Some part of him longs for human contact, for the reassurance that there is someone, anyone in the galaxy, that will tend his wounds at his worst. He’s done nothing to deserve any ounce of kindness the older man offers him. 

     ❝ You should have killed me. ❞ He repeats, voice scratching into a whisper even as he collapses into the familiar touch. Despair travels through him, pushes aside everything else in his heart, pouring up through the vents. His own body is treacherous territory, rooted with evil, the kind that might collapse beneath him at any given moment. 

               Anakin knows every kind of death now, like the ones that don’t end in funerals, or decay, or the savage awe of a supernova. Some deaths you find in yourself. You carry them inside you, nursing a graveyard, until the ghosts seem like the only thing that’s real. 

              Bandages unspool, the sour smell of charred flesh rising from cauterized stumps. Anakin looks away, his stomach heaving. Numbness prickles at his skin, but he’s unable to achieve the leaden degree of separation that would boost his awareness outside of his body. So he endures with the stoicism learned by frequently experiencing pain.