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The sky above the Jedi Temple is burning.
Anakin doesn’t remember when it began—only that the red glow on the horizon is no longer just the setting sun. Something ruptured in the Force hours ago, a deep and resonant cracking, as though the galaxy split its own spine. He has been fighting ever since.
His hands are shaking.
Not from fear, not from exhaustion, even though both have long since become constant companions—but from grief . From knowing . From not knowing enough .
Cin Drallig’s body is still warm beneath the collapsed pillar.
Anakin had arrived too late. He always arrives too late.
A line of smoke curls up from the training halls, acrid, burning, and unholy. Somewhere, children scream.
His saber hisses to life again. Blue light. Righteous light. He won’t let it go out. He can’t.
They came in uniforms bearing the crest of the Republic. Their orders were clear: eliminate all Jedi. No warning. No explanation. No mercy. Commander Appo didn’t hesitate when he raised his blaster to Anakin’s chest. And Anakin didn’t hesitate either.
He doesn’t feel guilty for what he did to the clones. That’s what terrifies him.
His boots are slick with blood—he doesn’t look down to see if it’s his. He presses forward, deeper into the Temple. The bodies of Padawans lie scattered in the shadows. His throat closes. He’s dragging in smoke instead of air.
The Force is screaming, and it screams in a voice he knows:
Obi-Wan.
He doesn’t know where his Master is. Doesn’t know if he’s alive. Doesn’t know if this was a trap from the start, if the entire war was just a theater piece with Jedi as its final casualties. He only knows that he’s alone. That he is trying to hold the Temple together with blistered hands and a heart fraying at the edges.
He reaches the communication tower. Static whines. He tries the emergency channel.
Nothing.
He tries again.
“Master. This is Anakin. I’m in the Temple. The clones have turned. It’s—something’s wrong. It’s—it’s not just a breach. It’s genocide. I’m holding the main floor. There are survivors, I think, hiding in the lower levels. We need you. I—I need you.”
His voice breaks on the last word.
He doesn’t say I’m scared . He doesn’t say they made it look like me . He doesn’t say please believe me .
He doesn’t have to. Obi-Wan will hear it anyway.
He ends the transmission.
There is soot in his hair. Blood beneath his fingernails. His saber hilt shakes in his grip as he limps down the corridor. The High Council chamber doors are broken. The windows shattered. Wind howls through the jagged glass and makes the firelight dance like ghosts.
He steps inside. Kneels, because that’s what he was taught. Even now.
He bows his head.
“I am still a Jedi,” he whispers. “I swear it.”
The Force doesn’t answer.
But for the first time all night, it doesn’t scream, either.
***
He wakes to the sound of wind.
High-altitude wind, too clean to be real. It brushes against the mountains outside, rippling through the tall glass windows of a palace too quiet to be alive. The sheets under his body are soft. He doesn't remember lying down.
He tries to move.
Pain greets him like an old enemy.
His throat tightens before he can speak, and his chest burns—not from smoke, though there was plenty of that—but from something deeper. Something buried beneath ash and blood.
There is a hum of equipment nearby. Medical tech. A presence in the room, calm but alert. Not Obi-Wan.
He opens his eyes. Or eye. The other refuses.
The face that greets him is not one he knows intimately, but he knows of her. Queen Breha of Alderaan. She is seated, hands clasped, posture perfect. The weight of a crown sits invisibly on her shoulders.
“You’re awake,” she says, voice low and even. Not unkind.
He tries again to sit up. Fails. His fingers twitch against the bandages wrapped around his torso.
“Where—”
“Alderaan,” she answers before he can finish. “You’ve been unconscious for three days.”
Three days.
The Temple burned for three days.
He stares at the ceiling. A crack runs through the plaster. A flaw in perfection.
She watches him for a moment. Then adds, “You were badly injured. Blaster fire. A fall. Your body is…fighting. You should not be alive.”
He swallows. His tongue feels like sandpaper. “Obi-Wan Kenobi?”
Silence.
Breha’s gaze flickers. Not evasive. Just…helpless.
“I don’t know,” she says.
Something frays in him. The light he’s been clutching flickers in his chest. Not extinguished—but desperate. Obi-Wan isn’t dead. He knows that. He would know.
“Where is Senator Organa?” His voice is hoarse, but urgent.
“Back on Coruscant,” Breha says. Her tone hardens, just slightly. “He carried you from the Temple ruins himself. You were nearly lost. He handed you to our pilot and went straight to the Senate.”
Anakin closes his eyes.
He doesn’t ask what the vote was. He already knows.
The Republic is gone.
Palpatine has what he wants. Power wrapped in procedure. A crown forged in votes and fear and smoke.
And Obi-Wan—
Obi-Wan is somewhere.
He’s not in the Force—not like Yoda is, not like Mace Windu is, not like the others. There’s still a thread. Weak. Pulled taut across the stars. But there.
Anakin clenches his jaw.
“I need to find him,” he whispers.
“You need to heal,” Breha says gently, but there is steel in it too. “You stood between death and the children in that Temple. You will not throw your life away now.”
He turns his face toward the window. The sky is cruelly blue.
“I can’t feel him clearly anymore,” he murmurs. “But I know he’s not dead.”
Breha rises.
“I believe you,” she says, without needing to.
***
“I need to see it,” Anakin says, voice low but unrelenting. “Show me.”
Breha Organa regards him the way a cliffside might regard the tide—immovable, but weathered by years of knowing that insistence, when it comes, is never without cause.
“Can you stand?” she asks, not unkindly.
“I have to.”
Something about the way he says it makes her relent. She rises, moves to the wardrobe at the corner of the chamber. The robe she retrieves is long, royal blue, heavy with Alderaanian embroidery—but it was clearly meant for comfort, not ceremony.
She hands it to him without comment.
It takes longer than he expects to put it on. His fingers fumble over the fabric. His shoulder protests violently when he lifts his arm. The inner lining brushes against the bacta-drenched bandages wrapped around his ribs, and he grimaces, breath sharp.
The robe falls open slightly at the chest. Pale, bruised skin. Cauterized wounds. Scars beginning to form like fault lines across a body pushed too far for too long.
Breha doesn’t look away. She helps him stand, encourages to lean on her.
She leads him through the quiet halls of the palace, past tall glass archways and flowering vines that seem grotesque now, too alive for a world where so much has died. The staff make themselves invisible. Eyes cast downward. Not in shame. In respect.
The observatory is empty.
There’s a single, embedded holoprojector in the middle of the room, surrounded by floor-length windows overlooking the ice-ringed mountains. Light filters in cruelly.
Breha steps forward and activates the feed.
The room fills with sound.
“…still at large following the cowardly and coordinated assault on the Senate and Temple complex. Thousands of clone troopers lost their lives responding to the Jedi uprising, with many of our Republic’s youngest heroes cut down while defending our democracy…”
An image flickers into being.
Anakin’s face.
Blood on his jaw. A slash of soot across one cheek. Blue lightsaber raised mid-swing—his expression twisted in some unrecognizable snarl. The image freezes for dramatic emphasis. He looks feral. He looks wrong.
Anakin stares.
Breha watches him, lips pressed into a tight line. “They’ve been running this for two days.”
“…Skywalker is believed to have manipulated Temple security and communications to lure additional Jedi to attack His Imperial Majesty. When the assault failed, he fled, abandoning the others to their fate. His current whereabouts are unknown. If you have information, contact the Imperial—”
Anakin switches it off. He doesn’t speak for a long time. Just stands there, shoulders drawn taut beneath the robe, the blue folds hiding the worst of the injuries but not the weight of them. His hair is a mess. His feet are bare. He looks like a ghost of himself.
“So that’s what I am now.”
“You’re not, ” Breha says sharply.
“But that’s what the galaxy believes.”
“Belief doesn’t make it true.”
He turns to her. There’s no fire in his eyes. No rage. Just clarity. Cold and hard as the peaks outside the window.
“I can’t stay here.”
Breha doesn’t answer right away. She doesn’t need to. The words are already written on her spine, in the set of her jaw.
“This palace is the safest place I can offer you,” she says. “But even that’s no longer certain. My husband is risking everything as it is. If they trace your rescue back to Alderaan—”
“They will,” Anakin says. “If not now, then soon.”
She exhales slowly, then: “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
He rests a hand on the edge of the holoprojector, as if steadying himself.
“But I’ll find him.”
Breha studies him. The broken Jedi. The boy who fought the impossible. The man who doesn’t know yet that survival isn’t failure. That hope is an act of war now.
“If anyone can,” she says quietly, “it’s you.”
***
As soon as he wants to leave, strength leaves him instead. The Queen allows him to stay until he recovers.
The palace is quiet again. Too quiet.
Anakin doesn’t sleep. He wanders instead—drifting through marble corridors and echoing halls like a stormcloud looking for a strike. Alderaan is too gentle, too still. The galaxy is burning and this world is merciful . It makes him sick.
He finds the archive room at dawn. Or close to it. Light is just beginning to edge along the mountaintops outside.
Breha let him in here days ago. A soft permission he never acted on. Until now.
The Jedi holoprojector he recovered from his robes—singed, cracked, but still functional—sits in his lap. Obi-Wan gave it to him years ago. Told him to carry it always, in case the Temple’s signal ever failed. “The Order is in the records,” he said. “Not just the walls.”
Anakin’s thumb drags across the metal, slow. Maybe there will be updates tonight.
He activates it.
A flicker. Then static. Then a recovered message—timestamped two days after the attack.
“If this message reaches anyone—this is Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. To all remaining Jedi— do not return to Coruscant. The Temple has fallen. The clones are hunting us. This… this is not a war anymore. It’s a slaughter.”
Anakin missed him. He missed him.
Anakin’s breath hitches.
His heart is already galloping ahead of the transmission. That voice— his voice —it’s alive. It’s strong. The same cadence Anakin’s heard in battle, in council meetings, murmured in his ear when nightmares chased him from sleep.
“I will attempt to reach Master Yoda on Kashyyyk. If I don’t make it—if I fall—know that Skywalker fought for us. He defended the Temple. He tried.”
The projector goes dark.
***
It takes a week to reach Kashyyyk. Maybe more. Anakin doesn’t track time anymore. Just hyperspace jumps and silence.
The stolen ship rattles when it descends through the planet’s cloud cover, but he doesn’t flinch. The Wookiee signal beacon responds.
He lands in a clearing near the Shadowlands’ edge—where light barely touches the forest floor and the trees are older than the Republic itself.
They’re waiting for him.
Three Wookiees, broad-shouldered and solemn, draped in ceremonial armor woven with beads and moss. Their fur glints silver-green in the filtered sun. They do not bow. They do not raise weapons. They understand who he is.
They heard what the Empire says. But they also know who stood beside Yoda. Who defended the Temple. Who fought like a wildfire that refused to burn anything but injustice.
They had a Jedi’s commlink.
Anakin descends the ramp, slower than usual. His wounds are mostly healed now, but some don’t fade with bacta.
The Wookiee leader—Elder Rruurrhr—steps forward. He places one heavy paw over his chest. A gesture of mourning.
Anakin’s mouth is dry. “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he says. “I’m looking for him.”
Rruurrhr grunts low and sorrowful. He beckons.
They lead him deep into the trees.
The Temple they reach is not stone, not metal. It is a tree . A vast, hollowed giant, branches curved like ribs around a silent heart. Vines hang like tapestries. Bioluminescent blossoms pulse faintly at its base. The Tree of Memory.
Rruurrhr speaks in Wookiee, low and resonant.
“Master Kenobi came to us. He was injured. Deep wounds. The healer said he—he knew he was dying.”
Anakin closes his eyes.
“He asked for quiet. To… pass into the Force without violence. He said he was tired.”
The wind rustles the branches above. It sounds like breathing.
“We built him a resting place at the heart of the tree. With the others. Jedi and Wookiee alike. He asked for no grave. Only memory.”
Anakin doesn’t move.
His hands are shaking, but he clenches them into fists until the tremor becomes pain. Pain is easier.
“He left this for you. Said you might come.”
Rruurrhr steps forward again. In his massive hands: a satchel. Inside is Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.
It’s scorched. The hilt cracked slightly. But whole.
Anakin takes it.
Anakin takes it with the reverence of a priest handling a relic.
He doesn’t speak for a long time.
When he does, his voice is raw.
“Did he say anything else?”
“That you wouldn’t stop looking.”
***
The roots twist inward like fingers curled around breath.
Anakin follows them down into the hollow. No guards. No flames. No monuments. Just the hush of ancient bark, the scent of moss and time, and the faint sound of something growing in the quiet.
The Wookiees have left him alone.
Obi-Wan's saber hangs heavy at his belt, a weight that shouldn’t be foreign but feels wrong anyway. Not his. Never his. Sacred.
At the center of the chamber is a raised platform woven from root and stone. Not a grave—just a resting place. A nest made of memory.
Anakin kneels.
He doesn’t know what to say.
His hand presses to the wood.
“Obi-Wan.”
The name tastes like blood and rain.
He bows his head, presses his forehead to the roots. The bark is warm. Alive. Like it remembers him.
“I came as soon as I could. I—”
His voice shatters. He doesn’t look up.
He stays like that for a long time. Eyes shut. Fists curled. Forehead pressed to the ground like a penitent knight or a dying man.And then something shifts.
A whisper in the Force.
Not a voice. Not a vision.
Just an image. A flicker of heat and light and balance.
A white spire. A twin eclipse. A planet that doesn’t exist on any chart. A place where the Force breathes with its own lungs.
Anakin lifts his head.He brushes his fingers against the roots once more—so gently now, like a farewell kiss.
“I don’t care if I have to tear through myth and fire and gods. I’ll bring you back.”
He turns toward the exit, Obi-Wan’s saber at his hip, the Force swirling around him again for the first time in days.
The silence behind him doesn't break.
But somehow, it feels less empty.
***
No hyperspace lane. No map. Only fragments—half-coded verses buried in the Jedi Archives. An untranslatable glyph carved into a ruined holocron. The name Mortis mentioned once in a journal left behind by an old Jedi Seeker, long since declared mad.
And still Anakin finds it.
Because he must.
The coordinates lead to a dying system at the edge of nothing. A collapsed star. A ring of shattered moons. Nothing stable. Nothing safe.
He drops out of hyperspace in a craft barely holding together, hull patched and scarred.
There is a planet below. It shouldn’t be.
A white orb. Featureless from orbit. No atmosphere readings. No gravity fluctuation. No logic.
And yet— he feels it.
Not the way he feels normal planets. Not with the Force as his guide.
He feels it like a shiver up the spine of the soul.
Like the moment before a dream turns real.
He closes his eyes.
There. Faint. Like the beat of a heart buried under stone.
Obi-Wan’s presence. Muted. Faint. But not gone.
“Hold on,” he murmurs, to no one. To him . “Just a little longer.”
He sets the ship to manual descent.
The moment he breaches the atmosphere, everything goes wrong.
The ship screams. Metal groans. Gravity shifts mid-fall, then shifts again. Clouds churn in impossible patterns. Light bends sideways.
A second sun rises backward across the sky.
The ship crashes.
***
When he wakes, he’s lying on moss that glows faintly beneath his body. His ship is gone. Disintegrated or absorbed or never existed here at all. He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t care.
There is a white spire on the horizon. Towering. Ancient. It pulses like a beacon in his mind.
He begins to walk.
Time bends here. The ground shifts beneath his boots like memory. Once, he sees a flash of his old lightsaber—the one he built as a boy—half-buried in the dirt. When he blinks, it’s gone.
He walks until the sky changes color.
Until the Force begins to speak.
A cradle of stars. A voice whispering balance . A flicker of Obi-Wan, back turned, standing before an altar of light.
He runs.
The White Spire looms closer. Doorless. Seamless.
And then—it opens.
***
The door seals behind him with no sound.
Inside, the Spire is impossibly vast. It stretches in directions that don't exist, built of pillars carved from starlight. Every breath Anakin takes feels like it echoes across a thousand timelines.
At the center of the chamber: a throne.
And on it sits someone he vaguely remembers. Not young. Not old. Not anything Anakin can name. He is made of stillness. Of time that chooses to stop moving. His face is neither kind nor cruel.
He regards Anakin without blinking.
“You have come,” the Father says. His voice is inside Anakin’s skull. “The boy who defended the light.”
Anakin steps forward. His voice is steady. “I want him back.”
“You cannot command life to reverse,” the Father says. “Even the Chosen One cannot tear breath from the jaws of death.”
“I don’t want to tear,” Anakin says. “I want to give.”
The Spire shifts. The light dims. Something rustles behind the veil of reality.
“You would give what?”
“My heart,” Anakin says. “Split it. Take half. Give it to him. Bind us.”
A pause.
“You offer your heart,” the Father says. Anakin nods.
“If I must live,” he says, “let it be with him. If he must return, let it be through me.”
“You would become one flesh, one will, one breath?”
“Yes.”
“Even if it means never truly being separate again?”
Anakin steps closer to the throne. “We never were.”
The chamber dissolves around him, replaced by—
****
He stands in the Jedi Temple.
But everything is wrong.
The sky outside is fire. The clones are marching. The alarm is screaming.
Obi-Wan is there, backlit by flames, lightsaber ignited. His expression is anguish.
“Anakin, please,” he says. “Don’t do this.”
“I’m not,” Anakin whispers.
But he looks down—
—and his hands are bloody .
The younglings are behind him. Slain.
He looks up, panicked—and Obi-Wan steps back.
“Don’t leave me,” Anakin begs.
“I didn’t,” Obi-Wan says, but he’s fading, fading—
“I didn’t— !”
Anakin reaches out—
***
He’s on his knees in the Spire again, heart pounding like a drum of war.
The Father watches.
“What was that?”
“If you give him your heart, there will be no return to solitude. He will breathe with your lungs. You will dream with his soul. You will live one life. One end.”
Anakin rises.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Is it? You often act without thinking, you spiral into anger without meaning - will you doom Obi-Wan Kenobi to the same fate?”
Behind the Father, a doorway opens. Not a door, exactly—just light, curved like a crescent moon. It hums with presence.
***
There is no door.
There is only light —not warm, not cold, but absolute. It spills like smoke, like silk, like the memory of sunlight on stone.
When Anakin crosses the threshold, the Force does not greet him with trumpets. It does not roar or shake.
It breathes.
And Anakin breathes with it.
He walks through a corridor that isn’t a corridor at all—just endless, glowing mist. Soundless. Scentless. And yet filled with the unmistakable sense of presence . A thousand echoes crowd around him. Lives that once were. Fragments of laughter. The scent of Temple stone after a storm. A child’s hand pressed into his palm.
At first, it’s only a silhouette. A figure sitting beneath a tree that shouldn’t exist—twisted and gold-leaved, rooted in starlight. His back is turned, legs drawn up, arms loosely resting on his knees. He looks peaceful.
But it’s the kind of peace that knows nothing but surrender.
The closer he gets, the more details sharpen into unbearable familiarity—the slope of his shoulders. The tilt of his head. The way his hand curls when resting. His stillness .
Obi-Wan.
His robes ripple faintly, but there is no wind.
Anakin stops a few paces away. The space between them is cavernous. Sacred.
He doesn’t speak yet. He doesn’t trust his voice.
Obi-Wan turns his head—just slightly, just enough for his profile to catch the glow—and frowns, gently, as if waking from a dream that’s clung too tightly.
“Anakin?”
The sound of his name, from that voice , cleaves him open.
Anakin exhales like he’s been holding his breath since the Temple burned.
“You’re here,” Obi-Wan says softly, uncertain. “But you’re not dead.”
“No,” Anakin says, barely above a whisper. “Not yet.”
Obi-Wan turns fully now. He looks... younger, somehow. Unburdened by the war, untouched by exile. But the grief in his eyes is timeless.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.
“I had to find you.”
Obi-Wan studies him for a long moment. Something in his expression flickers—hope, fear, longing. But it’s buried fast.
“You came all this way,” he says, quietly, “for a ghost.”
Anakin steps forward.
“I didn’t come for a ghost,” he says. “I came for you. ”
Obi-Wan shakes his head, weary. “Anakin, you don’t understand—”
“I do. ”
He kneels.
Not out of reverence. Not out of tradition.
Out of love.
“I stood in the Temple, covered in blood and fire, and I felt you leave. Not the way a Jedi feels death. Not like the others. I felt you like a tether snapping. Like someone pulled the sun out of the sky.”
Obi-Wan’s mouth trembles.
Anakin presses his hand to the glowing ground.
“They call me the Chosen One. They say I’m meant to bring balance. But what is balance without you? What is peace without your voice in it?”
Obi-Wan’s voice is thin. “You don’t need me anymore.”
“Yes, I do,” Anakin says, fierce now . “It’s all … gone. Everything’s gone - you can’t be gone too!”
His voice cracks.
“I need you. ”
The tree above them hums faintly, its leaves rustling like whispered truths.
Anakin swallows.
“I would share my heart with you. Half mine. Half yours. One breath. One life.”
Obi-Wan’s eyes shimmer. He looks down at his hands. “You would carry me?”
“No,” Anakin says, stepping closer now, voice steady. “I would live with you. Not beside you. With you.”
Obi-Wan’s composure shatters like glass under heat.
“You idiot,” he says, voice breaking. “You stupid, impossible man.”
Anakin laughs, sharp and wet with grief. “You’re not real until you insult me.”
And Obi-Wan—beautiful, burning, real —crosses the final space between them and presses his forehead to Anakin’s, his hands trembling as they rise to touch his cheeks.
“You would do all this,” he breathes, “just to give me half your heart?”
“No,” Anakin murmurs. “To give you the whole thing. ”
The tree bursts into light.
The wound in the Force starts to heal.