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Maul slammed his hands palm down on the holoprojector table. “What do you mean ‘application denied’?”
The diminutive hologram of the Muun agent blinked at him. “Exactly what I said—” the Muun checked the screen of the console in front of him, “Maul. I’m afraid we can’t offer a loan to someone with your credit score.”
“Why would I have a credit score?”
“ Exactly the issue.”
“This is ridiculous! You financed Black Sun! Ziton told me so!”
“Ziton Moj?” said the Muun. “That was a decade ago. He also had his grandfather co-sign on it.” The Muun shook his enormous cranium. “Besides, the IBC cannot be handing out credits to every life form who walks through our doors. Not in this economy.”
“How about this?” said Maul. “You will give me the credits I require, or I will hunt you down, and you will wish you had given me the loan.”
The Muun looked unmoved. “ I assure you, plenty of mercenaries just like you have made threats to the same effect. No doubt if you tried hard enough you could kill me, or other members of the Banking Clan. Your reputation precedes you after all. But you are not a stable investment, and you will not see a single credit.”
“What grounds do you have to deny me?”
“You have provided essentially no collateral whatsoever,” said the Muun flatly. “ Our organization has worked with...unusual clients before, but you offered nothing substantive.”
“I—” Maul couldn’t exactly argue with that statement. Bumping up against Sidious’s Empire had left Crimson Dawn—all the remains of the Shadow Collective really—scrambling for scraps as the new power base exerted itself. Opportunities for resources had dried up, and many of the mercenaries were left peddling their services to various warlords. But most warlords were too wary to confront Imperial forces directly, and tended to prefer their own when it came to protection, so the cash flow had been rather more of a trickle of late. “I have starships I can use as collateral. I included them on the application.”
“Our actuary professionals evaluated them and concluded they would not be worth a third of what you are asking.” The Muun’s expression turned a shade exasperated. “ You don’t even have a last name or other markers of identity. Two-thirds of the application fields were blank.”
“I have no need of such frivolities.”
The Muun’s left brow ridge rose. “ Such frivolities are how we track credit ratings, and our investments.”
“I...may have prison records?”
“And you suppose those would convince the IBC to consider you a sound investment?”
“I have upcoming prospects,” said Maul, hoping he didn’t sound as desperate as he felt. “Planets my organization has been scoping out for raw resources.”
The Muun shook his head. “Prospects are not solid enough with the market so tenuous. The answer is no. Good day.”
The holoprojector disconnected, and only the thought of how much repairs would cost kept Maul from putting his fist through the table.
A standard week later, Maul found himself tasked—by himself—to conduct a thorough audit of his cache of assets on Dathomir, on the grounds there had to be a combination of items of sufficient value, among the hodgepodge of Imperial leftovers he’d ended up trawling in the wake of Sidious’s relentless march across the galaxy, to convince the IBC to grant him a loan. Or to sell to some junk dealers in exchange for currency.
In any other circumstance, Maul would have not even considered such undignified hawking, but the hard truth was that armies, even mercenary ones, did not subsist on blood alone. While it was true that the majority of Maul’s fighters feared him too greatly to openly leave his ranks, this did not mean they didn’t do so covertly, and Crimson Dawn’s greatly reduced income meant that all of them were seeing massive wage cuts. Even taking into account the opportunities for looting that constituted the standard underling benefits package, many of them had read the writing on the wall, and were making a break for greener pastures. Maul needed payroll, and he needed it yesterday.
Maul absently shunted a crate of expired death sticks across the storage cave that doubled as his quarters with a wave of his hand. The object slid across the floor and collided with another, nondescript metal crate, a more recent acquisition from a transport that had been headed for Coruscant before encountering unavoidable delays in the form of Maul’s soldiers. The impact was not particularly noisome, but as it occurred, something—for lack of a better term— clanged in the Force, buzzing inside Maul’s head. He did not do anything so weakly pedestrian as flinch, but he snapped his head round, seeking the source of the disturbance.
Nothing, the cave appeared empty.
Frowning, he walked over and inspected the crate, looking it over with suspicion, though any explosive device surely should have been triggered months ago. The origin and destination information was displayed on a narrow, glowing strip on the crate’s surface.
It had originated on Muunilinst.
Interested despite himself, Maul triggered the latch on the crate, and lifted the lid.
Rugs. Piles of them. Colorful, woven floor rugs stacked close to the brim of the crate. While he had only begun engaging in such activities recently, Maul understood the concept of decorating one’s living space with items. And now that Sidious only rarely came within torching range of his possessions, he’d even begun to value objects other than weapons or ships. Such as the painting of the former Duchess of Mandalore. While it could be considered a weakness, he preferred to think of such possessions as relics, trophies to remind himself of the truly important things.
Like his quest for vengeance against Kenobi. Who was dead. Or his apprentice, Savage. Who was also dead. Or his rule of Mandalore. Which had ended in abject failure.
Maul tried to remember what precisely he had been thinking when he put up the painting, and found only a black hole that felt like one of Sidious’s lessons.
Slamming down on any of the associated thoughts which came with this concept, Maul lifted some of the rugs out and began to sift through the crate’s contents. They looked decently valuable, as if they’d been taken from a wealthy household. He recognized some of the patterns from similar accoutrements he’d seen in Sidious’s apartments on Coruscant, now decades ago. Maul wondered if some of the Outer Rim warlords might enjoy carpeting their lairs with them. Or maybe the Muuns considered them valuable, since they’d come from Muunilinst.
As he pulled out a small carpet of pale green, patterned with red and black diamonds, something fell to the floor with a clunk.
It was an angular, strangely shaped object, that appeared to be made of carven black stone. Maul put the carpet aside and crouched to pick it up.
At first look, he couldn’t quite tell what it was supposed to represent, if anything. The geometry was quite bizarre, angles upon curious angles, and marked with unreadable hieroglyphs. He turned it over, seeking an artist’s or manufacturer’s mark, but found nothing.
Then out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a hooded figure.
Maul had his lightsaber out and through the figure’s chest before he’d completely registered its presence. The red beam sliced through the figure’s midsection even as the stone tumbled to the floor.
It was then that he registered the figure was gone. Vanished as if it had never been. He scanned the cave, saberstaff held before him, half-ignited, and saw nothing.
Had it been a vision?
Was he losing his mind?
A disturbing thought. He knew his time on Lotho Minor had...fractured something in him, something that was not rebuilt so easily as metal muscle and bone.
And now he was alone again, on the planet that would have been his homeworld, in another life, another thread of destiny. Accumulating junk and painting the walls of his solitary cave as he listened to the Dathomirian wind howl through the canyons.
Maul wondered—not for the first time—if he should look into getting a pet.
Once he’d satisfied himself that there was no one present, Maul extinguished his saber, and picked up the stone. He kept his eyes trained on his surroundings as he did so.
Nothing. He breathed a faint sigh of relief.
I have to say. Of all possible intruders, I truly did not expect you.
Maul spun on his heel, saber ignited. There! The hooded figure, standing on the opposite side of the cave. He loathed the way his stomach lurched at the outline.
It was then he registered that the figure was not Sidious.
They were entirely too tall for one thing. Well over Savage’s height if he had to estimate. And while they wore a set of very familiar dark robes, their silhouette was far from human. They were skeletal thin, and from the ends of their sleeves poked pale, arachnodactylic fingers. Their voice—despite its insubstantial tone—was strangely metallic, as if they were speaking through an enunciator.
“Identify yourself,” said Maul. “Or I gut you.”
The figure didn’t move. Not very polite of you, Maul. Though I suppose it was a mistake to assume that Sidious would have taught you better manners.
Maul stiffened. “How do you know me?”
I have known you for years.
“I’ve never met you.”
No , said the figure, as if to itself. No you haven’t.
“What are you? You’re not a life form.”
Correct , said the figure. I am an...echo, I suppose you could say. Trapped within the object you hold.
“Trapped by whom?”
By our mutual friend.
“Sidious.”
The very same.
Maul considered the figure. Always Two, no more, no less. “You were Sidious’s Master.”
I was. I might have been yours as well, but...circumstances intervened.
Maul frowned. “That makes no sense. There are never more than Two.”
Not always. But strictly speaking, yes, there was only one Master, and one Apprentice.
Disquiet pricked him. “I don’t understand.”
The proposal, when Sidious brought you into the fold as an infant, was that you were to be trained as an assassin. The figure regarded him. Not an Apprentice.
Ice rushed down Maul’s spine. “You lie.”
What reason have the dead to lie? Sidious may have been your Master, but you were never his Apprentice.
Maul couldn’t breathe. Something tight was squeezing his chest, as if Sidious himself were closing off Maul's throat. His mind flickered to the images he’d seen, Imperial advertisements, the hulking shadow now leashed at his former Master’s side.
You were right. That perpetual knowledge in the deepest core of you. That you were never more than a placeholder. For someone better. Someone stronger.
Dimly, Maul was aware that his breaths were coming in fierce gasps. The figure watched him, motionless.
Maul squeezed his fist around the stone and wondered if he might shatter it. Might vanish the apparition where it stood.
“What do you want from me?”
The figure cocked its head. Want? What do the dead want of the living?
“Revenge? Remembrance?”
Perhaps. But I had not planned for either. That you do not know me says that Sidious kept my existence a secret even after my death.
“And when did you die?”
The day before Sidious rose to power in the Senate.
A flare of remembered agony. Just before I fell on Naboo. He speaks the truth. I was never an Apprentice.
“What is your name?” said Maul, hollowly.
The figure lifted the edge of their hood, revealing a bare, domed cranium, and an elongated face, their nose, mouth and chin capped with a transpirator, two trailing lines running from the breath mask to vanish amid the ghostly folds of their robes.
My true name, said the Muun. Was Darth Plagueis.
After the soul-shattering revelation that his entire life had been even more of a lie than Maul had originally concluded decades ago, it felt entirely too pedestrian to go and eat breakfast.
Maul had assumed that Plagueis would disappear at some point, but when he entered the cave he’d decided to call his own, he found Plagueis’s image waiting, examining the decor with polite disinterest. Maul left the stone tucked into his pocket, but ignored Plagueis as he rummaged among his possessions for a ration bar and a container of water. He opened the water and drained it.
I am surprised you would have returned to Dathomir , commented Plagueis. Though I suppose the place reeks of death, so it hardly matters.
Maul bared his teeth. “Watch your tongue.”
You disagree?
“This is my homeworld. Show some respect.”
Plagueis gave him an arch look from the shadows of his hood. Respect for a homeworld which would have murdered you?
“If you speak of tradition , my mother would not have permitted my execution. And besides, how is it any better that your Apprentice ripped me from my mother’s arms as a babe and stole me away?”
Plagueis’s head tilted. Is that what Sidious told you?
“He didn’t need to. My mother did.”
Your mother?
“Mother Talzin.”
Plagueis shook his head. A Nightsister, yes. But Mother Talzin was not your mother.
Maul threw the empty water container at him. “Silence!”
Plagueis watched the container bounce harmlessly to the ground. I am simply confused. Sidious indicated that he took you on at your mother’s behest.
“Sidious lies.”
He does, Plagueis agreed. But he also said that your mother sent you away to protect you. You were a twin, and only one would have been reared as a Nightbrother. The other would have been killed. Is that the story he told you?
“I—no,” Maul’s brow wrinkled. “He told me I’d been sold to him as a child.”
Sidious does love the many versions of reality he constructs, said Plagueis, after a moment. Perhaps it does not matter.
Maul sat on the cave floor and bit into his ration bar. “Glad to see my childhood was of such little worth.”
On the contrary, said Plagueis softly. I’d venture to say our childhoods were valued too highly.
“I despise those who speak in riddles.”
Hmph.
“How long do you plan on plaguing me?”
That is up to you. You chose to pick up the stone.
Maul gulped down the rest of his ration and studied Plagueis. “You wouldn’t want to make yourself useful? Divulge the mysteries of the Dark Side? The afterlife?”
What is it you wish to know?
Maul sighed and pitched the wrapper in the direction of the waste crate. “As you say, perhaps it doesn’t matter any longer.”
Not necessarily. Plagueis clasped his spindly hands before him, fingers drumming noiselessly against his wrist. You have always been powerful, and disciplined, my understanding was all you lacked to be a true Sith Lord was training.
Maul stared at him, certain he’d misheard.
What if I agreed to train you?
“Train me?” The thought was both galling and surprisingly appealing. “How would a ghost train anyone?”
Plagueis spread his incorporeal palms. Am I not speaking to you? Do you not have ears?
“I suppose.” He hated the way the concept fed into a deep craving. He’d spent decades unable to articulate it, crushing it beneath expectations of Sith autonomy and isolation. He’d touched it briefly in the metal trap of Cog Hive Seven, but it hadn’t been until after Savage that he’d realized the true shape of it.
A craving for someone upon whom he could rely.
He shoved the thought away. “What would you have to teach me?”
Plagueis watched him for several moments in silence. You are strong in the Force, but I suspect that Sidious never taught you to tap into its deeper uses. We spent many years, he and I, experimenting with its manipulation. At minimum, I suspect I could teach you to fight more efficiently.
“I know how to fight.”
You know how to fight with a lightsaber.
“And without one, don’t patronize me.”
Did Sidious ever teach you to wield lightning?
Maul couldn’t stop a faint flinch. “Why does it matter?”
Lightning is not a crude instrument, said Plagueis. The use of the Force in such a way requires far more discipline and power than it appears. While I don’t deny the effectiveness of a saber, ultimately it is a crutch with which to channel the Force. A true Master does not require one.
“Well I’m not a true Master, am I?” snapped Maul.
The second the words were out of his mouth, his stomach lurched, hearts accelerating. He barely kept himself from cringing in anticipation.
Don’t cringe. Don’t flinch. That always makes it worse.
Plagueis leveled a superior look at him. Not with that attitude.
Maul didn’t know how to respond. He realized—as his muscles slowly unclenched—that he’d been expecting a blow. A blow from a ghost. Ridiculous expectation, and yet...
And yet Plagueis had not so much as made a violent motion towards him. Maul took several deep breaths, eyeing Plagueis warily. “You truly think you could teach me to conjure lightning?”
Of course. Provided you’ve the patience for it.
It was an appealing idea. Of having the kind of strength at his fingertips that he had spent so many years of his life cringing from, of learning true power, of finally not being afraid.
Maul wondered—not for the first time—if he should listen to some of his underlings' nervous mutterings and look into getting a therapist.
Then again, the prospect of barbecuing Sidious with Force lightning sounded fairly therapeutic.
“Very well,” said Maul. “How do we begin?”
Plagueis lifted his hooded head as if listening for something. Perhaps a practical demonstration. There is a storm forming, in the mountains southeast of here. We will start there.
And so, though it was nearing dusk, Maul found himself boarding a speeder and heading into the mountains at the behest of a ghost. The image of Plagueis vanished as he boarded it, but as he sped southeast across the desolate landscape, the occasional star winking into existence through the blanket of clouds, Maul heard his voice, insubstantial, seeming to come from everywhere at once.
This planet truly does exude Force energy to an astonishing degree. I would have liked to have studied it, had I the opportunity in life.
“The Sisters would have driven you out,” said Maul. His voice was stolen by the wind, but it seemed not to matter.
Oh undoubtedly. Or they would have tried. Still, the patterns of midichlorians here are unique. I can see them moving in great rivers along the fissures of the earth, along the spires of the temples and up into the mountains. Even along your tattoos.
“My what?”
Your tattoos. The markings of a Nightbrother are instilled with the use of Force magicks, and divert the flow of midichlorians along specific paths. Or did you never wonder why they are not disrupted by scarring?
“I suppose I didn’t consider it. They hardly mattered, except to make it more difficult to pass unnoticed, and now less than ever.”
True. I wonder how we might have brought you with us if Sidious and I had succeeded in our original plan. You would have caused quite a stir in Coruscant society.
For an instant Maul tried to picture it, wandering amongst the groups of beings he’d sometimes witnessed through binoculars in the plaza squares and floating parks that surrounded the Jedi temple. Navigating a party, like the one he’d seen in the window of a towering building during one of his silent, secret forays across the city to meet his master. Elegant beings of a hundred species, clad in a rainbow of colors, sampling decorative foodstuffs from trays and imbibing no doubt intoxicating drinks. He’d seen no end of life forms in that brief glimpse, even a couple of Jedi, their plain brown robes all the more distinct for the contrasting colors around them. He tried to imagine himself among them, his horned head uncovered, dressed in black, because it was impossible to picture anything else. Taking some of those strange, little food items off the trays. Meeting other beings, strangers, speaking to them. Meeting a Jedi, them looking on Maul all unknowing, in that glittering place.
Meeting Kenobi.
Maul beheaded this line of thinking. “It hardly matters now.”
He parked the speeder near a cluster of boulders. The brewing storm blanketed the summits of the mountains with billowing clouds. The rain had not yet begun to fall, but here and there a slight flash of hidden lightning threaded across the thunderhead. “What now?”
What else? Scale the summit.
Maul clambered up the rock pile with ease. When he achieved the apex, he stood and looked out across the peaks of the mountains and the cracks of the canyons.
The air felt tight and hot, ripe with the coming rain. Maul tipped his head back to survey the looming thunderhead.
Can you feel it? The gathering power?
“Yes.”
The clouds are a model of yourself. Concealing an insubstantial but powerful core. Call on the Force, match what you feel.
Maul did so. Dark side energies hummed under his skin, resonated in his prosthetics in a way that made his teeth ache.
You must know, to properly summon and use lightning, you must eventually take the energy within yourself. You must experience what it is to be on the receiving end of its power.
Maul couldn’t quite suppress his shudder. “I know it,” he said, the words bitten. “I know it well.”
Plagueis paused. You...know it well?
“Repeated application does tend to breed familiarity.”
Repeated—from Sidious?
“From who else?” Maul’s patience slipped. “If your concern is whether I can recall the experience of being struck with Force lightning, put it aside!”
Plagueis did not reply for several moments. Maul squirmed, the accumulated power like marching ants under his skin. “What is the next step?”
Channel the energy to your fingertips , said Plagueis, sounding as if he were trying to recapture a flow from which he had been interrupted. Concentrate the power—
A bolt of lightning struck the ground near Maul’s feet. He recoiled before he’d consciously registered the event, hearts pounding. The thunderhead growled threateningly above him.
You fear it .
“I fear nothing!”
Another bolt struck the ground, a blinding flash that left a smear of molten glass on sand when the afterimage had faded.
A lie. You do fear it. What did he do?
The remains of Maul’s gut lurched in sublimated panic. “That’s none of your business!”
A thorny hedge of lightning roiled above him.
You cannot control power that you fear. What did he do?
“Nothing that you haven’t, I’m sure!” A thread of lightning struck the ground and Maul didn’t even bother to hide the way he danced from its reach. “It was training, and all things are done in service of it! Failure is not tolerated and there are consequences which must be dealt!”
Plagueis was silent for what seemed like ages. Another bolt of lightning reached for Maul and he twisted from its path.
New lesson , Plagueis said.
Maul blinked, bewildered. “What?”
Allow the next bolt to strike you.
Maul’s innards twisted, torn between screaming refusal and the carven urge to obey to stay worse punishment. “I—”
Do it.
Maul shouted, or screamed something, he couldn’t afterwards remember what, and planted his feet as the next bolt streaked towards him.
In the space between the bare milliseconds before it hit him, he heard Plagueis’s voice, calm and controlled.
Catch it.
Maul flung out his hand.
It was difficult, in retrospect, to describe what happened next. The lightning struck his palm, like he was catching a speeder. Power slammed into him, as if he were an overloaded tanker, swelling under his skin as if it would tear him apart. He screamed defiance at it.
Now send it from you.
Maul twisted on instinct, bringing in his first palm and flinging out the other, a motion adapted from a defensive maneuver.
Lightning erupted from his hand, streaking into the sky and ripping into the clouds.
The sky opened, and it began to pour.
Maul stared, dimly aware that he was shaking violently.
Very good.
“Wh—what was that?”
Exactly what I said. You caught the lightning and sent it from you without harm.
“I...I don’t understand.”
The ability to properly make and wield Force lightning is the mark of a true Sith , said Plagueis. Not even a Jedi Master can produce more than a facsimile of such power. It is not an ability to be displayed in idleness . He paused. Or in service of corporal punishment .
Maul did flinch this time. Remembered crawling, dragging his beaten body, pathetically begging for mercy and not being granted it.
You would never be able to wield a weapon that you fear. This lesson is a tool to rise above that fear.
“Why would you do that?”
Plagueis said nothing for a long moment. Let us say for the present that this is not the first mess from Sidious I have needed to clean.
Faint steam was rising from Maul’s overheated skin as the rain pelted him. He felt weary, and aching, and above all confused. “What next?”
Go home.
“Go—what?”
Rest. Eat. I am tired of lessons for the day. Go home.
“I don’t understand.”
But Plagueis did not answer, and Maul eventually gave up and clambered down the cliffs to retrieve his speeder. The storm was sweeping northeast, and it seemed to follow him as he returned to the ruins of the Nightsister village and his base of operations.
Go home, Plagueis had said, but there was no real home to be found.
Nevertheless, Maul wiped himself down and changed into dry clothing. Ate a ration bar and drank some water. And despite the restless turn of his thoughts, wrapped himself in a blanket and found sleep, if not rest, among the graveyard of his possessions.
In the wake of the unseasonable storm, the arroyos around the village grew flush with vegetation practically overnight. Hundreds of plants raced to bloom, flower and seed before the land could once again dry and crack. On a hazy memory of a mention from Savage, Maul spent an early morning wandering the labyrinthine landforms in search of a certain fruiting bush, to supplement his rations.
Maul had only a passing knowledge of botany, obtained via some coursework on Orsis which had addressed the derivation and use of plant toxins for assassination, but he could discern leaves and flowers in a pinch, and the bush in question was quite distinctive.
The fruits themselves were mostly sour, with little sweetness and an intense bite that left a tingling mark on Maul’s palate, but they were also rich in nutrients. When he finally happened upon the thorny thicket, dense with small leaves and with a variety of oblong, blackish fruits dangling from the branches, he took the time to eat his fill before adding much of the remainder to a cloth bag.
Do you hunt here?
“Sometimes,” said Maul, glancing back over his shoulder at where Plagueis’s ethereal shadow stood, distorted slightly by Dathomir’s filtered sunlight. “But hunting means processing the kill, and larger game isn’t worth the time when I’m so rarely on-planet. Smaller animals, from time to time.”
I have not hunted since the days of Sidious’s apprenticeship. Let us see what prey the land will grant us.
Maul looked at Plagueis with faint surprise. “Now?”
Why not? Have you a weapon besides your saberstaff?
Maul tugged at the straps he’d slung around his torso. “I suppose I could fashion a sling.”
Acceptable. Seek the nearest trail.
Maul decided to humor him on the logic that fresh meat wouldn’t be undesirable, and set off northwards, scanning the landscape for tracks even as he unwound a strap and fashioned it into a loop which could be used to send a flat stone speeding towards its target. He didn’t strictly speaking need one, he was more than capable of hurling a rock with sufficient force and accuracy to bring down small game, but he enjoyed the skill required by the sling. As he made his way up a thin game trail, he pocketed a small handful of stones to be used as ammunition.
As he topped a rise, Maul spotted a hunched creature with elongate hind legs, easily four times the length of its body. It crouched among a patch of new vegetation, nibbling at the tender shoots. Without taking his eyes from it, Maul set his stone in his sling, and began to bring it to speed. At the top of his arc, he released.
The stone struck the creature at the back of the skull, sending it sprawling and limp amid the new growth. Maul descended the slope. The creature’s furry sides still rose and fell faintly, but it didn’t move as he approached. He squatted down to retrieve it, intending to break its neck.
Wait.
Maul paused, his fingers inches from the creature’s fur. “Why?”
Focus on the creature. Can you sense the movement of its midichlorians?
Another lesson then? Maul studied the weakening creature, then on instinct, reached and rested his fingers on its heaving side. He focused, but while he could feel the creature’s waning Force presence, it seemed no different than how he would sense any other lifeform. “What should I be sensing?”
The symbionts are loosest in their connection at the moment of death, but they are always present. It is not true visual data, but I perceive them as small pinpricks of light, which move in concert with the anatomical processes of the life form.
Maul frowned, then shut his eyes and attempted again. As he sharpened his focus on the creature, he saw it begin to coalesce; a miniature vortex of whirling lights.
“I see them.”
Do you see how they leave as the body dies?
“Yes.”
Call them back.
“What?”
Coax them, cajole them, bend them to your will. Just as you use the Force to lift an object or compel a being to comply, so too can the midichlorians be coerced into doing your bidding. Call them back.
But how? Maul could recapture the feel of how he used the Force for physical tasks with ease, but the idea of translating it into manipulation on what must surely be a cellular level was astronomical. He tried to picture corralling the fleeing midichlorians, demanding they return to their anchor.
It was shockingly difficult. The symbionts spiraled and slipped in his mental grip. He growled and bent his will to moving them.
Bit by agonizing bit, he forced the midichlorians back into the creature’s body. At last he was rewarded when the tide turned, and he felt something furry twitch against his palm.
Blinking, he opened his physical eyes just in time to see the creature twist from beneath his hand and take off into the distance like a shot. He stared after it, uncomprehending.
Do you see?
“I...I brought it back from the dead?”
From the brink, but yes, the wound was a lethal one. This was the type of manipulation of which I spent years in pursuit as Sidious plotted. Regeneration from grievous wounds. Resurrection of the dead. Life everlasting. All were alchemical skills sought by the ancient Sith. The Force is no trifling entity, but for those bold enough to bend it to their will, there are few limits to what they can accomplish.
Maul stared after the creature, strangely numb.
Resurrection of the dead. He thought of the way the light had drained from Savage’s eyes, and wondered if he was cursed to find every tool, every revelation, only once it was far too late to help him.
“How—” He hesitated to speak it, because for all that they were Sith it felt strangely vile to say it. “How long would one be able to bring a creature back? After the moment of death?”
Plagueis regarded him. Your face betrays you. You suffered a loss.
“My...my brother. Seven years ago.”
Your twin still lived?
“I—I don’t know. He called himself my brother, and I called him my apprentice. Sidious killed him.”
I see.
“Well?”
Plagueis shook his head. No. The midichlorians associated with the body would have long since fled. I have never tried something on one so long-dead, but it is unlikely that it would work. And the decomposition is likely too advanced.
“Likely,” said Maul. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears.
As he could think of nothing else, Maul took his sling and continued on until he found another animal, larger and lean, its scaled hide the same iron red of Dathomir’s soil.
This time, Plagueis said nothing as Maul slew it.
He slung the carcass over his shoulder, and checked the position of the sun through the morning haze. He traced the game trail back the way he had come, up and across the rocky and inhospitable terrain.
Wait.
“What now?”
Plagueis extended a skeletal, ghostly finger. The cactus, the one with the yellow and white flower.
Maul scrutinized the plant. “What about it?”
It contains a compound which can be used to enhance one’s connection to the Force.
“A drug, you mean.”
You should take it with you.
Maul frowned. “I have no need of chemical crutches. I cultivate my connection to the Force through willpower alone.”
Plagueis snorted, a sound like a stone caught in a ventilation system. If you believe it takes no willpower to survive such an experience, then you are a fool.
Maul scowled. “Why would I deliberately poison myself?”
For the same reason we all do. To peer beyond the veil and plumb the depths of the mysteries of the Force in a way no mere Jedi ever could.
Frustrated, Maul glared daggers at the tiny cactus, then caved and went to dig it up.
Back at his base of operations, he plated the plant in a shallow dish of sandy soil before going to skin and dress his kill. Plagueis said nothing as he moved around the cave, though he did remain visible, a secondary—if incorporeal presence—and a strange reminder of the existence and ironically solidity, of the outside world.
Maul wondered what level of madness he had reached that he found the company of a ghost at all comforting.
He skinned the creature he had killed, and rubbed its flesh with a small jar of salt and spices that had turned up amid a shipment headed for Taris. He spitted the carcass, and set it to roast slowly over an open flame.
As Maul watched the flesh begin to cook, Plagueis drifted about the space, pausing on occasion to observe Maul’s possessions. He lingered over the painting of the former Duchess of Mandalore, but ultimately moved on without speaking of it. Maul turned his roast.
Kenobi.
Maul twitched, upsetting his meal-to-be and almost sending it crashing into the fire. He caught and righted the spit. “What?”
That is what you have written here. Not in the tongue of Dathomir, but the letters are recognizable.
Maul didn’t need to look to see. He knew the shape of the letters, could trace them in the dark. The color of the old blood. His blood, red with iron like the soil of Dathomir. Red lines on the blank walls of Mustafar. The angled geometry of the characters. He hadn’t touched the mark since the day he made it, a day of jumbled and screaming madness, of choking sensations he would die before calling grief or despair. “It is nothing.”
Who were they?
“It is nothing!”
The cave and Maul’s skull echoed with the force of his shout. He clutched at his head, fingers threaded through the crown of his horns, and gasped deep, ragged breaths. Forcing down the thoughts.
Plagueis watched him dispassionately. A friend?
“Never!”
A lover then?
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
Only one of us is behaving in a ridiculous manner. This is something to you.
“What does it matter?” said Maul. “He is dead, understand? Dead! It’s ended!”
This is a source of grief to you.
“The only grief that I feel with regards to Kenobi ,” hissed Maul. “Is the grief of knowing that I will not be able to gut him personally!”
Plagueis looked at him in silence and Maul turned his face back to the fire. The carcass was starting to blacken on one side and he fumbled to turn it. He stared into the moving flames.
“Kenobi is— was , a Jedi,” Maul said. “He was sent to stop me on Naboo. Him and his master, Qui-Gon Jinn.”
I have met Qui-Gon .
“I tracked them to Tatooine,” said Maul. “And back to Naboo, in pursuit of the Queen. On Sidious’s command. I fought them both. I killed Qui-Gon.”
That was no small feat.
“It was my greatest wish,” said Maul. He pressed his palm to his belly, to the borderlands of flesh and metal. “To kill a Jedi Master. And I succeeded. My years of training brought to bear. A weapon of the Sith’s revenge.”
Plagueis said nothing.
“And then…” Maul’s fingers dug into his skin. “The apprentice struck me down. The apprentice. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Cut me apart and left me for dead.”
Yet you lived.
“Yet I lived. For years and years and years. In the lightless caverns. In the filth. Trapped in that place. Going mad in the dark alone. And always thinking of him.”
How did you escape?
“My—Savage,” said Maul. “He brought me out of there. To rejoin the galaxy. To seek my revenge.”
And did you find it?
“No.” A strange tightness gripped Maul’s throat, different than being Force-strangled but just as acute. “Sidious killed them. All the Jedi. Kenobi among them.”
He succeeded then. The Sith Imperative.
Maul laughed hollowly. “Was it the Sith Imperative for Sidious to rule the galaxy? To exploit it for his personal whims? Then yes, he succeeded. And I was left with nothing. My people gone. My would-be family gone. My exploits thwarted. And Kenobi…”
It is the way of the Sith to cultivate passion as power, said Plagueis after a long time. But many forget such emotions are a double-edged blade.
“I have nothing left. The Sith took everything from me.”
Plagueis did not reply.
Maul took his meal from the flames, and ate, for all he did not feel like eating. He wrapped the remains of the carcass to preserve them, and set about banking the fire. He laid out his bedroll near enough to feel the residual heat, and so he could scan the emptiness outside the cave’s mouth.
You should eat it.
“I should do what?”
The flower.
“I have no need of intoxicating compounds.”
Only a petal or two. It will enhance your meditation, and aid in the establishment of the new neural pathways while you sleep.
Maul scowled at the cactus, then rose and stalked over to it. He yanked two delicate petals from the broad, circular flower, and stuffed them into his mouth.
They were bitter, in the way of plants not meant to be eaten, but he swallowed them and washed the taste with water. He flopped onto his bedroll and flicked the blanket over him.
“Are you going to instruct me how to meditate as well?”
Perish the thought.
Maul stared at the glowing coals beneath their layer of smothering ash. He felt no different, so he fixed his mind on a fulcrum, and let himself lapse into a light meditation. His thoughts drifted and—
Sleep. Darkness.
He dreamed he saw the spires of Sundari, of Coruscant. The lava flows of Mustafar and the ocean near Orsis. He ran, and fought featureless shadows, and fled from his former Master’s laughter.
The images began to fracture. He heard the clanking, mechanical cacophony in the darkness of Cog Hive Seven. Scented the reek of rot on Lotho Minor.
No, no, I cannot return. This is a dream, a dream, a dream, I am not—!
In the cell at Cog Hive Seven, shackled to a chair as eager water rushed in around him. He squirmed and fought, fought for breath, fought his chains, fought the creature risen from the depths. Worms in his mouth, between his lips. The abyssal maw of the Syrox opening to swallow him whole.
Fighting. Saber to saber. Fighting Jedi. Fighting Kenobi. Battle rage and battle joy commingled. Blue eyes and ruddy, sandy hair and that well-known face etched with determination. Etched with sorrow. Kenobi screaming with rage from behind the red wall. Kenobi cradling the Duchess, his head bowed in grief.
Kenobi holding a cup of beaten metal, his cheeks marked with the faint tracks of tears. His beard and shorn hair frosted with grey, those blue eyes infinitely weary.
Maul stared at him, peculiarly transfixed by the sight of Kenobi, caught in this small act of mundanity. At this jumbled, conjured image of Kenobi as he might have been.
Kenobi’s head lifted, as if he were listening to something. He turned.
Their gazes met, and Kenobi’s eyes went wide with shock.
Maul didn’t consciously remember grabbing the coal from the fire. Casting it at the Kenobi-phantom with all his strength.
Kenobi recoiled, and the coal arced into the empty night like a comet. Struck the ground and skidded several feet.
Maul stared at the glowing ember. There was pain in his hand, but his thoughts felt slow. Syrupy, as if he were wading through mud.
The Kenobi-phantom was gone.
Maul stared at the empty space it had occupied, until his eyes slid closed, and he fell into dreamless sleep.
Maul woke to a slight headache, and second-degree burns on his left palm.
As he hunted among his possessions for a bacta patch, he puzzled over the vision. Maul had never known himself to have the touch of future-sight. Any images conjured by his drugged brain had to come from the past. And all of them slotted neatly into Maul’s perception of himself. Fighting. Struggling for survival. Lying in the Stygian darkness utterly alone and forgotten.
But Kenobi drinking tea? What was that supposed to represent?
Surely Maul must have been right; the drugs were a terrible idea.
“You are a bad influence,” he said, when he caught sight of Plagueis standing near the cave mouth.
I should certainly hope so. I wouldn’t be a very good Sith otherwise.
“My former Master had no need for such iniquities.”
Plagueis snorted. Is that what he told you? I fear you’d drop dead of shock if you’d have seen him at one of the Senate parties.
“A smokescreen to fool lesser beings.”
Perhaps. But I doubt one needs to drink fourteen sequential shots of Corellian brandy merely for the sake of fooling lesser beings. Plagueis made a soft sound of amusement. He never quite beat my record.
Maul frowned at his injured palm and flexed his fingers. “Why would I see a vision of Kenobi?”
Is it so surprising? He is clearly a source of fixation for you.
“But what is the point? He is dead. Revenge is beyond my reach.”
And yet you still crave it.
“No,” said Maul quietly. “I...I do not crave it. I feel only emptiness, not thwarted rancor.”
What do you crave then?
Maul hesitated. The answer would have surely earned him a beating from Sidious, but Plagueis could not truly hurt him. Not like this.
“Hope.”
Then perhaps that is what you saw.
“Kenobi? Hope? Preposterous.”
Is it?
“Kenobi is—was, my enemy.”
That only?
Something painful squeezed in Maul’s chest. “I…”
Outside, the wind howled through the canyons.
“He was my point of stability. Always there, unable to be killed, unable to be beaten. My...balance in the Force.”
You loved him.
Maul bared his teeth. “How dare you!”
The truth is written on your face.
“Sith do not love.”
Untrue. We are the dark shadow of the Jedi. And what is more unlike a Jedi than unconditional attachment? Attachment to burn us alive. Attachment which may rend us, may kill us, but our devotion to it does not waver. I once attached myself to the cause of seeking eternal life. My only bride was Bogan. But you...you have linked yourself to a far more mundane anchor.
Maul snorted. “An anchor cut adrift.”
Plagueis cocked his ghostly head in amusement. Ah, but are the Jedi not fond of saying: there is no death, there is the Force?
Maul turned his face away and observed the vista beyond the cave mouth. He felt nothing but deep weariness. What was he to do with this knowledge? The knowledge that he loved Kenobi, whatever that meant?
Again and again. Tools and knowledge and understanding. Too late, too late. Always too late.
“So?” he said gruffly. “What does it matter what the Jedi believe?”
Very little now, I suppose, as they are gone. Plagueis turned once again to the painted letters. But I lived a very long time before Sidious killed me. There is something to be said for making peace with oneself.
“And how am I to do that?”
Plagueis gave an elegant shrug. That is for you to discover. But you should eat the rest of your bloody repast before it starts to breed maggots.
“Later,” said Maul, distracted. “I’m going for a walk.”
He left the stone, and brought his saberstaff. Climbed a distant plateau of red rock and cut loose in a flurry of practice kata. Allowed his mind to empty and his emotions to rise. Fought in silence, his mind screaming in the Force.
The sun set, and Maul had long ago ceased to sweat, but he persevered into the night, the training grounds lit by only his saber. He spun and brought his blade down on a boulder, splitting it in two. In the same motion, he withdrew and spun and—
There!
A flicker of luminescent blue in the darkness, a saber rising to match his own and his hearts leaped—
And then it was gone, and Maul was left in the ruddy pool of his own saber’s light. He fought to slow his breathing.
“You weren’t supposed to die,” he said. “Not until I took your life with my own hand. Not until—”
He stared out into the sea of stars above him and felt his throat go tight. “Damn you, Kenobi,” he whispered. “What am I supposed to do now?”
Midnight clouds had gathered by the time he descended the plateau, and when he’d reached the cave a light rain was falling. He drank three containers of water and stood under the rainfall as he ate the cold remnants of the carcass and cast the bones into a ditch. Stripped his wet clothes and did not bother to stoke the fire. He expected Plagueis to show himself, but Plagueis did not.
As he crossed the space to his bedroll, the still-blooming cactus caught his eye, the blossom stark and faintly luminous in the dark.
Before he could think better of it, Maul plucked a petal, and stuffed it in his mouth.
He burrowed down amidst his bedroll, an almost instinctive movement. Going to ground. Going to safety. He stared out into the dark rain.
Time seemed to dilate, and did not know if he slept, but when he next opened his eyes, Kenobi was there, hooded, silvered hair and beard almost invisible in the gloom. His eyes glittering out of the darkness. The shadow of a Jedi.
“You’re dead,” said Maul, unmoving. “Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead.”
“I suppose he is,” said Kenobi, after a beat. He stood stiff and silent against the backdrop of the rain. “And you are not.”
“There is no one left with the strength to kill me.” Maul shifted and felt the sheet slip from his shoulder. “No one but my former Master.”
Or his dog.
“Is that what you wish?” said Kenobi. “To be killed?”
Discordant wants jangled in Maul’s skull. “Yes...and no.”
“A surprising answer.”
“You would not understand.”
“No,” said Kenobi, sounding weary. “I would not. I thought I tried, once, but I did not.”
“On Mandalore.”
Kenobi didn’t move. “Yes.”
“You asked the wrong questions,” said Maul slowly. “You claimed to know me, but it was burningly obvious you knew nothing.”
Kenobi sighed. “You are right. I knew what it meant, from a certain point of view, to grow up with nothing but your order, but I did not use that knowledge. I sought philosophy instead of empathy, and paid for it.”
“I am not a Sith,” said Maul. “Not really. But we are always the product of our upbringing.”
“Would you have have stood down? Would you have let her live? If I had asked the right questions?”
“Maybe. Or maybe I didn’t know what those questions were yet, and it would not have mattered.”
“And what will you do now?” said Kenobi. “That I am dead as well?”
“What do the living do for the dead?”
“Rejoice?” said Kenobi lightly.
“Or mourn.”
“You mourn me? Or your thwarted revenge?”
Maul’s throat tightened painfully. “You, Jedi scum. I mourn you.”
Kenobi blinked at him, those blue eyes as clear as they’d been on Naboo. “Truly?” He sounded unusually baffled.
“You were mine, Kenobi. Mine to kill. But also…”
“So you saw me as a possession.”
Maul shook his head, his horns catching on the blankets. “No. Because I was yours as well.”
Something shifted imperceptibly in Kenobi’s expression. “What do you mean?”
Maul grimaced. “It means what it means, Jedi. You struck me down, conquered me. I spent years rotting in darkness, with nothing but you as a beacon of focus. My life was yours, but you would neither finish what you started or take me into servitude. There are rules , Kenobi, and you broke them, and me with them.”
Kenobi’s eyes widened. “Jedi do not bind others in such a way.”
“And neither do they leave their kills half-finished.”
Kenobi flinched hard, as if Maul had struck him.
They stared at each other in silence.
“And what…” Kenobi’s voice wavered. “What would you have done? If I had fought you down and bound you at my side?”
Maul thought of the coiled ache in his chest, pictured the tenderness with which Kenobi had held a dying woman. “I would have stayed there, I think.”
“What if I had brought you to the Temple? If I had demanded you serve the Light?”
Maul touched the mental ashes of the bonfire that had once been his lust for vengeance against the Jedi. “I do not think I could have been a Jedi, not truly. But I think I would have learned to live with them. For you.”
Anguish flickered across Kenobi’s shadowed face. Maul said nothing.
“You killed those I loved,” said Kenobi, soft and wretched. “But then again, so have I.”
“Your Master was an order,” said Maul. “But I am sorry. For Satine.”
Kenobi shut his eyes.
The rain kicked up, droplets pounding against the sand. It dampened the hood of Kenobi’s robe and Maul watched in fascination.
“Can you see me?” said Maul. “My surroundings?”
“No.” Another beat. “Can you see mine?”
“The Force, you mean?” Maul shook his head. “No. Just you.”
“I should go.”
“Will I see you again?”
“The Force is a mysterious thing,” said Kenobi. “But I think not.”
“Please.” The word slipped out, possibly the first time Maul could remember uttering it outside of physical torture, but no less agonizing.
Kenobi watched him with haunted eyes. “You’ve no need of ghosts.”
“The only company I keep any longer are ghosts,” said Maul. Pain twisted in his guts and closed his throat. “I would at least keep the company of one who is…”
“Is what?”
You loved him. And now he is gone.
“Important to me.”
The words hung in the damp air and Maul wished he might snatch them back. Kenobi stared at him, wordless.
Maul yanked the blanket of his bedroll back into position and rolled away from the phantom. For the first time in his life, he turned his back on Kenobi and squeezed his eyes shut against the dark.
When the morning sun woke him, Kenobi was gone.
Have you explored the Temple?
“I swept it for hostiles,” said Maul. He added more oil to his rag and continued to work it into the joint of his knee. The sun that struck the cave mouth warmed the skin of his back and relaxed the muscles of his spine. “I found none.”
As I understand it, the Nightsisters branched off from a sect of Sith acolytes. When the Brotherhood fell and Bane’s line moved into the shadows, they continued to practice Force alchemy.
“So I have heard. There are remnants of the altars, artifacts here and there. And…” Maul paused. “Savage used to speak of it. Of the vast power they wielded.” He shook his head. “Strange that he never seemed to resent it, or seek such power for himself.”
The Sisters had little use for Nightbrothers with ambition.
“As did the Sith?” Maul caught the snide edge to his own tone and his muscles tightened in anticipation, but Plagueis’s shade merely snorted with derision.
Bane’s edict was meant to minimize jockeying and competition among the Sith. One Master, and one Apprentice to strive to surpass them. But I think the time was approaching when we could have moved beyond it. He lapsed into silence as Maul switched to tending his ankle joints. I wanted to move beyond it.
“How so?”
Plagueis actually seemed to hesitate. What Sidious and I had...it began as an apprenticeship, as needs must. But over time, our dynamic shifted. We divided the labor among us, mastery over the material world, and mastery over the Force.
Maul stared at him. “You were partners?”
Plagueis nodded. Operating in tandem in service of the Sith cause. Our eventual plan was dyadic rule. Once Sidious was positioned as Supreme Chancellor, he was to appoint me.
“But he obtained his power, and decided to remove you.”
Yes.
Words crowded into Maul’s throat, words of derision, of the foolishness of trusting Sidious to such a degree, of trusting anyone.
But the look on Plagueis’s face stopped him. Even obscured as it was by the transpirator, Maul was struck by the subdued melancholy in his eyes.
Maul turned his face away. “He does have a tendency to do that.”
As you learned as well.
“I suppose I should be grateful I kept my life,” said Maul. “Though it stings that he sees me still as so inconsequential a threat.”
We may be able to make progress on that front. Plagueis sounded slightly amused. Sidious is powerful, but no being is truly without peer.
“A thought,” said Maul. “But neither is he alone.”
He took a new apprentice?
“A fallen Jedi. Anakin Skywalker.”
A sound escaped Plagueis and Maul glanced his way. “You know the name?”
Anakin… Plagueis turned his face away, his expression faintly disturbed. Yes, I know of him. I may very well be responsible for his existence.
Maul straightened. “What?”
Plagueis didn’t answer for several moments. You must understand. Meddling with the Force is a dangerous endeavor. It is a vast and unfeeling thing, and like an ocean, can just as easily bear you to your destination as suck you beneath the waves.
“I don’t understand.”
Part of developing mastery over the Force was to bend it to my will in increasing ways. Plagueis tilted his head back and regarded the cave mouth. It was part of why I knew our partnership was the will of the Force; we faced no repercussions for our work. Until one day.
“What kind of repercussions?”
Blowback. For every action an equal and opposite. The Force struck back. And a child was born on Tatooine.
Maul’s eyes went wide. “A child of the Force?”
So it appears. Though I did not expect that Sidious could bend him to his will.
“He’s surprisingly good at that as well,” muttered Maul. He set aside his rag and stared at Plagueis. “Then what now? Is Sidious’s rule the will of the Force? Since the Chosen One enforces it?”
I could not say. If the galaxy has turned into the darkness, then perhaps.
Maul slumped. “Wonderful.”
Plagueis watched him. I can say that Sidious himself is not a product of the Force. He is a powerful Sith, with a talent for manipulation which surpassed any I had ever seen, but he is ultimately a lifeform like any other. And he is capable of failure.
Maul snorted. “If so, I’ve yet to see it.”
It is rare, but it has happened. For now, prudence and discretion may be the path.
“I haven’t much choice regardless.”
What is a standard decade in the life of the galaxy? Come, let us explore the ruins of your slavers and see what we can find.
Maul stretched and stood. “Very well. But I’m not consuming any other suspect compounds.”
The Nightsister temple was a huge and cavernous structure, with acoustics that sent the tread of Maul’s metal feet echoing. He’d memorized much of the temple layout, but he walked the rooms regardless, the pool of water near the entrance, overgrown with pond scum, the hall of carven pillars, and the sanctuary, a tiny, dark room containing an altar, large enough for a Wookie to perch atop it.
Maul circled the structure, running his palm across the stone. “See? Nothing here.”
Can you illuminate the space?
Maul ignited his saber and held it aloft, casting a red glow over the room.
Check the walls.
Maul did so, delicately prodding at the carven reliefs. Most of the images were alien to him, though he could see humanoid figures interspersed throughout them, Nightsisters and Nightbrothers which battled shadows which seemed to shift as Mauls stared at them.
As he scanned the designs, an unusual detail caught his attention. A Nightbrother, by the horns, holding aloft a lit torch. The graven image seemed set apart from the rest of the design.
He touched the image, and found it moved. The carved bit of stone sank briefly into the wall, and around him, Maul heard the groan of ancient machinery.
Above, there was a grinding sound, of stone one stone and a shaft of daylight pierced the dark.
Much better.
“How did you know that was there?”
Easily. I would have employed something similar. Check the altar again.
Maul crouched and examined the structure. Illuminated as it was from above, the top now cast strange shadows against the reliefs carved on the sides. He touched the carvings, traced the shapes given new perspective. What had been tangled, amorphous knots of vegetation now writhed in illusory movement, taking on new, disturbing and indescribable patterns. Maul’s eyes refused to focus on them, and he blinked, feeling the pinprick of a headache at his temples.
Cautiously, he touched a peculiar section of the carving, a section of the design which, by some trick of the shadows, appeared to take the form of a shifting design of linked spheres.
Rock floor struck the back of Maul’s head, and he knew no more.
“Maul, Maul,” Kenobi’s voice was grating as always, but there was an incongruous thread of anxiety in it. “Maul, wake up.”
Maul groaned and rolled over, blinking through doubled vision at the scattered sun which lit the space. His consciousness pitched and yawed, sending a wave of pain through his skull as his horns bumped against the stone floor.
“So you are alive,” said Kenobi’s ghost. He was little more than shadow in the sanctuary, but Maul could see that he had crouched, as if to bring himself closer and examine Maul’s potential corpse.
“Why do you ask, Kenobi?” said Maul, pressing his palms to his scalp as if he could stabilize his spinning vision. “Worried?”
“I…” Kenobi cleared his throat. “What happened?”
“Some mystic nonsense I’m sure,” said Maul. He tried to sit up, was swamped by a wave of nausea, and pressed himself back to the cold floor. “It figures the Sisters would build in some sort of trap; it’s what Sidious would have done.”
“What were you trying to do ?”
“What have I always done?” said Maul. “I seek vengeance, and so the tools of power to accomplish it.”
“But I am dead.”
“Despite what you may think, Kenobi, not every event for which I desire vengeance has revolved around you.”
“I suppose when one is as deeply involved with the Dark side and organized crime as you, one is bound to acquire enemies.”
Maul bared his teeth, and winced as the musculature of his jaw pulled and sent pain like lightning across his scalp. “Don’t be trite, Kenobi. Sidious has only enemies.”
“And how do you expect to topple Sidious? With all the power of the Republic at his command, and Vader at his side?”
“Anakin, you mean.”
Kenobi’s face pinched with pain. “Anakin Skywalker is dead.”
“Anakin Skywalker chose to seek the tools of the Dark side,” said Maul. “That his quest shaped him in ways you find repugnant has nothing to do with whether he still lives.” He palpated across the back of his scalp and found the skin unbroken. “At least give him the dignity of choice that you denied me.”
Kenobi was silent for a time. “But you didn’t, did you? Choose?”
“What do you think?”
“I think...you were a child.”
“And children are weak.”
Kenobi actually looked stricken. “No.”
“They are,” said Maul. “It is the way of things. I was weak, once. Weak to pain. Weak to hunger. Weak to blood and injury. Weak to the delusion that Sidious saw me as a son and not an animal. Weak to the arrogance that I could defeat him, could protect my brother-apprentice from him. And one by one, I stripped those weaknesses away.”
All but one, apparently.
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“But it was what you said.”
Kenobi’s shoulders slumped. They sat in silence.
“What did you mean?” said Kenobi softly.
“When?”
“When you said I was important to you.”
Maul’s insides lurched with a sensation that had nothing to do with head trauma.
To so sniff out the weaknesses of your enemies, Kenobi. You would have made a good Sith.
“What does it matter?”
“It matters…” Kenobi trailed off and averted his eyes. “Because it clearly matters to you. And I would understand you if I can.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought I did, and I don’t. I never have. And because I would shame the man who was a surrogate father to me if I didn’t offer compassion to one who has suffered as much as you.”
“The man I killed.”
“Yes.”
Maul looked away from him. “It means what it means, Kenobi. The Sith are the mirror of the Jedi after all.”
“But you are not a Sith.”
“Well,” said Maul, “not a very good one.”
“You...feel for me?” there was an edge of disbelief to Kenobi’s tone, but layered beneath it was something Maul couldn’t decipher. “Passion? Or…?”
“And.”
Kenobi rocked back on his ghostly heels. Naked shock was writ across his face.
“Impossible.”
“Why?” snarled Marl. “Because I am a monster? Or will you claim your erstwhile apprentice similarly incapable?”
Kenobi’s face crumpled in grief. “A love twisted by fear. Poisoned by anger.”
“When fear and anger are all you have,” said Maul. “They touch all you do.”
“You cannot love me.”
“Do not tell me what I feel, Kenobi!” Red rage, bloodshot with pain and grief and exhaustion, ripped the stops from his tongue. “It was your saber that fired my blood and marked my flesh! It was your eyes that haunted my dreams in darkness! It was your death that I grieve! Do not presume to know me!”
Kenobi recoiled, eyes wide. “I…”
“Do not stand there, in your sanctimonious superiority! In distance! In pity! If you truly mean not to haunt me, then get out of my sight!”
Something that, just for a heartbeat, Maul might have mistaken for true grief, flashed across Kenobi’s face, and he vanished.
Maul dragged himself to his feet and stormed from the ruins of the temple. And if the dry, dusty winds of Dathomir streaked moisture from his eyes, he ignored it.
“The temple was an abject failure,” snapped Maul, when he caught a glimpse of Plagueis’s shade standing amongst the boxes in his cave like a skeletal scarecrow overseeing vast and empty metal fields. “What did you expect me to find?”
Plagueis shrugged. An alchemical tool of the Sisters, perhaps. A sign or portent to guide you on a path. Or nothing at all.
“I don’t require your training to find nothing. I’m more than capable of that level of failure on my own.”
Plagueis scrutinized him. You are angry. Why?
Rage that had simmered in a haze in the back of Maul’s mind bubbled up once more. “And what of it! Is not anger the purview of the Sith?”
Anger may be one expression of passion. But they are not interchangeable. Not to mention excessive anger can blind you to matters of importance.
“Nothing of importance remains, you useless mystic! Everything has been stripped away, or will be! Why should I seek the summit, push myself beyond my limits over and over and over, when there is no point !”
Plagueis raised a quelling hand but Maul barreled onwards. He was vaguely aware that such behavior would have gotten him crisped as an apprentice, but he could no longer contain himself.
“Your training is useless! Why should I take pointless orders from a being that Sidious defeated and killed! You obviously weren’t strong enough to be the Master, so why should I listen to you? You’re a meaningless relic!”
Before Plagueis could respond, Maul spun on his heel, made for the cave mouth, and flung the curiously angled stone from him. The motion was Force-driven, and the black hunk sailed into the distance, vanishing among the rocks and craggs of Dathomir’s cracked surface.
The next three days dawned foggy and chill, and the high desert cold settled into the spaces of Maul’s metal bones. His mood was equally foul as the weather, and while at first he was relieved that—as expected—Plagueis did not appear, as the days dragged on Maul found the knot of his anger settling into an icy core within him. One that echoed of years long-forgotten, entombed in his cell on Mustafar, tracing lonely patterns on the walls.
It was a shameful lapse, but he sought his bedroll and cocooned himself within it until only his face showed, and ate rations that tasted of dust. The fire was ashes, and the blanket of stars burned with cold fire in the unusual clear sky.
In the space of a blink, he saw Kenobi’s shadow, hunched and hooded, seated across the sea of dead coals.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing,” said Kenobi, his tone subdued. “A dead man cannot want.”
“Sometimes it seems I do nothing but want,” said Maul. “Want for vengeance. Want for power. Want for…”
“Love?”
“Hope,” Maul whispered hoarsely.
Kenobi was silent for an eternity. Then, with interminable slowness, he reached out his hand.
Maul stared at the outstretched appendage as if at an animal which might bite him. But Kenobi merely remained, arm extended, palm facing him.
Maul swallowed hard, and reached.
The barely-there touch against the pads of his fingers sent a tingling, electric stripe of sensation along Maul’s arm, riding the dermatomes across his back to the ruins of his spine. He shivered hard, and Kenobi made a gentling noise.
Kenobi’s shade was warm.
Maul was dimly aware he was breathing in shallow, uncontrolled gasps. That almost-insubstantial touch turned his own hand palm up, and he allowed himself to be guided onto his back. Stared up at Kenobi as he knelt alongside him, leaned over him, eyes still somehow visible in the dim starlight and fixed on Maul.
“Easy,” whispered Kenobi, and bent to fit their mouths together.
Maul couldn’t speak, or breathe. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and pressed up into the kiss, blind and clumsy and Kenobi murmured soothing nonsense in the breath-space between them, and pressed his there-not-there hand into Maul’s.
At last the kisses tapered off, but Maul kept his eyes shut, and Kenobi stayed near, a presence of subtle, radiant heat. His fingers, callused and strong as Maul’s own, caressed his palm.
“I failed you,” said Kenobi. “When I did not give you an honorable death. And again and again when I failed to see the bridges between us, the space for common purposes, and when I forgot the faces of my forebears and acted in anger instead of compassion. I am not a very good Jedi, Maul who is no longer Darth, so perhaps we were always meant to be matched.”
Maul’s throat tightened.
Here, at the end of everything, when darkness has closed over the galaxy and it no longer means anything. Now he sees.
“From where we begin,” said Kenobi softly, “we always return. I do not know if there is anything left of me to give, or why you would want the tattered remnants. But hope...that I still have.”
Then he pressed something small and hard and blood-warm into Maul’s palm, and he was gone.
Maul fumbled the object, his fingers suddenly clumsy, enfolding it and mapping its shapes in darkness. It was spherical, metal by the touch of it, bored on opposite sides and embossed with waving lines, like the waves on an ocean or the dunes of a desert.
The persistence of memory, acute as the edge of a vibroblade. The reactor shaft on Naboo, details carved sharp in blood and pain, blue eyes and red gates. Red as the dot of color which moved as they danced, deadly and intimate.
A bead, whole and solid and real, rested in Maul’s hand. Hope made tangible.
The bead which had once capped Kenobi’s Padawan braid.
The finding of objects with the Force was a talent easily honed by children, but Maul had never been very good at it. Sidious had insisted he learn to track his prey to an acceptable degree, of course, but generally failed to imbue the purpose of finding items for reasons other than murder.
And so Maul scoured the canyons for the curiously angled stone, stomach wrought with anxiety but hearts strangely light. He strung Kenobi’s token on a length of salvaged cord, and wore it around his neck.
He lives. Somewhere in the galaxy, he lives.
He found the object nearly a week from when he’d first cast it from him, wedged between two iron red rocks, such that at first, he nearly overlooked it. He knelt to pick it up and—a little shamefaced—brush the layer of rusted dirt from its surface.
“Plagueis?”
Nothing happened. Maul scanned the horizon around him, but saw nothing. He looked back at the stone and felt a lump of corresponding hardness form in his throat.
“I am sorry,” he said, and while he had begged for forgiveness for transgressions in the past this felt new, an acknowledgment of hurt offered and a tacit agreement not to repeat the action. “I spoke untruths. You are not what I said, and I did not mean to banish you. I...I know what it is to be a relic of Sidious’s machinations, to trust when one should not. And I know what it is to be so completely alone.”
Still, there was silence. Maul swallowed and wrapped up the stone in his clothing, and returned to his shelter. He stoked the fire into life and worked to pack his meager personal items and draft a letter to the lieutenants who managed Crimson Dawn in his absence. Hopefully not too many of them had yet written him off as vanished or dead.
He was puzzling over the tone of a specific sentence when Plagueis’s voice spoke in his mind.
Still, you were not wrong. Not really.
Maul ceased his fiddling and turned to face Plagueis. “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I should say so.”
Plagueis regarded him from beneath the edge of his ghostly hood. I wonder, sometimes. How it might have been. Had we met. Had I not told myself the lie that Sidious was capable of rearing you and intervened.
“And what would you have done? To mold a Sith is a violent process.”
Not in so many words. To be a Sith is to push beyond the limits of the ordinary. That deprivation, and suffering, and denial are all meaningless in pursuit of power and knowledge. But such understanding requires consciousness. An infant cannot grasp the reasons behind its pain, a child cannot understand the lesson behind such a hurt. Traditionally, Sith do not take child apprentices, as the Jedi do, for ours is a harsh path unsuited to the wholeness of a young mind.
“When did you take Sidious as an apprentice?”
Sidious was seventeen when he swore fealty to me. Young, yes, but hungry for power, and capable of grasping the meaning of the path he sought.
“And your own master?”
I was five years of age. Plagueis’s eyes slitted in amusement. I too was an unusual case.
“And what would you have done?”
Plagueis was quiet for several moments. I think, if I had understood that the time of Two had ended, then I would have truly overseen your education. Brought you as I did Sidious, to Sojourn, to Aborah, to Coruscant. We might have knit a new Brotherhood from Bane’s ashes, and set aside the edict of compulsory usurpation.
Maul allowed himself to picture it for a moment. Himself, as he had been, a small child, trailing in the wake of not one Master, but two, on the glittering wheel of Coruscant. On island beaches of Muunilinst, and in tangled jungles.
“You mean...a family?”
Plagueis watched him. I cannot pretend I knew much what one looked like, but perhaps. Despite it all, I can see little ill from the strengthening of bonds of loyalty.
“I guess we’ll never know.”
No. No we will not. Nothing remains but for the living to salvage what can be. Plagueis hesitated. And for the dead to help them as they can.
Maul set his mouth, reminded himself that Plagueis could not hurt him. “I’m going to find him. Kenobi. I...he’s the only one left of meaning to me.”
I know.
“You don’t...disapprove?”
Plagueis raised a brow. All my machinations turned out to be for naught. I would be a great hypocrite indeed if I did not encourage you to seize what satisfaction you can of life.
“But...isn’t love a weakness? A failing as a Sith?”
Perhaps so. But the gaining of power can make such weaknesses not matter so much. And, as you said, you are not truly a Sith, so who gives a damn?
“Will you come with me? To look for him?”
Plagueis blinked at him, nonplussed. You want to take me with you?
“You said we were not able to know each other in life, but…” Maul rubbed the hem of his sleeve between nervous fingers. “We might be able to, now.”
Plagueis was quiet for a moment. I think I might like that.
A wash of feeling that Maul recognized as relief enveloped him, for all that he didn’t realize the tension he had been holding. “Then come help me with the starmaps, and we’ll sniff out where Kenobi hides.”
Plagueis—perhaps unnecessarily—moved up beside him as Maul pulled up a map of the galaxy, and they bent both their minds to search for Maul’s Jedi.
“The last pieces of intelligence I have place Kenobi at Utapau,” Maul rotated the map to display the associated sector. “His death was reported to have occurred there, execution for betrayal of the Republic. But after that he vanishes.”
No lifeform can truly vanish.
“Tell him that.”
Sometimes, you must utilize the elements around an object to determine its relative position, rather than simply chasing its trail directly. Think, who would have interest in confirming Kenobi’s death?
“His enemies. And his allies, presumably.”
Start with that. What were his enemies’ movements around the time of his supposed death?
“Sidious doesn’t exactly publicize his more sinister activities.”
But Sidious is not an island. He is reliant on infrastructure and technology, as we all are. And both leave traces which can be tracked.
Maul crushed a frustrated sigh. “So what do you suggest? Mine the Coruscant landing flight records for the day Kenobi disappeared?”
That would be a start.
The flight records in question were extensive, and irritatingly mundane. Transporter, Model 5789-A, inbound, point of origin Mygeeto. Pleasure shuttle, Model 444-F, outbound, point of destination Scarif. A rhapsody of minutiae and bureaucratic activity.
“This is a waste of time.”
It isn’t as if you have other leads.
Something caught Maul’s eye as he scanned down the endless data rows, and he frowned. “That’s strange.”
What is?
“This entry: ‘Transport shuttle, Model 54545-S, outbound, point of destination Bespin’. Model 54545-S is a specialty shuttle, reinforced to withstand particularly hostile environments, such as high temperatures or excessive radiation.”
Bespin is also in the same sector as Utapau, and would require similar fuel stores to reach it.
A faint chill trickled down the remains of Maul’s spine. “Bespin is a gaseous planet, and there’s no part of it which requires this level of protection. This ship would be overkill, the last time I saw a shuttle of this type regularly…”
Yes?
“Was on Mustafar.”
I see.
Maul curled one of his hands to crush the faint tremor.
Mustafar is also in the same sector as Utapau.
“From where we begin, we always return,” said Maul hollowly. “I guess that’s what he meant.”
Does Sidious not still control Mustafar?
“Sidious controls nearly everything. But if Kenobi is there, somehow, or there’s a clue to his whereabouts...I have to go back.”
We must tread cautiously, said Plagueis after a few quiet minutes. But hopefully our presence may go unnoticed.
There was no power in the galaxy that could have made Maul admit the comfort he garnered from the word ‘we’, but it did not make him any less appreciative.
Mustafar was, as expected, exactly as Maul remembered. The ominous gas clouds blackened by volcanic ash, the suffocating heat, the sulfurous tinge to the air. Sidious’s fortress loomed darkly against the flaming sky, and Maul regarded it with resignation.
“There’s a shuttle on the landing platform; but I don’t sense Sidious. I can manage the assassin droids at the entrance, but I think the ventilation ducts are a better route.”
Discretion is not completely incompatible with valor, said Plagueis, though he seemed a touch nervous, which put Maul on edge.
Maul descended the ridge from where he’d hidden his tiny starhopper. He carried nothing but his saberstaff and Plagueis’s artifact. He’d layered himself in a dark envirosuit and resistant gloves to prevent tissue damage from the baking rocks, but he could still feel the conducted heat through the material, and he did not linger.
The ventilation system of the fortress was enormous, an eldritch tangle of air handlers and filters to remove sufficient quantities of the ash and chemical fumes to render the air breathable for more than brief periods. Maul knew from past experience that, due to the massive quantities of airflow required, the ductwork was large enough to accommodate a determined humanoid.
That being said, he had not explored the entirety of the ventilation system, and he had no desire to drop accidentally into Sidious’s receiving room, so Maul retraced the one route he could recall with perfect clarity.
The ceiling height of his old cell was significant, and as he peered through the grate Maul could see that the room had been at some point filled with a variety of crates and broken equipment, which formed a fairly convenient platform which led down to what little clear floor space remained. Maul set to work on the screws holding the grate in place, carefully reversing their direction with the Force and placing them inside the duct to prevent them from pinging to the floor. He released the disconnected grate and piloted it soundlessly to rest atop a crate of what looked like replacement air filters, then lowered himself through the vent.
He’d made it almost to the floor when the door to the room whooshed open, and Maul found himself face-to-face with a mountain of black metal and the hollow, skull-faced stare of a helmet.
Darth Vader’s helmet made it impossible to gauge his expression, but Maul suspected he must have been equally surprised, as Maul wasn’t immediately fending off a lightsaber to the gut. His hand flew to his saberstaff, but he hesitated momentarily, gauging whether it might be more valuable to vanish back up the ventilation shaft or attempt to kick Vader’s teeth in and scramble past him.
“What are you doing in the storage closet?” said Vader. He must have been using a vocoder, because his booming, bass voice sounded nothing like Anakin Skywalker.
“My deepest apologies,” said Maul. “I was looking for my old room. I seem to have gotten turned around.” He began to inch backwards up the pile of crates, on the additional logic it might be better to fight from higher ground. “I’ll just be going now.”
“Your...room?” Vader seemed to lack much inflection beyond ‘murderous pronouncement’ but he sounded a touch baffled.
“Sidious doesn’t exactly keep an excess of lava fortresses in which he houses his apprentices,” said Maul. “I promise I didn’t get the wrong address.”
Vader slowly turned his head to regard the room, taking in the cramped space, the blank walls—except for a small section on which markings the color of old blood peeked from behind a crate—before turning to scrutinize Maul with that death's head stare. “There are no windows,” he said, “and the door locks from the outside.”
Thrown by this non-sequitur, Maul tightened his grip on his saberstaff. “Yes, it does?”
For a long moment, Vader seemed about to say something, but then his helmet lifted, like an animal scenting the air. “My Master approaches.”
Ice washed down Maul’s spine and he leapt backwards for the duct, but the crates erupted beneath him like an earthquake, sending him skating back towards the floor in a landslide of spare parts. He turned as he fell, igniting one half of his saberstaff just in time to catch Vader’s blade. He kicked, clipping the edge of the chest component of Vader’s transpirator with a ringing, metallic crunch. Vader recoiled and Maul spotted his chance.
He dove.
Vader’s reflexes were astounding, but Maul was smaller and faster, and he twisted through the narrow gap between the towering cyborg assassin and the door, just in time to feel Vader’s gloved fingers snatch at him.
Memory guided his feet, down winding hallways and through the dining room that had once housed a suspended fishtank, now dry and emptied of fish.
He reached the front doors and flung them open on the volcanic tableau surround the fortress’s landing pad, just in time for Sidious to reach the end of the gangplank of a second shuttle.
Sidious looked up from beneath the edge of his dark hood, and met Maul’s gaze.
“Oh, Maul,” he said, with a mildly put out sigh, “why must you continue to disappoint me so?”
Maul froze. He didn’t mean to, but his feet fixed themselves to the stairs and refused to take another step towards his former Master. Behind him, he could hear Vader’s clanking approach. He spun on his heel and caught the plasma blade of Vader’s saber with his own.
The fight was brutal, and painfully short. Vader still fought like a Jedi, and for a time Maul kept him at bay, but the relentless, mechanical advance forced him down the stairs, putting Maul at a disadvantage.
And his back to Sidious.
It was with their blades locked, Maul bearing up against the unbelievable weight, that the lightning struck him.
Maul crumpled, his limbs turning limp as he tumbled the last few steps and struck the ground. He managed to keep hold of his saber, right up until Vader kicked his arm with a boot like a speeder crash, and he released the object to avoid broken bones.
He rolled, scrambling to get his feet under him, but ended up on his back. His every muscle felt like paste. Sidious approached unhurriedly and Vader boxed him in, the hum of his saber blade like an angry swarm of stinging insects.
“Skywalker,” Maul said, as his skin prickled.
“Silence,” rumbled Vader.
“I’m not certain,” said Sidious in a sedate tone, “what thought occupied your empty head to convince you that coming here was at all advisable, but ultimately it does not matter. You are an irritant, my former apprentice, and one that it is beyond time I removed.”
His fingers curled like claws, and lightning lashed forth.
Maul flung out his hand.
Catching Force lightning was far worse than ordinary lightning. The weight of Sidious’s power slammed into Maul, filling him to overflowing. It crawled across his flesh, searing across the paths of his tattoos, rattling electric pain in the roots of his teeth. His skin swelled tight and hot.
Send it from you.
Maul screamed defiance, and did so.
Sidious had less than a second to realize something was wrong before the lightning struck him. An overwhelming surge of power, meant as a killing blow. The redirection flung him off his feet and sent him skidding across the tarmac to land in an untidy heap of robes.
In the resounding, shocked silence that followed, Maul dove for his saberstaff.
He rolled to his feet, blades ignited, gaze split between Sidious, lying on the landing pad, chest heaving for breath, unnaturally pale face rigid with shock and something which might have been fear, and Vader, standing motionless with his saber still extended.
Maul met Sidious’s gaze.
“Your former Master sends his regards,” said Maul, and Sidious’s eyes widened.
He glanced at Vader, felt the weight of the bead at his throat, and addressed him. “And remember this, if you should ever tire of wearing Sidious’s chains.”
Then Maul turned and ran for his life.
He didn’t stop moving until he was in hyperspace, parsecs away from Sidious, or Sidious’s apprentice, or any planets or property belonging to Sidious. When at last he set the ship in the direction of a random Outer Rim sector, he finally released the controls and took the time to strip his gloves, wash his face, and drink a little water. The inside of his mouth felt baked.
You did well.
Maul blinked up in bewilderment at Plagueis, who somehow managed to fit inside the cockpit despite no doubt being far too tall to do so in life. Certain he’d misheard, Maul shook his head. “I obtained nothing of value. Again.”
I’m not certain of that. Plagueis’s eyes slitted in amusement. The expression on Sidious’s face was of great entertainment value.
A startled, barking laugh escaped Maul before he could stop it. “I suppose you’re right. But the fact remains that I still have no idea where Kenobi is.”
Perhaps you merely approached the situation from the wrong angle. Did Kenobi have any reason to know of your time on Mustafar?
“No—I...of course he didn’t.” Maul shook his head. “He must have meant something else. But ‘from where we begin’, what could he have possibly meant? Naboo? Surely he isn’t hiding under Sidious’s nose.”
Was Naboo where you first met?
“Yes,” said Maul, impatient. “We fought and—wait, no, that isn’t right. I fought Kenobi for the first time on Naboo. I fought his master on Tatooine.”
So Tatooine was where you revealed yourself to them. The Sith Imperative. Where they found Anakin Skywalker, child of the Force, and set in motion all the events leading up to this point.
“‘From where we begin, we always return’,” said Maul, slowly. He slumped back in his command chair and stared unseeing at the viewscreen. “To a desert planet with twin suns.”
The spaceport of Mos Eisley was still more full of lifeforms than Maul would have preferred, but with so many beings covered to avoid the suns’ glare, hardly anyone glanced at his dark hood and robes. Once his ship was securely—or as securely as might be expected—docked on the edge of town, Maul spent a brief stint exploring the area, viewing the items in the sleepy market and listening for whispers of Kenobi. When he heard none, he purchased a waterskin of good size, took a small handful of ration bars, and—lacking direction—set off on his speeder south towards Anchorhead.
The landscape was harsh and riddled with crags and canyons. Here and there Maul caught the occasional glimpse of one of the Tuskens, but no one challenged him, and he skimmed between the sheer cliff walls, winding his way south.
It was strange in the extreme, to be back in the unchanging desert, when he himself had been so thoroughly changed. The pale sand and blue sky blinded, and the unrelenting glare of the suns stole the moisture from his mouth and eyes. He stopped at the hottest part of the day and crouched in the shadow of his speeder to slake his thirst. It might have been easier to garner shade in one of the canyons, but he’d no desire to provoke hostility from that particular quarter.
Anchorhead proved no more fruitful, and in a fit of pique, Maul stopped and bought a handful of small, stuffed pastries and a lukewarm bottle of some local tea, sweet and strong with volatile oils of mint, and sat eating in the shadow of a building and scowling at all who dared glance his way.
He’d hoped—perhaps rather naively—that he would sense Kenobi when he arrived on planet, but the man appeared to have hidden himself thoroughly. Tatooine was a small planet, but it was still desolate and harsh, with regions of near-uninhabited desert large beyond reckoning. How long might Maul spend searching the sands, sifting through the endless dunes and rough outcroppings of stone?
And why would Kenobi come to this place in particular? Only to hide? Was he working to some greater purpose?
Protecting something?
Surely if Kenobi had truly invited Maul to join him, he would have left some kind of beacon?
As Maul worked his way through the last of his remaining pastries, a voice addressed him. A child’s voice, high and curious.
“Are you from Mos Espa?”
The speaker was a small, human boy with sandy hair, likely no more than six. Maul lowered his bottle to look at him, and felt a disconcerting jolt of recognition, as though time had looped back upon itself.
The little boy had thrown himself to the boiling sands, but Maul’s focus was on the Jedi. His blood up and his saber lit, the lust for revenge burning like a bonfire within him. The boy rolled out of the way of the speeder and Maul caught a split-second glimpse of his face.
“Mister?” said the boy.
Maul stared at the child with Anakin Skywalker’s face, a veritable glowing star in the Force, and found himself at a loss for words.
“Can you talk?” said the child. “I’m sorry, Aunt Beru is always telling me not to assume people can talk like me. Do you want me to leave?”
“I can speak,” said Maul. “And, no, I am not from Mos Espa.”
The boy’s face brightened. “Are you an off-worlder then? I’ve never seen anyone like you.”
“There is no one like me,” said Maul imperiously. “But yes, I am from off-world. I’m looking for a...friend of mine.”
“All the way out here?”
Maul nodded. “He’s human, like you.”
“I don’t know very many humans,” said the boy. “Uncle Owen says most of them live up near cities like Mos Eisley, where there’s more—what did he call it—‘economic opportunities’. Only people out here are the Tuskens, and moisture farmers like us.”
“I see. My friend is…” Maul struggled to think of a way to describe Kenobi that didn’t involve the word Jedi . “He is an old man, with a beard, reddish, though it’s turning white as his hair, and blue eyes, like the sky. He’s probably quiet, and keeps to himself.”
The boy cocked his head and scrutinized Maul with a look that only a being that could sense the eldritch currents of the Force displayed. It always reminded Maul of the way Sidious would look at him, open and curious and deceptively disarming. Maul wondered if the boy ever used such queer focus on his caretakers.
He felt the boy’s consciousness bump against his own, and had to restrain himself from either striking back or rolling over to mentally bare his throat. He was clumsy, in the way of children, scraping obliviously across the surface of Maul’s thoughts and provoking a mild headache.
“You’re looking for Old Ben,” announced the boy.
Maul straightened, focus aligning like a blaster shot. “Ben?”
The boy waved his arm vaguely in the direction of the western horizon. “I’ve seen him in the market but he lives out that way, I think. By the Wastes. Uncle Owen says not to go that way because it’s dangerous and Ben is, you know.”
“Is what?”
“Weird.”
Maul’s hearts leapt, and he felt the still-strange sensation of his lips curling into a smile.
“That he is. Thank you, boy, you’ve been a great help.” Maul chewed the inside of his cheek. “Tell me, what is your name?”
The boy grinned in return. “I’m Luke. Luke Skywalker.”
Not protecting something. Protecting someone. Kenobi, you wily bastard.
Maul leapt up, making a line for his speeder. “Then get back to your caretakers, Luke Skywalker.” He displayed a grin full of teeth at the boy. “And maybe someday we shall meet again.”
Luke beamed at him. “I’d like that, mister.”
Maul kicked his speeder to life, and took off towards the northwest.
Maul approached the Jundland Wastes along the rocky edge of the Western Dune Sea. The suns finally set, plunging the temperature around him and the dry wind crept up into the spaces of his robes to chill his skin. He considered stopping and digging a foxhole in which to sleep, but a thin thread of compulsion drew him onward.
He parked the speeder on the top of a gentle rise, and looked out across the darkened dunes, waves mirrored beneath the glass-still sea of stars above them.
Where are you, Kenobi?
Then, to the north, set against the rising spires of the Wastes, Maul caught the smallest glimpse of a pinprick of light, warm and golden, like a star fallen to rest.
The light of a fire.
He was on his speeder in an instant, triangulating the position from the stars. He kicked the engine to life and launched the speeder forwards, streaking across the sands towards the distant, yellow light.
The firepit was dug in the shallow bowl of a dune, within sight of the shadowy megaliths. The fire had burned low, and Maul’s eyes, shaped for darkness, could see the remnants of repeated burnings, ashes carpeting the pale sand.
A beacon, an invitation.
The fire was tended by a single occupant, hunched, hooded, and cloaked.
Maul coasted his speeder to a halt a fair distance away and dismounted. He found, to his faint shame, that his hearts were pounding. The figure didn’t move as he approached.
It was only once Maul reached the circle of low-burning flames, that Kenobi lowered his hood.
Maul thought he’d been prepared for the sight of him, but that had been a lie. The lines of Kenobi’s face, the creeping white in his beard and hair, those were different. At a glance he might have been mistaken for another old man. But the eyes, the eyes were the same. As they’d been on Naboo. On Mandalore.
“You are alive.”
“From a certain point of view,” said Kenobi wryly, though his eyes were serious. “And you took your time. I’ve been waiting out here each evening, to see if you’d arrive.”
“Your directions were shoddy.”
“Were they?” Kenobi smiled slightly, and the sight did unfamiliar things to the rate of Maul’s hearts. “I suppose I should have been more clear.”
“What...what were you expecting? Of my arrival?”
Kenobi shrugged, his mouth flattened. “That, I suppose, is up to you.” He nodded at the sand beside him, where Maul could see laid out two objects. A lightsaber and...
“What’s in the thermos?”
“Tea. Would you like some?”
Maul scrutinized the items. He couldn’t deny, even here, faced with the profound relief of Kenobi’s continued existence, that some part of him still didn’t desire retribution, challenge. Kenobi’s eyes were wary, watching, and Maul knew he would fight him if pressed. But there was just a shade of hope in them too, like the way he’d looked at Maul just before he’d kissed him.
Maul knelt on the sand, unclipped his saberstaff, and set it aside. “Yes, I think.”
Kenobi’s face actually brightened, and he moved to comply. The tea was cool, minty, like the one Maul had drunk in Anchorhead, and Kenobi allowed his hand to linger on the light, metal cup as Maul took it, though their fingers didn’t quite touch.
“I wondered why you had come here,” said Maul. “Why this planet in particular. But I met your child in the Anchorhead marketplace.”
“My child?”
“Luke.”
The atmosphere changed immediately, and Kenobi’s eyes grew wary. Maul hastily backpedaled. “He’s fine. It’s fine. He gave me directions, that’s all. Though I’m surprised you wouldn’t think I’d wonder why you were looking out for Vader’s son.”
Kenobi sucked in air and the tense lines of his robes shoulders relaxed a bit. “I—someone had to. He’s important.”
“He’s powerful, like his father.”
“What of it?”
“He’ll need training.”
“Not from you.”
Maul held up his hand in a placating gesture. “I didn’t come to have this conversation. I told you; I let him alone. I just hope...you know what you’re doing.”
Kenobi’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t. He only...he’s all that’s left of Anakin.”
“The Chosen One, who would bring balance to the Force,” said Maul quietly. “Seems a rather brutal balancing.”
“He might be the only one who can bring down Vader.”
“You would pit him against his own father? Surprisingly brutal, for a Jedi.”
“The Jedi are no more.”
Maul sighed. “Maybe. But the Sith are hardly better off. And…” He trailed off, thought of Vader, clanking around the desolate, monstrous prison on Mustafar, a dead-eyed and burned husk. Thought of awkward half-questions about locks on doors. “Does he know? Anakin Skywalker? That he is a father?”
Kenobi shook his head. “And he cannot know.”
“Undoubtedly. But…” Maul looked up at the stars above them. “I think one day, he may be ready to know.”
Kenobi stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. But remember, Kenobi, I wore Sidious’s chains longer than anyone alive in the galaxy. They are strong, and cutting, and destructive, but they are not unbreakable.”
The look on Kenobi’s face was the most devastating thing Maul had ever seen. A fractured, monstrous tangle of grief and fear and pain. Pain of betrayal, pain of hope deliberately crushed. A festering, self-mutilation of guilt.
Actually alarmed, Maul set down his tea and scooted around the fire, hands outstretched to do...what he wasn’t sure. This was so far outside the realm of his experience as to be on the other side of the galaxy, but the subconscious part of his brain urged him on, said closer, touch, protect.
Kenobi flinched when Maul’s hand came to rest on his arm, but he didn’t reach for his saber, and he didn’t pull away. Maul could see him fighting for control, and inched closer, trying to translate a bundle of his own unhelpful instincts that clashed with conditioned responses that told him he had a dangerous foe entirely too close. Desperate, he groped with his free hand and unclasped the front of his robe, opened up a space. “Here.”
Kenobi blinked at him in bewilderment. “What?”
Unable to explain his intentions in any way that made sense, Maul tugged Kenobi towards him. “Come here.”
For a moment he thought Kenobi didn’t understand, but then the man shifted, rolled into him. He was too large to properly fit under Maul’s robes, and his legs and feet stuck out. But he leaned on Maul’s shoulder and Maul folded them both in a ragged cocoon of dark cloth. Pressed his chin to Kenobi’s whitened hair and pressed thoughts of safe, and concealed and the inexplicable tangle of attachment that he felt for the other man into the Force around them, with the same clumsiness with which he’d once painted the walls of his room in blood.
Kenobi gripped the front of Maul’s tunic, and his breathing eased, naturally rather than the Forced control of the manipulation of vital functions. He tugged at the edge of Maul’s robes and Maul released them to let in air. But Kenobi didn’t distance himself, just slipped his arms around Maul’s body, near his waist, where flesh became metal, and squeezed gently.
Maul could have kept them propped half-upright with strength alone, but he allowed Kenobi’s weight to push them into the chill sand. The fire was burning down to embers and it changed the quality of the light, encasing them in shadows. Kenobi shifted against him, and Maul let himself succumb to another instinct.
Kenobi moved into the kiss with a quiet sound, touched Maul’s face and stroked the jagged patterns of his tattoos and up to the spaces between his horns. At some point they lost the alignment between their mouths, but Maul didn’t stop, rubbing his nose and cheeks along the roughness of Kenobi’s beard while Kenobi murmured encouragement.
At last they both lapsed into stillness, an alien tranquility to Maul, but one that left him as strangely stimulated as a good fight, and far more satisfied than a fight had ever left him. He listened to them breathe together.
“I killed him,” whispered Kenobi to the dark.
“Who?”
“Anakin Skywalker. Dismembered him and left him for dead. Left him to suffer and be remade into something monstrous. You said that Jedi do not leave their kills half-finished, but again I did, and again it cost everything.”
Maul digested this. “There is nothing to be done for the past. But the future…you said that Hope was still a thing you possessed.”
“Sometimes. In my better moments.”
“Then keep your hope for the father as well as the son.”
Kenobi’s arms tightened around him. “You’re really here, aren’t you?”
“I told you once,” said Maul. “I have never forgotten you. And I never intend to.”
“We should get out of the open.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Yes, I think.”
He helped Kenobi upright and together they kicked sand over the glowing embers. Kenobi had brought no means of transport, and insisted it was not far, but Maul coaxed him up on the speeder regardless and they coasted across the sands towards the jagged skyline of stone. Kenobi’s dwelling was set low, embedded in the cliff face, though Maul could see where parts of the compound wound their way skywards, and glimpse the shadowy finials of moisture collectors.
Kenobi activated a light as they entered, a greenish bulb that had the look of a repurposed ship fixture, and ushered Maul into the living space. The furniture was low, and mostly carved from existing stone, but Kenobi had layered the surfaces with mismatched but colorful cushions and blankets.
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Then sit with me?”
Maul did, and Kenobi seemed to take his earlier fumblings as permission to stretch out alongside him, bodies touching. Something in his eyes shifted, and he reached to trace the cord at Maul’s neck, lifting the bead and rubbing it between his fingers.
“You know why I am here,” Kenobi said. “But what do you intend to do? Now that you’re at my side?”
“I would stay there.”
“Abandon your life to tend a desert garden and take tea with an old man?”
“Yes. In a moment.” Maul wound his fingers around Kenobi’s wrist to feel the pulse point. “You cannot know what it has been like, to think you gone.”
Kenobi bent his head and Maul felt the tickling passage of his lips and beard across his knuckles. “No, I cannot. But I know what it has been to be here, alone in the unchanging desert with only my memories for company.” He sighed. “And I also know that you run a rather extensive criminal organization. If you vanish, you will leave a power vacuum which presents its own dangers to the galaxy.”
Maul felt his shoulders slump. “So you don’t want me here.”
“To the contrary, I want you here to a baffling degree. But my wants must take a back seat to the greater good.”
Maul chewed his lip in thought. “What if I could turn my organization’s goals in line with yours?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Rebellion flourishes in the shadowy corners of the galaxy. They’ve leadership, but they lack funding, and muscle. I can obtain those things. Or retain the latter if I can obtain the former.”
“You’re...you’re suggesting that the Rebellion hire your mercenaries?”
“I’m suggesting that I hire my own mercenaries to back the Rebellion. And I have contacts with weapons dealers and warlords that hate the Empire, and won’t deal directly with the Rebels.”
“You have the funding to do that?”
Maul paused. Therein lay the crux of the matter. He stared in thoughtful silence at Kenobi’s living room for several minutes, and came to a conclusion.
“Marry me,” said Maul.
Kenobi promptly choked on his own spit. After what seemed to Maul a needlessly exaggerated coughing fit, he cleared his throat and blinked at Maul through streaming eyes. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have a last name,” said Maul. He gestured at the house around them. “You have a permanent address. References. A history of payment. You have credit. ”
Kenobi stared at him. “I’m not following.”
“I need payroll and the IBC refuses to grant it.”
“You’re...asking me to marry you so you can take out a loan?”
“Not only that, Kenobi, don’t be obtuse.”
“A loan to fund the Rebellion?”
“To keep my organization from going to pieces, and by extension, fund the Rebellion.”
“Wouldn’t your organization going to pieces be a net good for the galaxy?”
“Perhaps,” said Maul. “But it depends on whether you’d see a significant number of well-trained mercenary fighters let loose on the Empire, or the galaxy at large.”
Kenobi’s expression was dumbfounded. “You’re serious.”
“When have I ever been anything but serious?”
“I...suppose I can’t argue with that.” Kenobi looked at their overlaid hands. “You’re really asking me to marry you?”
“Do you deny the soundness of the proposition?”
Kenobi’s skin heated. “No. No, it’s certainly worth the difference it could make in the long-term costs of war. It’s just...rather sudden, isn’t it?”
“I’m working on a time limit.” Maul swallowed and felt his hearts skip uncomfortably. “Did you...want to be courted first?”
“I—I honestly don’t know what that would look like.” Kenobi’s brows furrowed. “I’ve not courted, so to speak, since I was a youth.”
“I’ve never courted anyone at all.”
“Then maybe it’s better to start with the business aspect of it, and work from there.”
“Are you saying yes, or no?” Maul averted his gaze. “And in this hypothetical ‘business’, am I still allowed to kiss you?”
“Oh,” said Kenobi. “Yes. And yes, most definitely allowed.”
He reached and cupped the back of Maul’s skull, pressed their foreheads together, and let their breath mingle for several long moments.
“We’ll have to pick up a contract in Anchorhead tomorrow,” Kenobi said, and there was something downright fond in his tone. “But we can get started on the consummation tonight, if you like?”
Maul hauled Kenobi in and kissed him, and as he always had, Kenobi met him with equal fervor.
The sun creeping across the floor through one of the slit windows and the tingling feeling he tended to associate with impending assassination woke Maul. Bewilderingly, there did not at first appear to be any such assassination attempts forthcoming. Kenobi’s face was pressed against Maul’s bare shoulder, eyes closed, the space beneath his cheek slightly damp with drool, and his robe, draped across them both, had slid to his waist. Maul cautiously turned his head to survey the room, and felt the horns on the back of his scalp catch on the deep furrows they’d ripped into the decorative pillow that supported his head.
Plagueis’s ghost was sitting in one of the empty chairs across the living room, fingers steepled.
Maul swallowed, fighting the feeling that he was supposed to be cowering. “You said I should seize what satisfaction I could in life.”
Indeed I did.
“We’re both consenting adults,” said Maul, desperately trying to remember the wording on one of the pamphlets an underling had once not-so-subtly dropped on a meeting room floor. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
I never said you did.
“Are you...angry?”
I’m simply trying to grasp why at no point you saw fit to mention you were having issues with the IBC, despite spending weeks in the presence of a Muun.
“Oh.”
Or if you needed credits, why you simply did not say so.
“I...you have credits?”
Plagueis gave him a look. At one point I fully intended to live forever. I have credits.
“But, you’re dead?”
And you are not. And thus fully capable of making withdrawals with my information. Which I will provide to you. I believe you might be familiar with the term ‘identity theft’?
“I don’t understand?”
I’m just hoping you realize that you are not actually beholden to some absurd scheme to marry a Jedi in order to extricate yourself from your financial troubles. Plagueis regarded him a moment. Unless the goal of this absurd scheme was in fact to marry a Jedi, in which case, congratulations on a well-executed plan.
Kenobi mumbled sleepily into Maul’s skin and blinked through crusted eyes, then shot off of the couch with a shout. He landed on the floor in an untidy sprawl, robe just barely preserving what was left of his modesty, his eyes wide and fixed on Plagueis’s ghost.
“What is that?” he gasped.
Plagueis favored him with a superior look. How rude. I have a name, you know.
“My apologies,” said Maul. “I...forgot to mention him. Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, meet my old Master’s Master, Darth Plagueis.”
Kenobi turned alarmed eyes to Maul. “You brought a Sith ghost into my house?”
Shouldn’t it be ‘our house’, based on all the nonsense you got up to last night? said Plagueis, unhelpfully.
Kenobi actually turned red to the roots of his hair. “You watched? ”
Don’t flatter yourself. Only until it became clear in the direction things were headed. My congratulations on your impending nuptials, Jedi scum.
“He’s assisting me with thwarting Sidious,” Maul interjected somewhat desperately. “He’s arguably the only reason I didn’t end up dead on Mustafar.”
“You went to Mustafar? ”
“I told you your directions were terrible.”
“I…” Kenobi looked like he was reeling under the onslaught of too much information. “Why did you bring a Sith ghost into our house?”
“He’s...possibly the closest I have to family?”
Kenobi’s expression looked momentarily torn somewhere between pity and horror, but to his credit, he pulled himself together, climbed off the floor, slipped his robe up and around him, and bowed warily in Plagueis’s direction. “I meant no disrespect, but you must understand my...reservations. May I ask your intentions?”
Plagueis’s eyes slitted in amusement. Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that?
Kenobi looked taken aback. “I…”
Do you intend to make an honest lifeform out of my grand-Apprentice?
Maul wondered if he should mention the fact that he hadn’t actually been an Apprentice, but decided to keep his mouth shut as Kenobi spluttered a mix of assurances and objections until Plagueis cut him off with a wave of one ghostly hand.
Calm yourself, Jedi. I have little remaining interest in galactic domination—and little ability to execute such efforts if I were. My only satisfaction in death will come from seeing my killer fall, and in that, our interests are aligned.
Kenobi rubbed the bridge of his nose as if he were battling a headache. “Let me...make some tea. And then breakfast.” He turned a pointed look on Maul. “And you can explain everything. Including what you got up to on Mustafar.”
Maul climbed off the couch and approached somewhat tentatively, but Kenobi caught his hand, and gave it a reassuring squeeze, before pointing him towards the kitchen.
Later, half-dressed, breakfasting on cooked, salted meat and a kind of gritty, pastelike gruel that Kenobi had seasoned with something floral and sweet, watching his new lover argue with the ghost of his new almost-Master, Maul found himself suffused with an unfamiliar sensation. A warm one, reminiscent of a full belly, a safe place to sleep. Reminiscent of what he experienced when Plagueis had told him he’d done well, or when Kenobi had whispered words of praise into the dark as they’d twined together.
Happiness. You feel happy.
True, there would be dangers to come. The looming, double shadow of Sidious and Vader. The uncertainty of war. The endless complications of the Rebellion. But for the first time since he’d fallen on Naboo, Maul felt aligned with the flow of destiny, content with the path ahead.
He smiled to himself, and reached for Kenobi’s hand.