Chapter Text
Mara has never been prouder than when Asyr settles early. Her tutors and trainers had carefully marked out schedules and timelines that account for every benchmark that Mara is expected to achieve, year by year. Those timelines had predicted that Asyr would settle when Mara was fourteen, but he shifts into the form of a night felinx when Mara is thirteen, a whole year early. It’s a good body for stealth, her trainers tell her, and praise them for it.
There are night felinxes on the few Core Worlds that still have scraps of wilderness where wild creatures can hide. They’re rare, but not unheard of. There are a few in the Coruscant zoo, a place that Mara had only been a couple of times when she was very little, before it was deemed too frivolous an excursion for a young lady with her training regime.
Asyr has a long face, long legs, sleek fur as dark as the void of space, and narrow ears that end in tufts of fur. His long tail tapers into a puff of black fur flecked with white. His eyes are an exact match for hers. Mara has seen other dæmons on Coruscant that take the form of larger felinxes, but Asyr’s head is level with her hip, and she loves that she can place her hand between his ears as they stand side by side. She spends days running her hands over his short lustrous fur in a combination of awe and fierce love.
She isn’t sure what triggered the shift from Asyr’s childish, unfixed state to the elegant creature he will remain for the rest of their lives. Looking back, she recalls that the month before he settled her instructors had increased her workload and lengthened her training hours. Mara had struggled to cope with her expanded schedule. She remembers feeling like she’d been dunked underwater, fighting against the exhaustion at the end of every day. Shortly before Asyr settled, they finally fell into a rhythm, adjusting to the steady, relentless pace of training and lessons.
Among those lessons are the occasional session with her master, the Emperor. She has the latent talent for a secret ability that will allow, with years of special training, some of the powers that he has honed over a lifetime. Her talent is small, but he promises that he’ll train her to use it to the best of her ability, all the better to serve him. He plants his voice in her head, giving her the gift to hear him anywhere in the galaxy. For days afterwards, she feels like she’s floating along like a rainbow soapbubble, buoyed by the memory that he chose her—her alone—to hear his voice and train to be his Emperor’s Hand.
“Now that Asyr has settled,” Kalen Adjo, Mara’s physical training instructor says, “we can begin the adult program. Mara, Asyr, this is Anja and Emil.”
A trainer Mara has never seen before stands alongside Kalen. Anja is tall and lean, with hair so pale it looks white in the harsh lighting of the dojo. Her eyebrows and eyelashes disappear against her lightly tanned skin. Her dæmon is a short-haired river felinx, sleek and grey, with wide webbed paws and strange double eyelids.
“Emil will be teaching Asyr.” The words are no sooner out of Kalen’s mouth then Emil explodes into motion, leaping towards Asyr with claws and fangs extended. Asyr flips backward, tripping over his own feet.
Anja watches placidly, not even flinching when Asyr swipes Emil’s side with his claws. Emil lunges for Asyr and Asyr barely manages to dart out of reach, but it doesn’t last long. He can’t shift into a larger or swifter animal as he’s accustomed to doing, and it throws him off balance. In seconds, Emil has Asyr pinned to the mats, tail flicking back and forth steadily.
Mara feels weak and shaken.
At a nod from Anja, Emil releases Asyr, who slinks back to Mara’s side, ears flat, radiating shame and disgust. Mara expects a dressing down and dreads Kalen’s disappointment, but her trainer looks pleased.
“Emil will teach Asyr how to use his adult form—stealth, defense, how to fight and maim other dæmons. Anja will serve as your sparring partner.”
They bow to each other, and the first lesson begins.
“You want to kiss her,” Asyr accuses Mara as he sulkily cleans his coat.
“No I don’t.”
Asyr glares at her before turning his head to work at his paw with his teeth. “Yes, you do.”
Asyr doesn’t like Emil. That doesn’t surprise her; he doesn’t like anyone’s dæmons. Mara worries about him being lonely.
She doesn’t kiss Anja. When Anja pins her to the floor during a bout, Mara’s face goes red and her brain fuzzes out like a defective holo. It’s hard to focus on the lesson when she keeps staring at Anja’s lips or the curve of her breast under her workout shirt.
But she doesn’t say anything.
While Asyr grows agile and clever under Emil’s instruction, Mara learns new holds and throws, partnering with Anja under Kalen’s steady eye. Asyr still hates Anja’s dæmon. On breaks between lessons, Mara asks Anja tentative questions about her routine and holofilm preferences—it’s good practice for intelligence gathering. Anja is serious about her training, and tells Mara she intends to compete in the Chandrillan Games in two years, and then apply for service in the military. There aren’t many women in the Emperor’s military, but Anja says that if anyone can make shock trooper, she can, and Mara has no doubt she will. Asyr ignores Emil, sitting as far away from him as possible, eyes narrowed to green slits.
After months of practice, Emil judges Asyr capable on his own and Kalen deems this particular course of training complete. Anja and Emil are transferred back to their original dojo.
Mara never sees her again.
Luke is the last of his friends with an unsettled dæmon.
When they were younger, it hadn’t even occurred to him to worry about when Miré might settle, he only wondered what form she might take. Luke spent hours pouring over galactic bestiaries, wondering whether Miré would settle as a saber cat or a thranta or a more common Tatooine creature.
The speculation drifts through his childhood. What sort of animal do you think your dæmon will choose? asked by adults with indulgent smiles and between children as their dæmons flit from form to from in impromptu races across the desert sand. They’re just as likely to talk about a new holofilm or fall into a game of Tuskans and Stormtroopers, their dæmons morphing into large, war-like creatures.
The topic gets kicked up again like a flurry of sand when Markus and Teni come to visit. Markus is related to him somehow; a second cousin of Beru’s who lives out near Mos Espa. Luke hates when Beru’s Mos Espa relatives come to visit. Beru and Owen insist that he has to play with them even though they’re all bullies, and every one of them is bigger and meaner than he is.
Teni has recently settled into a dewback, squat and and leathery, with small, stupid black eyes. She’s smaller than a full-grown dewback, but still large enough to stand higher than Markus’s head. Markus is clearly proud of her, and shows her off as the other children from Anchorhead gather around.
“I bet you’re jealous I got a dæmon this big,” Markus says as he strokes her side.
“I don’t want a dewback dæmon,” Luke shrugs. Teni is slow and plodding and the dewback form suits her, but it would never suit Miré.
Markus scoffs. “You should be so lucky.”
Camie laughs. “His dæmon’ll probably settle as a stink lizard. Or a worm,” she says, and sings, “Weemo Wormie, weemo Wormie.”
Luke flings himself at Camie even though she’s taller than him and he knows he’ll be eating sand in a matter of minutes. Miré leaps to his defense in the form of an anooba, and Camie’s Borus, who has never been all that imaginative, turns into a larger male anooba and swatts Miré down with his paw.
The breath rushes out of Luke and he topples over. Camie doesn’t hesitate to use the opportunity to kick him. Luke doesn’t hate Camie—she’s just Camie, and this is how she is—and he knows that she wouldn’t have kicked him at all if Markus hadn’t been watching. Markus laughs nastily.
“Leave him alone,” Biggs calls. Japeta shifts into a dewback just as large as Teni and wedges herself between Miré and Borus. Luke rolls to his feet again and races away from the group, just to put some distance between himself and Markus. Miré turns into a small urusai and glides along behind him on leathery wings.
He can hear Markus’s laugh tailing him over the sand.
Luke grows taller than Camie, at least, though he’s shorter than most of the other boys in Anchorhead. As the dæmons of the older children in Luke’s generation begin to settle, the question of when and what sort of animal becomes a constant topic of speculation.
After the great drought, Fixer’s dæmon settles as a dwarf ronto. Biggs’s Japeta follows a year later. She becomes a desert bird of prey, a tawny sand hawk with a long tail and a spattering of red feathers across her breast. Borus takes the form of a flat-faced tooka, the meanest tooka Luke has ever seen.
Miré is the only one that doesn’t settle. She seems happy to flit from a jakrab to a scurrier to a sketto. Mimicking Japeta, she takes the form of a hawk and flies tight circles around Luke’s head, never more than the few yards—the bounds of the distance a dæmon can be separated from her human—and then minutes later she lumbers across the sand as miniature krayt dragon.
Beru tells him not to worry. Miré will settle when she’s ready, she tells Luke. “She’ll know when it’s time.”
There are more than a dozen throne rooms scattered throughout the Imperial Palace. Each one serves a different purpose, from grand staterooms that play host to delegations from far-off planets that wish to beg the Emperor’s favor, to amphitheaters where honors are bestowed on deserving servants of his Imperial Majesty. Every single one designed to glorify the grandeur of the Emperor.
There are no windows in the Silver Throne Room, a long, dark chamber deep in the heart of the Imperial Palace. The black marble floors are shot through with streaks of white that gleam silver in the light that shines from fixtures set into the floor, beams reaching up the angular walls and disappearing into the dark. A set of tall folding screens the color of mist flank the silver throne on a short dias at one end of the room. The screens hide the room’s only other exit and the Crimson Guards that are never more than a few meters away from their Emperor.
The throne itself is a work of art, unlike any other throne in the Emperor’s palace, a construction of silver tubes twisting around each other and into the vague shape of a chair. Mara thinks there’s something grotesque about the curving, bulbous lines of the throne, the metal coiled like a mass of maggots. The hall is designed for the Emperor to receive petitions from members of the Court, the long promenade from the door to the throne giving the petitioner plenty of time to reflect on their reasons for taking up the Emperor’s time.
Mara touches Asyr’s head, once, to steady herself before they begin their approach along the length of the hall. The throne room is just wide enough to allow courtiers and supplicants to line the walls and watch as the Emperor weighs each case brought before him, though none of them stand there now. Today the hall is empty except for her master, who sits implacably on his throne, and Lord Vader, a black shadow beside him. The only sound is the tap of her footsteps against the marble floor as she approaches the throne and the suck-hiss of Vader’s breath.
No one has ever seen Vader’s dæmon.
Just being the presence of a human without a dæmon makes her skin crawl. Mara’s heard the stories; that Vader’s dæmon was removed with cabalistic Sith alchemy, or that he’s a half-ghost who doesn’t have a dæmon at all—she’s not sure which story is more horrible. She prides herself on being able to hold her nerve even though every instinct in her body is telling her to run.
Facing her terror of Vader is a worthy price to pay to be in the presence of her master; in his presence, Vader is inconsequential. He is the heart of the Empire, the source of all its great strength. Mara, even with her slight abilities, can sense the power contained within him, like staring into a black hole, a pulsing void that knows her better than she knows herself.
She sinks to her knees before him. Beside her, Asyr drops to the ground as well, his head bent in a mirror to hers.
“Mara, my dear.”
She raises her head at his voice. Beside her, Asyr quivers with excitement.
“I’ve called you here today for your final test.”
She knew—had somehow known from the moment she’d woken up—that this was the day, the day that she would prove herself worthy of the title her master had chosen for her. If she passes the final test.
Silver glints in the Emperor’s hood as he steps down from the dias to stand in front of her. Nimué slinks onto his shoulder and dances elegantly onto his outstretched hand. A spindly leg extends to point at Mara, and a quicksilver thrill rushes through her.
“I have been studying ancient texts—texts forbidden to anyone but myself—on the ways of the Jedi. The Jedi were cunning and corrupt, but they had unusual talents, not unlike we do.”
Mara feels a swell of pride at the word we, though she knows her small talents can’t compare with the immense power of the Sith Master before her.
“The texts indicate that some of these skills can be acquired by non-Jedi—under certain circumstances.” He pauses, letting the weight of his words rest in the air.
“It is an experiment,” he confides in her. “A test. One that I hope you will be equal to.” He drops a hand near her face and she feels Nimué’s cold touch as a thin appendage rests against her cheek. “Are you ready to be tested, my child?”
“Yes, my master,” she says, and although she doesn’t entirely understand what he means, she trusts him implicitly.
“Good.” He withdraws Nimué and returns to his throne, hands folding over coiled armrests. The phantom spider dæmon disappears again in the folds of his hood. “You may stand.”
She can feel Vader moving closer and her skin prickles. Asyr’s fur stands on end, but he keeps still at Mara’s side.
“You will not move from that spot, Mara,” her master says, voice like stone. His eyes gleam golden from underneath the shadow of his hood. “No matter what happens.”
Mara cries out as Vader’s fist closes around the back of Aysr’s neck. Asyr thrashes in his grip, flinging his body back and forth in a futile attempt to break free. Vader turns away from Mara and begins to walk down the long promenade, ignoring the dæmon thrashing in his hand. He doesn’t even flinch when Asyr digs his claws into the leather bracer on his arm and tears it away, revealing an unyielding metal skeleton beneath.
He’s pulling them apart.
Mara feels like all the air is been sucked out of her lungs. If the bond between them breaks, they’ll both die.
This is the test. She must not move, even though every instinct in her screams to run to Asyr and rip Vader’s arm from its socket, no matter what it cost her.
It’s the cost that keeps her frozen. It’s the weight of her Master’s presence behind her. She cannot fail him—she will not fail him. It takes every ounce of that will to hold herself in place.
Aysr goes limp in Vader’s grasp, flopping onto the floor and digging his claws into the marble. It barely slows Vader’s inexorable march down the hall, dragging her soul behind him. It feels as though Vader has thrust his hand into her chest and is tearing out her heart.
As Asyr is pulled further and further away from her, she can feel a strange pressure building around her, as if the air itself is vibrating around her, through her. The tips of her fingers go numb. For a few moments, she can sense unconsciousness swim up to her and she sways on her feet.
“No,” she hears her master hiss from behind her. “Do not pass out.”
She can sense his presence—like a dark thundercloud, heavy with the smell of sulfur—on the edge of her awareness as she pulls herself back from the fringes of unconsciousness. Mara’s knees give out, and the sharp pain as they hit the floor helps to keep her alert and her head high. She mustn’t move from her position—she mustn’t take her eyes off Asyr for even a second.
The pain in her chest is almost unbearable.
Aysr begins to scream, a piercing howl that makes all the small hairs on the back of her neck stiffen in response. Her breath comes in rough gasps. She presses her fist to her mouth, biting down so hard the taste of copper washes against her tongue.
Vader reaches the end of the hall and stands underneath the arch that frames the entrance to the throne room. Sculpted by the same artist as the throne, the arch’s silver tubes seem to seethe and writhe in Mara’s watery vision. She can see Asyr’s eyes gleam across the distance, full of rage and grief.
A strange feeling courses through her, as the intense pain in her chest eases as abruptly as rubber being snapped. She lets out a hiccuping cry, for fear that her connection to Asyr has been severed forever. But no, she can still feel him—alive and frightened and angry. There’s a distance to their bond now, as if a shadow has moved between them; the absolute clarity of the connection between their minds gone hazy, precise edges blurred.
Vader drops Asyr to the floor. For a second, Asyr lies at Vader’s feet, stunned, and then he scrambles up and clears the hall in a black blur. Within moments, he leaps into Mara’s arms and they collapse together to the floor, Mara sobbing into his fur.
Long minutes pass before she manages to pull herself together and kneel before her master again. Shame nearly swamps her; shame at her display of emotion and loss of control, shame at her tear-streaked face and bloody hands. She fists her hands to hide their shaking, and Asyr leans into her shoulder as support.
Vader has returned to his master’s side, expressionless mask tilted down to gaze at them. His prosthetic hand, the hand that had torn Asyr away from her, hangs loosely at his side, the bare metal glinting in the light. She has never hated anyone as much as she hates him in that moment.
“Well done, my child,” her master says, as he looks down on her with pleasure and pride.
That’s all that matters.
The lines in his face crease into paternal concern. “I know how difficult that was for you. You have achieved something remarkable today. The bond between you and your dæmon has been permanently altered. You will now be able to separate from your dæmon—for great distances and for as long as I command it.” His face crinkles in a tight-lipped smile. “Do you understand how valuable you are to me now?”
“Yes, master.”
“Good. Good. Rise.”
Mara does. The Emperor raises his hand in benediction, and Mara’s mouth goes dry.
“Mara Jade,” he intones. “You are now the Emperor’s Hand. Extension of my voice and will throughout the galaxy.”
The Emperor’s Hand. She should be suffused with victory, high on the triumph of earning the title she’d been working toward for most of her life. Instead she feels hollow, like there’s a crack running through her and everything she cared about has drained away.
The Emperor’s Hand. It rings through her head, over and over. She faced the sacrifice of her bond with Asyr, and came out of her trials with her master’s favor, and with a secret power that only belongs to them.
It should be enough.
She is the Emperor’s Hand, and no one can take that from her.
“He’s here!” Miré cries, leaping into the air. She changes from a sand lizard to a peko-peko in midair, darting above his head to see over the tall Rodian bartering with the flint dealer in front of them. Luke has to lean around the Rodian, stretching out sideways until he catches a glimpse of Old Ben on the other side of the marketplace.
The wizard has his hood up, shading his head and face from the sun, but there’s no doubt that he’s Old Ben from the Dune Sea. His dæmon, riding on his shoulder, is unmistakable. Luke doesn’t know her name. Her long, spindly legs are folded under pure white feathers. Hidden underneath that downy white are pinion feathers in iridescent shades—gold and bronze and shimmering red. There are iridescent notches on her long sharp beak as well, that catch the light when she turns her head, looking this way and that, her four eyes ever alert as Old Ben glides from stall to stall. She has a long, elegant neck, like some of the water birds in Luke’s dæmon bestiary, though he’s never been able to identify her species. Not a creature was ever native to Tatooine, nor one that belongs in the desert.
Luke and Miré dawdle at a lampta stall, and then duck behind a leather goods vendor, keeping their distance as they track Old Ben through the marketplace. Miré shifts into the same bird form as Ben’s dæmon and alights on Luke’s shoulder, though not before glancing around to make sure Uncle Owen isn’t watching them. Uncle Owen wouldn’t approve of their interest in the old wizard.
“I wouldn’t mind if you kept that form,” Luke tells her, running a finger along her beak.
“Maybe I will,” she says, preening. She spreads a wing and the multicolored feathers gleam in the sunlight. But she shifts back into the shape of bright blue peko-peko minutes later.
She constantly transforms into birds, insects, small winged reptiles—anything that can fly. Sometimes when Luke needs to get away from the homestead, he goes rock climbing on the bluffs in the Jundland Wastes. He and Miré sit on one of the wide ledges and watch the urusai glide on the updrafts for hours. He’s always been fascinated by anything that can take flight, and when he's not working on the old skyhopper in his Uncle’s garage, he usually has his gaze above the horizon, watching the sky. Dreaming of following his father’s footsteps and traveling to the stars.
Aunt Beru comments on it more than once. Uncle Owen doesn’t like it, Luke can tell.
Everyone’s convinced that when Miré finally chooses a permanent form, she’ll settle as some sort of bird. The other teenagers have already taken to calling him “birdbrain,” and while Luke isn’t thrilled about that, he likes the idea of Miré choosing a bird and he knows that she does too.
But it isn’t the shape of Ben’s dæmon that really interests Luke. It’s a rumor that Miré has heard, and that she and Luke have witnessed. Aunt Dama’s Lularian once told Miré that Old Ben’s dæmon could use wizard magic to travel great distances from her human. It sounded like something out of a bedtime story, a fable that Aunt Beru used to tell them before bed.
Then one day, out on the salt flats at the edge of the farm, Luke spotted Obi-Wan riding an eopie off in the distance. Riding alone. Luke watched him through his battered old macrobinoculars for a quarter of an hour until he spotted the old man’s dæmon, gliding in from the east. Even her altitude was far beyond what Miré could manage, and it was clear that she had flown at least a mile away from Old Ben.
The terrible pain that overtakes Luke and Miré when they attempt to separate more than a few yards doesn’t seem to affect Old Ben, and his dæmon is free to fly a significant distance from her other half. Luke hasn’t figured out how they do it, but he’s dying to know.
When Ben is drawn into a conversation with Old Lady Meru, Miré transforms into a green winged lizard and flits off, darting through the air to land on a barrel near their quarry. Ben’s dæmon turns toward her, blinking two of her four eyes, and extends her long neck in Miré’s direction. Miré bobs her lizard head as she speaks and the bird dæmon answers. Old Ben ignores them, as is polite.
After a brief, hushed conversation, Miré leaps into the air and glides back over to Luke. “Her name is Penelope,” she says.
“Penelope.” The strange name feels odd in Luke’s mouth.
“She’s a Basí river egret from a planet called Stewjon. She wouldn’t tell me anything else. She was nice, though.”
Luke didn’t really expect Ben dæmon to reveal the wizard’s secret, but he’s determined to figure it out, one way or another.
“I don’t like this,” Miré says. She’s taken the form of an animal covered in red plates like armor, large enough to block the door of the skyhopper.
“We won’t know until we try,” Luke says.
They’ve been testing the bond between them all month. Each day Luke runs a short distance from Miré, to the edge of the link, to see if the pain of separation lessons with practice. It doesn’t. Luke stands with tears in his eyes until they can’t stand it anymore, and Miré flies into his arms.
If repetition doesn’t make it any easier, what will? Will forcing a separation increase the distance between them permanently? Loosen their bond—or something worse?
The only way to find out is to test it.
After a frustrating month getting nowhere, Luke decides that they need to try something a little more drastic. He can force the distance between them. Fly the skyhopper beyond the range of the bond, leaving Miré behind in the desert. If Luke’s sealed in the skyhopper, neither of them will be able to back out of the experiment at the last moment. He picks a spot out in the Dune Sea, far enough away from the homestead that they won’t be disturbed, and Miré argues half-heartedly all the way there. They’ve made up their mind, and even though she can’t help voicing their doubts and fears, she knows she can’t convince him otherwise.
He lands the skyhopper and plants a small marker where Miré will stand, so that he can measure the exact distance later—a small stab at testing the process in a scientific manner. It’s when he turns back to the skyhopper that he finds Miré between him and the door.
“It’s going to hurt,” she says in a small voice.
“I know,” Luke says. He throws his arms around her neck. “But we can handle it. I know we can.”
He coaxes her away from the door. At first she goes, grumbling, lumbering away from the door under his guiding hand—but then she transforms, quick as a jump to lightspeed, into a large lizard and skitters away from him. Ignoring the pang at her rejection, he turns back to the skyhopper and steps inside the small cockpit. There’s a sudden scuffle as Miré throws herself at the door to the skyhopper right as Luke reaches over to pull it shut, forcing him to shove her bodily away.
(That moment will haunt his dreams for months).
Luke straps himself into the pilot seat and starts the ignition sequence, flipping switches with shaking fingers. He can sense Miré circling the skyhopper, backing off as the engine revs. Before liftoff, she darts in front of the vehicle, scratching and beating her wings against the transparasteel viewport. Luke shudders and looks away, pulling back on the yoke to ease the craft into the air. He catches glimpses of Miré through the viewport, in the form of a desert falcon, hovering as near the skyhopper as she can as it coasts forward.
Luke increases speed gradually, feeling the stretch and tug of their bond as Miré struggles to keep up—in the form of a falcon, an urusai, a great winged lizard. She won’t be able to keep up for long, and the pain begins to swell in his chest as the distance between them increases.
Sealed in the skyhopper, he can’t hear the frantic beat of her wings, the strain in her breath, or the sound of her voice screaming across the sand. He chants her name under his breath like a prayer. His heart is thrumming like the wings of a Bestine thistle bee, hammering in his chest, like it could leap out and join the tormented dæmon struggling alongside the craft. It hurts more than he could imagine.
There’s a strange feeling in his body, like he can sense everything around him at once, and pinpointing Miré’s exact position in space is easy as breathing. She’s so far away—too far away—and the distance hurts. All the fears he stubbornly pushed to the back of his mind stream through his head as fast as the wind rushing by the skyhopper. What if his connection to Miré shattered and the shock killed her?
He pulls back on the yoke and the skyhopper leaps forward toward the horizon. The pain in his chest is almost unbearable—almost.
The horizon blurs, as he pushes the skyhopper towards it. Lightheaded and dizzy, blackness begins to creep into the edges of his vision. He can still sense Miré, dwindling in the distance, the connection between them stretched out like a golden ribbon of light, pulled thin but not broken.
He cuts the throttle and pushes the ship into a sloppy, wavering descent, sweat-slick hands sliding on the controls as the ship dips toward the desert floor. The impact tosses him forward into the yoke, the force of it punching through him—but by then unconsciousness claims him and he’s beyond caring.
When Luke wakes, everything hurts.
His entire chest is bruised, and his head is pounding. He turns to ask Miré if she can see if he’s hit the back of his head and realizes that she isn’t there. Chest tight with dread, he climbs out of the skyhopper half-buried in the sand, looking wildly at the surrounding dessert, screaming his daemon’s name.
Miré is nowhere in sight.
He waits until the suns sink low on the horizon—more than enough time for Miré to have caught up with the downed skyhopper—but she never appears.
The skyhopper, miraculously, is undamaged enough to fly and still has enough fuel to make it home. He’s glad that he had the foresight to remove the forward laser cannon before making the flight, since the front of the craft took the brunt of the landing. The left airfoil will probably have to be replaced, but it’s in good enough condition to limp home. Luke’s head floats in an empty fog as he flys home. The thought that Uncle Owen will be furious at the state of the skyhopper never even crosses his mind.
He tumbles out of the skyhopper and staggers toward the door of the homestead, vaguely registering Hannili’s concerned chirping as he staggers down the steps to where Aunt Beru and her vixcha dæmon are waiting. Aunt Beru’s face is ashen and her hands are shaking as she holds them up to clasp his cheeks. His face is caked with streaks of salt and sand. “Where’s—?”
He can’t say. Sobs come juddering out of his chest, his entire body heaving with grief. He can sense her, out in the desert, and it’s strange—unnerving and unnatural—to have a part of himself hidden and distant.
When Miré comes out of the desert again, days later, she pads across the sand on four legs, never to take flight again. When he buries his face into her fur, he knows that things will never be the same.