The sounds of choking filled the air. Alarmed, Lathril flew to his feet and looked into his master’s office.
It had been a few days after the announcement and ceremony of Sarak’s new position, assuming the place of Lord Commander. The Chiss Sith still conducted his business from the Bonadan manor, but it would not be for long. His new office waited on Dromund Kaas.
Ripples of displeasure had emanated across the Empire at the appointment. Some of it was the general malcontent of jealousy and the reshuffling of power dynamics now that Sarak had been revealed as a longtime member of the Emperor’s Honor Guard. Lathril remembered similar rumors when the young human Brant Auretal had taken the reins. He had believed today’s petitioner was one such malcontent, and he hadn’t expected a pleasant meeting.
Even so, he hadn’t expected to turn the corner and find Sarak holding the petitioner by the throat, his face a web of deeply etched lines of snarling fury. The petitioner sputtered his last breath as Lathril looked on.
Lathril looked at his master, his friend, and wondered how he had never noticed those lines before. They didn’t relax as the petitioner’s convulsions ceased. He thought that perhaps he should have known them; his back twinged in pain remembered from being held against a wall in similar grip. The Chiss had made just such a deeply-lined expression then too: when Lathril had disobeyed him to let a young Padawan escape from the Empire.
In his naviety, Lathril had believed Sarak driven by the same creed as his own. Now here was a different motivation, writ large in those lines, and Lathril could no longer deny it. There was no calling towards a greater harmony with the Force or sense of justice in that face, only the fury of a plan thwarted, a desired respect denied.
Lathril bowed his head as the faith broke.
And Sarak spied him, as he threw the aspirant aside. His glowing red eyes seemed particularly devilish, narrow, with a hint of paranoia that had not been there before. He sensed Lathril’s thoughts.
Lathril had nothing to say or hide. He raised his chin and simply looked at the Lord Commander.
It was not Sarak’s way to cave in the moment: only later, when he was alone. Yet something shifted. An old memory, an old wish. A human light came back to the eyes and made them normal, but only for half a second. The Chiss looked around his office, taking in the trappings of his station. Lathril saw the bars on his eyes as Sarak perceived the cage, but then they hardened down into them as his pride swelled again and overtook the man hanging, as from an executioner’s rope, inside.
“Clean it up,” he told his apprentice, indicating the body. It was the thrust of a new order, a new way of life.
Lathril said nothing. He also did nothing. He turned and walked away.
Sarak sank into his chair. When Lathril had refused the order, he had called in droids instead. Unthinking automatons, programmed only to obey, they descended swiftly and disposed of the body in minutes.
He hadn’t punished Lathril for his disobedience. Perhaps he should have. The Lord Commander could not be disobeyed: not in his own house and powerbase. He had given mercy to his apprentice when he really did not deserve it.
A part of him could go on believing that. It was the part that would lead to his further rise through the ranks in the Sith Empire, a deepening in his power with the Dark Side. Such things had become necessary.
Even as another part of him, small now, reflected that a past Sarak would have been horrified by this development.
That past Sarak would not have survived this long, though. He had had to change and evolve into what he was now. The Sith Empire demanded the severing of any thing, creature, or purpose that could not withstand the test of the war of might. His own best friend had not, after all… Brant, who had been so stubborn, so alive with energy and will, had fallen just like the rest of them.
The thought sobered him. He relied on honor as much as sentiment to reach towards the comms unit and call Lathril back into the office.
Overall, Lathril took it with a sense of foreboding and cautious optimism.
“You have worn out your use within the Empire. I am sending you back to where you belong.”
There was compassion in it, but a withered kind. Strings of recognizing Lathril’s service twined with strings of rejection and disgust. A choice had been made, perhaps long ago or perhaps only when Sarak had donned the Lord Commander’s armor. Now the armor hemmed him in and directed his course.
Even if it meant breaking old oaths.
“I release you from your oath of service,” Sarak said in his next breath as if he had heard Lathril’s thoughts. Maybe he had. “With the authority of the Emperor’s will, I also void that which was made to the Sphere Head of the Inquisition. You are free to leave.”
It was a gift, or perhaps Sarak wanted it to be. Lathril closed his good eye to prevent the Chiss seeking insight in it. Precognition had never been the apprentice’s strength, but just then the Force had buckled and dipped beneath him, as he pictured a black hole, with the tentacles of a sarlacc reaching out of it, wrapping about the Chiss and dragging him to a crushing death.
He opened his eye and saw a flash of terror on the Chiss’ face. No, Sarak had seen the vision too.
A hint of the old vulnerability between friends dripped into the moment. “You must go,” said Sarak. “You know there was never any other fate for me.”
“Did I?” said Lathril.
“It is too late now.”
“It is never too late.”
Pain. “Don’t make this harder.” Sudden anger, biting: a new impulsivity that wasn’t there before. It clawed at Lathril like a reaching tentacle from the darkness. “I could have you executed instead.”
Too late? Lathril wondered. Or simply, too weak? The Force called for everyone, and faint though it was in this dark place, it called for Sarak too.
The Chiss would not answer it, though. It was too much of a wrinkle in the smoothed uniform he wore, the iron discipline with which he conducted his days, like an armor-clad fist wrapped about a petitioner’s throat. It was grief and desperation and the unwillingness to die.
The latter especially. There is no Death, there is the Force. Lathril suddenly knew he had been far braver than many could be in the Empire, to accept death as the likely consequence for his beliefs, to hold to them anyway. Yet it wasn’t his bravery that kept him above the drowning waves of Dark Side corruption: it was only his trust in the Force.
“Goodbye, Sarak.” He said it quietly, with no title or honors. This was the requiem for a friend. He added nothing else: there was too much else to add.
There was sorrow and the last gasp of understanding and empathy reflected in the Chiss’ eyes. “Goodbye, Lathril Sunwalker.”
Lathril made one last bow: not to whom the man had become, but to who he had been. When he left, Lathril kept only the clothes on his back, his lightsaber — and his droid.
Teesev whistled a query as they loaded onto the shuttle. The nameplate was blacked out: it would take them to the Core Worlds, as one last gesture of generosity from the Lord Commander. Perhaps the last that would ever be made.
“Yes,” Lathril told him. “The mission is over. We are going home.”
Teesev persisted.
“I don’t know if it was successful,” said Lathril, taking one last look at the Empire’s holdings as the shuttle launched them into space. “Somehow, if he stays here, I don’t think it will be.”
Teesev warbled gloomily, and Lathril put his hand on the droid’s head in companionship.
“The only one who can make that choice is him.”
Teesev squeaked, turning its head back and forth. Lathril sat back, fully absorbing the droid’s question and letting the Force answer through him.
“I think… Yes. Not the way we expect. But yes. He only has to remember.”
Teesev bobbed in acceptance. Matters of deep philosophy wasn’t something that interested droids, not even ones who had as large a memory bank as this astromech. Lathril smiled softly and turned back to the window, but the view was already filled with stars, soon lengthening and blurring into the fog of hyperspace.
This story had ended. He would perhaps never know the outcome, the epilogue, of the other side. Lathril took a deep breath. But it did not matter. In the series of life, a new book was always just beginning.
The Force called to him, and he would answer. As he always had.