Love Song in Six Verses: a Star Wars Story

One.

The Force sings to Samara. It has as long as she can remember, like music beneath her hearing, resonating through her body and into the air around her. In the gentle rise and fall of its harmonies, she can sense her fellow students, moving through their drills; the instructor, beyond them, is a still, watchful hum. Through her mask, she can’t see the drones, but she knows where they are, and they dip and bob in the stale air of the temple.

Samara takes a step back and brings her training saber up. The drone’s laser bounces off with a buzz. There’s another student just behind her, who steps easily out of her way. He— she’s almost certain which student this is, a human boy about her age—raises his arms in an overhead block. Samara ducks and shifts her stance into the empty space left by his movement, blocking low and then high, above her face. Two lasers strike the training saber behind her, and her own saber echoes them. 

The Force sings, and Samara falls into it, letting it move her through her forms. She does not need to remember them when her thoughts are only music.

She can sense her fellow student, and he’s just behind her, closer than would be strictly safe, but they do not collide. He moves when she moves, in perfect, glorious harmony.

The instructor claps her hands, and the exercise ends. The soundless music of the Force quiets, but it never goes away. Samara still hears it at the back of her mind; her constant, faithful companion.

She pulls off her mask, untangling the straps from her lekku. The drone is dark and silent now, and she brings it to her hand. It’s faintly warm.

She turns at the same time he does. He’s small for his age, quiet and serious. The mask has tousled his shiny, dark hair. His eyes are a luminous green.

He is familiar, though she has never spoken to him before. She knows him—has always known him.

“I’m Samara,” she says. She holds out a hand.

He takes it, brown fingers over blue. “Iskandar.”

---

Two.

Someone puts a plate in Samara’s hand, and someone else slaps her on the back, between her shoulders. She’s still sore there, but it’s a good hurt. Behind the noise of the party, the Trials still echo in her memory. Her head feels out of balance, lacking the weight of the string of beads that, until now, stood in for braided hair.

Master Elianna kisses her near each cheek. As always, there is the slightest distance between them. “I’m so proud of you, Samara.”

“Thank you, Master.”

Elianna’s smile falters, and she looks away, covering her eyes with one hand.

Samara reaches out to her, not quite touching her arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Elianna says. Her smile returns, but it’s brittle, hollow. “Just a headache. Go, say hello to your friends. Eat your cake.”

Samara nods, though she’s worried. Something isn’t right—there’s a dissonant note there, under her master’s familiar sounds.

Elianna waves away the unspoken question. “I’m fine. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Another padawan takes Samara by the arm and leads her back into the party. She eats her cake, obediently. It’s heavy and sweet, sticking to her tongue.

Something is missing. The room resonates with so many Jedi here, but it feels incomplete. She looks at every face, thanking them automatically, not really hearing them. She’s listening for something else.

Then she hears it. The hum of the room changes, and the Force sounds right, like an instrument in tune. 

She turns, and Iskandar is there, shouldering his way through the crowd. He’s big, now, taller than her and her lekku, his chest broad. She’s not quite used to it yet, but she likes the beard. There’s a bristly patch behind his ear where his braid was cut.

He wraps his arms around her and holds her there. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. The Force sings, soft and whole.

---

Three.

“Listen to me!” Elianna screams, her voice raw and discordant. “The Jedi are finished. There is nothing you can do.”

Samara hears the jarring notes of the Dark, and they are loud, louder than Elianna’s cries, louder than the forest that surrounds them. It almost drowns out the song of the Light.

She cannot win against Elianna. Her former master taught her everything she knows, and now has nothing to lose, nothing holding her back. Samara should have known something was wrong. She should have done something, anything to save her. How could she not have heard the corruption taking hold?

Samara cannot defeat her alone. She and Iskandar, however, might have a chance.

He came to her quarters, answering a summons she never sent, as soon as he heard the news: her master had fallen. 

“I need your help,” was all she said.

Their lightsabers hum to life as one. They are two halves of one warrior—a single body, a single will. They move in perfect rhythm, and the Force sings. It echoes between them, growing and deepening, and resonates through the forest, into the planet, and out to the void. It resounds until it silences everything else, and even the cacophony of the Dark fades away.

Elianna falls.

Samara catches her—or maybe Iskandar does; it’s not clear where she ends and he begins—and lowers her to the moss. She sees her now, utterly still, this face she knew so well scarred and twisted.

The connection snaps, and Samara reels, suddenly back in her body. Silence presses in on all sides, like pressure in her ears.

She wails, a lonely, animal howl.

Iskandar gathers her in his arms, and he is solid as the planet, warm as home. He says nothing while she sobs, rocking her gently. In that rhythm, the Force begins to sing again. Eventually, she sleeps, her limbs tucked against her and her face pressed into his chest. 

In the morning, they burn Elianna. Samara presses a kiss to her forehead, and tries to see only the woman she knew, before she lights the pyre.

When that is done, they are alone. 

Iskandar looks at her. There is pain in his eyes, in his face as familiar as her own. He takes her hand, twining their fingers together, brown in blue.

“I love you,” he says, “with everything I am.”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to—there is no distinction between his love and hers.

“What are we going to do?” he asks.

Possibilities spin out before her. Through them rings the song of the Force: as steady as time, as merciless as gravity.

“For you, I would burn this galaxy to ash,” she says, “and that way lies the Dark Side.”

He knows. He lifts her fingers to his lips, the only kiss they will ever share. She closes her eyes, memorizes the sound of this moment. They take one breath into their shared body, and he lets her hand fall. 

They are two halves of the same warrior, and that warrior is a Jedi, in the end.

---

Four.

Years pass. The galaxy calls, and they are apart for long stretches at a time. They see each other but rarely. When they do, they spend their days training, moving through their forms in easy synchronicity, and sip tea in the evenings without needing to speak. Each time, there’s a little more silver in Iskandar’s beard.

They are content. Still, when he is away, the Force does not sing quite as sweetly. Samara pretends not to notice, and Iskandar makes no mention of it. 

The Council urges her to take on an apprentice, but she cannot. Not after Elianna. Not when the thought of caring for another sentient being makes the Force drone out of tune in her ears. With things as they are, she prefers to work alone.

Then the war begins.

This is not what the Jedi are for—leading armies, marching for the Senate. Change is coming, and it fills Samara with a nameless dread. But she has given everything to the Order, and she trusts it, and she trusts in the Force.

On Geonosis, she finds Iskandar again. Even in the chaos of battle they are drawn to each other—they are a binary system, formed of the same matter when the universe was young, connected even through the distance between stars. Once more, they move as one. The time between them falls away, and everything is in harmony at last.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he says, after.

She studies his face. Is it his conflict she senses, or hers? Has there ever been a difference?

Silence hangs between them, and for the first time, it’s uncomfortable. 

What does she want him to say?

He takes her hand, brushes a thumb over her knuckles. The gesture is enough.

“I’d like you to meet my padawan,” he says at last.

This is as it should be. She stills the conflict in her, and is satisfied to hear the Force in tune again.

---

Five.

Trust in the Force. Do not return to the temple.

Samara is safe, for the time being. Her clones are dead, and she is not. That’s what matters now.

She has to find others—if Kenobi survived, and she did, there should be more. There have to be more—but there has been so much death. The Force is painfully discordant. Elianna knew about this, didn’t she? Somehow, she knew. 

Samara listens. She can still hear Iskandar, somewhere far away, even through the chaos. He calls to her, and she follows.

She is in a seedy Outer Rim spaceport when he dies. She hears a sound like a thunderclap and feels a searing pain in her chest, as if she is being torn in two. She doubles over, her hands on her ears. Her fellow travelers stare. She almost expects to see blood on her clothing, but there is nothing. She knows what has happened even as she asks the question. Nothing else could have done this.

She ducks into a grimy corner and buries her face in her empty hands. She reaches out through the Force, opening herself to the vastness until it roars through her, and there is no returning echo.

Samara knows, but she cannot believe it. She cannot face this alone, without the other half of her heart.

She should have been with him.

It takes an hour to find a safe channel to connect to the holonet, and another to access official records. Samara sees her own face, next to the word unconfirmed. Below that, a number: thirty-two clones lost trying to subdue her. They will be hunting her, she knows, for as long as she lives.

However long that might be.

At last, she finds Iskandar. A neat red X is printed over his face, its arms covering his luminous eyes. Confirmed, says the readout. No clones lost. He didn’t even fight back.

You were the better Jedi, after all.

The holo display flickers. An image of the new emperor appears, along with a message: remain calm. All is as it should be. 

Samara is filled with sound. Her perfect harmony is gone, but the Force still sings. 

She knows what she must do.

---

Six.

And so Samara falls, through the quiet between beats, and into the song of the Dark. She hides her face and boards a transport to the Core, and the thrum of it grows louder as she crosses the galaxy.

Her heart pounds out a heavy tempo, and her feet follow it as she steps out onto Coruscant and makes her way to the palace.

There are rows and rows of clones standing guard there, faceless in their identical helmets.

Was it one of them who—?

It doesn’t matter. The clones are not responsible, but they are in her path. The Force sings, crashing through her mind. Her lightsaber flares, a deep, bloody purple.

By the time she reaches the throne room, she reeks of charred flesh. Energy pours from her like waves of sound, like light from a dying star. There is a hum, dark and grating, under the crescendo of death. She can hear him, the man who destroyed the Jedi—the man who took Iskandar from her.

She screams, wordless, and charges. The Emperor laughs.

A shadow in black appears in her path, and his sound in the Force is a dull, metallic ringing. The thing Anakin Skywalker has become ignites a lightsaber red as rage.

Samara parries his blows, but he drives her back. She had never been a match for Skywalker—no one was—and now she is half of herself. But she isn’t here for him.

She feints and lands a grazing blow. Sparks shower from his body. She ducks under his counter and runs for the throne.

“That’s it, little Jedi,” the Emperor says. He is still laughing. “Give in to your anger.”

Anger was tearing herself from Iskandar, again and again, year after year. Anger was soothed by endless meditation, tamed by discipline. This is something else entirely. It thunders inside her, and her body pulses with it, her movements not her own.

She reaches out for the support pillars on either side of the throne. They crack, and dust rains from the ceiling, and then they come down.

The Emperor catches them in midair. Samara cries out again and pulls.  The stone shudders and grinds under the competing pressure. She hears music, low and ruinous.

The pillars start to give way. Suddenly, she is thrown backward, yanked by an unseen force. She slams against the wall. Instead of falling to the floor, she hangs there, her feet kicking uselessly. 

The Emperor laughs again, and he tosses the pillars aside with a deafening crash. The shadow stalks toward her, one hand raised.

She gasps for breath. Her throat constricts, and her vision clouds. Her numbing fingers scratch at her neck. The terrible song of the Dark rings in her ears, louder than her racing heart. 

The black fist closes, and the Force sings to Samara no more. 

---

Happy Star Wars Day! May the Force be with you, always.

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