Chapter Text
Kill the spare!
(Nonononono)
Avada Kedavra!
(NONONONONO)
Bone of the father, given unknowingly, renews the son!
(Pleasepleaseplease)
Servant flesh was given willingly, restore the master!
(PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE)
Enemy blood taken by force, resurrect your foe!
(Helphelphelphelp)
A body lying on the ground, eyes staring into the void without seeing, a cauldron on fire, body, and grave violated and blood and bones stolen, a mutilated servant, a man rising from the cauldron, figures in black robes and bone masks, a silver hand, bow to death Harry Potter, run Harry, be afraid Harry, you will die Harry because now I have your mother's protection and now I can touch you, surrender and die like the pig sent to the slaughter that you are, come here Harry, duel with me and die with honor Harry, Avada Kedavra, Expelliarmus, white energy beads in a golden thread, wands screaming and phoenix cores singing, take my body back to my family, I love you baby your daddy is coming, you're doing fine son but you need to let go, let go LET GO
(I can't! Help! Please!)
Y O U N E E D H E L P L I T T L E C H O S E N W E W I L L H E L P Y O U
R E L E A S E
N O W
The holly wand burns in Harry's palm, and he releases it with a cry of pain.
The world – the reality –breaks.
And Harry falls and falls and falls and falls
until he is not.
The Father felt when the fate of the Universe changed when The Force touched a new Chosen, one who would bring about the Balance in such a perfect way that the dark fate that awaited the galaxy just around the corner shattered.
Emotion, but Peace.
Ignorance, but Knowledge
Passion, but Serenity
Chaos, but Harmony
Death but the Force
Anakin Skywalker has always been the Balance-bringer, the one who would bring balance by replacing The Father in Mortis to balance the existence of The Son and The Daughter. But with this new Chosen One, with this new Force-touched child such that, if he were not balanced by Anakin Skywalker's Luminous existence, the Balance would be shattered, the fate prophesied by the Chosen One's prophecy changed in such a way that it was impossible to know if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
The Father could not allow something like this to happen to a future that was supposed to be immutable.
There is no Emotion, but Peace
There is no Ignorance, but Knowledge
There is no Passion, but Serenity
There is no Chaos, but Harmony
There is no Death, but The Force
Arasuum may be a Mandalorian god, but Stagnation is His power and His dominion, and a god is never limited to just one planet, even if His pantheon was born and maintained there. So when The Father – who is not a god like his Children, who never was and never will be – denies the change of the prophesied future that will only bring pain and Darkness to the Universe... This is deliberate stagnation. And such an act, at this rate, would inevitably draw His attention.
Kad Ha'rangir, on the other hand – and being the god of Destruction and therefore also of Change and Renewal and Arasuum's eternal enemy –, does not approve of The Father's decision not to allow change to take over the Universe.
The Winged Goddess and the Fanged God agree with Him on this.
Without Emotion, there is no Peace
Without Ignorance, there is no Knowledge
Without Passion, there is no Serenity
Without Chaos, there is no Harmony
Without Death, there is no Force
The true balance would only be brought about with a Chosen One for the Light and a Chosen One for the Dark. And even if the Jedi – and The Father – say that Darkness is evil, there can be no Light without Shadows to balance. And too much Light can be even worse than too much Darkness, just as Light can be bad and Darkness can be good.
On Earth, this would be called the philosophical principle of yin and yang.
That is why the Manda – the other side of the Force, that one that is Chaos and Change and Renewal and Freedom, the power of the warriors of Mandalore who did not die, but marched among the stars – intertwined with The Force and blessed the new Chosen One who possessed the free spirit of a jai'galaar and the lonely but loving heart of a mitosaur.
It blessed the new Chosen One with the blood of its people, slain and extinct during the Dral'Han.
On Tatooine, nine years before Qui-Gon Jinn and his padawan land on the outskirts of Mos Espa with the entourage of the Queen of Naboo, on the day that Shmi Skywalker gives birth to a son who was conceived without a father, a child with little more than fourteen years old is delivered to the slave quarters of Jabba the Hutt's palace. He is small, thin as a branch, and wears the typical rags of slaves who until recently were on a slave ship in the Hutt Space of the Outer Rim. But anyone who saw him – especially those who worked in Jabba's private harem –, would admit that the boy was strangely beautiful for a slave of unknown origin, even if his deeply wavy black hair, his eyes of an intensely green and skin a faint golden brown tone reminded the passing Mandalorian bounty hunters of people that lived on the wild planets of the Mandalore System, people from abandoned planets and moons closest to the Outer Space, places destroyed until almost nothing left by the intense orbital bombardment during the wars of the past, and people whose blood still dries on the glass sands of Manda'yaim.
Blood recognizes blood, after all, and the Mandalorian blood in that child with blazing eyes and spirit blessed by the Manda himself and the Ka'ra is obvious to anyone who knows where to look.
And if that wasn't exotic enough — at least by the exacting standards of something like Jabba, who's old, who's looked various Mandalorians with and without their buy'ce in the eye, but never really bothered to look closing on this child's eyes —, the boy had a pair of heavy ivory horns on his head, three fingers thick at the base that comes out from the back of the skull, a few centimeters above the nape of the neck and a little behind the ears, tapering to curve in a C until the tips are under the chin and the front of Adam's apple, relentlessly guarding the entire neck and preventing the slavers from putting the boy in anything other than a plastoid and dura steel muzzle after he ripped a finger off one of the slaver pirates with his wickedly sharp teeth – and as if to mock them, the boy's horns were impossible to cut, and they had no way of using plasma to not risk damaging further the product if they wanted a successful sale in the Hutt cohorts.
In the end, the angry little thing – that was still growling like a sandspeeder engine since being microchipped after the sale to Jabba – was chained up with at least fifteen pounds of durasteel with electrocution terminals from the sharp elbows to his bare feet and placed on his knees before the Hutt ruler of Tatooine on the same afternoon that Anakin Skywalker takes his first breaths out of his mother's womb.
And that changes everything.
It was dark. He didn't like the dark, never did, because darkness always reminded him of the cupboard under the stairs, and he couldn't stand the claustrophobic feeling of the cupboard.
He wanted to be free.
Then the Magic – the Manda – curls around him, hugging him lovingly as it whispers about the beginning of it all, about the Taungs, about a planet of dense forests and white sand deserts and deep oceans and mountains so high that scratch the sky, over wingless dragons as big as cities reigning over the forests and deserts, about hawks whose voices make heaven and earth tremble with terror, about Mand'alor the First, about Arasuum and Kad Ha'rangir and their infinite war, about beskar and armor and weapons and bones carved into axes, about conquest and love and blood and freedom, about an empire of warriors in beskar'gam that almost took over the galaxy.
Told him about Mando'a, about jetiise and dar'jetii and Tarre Vizsla and his dha'kad'au, about the Mand'alor'e, about the Mando'ade, about Manda'yaim, about the last mitosaur, about the symbolism of the jai'galaar, told him of a people blessed by the Manda, a people with the blood of the Manda'yaim and the spirit of a jai'galaar and with a piece of the last mitosaur's heart beating in their chests. It told him of warriors who didn't die but marched away among the stars, who were always watching over Manda's children, watching over him, and how he was the last of Manda's blessed, the last to be born with mitosaur horns and jaig's eyes, and how he was needed elsewhere.
About how he shouldn't have to be alone as the last mitosaur to walk over Manda'yaim, about how he was both predator and prey and how he would survive if he had faith.
It told him about the wars against the Jetii'ade, lamented over the consequences of the Dral'Han, talked about how it was alone since the death of Tarre Vizsla, the first and last blessed by Manda who was Mando'ade and Jetii, about responding to a desperate cry for help from a child with so much mandokarla that how it couldn't answer his beg, and why exactly he was Chosen. About changing the galaxy and bringing true balance, about not being alone soon. He just needed to accept his fate, and the Manda and the Force would provide it.
And he... He – who spent most of his life cold and alone and unwanted, who knew he would die for the sake of others, who were Chosen for something that shouldn't have been his destiny – accepted.
And the world dissolved in phoenix fire and starlight.
It doesn't take long to find out that Jabba's indulgent little investment would come back to bite him. Literally, for on the first day in the harem the boy — whose species, whatever it was, now was proven to be as dangerous and moody as a krayt dragon — bit Jabba's arm so hard that his teeth pierced the Hutt's hide, as well as ripping off a chunk of skin before being electrocuted enough to release him.
From then on, the boy who cost more than he was worth was delegated to the gladiator cages in the basem*nt of the palace, as Jabba refused to squander the credits he spent on the boy throwing the wild and cheeky thing into the pit of Sarlacc or on the grudge.
So very well. If the boy – which was a waste and a shame, because the boy was very beautiful – wasn't going to enjoy the rest of his life at Jabba's harem, he'd make up for his debt by fighting for the Hutt until he died.
But the thing that Jabba intentionally ignored about the boy was that he was more resilient than his battered body and small size would say at first glance, even with the boy managing to injure him. That said, it shouldn't have been surprising that the boy – who everyone in the Hutt cohort in particular and on Tatooine in general increasingly believed to be a humanoid species of apex predator that was strangely and eerily thriving under Tatooine's binary suns – survived the first time in Jabba's private arena armed with nothing but his sharp teeth and claws and raw instincts.
The next, as big as it was, didn't stand a chance after the boy mounted it on its shoulders and clamped his jaw on its smooth neck as he squeezed its windpipe with deceptively strong arms.
As dangerous as a krayt dragon.
After that, it was decided that the boy would be trained as a gladiator and kept on a short leash and with a muzzle outside the palace's training areas and slave quarters, as Jabba's arm was still suffering from phantom pain, and everyone still remembered the mutilated hand of the slaver pirate who sold the boy.
But while the boy was an absolute terror to Jabba and his accomplices, to the other slaves the boy was like an envoy of Ar-Amu, one of Ehkkret's many forms, and each time he placed himself between one of the masters and one of the children, each time he growls and roars at Jabba and endures the arena and the masters and the punishments, unafraid of the biochip under the skin between his shoulders, with every furious breath he takes, the slaves whisper of Lukka, the Storm who will bring Justice upon the masters, of Leyah, the Krayt, the desert dragon beneath the sands that one day will rise and devour all the masters and break the chains, of Ehkkret the Trickster and his hundred thousand tricks, about the Skywalker, the one who will make it rain in the desert and free the enslaved people.
Whispers run through slave quarters and mines and shops and markets and spaceports and moisture farms and bantha breeders about a fierce boy with a collar that is a crown of horns, a child with blazing green eyes and krayt dragon teeth, a desert monster that will eat the depures alive one by one and will be the herald of the rain.
They whisper in canteens and taverns and communicators and holo calls and little notes on the holonet about a Mandalorian child with mitosaur horns and a pair of jaig eyes who is barely old enough for a verd'goten, who used his teeth to try to kill the Hutt before he was kicked out of the harem directly to the arena beneath the Hutt's palace, and about how he prospered there. How he defended the slaves rather than asking his vod'e for help or running away on his own. How he acted like a true Mandalorian.
Anakin Skywalker – the one who brings the rain, the one who walks in the sky – is three years old when he is introduced to Ranmaroo, the gladiator slave with a collar made of heavy bone horns that grew larger and metallic every day, the slave named by the elders after the first krayt born from the womb of the desert because he hasn't a name that they understand and speaks neither Basic nor Huttese nor Amattakka. After all, the masters won't break him, they won't take his culture away from him any more than they already did, and because of this Ranmaroo speaks a different language, a language of an Outer Rim planet, of another desert, a desert of bloodstained glass, the same desert from which the men and women on armor came from now and then to trade with the Hutt.
One day, when Ranmaroo places himself between a master and Anakin and growls at the deeper and is punished for doing so, one of the elders responsible for the children of the slave quarters sits with Anakin and explains that what Ranmaroo speaks is Mando'a, that Ranmaroo is not a son of Tatooine, but a son of Mandalore, that he and the armored warriors of Jabba's cohort come from the same system in the galaxy's Outer Rim, but that Ranmaroo cannot go with them because he wears chains instead of armor, and that none of his brothers and sisters will set him free because Ranmaroo is Mandalorian, and a Mandalorian is a predator and prey, and Ranmaroo still hasn't gnawed his leg to free himself yet because if he does, they will all be at total mercy of the masters again, and that is something Ranmaroo will not tolerate.
One day, after another Ranmaroo victory in the arena where the seventeen-year-old gladiator came out bleeding but alive and with the blood of a pack of anoobas in his teeth and claws, Anakin sits down with him and that part of him that always knows when there's going to be a sandstorm or when to get out of the way of the masters or where there's going to be a drop of water to steal, reaches out and reaches for Ranmaroo, whispering about Ani, about who he is and who he wants to be, about Mom and fear and loveand gratitude and
Hello. My name is Anakin. Who are you?
And Ranmaroo responds.
At first, Harry wasn't sure he'd made a good choice in accepting the proposal of a semi-omniscient, fully omnipotent, and certainly omnipresent power. Of course, like all wizards he trusted in Mother Magic, he knew that nothing bad would happen to him if he had faith and remained kind, if not good, but he had to admit that when he asked for help during the duel with Voldemort, he wasn't sure if his request – desperate and ambiguous as it was – would be answered.
He shouldn't have doubted.
When The Manda and The Force reach up with him, Harry at first hesitates to reach back, but he is so tired and violated and so afraid, and Cedric is dead, and...
It was a choice, one he had sought for himself rather than being foisted on him by others, and Harry… Harry chose to take that leap of faith. And despite the pain and the new scars and the muzzle and the chip embedded in the flesh between his shoulder blades, despite the Hutt and the arena and the deaths he had to inflict to survive, he didn't regret it. He doesn't regret staying between the masters and the other slaves, sharing his rations of food and water with the children until he has the absolute minimum to survive the heat of the binary suns, from refusing to speak Basic or Huttese or Amattakka despite learning all three because now he is Mandalorian before he was a slave, and his new culture will not be ripped from him while he was alive.
He learns about Ar-Amu, Ehkkret Lukka, and Leyah, about what a skywalker is, about the one who will bring rain to the desert, about what his presence and actions mean to other slaves, about why he was baptized with the name Ranmaroo, and then he meets Anakin. Anakin, a skywalker, catches up with him through the Manda and asks for the first time since he was sold to the Hutt who he is.
And Harry... Harry answers.
In every version of this story, this tragedy, Anakin Skywalker is the one who will bring rain to the desert, the one who will free the children of Tatooine from oppression. In all these tragedies, he is Ehkkret married to Ar-Amu and they give birth to Lukka and Leyah, and yet the galaxy is smothered in darkness caused by the death of a binary sun whose sister has no strength to light up the galaxy alone.
This time, Anakin Skywalker – Ehkkret – is not alone.
This time, Ranmaroo is with him.
This time, there will be rain in the desert.
Shmi Skywalker always knew that her son's fate was not in the sands of Tatooine. For many years she dreamed of a desert of fire cut by a river of boiling stone, with a moon of metal and death, with her precious Ani lost in the shadows and bowing to a new Master, a master worse than the Hutts, worse than anything in the galaxy. She dreams of the end of all things, about Ar-Amu giving birth to Lukka and Leyah and dying without even holding them, with the boy the man the elder whose existence itself is a shatter-point because it all starts with him, of the death of thousands of bright stars, young and old, in the hands of the infinite reflection of the same man. She dreams of binary suns igniting the galaxy's darkness until one of them inevitably dies and everything goes dark once again because the twin is not enough. She dreams, and in none of those dreams does it rain in the desert.
Shmi is terrified, and every day she prays for Ar-Amu begs her to protect her son from what is to come.
And then the Mandalorian child named Ranmaroo like the first desert-born krayt that blew the first sandstorm and ate the Sarlacc comes along and the first thing he does is try to devour the Hutt as the true Ranmaroo did with the Sarlacc at the beginning of all things.
Then Ani meets him, and suddenly Shmi is dreaming of a storm of water flooding the desert, dreaming of hope.
The elders of the slave quarters always said that Ranmaroo would herald the rain.
And the rain comes when Jabba, in one of his moods, decides to take Ranmaroo back to the harem, as the young man – now twenty-three years old – has only gotten more beautiful as time goes on, mainly because his horns grew with him, and the delicate ivory of his youngling years was replaced by a gleaming metallic silver very similar to the silver of the armor of Mandalore's children, a beautiful color that matched his sun-golden skin full of dark bronze scars, lightning green eyes, and pitch-black hair. Cleaned and dressed in the finest white silks Jabba owned, Ranmaroo looked like something divine.
And when Ranmaroo enters Jabba's arbor that night, as beautiful as a supernova and as dangerous as a black hole, it's with a grim look in his eyes that warns everyone to prepare for the storm.
When Shmi goes looking for Anakin, it's to finds that her genius son, some of the other slaves, and Ranmaroo had a plan to take advantage of Jabba and his accomplices' distraction to launch a rebellion that would end once and for all the masters' tyranny over the people of Tatooine.
It starts with C-3P0 and the droids that Anakin spent the year tweaking and building and programming taking down the signal from the slaves' chips, thus preventing the masters from blowing up the damn things and killing all of them before they even start. When the signal is cut, a truly draconic roar shakes the arbor walls, and soon slaves everywhere are attacking and subduing the masters as the Hutt and the other masters in the arbor scream and scream and scream.
Indeed, Ranmaroo announced the rain, and Ani brought it.
Months later, when a Nabooan transport lands in Mos Espa and a Master and his padawan disembark with the Queen, a Gungan, and an astromech, they are greeted by a pair of brothers who were themselves human incarnations of the binary suns so brightly did they glow in the Force. And when Qui-Gon Jinn asks who they are, the oldest of them smiles with krayt dragon teeth while the youngest answers.
That's how it starts.
Meanwhile, on Earth, more precisely in the British magical enclave, a question echoes through the minds of terrified wizards and witches:
Where was The Chosen One?
