Anakin came awake slowly. Everything was dark around him and an incredible force pressed down on him from all sides.

  Yet the Force was gone. That invisible presence that had been with him for his whole life was silent, and he felt strangely vulnerable without it.

  He was floating in the center of the elevator shaft. He’d been falling, everything had been so chaotic as the Force had pulsed above him with that destructive wave…

  But then he’d activated his newest ability and he’d appeared here. Floating in mid air in the center of this pitch black elevator shaft, and able to feel the whole underground bunker under his house instinctively. Like it was part of him and he could feel it with the tips of his fingers. Yet strangely at a certain limit there was a hard wall that he couldn’t feel past, like an invisible barrier in a massive sphere surrounding him in nearly a kilometer and a half radius in all directions.

  “Oof. We got away,” Draeth sighed in relief as its voice came from the darkness to Anakin’s left, “But do you even know how close that almost was? We were both almost goners.”

  “Both?” Anakin managed to say even if it felt like his head was being compressed under the weight of a mountain. He tried to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of the missing Force and refocused on the current situation. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t move his body the slightest bit besides his mouth for some reason.

  “Yeah. Both,” Draeth said, a resigned note in its voice, “The Force saw me directly and locked me down. We’re in this together now. I can’t escape this reality or let you die or the Force will find my real body and kill me. I’m powerful, but I can’t match an entity like the Force by myself. It’s the big boss around these parts. It finds my real body and I’ll get crushed like a little bug under its boot. Oh by the way, I’m draining your midichlorians all the way right now. Little energy factories production are going right to me now, can’t risk you drawing on the Force too much and getting us in trouble right now. A shame really, they produced so much more energy when you were using them than how they are suppressed by me and under control... Ah, but it is what it is. No need to risk it given our current... Situation.”

  “What… Happened?”

  “Whoever that was that attacked you was almost impossibly powerful in the Force. Powerful in the dark side of the force, based on that Sith lightning that he was zapping you with when I showed up. When he spotted my true form, it caught the Force’s attention and it focused on us to investigate. Apparently the Force decided to go for overkill when it decided to make sure that it would kill you and expose my main body to attack. Without having you as a host to anchor me to you and maintain my connection to this universe anymore, I’d float around as a spirit for a while and not be able to hide as easily from the Force’s attempts to find me.”

  “Family… Safe? Where… Are we?”

  “I dunno. But your family should be fine. We still have time before we have to worry about air or food or anything like that. And to answer your question, we’re in hyperspace right now. Actually, that’s kind of a misleading way to put it. What you think of as hyperspace is like level two or three of hyperspace. Traveling across the higher dimension where traveling a shorter distance leads to more distance traveled in realspace. You remember that part?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, so the higher you go in hyperspace away from realspace, the more distance you travel in realspace for each unit that’s traveled in here. Normal ships get to level two or three of hyperspace during travel. The very fastest might even get to the edge of level four or so. Like three point seven or eight, I think? Something like that from what I’ve overheard on how fast the ships can travel across the galaxy.”

  “We’re in… Hyperspace? What level are… we on? How?”

  “Okay, so level four is the normal maximum of your hyperdrives. Right now we’re probably at level… thirteen or fourteen I think? The higher we go the weirder and more hostile things get as the normal laws of physics that you know start changing and becoming unfamiliar. And it’s your newest ability that’s brought us here. You must feel it. That tension, waiting for you to release it? But don’t release it!

  “You can be sure that an explosion that massive has made at least the lowest few levels of hyperspace so chaotic that we’d be shredded on the way back down to realspace. It would shred us to bits all the way up to level six or seven at least based on what I felt just before we managed to get this high in the dimensions.

  “And the Force might just spot us itself if we’re really unlucky… So we can’t just go back to realspace immediately, even if it was clear. So we gotta just be… Still and not move at all. Be very still, just in case.”

  “So what… Do we do? If hyperspace is so… Dangerous… How are we still here? Why can’t I… Move at all?”

  “Your new ability comes in two parts. First one is the one that I already told you. With some practice you can phase up or down through hyperspace or back down the realspace. Although it's so dangerous usually, that I would only use the ability carefully when we aren’t so desperate. That’s what let us get up here so deep in hyperspace just now.”

  “And… Two?”

  “That’s that feeling that you must be getting right about now. That faint sensation of this whole base with you as its center? That. That part of the ability is simple. It infuses all of these materials with your energy and treats it like an extension of yourself. I’m sure that a large portion of this place dissolved away to the mercies of the hyperspace around us before it finally adapted to the damage and became strong enough that it wouldn’t dissolve anymore. Or when it reached the limits of your ability. It’s a pretty amazing ability, but there is a ceiling on what it can protect you from even at maximum power. That ability that can only do so much when you’re getting blasted by hyperspace itself at such high levels of power.”

  Anakin found that he did have a faint sense matching what Draeth described. He now knew the halls and smallest bits of the bunker like they were the back of his hand. He let out a sigh of relief as he felt three living figures that must be his family in a room below and all of the droids moving through the hallways with purpose. The metal figure with his family must be TC-04.

  Anakin frowned slightly through the pressure on him from all sides.

  “Still… Shrinking. Regeneration. No Heal. Why won’t… It stop?”

  “Well, ah… I mean it’s hyperspace. The fact that this little bubble of matter isn’t scattered into dust is the real win here. And it won’t heal like you do, even if it will get some of your resistance because of your other power. This place is made of real matter, it naturally wants to sink back down into real space at all times if nothing keeps it up. Your ability is anchoring us up here at this level of hyperspace and keeping us from blasting back down into realspace at high speed just like how we arrived here. It’s like a wound spring, if you release it too quickly then it’ll shoot us like a rocket and kill any squishy family members that you may care about inside. Or like a heavy weight tied to the buoy of your power keeping it anchored up here. If you let go we’d go slamming down if you stopped supporting us. Definitely not good. So… Really don’t move. Please. Just don’t do it.”

  “This place still… Shrinking. Chunks dissolving on outside. Will stop?” Anakin asked.

  “Well, hm. There’s a minimum size I think. You’re still getting that energy from the hyperspace damage below your adaptation threshold. Hyperspace at this level is chaotic enough that the power levels fluctuate enough that that’s something that still happens occasionally. All that energy you’re getting from that is just going to maintain this space and keep everything infused with your energy rather than healing like it usually does. Once there’s less volume to cover, less area to be infused and your defenses grow stronger. At some point there will be enough energy flowing through that this chunk of matter around us will stop shrinking.”

  “So… What do we do? Can’t go down because… Hyperspace chaos,” Anakin managed to say, “I can’t move. Why can’t I… Move?”

  “You’re anchoring this space, it’s almost like an extension of your body in a way. You don’t get to move your organs and veins around freely when you want to, do you? You’re anchored to this position in the structure or the whole energy system of your infused energy won’t work and catastrophically fail. Like if you randomly moved your heart down to your stomach without shifting anything else in that fleshy body of yours. Not possible, and deadly even to you.”

  “Why… So powerful? Ability? Saved… Us last minute. Why not earlier?”

  “Really? You ungrateful little…. Oh, why I ought to… Fine! Fine, I gave you all of my energy alright? Everything that I’ve collected up to now, all of my half. We needed to get out of there and it was the only way. But it’s only a loan, you’ll be paying me back! With interest! You happy now? I’m destitute and powerless because of your needy butt! If you’d just defeated whoever that person was without waking me up by coming near death, then everything would have been fine!”

  “Excuse… Me. You’re the one who just… Randomly appeared without even checking what was happening. Don’t blame… Me for this. I had that Darth Sidious… Handled. I’d just adapted to his… Sith… lightning right before you showed up.”

  “Bah!” Draeth said in the darkness, but didn’t counter Anakin’s statement, “Well whatever,” Draeth muttered, “I guess it’s not either of our faults. We can blame the Force for being so extreme. I barely even stole anything. It rules a whole universe, I bet it hardly even notices the difference of that tiniest little sip of energy that I siphoned out of its territory into my real body…”

  They lapsed into silence for a while as Anakin felt the droids in the base moving and apparently searching the length of the elevator shaft and the rest of the base. At least he was pretty sure they were the droids based on the sensation of rigidness and cold when he focused on them with his strange new sense of touch that permeated through the whole sphere around him. His sensation wasn’t nearly granular enough to make out the features of a single person or droid, and instead they just sort of felt like large squishy blobs that moved around on their own.

  Were the droids looking for Anakin maybe? TC-04 and his family remained in the control room, the same as before. Anakin could feel the warmth of the living people in there. Still alive, to his relief and seemingly unharmed.

  “Well, just wait around for now,” Draeth said eventually, “We can plan some more once we see what the minimum sustainable size is for this place. I gave you a bit of extra juice to increase the size of the area affected and to get us through that chaotic hyperspace storm, but we can’t risk going into realspace just yet. We’ll see how much mass in this place you can handle before we even think about making any big moves. You get me?”

  Anakin grunted in confirmation and then with a soft pop Draeth disappeared again. Anakin couldn’t see the creature still, but all sounds from it disappeared all at once and he had an innate sense that Draeth’s projection had disappeared.

  After another hour or two, one of the commando droids rappelling down the side of the elevator shaft eventually found Anakin, hovering in the air in the center of the elevator shaft and unmoving.

  “Sir?” the droid said in TC-04’s voice as it stared at him with a bright light illuminating the shaft shining from both of its eyes, “Are you alright? My sensors and those of the other droids within the facility are giving some strange readings…”

  “TC-04… Here’s what… Happened…” Anakin managed to say painfully before giving a broken explanation of the situation.

  “Pull… Everything you can into a sphere around me. Everything on the edges will… be drawn into hyperspace and destroyed. I don’t know… How big my final sphere will be. Try to save as much equipment as you can. I don’t want my family to… run out of air if we spring a leak through all of this dirt and stone to the raw hyperspace out there. Yes, life support systems… Need to be preserved before anything else… Is lost to hyperspace chaos.”

  “...Affirmative. Calculating optimal droid paths to bring all valuable equipment and items available to the central staging point.”

  The droid remained nearby and TC-04 narrated what it was doing as Anakin listened in.

  He could vaguely sense the movement in the maze like hallways of the bunker and the floating chunk of the planet floating out here in hyperspace.

  But hearing TC-04 reasoning and exact explanations of the droids’ movements and actions helped Anakin understand what was happening much easier. And was soothing in an odd way. Helped him calm down slightly from the stress from what had just happened.

  But after a long time of hovering motionless in the air of the elevator shaft, Anakin eventually started becoming tired. Before he even knew it, the droning voice of TC-04 started sounding like a lullaby as the rhythmic tone caused Anakin to shut his eyes and drift off to sleep even as the droid stopped speaking as it noticed his eyes closing.

  — — —

  There was now a metal platform a short distance below where Anakin hovered in the air. In the last stretch of time that must be at least days, the whole space of the formerly dark elevator shaft had been transformed into a brightly lit room. Droids bustled in and out the new room, retrieving equipment relentlessly and reinforcing the structure around them to the maximum and making everything airtight and as strong as possible. TC-04 had moved all of the equipment from the control room and moved it up here around Anakin so it could observe and control the whole facility with the press of the button even as it carefully walked around Anakin’s frozen and floating body.

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  “How are you feeling, Anakin?” Slarena asked from above where she was sitting on his stomach. As a joke she’d started using him as a chair as it became clear that her weight sitting on top of him wouldn’t shift his position, from where he floated frozen, in the slightest.

  “Bored…” he said, “Glad you’re… All here though. Almost… Lost you.”

  “I… I can’t believe they’re really all dead,” Slarena said, sounding depressed, “I didn’t know anybody really that well. I thought that was a bad thing. But I knew people. Shmi’s friends, Riktor’s family… I can’t believe they’re all just gone just like that.”

  “Draeth says that they’ll rejoin with the Force,” Anakin said, “Life… After death. Maybe. Spirits. If strong willed enough or strong in the Force when… They were alive. Maybe they’ll live on for a while longer. If it… Makes you feel better.”

  “A little. Still. At least we made it. And you and Draeth can handle anything the Force can throw at you, right?”

  “R- R… Right. We’ll handle… Everything. No need for… Any of you to worry. I’ve gotten us… This far already… Haven’t I?”

  Slarena kept sitting on him for a moment before she reached out and patted him directly on his forehead that was pointing directly towards the ceiling, frozen.

  “Thanks, Anichair. That helped,” she said, “You think it would cheer your mom up if we convinced her to sit on you too?”

  Anakin grumbled and hedged his answer for a few minutes before Slarena finally managed convinced him to her point of view.

  “Fine…," Anakin grunted, "If it… Makes her feel better. I guess it is… A little funny. As long as no one… Pokes my eye again.”

  “I said that I was sorry about that,” Slarena protested, “It was an accident, really.”

  “Still… Hurt a bit.”

  “I’ll go get her. This should help her get out of her funk.”

  The whole production from Slarena and the obvious effort to cheer up mom after did work somewhat. Anakin was officially renamed Anichair until he was unfrozen again and could defend himself better from Slarena’s teasing. But clearly mom was still having trouble coming to terms with the death of all of her friends and extended family. They’d never really talked with Riktor’s family much besides the wedding. They were somewhat estranged from Riktor even if it was more cold than a hostile reaction from what Anakin had observed at the wedding. Or at least that’s how it had been.

  “Here, feeding time,” Mom said as she sat in a chair she dragged over and took out a bowl of soup as Shmi and Riktor ate the same in a table set up a few steps away. The two of them had distant looks as they both drank the soup from their spoon mechanically. Anakin struggled to open his mouth slightly and Mom carefully dribbled some soup into his mouth. He worked hard to swallow it before opening his mouth again to repeat the process.

  It made him feel helpless. Like how it had been when he’d had to wear those skin grafts years ago and had to move around in the hoverchair. He literally couldn’t do anything by himself now, even moving his mouth too much to chew sturdier food. Just eating was an exhausting effort.

  After Mom was done feeding him, she went over to the actual table with Riktor, Slarena, and joined them in their own meals.

  “Draeth, how… Much longer?” Anakin asked as he felt a bead of soup dribbling from the corner of his lips and down his cheek. Frozen, and without even the Force flowing through him ever since he arrived here, Anakin wasn’t able to do anything to stop it from slowly falling down and dripping onto the metal floor below.

  Draeth popped into existence above Anakin, looking like he was clinging to the ceiling above.

  “Not looking good. You’re at the minimum size, we’ve stopped shrinking. Ended up at two hundred meters radius. I’m surprised just how much that droid of yours managed to salvage. Good job making that one. It seems a bit… More intelligent than the others that I’ve seen from this universe. And it really packed all of those droids into here up to the walls. Didn’t know you even had that many in this facility.”

  “Why… Not good? TC-04… Salvaged everything and is refitting it to make this place into a spherical ship with the… Strongest metal plates on the outside. Shouldn’t we be able… to go back down to realspace soon? Stopped shrinking, so safe to go down now right?”

  “No, not even close,” Draeth replied firmly and waved several of its blue tentacles as if to wipe away Anakin’s comment.

  “Up here is dangerous, but the hyperspace is calm like a placid lake. Down there it’s like a raging storm. We’ll be ripped apart far before we make it down to realspace. It’ll be too chaotic for you to adapt in time and one powerful burst from that storm could destroy this whole place in one hit. It was a miracle we even survived making it up here the first time.”

  “Why not… Horizontal travel? High in hyperspace… Move sideways out of the storm? Little distance is a massive amount down there in realspace.”

  “Bad idea. Very bad idea. Right now we’re an interesting piece of rubble. Hidden. But if we start moving around and acting obviously like a ship then we might attract the attention of the Force. Not much happens up here, and the Force will… I bet the Force has some way to monitor what goes on in hyperspace even if it doesn’t fully pay attention to it most of the time. And who knows what it would do if it realized that we survived what it did last time… No, we have to wait until the storm below settles and the Force has turned its attention somewhere else, thinking that it’s killed us.”

  “So… What then?” Anakin grunted in frustration, “Been… Days already. How much longer will we… have to wait?”

  “That’s… I don’t know,” Draeth admitted, “Based on the decay of the storm that I can feel below through your senses… Years. Decades, even. I can’t think of a way of getting out of here safely without having to wait it out...”

  “Wait… How are you… awake?” Anakin suddenly asked as he thought of something, “Shouldn’t the newest abilities have… knocked you out?”

  “Yeah, well… Yeah. They’re trying to. I’m keeping myself awake until things are stable and we have a plan so we don’t all die while I’m asleep. I’ll have to sleep longer for every second that I force myself to stay awake. But I think I have enough energy to give you one more minor ability maybe before my personal energy stores are nearly empty. You might need that little extra bit to survive up here. I’m not sure how you’re going to last decades with only a few months of food and water stored in this place. Let alone your family too. And there’s only two or three years of air for you four, from what your droid says. I honestly can’t think of a way to preserve the others for so long, even if you personally might make it that long. Maybe.”

  “No…” Anakin groaned, “Must be… A way…”

  “Anakin? What’s going on? What’s Draeth saying?” Slarena asked in worry. TC-04 turned and watched them as Riktor and Mom stared at him as well.

  Anakin hesitated, but then explained everything that Draeth had said in halting pauses. The mood was grim for a few minutes as no one said anything and were just thinking to themselves silently.

  “Sir, are you aware that the coolant used in the spider droid's coolant systems resembles cryochamber preservation fluid in many respects? Maybe even enough to serve as a replacement.”

  Anakin’s eyes widened at TC-04’s words. Of course! Cryopods would slow their body functions enough that they could survive as long as they needed. Make their food, air, and water last nearly forever if it needed to. His mind raced as his mind flickered through half remembered designs and specifications that he’d seen before.

  “I… think I might know how to build one,” Anakin said, “Just need to… fill in a few gaps. TC-04, I need a lot of components. I’ll need everyone’s… help and the nimblest droids to assist us in building it.”

  “Of course, sir. What is needed? We currently have twenty seven spider droids that can be broken down for components and over two thousand various other units of various forms that can also be used. As well as all of the other scavenged equipment that we recovered.”

  “Right… So here’s the list. Save spiderdroids for… last. Coolant fluid critical. Can’t risk wasting… even a little bit. Not with so little fluid in the droids compared to what a… functional cryochamber needs.”

  It took two whole weeks to build the first cryo chamber as Anakin guided TC-04, the other droids, and his family into helping as best as they could to assemble things and properly disassemble the sacrificed droids for their components.

  It only took three more days to build the next two cryo chambers. Another three days to have them be thoroughly tested for every failure obsessively to make sure that they would function. It was almost more stressful when there weren’t anything more than minor issues crop up in any of the three devices. It made Anakin feel like he was missing some critical failure when he found nothing wrong with the chambers after all of his impulsive checks again and again. Well, ordering the droids and others to check considering he was still frozen in place and unable to move from his position.

  The cryo chambers now filled almost the entire room, in a triangle around Anakin and looking like large metal coffins with wires and pipes wriggling in and out of them haphazardly. They had to make due with the components on hand, so Anakin hadn’t had the luxury to make them pretty, or make an exterior window to let the people inside to see out through the metal lid.

  But they had had enough material to finish them all, and the tests said that they were working. And their food was running low. It would be out after two or three more months by Mom’s calculation. But it would last for a long while once they were all in cryosleep.

  The spider droids had just been carefully harvested and their coolant pumped into the three cryo chambers. The final test showed that everything was functioning. There had been enough fluid in the end for the three of his family members.

  “What about you, Ani?” Mom asked, “Isn’t there one for you? Even with you… Floating?”

  “No, mom,” he assured her, “Draeth… has a solution. I’ll be going to sleep too. Won't even... Age while I'm asleep... It tells me. See you back… In realspace.”

  She hesitated before nodding. The three of them stepped into their respective chambers and laid back on the slightly angled pad on the back.

  “See you in realspace, Ani,” Slarena said, “We’ll make it. We’ll… Make it.”

  “See you then… Slarena. Riktor.”

  The man nodded but didn’t say anything, looking nervous as well as the metal lid from above started to slowly lower down. After a few seconds the metal lid on all three of them sealed and with a heavy clunk sealed themselves. There was a soft hiss as all three chambers activated and the cryo chambers started putting the three of them in suspended animation. The temperature in the room dropped until after a few minutes there was nothing but a faint chill and a faint hiss and hum of electricity from the three chambers surrounding him.

  “TC-04… Keep the power system… Online. Sacrifice everything to keep those… cryopods running if you have to. They have to… Survive. Do you understand? Priority one orders, override all previous limits and constraints,” Anakin said firmly despite his voice shaking slightly from his welling emotions as he spoke with difficulty.

  “Confirm primary directive without recommended safeguards or programmatic limits?” TC-04 asked with a flatter voice than its normal synthesized voice. Anakin hadn’t even realized that TC-04 had even been talking differently than the other droids until just now…

  “Confirm orders. Override… limits.”

  “Confirmed. Installing directive into mental framework and reorganizing order hierarchies… Installing… Installing… Rearranging… Operation complete. New orders processed and integrated.”

  TC-04’s eyes flickered and its voice returned to its more expressive version from before as it stared back at Anakin.

  “I will keep the power systems running as long as needed. Do you have any further orders before you go to sleep as well?”

  Anakin tried to think of what else to say before his mind snagged on something. What he’d been keeping hidden from the others.

  “I will sleep for… A long time. Don’t know how… long. Draeth is the one who has to manually wake me back up. So I’ll sleep… At least as long as he will. If we reach realspace and I’m still asleep… Take them and get away. Protect them somewhere else where they’re… Not in danger from being around me or getting attacked by… the Force as I sleep. In case it finds me again.”

  “Understood, sir. I will do so with all of my intellect and strength,” TC-04 promised.

  “Thank… you,” Anakin sighed in relief, despite feeling exhausted from talking so much in such a short time.

  “Here I go… I hope that… You can tell them that I’m sorry. When they… wake up. If I’m still asleep when they have to leave.”

  “I’ll relay the message.”

  Anakin closed his eyes.

  “Draeth, it’s time,” he whispered to himself.

  “I’ve installed the detector into your newest ability,” Draeth whispered into Anakin’s ear, “When the hyperspace below is calm again you’ll subconsciously bring us back to realspace even if we’re both still sleeping. This suspended animation isn’t recurring, it’s a one time thing. It’ll take my energy again to wake you back up. I don’t have enough energy to give you a full ability or let you control it. Hopefully I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “On the… Other side, Draeth,” Anakin muttered as a wave of energy rushed up within him. It only took a few seconds before Anakin was fast asleep, so still by Draeth’s power that a single one of his breaths would now take a month or more at a time.

  TC-04 stood there watching the scene for another twenty minutes before turning back to its command console.

  Its newest directive pulsed through it as its now unrestricted mind considered many solutions and methods that it had never before. It considered its resources, ones that would have to last for an indeterminately long time at least on the order of years.

  And then it got to work.

  It was the leader, and all the remaining droids were its hands to execute its vision and achieve its goals. It would succeed in its mission at all costs.

  — — —

  Fifteen years had passed. The dust of the destroyed solar system slowly swirled and moved, abandoned and undisturbed by any other ship in the galaxy for years now. Nothing but a morbid curiosity to the larger galaxy after so many years having passed since the star system’s destruction. The galactic civil war had been over for over five years now.

  Yet, something was different about the swirling dust on this day fifteen years later. In a flash of blue light, a spherical ball almost resembling a ball bearing appeared amongst the disperse dust. Its surface was pitted and scarred, with great tears and scars coating its whole surface, smoothly cut out as if removed by a spoon or deleted from reality.

  The sphere remained motionless for five days. To an outside observer, to which there were none, it appeared to be lifeless. And in a certain sense it almost was. Yet the inside of the vessel was a flurry of activity still.

  By the end of the seventh day, a laser could be seen cutting through the exterior shell of the great metal sphere four hundred meters in diameter. Emerging from inside like a bird hatching from an egg was a ship nearly the size of the egg itself.

  It was haphazard, slapdash, looking like any random piece of scrap had been taken and thrown together and welded together to form its cylindrical exterior. But it worked. It still functioned as the ship as it slowly separated from its former housing. All across the surface there was a macabre sight of dozens of droid heads fused to the hull and poking through. Their eyes flickered as the disembodied heads observed their surroundings as the ship slowly maneuvered away from its former home and activated its thrusters gently.

  A day later, its similarly ugly and haphazard hyperdrive activated. And while it groaned and shook violently as it did so… The hyperdrive took the ship into hyperspace and out of the system and out to the greater galaxy. Carrying its sleeping passengers in their sealed cryotubes in the slapdash ship, waiting to be awoken at the proper moment.

  TC-04 had accomplished its mission. Now all it had to do was wake up its charges and continue protecting them in the future, but only after it scouted the situation and determined if doing such a thing would be safe for them, of course.

  Anakin remained behind, eyes closed in the cracked open sphere slowly spilling out its remaining contents into the clouds of dust swirling around it. His body floating in place in the empty ship, still frozen and connected to the rest of the ship through his ability despite having returned to realspace.

  Like a new sun to the system, the dust swirled around the spinning metal sphere. And slowly rings of swirling dust formed around it as if it were a new sun to the shattered solar system.

  And inside Anakin still slept. Deep in his slumber and hovering all alone in the silence of a shattered solar system.

  Waiting for the moment when he would wake and return to the galaxy once more.