“My dear Twilight,” the letter began, oh so innocently.
In a small but serviceable apartment hundreds of levels up from where she had confronted the insane princess of the night, Twilight Sparkle sat behind a desk, a simple scroll clutched tightly in her hand. It was a fragile little thing, looking no different from the thousands of letters she’d sent and received in the years past. But, at that moment, it might as well have been a Base Delta Zero enacted on Equestria.
I have been summoned to a personal audience with Emperor Palpatine, to address the issue of my sister. I do not honestly know whether or not Luna shall be returned to us, but I am certain that while on Imperial Center I shall be monitored most thoroughly. As anything I do might have the utmost of repercussions for Luna and Equus itself, I must request that you refrain from sending me any further letters via dragonfire until such time as I contact you again. Knowledge of your activities must not reach the Imperials.
I know this has been your only link to home these last few months, and that this will be hard for you. I am deeply sorry, but I cannot conceive of a way to make certain that no one on Coruscant observes any letters I receive while I am here. I can only extend my heartfelt sympathies, and remind you that I have the utmost faith in your abilities. You are the most brilliant pupil I have seen in eons, Twilight Sparkle. I have every confidence you will prosper until we are able to speak again.
Your ever-proud teacher,
Princess Celestia
The letter was orbital bombardment delivered directly to her hope. Now, more than perhaps ever before, she needed to talk to her teacher. To tell her that sister had been driven mad, was wielding evil magic for murder, and planned to plunge the entire galaxy into a nightmarish civil war. Needed to ask her what needed to be done, how the Luna she knew could be brought back. She needed somepony with millennia of experience and wisdom to sit her down and tell her that everything would be alright. That six good men hadn’t just died for no good reason. But fate had conspired to take her mentor away, and put her right where she was completely out of reach. She was as physically close by as the two had been in months, but more distant than ever all the same.
What was she supposed to do now? Princess Luna had either gone insane or been turned back to evil, and now she was running around working for one of the single most dangerous and evil men in the entire galaxy. She had already killed for Vader at least three times, and quite likely more. She sought to deliver artifacts that would make the mysterious black cyborg even more powerful, all the while claiming to want to kill him. In all her years, throughout all her adventures on Equestria and beyond, Twilight had never encountered a situation like this one before. She needed advice, and needed it badly.
“It came a couple of days ago,” the little dragon sitting in her lap explained. “Not long after you and the rest of those guys ditched me here.”
“You know you’re too young and small to be wandering the underworld of Coruscant,” Twilight didn’t feel like rehashing the argument. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m not that much younger than you!”
“I’m a pony, you’re a dragon. You’re much earlier in your species’ life cycle than I am.”
“Now that you’re an alicorn, do you even have a life cycle? I thought they lived forever.”
“Barring fatal injury, so far as we know they do,” Twilight recited absentmindedly. Facts help take her mind off the letter in her hands. “There’s no recorded case of any alicorn ever dying of natural causes, and Princess Celestia’s and Luna’s ages suggest that there may for all practical purposes be no limit on potential alicorn lifespan.”
“Anyway, my point is that you’re not much older than I am, and I should have been with you.”
“Then would Luna have killed you too?” Twilight wondered, feeling ice in her veins at the very idea. Spike was like a little brother to her, the thought of him lying there with his legs cleaved off and then electrocuted to death…
“Absolutely not,” she declared, unable to shake the mental image. “They would eat you alive down there.”
“I’ve been in dangerous situations before you know,” he crossed his arms. “In the Crystal Empire back home, with you on Serenno. Remember? I’m not some helpless baby. And besides, you can’t just leave me behind forever.”
“That’s what scares me,” Twilight thought.
Her comlink chose that moment to begin beeping.
Many hundreds of miles away, Luna sat curled up on her ship’s bunk, reading over the documents that her men had recovered from the scene or subsequently been able to reconstruct from the video recording. Apparently, the theft of Vader’s Sith treasure trove had been specifically commissioned in great haste through Argon Ur to a group of pirates by a hooded and masked man mostly through courier droid intermediaries – he’d never actually met his client in person. Information on the location and nature of the sought after relics, as well as the best time for an ambush, had been supplied along with a very healthy number of credits run through an anonymous account via Muunilinst. Where it had all ultimately come from was a mystery.
While the client had clearly done his best to remain distance from the actual operation, Ur was a savvy businessman who knew the value of information. He’d had the droid messengers tracked several times, pinning them to a relatively wide area on level 1313 known for its exceptional criminality even by underworld standards. Most of them time it hadn’t amounted to much, the droids either giving his men the slip or else simply scrapping themselves after making a dead drop. Once, however, a droid of his own had managed to follow a courier back to an abandoned warehouse in time to catch a meeting in progress.
The courier droid had delivered Ur’s reply to a tall, well-built man in a black cloak and mask that concealed the bulk of his features. But the video feed showed something that the ferried holograms hadn’t – even through the hood it was plain that the man’s skull was crowned with a number of small horns, and that he sported twin cybernetic legs from at least the knees down. A man of that description had been tentatively linked to a number of shady gangs and insular secret societies on at least half a dozen worlds stretching from the Core to the Inner Rim and possibly beyond. He was known to be a collector of rare weaponry, as well as objects connected to what the Gotal black marketer had derisively deemed “outdated mysticism”. He paid well, answered no questions, never stayed in the same place for long, and those who dealt with him too often had a tendency to vanish into thin air.
They called him Maul.