EAST OF EDEN ( anakin s. ) ✔️

033 | Vengeful Serpents..

━━━━━━ ༻ 🌅 ༺ ━━━━━━
" vengeful serpents "
...
━━━ ༻ CHAPTER THIRTY THREE ༺ ━━━

          UNDER THE WATCHFUL GAZE OF THE MOON, the garden was entranced with silver touches upon its petrified walls of roses. Almost a whole day before Obi-Wan's frenzy would stray him in a discussion with the bounty hunter Erso, beneath the starless sky, the garden's paths had fallen silent, haunted by the ghost of sunlight whose warmth the stones kept. Had one been lucky enough to sit on the roofs of one of these tall buildings the planet-city challenged its surface with, Coruscant's sleeplessness would finally shed its foil of nuisance and become instead quite a miracle: the stars that were missing from the sky above had been moved across the whole horizon, where life flickered in a myriad of colorful imitations of the cosmic wonder, a homage brought to the power behind manmade architecture, but also to the evolution of civilization, as allowed by the cradle of life itself, into a cold corpse emulating life.

"Don't lurk in the shadows like a frightened dog," Supreme Chancellor Palpatine spoke to the pseudo-silence of his garden, though his tone held neither concern, nor a particular annoyance towards the presence straying into his solitude, marked by a rather unusual and compromising position. Instead of being seated on the bench, Sheev Palpatine was knelt in the dirt, before one bush of roses not yet in bloom. The outer wear of his senate robes has been abandoned to the bench near the path, accounting for concealing the dirt now stuck to his pants once his nightly experiments were completed.

"Come and see for yourself," Palpatine urged the lurker in the shadows to step closer, pleased with hearing light threading steps behind him as an almost immediate confirmation of the intruder's remaining obedience. "The product of our labor..." In the fade of his words awakened his greed-riddled smile, casting its malignant interest down upon the movement of his very own hands. His right retrieved a dagger from his belt, on the blade of which even moonlight dared not shine: up above, a lone cloud shaded the ghostly silvers of their single watcher, plunging into a shadow Palpatine's left palm as it opened on his lap, facing the great void above.

The steps of his hooded partner in the quiet garden stopped right behind him, but the presence altogether did not keep Sheev from going through with the motion of descending the blade upon his left palm. On the contrary, the presence's influence was that of making him ever the more eager to slash a cut into his skin and watch red bubble out of a stinging sensation that he has felt so many times, it no longer made him hiss nor flinch. Instead the pain irked his smile to get a little wider, a little closer to a predator being confirmed his place up on the brutal hierarchy of the food chain.

With little regard towards the crimson rivers forming from his open palm down to his wrist, the Chancellor slowly sheathed his dagger back to its half-concealed place at the side of his belt. In the same temperance of unbothered masochism, he reached his right hand forward and closed his fist upon a rose bulb from the bush in front of which he was knelt.

From the perspective of a blissfully clueless individual, nothing significant happened for some uncomfortably long seconds. It was only to the heightened perception of a Force sensitive individual that as soon as Palpatine closed his eyes the very air around him responded to the heavy signature of his energy by tightening and growing thick enough to be cut through as the lianas of a jungle. Fortunately, the Chancellor's obedient company was attuned to the slithers of darkness now murmuring their tearing wails through the Force, thus before the physical results were even visible sufficiently to break the distinguishing barrier between the commoners and the sentiently superior, he already hitched his breath in anticipation. 

The cut on his left palm sealed itself, while the entire rose bush to which the bulb he held onto belonged turned to rot and then to dark dust. 

"You did it," the gasp behind the Chancellor was followed by a dulled thud, marking the moment the knees of the companion dug themselves in the dirt, at long last. "The key to immortality," within arm's reach from a miraculous power, his voice cracked on the vulnerability of awestruck emotion. "You've mastered it, father."