Midnight in the Garden

Chapter 24: Speed of Sound 3

Palpatine granted him a special, secret hyperspace route and use of a diplomatic shuttle. Just as well, Anakin thought. If the Jedi ever realized I'd traveled to Korriban ...

He found the shuttle stocked with water and nonperishables. Master seems to think I might be here a while. I wonder why that is?

It wasn't hard to find the building he was looking for. Halfway through a standard orbit of the planet, a massive Y-shaped structure appeared on his scanner. He scanned more closely. Stone, carved into perfect geometric blocks. As he descended into the atmosphere, sinking into that hemisphere's night, the darkness reached up to grab him and sink cold talons into his very bones.

He elected to remain in the shuttle and try to sleep until dawn.

The sun had a pinkish cast here, turning the blond sand rosy and the sky a sort of crisp bronze-blue. He stepped out onto a planet devoid of sentient beings, devoid even of most plant life. But for the scrubby shrubs that dotted the landscape and the pinkish-bronze light, he might have thought himself back on Tatooine. It certainly promised to be as hot.

The Sith temple was built of black stone, the same black stone he had scanned in deposits here and there on the planet's surface. Rocks and boulders of it littered the way up the hill to the structure.

Of course, a Sith temple would be built on a hill.

Looking closer, Anakin discovered that the rock on the ground had marbled veins like quartz, rose and white, but the chiseled rock of the temple walls was solid black. Its formerly sharp edges had weathered with centuries of wind. Carvings adorned the walls, and in these crevasses the marbled veining remained. The rock had been treated somehow, to turn the exterior solid black.

The three arms of the building were each about two levels high and formed peaked, five-sided structures when viewed from their ends. The arms widened gradually as they approached the main body of the building, a huge six-sided body that rose majestically into a peak far above Anakin's head.

Anakin approached the nearest arm, circled it to the end. A stone door was set into the building's face carved with --

Anakin blinked and looked more closely. A stylized glyph of a sun halfway at horizon met him at eye level. A representation of sunrise -- and he knew it was supposed to be sunrise because that very glyph appeared everywhere in the Jedi Temple. It symbolized the Light side.

Why was the light side depicted on a Sith temple?

Anakin could not read the Sith heiroglyphs around the door frame; due to the exigencies of the times, Palpatine had taught him little of the ancient system.

He decided to check out the other arms of the Y; presumably they had doors, too.

The north door bore representations of the Unified Force; the southeast door; the Living Force. Anakin could pretty much guess what the pinnacle of the tower symbolized.

But which door to enter?

When he thought of the Living Force, he remembered Master Jinn, blue eyes twinkling mischievously, leaning back in his chair, laughing at his mother's kitchen table.

He figured this door was as good as any.

The doors, huge heavy slabs of thick rock, didn't appear to be locked or secured in any way. At this size and weight, they hardly needed to be; most people would need a blaster or a team of banthas. Anakin settled for the Force.

He slipped inside a long, narrow passageway as black as night. He could feel the cold walls close about him in the Force, dark as the darkness that blinded him. Just as his mind wandered to consider the approximate thickness of these walls, to be so close from in here and so wide from out there, a ringing sound reached his ears.