Chapter Text
Obi-Wan stares at the two powerful Force-sensitives. Both are in their mid-to-late teens, dressed in a strange style of robe not native to this planet or in line with current galactic fashion.
The Darksider, who feels so much darker and more powerful than Xanatos du Crion in the Force, has brown hair and red eyes, and wears a black robe with green highlights.
The other Force-sensitive is a Lightsider if a strange one; however, Obi-Wan has no idea what Force tradition he trained in, for it is certainly not that of a Jedi. The Lightsider, with dark hair and green eyes, is dressed in a similar dark robe with red accents. He wears a ring with a black stone on his finger and carries a stick in his hand, which gives off a bad feeling in the Force.
The Lightsider starts talking in an unknown language. Obi-Wan shakes his head and responds in Basic. The Lightsider shakes his head before turning to the Darksider and saying something. The words are unintelligible to Obi-Wan; however, the tone and the impression in the Force suggest a request.
The Darksider heaves a heavy sigh and murmurs a couple of words that echo strangely in the Force, then waves his hand.
“Hello, I’m Harry. Who are you? Where is this place? What is the local situation like? You look to be child soldiers or homeless children in an undesirable situation. Would you like some help?”
The Lightsider, now known as Harry, asks eagerly. This causes the Darksider to sigh and start talking.
“We are not local in any sense, and have no context for your society, ethics, laws, or culture. Please provide broad strokes, then the more pertinent details.”
Obi-Wan blinks once, twice, then asks carefully. “Are you familiar with the Galactic Republic?” Receiving a headshake from the Lightsider, he asks, “Are you familiar with the Force, Jedi, or Sith?” Receiving another head shake, Obi-Wan puts aside his instinctive mistrust and starts talking at the urging of the Force.
“The galaxy currently is divided into many factions; however, the biggest and most powerful is the Galactic Republic, which was founded by the Jedi, who are Light Side force users. It's a galactic democracy that sends Jedi to act as peacekeepers and problem solvers. The Jedi can be divided into five branches—agricultural, Exploratory, Medical, Educational, and Knights. We are on the planet Melida Daan, which is in a state of civil war between the Melida and the Daan. Currently, a third faction has risen, the Young, which is comprised of children under the age of fifteen who want the fighting to stop.”
Obi-Wan says, answering the questions to the best of his abilities, summarizing as much as he can into pertinent points.
“I see, and is this planet a member of any galactic faction?” The Darksider asks in a near purr.
“Not currently; the civil war prevents them from joining any Galactic faction.”
Obi-Wan answers hesitantly. Harry nods with a grim look in his eyes.
“Alright, I understand the situation. Lead us to the children. Tom can heal and build fortifications and protect all of you while I handle the child killers.”
Harry says, and the force… moves strangely. Obi-Wan is not sure what it means outside of this being a good thing for the Young. They don’t look like elders; they look just a year or two older than him, so he leads them to the Youngs' base in the sewers.
Obi-Wan's scouting team gives him a questioning side-eye but trusts his judgment and 'bad feelings.'
Upon reaching the entrance to the sewers, Harry wrinkles his nose and waves his stick, saying a word, and all the filth and smell disappear for several dozen meters. Obi-Wan stares for a few seconds at the absurd Force technique before shrugging. Harry continues to clean as they go. Obi-Wan has a half thought about leaving such a trail, but the force gives him a don’t worry about it feeling.
Obi-Wan gives an all-clear signal as they approach the area claimed by the young. After arriving, Harry glances around and waves his stick; every inch of ground, cloth, skin, and hair becomes spotless. Without hesitation, he moves over to the area with the wounded and starts healing injuries. Flesh knits, bruises fade, and bones straighten.
“I can heal basic injuries, not sickness or infection. Tom can handle that while I go deal with your elder problem.”
Harry proclaims ominously after finishing with all the now clean and healed children. Harry then marches out the way they had come.
This leaves over two hundred clean and healed children staring after him before they turn their gaze to the Darksider, now known as Tom.
Tom heaves a sigh. “Healing is not my specialty, and I don't have a wand. I am, however, proficient in blood alchemy, which, as it would translate to you, is magical genetic engineering. It would be much easier to simply change all of you to be immune to the mundane diseases and infections you currently have, and to make you immune to most other diseases. So what traits would you all like to have?”
After a few seconds of processing to understand what he ment and a few older Children explaining what he meant to the younger ones, they start shouting out answers, not thinking too hard about it, given all the things they have seen Obi-Wan do and talk about others doing, saying that ‘all things are possible in the Force’.
“I wanna be strong!” “I wanna heal fast!” “Can you make me see in the dark?” “I want to be fast!” “Can you fix my hearing in my bad ear?” “Can I have claws and sharp teeth?” “Could you give me red hair like Obi’s?”
The children call out requests, and Obi-Wan finds himself holding off a panic attack as Sith Alchemy is used on children. The Darksider uses the Force to carve a circle on a flat piece of ground and glyphs around it with idle flicks of his fingers.
“So health, regeneration, strength, speed, dexterity, increased immune system, nocturnal vision, along with a vision boost, super hearing, The ability to overcome malnutrition fully at any point in your lives, sharp nails and teeth and the hair of the redhead,” Tom says while carving before striding over to Obi-Wan so he can pluck a hair out of his head ignoring Obi-Wan’s panic attack before returning to drop the hair on a rune, and finish up his intricate carving.
“Now, children lay in the circle one by one, so I can add your desired traits.”
Tom says easily, as if using Sith Alchemy on children was the most normal thing in the world. A seven-year-old girl goes first; she has a bad cough with fluid in her lungs. Obi-Wan knows and worries that she will not survive much longer.
Tom gets on one knee and chants a few words as the circle glows, and the Girl changes before all their eyes.
Her hair changes to a bright metallic red; her eyes change to have vertical slit pupils, her canines sharpen, and her nails turn to small claws. She gets up with more energy than any child on this planet has had in centuries and looks around in wonder, hopping on the balls of her feet before she jumps up onto the ceiling, latching on with her claws, and laughs a loud and bright sound as she hangs upside down. It's not long before Tom is changing the next child and the next. Before long, all of the children besides Obi-Wan have been changed.
“We have more Young hidden outside of the city. Will you be able to change them too?”
One kid asks Tom, the Darksider.
“Yes, now give me a few minutes to craft a focus using all the bloodshed Harry is causing from dealing with your Elder problem.”
Tom says that before continuing with his next task, he bites into his finger and uses the blood to craft another, smaller circle. Before long, there is a red crystal stick growing out of it, the same shape and size as Harry's stick. Are they like our Kiber crystals? Obi-Wan wonders to himself.
It's been a week, and everything has changed. Harry and Tom have transformed all the surviving children into a new species and killed off every adult on day one. On the second day, they repaired the city, cleaned it, and began transforming select government buildings into communal housing. They transformed old, used cloth and rusted metal into new-looking four-poster beds, large enough for children to make massive cuddle piles to sleep in. The changes in the children have been significant, as they are now far from their baseline human state.
Oni-Wan is trying to keep track of everything. Asking questions of the two is confusing. They claim to be wizards, and that's fine. A lot of Outer Rim Force users claimed to be wizards with magic. They also claim to be bound together, coming from another time and place—something about cursed immortality through reincarnation and the tying of their souls together.
Harry is most certainly light. Obi-Wan knows this because he summoned a light side manifestation in the form of a herbivorous quadruped with antlers. Tom is most certainly dark. The best Obi-Wan can figure is that they are a dyad of some sort, one light and one dark. When Obi-Wan asks further about their theological views and tries to explain the Jedi, he is pulled into a lecture about all things being in balance, light and dark, yin and yang, male and female, life and death, order and chaos, the cylindrical nature of reality, and the turning of the wheel.
Which would likely be considered heretical by the modern Jedi Order.
After Harry had killed all the adults in ‘purifying fire,’ which Obi-Wan suspects is code for light-side pyrokinesis, he gathered all the children and food in the restored capital. The children, who now number around 5,000, include the Young, surviving Melida, and the Daan children.
Now, the leaders of all the kids, Obi-Wan, Nield, Cerasi, Deila, and a few other older children, gather around the meeting room with Tom and Harry.
“This planet is in the outer rim and is barely habitable after the last few centuries of war. I recalled the ghosts of past leadership to inquire about any resources or hidden accounts and found nothing. The first order of business is to terraform the planet into something more usable.”
“You can do that with your Force Magic, Obi?”
Cerasi asks with wide eyes.
“Yes, the Jedi agricultural corps specializes in repairing ecosystems and terraforming.”
He confirms hesitantly.
“Now, as the first planet in my soon-to-be empire-” Tom starts earning an eye roll from Harry and many side glances from the children. “-it must be grand, I will spare no expense. Grand feats of magic require sacrifice. We could slowly change the planet over years or centuries; however, why wait when we could do it in a day? So, I will be using the spilled blood of all those who died in battle on this world, along with their names, as fuel. From death, life, and their names will be the sacrifice. I won't bore you with the details, but please note that for the next day, don’t leave the city. I put up some heavy wards to protect it while the planet adjusts to its soon-to-be new state.”
Tom finishes his statement, gets up, and strides out of the room without waiting for a reaction. The children turn their gaze to Harry once Tom's out of sight.
Harry smiles sheepishly and scratches his cheek.
“Doing big things takes sacrifices or time; you can’t just snap your fingers and create an impenetrable fortress. So, Tom is going to utilize all the essence of death that this planet has absorbed over the past few centuries to bring life as part of the natural cycle. Beyond that, sacrifices can be used as fuel and as a source of power. Names have power to them; to name something is to gain power over the thing named, and to give a name is to provide power. Since I have slain all the Melida and the Daan, I have claimed them through the right of conquest. Tom and I are soul-bound, so he has claimed them as well. Now, he will be sacrificing their names to power this ritual, which, in practical terms, means that everyone who has ever known the names Melida and Daan will forget them, and all written records will disappear. Now this leaves us with the practical concern of what to call the planet and ourselves.”
Harry explains, trying to clarify just what is going on.
“This planet has been poisoned, and there is very little nature left. We can’t pay for what would be needed to restore it. We will also need food, so Tom is going to terraform the world. That is, change it from what it is now into something with more plants and nature so that we can have farms and fruit trees. This will involve altering the atmosphere, weather patterns, soil composition, and many other factors.
Harry concludes with a sheepish smile, earning a bunch of disbelieving stares from the children.
“We can call the planet Tom’s planet?”
“Please, no, don’t give him any more ideas.”
After a few more suggestions, they settle on calling the planet Melidaan.
One child stares out the window, prompting others to do the same. A massive bubble encloses the city as the world outside descends into chaos with hurricane-like winds. Lightning, storms, and dirt flying everywhere. It's as if the world is howling with agony as it's forcibly changed.
Obi-Wan passes out from the overwhelming feelings in the Force.
Melidaan has forests now. A jungle planet filled with fruit trees and a single city that runs on Force magic to conjure water, keep people warm, and keep the streets clean.
Melidaan also has a self-styled Dark Lord Tom, who, when not interrogating Obi-Wan about galactic politics, is off performing unknown Dark Side rituals of dubious purpose.
Obi-Wan has been conscripted into being a teacher now that he no longer has to lead a war with an army of children against adults.
Harry, their very own Light Lord, and Tom’s minder has been going around transforming the city into something new and beautiful. All the Duracrete has been transformed into a beautiful white stone, enchanted to be unbreakable and always clean. Harry raised a battlement wall around the city with that same unbreakable white stone. Meeters thick and taller than any house. He claims it has all the standard enchantments, whatever that means.
The buildings have not been spared Harry's treatments, along with a newly created bath house, a dining hall with magical food storage, magical outhouses, empty shops, and other essentials. However, they do not currently have a use for shops. Harry insists, however, that they will be helpful one day to the unconvinced children who have never seen such a thing before. Harry has also made little balls of light that appear each night to float gently over the streets, creating what Obi-Wan will admit is a breathtaking view.
All this and Tom’s castle in the middle of the city that could house all the current inhabitants of the planet.
The children, the newly superhuman children, have been foraging among the many fruit trees when not in makeshift classes run by the older teenagers, who teach lessons on how to read and write, along with those who have been taking care of the babies and toddlers.
On another note, the children's coppery red hair has some metallic properties, which means it's nearly impossible to cut or tame. Obi-Wan thinks that this will further the feral child aesthetic that they are building towards.
“We have a pirate ship inbound.”
Tom said casually while lounging on his throne-like chair during the next meeting in his castle in the middle of town.
“First, how do you know we have a ship inbound? Second, how do you know it's a pirate ship?”
“I set up a ward to attract ill intent so that I might have acceptable targets due to Harry’s delicate sensibilities. Thus pirates. Numerology to determine when. Divination to scry the ship itself.”
Tom says with an airy wave of his hand.
“When they land, I'll kill them all, take and repair the ship, enchant it so it's not so useless, use Numerology to find a derelict dreadnought or two, repair and enchant them to the best of our abilities, and use them to start my plans for my future empire.”
Tom says this with a self-satisfied smile.
“The city wards should keep us safe from planetary bombardment and infiltrators.”
Harry adds helpfully.
Obi-Wan watches a Dark Lord storm an unsuspecting pirate vessel and can only offer a silent prayer for them as they go screaming into the Force. All except the Captain, of course, whom Tom interrogates via mind-reading, then mind-controls to have him transfer ownership of all the Droids and systems.
“Harry, protect my holdings and minions.”
Tom commands before taking off in his newly commandeered ship.
“Don’t worry, Tom, I'll keep the house and kids safe while you go conquer the galaxy.”
Harry replies with a smile.
Four days later, Tom returns with a newly restored Harrower-class dreadnought from the New Sith Wars.
Obi-Wan stares as Tom lands the thing outside the city. Obi-Wan keeps staring as Harry and Tom get to work dismantling and rebuilding the thing. Each piece is carefully enchanted with runes engraved to make them indestructible. Each hull piece can conceal energy signatures and life signs from outside scans. The weapons are refurbished with piercing and predictive enchantments. They even somehow manage to make the thing run purely off the Force without the need for fuel.
They have even managed to make the thing move and attack off the Captain’s Intent instead of needing a crew. Obi-Wan is unsure if giving such a ship sapients is a good idea, but will admit he would rather not have the Young run the thing. Such ships often require thousands of crew members to run, as AI-run ships have been banned after a few to many Droid rebellions and ghost fleets.
Four months after they finally finished refurbishing the greatest ship in the galaxy, Tom declares it to be the Nagini.
Harry rolls his eyes at Tom naming his new ship after his snake.
Tom proceeds to take The Nagini on to terrorise the Hutts and purge most of the slave trade. Killing off the slavers, freeing the adult slaves, and offering the orphan children and young teenage slaves a place as his minions while magnanimously giving the former vessels to the freed and sending them on to Alderaan.
All of the children were put through the ritual to increase their survivability and dumped off back on Melidaan for Harry to manage, along with whatever spoils Tom wants added to his stronghold.
Harry has to start making new cities for all the new children. For some reason, probably having to do with seeing Tom eviscerate their abusers and slavers, the children are all really loyal to their Dark Lord.
Several prized force-sensitive children who have been enslaved have been given over to Harry to teach and aid him in creating more magical city fortresses to harbor all of their new minions, err, citizens.
Tom Riddle does not care about one's race, creed, religion, culture, force sensitivity, species; they are all equally beneath him and thus deserving of minion status.