What If The Jedi Council Had Visions of Darth Vader

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The air tastes of rust and swamp water.
Yoda walks, his feet not so much touching the earth as gliding just above it. Trees stretch into the sky like arms reaching for forgiveness. The world is damp, quiet — but not peaceful. It is a silence waiting to scream.
A path curls through the mist. Gnarled roots twist underfoot, then harden — metal, not bark. The forest fades. Before him now stands a single massive tree. Towering. Dead. Forged of dark iron. Its limbs crackle faintly with static. The bark is scorched. And from its branches hang lightsabers.
Not just one. Dozens. Hundreds. Some still hum. Some flicker with dying light. Some — cracked, broken — drip.
Bones lie beneath them, twisted into the roots like offerings. The tree breathes. In and out. Metal lungs drawing in the air like the rasp of a broken machine.
Hhhhhh. Kshhhhhh.
Beneath the roots, buried in muck, something pulses. A heart, maybe. Or a furnace. Yoda reaches out with his mind — and sees nothing. No future. No past. Just a name that does not exist yet, echoing as if remembered:
GHOST: “Vader.”
He opens his eyes. Still in the dream. A black sun hangs over the tree. The lightsabers swing in the wind. One of them is his.
Hhhhhh. Kshhhhhh.
Sand stretches forever. Golden. Cracked. Motionless.
Mace walks alone. No war. No clones. No noise but the rasp of wind against stone. His boots sink slightly into the surface with each step. The sun never moves. Something is ahead. A shape in the sand. A black obelisk, half-buried. Carved with deep, ancient grooves like claw marks or script too old to know. It pulses. Very faintly. Like it is alive.
Mace steps closer. Heat distorts the air around it. A breath escapes the obelisk — mechanical, wet —
hhhhh… kshhhhh…
He draws his lightsaber. But the hilt is wrong. It’s not his. It’s split in two. One half burned. The other caked in sand.
Then… a voice cuts the silence.
GHOST: “The lightsabers swing in the wind, they do.”
The voice is Yoda’s, soft and mournful, echoing as if from underwater. But he is nowhere to be seen. The obelisk splits open. Mace steps back.
Inside is a throne of glass, and seated upon it — not a man, not a Jedi — a figure cloaked in shadow and ash. Red light burns behind its eyes. The throne pulses with breath.
hhhhh… kshhhhh…
GHOST: “You will try”
The voice is Mace’s own. He wakes. His knuckles are white around the hilt of his real saber. He does not remember gripping it. Rain pours outside the meditation chamber.
hhhhh… kshhhhh…
THUNDER
Rain falls upward. Shaak Ti walks through Kamino’s endless cloning halls, but the halls are wrong. The walls are transparent, floorless, glowing from within — and every time lightning strikes outside, she sees her own reflection walking beside her. But it never moves the same way she does.
She stops. So does the reflection.
But it’s no longer her. The armor is black. The face is masked. The figure is tall, framed in red. The silhouette stands still, but inside the glass — behind the reflection — the corridor burns.
She reaches for the glass.
GHOST: “You will try…”
GHOST: “The lightsabers swing in the wind…”
The voices aren’t hers. One is Windu. One is Yoda. They ripple faintly through the glass like whispers in a sealed chamber. Her fingers touch the reflection.
hhhhh… kshhhhh…
The glass screams. Not a crack. Not a shatter. It screams.
Dozens of voices erupt from the mirror: younglings, knights, clones — all trapped, clawing to escape. Their faces merge, overlap. Their hands press against the inside, as if she is on the wrong side. As if she was always inside. As if she never left.
The corridor is gone. She now floats in an ocean — suspended beneath the surface — and the red figure walks calmly above her. His shadow casts down in sharp lines, slicing through the water like bars.
She tries to rise. Her limbs don’t respond. She looks at her hands. They’re wires.
A voice speaks. Not her allies. Not the Force. A clone.
Clone: “We only became monsters because you asked us to be.”
The reflection above raises its saber. She awakens cross legged on the temple floor, her meditation broken. The rain still falls outside — but downward again.
hhhhh… kshhhhh…
Ki-Adi-Mundi moves with purpose through the High Hall, staff in hand, cloak brushing over polished stone. The pillars rise like mountains. The stained-glass windows shimmer with past triumphs: Jedi duels, crowned Padawans, victories in light.