a ghost is moving through the trees/it only stalks at night/before the dawn it finds its prey/and none escapes its might

(Sometimes, during the long, sleepless nights in Senator Renking’s Citizen’s Assistants office in the Bartanish Four Sector on Coruscant, Arihnda Pryce, born of Elainye and Talmoor Pryce, imagined the blazing white light of the twin moons on the horizon of the evening sky, and remembered the legends told of the loth-wolves—and the warnings they told of the darkness within one’s soul.)

Arihnda, at the price of her family’s livelihood, made a deal with then-Senator Renking to leave the rustic, backwater life she led on Lothal.

(So she lied, she cheated, and she betrayed.)

She climbed the unsteady and dangerous social ladder of Imperial society, and she surrendered her homeworld to the Empire for its governorship.

(She took the lives of over a thousand civilians on Batonn to ensure it.)

Its ore veins strip-mined and its people exploited and cast away, Lothal’s very soul was laid bare for the Empire’s taking.

(Through all of its pain and all of its suffering, the planet took its long-sought revenge.)