(Theatrical Edition)
Episode V: Wrath of the Republic
“I knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help. Now get movin'.”
--Joe (Clint Eastwood), A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone
Twenty years had passed since the First Clone War and the victory of the Republic. Yet in their exile the survivors of Clan Valorum remembered their grudge, and vowed that one day vengeance would fall upon the Republic.
The young and impetuous new Clone King, Xerxes Valorum, judged the time to be right to strike.
So began the Second Clone War.
At the height of the war, Xerxes Valorum, leading a small force of ships, made a raid upon Organa Major, hoping thus to revenge himself upon those who had defeated his late predecessor, the Clone King Zander.
In a daring assault upon the planet surface, Xerxes carried off Crispin and Corwin, the young twin sons of King Carl and Queen Alexa of Organa Major.
Crispin and Corwin, however, had managed to carry with them a hyperspace beacon, which allowed the Republic to track the Clone King’s ships.
A fleet of ships from the Republic Navy embarked on a chase. Aboard the flagship was Annikin Starkiller, now a Jedi Knight.
But his fellow Knight, Ben Kenobi, looked at the route of the fleeing Clone ships and extrapolated its likely destination: a nebula on the outer perimeter of known space. Thus, when Xerxes Valorum’s ships dropped out of hyperspace, a Republic gunship was waiting.
While the Republic ship’s crew engaged the Clone gunners in a dogfight, Ben and his young apprentice Darth Vader donned spacesuits.
Crossing through the void, they managed to breach the interior of Xerxes’ vessel. They found the young boys, held captive in a luxurious suite, and slew the guards defending them.
Meanwhile, Annikin Starkiller’s armada dropped out of hyperspace behind the Clone King’s smaller fleet. Realizing he was no match for this superior force, Xerxes Valorum took his personal shuttle and fled into hyperspace.
Thus the decisive battle of the Second Clone War ended with a Republic victory.
Upon their rescue, Crispin and Corwin informed the Jedi that they had stowed their locator beacon inside Xerxes’ shuttle when they were first captured.
While Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader returned the children to their parents, their fellow Jedi Annikin Starkiller took a starfighter and pursued Xerxes Valorum, who had fled to the other end of the known galaxy.
Darth Vader, eager to find glory in battle, had wanted to pursue the Clone King himself. But Annikin, who recognized in Darth some of the hotheadedness he had once shared, took the mission for his own.
Still, there was another reason for Annikin’s departure, one which he did not state: he thought the twins’ mother Queen Alexa was very beautiful, and he feared to be around her, lest his own desires end by robbing the happiness from Carl Organa’s marriage.
Xerxes Valorum emerged from hyperspace over the desert world of Sullust, created a mere twenty years before.
When Annikin’s craft emerged into normal space, Xerxes was hiding his own ship behind an asteroid. Before Annikin was aware of him, he fired on the Jedi Knight’s starfighter, forcing Annikin to make a crash landing on the planet surface.
Annikin was left insensible by the crash, and lay unconscious in the burning wreckage of his craft, but he was pulled out by a local settler girl, about eighteen years old. Her name was Beru Thorpe.
Beru nursed Annikin back to health over the next few weeks. When Annikin saw her face, with its brown hair, kindly brown eyes and easygoing smile, he found it pleasant to look at. Beru, too, thought Annikin Starkiller was quite an attractive man, whose missing right arm rather increased than diminished his appeal.
But Beru had a sister, Breha, whose steely blue eyes and sharp tongue had driven away all suitors, though her father Bail clearly favored her over Beru.
When he was well enough, Annikin left the Thorpe homestead, and began hunting for Xerxes Valorum. His knowledge of the war’s progress, as well as his Force sight, told him that Xerxes had likely not left the planet, and was even now hiding out somewhere on Utapau (as the locals termed it).
Before he departed on his quest, Annikin spoke words of love to Beru, and promised that, if he returned alive, they would be wed. To himself he even thought of retiring from the Jedi Order, if only to escape from the gaze of the beautiful Alexa Organa.
In the shadows, Breha Thorpe fumed with jealousy.
Meanwhile, for his first solo mission, Darth Vader was sent to track down a surviving Clone general.
He traced his prey to the rocky desert planet of Ttaz, a sparsely inhabited world of red sands and tall stone outcroppings beneath strange emerald skies. Once, this world had been densely populated, until it was struck with a plague, in the wake of which most of the survivors fled.
While hunting for his quarry in the ruined cities of Ttaz, Darth Vader heard from the few remaining inhabitants rumors of a witch or sorceress who lived in a cave in the desert. Wondering if she might be connected to his missing general, Vader set out to find this so-called witch.
Eventually, in a remote cave on the farthest fringes of the red desert of Ttaz, Vader found his witch.
She was no fraud.
The witch spoke to Vader of his upbringing at the hands of his mother, Zara Valorum, who had raised him to seek vengeance on his father, Annikin Starkiller.
This was a secret Vader had as yet revealed to none, for he never spoke of his childhood to others, and said only that he was the son of a poor farmer’s daughter. Zara had died before her son enrolled in the Jedi Order; so far as Vader knew, she herself had been as reluctant as he was to discuss their history with others.
Vader did not yet quite believe the witch was more than a mind-reader… after all, there were many who had such powers, not all of them Jedi. He asked her to summon his mother’s spirit, so that he could talk to her.
At the witch’s command, the ghost of Zara Valorum appeared in the hut.
Zara’s ghost spoke with the regret of one who had sinned in life, and now could not undo those sins. She said to her son that she had lied knowingly to him.
Annikin Starkiller was not in truth the one who had destroyed their world. It was, in fact, Annikin’s fellow Jedi Ben Kenobi, who afterwards denied his crime. Therefore the Starkiller line was largely innocent of the blood curse she had sought to wreak upon it.
Vader was incredulous and disbelieving. Even if these words were true, he said, Annikin had still assaulted her and killed her clone-father, King Zander Valorum.
But this seeming could not be true. His mother would not have lied to him.
No, the witch had to be trying to deceive him.
And so Darth Vader, lashing out with his lightsaber, slew her in her own hut.
Not long afterward, under the evening light of the moons of Ttaz, Vader found his missing general, hiding out in an encampment hidden among the rocks of the desert. The fugitive Clone leader was sound asleep, and did not rouse at the Jedi’s arrival.
Vader pondered for a moment whether killing this man as he slept, without even letting him know of his impending fate, was wrong. But he told himself that the man was an enemy of the Republic, and therefore deserved to die.
So Vader killed the former Clone general in his sleep, and returned to the Republic, taking the corpse’s head as proof of his quarry’s death.
On Sullust, after months of searching, Annikin finally located Xerxes Valorum, now fallen into a haze of alcohol, in the back alley of a seedy small town. Xerxes was a poor lightsaber duelist, and moreover a coward at heart, and in his drunken misery he begged for his life.
Remembering what had happened on the tenth planet of this solar system, twenty years prior, Annikin decided to give Xerxes a fighting chance to live.
Instead of a sword duel, they had a gunfight.
Annikin was shot in the shoulder. Yet using his left hand, he struck down Xerxes Valorum with a blaster pistol, shooting him in the eye.
From the dead Clone King’s hand, Annikin took a Ring as proof of Xerxes’ death. This magic Ring, identical to that worn on Annikin’s left hand, had the power of preventing its owner from dying. But the ring was ineffective against assaults upon the wearer’s eyes, and Annikin’s shot had penetrated Xerxes’ eye socket and pierced his brain.
Returning to the Thorpe farm, Annikin still ached with the pain of his wound. As he lay recuperating in a guest bedroom, Breha Thorpe approached him, and gave him a drugged drink which roused his passions. Having thus drugged his body and dulled his mind, Breha slept with the man whom she had long desired.
Afterward, Breha went to her father, and said to Bail Thorpe that Annikin had lain with her of his own free will, siring a child on her. Bail urged Annikin to make an “honest woman” of Breha and marry her. Reluctantly, Annikin agreed.
Annikin Starkiller married Breha Thorpe, and settled down to live on Utapau shortly afterward.
Beru Thorpe, heartbroken, married a fellow moisture farmer, Owen Lars, whose advances she had previously rejected, thinking him a dullard.
The Second Clone War continued on for almost another year, but with the disgrace and death of its leading figurehead, the Clones’ defeat was all but inevitable.
The end of the war was celebrated with much fanfare. Prominent Senators spoke of the “end of history” and looked forward to decades of peace.
Cloning technology was outlawed across the Republic, in order to prevent unscrupulous kings from breeding a new race of mentally unstable soldiers.
Ben Kenobi, capitalizing on his fame, wrote a book: Diary of the Clone Wars. It became an overnight bestseller.
Nine months after Annikin slept with Breha Thorpe, she gave birth to a child. This boy had the fair hair and blue eyes of his father.
She named her son Luke.