So,

A couple days ago, on discord, the amazing @uuurgh posted a super neat animation short, which you can see here (shared with permission by @dathomirdumpsterfire) which, after 2 and a half watches, began to spontaneously generate a Time Travel AU in my head. Which I ran some rambles in DMs to develop.

And since Ao3 was down this evening, I decided I would have to whittle away the hours until my husband (Ao3) came home from War (downtime) by writing to him (new fic doc)

And since Ao3 is STILL DOWN, and my muse is quiet now but my impulse is still High, Tumblr gets the 1K Prologue I wrote for this Maul Time Travel Fix-it. Which will probably contain a LOT more Nonsense and Shenanigans than the prose of this first bit implies. It will go up on Ao3 once it's back. (Please come back, me beloved. T^T)

Enjoy, Tumblr Gremlins!

A New Path, Yet Untrod - Prologue

How long?

How long had he been here now?

Would he still have come? If he had known? If he’d known that THIS would be his fate?

As much as he loathed Sideous… as much as he craved the fall of the Empire…

The silence was an enemy he had no recourse against.

Sideous could kill him. And oh, it would hurt. He had no doubt that the Sith Lord would not let him go quickly, or quietly, if ever they met again.

But Sdieous would be a mercy, in comparison.

He could not do this again.

He could feel himself fading. Faltering.

This was a place of ghosts. And he was becoming one of them.

He was a fool to have come here.

He wasn’t a Sith anymore.

He had no Master, and he had no apprentice. Therefore, the knowledge of the Sith was just beyond his grasp. For he was only one. And the Sith, and all they left behind, required two. Always. No more, no less.

His ship was gone. He had no way off of Malachor. And from what he could tell, he was the first to set foot on this planet in centuries. In the deep places, he could find what he needed to survive. Water, stale and ashen in his mouth, but necessary. Fungi, and crawling things. Foul, but sustaining.

But he could not bear to stay in the deep places for too long. Always, he would return to at least the second underlayer of the battlefield. Where there were only stone corpses. No water, no life. Only death so old and final that nothing lived around it. No flies or scavengers or things that grew among the dead. The deep places of Malachor, deeper than the roots of the Temple, had not been touched by this great apocalypse.

But the deep places, where water flowed, and things crawled, reminded Maul too much of days he tried very hard not to remember. Of days he thought he had forgotten. That Mother Talzin had purged from him. Of another deep place, where he had carved out a labyrinth of refuse, trapped in the dark and his own ruined mind.

But when he went too deep, where no light touched, where the air was still and stale and his hands clawed and he licked dampness from the raw, rough stones, and caught wretched sightless things in his teeth… he remembered. And once his stomach had at least a few mouthfuls of food and water, he would scramble back high enough to where he could see the stark white starlight of the pockmarked ceiling of black glass that protected the Sith Temple from prying eyes.

What had he come for?

Knowledge. He had come for knowledge. For a way to destroy Sideous and his Empire.

When would he learn?

For all his ambition, for all his pride, for all his drive… he was nothing. This was just another goal he would never reach. Another destiny not meant for him. And in the dead quiet, he would scream and beat his fists against unfeeling obsidian pillars, and cut stone corpses to pieces with the last gasps of energy from their own millennia-old lightsabers.

And in the quiet, after, as he sat panting in the dust, he would clutch at his horns, and tremble. For he could not tell if the Force was whispering to him in comfort… or if he were going mad again.

And he feared the madness. More than anything, he feared becoming so hopelessly lost again. There was no Savage or Talzin to save him this time. If he went mad here, he would never return. By now he doubted, truly, if he would even notice the moment his body died, and he was left to wander Oblivion.

But Maul was, above all else, too stubborn to die. So he wandered, but never too far from the Temple. He braved the deep places, to sustain his slowly withering body. And he waited. He’d had a vision of this place. So he had come. This was where he needed to be, so this is where he was. The Force had made sure of it, taking his only means of leaving away from him, so that he could not falter from this course, when the solitude threatened to shake his resolve.

Weeks.

Months.

Years.

He wondered what had happened to the empire he had built, of greedy scum and grasping criminals. He wondered who had come out on top when his absence had inevitably created a power vacuum in Crimson Dawn. Perhaps it had just dissolved back into its original syndicates. Not that it mattered. It had been a means to an end. The power to know and to control what he could, when he could, where he could. All gone now. As much metaphorical dust as the literal dust that softened his steps here and now.

He leaned heavily on his cane as he walked around the base of the Temple. He needed it more and more these days. His metal limbs seemed to grow heavier every day. There was a hitch in one of his artificial hips that he could no longer be bothered to correct through sheer force of will.

You will not be ready, when the time comes… something whispered to him. He sighed.

“I am running out of time. Surely you can see that.” He murmured in reply to the emptiness. His voice had grown soft and weak from disuse. He sounded as old as he felt.

There was no day or night on Malachor. Not here, under the pillars. The obsidian ceiling let through its cold, sharp beams of ‘starlight’ into the dark. Maul took sleep when his body told him he needed it, wedging himself beneath some ledge or outcropping. Not that he needed shelter from any elements. It did not rain here. It did not grow colder. It was only to give his body some sense of ‘night’ from the unblinking shafts of light spilling down from above.

One ‘morning’, when Maul woke, something felt… different. The still air was heavier.

“So… today is the day?” he rasped, to nothing and no one. He picked up his cane, his spine crackling as he stood. With slow, shuffling steps, he made his way beneath the looming shadow of the Temple.