Chapter Text
Shmi tells her son that he was a miracle. That she prayed to Ar-Amu and asked the great mother of the desert for a son and that the goddess answered her wish.
Shmi is a liar.
Shmi was well aware that there was no father involved with her pregnancy. She counts her days too thoroughly to ever lose track of time. She knows what happens to slave women that drop their guard. She did not want to become one of them.
When Ar-Amu placed her child in her womb, Shmi thought she was going to die. She remembers stumbling out into the desert, howling in pure agony. She remembers the feeling of the writhing mass of limbs lashing inside her body screaming with the voice of a thousand tongues echoing across the universe, the power of ten thousand stars making its home inside her blood.
Ar-Amu whispers, Dakkalu, strength now, and Shmi holds steady. The pain fades and she is left with a life inside her body, snarling and fierce, promising death to anything that dares attack its mother-vessel. She is not beaten once throughout her pregnancy and if she looks too hard into a mirror, she’ll she something she’s not supposed too.
(-a dragon with hundreds of wings of fire and the tail of a phoenix, too massive to truly comprehend-)
When her son is born, it does not simply rain on Tatooine. It pours. Shmi had only heard about thunderstorms through stories and holos. When her son comes into the world, he brings the first thunderstorm in several thousand years to Tatooine.
The earth shakes, the wind screams, and the sky bellows as the Grandmother of the quarters helps ease her child from between her legs. She wakes to what seems to be a perfectly normal baby in her arms and a world in ruins.
The skies are still grey as she walks around Mos Espa, with no oppressive sun bearing down her back. The ground is split in several places, buildings crumbled to the ground, mudslides wrecking the roads.
She gets word that the entire planet had suffered the same plate and sees footage of mountain ranges being split in two, lightning strikes that set entire cities ablaze, Sand People that had been frozen in the spots they stood, and kryat dragons that had been picked clean because the earth had shaken so hard it had literally vibrated the flesh off their bones.
Her son giggles and the sky rumbles once more, his eyes flashing in a way no human eyes should.
The slave quarters in Mos Espa, and in every other settlement remain completely untouched.
She gazes down at her infant son that shook the world and bent the sky to his will. She names him Ekkreth. Anakin Ekkreth, the sky-walker, breaker of chains and rain-bringer.
Shmi Skywalker knows that she will not be able to protect her child from a destiny as great as his. But Shmi Skywalker has endured, and she will teach her child to do the same so that he will be able to endure as well.
They’re all depending on it.