Star Wars Myths & Fables Read online

  © & TM 2019 Lucasfilm Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Lucasfilm Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Lucasfilm Press, 1200 Grand Central Avenue, Glendale, California 91201.

  ISBN 978-1-368-05515-4

  Visit the official Star Wars website at: www.starwars.com.

  For my young Padawans, James and Emily.

  May the Force be with you!

  —G. M.

  Thank you to my parents, Jean and David Griffin, and a BIG thank-you to my wife, Delaney Wray, for forever keeping my spirits high.

  —G. G.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Knight & the Dragon

  The Droid with a Heart

  Vengeful Waves

  The Wanderer

  The Black Spire

  Gaze of Stone

  The Witch & the Wookiee

  The Dark Wraith

  Chasing Ghosts

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  INTRODUCTION

  ALL ACROSS THE GALAXY, there are tales waiting to be heard and stories longing to be told. Such legends are passed down through generations, spanning millennia, stretching to the farthest reaches of space as they are carried from planet to planet. For stories bind our universe together.

  Whether whispered in quiet corners of cantinas, or shared while flying through the funnel of hyperspace, or simply told to little ones before they close their eyes at night, stories are for every soul who wanders this galaxy.

  Indeed, true power resides not in armies and empires, or in blasters and ancient weapons of light, but in the tales we share with one another.

  From the lowliest homesteads on forgotten planets to the glittering towers of bustling metropolises, from the hearts of smuggling dens to the tattered edges of Wild Space, stories—regardless of origin or language— remain a powerful source of inspiration, instruction, enjoyment, and hope.

  As time cycles ever on and the great wheel of the galaxy turns, such tales have proved, over and over, to be the seeds from which kingdoms and empires have grown, and the stuff from which great civilizations are built.

  Indeed, stories are the rhythm of all languages, the root from which shared understanding might flower—told to the youngest, whispered amongst the eldest, and enjoyed by everyone in between, be they pilots or pirates, soldiers or spies, farmers or senators. Even creatures and droids pass on what they know to one another in the form of tales woven by time.

  Some legends caution against unspeakable dangers and warn the unwary about straying too far down a dubious path. They demonstrate one’s place in the order of things and make the vastness of the galaxy a little less uncertain.

  Yet not all tales are cautionary in nature, and some in their telling instead point us toward possibilities and far-off lands, unimagined peoples and thrilling adventures. In this way, such grand stories encourage us to test our limits, to step into what our futures may hold.

  For all across the teeming galaxy, every one of us is living our own story, treading our own, individual path. Sometimes we will stumble and sometimes we will stride, but no matter our destination, our tales will live on, told by those whose lives we touch, rippling out across the stars throughout the generations, because stories are immortal—eternal.

  Here, then, are a few such tales, sought out from across time and space and carefully transcribed. Whether they are true or simply echoes of things that once came to pass, no one can be quite certain. Trust, instead, that before you lies more than a mere collection of words and pictures. And may you be emboldened by the power held within these pages. . . .

  HERE WAS ONCE A TRIBE of nomadic people on the distant, dusty planet of Tatooine who, for many months, had been terrorized by a fearsome dragon.

  These were a simple people, with simple needs, who had for generations eked out an uncomplicated existence on the harsh desert sands, trading with the other tribes for water and sustenance, salvaging the wreckage left behind by those careless few who shared their world—those others whose lives unfolded in the noisy cities and spaceports, who tried ineffectively to hold back the sand rather than embrace its gifts.

  The desert folk had little cause to visit those teeming cities, however, and although they had once roamed the rolling dunes in great caravans, they had found a place to settle. They were at one with the land and knew that the desert itself would provide them with everything they might need.

  So it was that these Sand People came to establish a village of their own, a place they might call home.

  For many months the village flourished, and food and water proved bountiful as the desert offered up its gifts. The villagers, once so used to their endless migration across the sands, grew complacent and comfortable. Yet in their ignorance, they knew not that they had awoken the wrath of a great dragon, Krayt, that made its nest amongst the nearby dunes and called that domain its own.

  Krayt was sly and knew that the people of the sand were in no way its equal in battle or cunning, so it devised a plan to rid itself of them. Just as the desert had provided for the villagers, it would provide, too, for the dragon. The people of the sand were numerous, and the dragon ever hungry; if it rationed them carefully, the villagers would sustain it for many months to come. Soon enough, it would reclaim its domain from those interlopers—once they were all inside its belly—but dragons are long-lived and lazy, and Krayt saw no need to hurry.

  Thus, it chose to begin with the villagers’ plump livestock, which they held in large corrals on the outskirts of the village. Only then, when the entire herd had been consumed, would the dragon enjoy the taste of that which it so craved: people.

  Thus began a campaign of nightly terror as the dragon—so large that the beat of its wings alone was enough to stir the sand into great storms that ravaged the villagers’ tents—descended upon the village to snatch at the mewling beasts in their pens before hurrying away, back to its sandy lair, to feast. The villagers cowered at the mere sight of such a terrible beast, and in their fear, they made no move to try to prevent the dragon’s attacks.

  On the fifth day, however, the villagers were growing desperate, for they knew that if the dragon continued, soon there would be no livestock left in the pens to feed their children. That night, ten of the village’s most trusted warriors took up their arms and went to stand guard over the pens, in the belief that, together, they might prove strong enough to scare the beast into fleeing, or even to slay it.

  As it had each night before, the dragon came with the setting suns—a vast and horrifying silhouette, stark against the reddening sky. On huge wings it soared, sweeping low over the heads of the villagers, wheeling above them as they raised their weapons and took aim. Yet their weapons were ineffective and did not so much as scratch the beast. Far from dissuaded, it brushed the villagers aside with a flick of its wing and once more sailed away into the night with a squealing animal for its supper.

  In such a way it continued for many days, until the villagers’ livestock had all been consumed, and the Sand People themselves lived in fear of what the dragon Krayt might do when it returned to discover the pens empty.

  Krayt, though, had planned for such an eventuality and had secretly willed that day to come, because to a dragon, there is no sweeter meal than a helpless villager.

  That night the dragon returned to the village to find the livestock pens had been abandoned
. With a cackle of malicious glee, it turned to the village and beat its wings until the tents were swept away in a blizzard of sand and the people cowering beneath were revealed. For a moment the dragon seemed to linger, and then, licking its lips, it selected a young boy, whom it plucked from his mother’s arms and carried away into the night.

  The boy was not the last of his peers to be lost in such a fashion, for Krayt soon developed quite a taste for children. The villagers took to hiding their young in pits beneath the shifting sands, but the dragon was wise and had seen such tricks before. It dug up the children like wriggling worms, one to feast upon each night.

  The villagers could stand for this no longer and elected a warrior from amongst their number, whom they armed with their most precious weapons, adorned with their strongest armor, and sent out into the desert to stir the dragon from its nest. This warrior carried vengeance in her heart, for she knew the dragon must pay for the lives it had stolen, and she boldly claimed that she would soon return with the beast’s head as a trophy of her victory. The villagers cheered as she strode off toward the horizon, and in their hearts, for the first time in months, they carried hope for the future.

  That evening, the dragon did not return to the village. Cautious words of optimism were whispered around hearthstones as the villagers enjoyed their first night of peace for some time, and with the dawn, all agreed that the warrior must have been successful and the only reason she had not yet returned was that she bore the weight of the dragon’s head on her return journey. Collectively, they sighed in relief and believed that the nightmare of their plight was over.

  Yet evening rolled around again, and still the warrior had not returned. Optimism once again gave way to creeping fear, and sure enough, as the suns dipped out of sight, the dragon appeared on the horizon, and the villagers realized that all they had achieved in dispatching the warrior was to save the dragon the trouble of coming to the village for the previous evening’s meal. The campaign of terror began anew.

  So it was that, in desperation, the villagers concocted another plan.

  Certain that the dragon would not be dissuaded and would keep on returning until every last one of them had been gobbled up, the villagers agreed that they must find an alternative form of sustenance to offer the dragon. The next day a small band of villagers set out across the sands to where they knew a traveling band of fellow desert folk had temporarily made their camp. It did not please the villagers to lay siege to their own kin, but the dragon had left them with little choice, so the camp was hurriedly raided and the livestock stolen. It was a small herd, but it would buy them time, so the livestock were driven back to the village and penned in the corral, ready for the dragon’s return that night.

  True to what had gone before, the dragon came with the setting of the suns but showed little interest in the livestock, for it had enjoyed the taste of people, and livestock would never again satisfy its hunger. The villagers wailed as it plucked another of their number from the sand, for soon, like the livestock, there would be none of them left, and their plan to distract the dragon had failed.

  There was only one recourse left to them: if the dragon wanted people, then people they would give it. Yet they would no longer allow the dragon to take from amongst their own, for they had already lost too many. Nor would they be driven from their newfound home, for the desert had accepted them and the months before the coming of the dragon had been the happiest they had known.

  Thus, the raiding party that had set out the previous day did so again—only this time, they had a different quarry in mind.

  It was two days before they returned, and they were pained by the knowledge of what those two days meant—that Krayt would have paid two more visits to the village in their absence. Two more of their people would have been lost. And yet, upon their return they were welcomed as heroes, for they had brought with them seven humans, captured on the outskirts of the nearest town and marched along the winding pathways through the dunes.

  Most of the livestock corrals were empty, so the captives were herded into one such pen and bound, and upon the setting of the suns, one of them was chosen and tied to a stake outside the village boundary as an offering to Krayt.

  At first the dragon seemed unsure of the new development—perhaps suspicious of the villagers’ intent, lest they meant to poison it (in truth, a thought that had not occurred to the villagers, so desperate were they to save themselves). The dragon had, however, a most delicate sense of smell and was soon able to discern that the offering was fresh and juicy and wriggled just as well as all the others Krayt had plucked from amongst the villagers.

  The villagers were overjoyed, for the dragon had been sated and their plan had worked. For the next three nights they continued in such a fashion, selecting one of the captives, pinning the sacrifice out on the village boundary, and going about their business while the dragon feasted. More raiding parties were raised, and further excursions to the nearest city yielded yet more captives. A solution had been found, and the people of the sand could once more go about their lives, assured that they had settled upon a means to appease the dragon.

  Yet once again, the villagers had not counted on their actions invoking the wrath of another.

  An old knight who had once been regarded as a mighty hero had made his home on the desert world, where he had long before been tasked with protecting a most particular treasure. The knight was retired from adventuring, and much like the desert people, he shunned the company of others, preferring a life of solitude and quiet contemplation while he went about his final duty. Nevertheless, the old knight was of an altruistic disposition, and upon hearing that people were being taken from the nearby town, he felt compelled to investigate.

  The knight soon discovered the perpetrators behind the disappearances—for the desert folk were not subtle in their capture of the sacrifices—and, still stealthy from his years traversing the galaxy, followed the raiding party back to the outskirts of the desert village.

  There the old knight learned the truth: that the villagers were acting in desperation to protect themselves from the dragon Krayt. Still, while he felt great sympathy for the villagers and all they had suffered, he could not allow such a thing to stand.

  The old knight had not seen battle for many years and had long before discarded his armor in favor of simple robes—all the better to conceal his true identity from the many enemies who might yet seek him out on that backwater world. So it was that, upon descending from the dunes to enter the village, the old knight was derided by the villagers, who challenged him and bound him and tossed him into the pen along with the other townsfolk they had captured, for the villagers were blind to the truth and could not see that the old knight still harbored a great and terrible strength in his weary old bones. He would, they decided, serve as another sacrifice to the great dragon Krayt, despite his advanced age and tough, leathery flesh.

  In his wisdom, the old knight played along with the villagers’ games, until, penned in amongst the other captives and unobserved by the villagers, he shrugged off his bindings and set to work freeing the others from within. Soon the townsfolk had fled the pen, hurrying off into the dunes toward their homes, and the old knight stood alone, satisfied with his work and smiling.

  As the afternoon light began to wane, the villagers returned to choose a sacrifice from amongst the captives but were infuriated to find only the old knight, kneeling silently inside the pen, his eyes closed in peaceful meditation as he awaited his fate.

  With little choice, lest they sacrifice one of their own, the villagers dragged the old knight to the village boundary and tied him to the stake before retreating to the safety of their tents to await the coming of the dragon.

  Sure enough, as day finally gave way to dusk, the silhouette of the dragon, vast and ominous, appeared on the horizon, its wings unfurled to stir rolling clouds of dust as it sped toward the village boundary. It circled once above the camp, eyeing the old knight, laughing at the sight of suc
h a poor victim.

  Yet the old knight was wily and had once again slipped his bonds—for he had known the villagers would select him as their sacrifice—and as the dragon swooped low to pluck him from the sand, he stood and ignited his gleaming sword of light, which he raised above his head in warning, thus revealing his true nature to all who looked on.

  The dragon, duly unnerved by the sudden alteration, wheeled in the sky above the village, roaring in frustration that what it had assumed to be another simple sacrifice had proved to be something altogether more complicated.

  Krayt was an arrogant beast and knew that, despite the villagers’ trickery—for surely it was they who had concealed the unlikely warrior beneath such humble robes—one man could be no match for a beast of its size and power. Krayt knew that it would not go hungry that night.

  Thus began a dance of such elegance and ferocity that the villagers all emerged from their tents to observe as dragon and knight dipped and weaved—Krayt sweeping low with its whiplike tail and flashing talons, the knight ducking and leaping, the glowing blade of his sword humming through the air. He moved with a grace that belied his age, and the villagers knew at once, upon witnessing such a feat, that they had badly misjudged the man they had assumed to be a pitiful traveler from the nearby town.

  For an hour or more the battle continued, and yet neither the dragon nor the knight had made a mark upon the other, so evenly matched were they in wit and skill. The old knight understood that, as well-fed and as strong as the dragon was, he could never defeat it in battle. Indeed, his display was designed to serve an altogether different purpose—for he soon began to tire, and he sensed the dragon’s glee as he faltered in his feints and stumbled on the sand.

  Krayt smelled victory and dove.

  And the old knight lowered his sword of light.

  The villagers gasped as the dragon swooped low, claws stirring the sand, jaws yawning wide to reveal a cavernous maw lined with ivory daggers. . . .