Lives & Adventures Read online

  Collection copyright © 2014 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM.

  Star Wars: The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi

  Copyright © 2008 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM.

  Cover art by Hugh Fleming

  Star Wars: A New Hope: The Life of Luke Skywalker

  Copyright © 2009 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM.

  Cover illustrations by Mike Butkus

  Star Wars: The Wrath of Darth Maul

  Copyright © 2012 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM.

  Cover illustrations by Mike Butkus

  Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of Darth Vader

  Copyright © 2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM.

  Cover art by Drew Struzan

  Design by Phil Falco

  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, 1101 Flower Street, Glendale, California 91201.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-2101-8

  Visit www.starwars.com

  Contents

  The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Interlude

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Interlude

  Chapter Five

  Interlude

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Interlude

  Chapter Twelve

  Interlude

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The Life of Luke Skywalker Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Interlude

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Interlude

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Interlude

  Chapter Ten

  Interlude

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The Wrath of Darth Maul Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifiteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The Rise and Fall of Darth Vader Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Interlude

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Interlude

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Interlude

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Interlude

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  More Star Wars eBooks

  For Frank Thorne, my favorite wizard, and everyone who ever wanted a real lightsaber

  Luke Skywalker was surprised to see the moisture vaporator standing beside Ben Kenobi’s abandoned hut on Tatooine. Given that over three years had transpired since Ben left the desert planet, Luke had assumed the vaporator would be long gone, scavenged by the Jawas or Sand People. Incredibly, both the vaporator and Ben’s hut appeared to be in good shape.

  The sun-bleached dwelling hugged a remote, stony bluff in the Jundland Wastes with a sweeping view of the Western Dune Sea. Luke had landed his X-wing starfighter nearby, and was eager to get out from under Tatooine’s blazing twin suns. But as he trudged across the rocky ground and drew closer to the plasteel door that was the entrance to Kenobi’s hut, he sensed a strange tension in the air. It reminded him of the disturbing sensation he had felt on Dagobah, at the cave that was so strong with the dark side of the Force. But while that cave had radiated cold and death, and seemed to challenge and beckon Luke to enter, this was an entirely different feeling—as if the entire property were saying Go away.

  However, Luke also sensed that the message was not for him. He wondered if Ben had used the Force to protect his home, and figured he’d find out soon enough.

  The plasteel door was unlocked. Luke slid it open and stepped inside. The air was musty, but the shadowy interior offered at least some relief from the heat. Looking around at the various relics that rested on small tables and shelves, and the animal pelts stretched out on the semicircular couch that had also served as Ben’s bed, Luke couldn’t see that anything had been damaged or stolen. The only obvious evidence of Ben’s absence was the thin dusting of sand that covered everything.

  Luke moved down into the small living area, where he found a vacuum-seal chest on the floor beside a structural column. It was from this chest that Ben had extracted Luke’s first lightsaber, the same lightsaber that Ben claimed had previously belonged to Luke’s father.

  Luke brushed the sand from the chest’s lid, then lifted it and looked inside.

  It was empty.

  Luke sighed. He hadn’t expected the chest to contain a second lightsaber, but he had hoped to find something useful. If not a datatape or holographic recording, at least some kind of clue that might answer the questions that had been gnawing at him for months, ever since his duel with Darth Vader on Cloud City.

  As he thought of that devastating encounter, which had cost him not only his inherited weapon but his right hand, he suddenly felt an aching sensation at his wrist. Phantom limb pain, he recalled. That was the term that the medical droid had used to describe the occasional ache that Luke might feel from time to time.

  Luke flexed the lifelike, mechanical fingers of the prosthetic hand that the droid had so carefully attached to the end of his right arm. Veins, muscles, and bones had been replaced with wires, pistons, and metal, and sensory impulse lines even made his cybernetic fingers touch-sensitive. Despite the fact that Luke’s original right hand had been lost in the reactor shaft at Cloud City, the medical droid—an expert with highly specialized techniques of genetic reconstruction—had replicated a perfect synthetic duplicate, right down to the fingerprints.

  But the medical droid couldn’t do anything about the phantom pain. Luke would have to live with that.

  He continued his inspection of Ben’s home. It didn’t take long to find the trapdoor in the floor that led to the cellar. A short series of steps, hewn fr
om bedrock, descended into darkness. Luke pulled a small glowrod from his belt, activated its light, and climbed down the steps. The cellar wasn’t entirely dark, as a scant, eerie light emanated from luminescent stone that was set in one wall.

  Ben had used the cellar for food and water storage, and a small variety of dried fruits, vegetables, and meats—all of which now looked like collapsed bits of leather—remained strung to a metal pipe that traveled to a cistern. Luke also found a workbench that had been constructed from scrap metal. Tools were neatly arranged on shelves, but a few select tools rested on the workbench, as if waiting for their owner’s return.

  Then Luke spotted the box. It was an intricately carved boa-wood box, resting on the floor between the workbench and small auxiliary generator. Luke was moving the glowrod closer to the box when a sudden sound came from above.

  Thud!

  In a swift, fluid motion, Luke spun to his left as he reached fast for the blaster that was holstered at his right hip, and then sprang back toward the cellar steps. He brought his blaster up fast so that its barrel was angled up through the open trap door. An instant later, the air was filled by a panicked, electronic shriek.

  The shriek came from the domed head of Luke’s astromech droid, R2-D2, who had traveled with him and helped to evade the Imperial blockade around Tatooine. The startled droid unleashed a flurry of angry beeps as he peered down at Luke, then he stomped his treads at the edge of the trap door’s opening, kicking up the layer of sand that rested on the floor of the upper room.

  “Sorry, Artoo,” Luke said as he lowered his blaster. “Guess I’m a little jumpy.” As he returned his weapon to its holster, he muttered, “I’ll probably stay that way until we find…Han.”

  Luke’s throat was already dry from the desert heat, but as he said Han’s name, he felt as if he might choke. He had no idea where his friend Han was, only that the armored bounty hunter Boba Fett had taken Han’s carbonite-frozen body from Cloud City. Various reports confirmed that Boba Fett intended to deliver Han to the Tatooine-based gangster Jabba the Hutt, but so far, Boba Fett was a no-show. It was Luke’s other friend, the Alliance leader Princess Leia Organa, who had instructed him to hide out on Tatooine and wait for some sign of Han.

  Unfortunately, Luke had never been very good at waiting.

  From above, R2-D2 emitted a series of soft electronic beeps and a short whistle. Recognizing the whistle’s lilt as a concerned question from the droid, Luke replied, “I’m fine, Artoo. Go make sure the X-wing’s camouflage net is secured, and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  R2-D2 chirped a hesitant response, but then his motor whined and he backed away from the trapdoor. The movement pushed some sand toward the trapdoor, sending it streaming down into the cellar. Luke shook his head. One way or another, sand found its way into just about every place on Tatooine.

  While R2-D2 headed back outside to inspect the X-wing, Luke returned to the boa-wood box and crouched down in front of it. Examining the box more closely with the glowrod, he noticed a tight cluster of buttons, and realized that the box was a keypad safe.

  Luke stared hard at the keypad. Ben had never mentioned this box in his basement, and Luke could only imagine what the access code might be. Struggling to recall whether Ben had ever hinted at the code, Luke thought back to that fateful day when Ben—in the room just above Luke’s head—had revealed himself to be a Jedi Knight and told Luke about the Force. Luke seriously doubted that Ben would have programmed any obvious letter combination, like JEDI or THE FORCE. He wished he could somehow ask Ben himself, but after their last exchange, that seemed very unlikely.

  Since Dagobah, Luke had been on his own.

  For a moment, he considered breaking the box open, using a small prybar he had noticed on the workbench, but then he dismissed the idea. As much as he was curious about the box’s contents, he didn’t want to damage it. He reached cautiously toward the box, brushing the tips of his fingers against the keypad.

  Snap!

  Luke flinched and pulled his fingers back as the keypad automatically slid aside on an inlaid track to reveal a thumbprint clasp. He wasn’t sure what had just happened, but somehow, he had bypassed the keypad. He hesitated for a moment, then thought, Here goes nothing. He pressed his right thumb against the clasp.

  Clack!

  The clasp yielded to his touch, and Luke saw a thin black slit appear along the lower edge of the box’s lid. He lifted the lid slowly with one hand, adjusted the glowrod with the other, and peered inside the box. The first thing he saw was a flashpacket, an explosive device that had been affixed near the back of the keypad.

  Luke eyed the flashpacket warily. It certainly appeared that Ben had rigged the box to explode, but for whatever reason, it hadn’t worked. Luke thought, Maybe it’s a dud.…

  Another possibility suddenly struck him. Maybe Ben not only left this box behind for me, but also set it to explode if anyone else attempted to open it. But how? Did Ben somehow obtain my fingerprints? Did he foresee that I would lose my hand? Or was the clasp engineered to recognize me by the Force? Luke was mystified, but if it turned out that his fingerprints had been all that prevented the flashpacket from detonating, he would have another reason to be grateful to the medical droid who had recreated his hand.

  Peering past the flashpacket, Luke saw that the box contained some rectangular objects. He recognized them as books. Although he was far more familiar with datapads for information storage, he had seen enough books in his lifetime to know how what they were and how to use them. The largest book was a leather-bound volume that appeared quite ancient. Luke picked it up, and noticed that it too was sealed by a thumbclasp.

  He pressed his right thumb against the clasp. The clasp yielded without a sound.

  Luke wasn’t surprised to find another flashpacket, this one affixed behind the book’s front cover. Nor was he surprised that the explosive didn’t detonate. What surprised him were the handwritten words on the book’s first page.

  Luke,

  The flashpackets were a necessary precaution. I trust you will dispose of them properly.

  The future of the Jedi Knights is in your hands. Read these books and use them wisely.

  May the Force be with you.

  —Obi-Wan Kenobi

  Luke blinked at the words as if to confirm they were real, that he wasn’t just having a dream. The book felt suddenly heavy in his hands. He set it down carefully upon the workbench and, by the light of his glowrod, he began turning the pages. Every page was filled with handwritten text, and his heart began pounding harder as the various words and phrases caught his attention. Jedi Council…Old Republic…Battle of Naboo…Sith Lords…Jedi Temple…Separatist Movement…Battle of Geonosis…the Clone Wars…

  Luke stopped to catch his breath. He knew he should start at the beginning, but the book was so thick, and he was impatient to find two names in particular. He began flipping through the pages even faster, scanning the text for the names—Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader—that he believed were the keys to the answers he sought.

  Ever since the duel on Cloud City, his thoughts had been dominated by two questions:

  Is Darth Vader really my father?

  And if he is, why didn’t Ben tell me the truth?

  The dull ache returned to Luke’s right wrist, and he stopped turning pages. He hadn’t found the names he was looking for, but had come to a section that contained Ben’s instructions for the construction of lightsabers. The section included numerous illustrations by Ben himself.

  Luke hadn’t considered the possibility of building a lightsaber. Only after he lost his lightsaber at Cloud City did he realize that he had no idea where to obtain another one, let alone how to go about making one from scratch. Now, thanks to Ben’s book, it seemed he might actually stand a good chance at replacing it.

  A skilled Jedi can complete a basic lightsaber in a few days if necessary, but creating one for the first time can take many months. The most essential component is the f
ocusing crystal, preferably a natural jewel, which can be…

  Luke was transfixed, nearly forgetting his intent to find information about his father’s identity. He flipped back a few pages and began reading from the beginning of the entry.

  Like most Jedi younglings, I constructed my first lightsaber at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Although it was merely a competent weapon, I would be a liar if I said I built it purely for training exercises. I crafted it with much thought and care, and dared to imagine that it would serve me well in the future.

  In fact, I did use the weapon during my earliest missions with my Master, but it was not until…

  Seeing the word Master, Luke skimmed ahead. He suspected Ben was referring to Master Yoda, but he didn’t see Yoda’s name written anywhere. Luke went back to where he had left off.

  …but it was not until after we went to Ilum, when I was still in my thirteenth year, that I learned the true power of a lightsaber.

  Luke turned the page. He had expected the journal to provide details about what Kenobi had experienced in his thirteenth year that made him learn “the true power of a lightsaber,” but as he read through the next few pages, it appeared that the elder Jedi may have kept that information to himself. Ben had also mentioned being “on Ilum,” but there wasn’t another mention of Ilum either, at least not that Luke could plainly see.

  Luke frowned. Although he was eager to read the entire book, he also believed that building a new lightsaber might be his first priority. According to Ben’s instructions, first-time efforts at lightsaber construction could “take months.” Luke and his allies didn’t know Han Solo’s current whereabouts and had yet to formulate a rescue plan, but if they were going up against Boba Fett or Jabba the Hutt, Luke had a feeling that a lightsaber would be useful.

  As Luke reexamined the instructions for lightsaber construction, his thoughts returned to Obi-Wan at age thirteen. What was he like then? Luke wished he could have known more.

  Although the Jedi Order had deliberately banished Ilum from all standard star charts for many centuries, almost every Jedi trainee dreamed of visiting the sacred, secret planet in the Unknown Regions. That was because many generations of Jedi had gathered crystals from Ilum to energize their lightsabers, and some Jedi maintained that Ilum crystals were the finest in the galaxy.