Maul lay dreaming.
It wasn’t common for him, and when he did dream, he was rarely aware of it at the time. His equivalent of REM sleep was not the sort that invited the typical neurological sorcery between conscious and unconscious thought. His warrior’s brain had no use for it.
So the fact that he was dreaming now, heavily sedated and stretched out in medbay with tubes and wires running through his body as he recovered from his last fight, would have come as a surprise. The simplicity of the dream only underscored its verisimilitude, and for a short time he believed it was actually happening.
He was in another bout.
Standing in front of the hatchway in his cell, waiting for his opponent to show himself, he looked down and saw something sitting on the floor in front of him, an unremarkable black steel box no bigger than a mouse droid. Yet one glance told him that it held what he’d come here to find, the goal behind all his time spent slogging through the slime and filth of Cog Hive Seven.
He reached down for the box to open it, and a noise came from the other side of the wall—a grunt, the sound of something alive, preparing itself to come forth and do battle to the death. With that same irrefutable dream logic, Maul understood that this particular foe would be the most indomitable yet, far worse than the thing he’d fought upon first arriving, worse than the wampa or the Aqualish or the Weequay with his clawbird.
This would be the one that defeated him.
The hatch slid open and his enemy stepped out.
Maul stared at him.
And in the end, that part of the dream was not such a surprise after all.
“Open it,” the other Maul said, staring past him, down at the black box. “It’s yours. What are you waiting for?”
Maul stared back at himself, an identical reflection standing five meters away. Somehow, at least in the dream, the fact that he’d come here to fight himself made perfect sense—as if this moment, and not the arrangement with Iram Radique, had been the inevitable goal he’d been seeking the entire time he’d been here.
And all at once, Maul knew what was in the box.
“No,” he said. “My Master forbids it.”
“Your Master?” this other Maul snarled. The answer only seemed to enrage the doppelgänger. “Don’t be a fool. It belongs to you. You’ll need it if you’re going to defeat me. Otherwise, you’re as good as dead. Take it!”
“I can’t. It will undermine the mission that I’m sworn to uphold.” Maul’s voice constricted. “I need to show restraint. I need to—”
“You’re lost without it!”
Dream or no dream, Maul felt anger boiling up in his chest, taking hold of his lungs and the nerves in his spine. His jaw clenched.
“Perhaps,” he told his other self, “before you make such statements, you’d better try me first.”
“Really.” The doppelgänger laughed. “It’s too late for that. You’ve already been weighed and measured, and found wanting.” He nodded back down at the floor. “See for yourself.”
With a sudden sense of foreboding, Maul looked back at the box.
It was open.
It was empty.
Because the item that it contained was already in his hand.
His saber staff.
Staring at it, Maul felt a crushing wave of shame come thundering over him—the realization that, in opening the box and taking up the weapon of the Sith, he’d failed his Master. He had done the one thing he’d sworn not to do, and as such—
The other Maul lunged for him. On reflex, without a moment’s hesitation, Maul flicked the activation stud on the saber. It sprang to life in his grasp, its two red blades shooting out on either side, and in spite of everything, Maul felt a surge of power explode through his being, swallowing him up and enveloping his very soul.
The certainty was upon him, the realization of his own true strength.
This was what he was made for.
He swung the saber staff around in a graceful whirring arc, and in a single, sweeping motion he bisected the other Maul cleanly at the waist, the upper and lower halves coming apart bloodlessly, landing in pieces on the floor of the cell. Looking down at his own face, Maul saw his own dying face smiling back up at himself.
“Good,” his voice said, and in an instant he realized his error.
He was the one on the floor, the fallen one.
Looking up at himself, the other, the victor.
But it wasn’t his own face staring down at him anymore. It was a Muun, one he didn’t immediately recognize, though an uncanny familiarity encompassed his presence, the nagging sense that he should have known him, had perhaps encountered him elsewhere, in a dream within a dream. An unfamiliar name came over him like a death rattle.
Plagueis.
Darkness closed in, and when he awoke in the medbay, bathed in sweat, his fingers were gripping the cot, curled around the emptiness of the cylindrical shape that was not there.