AHCH-TO had two suns but one moon. That night it hung giant and full in the sky, its eerie light shimmering in the rain on the temple’s mountain ledge, where Luke stood.

He placed his hands on the meditation stone on which Rey had sat a few hours before. He could still feel her there, specks and motes of her presence drifting in the currents of the past. But he wasn’t concerned with her. He had another in mind.

Luke shut his eyes and breathed. The patter of raindrops and sloshing of the tides soothed him as he let the Force take him where he needed to go.

His mind’s eye opened to see Leia, lying on a bed on a star cruiser, hooked up to medical devices. She was near death, her life clinging to the Force. His touch stirred her awake.

“Luke?”

Her presence in the Force brightened. The medical readouts showed increased signs of activity. Luke strained to hold the connection. He had not communicated with his sister for a long time, and they had grown apart, not only as siblings but also in the Force.

“Leia,” he said, and bestowed to her what strength of his he could before the connection faded for good.

When he opened his eyes, he saw with a new clarity. It wasn’t the galaxy that needed him. It was his sister. She was hurt.

He hurried down into the village, his robes drenched by the storm. “Rey, you were right. I’m coming with you,” he said loudly. “Rey?”

No one answered him. But a light shone in the doorway of her hut. He heard voices.

Luke went up to the door and looked inside. Rey sat on the ground, talking to someone Luke could not see.

“All those years in the desert on Jakku, all that time, I had never felt so alone,” she said.

“You’re not alone.”

Luke braced himself at the second voice. He heard it through the Force. Ben Solo—or Kylo Ren as he now called himself—was communing with Rey.

“Neither are you,” Rey replied. “It isn’t too late.” She extended a hand, then bent her fingers, as if clasping the hand of another.

Luke strode into the hut, intruding on their shared vision. The Force revealed that his disgraced pupil had locked his hand with Rey’s. The two were in league.

“Stop!” Luke gestured at the walls and ceiling of the hut. All the stone blocks shot outward, as if detonated. Ben looked at Luke, then disappeared. Rey gripped air where she had been holding Ben’s hand.

She rose, now wet from the rain since the hut had lost its roof. “Is it true? Did you try to murder him?”

“Leave this island. Now.” Luke began to walk away. He would find another way to help Leia. The girl could not be trusted.

“No—you answer me. Tell me the truth!”

Luke didn’t stop. That this girl had the gall to even suggest—

He fell, the back of his skull ringing in agony. She’d struck him from behind. Rolling in the mud, he looked up, his head throbbing. Rey hovered over him, wielding her staff.

“Did you do it? Did you create Kylo Ren by trying to kill Ben?”

Luke staved off the pounding pain and staggered back to his feet. He started to shuffle away. She swung again.

This time he was ready.

Calling on the Force, he snapped a lightning rod off the roof of a hut and brought it flying into his hand. He used it to parry Rey’s assault, then pushed her off her feet. She bounded up, undeterred, whirling her staff for another blow. Their weapons clanged against each other, battering out a rhythm with every strike. Her aggressiveness surprised him, as did her talent, and she drove him backward. But retreat did not signal defeat.

Blocking her attacks, Luke levered the other end of his rod to swing it back at her like a pendulum. Her staff flew from her grip. She was weaponless.

But not for long.

She summoned his old lightsaber from her satchel, activated it, and slashed. The blue blade sliced through the lightning rod and Luke tumbled to the ground.

She held the lightsaber over him. Rain sizzled against its energy beam. But she didn’t strike. She switched the saber off. “Tell me the truth.”

Luke wheezed from the fight. He knew he couldn’t hold on to the past any longer. And he wasn’t Obi-Wan. He couldn’t tell things from “a certain point of view,” as his first Jedi teacher had excused the half-truths he had told about Luke’s father. Luke couldn’t lie.

“I saw darkness,” Luke said. He fixed his thoughts on the memory that never went away, that fateful moment when he had entered Ben’s quarters.

He remembered holding his hand over his sleeping nephew, then closing his eyes as he searched Ben’s mind.

“I had sensed the darkness building in him. I had seen it in moments during his training. But then I looked inside, and it was beyond what I ever imagined.”

Horrible thoughts that weren’t his own bubbled up like splattering lava. Ben screamed, Ben shrieked, Ben killed, Ben changed. A blue lightsaber replaced by a crackling red one. Still, Luke kept himself rooted in the memory, as much as it caused him pain. “Snoke had already turned his heart. He would bring destruction and pain and death and the end of everything I loved because of what he would become. And for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop it.”

In that memory, he unbuckled his lightsaber from his belt. He activated it and looked at the green beam, but did not raise it to deliver a killing stroke. Nevertheless, for an instant, he considered the possibility. Ben was completely vulnerable on his pallet.

“It passed like a fleeting shadow. And I was left with shame.”

Ben woke to find Luke clutching his lightsaber hilt. Recognition of the deed Luke had contemplated poisoned his stare.

“The last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him.”

Ben called his own saber to him, igniting it in an attack. Luke raised his in defense, and the two swords crackled and clashed.

“No, Ben!”

But nothing Luke could say or do would ever restore his nephew’s trust in him. The young man lifted a hand and the ceiling collapsed on his uncle in a pile of rubble.

A warm hand on his arm pulled Luke away from the memory. He found himself back on Ahch-To, with Rey kneeling beside him in the mud. “You failed him by thinking his choice was made,” she said. “It wasn’t. There’s still conflict in him. If he were turned from the dark side, that could shift the tide. This could be how we win.”

Luke shook his head. “This is not going to go the way you think.”

“It is. Just now, when we touched hands, I saw his future. I saw it, as solid as I’m seeing you. If I go to him, Ben Solo will turn,” Rey said.

“I killed Ben Solo that night, if not in body, then in spirit. Now there is only Kylo Ren, and he’s stronger than you know, Rey.” He looked up at the girl, beseeching her to listen to him. “Don’t do this.”

Rey rose and held out Luke’s old lightsaber to him, as she had when she’d first approached him on the cliff. He admired her persistence, but he knew that she alone wouldn’t be enough. One person was never enough, it seemed, to dispel the darkness. Luke brought his father back to the light, but Darth Vader’s evil returned to possess Luke’s own nephew. The cycle of light and darkness was inevitable, just as the moon of Ahch-To would overtake the suns.

He refused the lightsaber.

“Then he’s our last hope,” Rey said. She stalked away from him, heading in the direction of the Falcon.

Luke rose, shaking off the mud and the pain. This time, it was he who followed her, down the mountainside. If she heard him, she didn’t turn in acknowledgment.

Luke halted at the bottom of the staircase. Chewbacca was visible in the Falcon’s cockpit. He saw Luke and waved for him to come aboard. Luke shook his head. He worried that the Wookiee might run out and try to wrangle him inside the ship. But Chewbacca just bared his fangs and looked away from Luke, busying himself with the controls from his co-pilot’s seat.

The Falcon thrummed, preparing for takeoff. Water ran down its sides in rivulets. A curious R2-D2 sheltered underneath the ship, waiting for Rey at the ramp. She ignored his queries and strode up into the freighter without a word. Some wayward porgs toddled after her.

Luke wanted to pull her back, but he knew that was pointless. Had he not done the same as her when he had cut short his Jedi training on Dagobah and gone off to save his friends? Rey would have to learn her own lessons, as he had.

R2-D2 rolled after Rey on his treads. But at the base of the ramp, the droid stopped, swiveled his dome, and focused his radar eye on Luke.

Beep?

Luke mustered a smile. “Thank you for everything, old buddy. You were right to show me that message. Send my best to Threepio.”

The ramp started to lift. R2-D2 whined and rocked from leg to leg. The droid would have dropped off the ramp if Luke hadn’t held up a hand. “You must stay with the girl. Make sure she gets back to safety.”

The ramp continued to rise. R2-D2 kept rocking. Luke struggled to maintain his own composure.

“May the Force be with you, Artoo.”

The last Luke saw of his loyal companion was the indicator light on the astromech’s dome blinking red in the rain. As the hatch closed, a small, sad sound pierced through the rumble of the freighter’s engines.

Meeep.

Luke bowed his head and walked back up the stairs.

From a nearby cliff, he watched the Millennium Falcon vanish into the clouds. Rain trickled from his beard, his brow, and even his eyes.

Though he had escaped the rubble of the temple he had built, its weight remained.