FYI - History
Augh… Okay. This is not an in-depth history. Things will be skimmed over to an absurd extent. Luke Skywalker is in nearly every fragment of the EU which was set after his birth. I will not mention every single time he’s been out with Rogue Squadron and survived an ambush, every random Rebel mission he’s been on, every Jedi mishap, etc. Though it’s still long.
He was also in a fragment before his birth - Zayne Carrick, Darth Vader, Luke, and Cade Skywalker all appeared in a vision four thousand years before any of this.
Luke’s father was a Jedi who fell and became Dark Lord of the Sith, then wiped out most of the Jedi; his mother was a politician who died soon after his fall. Luke and his twin sister Leia were born at the start of the purge, within days of the point where the Republic became the First Galactic Empire.
The two Jedi Masters overseeing this separated them, sending Leia to be adopted by Bail Organa of Alderaan. Luke went with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who took him to live on Tatooine with his father’s stepbrother’s family - Owen and Beru Lars. For the first few years Obi-Wan involved himself closely in Luke’s upbringing, but in time Owen barred the Jedi Master from the moisture farm.
Luke first used the Force when he was six years old, finding a lost tool. Owen thought he’d put it there and scolded Luke harshly enough that the kid didn’t replicate the trick. He did find that he could sense things before they happened and that he was a great pilot.
As a child Luke was endlessly curious about his parents; his aunt and uncle had wanted him to consider them his parents, but Obi-Wan had encouraged him otherwise. At age ten, when he couldn’t get answers out of his caretakers, he ran away and got lost in a sandstorm. He encountered a tall, dark figure, and then a boy of his own age with very similar interests, Annie. They wandered around, Luke killed a krayt dragon with a well-thrown gaffi stick, and Annie disappeared, along with any trace of the dragon, by the time Luke’s rescuers arrived. Luke was sure that it was more than a dream.
His friends were the kids of other local moisture farmers. They were a relatively rambunctious bunch, always trying to race or fix things to get them into racing condition, but also relatively harmless. Most were happy enough at the prospect of staying on Tatooine, but Tank, Biggs, and Luke shared a longing to leave the planet and become fighter pilots. Tank and Biggs were both older than him.
Luke’s first trip off Tatooine, an illicit ride with Biggs on a passenger freighter to the world’s moon, ended badly when something in the engines broke down. Luke fixed them on the fly and saved everyone, but he didn’t even quite get out of the atmosphere. When he was fourteen, he and Windy were flying through Beggar’s Canyon when their skyhopper - lightweight civilian flier - crashed. Obi-Wan saved them. After this Luke started running into the Jedi Master more frequently.
Challenged to a race by a local braggart, Luke found him decapitated the next morning. With Obi-Wan’s help he discovered the cause. There were various other incidents, saving and being saved by his circle, racing, becoming increasingly skilled at flying a skyhopper and hitting two-meter-long rats from a long range without a targeting computer. Luke was an adventure-seeker, craving excitement, and developed some mechanical aptitude.
There was some friction between the stolid Larses and Luke, who was a dutiful boy but never made a secret about how he didn’t intend to stay on the farm for his entire life. He did whine a little, and wanted more out of life, but he did not shirk his responsibilities, and they worked together. There was always more tension around the time when the closest pilot academy opened for applicants, though. The Larses wanted to keep him safe.
Biggs and Tank both left by the time Luke was eighteen. His relationship with the others in the group wasn’t as close, and he was lonely and frustrated.
When he was nineteen, there came the events of A New Hope. Threepio and Artoo were purchased, Luke tracked Artoo and found Obi-Wan, his aunt and uncle were killed, he went to Anchorhead and met Chewie and Han Solo, they went to the Death Star and lost Obi-Wan but saved Leia, they went to Yavin, Luke met Biggs again, Biggs and nearly every other pilot except Wedge Antilles died, Luke destroyed the Death Star.
He threw himself whole-souled into the Rebellion. Within two weeks he had investigated three potential Rebel base locations, travelled across the galaxy, helped out in X-Wing acquisition, and assisted in the destruction of a Star Destroyer.
Frankly, his early days in the Rebellion were exceedingly tumultuous and it would take a long time to describe it all, and I haven’t read most of the Marvel comics anyway. Mostly it plays out like those first two weeks; I will note the exceptional parts.
Luke was given the rank of Commander. He and Wedge, the two survivors of Red Squadron, formed Rogue Squadron, but unlike Wedge, Luke couldn’t stay with them full time and was often off leading other groups or working alone or with Han and/or Leia.
Six months after the Battle of Yavin - hence abbreviated as ABY - there was an incident investigating pirate activities in which he had to work with some stormtrooper deserters. Obi-Wan’s spirit manifested to help him, and the whole thing put a little crack in his young black-and-white view of the world.
He found a likely base location on Hoth and reported it, soon promoted to Lieutenant Commander. When he and a team found a clone trooper who had been stranded and was unaware of galactic events, Luke convinced him that the Republic had become the Empire and the Jedi had taken up arms against it, and that trooper joined until his death. Luke also ran into his friend Tank, now Imperial, and this nearly led to the destruction of the Rebel fleet.
He had a confrontation with a centuries-old Jedi driven mad by a talisman containing an even older Sith spirit, and though he and Leia escaped, it was at the cost of every other member of their company, who were mutated into hideous rakghouls. …Other than authorial mandates requiring that particular Jedi still be alive and in the same place a hundred and fifty years later, there is absolutely no reason why Luke didn’t come back after becoming a Jedi Knight or Master. I’m going to say that the incident was traumatic enough to flashburn both of them into forgetting, though the occurrence and what happened to their group still should have been on the record.
War and incidents like that blunted Luke’s initial idealism, though it wasn’t crushed.
2ABY saw Luke and Leia going together to Mimban, where they crashed and retrieved the Kaiburr Crystal for a Force-Sensitive older woman. This crystal’s shards gave a little boost to the holder’s Force ability; the entire thing magnified that ability a thousandfold. Vader also wanted the crystal. While in its proximity, Obi-Wan possessed Luke in order to fight him off. Afterwards, Luke accidentally discovered, in rapid succession, how to heal superficially, how to put someone into a healing coma, and how to enter one himself. He also found that the crystal was powerless offworld, though it was taken anyway, and he used a shard of it to augment his father’s lightsaber.
In 3ABY, Luke regrouped with Rogue Squadron at Hoth. The events of ESB happened; he was nearly killed, Obi-Wan told him to go to Dagobah, he fought in a battle and left for Dagobah rather than heading to the rendezvous point, he trained under Yoda and had difficulties with it, he left after having a vision of what was happening to his friends, he dueled Vader, had the famous revelation, and lost his hand.
If he’d been anyone else, going AWOL at such a critical time would have ended poorly for him; there was a battle not long after which could have gone very differently if he’d been there. But he was Luke Skywalker, essential both symbolically and actually, so this was let go. He’d always been an oddity in the Rebellion, and this cinched it - he started to be regarded as a little other, part of them but not answering to the same rules.
Luke was given a prosthetic replacement hand; it was covered in synthflesh and didn’t appear artificial, but he often wore a black glove over it anyway.
He was shunted around on various missions. One of them saw him sent as part of a diplomatic effort to try and bring a borderline planet over into the Rebel Alliance. He was imprisoned, then broken out by defecting Imperials. Another mission had him become very ill. A third had him take out a new superweapon, the Tarkin, and flee from Vader.
Working with Rogue Squadron, Luke fell in love with a pilot named Shira Brie. In a nasty dogfight his targeting computer was knocked offline, so he used the Force - and shot her down, apparently killing her. Investigations proved that she was an Imperial agent and a traitor.
Getting word that Boba Fett had Han Solo (in carbonite, remember) and was on a particular planet, Luke took the Rogues as cover for the Falcon’s pilots (Leia, Chewie, Lando) and their guide Dash Rendar, who buggered out and ruined the trap. Fett escaped, one of the Rogues had a renegade astromech that took over its X-Wing and tried to shoot Luke down, and Luke surgically disabled it without killing the pilot or destroying the droid, since he wanted it looked at. It turned out to have been sabotaged.
Luke then left the Rogues and went back to Tatooine, where he built a new lightsaber at Obi-Wan’s place and was saved by Dash Rendar from thugs; Dash had been hired to protect him despite that less-than-stellar record. They received a message that had been intended to go to Leia and went to meet a Bothan spymaster. The two headed a little squadron of Bothans attacking a freighter to steal important intel; Dash got some killed and then buggered out again to sulk.
The Bothan base was attacked by bounty hunters during decoding, and although most of the Bothans got away with the intel, Luke was captured when he refused to leave one who was dying. He learned how to severely mindtrick guards - previously his mindtrick had been used for easier persuades - and used this to escape before he could be delivered to Vader. He then regrouped with Chewie and Lando and found out that an underlord, Prince Xizor(Vader’s rival for the Emperor’s favor), had been behind various assassination attempts and now had Leia on Coruscant.
They infiltrated, met up with Dash Rendar (…again…), and went through the sewers into Xizor’s palace and got Leia. Luke fought Xizor’s human replica droid, Guri, discovering superspeed in order to do it. Rather than kill her, he gave her the chance to flee and reevaluate things. Luke and company then escaped, with the help of Rogue Squadron and the interference of the Imperial fleet (who were gunning for Xizor…It’s complicated). Dash Rendar appeared to die. (He did not. Instead, he let them think he died, because that’s Dash.)
Soon he found out that Han Solo had been delivered to Jabba the Hutt back on Tatooine, and went there, and made some plans. A Twi’lek dancing slave was freed. Then came the events of RotJ.
An attempt to 1) get Jabba to let Han go or 2) steal Han away met with first an attempt to feed Luke to Jabba’s rancor. Luke killed it, so he and the rest of the party were sent to be fed to the Sarlaac. Leia killed Jabba, Luke and the others killed a skiffload of guards, they got out of there, and Luke finally went back to Dagobah. Yoda died while Luke was there, he talked to Obi-Wan and found out various things including who Leia was, then left to go to Endor and try to take out the second Death Star’s shield generator. After being captured by Ewoks, he used his powers to strike the fear of Threepio into them, getting them on their side. Then Luke left and let himself be captured by Vader, who he hoped to turn back to the Light Side. He was taken to the Emperor, refused to fight until the subject of his sister came up, and then outfought his father until cutting off his hand and realizing that they were alike. Luke declared he was a Jedi, like his father before him; the Emperor tried to kill him with lightning and was killed by Vader, who died soon after. He escaped before Wedge and Lando blew the Death Star up and cremated his father’s armor during the celebration. The spirits of his father, Obi-Wan, and Yoda appeared to him but didn’t speak.
The next day, Luke rushed into orbit to save Wedge, who was preventing a messenger drone from self-destructing. The message was from an outpost world, Bakura, requesting Imperial help. The Alliance sent people, commanded by Luke. A truce between Rebel and Imperial forces was declared until the alien enemy was defeated. Luke and Leia had an argument when Leia was highly disturbed after being visited by their fathers’ spirit. He also became mutually attracted to a senator, but due to her philosophical views they never perfectly meshed.
The Imperials betrayed him and had him turned over to the alien enemy with a set of burrowing parasitic worms in his lungs. He used his talk-to-anything power to persuade the worms to go up out of his trachea and leave his body, and befriended a Force-Sensitive human being used by the aliens, escaping with him. The human soon died, but this led Luke to the realization that he should devote himself to finding other Force-Sensitives and rebuilding the Jedi Order.
Luke and the reduced-strength Rogue Squadron went to Corellia and were caught in some action, proving that even without the Emperor, the Empire wasn’t dead yet. Wedge acquitted himself extremely well, and Luke officially left the squadron to him, for good.
Luke then entered into another massively busy Marvel Comics period. He went on mission after mission. Helped a resistance movement overthrow a king. Trained his Jedi skills on Endor. Went on missions to talk planets into sending representatives to the Rebel Alliance. Met dozens of young people who wanted Jedi training and turned them all down, because he was afraid to give it, afraid they’d turn to the dark side. Fell in love repeatedly, gathered a whole host of companions. Came to regret not training any of them when one became Dark Lord of the Sith under a more powerful woman named Lumiya. He redeemed that student and decided to try training another, Kiro.
Luke got caught up in the Nagai-Tof Wars and soon found that one side was secretly being aided by Lumiya, who he fought, got captured by, was rescued by Kiro from, and fought again more successfully after building a second, shorter lightsaber called a shoto. He found that Lumiya was Shira Brie, the pilot he’d been in love with and fired upon. She’d been taken up by Vader, and had three damaged limbs replaced by cybernetics. She escaped them and Kiro was apparently killed.
Taking a more active, general-type role in the war, Luke and a fleet fought on the side which Lumiya wasn’t on. He found that Kiro had survived, but his fledgling apprentice no longer wanted to become a Jedi, which he accepted reluctantly. The war was ended after Luke captured an important leader. Lumiya vanished.
Luke rescued a Jedi kid from a hidden city and soon after helped the New Republic, as the Rebellion had started to call itself, capture a Star Destroyer. This finally led to him being officially promoted to General.
The Empire was defiant, but at the time it was also somewhat fragmentary, as on Imperial Center (Coruscant. The Empire changed the name) Sate Pestage hadn’t the charisma to force it together. In 5 ABY, one year after the Emperor’s death, there was word of a new Sith Lord, Shadowspawn, with his own great army. Luke led New Republic forces against them. When his ship crashed, Luke allowed himself to be captured and taken to Shadowspawn, intending to duel him - but instead of killing him, as expected, he sensed something off and disabled the man, finding that he was a Force-Sensitive older man named Nick Rostu who was being controlled by the real bad guy, Cronal. Nick told Luke to kill him. Luke saved Nick, was captured again, and then was forced to experience a mental eternity of the Dark, an interpretation of the Dark Side of the Force which was highly entropic.
He was able to free his mind and call the also-recaptured Nick to free his body, but for some time after this he was heavily affected by the Dark. He felt like he’d been used, that love and friendship were just tools in that using, and that continuing was pointless, since everyone would die anyway. He also decided to act exactly like he would have before seeing the Dark and “learning the truth”, because even a heavily nihilistic Luke can’t stop trying to save people, and because he hoped that if he pretended long enough, the mask would become his face and he could fall back into the beautiful dream. (He did. Or else the lingering effects of the Dark wore off when he realized that he was a white hole. …It’s complicated)
In time, Luke used his talk-to-anything powers on rock-based molten creatures and turned Cronal’s forces to serve him, though Cronal took them back in a horrible way. Luke freed a Darksider from Cronal’s control and used his connection to get back to Cronal. He then severed Cronal’s connection to all of his forces, which took Cronal out of the picture and killed all of them. Luke stayed to feel each one of them die, something like fifty thousand people at that point. When it was over he resigned his commission and hired someone to investigate the goings on and build an indictment against him, but was dismayed to find that the man had instead created a holothriller script for it, because no one was going to try Luke Skywalker for what he’d done.
After that, he spent three years travelling the galaxy looking for traces of the Jedi, though other things cropped up. He was called by a Jedi Master’s spirit to destroy an artifact. He helped the New Republic take Coruscant from the Empire, though he only had a minor role in that; he was once again outside of their jurisdiction, and most crises fell to others to solve. When one of the Rogues found the Emperor’s personal, desecrated Jedi museum, he studied it and offered that Force-Sensitive pilot the chance to train with him - something he hadn’t done before. His prior apprentice had asked him. It was a brave and uncertain step which was then turned down. Luke accepted this gracefully, but it probably affected his decision to turn down the request of another, less strongly Force-Sensitive pilot. Luke would not become anyone’s master, but while hunting Jedi traces he did give a handful of lessons and plenty of advice to those he thought could use it.
In 8 ABY, four years after Endor, he went to Dathomir and, when his ship crashed, discovered self levitation/gliding with the Force. He found the ruins of an ancient ship once used in training Jedi and was captured by a tribe of Dathomiri witches, women who developed Force-Sensitivity and who took men as sex slaves. …Luke ended up one of these men. However, he befriended his captors and ended up facing off against a Dark Side-aligned tribe of witches. They almost killed him, but he was saved by his healing coma power. Later he used the Force to manipulate all of the Millenium Falcon’s controls and shot down the shuttle the Dark Side witches were on.
A year later, he heard from the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi for the last time; his teacher moved on. The Empire resurged as Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Outer Rim, and several attempts were made to capture Luke and the pregnant Leia. At one point, narrowly escaping, Luke was stranded in his X-Wing with engines and communication systems offline, and a very slim chance of being found, by anyone, before he died (he did not yet know that he could be in a coma for years). Of course he was found, by the information broker Talon Karrde and his second in command, Mara Jade.
Mara Jade was Force-Sensitive and trained to some extent as one of the Emperor’s Hands. She hated Luke due to a combination of him ruining her career and life and because the Emperor’s final command, echoing through her mind far too often in the past five years, was “YOU MUST KILL LUKE SKYWALKER”. All the same, she respected her boss enough that when he didn’t want Luke killed then and there or just turned over to the Empire, she went with his orders.
Luke was taken to Karrde’s base on Myrkr while Karrde decided what to do with him. When Grand Admiral Thrawn unexpectedly showed up, Karrde had Luke moved to a storage shed, because this was a poor bargaining position. Luke broke out, fled, and was pursued by Mara Jade into the forest. Nowhere on Myrkr could he touch the Force, because native animals called ysalamiri pushed it back. When Mara caught up to him, Luke was just barely able to convince her not to kill him. She reluctantly worked with him to get out of the forest and past the Stormtroopers that had been set up for them. He was let go.
After a few incidents in the war, Luke was made aware of rumors of a Jedi Master on Jomark. Eventually he got there and started training under Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth, a survivor of the Outbound Flight extragalactic project who, Luke speculated, had gone somewhat mad due to the spirits of the other Jedi on the project hanging around, like Obi-Wan had. C’baoth also had some philosophies that Luke disagreed with, but he stuck on anyway, wanting to help the old man. When Mara Jade showed up, though, she came with the knowledge that C’baoth was with the Empire. She disabled C’baoth, but Luke would not allow him to be killed.
He went with Mara and saved Talon Karrde from captivity on Thrawn’s ship. Karrde, swayed towards the New Republic, agreed to tell the New Republic council about the location of a fleet of abandoned ships which could make a serious difference in the course of the war. Said council moved too slowly, so Luke took Rogue Squadron and some others out to the site and boarded the fleet’s flagship. It was soon apparent that this was a trap; Imperials attacked and it was only through a very fortunate sequence of events that our heroes came out on top. Turns out Thrawn had already removed most of those ships - also, most of the attackers had been freshly-decanted clones. Luke also took the time to find Mara where she’d been floating disabled in the void and get her to Coruscant’s medical facilities.
Luke and Mara developed a working relationship; despite repeated opportunities, she did not kill him, and in fact the two worked together very well. He sprung her out of jail and trusted her to lead him and a small band to Wayland, where the cloning facilities were. They found Joruus C’baoth there and confronted him, revealing that he too was a clone. Luke had to fight his own clone, Luuke, grown from the hand he’d lost at Cloud City and armed with his father’s lightsaber. Ultimately it was Mara Jade who killed both Luuke and C’baoth, completing her last command. For a mixture of reasons, Luke gave her his father’s lightsaber.
Somehow, Imperials retook Coruscant and Luke went on missions to it. He found various clues to the Emperor’s power and was scooped up by a raging Force storm which stuck him in a cell on a prison ship to a Deep Core world, Byss, where he met the Emperor Reborn. Palpatine had survived by going from one rapidly degenerating clone body to the next, and now neatly overwhelmed Luke, who agreed to become his apprentice.
Luke thought he could sabotage the cause from within, and he did download some important things to Artoo and cause some issues for a few Imperial efforts. But he did fall to the Dark Side, quite genuinely, and eagerly anticipated those Dark Side teachings that his master was willing to dole out. Like his father before him, he planned to kill Palpatine. But not yet.
Palpatine replaced his humanlike artificial one with a mechno-hand like his father’s, which was much more mechanical-looking. He did not have this re-replaced with another humanlike one later, but he did have it covered in synthskin.
Leia and Han arrived on Byss to try to rescue him. He helped capture them, grabbing Han by the throat. However, Leia’s influence and love for him eventually sparked the reminder of who he had been, what he’d come here to do, so soon enough he helped them escape with Artoo, who had some important codes and plans on him. Luke stayed behind to try to kill off Palpatine’s clones in the cloning lab right after the Emperor’s last body died. Palps transferred to one before he could destroy it and outfought Luke, bringing him to heel. This was a standard Sith thing to do, so Luke was not killed for it and continued to train, falling again. He did some terrible things.
Some time later, the Emperor took Luke with him to a base where Leia was. There, Luke abandoned the Dark Side for good and fought Palpatine sincerely, this time defeating him. Palps created another hyperspace wormhole, and Luke and Leia together forced him to lose control of it so that his current body was consumed. But while Luke had turned, the Dark Side was not entirely gone from his psyche. For years after this he would be showier, a little more arrogant.
New Republic leadership did not feel comfortable with him now, so he left them to try to train new Jedi to bring against the various Dark Jedi he’d seen under Palpatine. He fell in love with one of these trainees, who of course died during an assassination attempt. Palpatine went after Leia and Han’s newborn son Anakin, so Luke took his Jedilings and tried to stop him. Several trainees died, but Palpatine’s spirit was finally killed for good and Artoo destroyed the Emperor’s superweapon.
Having had a taste of training several Jedi at once, and convinced of the need to rebuild the Order, Luke declared himself a Jedi Master and talked the New Republic into giving him Yavin IV, the moon which the first Death Star had been destroyed around, for that purpose. He then went around and collected a variety of apprentices; some of them people he had worked with and given tips to before, some people he had never met.
Luke didn’t stay on his Yavin Praxeum all the time. He went to Kessel with Lando Calrissian and retrieved the Falcon, then met Qwi Xux, a defecting Imperial scientist who had been essential in the design of a number of superweapons, and the troubled and overwhelmingly Force-Sensitive youth Kyp Durron. Han and Chewie had convinced them to steal the latest and greatest superweapon, the Sun Crusher. They sank the superweapon into the heart of the gas giant Yavin.
There was a quick detour where a Dark Jedi captured him and was killed by one of Luke’s former students, whom Luke considered to be a Jedi Knight already. Luke promoted this student, the clone Jedi X2, to Jedi Master, but X2 declined the chance to teach at the academy, preferring one-on-one instruction.
At the Academy, Luke’s star student Gantoris suddenly produced a lightsaber, though he hadn’t had one before, and attacked Luke; Luke fended him off easily and let it go. Then Gantoris was found burned to death. Luke put Corran, an X-Wing pilot who was training so he could find his wife, on the case and was immediately distracted by new students, including Mara Jade, who he had a tenuous connection with. She left before long, since she felt he wasn’t teaching anything she didn’t already know. Then Kyp came to train, immediately becoming the new star pupil.
Unfortunately, he was influenced by the same thing which had instructed and then killed Gantoris: Exar Kun, a Sith spirit four thousand years old. Kun wanted to kill Luke; Kyp separated his spirit and body instead and fled, stealing the Sun Crusher and using it on some inhabited star systems. Kun made some other efforts to kill Luke, deluding some of his other students into trying and also sending monsters after him. The only people Luke could communicate with at all were his niece and nephew, Jaina and Jacen. He was able to possess one of them to fight off a monster with. Soon a combination of Luke’s spirit, the efforts of the apprentices, and the spirit of Kun’s own long-dead master were able to finally vanquish Exar Kun.
Kyp was retrieved and brought before Luke, who let him back into the Jedi Academy. His punishment was that he would serve as a Jedi, forever. Nobody was happy with this. Corran left the Academy in protest. In a few months Luke went after him to help; he easily fought off five Jensaarai, Sith-influenced offshoot Jedi, without killing them. He accompanied Corran in breaking people out of an Imperial prison, including Corran’s wife, and then confronted the leader of the Jensaarai. With Corran’s help, Luke turned that entire offshoot Order into allies.
Not long after that, Luke and a couple of students were caught by surprise and taken to the Eye of Palpatine, a special ship, and put through brainwashing. Luke fended off the brainwashing, had his left leg horribly mangled, and went looking for his students, on the way meeting Callista, a Jedi who had transferred her spirit into part of the ship. Soon finding that the ship was to destroy an old Jedi hideout, they worked to get everyone off the ship and stop it. They succeeded, but only after those two students sacrificed themselves. One gave her body to Callista, but in inhabiting it she lost her ability to touch the Force. Luke took her across the galaxy hoping to help her. They discovered on Dagobah that she could still touch the Dark Side, but that didn’t help. Back at the Academy, Luke fought off some Imperial attackers and Callista slipped away, deciding to leave him.
She later sent a message to Leia about something going on on the planet Nom Chorios; Luke went there and his ship was shot down, though he survived. Luke realized that the crystals being used on that world were actually sentient beings, and was able to speak to them and turn them to his side, averting a plague. He met Callista again, and they parted formally.
One of his students was murdered by Desann, one of the students who had left him and gone to the Dark Side. Kyle Katarn, another student, came by to tell Luke he’d seen Desann and thought Desann had found a powerful nexus in the Force. Luke and Kyle recruited Rogue Squadron to go there with them and found that Desann had joined up with an Imperial splinter group, the Empire Reborn. They stopped him; it’s more complicated then that, but not of great personal importance to Luke.
Hearing rumors of a healing cult and on the lookout for new trainees, Luke went to Crseih Station, where he found his Force abilities becoming erratic. A transdimensional being called Waru, who had been called into this world by the leader of the Empire Reborn, was there. In the end Luke found out that this leader wanted to feed Luke and all three of Leia’s children to Waru, and stopped them. It turned out that the fluctuating Force abilities were not related to Waru at all.
In 14 ABY, the cult which the Empire Reborn had become got word of the locations of other nexuses Luke’s Jedi knew about. He sent some of his Jedi to these places and went himself to Dagobah to repel them. When it became apparent that the cult was planning to bring back the ancient Sith Lord Marka Ragnos, he and a team of almost fifty Jedi went to Korriban and stopped them, killing any who didn’t escape or surrender and sealing Ragnos’s tomb.
Looking at what he’d done, Luke had a personal crisis and decided to become a hermit for a while. He used the Force to rebuild a demolished fortress and cut himself off from contact with other people. Someone found him anyway - Akanah of the Fallanassi, an extremely pacifistic sect of Force-Sensitives. She told him that his mother had been her teacher, and he went with her on a long series of pointless journeys trying to find her - the Fallanassi train a lot in secrecy and concealment - before learning that she’d been lying. He did learn some of their talents. Then he decided that a hermit’s life didn’t work for him.
Luke felt the shock of a world being destroyed and the Senate bombed, and found that it was connected to a pair of ex-students, Brakiss and Dolph. He went to Brakiss’s homeworld, was attacked by acidic balloon monsters, and popped them with heat redirection. Brakiss’s mother tended to his wounds and told him where to find her son. He found Brakiss, handily outfought him, and was told to stay out of it. When he went to see Dolph, he was burned and thrown into a pit to be eaten by a creature; Luke talked to it with the Force and instead used it to break out. When he fought Dolph he found himself getting angry and chose to die rather than dip into the Dark Side, but Leia just shot Dolph.
Lando recruited Luke to help him find a wealthy wife, which resulted in some very inane adventures. Then Luke got a report from an intelligence agent, went to Bakura to borrow a fleet, and took it to the Corellian system, where he used his powers to get a party through the increasingly lethal insides of Centerpoint Station. He met Mara Jade and defended against a fleet until the bigger New Republic fleet arrived to squash the insurrection.
While fighting pirates, Luke suddenly feared that the profligate use of the Force he’d been going with for years might be a bad thing and cut down on it. He realized that the pirates were clones; while investigating he was trapped and saved by Mara Jade. Soon he went to a remote planet after her, and together with the help of small batlike natives they infiltrated Thrawn’s fortress and kept its occupants from throwing in with the Imperial Remnant. They also accidentally killed an “unborn” clone of Thrawn and merged with each other in the Force. With his terrible romantic history, Luke had resigned himself to bachelorhood. Mara changed this.
They were married - a private ceremony in the Jedi academy, then a public one on Coruscant. The Empire had made peace with the New Republic, but a team of Imps still tried to infiltrate and do something; Luke’s friends negated their efforts and Luke talked the ringleader around, inviting him to join the party.
A year later, he and Mara went along with a Chiss ship to the site where a Jedi mission ship had been shot down by Thrawn. Events here are ridiculously complicated, but suffice to say that Luke handled his doubts about whether Jedi should marry, helped Mara settle her doubts about allegiance, and was disturbed to find that thanks to Jorus C’baoth, the survivors hated and feared Jedi.
In five years’ time, the Vong came in from another galaxy; they never took over everything, but they did establish a presence and became a persistent nuisance, in places a real threat. Luke worried that the Jedi were not unified enough, and perhaps not trained enough, to repel them outright.
Mara gave birth to their son, who they named Ben. Because the Vong seemed very interested in capturing Jedi, they sent him and the other Jedi children to a safehouse. Luke and Mara teamed up with the more militaristic Jedi factions and led them in a string of victories. Then, because we can’t have nice things, Luke’s nephew Anakin was apparently killed, Luke’s other nephew Jacen was captured, and Coruscant fell.
He and Mara joined General Antilles’s fleet and based themselves on a strategically important world, Borleias, also founding Twin Suns Squadron. Luke gave Twin Suns to his niece Jaina and went with Mara and the Wraiths to infiltrate Coruscant, where they killed a mutated cyborg Dark Jedi who’d been exposed too long to a Force nexus. Then they exfiltrated to help Wedge with Operation Emperor’s Spear, which was wildly successful.
Luke decided to reform the proper Jedi Council, this time with politics, and pulled strings so a pro-Jedi candidate, Cal Omas, became Chief of State, though Omas didn’t trust him for long thanks to the actions of some other Jedi. Luke then joined General Garm Bel Iblis in striking at the Vong, using a form of Battle Meditation on their forces. However, without his parents nearby and with the feedback from a galaxy at war, his son Ben cut himself off from the Force, something neither Luke nor Mara knew how to handle.
The New Republic merged with the Imperial Remnant and several others to become the Galactic Alliance, got the help of Thrawn’s people, and found the wandering sentient planet Zonoma Sekot, origin of the Vong, which they convinced to help them out. Luke, Mara, and others went to Coruscant and confronted the Vong leadership. He used serious Oneness to kill his opponents, and a treaty was signed that put down the Vong and had them live on Zonoma Sekot.
Luke telepathically contacted all Jedi and told them that the Order needed to change, to completely embrace and serve the Force. He started a new Jedi Academy on Ossus, and there were ten years of relative peace, or at least no new massive crises. There was a schism in the order, with Mara and Kyp arguing against close association with the Alliance, Corran and others arguing for it. Luke was able to keep things from going too far, but the fault remained.
There came the Swarm Wars, when hivemind insect people proved able to take over Jedi and make them into Joiners, part of the hivemind. Luke’s nephew Anakin, and some other Jedi thought to be lost to the Vong, were among them, helping the insects expand their territory into Chiss space; they were able to convert a number of people who they had been close to. Those Jedi who didn’t become Joiners had trouble deciding on courses of action. Eventually it was discovered that various Dark Jedi had also joined the hivemind and were influencing it, completely unbeknownst to the other Joiners.
When the Swarm Wars were resolved, the Joiner Jedi were parted from the insects until the Joiner connection evaporated. Anakin and the others thought lost had been changed by the near-fatal injuries, being “rebuilt” by the insects, and a decade in the hivemind. They were… off, and had trouble reintegrating.
Luke’s nephew Jacen fell under the influences of Lumiya, who’d been lurking around for forty years. He became Darth Caedus. Luke was very reluctant to see his nephew’s fall and act on it, though he managed to retrieve his son Ben from Caedus’s tutelage. Eventually, Caedus killed Mara Jade.
Luke did not quite go to the Dark Side, but he came close when he killed Lumiya. Realizing how close he’d come, he became profoundly depressed, only coming out of it to support the resistance and Jaina, who killed her brother.
The whole mess led to massive anti-Jedi sentiment, and the election of a Jedi-hating Chief of State. Luke was arrested for dereliction of duty and was able to go free only if he accepted exile from Coruscant. Luke and Ben started to try to determine how Jacen fell by travelling about and learning from some of the people he had learned from, picking up the various powers he had learned. Jedi started to go mad, which was caused by an eldritch abomination, Abeloth.
Reluctantly, they allied with a lost Sith tribe whose apprentices were also being driven mad by Abeloth, who turned out to have eaten Callista and took her shape. The Sith, predictably, betrayed Luke and Ben, who nonetheless persevered in the end.
Eventually Luke died. We’ll say that he was late seventies/early eighties when it happened, and it involved a relative going to the Dark Side as well as clones of a deceased Force-Sensitive. He allowed himself to be killed and become one with the Force, and his spirit lingered. It was largely because of him that that Dark Side relative turned back to the Light.
By one hundred thirty seven ABY he appeared most often to a whiny and obnoxious descendant, Cade, who was fooling around with bounty hunting and piracy instead of living up to his responsibilities as a Skywalker. Cade flirted with the Dark Side a lot and blew off his famous ancestor; still, it seemed there was a goldheart in there, very deep down. Eventually, he seemed to be seeking Luke’s approval.
He was also in a fragment before his birth - Zayne Carrick, Darth Vader, Luke, and Cade Skywalker all appeared in a vision four thousand years before any of this.
Luke’s father was a Jedi who fell and became Dark Lord of the Sith, then wiped out most of the Jedi; his mother was a politician who died soon after his fall. Luke and his twin sister Leia were born at the start of the purge, within days of the point where the Republic became the First Galactic Empire.
The two Jedi Masters overseeing this separated them, sending Leia to be adopted by Bail Organa of Alderaan. Luke went with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who took him to live on Tatooine with his father’s stepbrother’s family - Owen and Beru Lars. For the first few years Obi-Wan involved himself closely in Luke’s upbringing, but in time Owen barred the Jedi Master from the moisture farm.
Luke first used the Force when he was six years old, finding a lost tool. Owen thought he’d put it there and scolded Luke harshly enough that the kid didn’t replicate the trick. He did find that he could sense things before they happened and that he was a great pilot.
As a child Luke was endlessly curious about his parents; his aunt and uncle had wanted him to consider them his parents, but Obi-Wan had encouraged him otherwise. At age ten, when he couldn’t get answers out of his caretakers, he ran away and got lost in a sandstorm. He encountered a tall, dark figure, and then a boy of his own age with very similar interests, Annie. They wandered around, Luke killed a krayt dragon with a well-thrown gaffi stick, and Annie disappeared, along with any trace of the dragon, by the time Luke’s rescuers arrived. Luke was sure that it was more than a dream.
His friends were the kids of other local moisture farmers. They were a relatively rambunctious bunch, always trying to race or fix things to get them into racing condition, but also relatively harmless. Most were happy enough at the prospect of staying on Tatooine, but Tank, Biggs, and Luke shared a longing to leave the planet and become fighter pilots. Tank and Biggs were both older than him.
Luke’s first trip off Tatooine, an illicit ride with Biggs on a passenger freighter to the world’s moon, ended badly when something in the engines broke down. Luke fixed them on the fly and saved everyone, but he didn’t even quite get out of the atmosphere. When he was fourteen, he and Windy were flying through Beggar’s Canyon when their skyhopper - lightweight civilian flier - crashed. Obi-Wan saved them. After this Luke started running into the Jedi Master more frequently.
Challenged to a race by a local braggart, Luke found him decapitated the next morning. With Obi-Wan’s help he discovered the cause. There were various other incidents, saving and being saved by his circle, racing, becoming increasingly skilled at flying a skyhopper and hitting two-meter-long rats from a long range without a targeting computer. Luke was an adventure-seeker, craving excitement, and developed some mechanical aptitude.
There was some friction between the stolid Larses and Luke, who was a dutiful boy but never made a secret about how he didn’t intend to stay on the farm for his entire life. He did whine a little, and wanted more out of life, but he did not shirk his responsibilities, and they worked together. There was always more tension around the time when the closest pilot academy opened for applicants, though. The Larses wanted to keep him safe.
Biggs and Tank both left by the time Luke was eighteen. His relationship with the others in the group wasn’t as close, and he was lonely and frustrated.
When he was nineteen, there came the events of A New Hope. Threepio and Artoo were purchased, Luke tracked Artoo and found Obi-Wan, his aunt and uncle were killed, he went to Anchorhead and met Chewie and Han Solo, they went to the Death Star and lost Obi-Wan but saved Leia, they went to Yavin, Luke met Biggs again, Biggs and nearly every other pilot except Wedge Antilles died, Luke destroyed the Death Star.
He threw himself whole-souled into the Rebellion. Within two weeks he had investigated three potential Rebel base locations, travelled across the galaxy, helped out in X-Wing acquisition, and assisted in the destruction of a Star Destroyer.
Frankly, his early days in the Rebellion were exceedingly tumultuous and it would take a long time to describe it all, and I haven’t read most of the Marvel comics anyway. Mostly it plays out like those first two weeks; I will note the exceptional parts.
Luke was given the rank of Commander. He and Wedge, the two survivors of Red Squadron, formed Rogue Squadron, but unlike Wedge, Luke couldn’t stay with them full time and was often off leading other groups or working alone or with Han and/or Leia.
Six months after the Battle of Yavin - hence abbreviated as ABY - there was an incident investigating pirate activities in which he had to work with some stormtrooper deserters. Obi-Wan’s spirit manifested to help him, and the whole thing put a little crack in his young black-and-white view of the world.
He found a likely base location on Hoth and reported it, soon promoted to Lieutenant Commander. When he and a team found a clone trooper who had been stranded and was unaware of galactic events, Luke convinced him that the Republic had become the Empire and the Jedi had taken up arms against it, and that trooper joined until his death. Luke also ran into his friend Tank, now Imperial, and this nearly led to the destruction of the Rebel fleet.
He had a confrontation with a centuries-old Jedi driven mad by a talisman containing an even older Sith spirit, and though he and Leia escaped, it was at the cost of every other member of their company, who were mutated into hideous rakghouls. …Other than authorial mandates requiring that particular Jedi still be alive and in the same place a hundred and fifty years later, there is absolutely no reason why Luke didn’t come back after becoming a Jedi Knight or Master. I’m going to say that the incident was traumatic enough to flashburn both of them into forgetting, though the occurrence and what happened to their group still should have been on the record.
War and incidents like that blunted Luke’s initial idealism, though it wasn’t crushed.
2ABY saw Luke and Leia going together to Mimban, where they crashed and retrieved the Kaiburr Crystal for a Force-Sensitive older woman. This crystal’s shards gave a little boost to the holder’s Force ability; the entire thing magnified that ability a thousandfold. Vader also wanted the crystal. While in its proximity, Obi-Wan possessed Luke in order to fight him off. Afterwards, Luke accidentally discovered, in rapid succession, how to heal superficially, how to put someone into a healing coma, and how to enter one himself. He also found that the crystal was powerless offworld, though it was taken anyway, and he used a shard of it to augment his father’s lightsaber.
In 3ABY, Luke regrouped with Rogue Squadron at Hoth. The events of ESB happened; he was nearly killed, Obi-Wan told him to go to Dagobah, he fought in a battle and left for Dagobah rather than heading to the rendezvous point, he trained under Yoda and had difficulties with it, he left after having a vision of what was happening to his friends, he dueled Vader, had the famous revelation, and lost his hand.
If he’d been anyone else, going AWOL at such a critical time would have ended poorly for him; there was a battle not long after which could have gone very differently if he’d been there. But he was Luke Skywalker, essential both symbolically and actually, so this was let go. He’d always been an oddity in the Rebellion, and this cinched it - he started to be regarded as a little other, part of them but not answering to the same rules.
Luke was given a prosthetic replacement hand; it was covered in synthflesh and didn’t appear artificial, but he often wore a black glove over it anyway.
He was shunted around on various missions. One of them saw him sent as part of a diplomatic effort to try and bring a borderline planet over into the Rebel Alliance. He was imprisoned, then broken out by defecting Imperials. Another mission had him become very ill. A third had him take out a new superweapon, the Tarkin, and flee from Vader.
Working with Rogue Squadron, Luke fell in love with a pilot named Shira Brie. In a nasty dogfight his targeting computer was knocked offline, so he used the Force - and shot her down, apparently killing her. Investigations proved that she was an Imperial agent and a traitor.
Getting word that Boba Fett had Han Solo (in carbonite, remember) and was on a particular planet, Luke took the Rogues as cover for the Falcon’s pilots (Leia, Chewie, Lando) and their guide Dash Rendar, who buggered out and ruined the trap. Fett escaped, one of the Rogues had a renegade astromech that took over its X-Wing and tried to shoot Luke down, and Luke surgically disabled it without killing the pilot or destroying the droid, since he wanted it looked at. It turned out to have been sabotaged.
Luke then left the Rogues and went back to Tatooine, where he built a new lightsaber at Obi-Wan’s place and was saved by Dash Rendar from thugs; Dash had been hired to protect him despite that less-than-stellar record. They received a message that had been intended to go to Leia and went to meet a Bothan spymaster. The two headed a little squadron of Bothans attacking a freighter to steal important intel; Dash got some killed and then buggered out again to sulk.
The Bothan base was attacked by bounty hunters during decoding, and although most of the Bothans got away with the intel, Luke was captured when he refused to leave one who was dying. He learned how to severely mindtrick guards - previously his mindtrick had been used for easier persuades - and used this to escape before he could be delivered to Vader. He then regrouped with Chewie and Lando and found out that an underlord, Prince Xizor(Vader’s rival for the Emperor’s favor), had been behind various assassination attempts and now had Leia on Coruscant.
They infiltrated, met up with Dash Rendar (…again…), and went through the sewers into Xizor’s palace and got Leia. Luke fought Xizor’s human replica droid, Guri, discovering superspeed in order to do it. Rather than kill her, he gave her the chance to flee and reevaluate things. Luke and company then escaped, with the help of Rogue Squadron and the interference of the Imperial fleet (who were gunning for Xizor…It’s complicated). Dash Rendar appeared to die. (He did not. Instead, he let them think he died, because that’s Dash.)
Soon he found out that Han Solo had been delivered to Jabba the Hutt back on Tatooine, and went there, and made some plans. A Twi’lek dancing slave was freed. Then came the events of RotJ.
An attempt to 1) get Jabba to let Han go or 2) steal Han away met with first an attempt to feed Luke to Jabba’s rancor. Luke killed it, so he and the rest of the party were sent to be fed to the Sarlaac. Leia killed Jabba, Luke and the others killed a skiffload of guards, they got out of there, and Luke finally went back to Dagobah. Yoda died while Luke was there, he talked to Obi-Wan and found out various things including who Leia was, then left to go to Endor and try to take out the second Death Star’s shield generator. After being captured by Ewoks, he used his powers to strike the fear of Threepio into them, getting them on their side. Then Luke left and let himself be captured by Vader, who he hoped to turn back to the Light Side. He was taken to the Emperor, refused to fight until the subject of his sister came up, and then outfought his father until cutting off his hand and realizing that they were alike. Luke declared he was a Jedi, like his father before him; the Emperor tried to kill him with lightning and was killed by Vader, who died soon after. He escaped before Wedge and Lando blew the Death Star up and cremated his father’s armor during the celebration. The spirits of his father, Obi-Wan, and Yoda appeared to him but didn’t speak.
The next day, Luke rushed into orbit to save Wedge, who was preventing a messenger drone from self-destructing. The message was from an outpost world, Bakura, requesting Imperial help. The Alliance sent people, commanded by Luke. A truce between Rebel and Imperial forces was declared until the alien enemy was defeated. Luke and Leia had an argument when Leia was highly disturbed after being visited by their fathers’ spirit. He also became mutually attracted to a senator, but due to her philosophical views they never perfectly meshed.
The Imperials betrayed him and had him turned over to the alien enemy with a set of burrowing parasitic worms in his lungs. He used his talk-to-anything power to persuade the worms to go up out of his trachea and leave his body, and befriended a Force-Sensitive human being used by the aliens, escaping with him. The human soon died, but this led Luke to the realization that he should devote himself to finding other Force-Sensitives and rebuilding the Jedi Order.
Luke and the reduced-strength Rogue Squadron went to Corellia and were caught in some action, proving that even without the Emperor, the Empire wasn’t dead yet. Wedge acquitted himself extremely well, and Luke officially left the squadron to him, for good.
Luke then entered into another massively busy Marvel Comics period. He went on mission after mission. Helped a resistance movement overthrow a king. Trained his Jedi skills on Endor. Went on missions to talk planets into sending representatives to the Rebel Alliance. Met dozens of young people who wanted Jedi training and turned them all down, because he was afraid to give it, afraid they’d turn to the dark side. Fell in love repeatedly, gathered a whole host of companions. Came to regret not training any of them when one became Dark Lord of the Sith under a more powerful woman named Lumiya. He redeemed that student and decided to try training another, Kiro.
Luke got caught up in the Nagai-Tof Wars and soon found that one side was secretly being aided by Lumiya, who he fought, got captured by, was rescued by Kiro from, and fought again more successfully after building a second, shorter lightsaber called a shoto. He found that Lumiya was Shira Brie, the pilot he’d been in love with and fired upon. She’d been taken up by Vader, and had three damaged limbs replaced by cybernetics. She escaped them and Kiro was apparently killed.
Taking a more active, general-type role in the war, Luke and a fleet fought on the side which Lumiya wasn’t on. He found that Kiro had survived, but his fledgling apprentice no longer wanted to become a Jedi, which he accepted reluctantly. The war was ended after Luke captured an important leader. Lumiya vanished.
Luke rescued a Jedi kid from a hidden city and soon after helped the New Republic, as the Rebellion had started to call itself, capture a Star Destroyer. This finally led to him being officially promoted to General.
The Empire was defiant, but at the time it was also somewhat fragmentary, as on Imperial Center (Coruscant. The Empire changed the name) Sate Pestage hadn’t the charisma to force it together. In 5 ABY, one year after the Emperor’s death, there was word of a new Sith Lord, Shadowspawn, with his own great army. Luke led New Republic forces against them. When his ship crashed, Luke allowed himself to be captured and taken to Shadowspawn, intending to duel him - but instead of killing him, as expected, he sensed something off and disabled the man, finding that he was a Force-Sensitive older man named Nick Rostu who was being controlled by the real bad guy, Cronal. Nick told Luke to kill him. Luke saved Nick, was captured again, and then was forced to experience a mental eternity of the Dark, an interpretation of the Dark Side of the Force which was highly entropic.
He was able to free his mind and call the also-recaptured Nick to free his body, but for some time after this he was heavily affected by the Dark. He felt like he’d been used, that love and friendship were just tools in that using, and that continuing was pointless, since everyone would die anyway. He also decided to act exactly like he would have before seeing the Dark and “learning the truth”, because even a heavily nihilistic Luke can’t stop trying to save people, and because he hoped that if he pretended long enough, the mask would become his face and he could fall back into the beautiful dream. (He did. Or else the lingering effects of the Dark wore off when he realized that he was a white hole. …It’s complicated)
In time, Luke used his talk-to-anything powers on rock-based molten creatures and turned Cronal’s forces to serve him, though Cronal took them back in a horrible way. Luke freed a Darksider from Cronal’s control and used his connection to get back to Cronal. He then severed Cronal’s connection to all of his forces, which took Cronal out of the picture and killed all of them. Luke stayed to feel each one of them die, something like fifty thousand people at that point. When it was over he resigned his commission and hired someone to investigate the goings on and build an indictment against him, but was dismayed to find that the man had instead created a holothriller script for it, because no one was going to try Luke Skywalker for what he’d done.
After that, he spent three years travelling the galaxy looking for traces of the Jedi, though other things cropped up. He was called by a Jedi Master’s spirit to destroy an artifact. He helped the New Republic take Coruscant from the Empire, though he only had a minor role in that; he was once again outside of their jurisdiction, and most crises fell to others to solve. When one of the Rogues found the Emperor’s personal, desecrated Jedi museum, he studied it and offered that Force-Sensitive pilot the chance to train with him - something he hadn’t done before. His prior apprentice had asked him. It was a brave and uncertain step which was then turned down. Luke accepted this gracefully, but it probably affected his decision to turn down the request of another, less strongly Force-Sensitive pilot. Luke would not become anyone’s master, but while hunting Jedi traces he did give a handful of lessons and plenty of advice to those he thought could use it.
In 8 ABY, four years after Endor, he went to Dathomir and, when his ship crashed, discovered self levitation/gliding with the Force. He found the ruins of an ancient ship once used in training Jedi and was captured by a tribe of Dathomiri witches, women who developed Force-Sensitivity and who took men as sex slaves. …Luke ended up one of these men. However, he befriended his captors and ended up facing off against a Dark Side-aligned tribe of witches. They almost killed him, but he was saved by his healing coma power. Later he used the Force to manipulate all of the Millenium Falcon’s controls and shot down the shuttle the Dark Side witches were on.
A year later, he heard from the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi for the last time; his teacher moved on. The Empire resurged as Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Outer Rim, and several attempts were made to capture Luke and the pregnant Leia. At one point, narrowly escaping, Luke was stranded in his X-Wing with engines and communication systems offline, and a very slim chance of being found, by anyone, before he died (he did not yet know that he could be in a coma for years). Of course he was found, by the information broker Talon Karrde and his second in command, Mara Jade.
Mara Jade was Force-Sensitive and trained to some extent as one of the Emperor’s Hands. She hated Luke due to a combination of him ruining her career and life and because the Emperor’s final command, echoing through her mind far too often in the past five years, was “YOU MUST KILL LUKE SKYWALKER”. All the same, she respected her boss enough that when he didn’t want Luke killed then and there or just turned over to the Empire, she went with his orders.
Luke was taken to Karrde’s base on Myrkr while Karrde decided what to do with him. When Grand Admiral Thrawn unexpectedly showed up, Karrde had Luke moved to a storage shed, because this was a poor bargaining position. Luke broke out, fled, and was pursued by Mara Jade into the forest. Nowhere on Myrkr could he touch the Force, because native animals called ysalamiri pushed it back. When Mara caught up to him, Luke was just barely able to convince her not to kill him. She reluctantly worked with him to get out of the forest and past the Stormtroopers that had been set up for them. He was let go.
After a few incidents in the war, Luke was made aware of rumors of a Jedi Master on Jomark. Eventually he got there and started training under Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth, a survivor of the Outbound Flight extragalactic project who, Luke speculated, had gone somewhat mad due to the spirits of the other Jedi on the project hanging around, like Obi-Wan had. C’baoth also had some philosophies that Luke disagreed with, but he stuck on anyway, wanting to help the old man. When Mara Jade showed up, though, she came with the knowledge that C’baoth was with the Empire. She disabled C’baoth, but Luke would not allow him to be killed.
He went with Mara and saved Talon Karrde from captivity on Thrawn’s ship. Karrde, swayed towards the New Republic, agreed to tell the New Republic council about the location of a fleet of abandoned ships which could make a serious difference in the course of the war. Said council moved too slowly, so Luke took Rogue Squadron and some others out to the site and boarded the fleet’s flagship. It was soon apparent that this was a trap; Imperials attacked and it was only through a very fortunate sequence of events that our heroes came out on top. Turns out Thrawn had already removed most of those ships - also, most of the attackers had been freshly-decanted clones. Luke also took the time to find Mara where she’d been floating disabled in the void and get her to Coruscant’s medical facilities.
Luke and Mara developed a working relationship; despite repeated opportunities, she did not kill him, and in fact the two worked together very well. He sprung her out of jail and trusted her to lead him and a small band to Wayland, where the cloning facilities were. They found Joruus C’baoth there and confronted him, revealing that he too was a clone. Luke had to fight his own clone, Luuke, grown from the hand he’d lost at Cloud City and armed with his father’s lightsaber. Ultimately it was Mara Jade who killed both Luuke and C’baoth, completing her last command. For a mixture of reasons, Luke gave her his father’s lightsaber.
Somehow, Imperials retook Coruscant and Luke went on missions to it. He found various clues to the Emperor’s power and was scooped up by a raging Force storm which stuck him in a cell on a prison ship to a Deep Core world, Byss, where he met the Emperor Reborn. Palpatine had survived by going from one rapidly degenerating clone body to the next, and now neatly overwhelmed Luke, who agreed to become his apprentice.
Luke thought he could sabotage the cause from within, and he did download some important things to Artoo and cause some issues for a few Imperial efforts. But he did fall to the Dark Side, quite genuinely, and eagerly anticipated those Dark Side teachings that his master was willing to dole out. Like his father before him, he planned to kill Palpatine. But not yet.
Palpatine replaced his humanlike artificial one with a mechno-hand like his father’s, which was much more mechanical-looking. He did not have this re-replaced with another humanlike one later, but he did have it covered in synthskin.
Leia and Han arrived on Byss to try to rescue him. He helped capture them, grabbing Han by the throat. However, Leia’s influence and love for him eventually sparked the reminder of who he had been, what he’d come here to do, so soon enough he helped them escape with Artoo, who had some important codes and plans on him. Luke stayed behind to try to kill off Palpatine’s clones in the cloning lab right after the Emperor’s last body died. Palps transferred to one before he could destroy it and outfought Luke, bringing him to heel. This was a standard Sith thing to do, so Luke was not killed for it and continued to train, falling again. He did some terrible things.
Some time later, the Emperor took Luke with him to a base where Leia was. There, Luke abandoned the Dark Side for good and fought Palpatine sincerely, this time defeating him. Palps created another hyperspace wormhole, and Luke and Leia together forced him to lose control of it so that his current body was consumed. But while Luke had turned, the Dark Side was not entirely gone from his psyche. For years after this he would be showier, a little more arrogant.
New Republic leadership did not feel comfortable with him now, so he left them to try to train new Jedi to bring against the various Dark Jedi he’d seen under Palpatine. He fell in love with one of these trainees, who of course died during an assassination attempt. Palpatine went after Leia and Han’s newborn son Anakin, so Luke took his Jedilings and tried to stop him. Several trainees died, but Palpatine’s spirit was finally killed for good and Artoo destroyed the Emperor’s superweapon.
Having had a taste of training several Jedi at once, and convinced of the need to rebuild the Order, Luke declared himself a Jedi Master and talked the New Republic into giving him Yavin IV, the moon which the first Death Star had been destroyed around, for that purpose. He then went around and collected a variety of apprentices; some of them people he had worked with and given tips to before, some people he had never met.
Luke didn’t stay on his Yavin Praxeum all the time. He went to Kessel with Lando Calrissian and retrieved the Falcon, then met Qwi Xux, a defecting Imperial scientist who had been essential in the design of a number of superweapons, and the troubled and overwhelmingly Force-Sensitive youth Kyp Durron. Han and Chewie had convinced them to steal the latest and greatest superweapon, the Sun Crusher. They sank the superweapon into the heart of the gas giant Yavin.
There was a quick detour where a Dark Jedi captured him and was killed by one of Luke’s former students, whom Luke considered to be a Jedi Knight already. Luke promoted this student, the clone Jedi X2, to Jedi Master, but X2 declined the chance to teach at the academy, preferring one-on-one instruction.
At the Academy, Luke’s star student Gantoris suddenly produced a lightsaber, though he hadn’t had one before, and attacked Luke; Luke fended him off easily and let it go. Then Gantoris was found burned to death. Luke put Corran, an X-Wing pilot who was training so he could find his wife, on the case and was immediately distracted by new students, including Mara Jade, who he had a tenuous connection with. She left before long, since she felt he wasn’t teaching anything she didn’t already know. Then Kyp came to train, immediately becoming the new star pupil.
Unfortunately, he was influenced by the same thing which had instructed and then killed Gantoris: Exar Kun, a Sith spirit four thousand years old. Kun wanted to kill Luke; Kyp separated his spirit and body instead and fled, stealing the Sun Crusher and using it on some inhabited star systems. Kun made some other efforts to kill Luke, deluding some of his other students into trying and also sending monsters after him. The only people Luke could communicate with at all were his niece and nephew, Jaina and Jacen. He was able to possess one of them to fight off a monster with. Soon a combination of Luke’s spirit, the efforts of the apprentices, and the spirit of Kun’s own long-dead master were able to finally vanquish Exar Kun.
Kyp was retrieved and brought before Luke, who let him back into the Jedi Academy. His punishment was that he would serve as a Jedi, forever. Nobody was happy with this. Corran left the Academy in protest. In a few months Luke went after him to help; he easily fought off five Jensaarai, Sith-influenced offshoot Jedi, without killing them. He accompanied Corran in breaking people out of an Imperial prison, including Corran’s wife, and then confronted the leader of the Jensaarai. With Corran’s help, Luke turned that entire offshoot Order into allies.
Not long after that, Luke and a couple of students were caught by surprise and taken to the Eye of Palpatine, a special ship, and put through brainwashing. Luke fended off the brainwashing, had his left leg horribly mangled, and went looking for his students, on the way meeting Callista, a Jedi who had transferred her spirit into part of the ship. Soon finding that the ship was to destroy an old Jedi hideout, they worked to get everyone off the ship and stop it. They succeeded, but only after those two students sacrificed themselves. One gave her body to Callista, but in inhabiting it she lost her ability to touch the Force. Luke took her across the galaxy hoping to help her. They discovered on Dagobah that she could still touch the Dark Side, but that didn’t help. Back at the Academy, Luke fought off some Imperial attackers and Callista slipped away, deciding to leave him.
She later sent a message to Leia about something going on on the planet Nom Chorios; Luke went there and his ship was shot down, though he survived. Luke realized that the crystals being used on that world were actually sentient beings, and was able to speak to them and turn them to his side, averting a plague. He met Callista again, and they parted formally.
One of his students was murdered by Desann, one of the students who had left him and gone to the Dark Side. Kyle Katarn, another student, came by to tell Luke he’d seen Desann and thought Desann had found a powerful nexus in the Force. Luke and Kyle recruited Rogue Squadron to go there with them and found that Desann had joined up with an Imperial splinter group, the Empire Reborn. They stopped him; it’s more complicated then that, but not of great personal importance to Luke.
Hearing rumors of a healing cult and on the lookout for new trainees, Luke went to Crseih Station, where he found his Force abilities becoming erratic. A transdimensional being called Waru, who had been called into this world by the leader of the Empire Reborn, was there. In the end Luke found out that this leader wanted to feed Luke and all three of Leia’s children to Waru, and stopped them. It turned out that the fluctuating Force abilities were not related to Waru at all.
In 14 ABY, the cult which the Empire Reborn had become got word of the locations of other nexuses Luke’s Jedi knew about. He sent some of his Jedi to these places and went himself to Dagobah to repel them. When it became apparent that the cult was planning to bring back the ancient Sith Lord Marka Ragnos, he and a team of almost fifty Jedi went to Korriban and stopped them, killing any who didn’t escape or surrender and sealing Ragnos’s tomb.
Looking at what he’d done, Luke had a personal crisis and decided to become a hermit for a while. He used the Force to rebuild a demolished fortress and cut himself off from contact with other people. Someone found him anyway - Akanah of the Fallanassi, an extremely pacifistic sect of Force-Sensitives. She told him that his mother had been her teacher, and he went with her on a long series of pointless journeys trying to find her - the Fallanassi train a lot in secrecy and concealment - before learning that she’d been lying. He did learn some of their talents. Then he decided that a hermit’s life didn’t work for him.
Luke felt the shock of a world being destroyed and the Senate bombed, and found that it was connected to a pair of ex-students, Brakiss and Dolph. He went to Brakiss’s homeworld, was attacked by acidic balloon monsters, and popped them with heat redirection. Brakiss’s mother tended to his wounds and told him where to find her son. He found Brakiss, handily outfought him, and was told to stay out of it. When he went to see Dolph, he was burned and thrown into a pit to be eaten by a creature; Luke talked to it with the Force and instead used it to break out. When he fought Dolph he found himself getting angry and chose to die rather than dip into the Dark Side, but Leia just shot Dolph.
Lando recruited Luke to help him find a wealthy wife, which resulted in some very inane adventures. Then Luke got a report from an intelligence agent, went to Bakura to borrow a fleet, and took it to the Corellian system, where he used his powers to get a party through the increasingly lethal insides of Centerpoint Station. He met Mara Jade and defended against a fleet until the bigger New Republic fleet arrived to squash the insurrection.
While fighting pirates, Luke suddenly feared that the profligate use of the Force he’d been going with for years might be a bad thing and cut down on it. He realized that the pirates were clones; while investigating he was trapped and saved by Mara Jade. Soon he went to a remote planet after her, and together with the help of small batlike natives they infiltrated Thrawn’s fortress and kept its occupants from throwing in with the Imperial Remnant. They also accidentally killed an “unborn” clone of Thrawn and merged with each other in the Force. With his terrible romantic history, Luke had resigned himself to bachelorhood. Mara changed this.
They were married - a private ceremony in the Jedi academy, then a public one on Coruscant. The Empire had made peace with the New Republic, but a team of Imps still tried to infiltrate and do something; Luke’s friends negated their efforts and Luke talked the ringleader around, inviting him to join the party.
A year later, he and Mara went along with a Chiss ship to the site where a Jedi mission ship had been shot down by Thrawn. Events here are ridiculously complicated, but suffice to say that Luke handled his doubts about whether Jedi should marry, helped Mara settle her doubts about allegiance, and was disturbed to find that thanks to Jorus C’baoth, the survivors hated and feared Jedi.
In five years’ time, the Vong came in from another galaxy; they never took over everything, but they did establish a presence and became a persistent nuisance, in places a real threat. Luke worried that the Jedi were not unified enough, and perhaps not trained enough, to repel them outright.
Mara gave birth to their son, who they named Ben. Because the Vong seemed very interested in capturing Jedi, they sent him and the other Jedi children to a safehouse. Luke and Mara teamed up with the more militaristic Jedi factions and led them in a string of victories. Then, because we can’t have nice things, Luke’s nephew Anakin was apparently killed, Luke’s other nephew Jacen was captured, and Coruscant fell.
He and Mara joined General Antilles’s fleet and based themselves on a strategically important world, Borleias, also founding Twin Suns Squadron. Luke gave Twin Suns to his niece Jaina and went with Mara and the Wraiths to infiltrate Coruscant, where they killed a mutated cyborg Dark Jedi who’d been exposed too long to a Force nexus. Then they exfiltrated to help Wedge with Operation Emperor’s Spear, which was wildly successful.
Luke decided to reform the proper Jedi Council, this time with politics, and pulled strings so a pro-Jedi candidate, Cal Omas, became Chief of State, though Omas didn’t trust him for long thanks to the actions of some other Jedi. Luke then joined General Garm Bel Iblis in striking at the Vong, using a form of Battle Meditation on their forces. However, without his parents nearby and with the feedback from a galaxy at war, his son Ben cut himself off from the Force, something neither Luke nor Mara knew how to handle.
The New Republic merged with the Imperial Remnant and several others to become the Galactic Alliance, got the help of Thrawn’s people, and found the wandering sentient planet Zonoma Sekot, origin of the Vong, which they convinced to help them out. Luke, Mara, and others went to Coruscant and confronted the Vong leadership. He used serious Oneness to kill his opponents, and a treaty was signed that put down the Vong and had them live on Zonoma Sekot.
Luke telepathically contacted all Jedi and told them that the Order needed to change, to completely embrace and serve the Force. He started a new Jedi Academy on Ossus, and there were ten years of relative peace, or at least no new massive crises. There was a schism in the order, with Mara and Kyp arguing against close association with the Alliance, Corran and others arguing for it. Luke was able to keep things from going too far, but the fault remained.
There came the Swarm Wars, when hivemind insect people proved able to take over Jedi and make them into Joiners, part of the hivemind. Luke’s nephew Anakin, and some other Jedi thought to be lost to the Vong, were among them, helping the insects expand their territory into Chiss space; they were able to convert a number of people who they had been close to. Those Jedi who didn’t become Joiners had trouble deciding on courses of action. Eventually it was discovered that various Dark Jedi had also joined the hivemind and were influencing it, completely unbeknownst to the other Joiners.
When the Swarm Wars were resolved, the Joiner Jedi were parted from the insects until the Joiner connection evaporated. Anakin and the others thought lost had been changed by the near-fatal injuries, being “rebuilt” by the insects, and a decade in the hivemind. They were… off, and had trouble reintegrating.
Luke’s nephew Jacen fell under the influences of Lumiya, who’d been lurking around for forty years. He became Darth Caedus. Luke was very reluctant to see his nephew’s fall and act on it, though he managed to retrieve his son Ben from Caedus’s tutelage. Eventually, Caedus killed Mara Jade.
Luke did not quite go to the Dark Side, but he came close when he killed Lumiya. Realizing how close he’d come, he became profoundly depressed, only coming out of it to support the resistance and Jaina, who killed her brother.
The whole mess led to massive anti-Jedi sentiment, and the election of a Jedi-hating Chief of State. Luke was arrested for dereliction of duty and was able to go free only if he accepted exile from Coruscant. Luke and Ben started to try to determine how Jacen fell by travelling about and learning from some of the people he had learned from, picking up the various powers he had learned. Jedi started to go mad, which was caused by an eldritch abomination, Abeloth.
Reluctantly, they allied with a lost Sith tribe whose apprentices were also being driven mad by Abeloth, who turned out to have eaten Callista and took her shape. The Sith, predictably, betrayed Luke and Ben, who nonetheless persevered in the end.
Eventually Luke died. We’ll say that he was late seventies/early eighties when it happened, and it involved a relative going to the Dark Side as well as clones of a deceased Force-Sensitive. He allowed himself to be killed and become one with the Force, and his spirit lingered. It was largely because of him that that Dark Side relative turned back to the Light.
By one hundred thirty seven ABY he appeared most often to a whiny and obnoxious descendant, Cade, who was fooling around with bounty hunting and piracy instead of living up to his responsibilities as a Skywalker. Cade flirted with the Dark Side a lot and blew off his famous ancestor; still, it seemed there was a goldheart in there, very deep down. Eventually, he seemed to be seeking Luke’s approval.