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Master Luke. Master Skywalker.

He remembers Vergere. Remembering Vergere brings him to the voxyn queen, and the voxyn queen sends him slithering back down a despair-greased slope to Anakin’s corpse. Anakin’s corpse floats on a burning lake of torment far deeper than anything that can happen to Jacen’s body.

Jacen knows—intellectually, distantly, abstractly—that once he lived outside the white. He knows that he once felt happiness, pleasure, regret, anger, even love. But these are only ghosts, shadows murmuring beneath the roar of pain that fills everything he is, everything he will ever be; the simple fact that the white had a beginning does not imply that it will have an end. Jacen exists beyond time.

Where Jacen is, there is only the white, and the Force.

The Force is the air that he breathes—a cool whisk of sanity, a gentle breeze from a healthier world—though he can no more grasp its power than he might hold on to the wind. It surrounds him, fills him, accepts his suffering, and sustains his sanity. It whispers a reminder that despair is of the dark side, and that ceaseless murmur gives him the strength to go on living.

Distantly on that cool breeze he feels a knot of anger, of black rage and hurt and despair clenching ever harder, compressing itself to diamond and beyond, crushing itself back into carbon powder—he feels, through the bond they have shared from birth, his twin sister falling into the dark.

Jaina, he begs in a quiet corner of his heart. Don’t do it. Jaina, hold on—

But he cannot let himself touch her through the Force; he cannot ask her to share his torment—she is in so much pain already that to suffer his would only drive her darker yet. And so even his twin bond has become a source of anguish.

Jacen has become a prism, reintegrating the glittering spectrum of pain into pure blazing agony.

Agony is white.

Snow-blind in an eternal Hoth ice-noon of suffering, Jacen Solo hangs in the Embrace of Pain.

The touch of a hand along his jaw leaked time into the white. This was not a human hand, not Wookiee, not family or close friend—four fingers, mutually opposable, hard-fleshed as a raptor’s talons—but the touch was warm, and moist, and somehow not unfriendly. Pain retreated toward the back of his mind until he could think again, though he felt it lurking there, waiting. He knew that it would overtake him again, would break in waves across him, but for now—

The tides of agony rolled slowly out, and Jacen could open his eyes.

The hand that had brought him out of the white belonged to Vergere. She stood below him, looking up with wide alien eyes, her fingers light upon his cheek.

Jacen hung horizontally, suspended facedown two meters above a floor of wet, slick-looking greens and browns—its surface corded, viny, as though with muscle and vein. The walls oozed oily dampness that smelled darkly organic: bantha sweat and hawk-bat droppings. From the darkness above swung tentacles like prehensile eyestalks, ends socketed with glowing orbs that stared at him as the tentacles wove and danced and twisted about each other.

He understood: the enemy was watching.

Something that felt like claws, sharp and unyielding, gripped his skull from behind; he could not turn his head to see what held him. His arms were drawn wide, pulled to full extension and twisted so that his shoulders howled in their sockets. A single strong grip crushed his ankles together, grinding bone on bone—

Yet the greatest pain he now suffered was to look on Vergere and remember that he had trusted her.

She withdrew her hand, clenching and opening it while she stared at it with what, on a human, might have been a smile—as though her hand were an unfamiliar tool that might turn out to be a toy, instead.

“Among our masters,” she said casually, as though continuing a friendly conversation, “it is not considered shameful for a warrior in your position to pray for death. This is occasionally granted, to honor great courage.