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Read on for an excerpt from

Star Wars®: Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse

by Troy Denning

Coming soon from Del Rey Books

THE PILLARS STOOD SCATTERED ACROSS THE DISTANT MOUNTAINSIDE, their pale shafts cropping out of the blue-gray dust like cliffs of white larmelstone. They looked a hundred stories tall, and whatever mysterious edifice they had been erected to support remained hidden beneath a kilometer-high mound of silt. No road crossed the endless sweep of scrub-dotted plain that surrounded the dust-mountain, and no craft was to be seen streaking across the orange sky above it. And yet, the pillars were the sole hint of civilization in the Reo System—in the whole Maraqoo Sector—so this had to be the place.

Raynar Thul eased the landspeeder forward. Though he had played an important part in several recent Jedi missions, he did not feel ready for this one. Master Skywalker had asked him to return to the Killik Colony he had once led as the Joiner UnuThul. But Raynar had literally not been himself back then. He had been a wounded combat survivor who had allowed himself to become lost in the shared mind of a Killik hive. It was an experience that had totally destroyed his sense of identity and left his mind a shattered wreck, and Raynar continued to feel tenuous and incomplete in his recovery.

But now the Jedi were facing an enemy as enigmatic as she was powerful, and their only hope of survival was to coax some answers from the jumbled hive-minds of Killiks. Someone had to convince them to reveal everything they knew about the mysterious Celestials they had once served, and Raynar was the only Jedi who could do it. So he had accepted the assignment and promised to succeed … even if it meant losing the mind he had spent eight long years trying to reassemble.

As the landspeeder drew closer to the mountain of dust, Raynar saw that the giant pillars were decorated with reliefs of winged beasts and horned fiends. Twined around the feet of these figures were ropy shapes that might have been serpents or vines.

Lowbacca, two-and-a-quarter meters of Wookiee, hunched in the front passenger seat with his knees in his chest, growled the opinion that the vines were a good sign.

“I quite disagree, Master Lowbacca,” C-3PO said, speaking from directly behind the Wookiee. “In this context, the tendrils are symbols of inevitable destruction. If the ruins weren’t so obviously deserted, I would suggest that we turn around immediately and erase them from our memory chips.”

“I think Lowie means that we’re in the right place,” Tekli said. Sitting in the passenger seat behind Raynar, the furry little Chadra-fan was probably the only one in the crowded landspeeder who was even remotely comfortable. “The vines suggest that we’ve finally found a hive with a direct association to Abeloth. But the winged figures are something new. Is there a record of ophidian grotesques appearing with other symbols?”

“Not in my data banks,” C-3PO assured her. “And I have cached every available reference to the subject. In fact, I have available two point three million articles and seven point one million images—”

Lowbacca interrupted with an impatient rumble.

“No, I would not prefer to ride on the stowage cover,” C-3PO replied. “Do you have any idea what all this dust would do to my servomotors?”

Lowbacca rumbled again.

“I am not experiencing a problem with my vocabulator, Jedi Lowbacca,” C-3PO answered. “And even if I were, I assure you that more dust would only make it worse.”

Raynar chuckled, glad to have his friends along to keep his mind off his fears. Officially, Master Skywalker had assigned Tekli and Lowbacca to the mission as its medic and technical officer. But Raynar was pretty sure their most important duty was to keep him sane—at least, he hoped it was. C-3PO was on loan to serve as a translator, so it wouldn’t be necessary for Raynar to become a Joiner again just to communicate with the Killiks. Whether it was part of Master Skywalker’s plan