Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [135]
Jacen considered it. “Am I ready?”
“In all other ways, yes. But you have to make the sacrifice of love. And then you must take your Sith name, to reforge yourself.”
“Who must I sacrifice?” The question put a chill through him. If she were to say, The one you love most, he would be unable to do it. He would never sacrifice Allana. He would never sacrifice Tenel Ka.
“One you love. One who will leave a void in your heart.”
“Anyone?”
“Anyone.”
Jacen stared off into the distance. “Then it will be my father. Or mother. Or both.”
“Or perhaps not.”
Jacen stared at her, curious. “Do you have a sudden affection for them I should know about?”
Lumiya laughed. “No. I have forgiven Leia for what she has done to me, and Han was never that much of a nuisance. But it may be that you can’t sacrifice your parents.”
“Why?”
“You must sacrifice one you love. Are you certain you still love them? Search your feelings.”
Jacen thought, and then reluctantly abandoned thinking to open himself to his emotions. He let images of Han and Leia float in his mind’s eye.
He saw them as they had been when he was a toddler, as a teenager, as a man. He saw them in the ever-changing light of his own experiences, as he came to realize that they could not be ordinary parents, as he discovered that they were willing to abandon him and his siblings to surrogate parents for weeks or months at a time, as he learned that they had to. He felt again the wash of pain that all those separations had caused, that all those reunions had never healed.
All he could feel was pain and anger—pain they had caused, anger he bore against them.
But had the anger replaced the love, or did anger simply mask it? As hard as he sought an answer, he could not find one.
Lumiya whispered in his ear. “You don’t know because you have trained yourself to feel too little, to analyze too much. That is not the Sith way. You must do both.”
Jacen shook his head. “Emotion weakens you.”
“Yet anger, an emotion, gives you strength. Emotion doesn’t weaken you, Jacen. It scares you. You specifically.”
He stared at her, suddenly furious. “Nothing scares me.”
He could not see her face beneath her scarf, but he knew that she was smiling.
“Liar,” she said. Before he could formulate an answer, she rose and returned to the secret passage. “I was wrong,” she said. “You’re not quite ready. You don’t know yourself as well as you must. Find yourself, Jacen. Then make your sacrifice and take your Sith name. I’ll be waiting.” She departed, and the door slid closed behind her.
Jacen stared after her, feeling ill—ill that he had a weakness, that Lumiya had detected it, that he was confused. And now he could not even begin the process of choosing his sacrifice until he knew where his heart lay.
Until he knew whether he loved his parents.
In one way, though, both answers to that question were similar. If he loved them, he should sacrifice one—and kill the other, to prevent retaliation. If he did not love them, he should consider eliminating them and the potential trouble they represented. Either way, both he and the galaxy would be better off without them.
“Good-bye, Mom,” he said. “Good-bye, Dad.”
Read on for a sneak preview of Karen Traviss’s
SACRIFICE
The fifth novel in the epic new Star Wars series!
SITH MEDITATION SPHERE: HEADING, CORUSCANT—ESTIMATED.
It was odd having to trust a ship.
Ben Skywalker was alone in the vessel he’d found on Ziost, trusting it to understand that he wanted it to take him home. No navigation array, no controls, no pilot’s seat…nothing. Through the bulkheads he could see stars as points of light, and that meant it wasn’t traveling at hyperspace velocity. He’d stopped finding the ship’s transparency unsettling. The hull was there. He could both see it and not see it. He felt he was in the heart of a hollowed red gem making its sedate way back to the Core.