Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [139]
In the Dark, Cronal saw Skywalker smile. Thank you for joining me here. I was a little worried you might get away with that silly crown of yours.
This was impossible. This must be some hallucination, a twisted product of his Darksight run amok. He was in hyperspace! Hyperspace did not, could not, interact with realspace—
I was with Ben Kenobi in hyperspace when he felt the destruction of Alderaan.
No wall can contain the Force.
The Force, the Force, these pathetic Jedi kept nattering on about the Force! Did any of them even faintly comprehend how naive and foolish they were? If any of them had ever had so much as a glimpse of the real power of the Dark, that glimpse would have snuffed their tiny minds like candles in a hurricane—
Was my tiny mind snuffed? I must have missed that part.
Cronal could sense gentle amusement, like a tolerant uncle indulging a child’s tantrum. Fury rose within him like molten lava climbing a volcanic fault. This simple-minded youth had fooled himself into believing his paltry light could fill the infinite Dark? Let him shine alone within eternal night.
Cronal opened himself wholly to the Dark, cracking the very gates of his mind, expanding the sphere of his power like an event horizon yawning to swallow the universe. He surrounded Skywalker’s light, and with a shrug of power he consumed it.
In this arena, minds naked to the Dark contending in nonspace beyond even hyperspace, there was no question of age, or health, or physical strength. Here the only power that counted was the power of will. Skywalker and his so-called Force could never match Cronal’s mastery of the Way of the Dark.
On this level, Cronal was Blackhole. From his grip no light could escape.
Escape? Me? Did you forget that you’re the one who’s running away?
Cronal suddenly felt, unaccountably—and unpleasantly—warm.
At first he dismissed this unwelcome sensation; he was too experienced a servant of the Dark to be distracted by a minor malfunction in his life-support settings. But gradually he became aware that his body—specifically, his body’s skin—did not seem to be warm at all. It was, in fact, chilly. And damp.
As though he had broken out, somehow, in a cold sweat.
He turned his mind back to the Dark, and became again the ultimate black hole. He examined the abyss of darkness he had become and found it to be flawless. Perfect. The ultimate expression of the absolute power of the Dark.
This boy, this infantile Jedi-ling, had thought his meager light could stand against that power? Cronal’s black hole had swallowed every last lumen; Skywalker’s light was gone forever. His puerile Force trick of light had done to Cronal nothing whatsoever.
That’s because I’m not trying to do anything to you. I’m doing something through you.
What?
How could Skywalker still speak?
A creeping dread began to poison Cronal’s smug satisfaction. What if Skywalker was telling the truth? What if the boy had been so easily vanquished because he had intended to be? He had already used his tiny gift of the Force to forge a link through Kar Vastor to Cronal … what if his light had not been destroyed by falling into the black hole that was Cronal’s mind?
What if his light had simply passed through?
That’s where you dark siders always stumble. What’s the opposite of a black hole?
Cronal had heard this cosmological theory before: that matter falling into a black hole passes into another universe … and that matter falling through black holes in other universes could pass into ours, bursting forth in pure, transcendent energy.
The opposite of a black hole was a white fountain.
He thought, I’ve been suckered.
The Sith alchemy that had created the Shadow Crown had imbued it with control over meltmassif in all its forms; to drown Skywalker in the Dark, Cronal had opened a channel into the Crown. Through the Crown.