Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [61]
Perhaps after a decade or two ruling the reborn Empire, he could allow himself to slowly “pick up” a properly civilized mode of speech, but until then he’d have to keep up the pretense. Perhaps the only thing that could undermine his ultimate victory would be to have these Rebel scum notice that their pet Jedi had suddenly begun talking as if he’d been educated on Coruscant by way of Dromund Kaas.
A desiccated finger stretched forth to key the holoeditor and run the recording back two minutes, so that he could study again every slightest detail of Skywalker’s bearing, his walk, his gestures, the angle of his head, every faintest twitch of his eyebrows. This was critical to the old, old man’s plans; these few recordings, taken from the holocameras embedded in the stygium armor of his black stormtroopers, and from the concealed recorders in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne, were all he had with which to study the real Luke Skywalker.
Yes, there were all those numberless holothrillers—and studying them had been a useful preparation, especially in creating the theatrical Shadowspawn persona and devising the stage dressings of the Shadow Throne—but the computer-generated Farmboy Hero depicted by these holothrillers would convince none but the ignorantly credulous fans who devoured such preposterously contrived tripe.
When Luke Skywalker emerged from the Battle of Mindor, no one must even suspect that this legendary Jedi hero was only a shell: a living, breathing life-support system for the mind of this old, old man.
This old, old man who once had been known to a select few as Lord Cronal, director of Imperial Intelligence … and to many, many unfortunate enemies of the Empire as Blackhole, the Emperor’s Hand … and who would, after today, be known to the entire galaxy as Luke, the First Skywalker Emperor.
CRONAL’S RISE TO POWER HAD STARTED WITH A VISION: a vision of the Dark.
More than a vision, in fact; more than a simple prophecy, or precognition. To the Nightsisters of Dathomir, it was the Heartshadow. Other Force-users had other names for it.
But Cronal called it simply Darksight.
Deep in the area ignorantly described by the Old Republic, and later the Empire, as the “Unknown Regions,” there was a vast cloud of dust and rock and interstellar gas that pulsed with a bloody and forbidding scarlet glow as it radiated away the energy of twelve stellar clusters within. This was the Perann Nebula; the twelve clusters that it surrounded were known collectively as the Nihil Retreat. The absolute rulers of the Nihil Retreat, dreaded masters of dark magicks beyond the grasp of even the Sith, were the Sorcerers of Rhand.
The Sorcerers of Rhand were the only family Cronal would ever know. The Rhandites had plucked him from the arms of the nameless woman who had borne him, and had forged him as a weapon is forged, awakening his insight, refining his will, opening his mind to the One Truth:
Only power is real, and the only real power is the power to destroy. Existence is fleeting. Destruction is eternal.
Every child was born waiting for death. Civilizations fell, and their very ashes were swallowed by time. The stars themselves burned out. Destruction, on the other hand …
Destruction was the will of the universe.
Some called it entropy, and tried to quantify and constrain it with the laws of thermodynamics. Some expressed it with a simple poetic declarative: Things fall apart. Some even tried to dismiss it with a joke: Anything that can go wrong will. But it was not a joke, or poetry; it was not science, nor was it subject to any law.
It was the Way of the Dark.
Destruction was easy … and permanent. When a being was killed, everything he or she would have ever done or possessed, seen or felt, was murdered. And that murder made a permanent change in the structure of the universe—it emptied the universe of an entire life, and left behind only a void.
That void was the foundation of truth.
That was why the Jedi