Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [63]
Palpatine had been impressed with the “accuracy” of Cronal’s “predictions” … yet not even the great Darth Sidious had ever suspected that Cronal’s predictions were accurate not because Cronal had seen the future, but because he had chosen that future.
That exact future.
He had decided, and his choice had molded all of history to his will.
That was the power of Darksight: to search among all the possible futures for the one that best suited your own desire and the Way of the Dark … and then to map each step that must be taken to bring you to that future, and bring that future to you.
But to make it happen, you had to bind your desire to the Dark, and dream only of destruction.
Palpatine had been a fool. He had thought he could make the Dark serve him, instead of the opposite. In the days of the Old Republic, before he had revealed his Sith identity, Palpatine literally could not fail. Every blind flailing gesture of every Jedi who’d set himself against him had turned to his advantage, and even the sheerest accidents of fortune had served his goal … because that goal had been the destruction of the Jedi Order, and the death of the Republic. He’d served the Dark unknowingly, all the while believing that the Dark was only a means to an end, a tool to help him destroy his enemies and clear his path to absolute power.
What he’d never understood was that destruction was his power.
As soon as he’d turned his will to rulership, to building instead of destroying, he had forsaken the Way of the Dark … and everything had begun to go wrong for him. Where before he could not fail, now he’d had no chance of succeeding, because when you turn your back on the Dark, the Dark turns its back on you.
Only days after the Battle of Yavin, Cronal had cast his mind deep into the void, seeking the future of the young Rebel pilot who had destroyed the Death Star, and had found him as an older, more seasoned man, dressed in dark robes—and bearing a lightsaber.
Kneeling before the Emperor, to swear his allegiance to the dark side.
My fate … will be the same as my father’s.
Which was when Cronal finally understood who Darth Vader was, and saw the terrible flaw that would bring the Order of the Sith to its ultimate destruction. A destruction that Cronal not only was determined to survive, but was certain he could transform into an eternal victory for the Dark.
And, not incidentally, eternal life for himself.
Near to eternal, anyway; as long as a single living thing struggled and suffered and fed the Dark with killing and dying, Cronal would be here. His ultimate sacrifice to the Dark would be the survival of his consciousness until the heat death of the Universe … when he would be joined forever with the final oblivion of all that had ever been. All that will ever be.
He would be the last.
Slowly, subtly, through the months and years from Yavin to Endor, Cronal had served his vision. A delicate balance had had to be meticulously maintained, to navigate the intricacies of the relationship between Palpatine and Vader … to inculcate a rivalry with the half-mechanical terror that Palpatine had elevated to the rank of Lord of the Sith. For all his undoubted physical power, Vader had never been more than a blunt instrument, with no real understanding of the truth of the Dark, nor of the uses of real power. He had been, all in all, only a thug with a lightsaber … and, as it proved, a weakhearted, emotionally crippled, impulsively treasonous thug at that.
Though Vader could never have been Cronal’s equal in coursing the mazy paths of dark power, it had served Cronal’s purpose to pretend jealousy—even to appear to fail, more than once, and to openly bridle under Vader’s supposed authority, so that Palpatine had begun to suspect that Cronal might