Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [64]
Out among the forgotten fringes of the galaxy, Cronal had appeared to merely bide his time, running minor operations through his private networks of agents, while in truth he had devoted his life to searching out forgotten lore of the ancient Sith and other supposed masters of the Dark. If they had done so much damage even with their limited understanding of the Dark, how much greater destruction might be wrought by one who knew all their secrets, and also knew the One Truth?
He traveled in secret, deep into the Unknown Regions, following his Darksight vision to worlds so ancient that even legend had no memory of them. Among the drifting moon trees that flowered in the interstellar space of the Gunninga Gap, he was able to discover and assemble scraps of the Taurannik Codex, which had been destroyed in the Muurshantre Extinction a hundred millennia before; arcane hints in that forbidden tome led him to the Valtaullu Rift and the shattered asteroid belt that once had been the planet-sized Temple of Korman Lao, the Lord Ravager of the long-vanished race of demon-worshipping reptoids known as the Kanzer Exiles. The lore in the Temple fragments gave him the knowledge he needed to capture the corrupt spirit essence of Dathka Graush, to rip it free from its resting place in Korriban’s Valley of Golg, to eventually extract and consume even the most secret lore of Sith alchemy that the ancient tyrant had carried to his grave.
And that ancient Sith alchemy had given him the knowledge to forge a device to control the living crystal that formed the structure of Mindorese meltmassif …
Because the Emperor had once confided in him that the transference of the spirit to another was a pathway to the ultimate goal of a Sith: to cheat death. Of course, he had been thinking of clones, but Cronal’s plans were more ambitious; if such a feat was possible, he determined that he would perform it—and not to a mere clone body, either. After all, his own body had never been strong, and his service to the Dark had eaten away what little strength he’d had until he could no longer stand—until he could no longer feed himself, or even breathe without the life-support functions built into his gravity chair. Why should he settle for exchanging his flawed and failing body for another of the same model, every bit as certain to fail?
No. His devotion to the Way of the Dark had shown him a path to power greater than Palpatine could have ever dreamed: to transfer his consciousness permanently into a body that was young, that was healthy and handsome in a way Cronal had never been. A body more powerful in the Force than Vader, potentially more powerful even than Palpatine. The body of a true hero, beloved by all right-thinking citizens in the galaxy as the very symbol of truth and justice …
He would not simply turn Luke Skywalker to the service of the Dark. Why should he? Luke Skywalker served the Dark already, without ever guessing; he had powers of destruction that humbled even the Death Star.
No: Cronal would become Luke Skywalker, and serve the Dark himself.
RECLINING IN HIS LIFE-SUPPORT CHAMBER, CRONAL shut down the holoeditor. He had enough material already to persuasively make the case to the Republic as to why the stormtroopers would release him, even serve him, once he had become Skywalker. This was why his top commanders were all clones; he was counting on their conditioned obedience to even the most outrageous orders. Then the galaxy-wide release of his own little reality holodrama would make him—that is, Luke—even more famous, even more beloved, as the hero who had stood alone against the mad warlord Shadowspawn