Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [74]
And the Dark gave up no trace of evidence that they had ever existed.
All he got from the pebbles was gentle wordless urging to let himself sleep. Struggle is futile. The Dark swallows everything in the end. All his hopes, all his fears, every heroic dream and every tragic reality. Every single distant descendant of everyone who had ever heard of him. All would be gone, leaving not even an echo to hint that they had ever existed. The only answer was sleep. Eternal sleep.
Sleep.
Luke thought, Never.
He had an intuition that was half memory, half guess, and maybe altogether a hint from the Force, because when he again turned that imaginary stone in his imaginary hand, one of those imaginary pebbles of powdered graphite had a crack in it that wasn’t imaginary at all.
And through that crack, tiny beyond tiny, nanometrically infinitesimal, so small that if it hadn’t been imaginary, Luke couldn’t have seen it even with the most advanced instruments in the galaxy, shone the very faintest conceivable glimmer …
Of light.
With the Force to guide him, he focused his perception into a similarly nanometric filament. And through that tiny crack of light within the imaginary stone, Luke found the universe.
FOCUSING HIS WHOLE SELF INTO HIS FORCE PERCEPTION with all his power and every scrap of the mental discipline that Ben and Master Yoda had pounded into him, Luke could send enough of himself along that filament of light that he could see again—dimly, distantly, through waves of bizarre distortion—and what he saw was sleeves.
Voluminous sleeves, draped together as though concealing folded hands … and beyond them, a floor of smooth stone, illuminated by cold, flickering blues, like the light cast by the screen of a holoplayer. He tried to lift his head, to get a look around, but the view didn’t change, and he realized that the eyes through which he saw were not his.
With that realization, other perceptions began to flower within his consciousness. He became aware that the floor at which his borrowed eyes were staring was connected with him somehow … that it was not ordinary stone at all, but a curious semicolloidal structure of crystal … that it was, inexplicably, somehow alive.
That when he set his mind to it, he could feel the life, like a subsonic hum can raise a tingle on the skin. But it wasn’t on his skin that he felt it, it was inside his head … and he felt it because he had crystals of that semicolloidal somehow-living stone growing inside his brain …
No—
Not his brain.
The crystals grew within the other brain, the one connected to the eyes he was borrowing from outside the universe. This became another subject of contemplation, like his imaginary stone, because like that imaginary stone he was both inside this borrowed brain and outside it, pushing in while looking out. And when he touched those crystals with his attention, he could hear—no, feel—the whisper of despair that had murmured to him at the end of the universe.
Sleep. Struggle is futile. All things end. Existence is an illusion. Only the Dark is real.
He could feel now that the whisper came from outside this borrowed brain, even as his own perception did, and that the crystals somehow picked up this whisper and amplified it, adding this brain’s limited Force power to its own, the same as it had done with the other hundreds of brains that Luke could now feel were all linked into this bizarre system.
There was somebody out there.
Luke thought, Blackhole.
And with that thought, he could feel the malignancy that fed this field of Dark: the ancient wheezing cripple entombed within his life-support capsule, who poured his bleak malice through a body-wide webwork of this selfsame crystal …
Just like the one growing within Luke’s own body.
And with that understanding came power: he set his will upon the web of crystal within his body and allowed the Force to give power to his desire; now he was able to clearly perceive the link