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Inside your head, there is only fire. Around your heart, the dragon whispers that all things die.

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, right now.

There is an understated elegance in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber technique, one that is quite unlike the feel one might get from the other great swordsbeings of the Jedi Order. He lacks entirely the flash, the pure bold élan of an Anakin Skywalker; there is nowhere in him the penumbral ferocity of a Mace Windu or a Depa Billaba nor the stylish grace of a Shaak Ti or a Dooku, and he is nothing resembling the whirlwind of destruction that Yoda can become.

He is simplicity itself.

That is his power.

Before Obi-Wan had left Coruscant, Mace Windu had told him of facing Grievous in single combat atop a mag-lev train during the general’s daring raid to capture Palpatine. Mace had told him how the computers slaved to Grievous’s brain had apparently analyzed even Mace’s unconventionally lethal Vaapad and had been able to respond in kind after a single exchange.

“He must have been trained by Count Dooku,” Mace had said, “so you can expect Makashi as well; given the number of Jedi he has fought and slain, you must expect that he can attack in any style, or all of them. In fact, Obi-Wan, I believe that of all living Jedi, you have the best chance to defeat him.”

This pronouncement had startled Obi-Wan, and he had protested. After all, the only form in which he was truly even proficient was Soresu, which was the most common lightsaber form in the Jedi Order. Founded upon the basic deflection principles all Padawans were taught—to enable them to protect themselves from blaster bolts—Soresu was very simple, and so restrained and defense-oriented that it was very nearly downright passive.

“But surely, Master Windu,” Obi-Wan had said, “you, with the power of Vaapad—or Yoda’s mastery of Ataro—”

Mace Windu had almost smiled. “I created Vaapad to answer my weakness: it channels my own darkness into a weapon of the light. Master Yoda’s Ataro is also an answer to weakness: the limitations of reach and mobility imposed by his stature and his age. But for you? What weakness does Soresu answer?”

Blinking, Obi-Wan had been forced to admit he’d never actually thought of it that way.

“That is so like you, Master Kenobi,” the Korun Master had said, shaking his head. “I am called a great swordsman because I invented a lethal style; but who is greater, the creator of a killing form—or the master of the classic form?”

“I’m very flattered that you would consider me a master, but really—”

“Not a master. The master,” Mace had said. “Be who you are, and Grievous will never defeat you.”

So now, facing the tornado of annihilating energy that is Grievous’s attack, Obi-Wan simply is who he is.

The electrodrivers powering Grievous’s mechanical arms let each of the four attack thrice in a single second; integrated by combat algorithms in the bio-droid’s electronic network of peripheral processors, each of the twelve strikes per second came from a different angle with different speed and intensity, an unpredictably broken rhythm of slashes, chops, and stabs of which every single one could take Obi-Wan’s life.

Not one touched him.

After all, he had often walked unscathed through hornet-swarms of blasterfire, defended only by the Force’s direction of his blade; countering twelve blows per second was only difficult, not impossible. His blade wove an intricate web of angles and curves, never truly fast but always just fast enough, each motion of his lightsaber subtly interfering with three or four or eight of the general’s strikes, the rest sizzling past him, his precise, minimal shifts of weight and stance slipping them by centimeters.

Grievous, snarling fury, ramped up the intensity and velocity of his attacks—sixteen per second, eighteen—until finally, at twenty strikes per second, he overloaded Obi-Wan’s defense.

So Obi-Wan used his defense to attack.

A subtle shift in the angle of a single parry brought Obi-Wan’s blade in contact not with the blade of the oncoming lightsaber,