Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [281]
The same color, Obi-Wan observed distantly, as a Sith blade.
Anakin scrabbled at the soft black sand, but struggling only made him slip farther. The sand itself was hot enough that digging his durasteel fingers into it burned off his glove, and his robes began to smolder.
Obi-Wan picked up Anakin’s lightsaber. He lifted his own as well, weighing them in his hands. Anakin had based his design upon Obi-Wan’s. So similar they were.
So differently they had been used.
“Obi-Wan …?”
He looked down. Flame licked the fringes of Anakin’s robe, and his long hair had blackened, and was beginning to char.
“You were the chosen one! It was said you would destroy the Sith, not join them. It was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness. You were my brother, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan Kenobi. “I loved you, but I could not save you.”
A flash of metal through the sky, and Obi-Wan felt the darkness closing in around them both. He knew that ship: the Chancellor’s shuttle. Now, he supposed, the Emperor’s shuttle.
Yoda had failed. He might have died.
He might have left Obi-Wan alone: the last Jedi.
Below his feet, Darth Vader burst into flame.
“I hate you,” he screamed.
Obi-Wan looked down. It would be a mercy to kill him.
He was not feeling merciful.
He was feeling calm, and clear, and he knew that to climb down to that black beach might cost him more time than he had.
Another Sith Lord approached.
In the end, there was only one choice. It was a choice he had made many years before, when he had passed his trials of Jedi Knighthood, and sworn himself to the Jedi forever. In the end, he was still Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he was still a Jedi, and he would not murder a helpless man.
He would leave it to the will of the Force.
He turned and walked away.
After a moment, he began to run.
He began to run because he realized, if he was fast enough, there was one thing he still could do for Anakin. He still could do honor to the memory of the man he had loved, and to the vanished Order they both had served.
At the landing deck, C-3PO stood on the skiff’s landing ramp, waving frantically. “Master Kenobi! Please hurry!”
“Where’s Padmé?”
“Already inside, sir, but she is badly hurt.”
Obi-Wan ran up the ramp to the skiff’s cockpit and fired the engines. As the Chancellor’s shuttle curved in toward the landing deck, the sleek mirror-finished skiff streaked for the stars.
Obi-Wan never looked back.
A NEW JEDI ORDER
A Naboo skiff reverted to realspace and flashed toward an alien medical installation in the asteroid belt of Polis Massa.
Tantive IV reentered reality only moments behind.
And on Mustafar, below the red thunder of a volcano, a Sith Lord had already snatched from sand of black glass the charred torso and head of what once had been a man, and had already leapt for the cliffbank above with effortless strength, and had already roared to his clones to bring the medical capsule immediately!
The Sith Lord lowered the limbless man tenderly to the cool ground above, and laid his hand across the cracked and blackened mess that once had been his brow, and he set his will upon him.
Live, Lord Vader. Live, my apprentice.
Live.
Beyond the transparent crystal of the observation dome on the airless crags of Polis Massa, the galaxy wheeled in a spray of hard, cold pinpricks through the veil of infinite night.
Beneath that dome sat Yoda. He did not look at the stars.
He sat a very long time.
Even after nearly nine hundred years, the road to self-knowledge was rugged enough to leave him bruised and bleeding. He spoke softly, but not to himself.
Though no one was with him, he was not alone.
“My failure, this was. Failed the Jedi, I did.”
He spoke to the Force.
And the Force answered him. Do not blame yourself, my old friend.
As it sometimes had these past thirteen