Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [101]
Jacen does not notice.
His attention is filled with the hollow in his chest.
His empty center rings with anger and mistrust and hungry triumph: the emotions of the World Brain, which has caught the former friend who tried to murder it.
The former friend it had trusted, and by whom it had been betrayed.
Mobile teeth like swords protrude from humps of muscle like multiple tongues, and begin to circle and clash within the tentacle-ringed mouth.
Jacen can answer only with regret and sadness.
Yes. I betrayed you. I taught you to trust, and I taught you what it means to trust a traitor.
He cannot teach it forgiveness. He has not learned that lesson yet himself: there is too much he will never forgive.
The tentacles contract, drawing him into the gaping maw, and the sword-teeth close upon his flesh.
He does not recoil in fear.
He does not resist.
He does not struggle.
Instead, he opens himself. In his most secret center, that gap in his being that once fed him pain, he offers an embrace.
Into the hollow in his center, he pours compassion. Absolute empathy. Perfect understanding.
He accepts the pain he caused the dhuryam with his betrayal; he shares with the dhuryam the pain that betrayal had caused him.
He shares with the dhuryam all his experience with the spectrum of life: the featureless whiteout of agony, the red tide of rage, the black hole of despair, the gamma-sleet of loss … and the lush verdure of growing things, the grays of stone and duracrete, the glisten of gemstones and transparisteel, the blue-white sizzle of the noonday sun and its exact echo in a lightsaber’s blade.
He shares how much he loves it all: for all these things are all one thing: pain and joy, loss and reunion, life and death. To love any is to love all, for none can exist without every other.
The Universe.
The Force.
All is one.
The Yuuzhan Vong and the species of the New Republic.
Jacen and the World Brain.
When I betrayed you, I betrayed myself. When I killed your siblings, I killed pieces of myself. You may kill me, but I will live on in you.
We are One.
And Jacen cannot tell if those words come from him to the World Brain, or from the World Brain to him, for Jacen and the World Brain are only different faces of the same thing. Call it the Universe, or the Force, or Existence: those are only words.
They are half truths. Less.
They are lies.
The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it.
The skirl of lightblade along amphistaff, a thrusting bind that sizzles disintegrating energy through the web of skin between a Yuuzhan Vong thumb and forefinger where hand meets amphistaff—
A world-whirl of airborne somersault over the heads of two warriors lunging side by side, and their boneless collapse as a single lightsaber slash opens the napes of two necks and unstrings their limbs—
The astonished blink of a warrior’s eyes as an amethyst shaft of energy spears into his open mouth, angling upward to burn open a three-centimeter-wide tunnel from his hard palate through the roof of his skull—
Of such brief flickers is built the death of Ganner Rhysode.
—burned-milk reek of Yuuzhan Vong blood sizzling into smoke on his blade—
—lines of burning ice that are the slices left in his flesh by amphistaffs—
—cold flame of amphistaff venom consuming his nerves—
These are mere flicks of melody in Ganner’s symphony of the Force. The Force does more than give him strength, more than lift him, spin him: the Force surges though his veins to tune his heart to the rhythm of the Universe.
He has become the Force, and the Force has become him.
He is not directly