Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [102]
The day of his birth set his feet upon this path; every triumph and tragedy, every foolish stunt and humiliation, each random useless twist of cruel fate built a pressure within him, piled up in tidal surge behind the dikes of his control. Those dikes had been built by his parents, trying to smooth the rough edges of his arrogance; they had been built by the mocking laughter of his playmates, when they jeered his every attempt to impress them; they had been built even by Luke Skywalker’s Jedi training—“A Jedi doesn’t show off, Ganner. Fighting is not a game. For the Jedi, combat is failure. It is a tragedy. When blood must be shed, a Jedi does so quickly, surgically, with solemn reverence. With grief.”
Ganner tried for so long, tried so hard to be what everyone told him he was supposed to be, tried to control his flair for the dramatic, for the elegant, the graceful, the artistic, tried to be a good son, a good friend, a humble man, a good Jedi …
But in the archway, he finds the end of trying.
There is reason no longer to resist the truth of himself. Playacting the hero’s part is not only permissible—
It is necessary.
To hold the archway it is not enough to merely wound and kill, is not enough to be calm, and surgical, and grieving.
To hold the archway, he must not only slaughter, but slaughter effortlessly, carelessly, laughingly. Joyfully.
To hold the archway, he must dance and whirl and leap and spin, calling out for more opponents. More victims.
He must make them hesitate to face him.
He must make them fear.
He had spoken the words: he had found a magical incantation to crack the dikes within him and unleash the flood.
None shall pass.
He wields the blade of a fallen hero, but now he is the hero, and it is others who fall.
He is rising.
The Force thunders through him, and he thunders through the Force. Letting slip the bonds of control, leaving aside conscious thought, answering only the surge of his passion and his joy, he finds power undreamed of.
He has become the battle.
He is not directly aware of the corpses that litter the tunnel, that his feet nimbly avoid of their own accord.
He is not directly aware of the warped sheets of durasteel that he has drawn from the wreckage of the Great Door, sheets that spin and tumble around him to become anvils for the hammer of thud bugs and shields to shelter his flanks.
He is not directly aware of the coral-embedded statues from the Atrium that he has caught in his Force-powered dance, immense figures of the species of the New Republic that seem to come to life to fight in his cause, statues that lumber and rock and fall, crushing dozens and hundreds, remaking Atrium into abattoir.
No more is he aware of the texture of the coral that lines the walls, or the quality of the light, or the number of his opponents. Has he faced a dozen? A hundred? How many have been pulled back to safety after taking disabling wounds? How many lie dead in the brimstone smoke?
He doesn’t remember, for there is no memory. There is no past. There is no future.
He is not even aware of himself. Nor of the Yuuzhan Vong. He has become the warriors he fights, slaying himself with each who falls. There is no longer any such thing as a Ganner Rhysode; there are no more Yuuzhan Vong, no more Jedi.
There are only the dancers, and the dance.
The dance is all there is: from whirl of quarks to wheel of galaxies, all is motion.
All is dance.
All is.
Nom Anor motioned for Vergere to wait while he took one last quick look around. Before him rose the coral mountain of the Well. The half-finished thorn maze towered behind, empty of shapers—they’d all probably been drawn to the Well’s front by the noise of the battle. Distant explosions popped in stuttering arrhythm, punctuated by fainter shouts.
Satisfied