Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [61]
And he remembered channeling that whole galaxy of rage down his arms and hurling it at Vergere.
He remembered watching her writhe in the electric arcs of his hatred: remembered the sizzle of his own hands burning as lightning burst through them: remembered how that pain had only fed his anger.
And he remembered how good it had felt.
Clean.
Pure.
No more wrestling with right and wrong, good and evil. Every knotty problem of Jedi ethics had dissolved in one brain-blasting surge; once he had surrendered complexity, he’d found that everything was simple. His hatred became the only law of the universe. Anger alone had meaning, and the only answer to anger was pain. Someone else’s pain.
Anyone else’s pain.
Even now, awake, alert, choking on horror, he could feel the sweet echo of that clean, pure rage. He could hear it calling to him. It coiled inside him: a malignant parasite chewing at the bottom of his mind.
What have I become?
Vergere lay on the floor like a broken doll; her eyes were dull, glazed, empty, and her crest showed only dirty gray.
“Vergere—” he murmured. It had been so easy to hurt her. So simple. Tears spilled onto his cheeks. “I warned you, didn’t I? I warned you. The dark side—”
“Don’t … make excuses …” Her voice was even fainter now, breathier, more ragged.
“I wouldn’t dare,” he whispered. There was no possible excuse. No one knew the dangers of the dark side better than he; those dangers had haunted the depths below his entire life—
Yet he had fallen so easily.
He had fallen so far—
The wall of rubble closed off most of the chamber: tumbled hunks of duracrete, fallen in a steep slope from uncountable floors above. The only light in the much-reduced chamber was leakover from glow globes in the ruined hallway outside. The ceiling had collapsed, he remembered that much, remembered the roar, the pounding, the dust and flying splinters of stone. No, wait, it hadn’t collapsed …
He had pulled it down.
He remembered swirling within the red tide, remembered feeling Vergere lose consciousness, remembered reaching for a new target, a new victim, reaching for Nom Anor with the lightning that had felled Vergere—
And being unable to find him.
He could see the Yuuzhan Vong executor, could hear him shouting orders to the warriors around them all, but he could not touch him with the lightning. There had been a circuit missing: the lightning would ground harmlessly into the floor or the walls or arc back to make Vergere’s unconscious body spasm in convulsions. The lightning of his rage could only span gaps between poles of the Force—neither Nom Anor nor his warriors could conduct that current. Frustration had compounded Jacen’s fury; he had thrown himself outward seeking power to do these creatures harm—
And the storm above the crater had answered.
He remembered the wild joy of release as the power of the storm had roared into him and through him and became a mad vortex within the underground chamber, lifting stone and brick and chunks of duracrete to whirl and batter and slash the Yuuzhan Vong, pounding the warriors with pieces of the planet that had once been Jacen’s home. A shrug of wind had crushed the Yuuzhan Vong into one corner of the chamber, and he remembered bubbling laughter exploding with malice into a shout of victory as he had reached up his hand and brought down the building around them.
He rocked back on his ankles, hands going to his face. Was it possible? He had buried them alive. All of them. And he didn’t care.
No: he did care. That’s what made it even worse.
He had buried them alive, and he was happy about it.
The dark side called to him: a shadow worm whispering promises of ecstasy