• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Desperate to know what to do, Jacen called to Luke again. This time Luke turned and tossed his lightsaber in a low humming arc, trailing pale green sparks onto the galactic plane. Anger welled up in Jacen, even as fear and fury focused his strength. He wanted to destroy the enemy. He stretched out his hand for the lightsaber … and missed.

That miss was all it took.

A dark, deadly tempest gathered around the invaders, and the galactic plane tipped more swiftly toward them.

Jacen felt himself begin to shrink until he was no more than a tiny, insignificant point in the dark tempest. Helpless, disarmed by a moment of anger, doomed by a single misstep—the galaxy doomed with him.

A voice like Luke’s but deeper shook the starfields, booming, Jacen, stand firm!

The horizon tilted farther and Jacen lunged forward, determined to lend his small weight to Luke’s side—to the light—only to misstep once more. He flailed for his uncle’s hand, missing time and again.

Finally, Luke seized Jacen’s hand and held it tightly, urging him to weather the storm. The slope steepened under their feet. Stars extinguished. The enemy scrambled forward, eclipsing worlds, entire star clusters, distant galaxies.

And again the voice boomed: Stand firm!

As the Yuuzhan Vong attacked—

Jacen returned to himself—to the here and now.

Since that vision he had fought the enemy on countless worlds, wounded Warmaster Tsavong Lah, triumphed over many lesser opponents, been stripped of and returned to the Force by Vergere, and been deemed a Knight by his Jedi Master, Luke. And yet he continued to feel as if he were a student.

The Jedi of the Old Republic had been too focused on indoctrination and ranks. If you were a Padawan, then you were something less than a Knight; and if you were a Knight, you were something less than a Master … But who was to say, now that there was no Jedi Council of sagacious Masters, that even a mere Padawan couldn’t be more Forceful than someone of higher rank? Perhaps it was something a Jedi needed to hear directly from the Force?

Ranks now were more like battlefield promotions—like Jaina’s promotion to colonel. Even the Jedi Knighting ceremony … It made no more sense to him than it had to Jaina. They had to analyze their paths separately from those things.

But if his twenty years of tutelage had been his education, and the time he had spent with Vergere in the bowels of the Yuuzhan Vong seedship and on conquered Coruscant had constituted the trials of a Padawan, what then was the decision he faced now?

Was it, too, not a trial, of sorts?

What does the Force want for the Yuuzhan Vong?

Stand firm, the voice in the vision had told him.

Occasionally he would get a sense that his education was nearing completion, and that the past year had been his true trial—possibly unlike any a Jedi Knight had ever faced—but the feeling never lasted long.

“Practicing, Jacen?” a female voice asked suddenly.

He knew then who had been watching him.

Sekot’s thought projection of Vergere rose from the center of the pool.

“Always,” he said.

“To achieve what?”

“Mastery.”

Vergere nodded. “Jacen, to tap deeply into the Unifying Force, we will have to surrender our desire to control events. We will have to unbridle ourselves of words and of thinking, because thoughts, too, are born of the physical world. We must refrain from analyzing the Force, and simply allow the Force to guide us. Our relationship with the Force must be impeccable, without the need to be supported by words or reason. We must carry out the commands of the Force as if they were beyond appeal. And we must do what must be done, no matter who attempts to stand in our way.”

THIRTY-THREE

We are committed, Wedge told himself as explosions bloomed like time-lapse fire flowers over night-side Corulag.

Its surface etched with intersecting trails of light, the Core world filled the bridge viewports of Mon Mothma. Between the planet and the refitted Star Destroyer