(To be completed.)

Sidious is a favorite Sith of mine, as well as villain in general, and I think he deserves a respect thread.

This thread, however, will be different from most respect threads created here in that comics are not the only source material for Star Wars. To represent Sidious' capabilities, I will be posting plenty of comic scans but also quoting novels, sourcebooks, handbooks, posting links to youtube videos/showing scenes from movies & TV shows, etc. For those of you who are hazy on Star Wars knowledge, let me explain a few things first.

1. Just in case this needs to be said, EU is Expanded Universe. Basically, EU Star Wars is all information and material separate from the movies. This includes TV shows, comics, novels, video games, etc.
2. The Star Wars canon classes will be brought up in this thread at least a few times. So, to follow the terms I use and just to clarify, in Star Wars continuity, there are five canon classes.

• G-Canon- (George Lucas Canon). This is the highest canon class. It includes only the movies and material pertaining to them.
  
• T-Canon- (Television Canon). This is the second highest canon class and includes any information provided in TV shows. This includes Star Wars The Clone Wars, as an example.
  
• C-Canon- (Continuity Canon). This is the basic canon. This includes everything else that is confirmed to be in continuity, i.e., novels, comics, sourcebooks/handbooks, video games, etc.
  
• S-Canon- (Secondary Canon). This is essentially any information that has yet to be confirmed as canon. It should only be mentioned in the context that there is a chance a given piece of information could be non-canon.
  
• N-Canon- (Non Canon). Self-explanatory.

Vader imagined the power that could be his if he crushed Palpatine and established his own rule over the Empire. But first, he would need his own apprentice. By himself, he could not hope to defeat the most powerful Sith Lord the galaxy had ever known.

Beyond the vision of the Jedi Knights, somewhere within the darkness, the greatest master of evil ever to use Sith power bides his time. As his strength grows, his plans begin to shape the course of the galaxy, and his snares await the unsuspecting.

When Yoda crosses sabers with the movie's arch-villain, he doesn't launch into a pinwheeling display of acrobatics, as he did against Count Dooku in Episode II. Instead, Yoda faces the dark side's fury, channeled by the most powerful Sith Lord in history. "Rob Coleman wanted Yoda to feel the power of his enemy," says Wheless, "like a force he's never dealt with before."

The Sith have waited millennium for the birth of one who is powerful enough to return them from hiding. Darth Sidious is that one—the Sith's revenge on the Jedi order for having nearly eradicated the practitioners of the dark side of the Force.

The Sith Order, in hiding for a millennium, had awaited the birth of one who was powerful enough to return the Order to prominence. Darth Sidious was the fulfillment of that prophecy, capable of exacting the Sith's revenge on the Jedi for having nearly eradicated the practitioners of the dark side of the Force.

Darth Sidious proved to be the grim culmination of a thousand years of Sith philosophy and teachings.

When the Sith finally emerged from a thousand years of watching and waiting, they numbered—in accordance with the tradition set down by Darth Bane—only two. The most powerful of these was Darth Sidious, an ice-cold, diabolically calculating genius equipped with the strength of the dark side of the Force, as well as an enormous wealth of Sith artifacts, equipment, and knowledge.

In truth, Palpatine was well versed in the ways of the Force, having been apprentice to Darth Plagueis the Wise, a Sith Lord who was a master of arcane and unnatural knowledge. In true Sith tradition, Palpatine murdered his Master upon receiving the skill and ability to do so.

Sidious served for many decades as the apprentice of Darth Plagueis, learning diligently at the feet of his Master. Once he possessed all of Plagueis' secrets, he retired him.

"My own Master, Darth Plagueis, made the grave error of teaching me too much, at which point he became unnecessary."

Unknown to the Rebels, the Emperor had already laid the groundwork for the perpetual rule of his New Order. He had turned a Jedi into his new dark apprentice, the terrifying Darth Vader. Vader himself trained apprentices. And the Emperor created a corps of loyal, Force-skilled minions to maintain his rule. Most powerful of all, of course, was the Emperor himself.

Inside the spacious interior of the Galactic Senate chamber, Yoda challenged the Emperor. The two engaged in a spectacular duel—a contest between the most powerful practitioners of the Force’s light and dark sides.

It quickly became clear to Luke that this decrepit and seemingly defenseless old man was masterfully adept in the ways of the Dark Side of the Force. Indeed, as Vader had warned, the Emperor had become the Dark Side's most powerful expression.

Even Ulic Qel-Droma would be envious of Palpatine. He had succeeded where all others had failed in taming the Dark Side.

Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying.

A tremor took hold of the planet.
Sprung from death, it unleashed itself in a powerful wave, at once burrowing deep into the world’s core and radiating through its saccharine atmosphere to shake the stars themselves. At the quake’s epicenter stood Sidious, one elegant hand vised on the burnished sill of an expansive translucency, a vessel filled suddenly to bursting, the Force so strong within him that he feared he might disappear into it, never to return. But the moment didn’t constitute an ending so much as a true beginning, long overdue; it was less a transformation than an intensification—a gravitic shift.
A welter of voices, near and far, present and from eons past, drowned his thoughts. Raised in praise, the voices proclaimed his reign and cheered the inauguration of a new order. Yellow eyes lifted to the night sky, he saw the trembling stars flare, and in the depth of his being he felt the power of the dark side anoint him.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.
Or was he?
Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning? Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise—for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?
If he hadn’t been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him. Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.
Sidious took care, still reaching out with the Force. On closer inspection, he saw that Plagueis’s already cyanotic flesh was smoothing out, his features relaxing.
Faintly aware of the whir of air scrubbers and sounds of the outside world infiltrating the luxurious suite, he continued the vigil; then, in relief, he pulled himself up to his full height and let out his breath. This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone.
Wry amusement narrowed his eyes.
The Muun might have lived another hundred years unchanged. He might have lived forever had he succeeded fully in his quest. But in the end—though he could save others from death—he had failed to save himself.
A sense of supreme accomplishment puffed Sidious’s chest, and his thoughts unreeled.
Well, then, that wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it might be...
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action. One heartbeat late and the universe would have recomposed itself, no imposition of will sufficient to forestall the currents. One could only observe and react. Surprise was the element absent from any periodic table. A keystone element; a missing ingredient. The means by which the Force amused itself. A reminder to all sentient beings that some secrets could never be unlocked.
Confident that the will of the dark side had been done, he returned to the suite’s window wall. Two beings in a galaxy of countless trillions, but what had transpired in the suite would affect the lives of all of them. Already the galaxy had been shaped by the birth of one, and henceforth would be reshaped by the death of the other. But had the change been felt and recognized elsewhere? Were his sworn enemies aware that the Force had shifted irrevocably? Would it be enough to rouse them from self-righteousness? He hoped not. For now the work of vengeance could begin in earnest.
His eyes sought and found an ascending constellation of stars, one of power and consequence new to the sky, though soon to be overwhelmed by dawn’s first light. Low in the sky over the flatlands, visible only to those who knew where and how to look, it ushered in a bold future. To some the stars and planets might seem to be moving as ever, destined to align in configurations calculated long before their fiery births. But in fact the heavens had been perturbed, tugged by dark matter into novel alignments. In his mouth, Sidious tasted the tang of blood; in his chest, he felt the monster rising, emerging from shadowy depths and contorting his aspect into something fearsome just short of revealing itself to the world.
The dark side had made him its property, and now he made the dark side his.
Breathless, not from exertion but from the sudden inspiration of power, he let go of the sill and allowed the monster to writhe through his body like an unbroken beast of range or prairie.
Had the Force ever been so strong in anyone?
Sidious had never learned how Plagueis’s own Master had met his end. Had he died at Plagueis’s hand? Had Plagueis, too, experienced a similar exultation on becoming a sole Sith Lord? Had the beast of the end time risen then to peek at the world it was to inhabit, knowing its release was imminent?

Resurrected in a youthful clone body, Palpatine does not reveal himself immediately. Studying the dark side of the Force to become more powerful, his education results in three manifestos: The Book of Anger, The Weakness of Inferiors, and The Creation of Monsters.

Palpatine knew precisely why the Empire couldn’t last without his dread power: he had designed it that way. No one ever suspected how much he relied on the Dark Side of the Force. He shaped those of his government by using the Force against them. He used it to control his fleets and to drive his soldiers on to victory. He used it to destroy his enemies from a distance and learn of conspiracies against him. Without it, there was no way the Empire could endure, as he had designed it. The Dark Side flowed through him like some primordial ichor and was the key to all his power.
Soon he was ready to strike. Fully healed and in greater control of the Dark Side than ever, he finally acted to end the Mutiny.

The feeling had begun as a faint stirring in the Force, like the tiniest ripple of something moving slowly through deep water, far away but drawing steadily closer. It intensified, until it felt like the Force itself was roiling, heaving like the sea in the grip of an enormous storm.
“I sense a presence,” Maul warned Savage. “A presence I haven’t felt since...”
And then Maul knew.
“Master,” he said, leaning forward on the throne.
The commandos guarding the royal chamber reached for their throats. As Maul watched, an unseen forced lifted them high in the air, then slammed them to the floor, where they lay motionless in their red-and-black armor. The doors opened, then closed behind a figure in dark robes. A deep cowl hid most of the face, leaving only a pale chin and a downturned mouth visible. To most eyes the man in those simple robes of rough cloth was unremarkable, just another being making his way in the universe. But to those who could feel the Force he was anything but ordinary. To them, he was a dark sun blazing with power that was simultaneously hypnotizing and terrifying to behold.
Darth Sidious, the reigning Dark Lord of the Sith, had come to Mandalore.
Savage stared at the new arrival in astonishment, transfixed by the sight.

Now the scene below subtly altered, though to the physical eye there was no change. Powered by the dark side, Dooku's perception took the measure of those below him with exhilarating precision.
Kenobi was luminous, a transparent being, a window onto a sunlit meadow of the Force.
Skywalker was a storm cloud, flickering with dangerous lightning, building the rotation that threatens a tornado.
And then there was Palpatine, of course: he was beyond power. He showed nothing of what might be within. Though seen with the eyes of the dark side itself, Palpatine was an event horizon. Beneath his entirely ordinary surface was absolute, perfect nothingness. Darkness beyond darkness.
A black hole of the Force.

The key to Luke's turning is the moment when he and Leia realize the Emperor is no longer defined by his physical form, but has become a chaotic nexus of dark energies that swell and burst open the fabric of space, tearing apart everything in the vicinity, human and machine.

Any unusual localization, or vergence, of dark side Force energy. These strange locales emanated the dark side of the Force, and were considered focal points of power for dark side users. As such, they were often guarded by Jedi Knights to prevent their discovery and exploitation. Known dark side nexuses included the twisted tree-cave on Dagobah, Halagad Ventor's hermitage on Trinta, and a "stain" of dark side energy that hovered over Endor following the defeat of the Emperor.

Plagueis made a soothing gesture and explained in great detail what had taken place. Concluding, he said, "He threatened, too, to place you out of reach."
All the while Plagueis spoke, Palpatine was storming through circles on the narrow path, shaking his head in anger and balling his fists. "He can't do this!" he snarled. He hasn't the right! I won't allow it!" 
Palpatine's fury buffeted Plagueis. Blossoms growing along the sides of the pathway folded in on themselves, and their pollinators began to buzz in agitation. FourDee reacted, as well, wobbling on its feet, as if in the grip of a powerful electromagnet. Had this human truly been born of flesh-and-blood parents? Plagueis asked himself. When, in fact, he seemed sprung from nature itself. Was the Force so strong in him that it had concealed itself?

Outside, the wind picked up another notch, shrieking and groaning among the eleven chimneys as if to announce the arrival of a hideous guest. Dooku's comm console chimed. He glanced over, expecting the daily report from General Grievous, or perhaps a message from Asajj Ventress. He reached over to open the channel, ecognized the digital signature of the incoming transmission, jabbed the channel open, and snapped to his feet. "You called, my Master?" 
The hologrammic projector on his desk sprang to life, and the wavering form of Darth Sidious regarded him. As always the picture was oozy and unclear, as if light itself were uneasy in the presence of the Lord of the Sith. Dark robes, purple shadows—a patch of skin, pale and mottled under his hooded cloak like a fungus growing under a rotten log. From under heavy lids the Master's eyes, snake-cold and serpent-wise, regarded him. 
"What would you have of me, Master?" 
"From you? Everything, of course." Darth Sidious sounded amused. "There was a time when I wasn't sure if you would be able to overcome that...independent streak of yours. After all, you were born to one of the wealthiest families in the galaxy, with gifts and abilities far, far greater than any amount of wealth could bestow. Your understanding is deep; your will, adamant. Is it any wonder you should be proud? Why, how could it be otherwise?" 
Dooku said, "I have always served you well and faithfully, my Master." 
"You have. But you must admit, your spirit was not made for fidelity. After all, a man who will not bow to the Jedi Council, or even Master Yoda...I wondered if perhaps loyalty was too mean, too confining a thing to ask from so great a being as yourself." 
Dooku tried to smile. "The war progresses well. Our plans are on schedule. I have dealt out your deaths, your schemes, your betrayals. I have paid for your war with my time, my riches, my friends, and my honor." 
"Holding nothing back?" Sidious asked lightly. 
"Nothing. I swear it." 
"Excellent," Darth Sidious said. "Yoda came to the Chancellor's office this morning. He is going on a very special mission. Top secret." He laughed, a harsh sound like the bark of a crow. The wind rose again, shrieking around the mansion like a creature in torment. "When he arrives, Dooku...see that you treat him as he deserves." 
Darth Sidious laughed. Dooku wanted to laugh along, but couldn't quite manage it before his Master cut the connection and disappeared. 
 
Dooku paced his office. With the end of Sidious' call, the storm had slackened, and the shrieking wind outside now only sobbed quietly under the gables of Château Malreaux. 

"But I was also overwhelmed by the knowledge that Vader was not only Luke's father, but mine, too. My memories raced to my first encounter with Vader. It was during my first trip to Coruscant, when I'd accompanied my father—that is, Bail Organa—to a reception for the Emperor. In hindsight, I'm surprised I was allowed to go, as it exposed me to both the Emperor and Vader. Granted, I'd never demonstrated any Force powers at that point, so perhaps Bail Organa thought it was relatively safe. I never knew anyone who guarded his secrets as well as Bail Organa.
The reception was at the Imperial Palace. As things turned out, it seems neither Sith Lord sensed anything about my true identity, for if they had, surely they would have done something. That's not to say their powers were weak. I'd meant to confront Palpatine and tell him what I thought of his xenophobic Empire, but as he approached me in the reception line, I was struck numb with fear. I remember thinking it was as if he were pitch-black inside. Vader loomed behind him like a malevolent shadow, and there was no doubt in my mind that if I had found the courage to speak my mind to the Emperor, Vader would have killed me on the spot."

Palpatine has spent decades studying the most arcane and esoteric Jedi disciplines. It is believed that he has mastered nearly all the known powers, previously unknown powers, and devises new ones at his pleasure.

"I have learned that Anger and Will, joined together, are the greatest Power.
I have learned to meditate upon Anger and Will with clarity and precision, and I have learned to open the hidden reservoirs of Dark Side Power.
Anger concentrated by Will in the vital center of the body creates a portal through which vast energies are released—the energies of the dark side of the Force.
Standing watch with the mind, in my meditation of Anger, I have slain my enemies from great distances, through the dark side Power that permeates the galaxy. I have created lightning, and unleashed its destructive fire.
Using this knowledge, I can unleash the dark side energies that are all around us, even to shatter the fabric of space itself. In this way, I have created storms.
Through a simple act of Will, I can generate Force Storms, energy storms that are vastly destructive and virtually unstoppable. Although triggering such storms requires merely thought and inclination, I admit I am not yet able to completely control the phenomenon. Among my goals is to perfect this control."

"The churning energy mass of a Force Storm can consume everything it touches, for at its eye is pure hate. Just as a black hole devours a star, this storm can swallow armies and fold space."

This is perhaps the single most destructive Force power known. This power allows the Jedi to twist the space-time continuum to create vast storms of force. The power also allows limited control of these storms. Capable of creating annihilating vortices, the storms can swallow whole fleets of spaceships or tear the surfaces off worlds.

"The Force Storm is truly an awe-inspiring demonstration of pure natural energy. After using the Force to open a hyperspace wormhole, tremendous shockwaves will ripple through the fabric of space. Due to the Force Storm's potential for abuse, the Council has recently classified it as a dark side power."

"The Reborn Emperor used this at Da Soocha. It has the power to kill worlds."
—Luke

Vast energy storms that connect wildly disparate spots across the galaxy, hyperspace wormholes are unpredictable and devastating. It was to the Rebel Alliance's detriment that Emperor Palpatine was able to not only control these storms, but to create them.

The shore of the western sea had been a glittering playground, a gay and glorious world that never slept, before the clone Emperor's Force storm had ravaged Coruscant. It had yet to fully recover.

Luke: He's created another energy storm.
Leia: It’s descending on Pinnacle Base, consuming all the ships in its path. (Sound of comlink activating.) Mon Mothma, can you hear me?
Mon Mothma: Princess Leia. There’s an energy storm. It’s suddenly taken over the planet! We have twelve ships lost already. All our hands are being lost. We’re being wiped out!
Han: Leia, Leia! (Sound of comlink deactivating.)
Leia: You’re going to slaughter all those people.
Palpatine: Yes. Did I not warn you? I’ve played along with your Jedi dueling games long enough. Now, you will experience my full potency. I live as energy. I am the dark side!

"One of the Emperor's Force Storms destroyed the Alliance base on the moon of Da Soocha and the entire fleet above it. Every day I'm reminded how lucky we are that Palpatine is lost to Chaos forever."
—Luke

He summoned up a huge Force storm, far more powerful than the one that had swept Coruscant. But this time, when Skywalker and his sister turned their combined resistance against him, Palpatine could no longer control what he had unleashed.

The moment the Emperor "died" at the Battle of Endor, Droga fell into an inexplicable insanity, butchering his crew and causing the Emperor's Shadowto plunge into Kaal's oceans. Even as he perished, Palpatine used the dark side knowledge the Sith Lords had granted him years earlier to rend space itself and transmigrate his essence across lightyears to Droga's body.

Mon Mothma: The energy storm that took Commander Skywalker, this is not an isolated event. Similar Storms have been detected in several systems.

Chancellor Palpatine spent many years studying ancient Holocrons to learn the secrets of the SIth. The Holocrons enabled him to channel Sith spirits, who taught him how to harness dark-side energy and release lethal bolts of lightning.

Though Palpatine seemed to be winning his war of conquest, his final clone body had begun to fail him, aging at a rapid rate and eaten from the inside by the sabotage of Carnor Jax. He tried to clone other bodies so that he could resurrect himself again, but Jax’s manipulations had tainted even the source material. Palpatine’s scientists and physicians could offer no solutions.

His body mortally wounded by Han Solo, Palpatine tracked down the Solos and desperately sought to transfer his fading essence to the infant Anakin Solo. He was blocked and absorbed by the dying Jedi, Brand, who promised that he and all the other Jedi spirits would ensure the dark sider never returned—a fate Palpatine had feared above all others. The Emperor's reign was over for good.

"One of the Emperor's Force Storms destroyed the Alliance base on the moon of Da Soocha and the entire fleet above it. Every day I'm reminded how lucky we are that Palpatine is lost to Chaos forever."
—Luke

Shortly after the Death Star was expected to crush the Rebel base on Yavin 4, Bevel Lemelisk had been summoned to meet personally with Emperor Palpatine deep within the Imperial palace. Lemelisk had been flanked by red-armored Imperial bodyguards as they whisked him off on a high-speed shuttle across the skylanes of the planetwide city. The millions of illuminated windows winked like corusca gems. Each point of light seemed to be another torch celebrating his triumph. 
Lemelisk rubbed his jowls, pleased that he had remembered to shave this time. The red Imperial guards were a silent lot, standing at attention like statues. Lemelisk hummed and grabbed his jutting knees as the shuttle approached the enormous pyramid of the Imperial palace. The guards rushed him down the hall so quickly that their flowing scarlet cloaks billowed around them. When the group reached the door to the Emperor's private chambers, the guards stood at attention, their force pikes raised, their smooth plasteel helmets obscuring any expression. 
Lemelisk jaunted happily into the vaulted room, pleased to see the black-cowled Emperor waiting for him. Palpatine hunched in his chair, reptilian yellow eyes glowing through the oily shadows cast by his hood. The Emperor appeared to be falling into ill health: His skin was blistered and folded in upon itself like a pasty drapery over his bones, as if decay had set in well before the advent of death. 
But Lemelisk couldn't be troubled by unpleasant thoughts right now. He stood on the polished stone floor and made a cursory bow of obeisance. "My Emperor," he said. "I trust you have received word by now that our Death Star has destroyed the secret Rebel base." 
"I have received word," Palpatine said and gestured with one long-clawed finger. Lemelisk glanced up at a clattering sound and saw a flexible wire cage released from the vaulted ceiling above. He ducked, but the cage fell squarely down over him, seating itself to the floor as if Palpatine were directing it with invisible powers. The cage was made of fine mesh, the grid barely large enough to stick his smallest finger through. 
"Excuse me, Emperor?" Lemelisk said. "Is there something further you wish to discuss with me? Another project perhaps? Anything else I can do for you?" Lemelisk swallowed again. 
"Yes, my servant," Palpatine said. "You may die for me." 
"Uh—“ Lemelisk could think of nothing else to say. "I was hoping for something else, actually," he said stupidly. 
Palpatine glowered at him. "I just received word that your Death Star was destroyed at Yavin. A puny band of Rebels with outdated fighters found a weakness in your design—a thermal exhaust port that allowed a single X-wing pilot to strike a fatal blow. One pilot obliterated an entire battle station!" 
Lemelisk pursed his lips. "Thermal exhaust port, eh? I knew I must have forgotten something. I'll have to fix that in the next design." 
"Yes, you will," Palpatine said with an icy voice. "But first, you will die for me." 
Lemelisk blinked his watery blue eyes and reached out to touch the fine, tough wires of his cage. He looked around, and nervousness raged like a whirlwind around him. Though he had shaved, his neck itched fiercely. The Emperor sat completely still, yet he must have manipulated a set of controls because with a sharp snick at Lemelisk's feet tiny openings appeared in the polished stone floor, orifices that led down to a black unknown. He heard clicking sounds, the scrabbling of sharp, hard feet. 
"I am most displeased with your performance, Lemelisk," the Emperor said. 
Bevel Lemelisk shuffled aside as something small but iridescent poked out of the opening: a beetle of some kind. The eight-legged, hard-shelled insect shone a deep blue as it clambered into the light and paused to probe the air with waving antennae. From other openings five identical beetles emerged. They fluttered their wing cases, then took flight, buzzing around the enclosed space. Lemelisk swatted at one, but the blue beetle detected the motion and swooped toward him, sinking mandibles with serrated razor edges into the thick flesh of his palm. 
"Oww!" Lemelisk flailed his hand until the beetle lost its hold. He stomped on it, cracking its carapace. But the scent of blood attracted the other beetles to him. He watched in horrified fascination as a dozen more of the insects emerged from the floor holes, fluttering their wing cases and buzzing toward him. 
"Those are piranha beetles," the Emperor said, lounging back in his swiveling black chair. "They are native to Yavin 4, and I considered them too precious for extinction when your Death Star was expected to destroy the moon. So I rescued them." 
The beetles swarmed over Lemelisk now. He slapped at them, shouting, paying little attention to Palpatine's words. "Stop this!" he yelled. 
"Not yet," the Emperor said. 
The beetles sliced through his clothing to the skin on Lemelisk's arms, his thighs, his chest, his cheeks. Blood flowed around him, drenching his shredded clothes. He could not keep up with the new injuries. Hundreds more beetles swarmed out, battering themselves against the cage mesh. 
"These fine insects are not in danger of becoming extinct after all, though," Palpatine said, "since your Death Star did not work! You have failed me, Bevel Lemelisk," he said, slowing his words. His wrinkled, rubbery lips bent upward in a fiendish grin. 
"And now, I'm going to watch these beetles devour you, bit by bit. They are very hungry, you see, and don't get satisfied easily. But if they gorge themselves and begin to slow down, don't worry—I have plenty more." The Emperor let out a glacial laugh, but Lemelisk could no longer hear. 
The beetles buzzed in his ears, tearing at his flesh, his hair, his clothes. He struck at himself, throwing his body against the cage mesh. In the process, some of the beetles were stunned, and their own companions fell upon them, cracking through the iridescent shells and chewing to the soft organs within. 
Lemelisk screamed and begged—to no avail. The agony went beyond his comprehension, beyond his imagination. His vision turned black after the piranha beetles devoured his eyes—but the pain continued for a long time afterward.... 
Later, Lemelisk had awakened, blinking his restored eyes, and was completely disoriented. He found himself in the same vaulted chamber, wrapped in a clean, white uniform. His body felt young and strong, without the paunch and the flab from spending too much time working on projects in his mind and too little effort maintaining his health. 
Lemelisk bent his arms and looked at his hands, blinking in astonishment. Hearing a small buzz and clatter, he glanced over to find the wire-mesh cage still filled with buzzing, clacking piranha beetles that scampered up and down the walls, snapping their mandibles. Spattered patterns of fresh blood made arcs along the walls of the cage. Inside, he saw a carcass that had been stripped down to gnawed bones and shreds of clothing—the clothing he himself had worn only moments ago. 
"You'll grow accustomed to your clone in a moment," the Emperor said, rubbing his knobby fingers over a strange ancient-looking artifact. "I trust that all of your memories have been transferred properly? It is an uncertain skill at best, and the Jedi I stole the technique from was reluctant to give me thorough instruction. But it seems to work." 
Lemelisk nodded weakly, wanting to faint but knowing he didn't dare. 
"Now don't fail me again, Lemelisk," the Emperor said. "I'd hate to have to think of an even worse execution for next time."

Simply hearing the word execution brought back to his mind the full horrors of the Emperor's executions, the excruciating deaths Palpatine had inflicted upon Lemelisk each time he made an error... 
The deaths remained in Lemelisk's mind, ever-present shadowy nightmares—seven executions in all. Once, Palpatine had launched him out an airlock; the pain had been excruciating, though the death was mercifully swift as the sudden drop of pressure and the freezing cold destroyed his internal organs.
He also remembered being slowly lowered into a vat of molten copper, watching his body burn away inch by inch. (Why molten copper? Lemelisk had wondered. Finally one day, more than a month later, he asked the Emperor. Palpatine’s answer had proved surprising in its utter mundanity. “It’s what the smelter used that day.”)
Lemelisk had also been trapped in a vault filled with thickening acid mist so that his lungs dissolved and he coughed blood, and the acid continued to eat him from the inside out. The other deaths had been as imaginative and just as painful.

The Death Star worked as planned, but fell victim to a design flaw at Yavin. As a result, the Emperor punished the engineer with the torture of flesh-eating piranha-beetles. Lemelisk died in agony, then awoke in the body of a clone. Motivated by fear, he set to work designing the second Death Stare, and also built the Tarkin super-laser. Lemelisk died seven times in total, dark side magic shuttling his consciousness through seven clones.

The moment the Emperor "died" at the Battle of Endor, Droga fell into an inexplicable insanity, butchering his crew and causing the Emperor's Shadow to plunge into Kaal's oceans. Even as he perished, Palpatine used the dark side knowledge the Sith Lords had granted him years earlier to rend space itself and transmigrate his essence across lightyears to Droga's body. The infusion of Palpatine's overwhelming dark side energies reduced Droga to incoherent madness. Eventually, Palpatine's Grand Vizier Pestage was able to find Droga and tear the Emperor's essence from Droga's body.

Palpatine's body was destroyed. Separated from his clones, Palpatine was forced to survive in the maddening, bodiless existence of the void. Through sheer will he retained his identity, crossing the gulf of space to again take up residence in his clone body.

Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.

While midi-chlorians appeared to resist manipulation of a sort that might imperil the balance of the Force, they remained passive, even compliant, in the case of a weak-willed being manipulated by one who was strong in the Force.

“The Bith—Venamis...”
“Dispatched by Tenebrous to test me—to eliminate me had I failed. But Venamis has been a gift; essential in helping me unlock some of the deepest secrets of the Force. Every creature you have glimpsed or sensed here has been a similar blessing, as you will see when I lead you into the mysteries.”
“What did the droid mean when it said the Magister’s pregnancies?”
Beneath the breath mask, Plagueis might have quirked a smile. “It means that the pregnancies were not achieved by normal means of conception, but rather through the Force.”
Surprise and disbelief mingled in Sidious’s blue eyes. “The Force?”
“Yes,” Plagueis said pensively. “But I failed to exercise due caution. As we attempt to wrest the powers of life and death from the Force, as we seek to tip the balance, the Force resists our efforts. Action and reaction, Sidious. Something akin to the laws of thermodynamics. I have been audacious, and the Force has tested me the way Tenebrous sought to. Midi-chlorians are not easily persuaded to execute the dictates of one newly initiated in the mysteries. The Force needs to be won over, especially in work that involves the dark side. It must be reassured that a Sith is capable of accepting authority. Otherwise it will thwart one’s intentions. It will engineer misfortune. It will strike back.”

Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.

And so it had been left largely to Sidious to bring the same fervor to the manipulation of events in the mundane world that Plagueis brought to the manipulation of midi-chlorians. Instead of challenging each other, they had both dedicated themselves to executing the Grand Plan. Political mastery and mastery of the Force. Someday soon, the Sith would wield both, with Sidious the face of the former and Plagueis behind the scenes, advising him about the latter. Like Plagueis, Sidious had moved judiciously, for unintended repercussions in the real world could be as damaging to the Sith imperative as blowback from the Force. The fact that the Force had not struck back argued that their partnership was something unique and in accordance with the will of the Force. Plagueis’s self-imposed isolation had taken a toll on some of the plans he and Sidious had engineered for the Trade Federation and other groups. But Plagueis had made what amounted to a full recovery from his injuries, and the dark side was no longer simply on the ascendant but risen and climbing toward the zenith.

Plagueis began to pace the cool floor. “No Sith have ever been in the position in which we now find ourselves, Darth Sidious: in step with the reemergence of the dark side, fortified by the signs and omens, certain that revenge and victory are near at hand. If the Jedi would abide by their philosophy of acting in accordance with the Force, of doing what is right, they would roll over for the dark. But they resist. Yoda and the rest of the Council members will double their meditation sessions in an effort to peer into the future, only to discover it clouded and unknowable. Only to discover that complacency has opened the door to catastrophe.
“If indeed they have been acting in accordance with the Force, how could we be succeeding in tipping the balance? How could the dark side be gaining ground? In fact, the Jedi have fallen away from their self assigned duty, their noble path. Could they have prevented it? Perhaps by having remained in control of the Republic, by electing and reelecting Jedi Supreme Chancellors. Or perhaps by absenting themselves completely from the affairs of the Republic, and attending to their arcane rituals in the belief that right thinking by them would keep the Republic strong and on course, the galaxy tipped into the light, instead of having allowed themselves to become marshals and enforcers.”
He cast a questioning look at Sidious. “Do you see the grand error of their ways? They execute the Republic’s business as if it were the business of the Force! But has a political body ever succeeded in being the arbiter of what is right and just? How easy it is for them to bask in self-assurance in their castle on Coruscant. But in so doing, they have rendered themselves ill equipped for the world we have spent a millennium bringing into being.”
He cleared his throat.
“We’re going to back them into a contradiction, Darth Sidious. We’re going to force them to confront the moral quandary of their position, and reveal their flaws by requiring them to oversee the conflicts that plague their vaunted Republic.
“Only Dooku and a handful of others have grasped the truth. All those years ago when I first met him on Serenno, I thought: What a blow it would be to the Order if he could be enticed to leave and embrace the dark side. What a panic it might incite. For if one could leave, then ten or twenty or thirty could follow, and the hollowness at the center of the Order would be plain for all to see.”
The Muun’s eyes narrowed. “One can’t be content to abide by the rules of the Jedi Order or the Force. Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”

Time is short.
Still in safekeeping on Aborah were texts and holocrons that recounted the deeds and abilities of Sith Masters who, so it was said and written, had been able to summon wind or rain or fracture the skies with conjured lightning. In their own words or those of their disciples, a few Dark Lords claimed to have had the ability to fly, become invisible, or transport themselves through space and time. But Plagueis had never succeeded in duplicating any of those phenomena.
From the start Tenebrous had told him that he lacked the talent for Sith sorcery, even though the inability hadn’t owed to a deficiency of midi-chlorians. It’s an innate gift, the Bith would say when pressed, and one that he had lacked, as well. Sorcery paled in comparison with Bith science, regardless. But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.
The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.
On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.
Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.
But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.
Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.
But he had yet to inform Sidious of this.
It was more important that Sidious remain as focused on manipulating events in the profane world as Plagueis was intent on dominating the realm of the Force, of which the mundane was only a gross and distorted reflection.
To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?
He recalled a stellar eclipse he had witnessed on a long-forgotten world, whose single moon was of perfect size and distance to blot out the light of the system’s primary. The result hadn’t been total darkness but illumination of a different sort, singular and diffuse, that had confused the birds and had permitted the stars to be seen in what would have been broad daylight. Even totally blocked, the primary had shone from behind the satellite’s disk, and when the moon moved on there had been a moment of light almost too intense to bear.
Gazing into Sojourn’s darkening sky, he wondered what calamity the Force was planning in retreat to visit upon him or Sidious or both of them for willfully tipping the balance. Was retribution merely waiting in the wings as it had been on Coruscant twenty years earlier? It was a dangerous time; more dangerous than his earliest years as an apprentice when the dark side might have consumed him at any moment.
For now, at least, his full convalescence was near complete. Sidious was continuing to become more powerful as a Sith and as a politician, his most intricate schemes meeting with little or no resistance. And the Jedi Order was foundering...
Time would tell, and time was short.

Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.

Depowered lampdisks were rings of ghostly gray floating in the gloom. The shimmering jewelscape of Coruscant haloed the knife-edged shadow of the chair.
This was the office of the Chancellor.
Within the chair's shadow sat another shadow: deeper, darker, formless and impenetrable, an abyssal umbra so profound that it drained light from the room around it.
And from the city. And the planet.
And the galaxy.
The shadow waited. It had told the boy it would. It was looking forward to keeping its word.
For a change.

The Coruscant nightfall was spreading through the galaxy. The darkness in the Force was no hindrance to the shadow in the Chancellor's office; it was the darkness. Wherever darkness dwelled, the shadow could send perception.

More than a century before, when Tenebrous had been but a Sith apprentice himself, the magnificent computational power of his Bith brain had led him far beyond the simplistic Force studies imposed on him by his Master. He had always been far too intelligent to be seduced by the traditional Sith metaphysical twaddle of dark destiny and the witless fantasy of endless war against the equally witless Jedi Order. Soon he had confirmed to his own satisfaction that the dark side of the Force, far from being some malevolent mystic sentience bent on spreading suffering throughout the Galaxy, was in truth merely an energy source, and a tool with which he could impose his will upon reality. It was a sort of natural amplifier he could use to multiply the effectiveness of his many useful abilities.
None of which was more useful than his matchless intellect.
Like many Sith before him, he had turned his powers toward knowledge of the future. But unlike any Sith before him, he had the enormous brain of his people, which combined sheer brute processing power with a level of analytic precision simply beyond the capacity of any other species. The future was always in motion, and while other Sith always struggled to foresee the faintest, least specific hints of what was to come, Tenebrous had no need to see the future.
He could calculate it.
While still merely an apprentice, his analysis had shown him the inevitable end of the Banite Sith and its preposterous Rule of Two. His calculations plainly indicated the coming of a shadow so vast it would darken the galaxy entirely—so vast it would mark the end of both Jedi and Sith as the universe had known them heretofore. The rise of the shadow would be the end of history itself.
Tenebrous had not the slightest doubt that the entire galaxy would measure time according to its arrival. Events would be marked by how long they had preceded the shadow, or how long after it they followed.
Though the exact nature of the great shadow remained occult, the remorseless logic of his extrapolation detailed the coming destruction of the Banite system, and the rise of what would become known as the "One Sith." One Sith! The conclusion was so obvious as to require no confirmation: one single Sith Lord would arise of such power that he'd have no need of any apprentice nor fear the Jedi. He would take and hold the galaxy by his own hand alone. Without an apprentice—or a Jedi Order—to destroy him, the One Sith would rule forever!
A heady prospect, with only a single drawback: Tenebrous was not to be that Sith Lord. His own death was clearly foretold, entirely inevitable, and it would precede the shadow by decades.

Now Tenebrous touched upon his apprentice's powers of foresight, which were also vastly more developed than Tenebrous had believed. For a moment, Tenebrous found his perception cast far forward in time—to Plagueis' own death at the hands of his apprentice, who was himself only visible as a smear of darkness...
A shadow!

Only Palpatine has been able to spread his darkness completely and totally over an entire galaxy.

Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.

The Muun’s eyes narrowed. “One can’t be content to abide by the rules of the Jedi Order or the Force. Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”

Time is short.
Still in safekeeping on Aborah were texts and holocrons that recounted the deeds and abilities of Sith Masters who, so it was said and written, had been able to summon wind or rain or fracture the skies with conjured lightning. In their own words or those of their disciples, a few Dark Lords claimed to have had the ability to fly, become invisible, or transport themselves through space and time. But Plagueis had never succeeded in duplicating any of those phenomena.
From the start Tenebrous had told him that he lacked the talent for Sith sorcery, even though the inability hadn’t owed to a deficiency of midi-chlorians. It’s an innate gift, the Bith would say when pressed, and one that he had lacked, as well. Sorcery paled in comparison with Bith science, regardless. But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.
The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.
On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.
Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.
But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.
Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.
But he had yet to inform Sidious of this.
It was more important that Sidious remain as focused on manipulating events in the profane world as Plagueis was intent on dominating the realm of the Force, of which the mundane was only a gross and distorted reflection.
To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?
He recalled a stellar eclipse he had witnessed on a long-forgotten world, whose single moon was of perfect size and distance to blot out the light of the system’s primary. The result hadn’t been total darkness but illumination of a different sort, singular and diffuse, that had confused the birds and had permitted the stars to be seen in what would have been broad daylight. Even totally blocked, the primary had shone from behind the satellite’s disk, and when the moon moved on there had been a moment of light almost too intense to bear.
Gazing into Sojourn’s darkening sky, he wondered what calamity the Force was planning in retreat to visit upon him or Sidious or both of them for willfully tipping the balance. Was retribution merely waiting in the wings as it had been on Coruscant twenty years earlier? It was a dangerous time; more dangerous than his earliest years as an apprentice when the dark side might have consumed him at any moment.
For now, at least, his full convalescence was near complete. Sidious was continuing to become more powerful as a Sith and as a politician, his most intricate schemes meeting with little or no resistance. And the Jedi Order was foundering...
Time would tell, and time was short.

Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.

Dooku smiled with his eyes, but not in mirth. “On the contrary, as you say. Since I’m interested in learning more about the possibility of an alliance.”
Palpatine adopted a hooded look. “You’re resolved to leave the Order?”
“Even more than when we last spoke.”
“Because of the Council’s decision to intervene at Naboo?”
“I can forgive them that. The blockade has to be broken. But something else has occurred.” Dooku chose his next words carefully. “Qui-Gon returned from Tatooine with a former slave boy. According to the boy’s mother, the boy had no father.”
“A clone?” Palpatine asked uncertainly.
“Not a clone,” Dooku said. “Perhaps conceived by the Force. As Qui-Gon believes.”
Palpatine’s head snapped back. “You don’t sit on the Council. How do you know this?”
“I have my ways.”
“Does this have something to do with the prophecy you spoke of?”
“Everything. Qui-Gon believes that the boy—Anakin is his name—stands at the center of a vergence in the Force, and believes further that his finding him was the will of the Force. Blood tests were apparently performed, and the boy’s concentration of midi-chlorians is unprecedented.”
“Do you believe that he is the prophesied one?”
“The Chosen One,” Dooku amended. “No. But Qui-Gon accepts it as fact, and the Council is willing to have him tested.”
“What is known about this Anakin?”
“Very little, except for the fact that he was born into slavery nine years ago and was, until recently, along with his mother, the property of Gardulla the Hutt, then a Toydarian junk dealer.” Dooku smirked. “Also that he won the Boonta Eve Classic Podrace.”
Palpatine had stopped listening.
Nine years old... Conceived by the Force... Is it possible...
His thoughts rewound at frantic speed: to the landing platform on which he and Valorum had welcomed Amidala and her group. Actually not Amidala, but one of her look-alikes. But the sandy-haired boy, this Anakin, swathed in filthy clothing, had been there, along with a Gungan and the two Jedi. Anakin had spent the night in a tiny room in his apartment suite.
And I sensed nothing about him.
“Qui-Gon is rash,” Dooku was saying. “Despite his fixation with the living Force, he demonstrates his own contradictions by being a true believer in the prophecy—a foretelling more in line with the unifying Force.”
“Nine years old,” Palpatine said when he could. “Surely too old to be trained.”
“If the Council shows any sense.”
“And what will become of the boy then?”
Dooku’s shoulders heaved. “Though no longer a slave, he will probably be sent to rejoin his mother on Tatooine.”

Plagueis came to a halt at the entry to Palpatine’s apartment. Eventually one of Queen Amidala’s near-identical handmaidens came to the door, a vision in a dark cowled robe. Her eyes fixed on the breath mask. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “Senator Palpatine is not here.”
“I know,” Plagueis said. “I’m here to speak with a guest of the Senator. A young human boy.”
Her eyes remained glued on the mask. “I’m not permitted—”
Damask motioned swiftly with his left hand, compelling her to answer him. “You have my permission to speak.”
“I have your permission,” she said in a distracted voice.
“Now where is the boy?”
“Anakin, you mean.”
“Anakin, yes,” he said in a rush. “He’s the one. Fetch him—now!”
“You just missed him, sir,” the handmaiden said.
Plagueis peered past her into Palpatine’s suite. “Missed him?” He straightened in anger. “Where is he?”
“Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn came to collect him, sir. I suspect that you can find him at the Jedi Temple.”
Plagueis fell back a step, his thoughts reeling.
There was still a chance that the Council would decide that Anakin was too old to be trained as a Jedi. That way, assuming he was returned to Tatooine...
But if not... If Qui-Gon managed to sway the Council Masters, and they reneged on their own dictates...
Plagueis ran a hand over his forehead. Are we undone? he thought. Have you undone us?

It was late in the evening when Plagueis made his way onto a public observatory that provided a vantage on the proprietary arabesque of a landing platform on which Queen Amidala’s Royal Starship basked in the ambient light.
With the cowl of his hood raised, he moved to one of the stationary macrobinocular posts and pressed his eyes to the cushioned eye grips. Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the boy had arrived at the platform in a Jedi ship; Amidala, her handmaidens and guards, and a loose-limbed Gungan in an open-topped hemispherical air taxi. Just then the latter group was ascending the starship’s boarding ramp, but Qui-Gon and the round-faced desert urchin had stopped short of the ship to speak about something.
What? Plagueis asked himself. What topic has summoned such an earnest look to Qui-Gon’s face, and such confused urgency in the boy?
Lifting his face from the macrobinoculars, he stretched out with the Force and fell victim to an assault of perplexing images: ferocious battles in deep space; the clashing of lightsabers; partitions of radiant light; a black-helmeted cyborg rising from a table... By the time his gaze had returned to the platform, Qui-Gon and the boy had disappeared.
Trying desperately to make some sense of the images granted him by the Force, he stood motionless, watching the starship lift from the platform and climb into the night.
He fought to repress the truth.
The boy would change the course of history.

Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs.
He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die?
How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled?

“My experiments proved midi-chlorians could be controlled. If this is true, then could they not also be induced to create life at the molecular level? Midi-chlorians in the cells of the mother could, in theory, be persuaded o craft a zygote.
For consistency in my test subjects, I obtained hundreds of identical humanoids, each with consistent midi-chlorian level. After much experimentation, I succeeded in prodding the midi-chlorians to replicate themselves through asexual fission. Though in most cases, this process increased the numbers uncontrollably and killed the host.
But I believe that by using this method I can trick midi-chlorians into creating a zygote. Then it would simply be a matter of growing the subject under normal biological conditions. Such a subject could, of course, take years to hit the development milestone of a typical humanoid, but he could have a midi-chlorian count as high as 20,000 per cell. That is more than any Jedi or Sith in recorded history. Although entirely theoretical, such an achievement is intriguing.
If a new life form could be created where none existed before, the living could sustain their bodies indefinitely. Science has led to these conclusions, yet these events must be guarded with utmost care. For now, it remains purely theoretical.”

“I can’t help feeling a chill as I read the account by Plagueis, knowing that my father was known for his high midi-chlorian count, which was supposedly even higher than Yoda’s.”
—Luke

“The beliefs of the Jedi are expressed in ritual and storytelling. Plain language somehow eludes those who have grown up tightly wrapped in tradition.
The Jedi await the coming of a savior, a prophesied Chosen One who will destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force. The Jedi tell of Mortis, a place of impossible geography inside the angles of a gargantuan monolith. The three all-powerful beings of Mortis can assume strange shapes and exemplify the dark side, the light side, and the principle of balance.
Compelling? It is debatable, but at the very least it is an adequate way to illustrate an allegorical point. Day coexists with night, for example and construction is always followed by ruin. Yet many of the Jedi treat the legend of Mortis as literal truth. They believe that the Chosen One will prevent these gods and demons from tearing the universe asunder—that their champion will be a vessel of pure Force energy.
So we come back to midi-chlorians. These organisms allow beings to live and provide a connection to the Force. If bred in sufficient quantities, midi-chlorians can even conceive a new life form and bestow upon it powers greater than any Jedi has ever dreamed, generating a vergence in the Force.
If I induce midi-chlorians to create such a being, my handiwork would fit all the descriptions of their Chosen One. But he would be an agent of my will. How fitting that the misguided reliance on superstition could lead to a Sith creation that is hailed by the Jedi as a savior.”

Anakin’s mother, Shmi, confirmed in her own words what Qui-Gon had already suspected—the boy was immeasurably strong in the Force. Neither knew of Darth Plagueis’s suspected involvement in inducing midi-chlorians to create life, though Shmi informed Qui-Gon that Anakin had no natural father.

Palpatine had carefully cultivated Anakin's hopes for preventing this dire premonition, and had revealed everything to Anakin: Palpatine's secret identity as Darth Sidious. His murder of his own Master, Darth Plagueis. The role that the Sith had played in creating Anakin by manipulating the midi-chlorians.

It was believed that the teachings of the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis, applied by his apprentice Darth Sidious, were instrumental in Anakin's birth, resulting in the conception of a boy with an unnaturally high midi-chlorian count.

Plagueis gulped for air and lifted an arm toward him.
"There's the rub, you see," Sidious said in a philosophical tone. "All the ones you experimented on, killed, brought back to life... They were little more than toys. Now, though, you get to experience it from their side, and look what you discover: in a body tat is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can't accomplish what you're asking of them."
Hatred stained Sidious's eyes.
"I could save you, of course. Return you from the brink, as you did Venamis. I could retask your body to repair the damage already done to your lungs, your hearts, your aged brain. But I'll do no such thing. The idea here is not to drag you back at the last moment, but to bring you to death's door and shove you through to the other side.

An 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.

Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs. He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die? 
How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled? 
None would be found. 
Sidious would have had to discover a way to compel midi-chlorians to do his bidding, and bring into being one as powerful as Anakin. As it was, Sidious and a host of medical droids had merely restored Anakin to life, which—while no small feat—was a far cry from returning someone from death.

Brand: I realize our steam-powered technology looks barbaric to your eyes, Solo, but it's quite servicable and very solid.
Han: Yeah, like that walking droid suit you're wearing?
Brand: This "droid suit" is a sophisticated survival system. It can keep me alive on the hottest, or the coldest, planet in the galaxy. I could live for a year in the vacuum of space...without eating.

Crackling from his fingertips, a web of blue lightning ground itself on the Muun’s breathing device. Plagueis’s eyes snapped open, the Force gathering in him like a storm, but he stopped short of defending himself. This being who had survived assassinations and killed countless opponents merely gazed at Sidious, until it struck him that Plagueis was challenging him! Confident that he couldn’t be killed, and in denial that he was slowly suffocating, he might have been simply experimenting with himself, actually courting death to put it in its place. Momentarily taken aback, Sidious stood absolutely still. Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to believe that he had achieved immortality?
The question lingered for only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.

“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”
“There is no mercy,” Sidious said.
Bolts of energy ripped out from the Sith Lord’s fingers, tendrils of brilliant blue and purple that danced across Maul’s tattooed skin and ripped through his muscles, his organs. His mechanical legs convulsed, shorting out.
“You belong to me,” Sidious said. “Your existence is now perfectly meaningless.”
He stretched out his fingers and the energy tore through Maul again. Sidious watched the lightning build in intensity, his eyes unblinking, his teeth gritted in a triumphant, terrible smile.

Lightning blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine's hands, and Mace didn't have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him. Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him. And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source.

Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace's blade back toward the Korun Master's face.

Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me—"

This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade.

"I need him alive!" Skywalker shouted. "I need him to save Padme!"
Mace thought blankly, Why? And moved his lightsaber toward the fallen Chancellor. Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord's hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine's hate struck him full-on.
He had been so intent on Palpatine's shatterpoint that he'd never thought to look for Anakin's. Dark lightning blasted away his universe. He fell forever.

Mace had determined that Palpatine, a Sith master, was too dangerous to live. Anakin couldn't risk losing the Sith secret of immortality forever. He severed Mace's sword arm with his own lightsaber. Palpatine, unleashing a burst of Force lightning, sent the great Jedi Master out the window to his death.

In the Senate Arena, lightning forked from the hands of a Sith, and bent away from the gesture of a Jedi to shock Redrobes into unconsciousness. Then there were only the two of them. Their clash transcended the personal; when new lightning blazed, it was not Palpatine burning Yoda with his hate, it was the Lord of all Sith scorching the Master of all Jedi into a smoldering huddle of clothing and green flesh.

The end came with astonishing suddenness. The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength.

Garrbo V'Droz almost dropped his glow rod when it shined off a face he recognized in one of the chambers. There was a grim smile on its face. The green-haired occupant of the chamber was someone with whom Garrbo V'Droz was intimately familiar: his brother, the construction foreman.
Whirling on his patron, he whimpered, "What is the meaning of this?" Emperor Palpatine smiled and said simply, "It means that you and I are the only ones left who know the way through the labyrinth to my...home for treasures too valuable even for my museum above. And soon, it will just be me," the Emperor grinned horribly, as Garrbo V'Droz cowered.
"Don't worry, my friend," hissed the dark figure, gesturing grandly at a vacant spot in the chamber, "you shall have a place of honor here. You've earned it."
Palpatine raised his hands, preparing to strike, and then, allowing himself a final moment to savor the fear in his victim, added, "And if I ever need your services again, I will not hesitate to clone you."
V'Droz cringed as the Emperor threw vicious bolts of lightning from his hands and ensured that the galaxy's finest architect was forever a part of his last, greatest work.

Palpatine raised his spidery arms toward Luke: blinding white bolts of energy coruscated from his fingers, shot across the room like sorcerous lightning, and tore through the boy’s insides, looking for ground. The young Jedi was all at once confounded and in agony—he’d never heard of such a power, such a corruption of the Force, let alone experienced it. But if it was Force-generated, it could be Force-repelled. Luke raised his arms to deflect the bolts. Initially, he was successful—the lightning rebounded from his touch, harmlessly into the walls. Soon, though, the shocks came with such speed and power, they coursed over and into him, and he could only shrink before them, convulsed with pain, his knees buckling, his powers at ebb.

Cosinga took a step in Palpatine's direction, only to be hurled back against the bulkhead separating the communications room from the main cabin. A female voice from behind the closed hatch asked in distress, "What was that?"
Nursing an injured shoulder, Cosinga looked suddenly like a trapped animal, his eyes wide with surprise and fear. He made a move to strike the handplate and open the hatch, but Palpatine thwarted his effort without raising a finger. Twisting violently around, Cosinga fell over one of the acceleration chairs, bloodying his face as it struck the armrest. A pounding began against the hatch.
"Guards!" Cosinga shouted, but the word had barely left his lips when the bulkhead against which he was slouched buckled inward, heaving him face-first to the floor and driving the breath from him. Palpatine stood rooted in place, his hands trembling in front of him and his face stricken. Something stirred behind his incandescent eyes. He heard the pounding on the hatch and whirled.
"Don't come in! Stay away from me!"
"What have you done?" It was his mother's voice, panicked. "What have you done?"
Cosinga pushed himself to his knees and began a terrified retreat, leaving smears of blood on the deck. But Palpatine was advancing on him now.
"If the Force birthed you, then I curse it!" Cosinga rasped. "I curse it!"
"As I do," Palpatine growled.
The hatch began to slide to, and he heard the voice of the guard who had escorted him from the Jafan III. "Stop!"
"Cosinga!" his mother screamed.
Palpatine pressed the palms of his hands to his head, then in eerie calm streaked to the hatch, pulled the surprised guard through the threshold, and tossed him clear across the cabin. 
Raising his face to the ceiling, he shouted, "We're all in this now!"

Once more Sidious allowed his memories to unfold, and he relived the crimethe event, as he had at last come to think of it. His father's limp and blooded body. The smashed skulls of the bodyguards. His hands clenched around his mother's slender throat—but not really, only in his mind, strangling her with his thoughts. The lifeless forms of his siblings, slumped here and there...

At the same time, Sidious used the Force to shift the apron of one of the waiters just enough to reveal the grip of a hold-out blaster the man was wearing at his waist. Lifting his glass for another swallow, he did the same to another of the waiters, whose apron concealed an identical weapon. Both had been manufactured by BlasTech, but not for common consumption. The E-series 1-9—the aptly named Swiftkick—was available only to elite members of Santhe Security, headquartered on Lianna.

Sidious masked his smile: the Shimmersilk had a back room.
He stood clumsily, leaning deliberately toward one of the security men, gauging his body temperature, heart rate, and respiration. “I’m slightly intoxicated. I may have to count on you for support.”
The man made a sound of exasperation but allowed Sidious to place one arm on his shoulder.
How effortless it would be, he thought, as the dark began to rise in him, searing and hungry, yearning to assume control of his body and unleash itself, to break the necks of both of them, to tear their beating hearts from their chests, to hurl and plaster them against the walls, to bring the entire sour-smelling place down on their heads...
But he didn’t. He needed to meet his abductor. He needed to learn the names of all those responsible. He needed to prove to his Master that he was adroit and capable—a true Sith Lord.

He sprinted up the stairs to the next floor, where he heard a cacophony of human voices muffled by the thick door to a nearby room. Blowing the door inward with a Force push, he took a wide stance in the shattered doorway and positioned the blade of the thrumming lightsaber vertically in front of him. Through the weapon’s glow he saw a dozen or more Santhe guards in uniform seated around a table littered with food and drink containers gape at him in disbelief before reaching for weapons fastened to their hips or scurrying for others buried beneath the rubble of their celebratory meal.
Sidious waded into the room, returning volleys of blaster bolts from those first to fire, then attacked, raising his left hand to levitate two guards into midair before running his blade through each of them.

Now Sidious gave full vent to his ire. Crashing through the doors, he landed in the center of a table covered with plates of grains and grassy plans and surrounded by a herd of grazing Gran, whose boisterous laughs froze in their throats. From the head of the table, Pax Teem gawked at him as if he might be a creature escaped from his most horrifying nightmare. And yet he wouldn't be the first to taste Plagueis's blade but the last; once he had been forced to watch the rest of his party butchered, from hooves to eyestalks; the painted ceiling brought down by Sidious's Force pull; the flames of a gentle gas blaze in the room's fireplace incited to a blistering inferno that Sidious tugged behind him as he soared from the table to the floor and closed on his final victim.

At the chamber's center, an enormous orb of transparent greenish blue liquid, nearly two meters in diameter, was suspended in the air above a circular dining table. Dozens of small, multicolored aquatic creatures swam within the orb, some so close to the surface that their swishing tails sent ripples around the orb's circumference.

Sidious smiled. "Excellent." He stepped past the boy and stopped beside the floating orb. Maul noticed that all the aquatic creatures within the orb swam to the far side, putting distance between themselves and Sidious. Sidious glanced at the creatures as if he found them only mildly interesting. "Maul, I have something important to tell you. I want you to listen carefully."
Maul listened.
Speaking slowly, Sidious said, "You...are...remarkable." Looking away from the watery orb, he faced Maul and added, "Very remarkable."
Maul did not know why he might be considered remarkable, or how Sidious expected him to respond. He decided to remain silent.
"Our galaxy is home to trillions of life-forms. Some are large, others small. But as diverse as they are, the truth is that most life-forms are just like these fish. Sidious gestured at the fish with a dismissive wave, and the fish appeared to shiver within the orb. "They seldom stray from where they were born. They spend their time worrying about their next meal, about how they might avoid pain, and how long they might live. They live in fear of one another. And then, they die. It does not matter if they are an insect, a fish, a man, or...a snake."

Sidious beamed at the boy. "Good." He glanced at the watery orb. "Ah! Look there, are those two fish."
Maul followed Sidious's gaze and saw a small fish with red and black stripes hovering beside a larger dark gray fish that had moved away from the other creatures to the bottom of the orb. Maul replied, "Yes, Master Sidious." He noticed that the smaller fish had yellow eyes, the same color as his own. The small fish stared back at Maul.
"How amusing," Sidious said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say those two were pretending to be us. If they were, I wonder where that would leave the rest."
Maul looked at the fish in the orb's upper area and saw them begin to jerk and spasm. Several fish puffed up twice their original size, shuddered violently, and suddenly deflated. Others rolled erratically through the water, their eyes bulging as their gills pumped furiously. But after a few seconds, all the fish except for the two at the bottom stopped swimming entirely and began drifting off in different directions. Some floated toward the top of the orb, but most sank down beside the two surviving fish, who continued to hover next to each other. As the fish sank, Sidious recited a strange verse:

"Far above, far above,
We don't know where we'll fall.
Far above, far above,
What once was great is rendered small."

Maul wondered what the words meant. He knew Sidious had somehow selected the two fish and maneuvered them to the bottom of the orb and caused all the others to die. He didn't know how Sidious had done this, but he suspected it was some kind of magic.

As Sidious stepped away from the floating orb, he waved his fingers at a tapestry that hung against one wall. The tapestry slid silently up toward the ceiling and revealed an open doorway built into the wall.

Leaving the cruiser behind, they proceeded to a nearby outcropping of bedrock, which was bordered by a broad field covered by small stones. The tops of a few large boulders loomed over the stones. Sidious and Maul stopped at the edge of the bedrock. Surveying the stones, Sidious said, "What do you see?"
"I see rocks, Master Sidious."
Sidious frowned. Then he pointed to the center of the field of stones and said, "Go stand over there."
Maul always felt especially vulnerable when he could not see his Master, but he did as he was told, stepping across the stones until he reached the designated spot. He stopped.
"Turn around."
Maul turned to face his Master. Sidious stood with his legs apart, his hands clasped behind his back. Sidious said, "I suspect that every creature that ever lived on Tosste did not think much about rocks either. I had hoped that you would be smarter. I'll ask you again. What do you see, spread out on the ground all around you?"
Maul's yellow eyes darted back and forth. He saw only rocks. Some were pebbles, others large stones, and there were the tops of a few boulders. As ever, he did not want to disappoint his Master, but he did not know any other answer than the one he had already given. Returning his gaze to his Master's face, he said hesitantly, "I see rocks, Master Sidious. Thousands of rocks."
Something hard slammed into Maul's left shoulder blade. He ducked as he spun to confront his attacker, and as he moved, he saw the object that had struck him. It was a stone, which fell on the rocks near his feet. Maul looked across the bluish-gray landscape. Not a trace of movement. No one had been standing behind him.
Another stone smashed into Maul's right bicep. He grunted as he spun again, this time to look back at his Master. Sidious had not moved. His hands remained behind his back. But from the trace of a wicked smile on the Man's face, Maul suddenly knew the stones weren't flying by themselves.
Lifting his gaze to the sky, Sidious said, "The creatures that once roamed this now dead ocean, they lacked imagination. Ultimately, that is why they all perished. They failed to see...potential."
Potential?! Maul suddenly sensed a small stone whizzing toward his head. He raised his hand to deflect the stone as he ducked, but the stones sailed past his fingers and clipped one of his horns. "Weapons!" Maul shouted. "I see weapons!"
Sidious sighed. "The correct response is..."
"I see weapons, Master Sidious!"
"Not fast enough," Sidious said as a stone smashed into Maul's lower back.
Maul crouched and grabbed the nearest rock. He no sooner lifted it from the ground than he felt it burning into his hand. He yelped as he reflexively opened his fingers and let the rock fall. How could the rock have generated such intense heat? He suspected it was his Master's trickery.
"Oh, come now," Sidious said impatiently. "Almost any humanoid with fingers can do that."
Two stones smacked into the backs of Maul's legs, knocking him off his feet. He gasped as his small body fell on the hard rocks. Looking up, he saw two more stones rise from the ground. He twisted his body fast, trying to shield his head.
"Maybe I was wrong about you being special," Sidious said as he watched the two stones strike Maul. "Maybe you are just as useless and stupid as—"
Several stones hurtled up from the ground around Maul's body. Battered and bruised, Maul glared at Sidious. The stones sailed through the air, all heading straight for his Master.
Sidious whipped one hand out from behind his back and extended it before him. The rocks stopped in mid-flight, then fell to the ground. "Is that the best you can do?" Sidious sneered. "I should crush you now."
Maul snarled as he jumped to his feet and swiped at the air with both hands. Dozens of rocks launched up from around Maul and raced toward Sidious. Sidious moved his other hand out from behind his back and flexed his fingers. The approaching rocks rebounded as if they had struck an invisible shield. Some of the rebounding rocks fell near Maul's feet. Surprised, he stumbled back. He wasn't sure what had just happened.
"Well done, young one," Sidious said as the dust settled around him. "You passed the test." He began walking slowly toward Maul. "The droid told me that you moved a staff without touching it, but I had to see what you could do with my own eyes. Did you feel it? Did you feel the power of your anger?"
"Yes, Master Sidious," Maul responded automatically. Until that moment, he had not known that he had in fact been responsible for making the staff jump up from ring in the training room. He looked at the rocks on the ground. He hadn't given any thought to launching them through the air either. He had just...done it.
Sidious came to a stop beside Maul. Looking down at the boy, he smiled and said, "I want to show you something. Stay close to my side."
Sidious extended his arms. Maul heard a rumbling sound and then saw stones sliding and bouncing away from two of the larger boulders that were about fifteen meters away, partially embedded in the ancient seabed. He realized the two boulders were rising slowly, as if an invisible giant were pulling them up from both boulders as they tore free from the planet's surface. Maul watched with wonder as they ascended several meters into the air.
Sidious flicked his fingers. The two boulders launched even higher. He flexed his wrists, and the boulders spun around together like a pair of enormous dancers. He moved his hands apart, and the distance the spinning boulders increased. Then Sidious clapped his hands together. Still spinning, the boulders swung into each other and collided with a thunderous crash. Shattered chunks and bits of rock exploded in all directions.
Watching the rocky debris rain down from the yellow sky, Maul said, "How, Master Sidious? How?"
"With the Force," Sidious said solemnly.

As Sidious and Maul drank, TD-D9 hobbled back into the chamber carrying a tray that held plates covered by domed lids. The droid set the covered plates before the seated figures, then said, "Are you finished with me, Master Sidious?"
"Most definitely," Sidious said. Keeping his eyes on Maul, Sidious waved at the droid. TD-D9 lifted off the floor, flew across the chamber, and smashed into the wall. The impact was so great that Maul noticed small shock waves ripple across the suspended orb. The droid's photoreceptors went dead as its ruined body collapsed in a loud crash.
Maul didn't flinch. He thought of all the time he'd shared with the droid, how it had reared him and punished him, and how he'd never expected his Master to destroy it. He wouldn't have the chance to say goodbye, or to destroy the droid himself. All these thoughts raced through his mind, but he didn't flinch. Smoke began rising from the droid's shattered head.

Then another memory comes to my mind. I am a small boy, walking with my Master on a planet that is all ice and snow. The wind cuts like a laser as we walk by a deep blue lake, but I am warmly dressed and don't feel the cold. I have just completed a series of exercises, rigorous ones that conclude with my having to run up the icy sheer slope of a mountain and come down at top speed. The effort called for superior balance and control. I feel fear, but I perform well, and I am hoping my Master will praise me. Instead, my Master raises a hand, and suddenly the dark side picks up my small body and tosses me into the middle of the lake.

Maul had not wanted to disappoint his Master. He wanted to apologize and ask for forgiveness, but he knew if he did, his punishment would be even worse. And then he thought of how long he had suffered on Orsis because he had not been allowed to use his powers, and he felt his shame transform into rage. He looked up at Sidious and was about to speak but his Master made a pinching gesture. Maul felt his throat constrict. Sidious walked a few steps away from Maul before he released his remote grip on Maul's throat.

Maul wanted to ask for forgiveness but his steadfast anger wouldn’t permit it. In any case, what was the point, since he had received beatings for being right as often as he had for being wrong. Welling up from some unreachable source, rage lifted his head and set his tongue flapping. But barely a word passed his lips when he felt his throat pinched closed by a negligent gesture of Sidious’ right hand.
“Don’t interrupt,” Sidious warned. He paced away from Maul, eventually allowing him to breathe, then turned to him.

Moving through a maintenance level to avoid more soldiers, Maul, Talzin, and the Nightsisters finally arrived in the hangar that housed Talzin's starship. Maul had expected to find the warlord's soldiers stationed in the hangar to prevent Talzin from reaching her ship, but he had not expected to find over a dozen Weequays lying dead on the hangar's deck. Although none of the Weequay bodies bore obvious wounds, Maul knew how they had died, and also the identity of their killer. Leaving Talzin standing with her Nightsisters, he moved across the hangar to face a dark alcove. He stopped, dropped to one knee, and bowed his head.
"Master."
Sidious stepped out from the alcove. He wore his dark robe, and his face was concealed by the shadows beneath his deep hood.

Talzin hadn't expected Maul to heed her command, and wondered as she ran why he was running with them. Did he actually intend to accompany them to Dathomir? She had begun to doubt that she had the power to subdue him a second time, or to persuade him to come. So what had changed? Had combat forged a primal connection of some sort? Or was he now prepared to accept his fate, despite what he had said about having perceived the presence of his Master?
Racing into the hangar, they saw that the deck was littered with fallen Weequays. None of the discolored bodies showed evidence of obvious wounds, but to a soldier they were dead. Clearly the Vollick had deployed them to keep Talzin and the rest from reaching the starship. Could they have turned on one another? She scarcely had time to consider it when she saw Maul come to an abrupt stop and drop to one knee with his head bowed.
“Master,” Talzin heard him say.
A human male stepped into view. Of average height, he wore a dark robe whose hood was raised over his head, concealing his face. Talzin could feel his power, not only in the Force, but in the dark side, as it was known to some. Even the Nightsisters could sense the man’s strength, and fell back a step in uncertainty, their energy bows aimed at the deck.

It was in the early days when Lord Sidious was secretly working to consolidate the strength of the Trade Federation. My mission was to go to the planet Chryya and ensure that their thriving spice business would be turned over to the Trade Federation to manage. I would accomplish this through threats and intimidation. I would not reveal my Sith powers unless I left my opponent dead.
At first, I was successful. A few incidents convinced the frightened merchants to sign all the agreements. But then one merchant organized a protest. Before I could move against him, a groundswell grew among the people. Every citizen of Chryya destroyed their spice supplies rather than give in to the Trade Federation. They wrecked their economy for principle. I had not forseen this. In my experience, creatures are guided by their own comforts. I could not kill the entire population, so I had to leave and report my failure to my Master.
He did not take it well. He raised a hand, and the dark side grabbed me by the throat and lifted me high. My breath was squeezed out of me slowly. Too slowly. I had time to feel every stretched-out moment of panic as I struggled to force even the tiniest trickle of air into my lungs. When I was close to passing out, I was dropped to the floor in a heap. My Master walked away. He did not address me or call for me for some time. The removal of his favor was worse than the punishment.

Sidious shifted like a liquid shadow, maneuvering around his apprentice. Maul was suddenly up against the wall, gasping for breath as his vision blurred. His strength was evaporating. He turned fast to see Sidious. Sidious lashed out with his lightsaber. Maul parried the blow, but then his lightsaber suddenly flew from his hand. As Maul heard his lightsaber deactivete and clatter across the cave's floor, Sidious raised his own lightsaber and advanced.

I am gasping, trying to suck in enough air to keep going. My vision blurs as Lord Sidious raises his lightsaber. I parry the blow, but my lightsaber suddenly flies out of my hand, torn by the power of my Master directing the dark side. I realize then that he has just begun to tap into his own reserves. Mine are played out.

Darth Sidious raised his right hand, palm outward.
Before Maul could prevent it—even if he had chosen to do so—the long cylinder that was his double-bladed lightsaber flew from its hitch on his belt and went directly to his Master. But instead of grasping it, Sidious stopped the lightsaber in midflight, centimeters from his raised hand, and directed it to spin and rotate before him, leaving Maul to gaze at him in unabashed awe. Sidious bade the lightsaber to ignite. From each end blazed a meter-long blade of rubicund fire, hypnotic in the intensity of its burning. The free-floating weapon pivoted left, then right, eliciting a thrumming sound that was as menacing as it was rousing.
"An exquisite weapon," Sidious said. "Tell me, my young apprentice, what were you thinking when you fashioned it? Why this and not a single blade, as the Jedi prefer?"
"The single blade has limitations, Master, in offense and defense. It made sense to me to be able to strike with both ends."
Sidious made a sound of approval. "You must bear that in mind when you go to Dorvalla, Darth Maul. But remember this What is done in secret has great power. A sword master knows that when he flourishes his blade, he reveals his intent. Be watchful. It is too soon to reveal ourselves."
"I understand, Master."
Sidious deactivated the lightsaber and sent it back to Maul, who received it as one might a cherished possession.

Darth Sidious, Master of the Sith, finished relaying his instructions to the Neimoidians and made a slight, almost negligent gesture. Across the room a relay clicked and the holographic transmission ended. The flickering blue-white images of the Neimoidians and the section of their ship's bridge captured by the split-beam transceivers vanished.

Sidious made another slight gesture. The Force replied in response, and the transmission grid beneath his feet glowed again.

Darth Sidious did not wait for a response; none was necessary. With a gesture he closed the relay, breaking the connection.

Suddenly, my lightsaber is gone. It flies from my hand across the room. It lands in the hand of my Master. I never see him enter. Not if he doesn't want me to. The smile of triumph fades from my face.

Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. "Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis." He held his thumb and forefinger close together. "Try to keep yourself alive while I choke the life out of you."
Plagueis gulped for air and lifted an arm toward him.
“There’s the rub, you see,” Sidious said in a philosophical tone. “All the ones you experimented on, killed, and brought back to life... They were little more than toys. Now, though, you get to experience it from their side, and look what you discover: in a body that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can’t accomplish what you’re asking of them.”

The Muun’s eyes had begun to bulge; his pale flesh, to turn cyanotic.

Plagueis slid to the floor and rolled facedown. Death rattled his lungs and he died.

Still struggling for breath, Plagueis managed to stand, but only to collapse back onto the couch, knocking a statue from its perch. Sidious moved in, his hands upraised to deliver another bolt, his expression arctic enough to chill the room. A Force storm gathered over the couch, spreading out in concentric rings, to wash over Sidious and hurl objects to all corners. In the center of it, Plagueis’s form became anamorphic, then resumed shape as the storm began to wane.
Sidious's eyes bored into the Muun's.
"How often you said that the order of Bane had ended with the death of your Master. An apprentice no longer needs to be stronger, you told me, merely more clever. The era of keeping score, suspicion, and betrayal was over. Strength is not in the flesh but in the Force."
He laughed. "You lost the game on the very first day you chose to train me to rule by your side—or better still, under your thumb. Teacher, yes, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But Master—never."

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.
Or was he?
Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning? Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise—for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?
If he hadn’t been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him. Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.
Sidious took care, still reaching out with the Force. On closer inspection, he saw that Plagueis’s already cyanotic flesh was smoothing out, his features relaxing.
Faintly aware of the whir of air scrubbers and sounds of the outside world infiltrating the luxurious suite, he continued the vigil; then, in relief, he pulled himself up to his full height and let out his breath. This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone.
Wry amusement narrowed his eyes.

The unmarked shuttle landed on the royal palace’s platform, reserved for Mandalore’s rulers and their most important advisers. The ramp lowered and a hooded figure in dark robes descended. The commandos rushing to intercept him reached for their throats, gagging, and the cloaked figure swept past them without a sideways glance, gaze fixed straight ahead.

The feeling had begun as a faint stirring in the Force, like the tiniest ripple of something moving slowly through deep water, far away but drawing steadily closer. It intensified, until it felt like the Force itself was roiling, heaving like the sea in the grip of an enormous storm.
“I sense a presence,” Maul warned Savage. “A presence I haven’t felt since...”
And then Maul knew.
“Master,” he said, leaning forward on the throne.
The commandos guarding the royal chamber reached for their throats. As Maul watched, an unseen forced lifted them high in the air, then slammed them to the floor, where they lay motionless in their red-and-black armor. The doors opened, then closed behind a figure in dark robes. A deep cowl hid most of the face, leaving only a pale chin and a downturned mouth visible. To most eyes the man in those simple robes of rough cloth was unremarkable, just another being making his way in the universe. But to those who could feel the Force he was anything but ordinary. To them, he was a dark sun blazing with power that was simultaneously hypnotizing and terrifying to behold.
Darth Sidious, the reigning Dark Lord of the Sith, had come to Mandalore.
Savage stared at the new arrival in astonishment, transfixed by the sight. Maul felt himself leap from the throne, mechanical legs clacking down the steps and toward his old Master. The motion was almost automatic, involuntary. Maul’s earliest memories were of that hooded figure—his tests, his teachings, and also his torments. He had been Maul’s father, his protector, his torturer. He had been everything.
Maul halted before Sidious and kneeled, bowing his head.
“Master,” he said simply.
Sidious stopped. For a moment all was silent.
“I am most impressed to see you have survived your injuries,” he said, the voice as rough and cracked as Maul remembered.
“I used your training, Master,” Maul said. “And I have built all of this in hopes of returning to your side.”
Sidious lifted his head slightly, and Maul saw his yellow eyes beneath the hood. They were as cold as space.
“How unfortunate that you are attempting to deceive me,” Sidious said.
“Master?” Maul asked.
“You have become a rival,” Sidious declared.
He raised his arms and both Maul and Savage flew through the air, smashing into the elegantly patterned walls of the royal chamber and crashing to the floor.

Maul tried to slash past Sidious’s guard, only to find his Master had given ground, causing Maul to extend his arms too far and leave himself slightly unbalanced. It was the smallest stumble, easily corrected, but Sidious saw it—and pounced before Maul could draw himself back. Snarling, he reached out with the Force and slammed Maul against the wall, leaving him lying stunned in a heap.
Savage knew the dangers of facing the Sith Lord alone, and pressed his attack before Sidious draw his hand back from Force-shoving Maul into the wall. Teeth bared, Savage windmilled his double saber, hoping to disarm Sidious or force him to give ground. If he did, that would allow the yellow-and-black Zabrak to follow his initial attack with a lightning-quick thrust that would penetrate Sidious’s defenses and wound or even kill him.
Maul tried to shake off his attack, rocketing up from the floor. Sidious neatly side-stepped Savage’s assault, drawing back as the massive Zabrak raised his double-bladed saber high to try to pummel him with it. Savage didn’t think Sidious was fast enough to take advantage of the brief opening in his defenses, but he was wrong.
Sidious rammed one of his blades through Savage’s black armor, the glowing crimson tip of the saber appearing between his shoulder blades. Savage gasped, his saber tumbling from his grasp. Sidious yanked his weapon back and Savage seemed to hang suspended for a moment, as if he were being levitated by with the Force. Then he crashed to the ground.
Sidious stepped back as Maul rushed to his fallen brother’s side.

Maul’s saber spun out of his hand, bouncing away across the floor. Then Sidious seized his former apprentice with the Force, hurling him against the wall. Maul’s vision swam. He tried to get up, but realized he was already in the air, held aloft by the Force. Sidious slammed him into the floor. Then Maul was off the ground again, legs kicking for purchase in empty air. He could taste blood in his mouth. His head hit the wall with a sickening crunch.
A rhyme crept into his head, a nagging sing-song bit of poetry.

Far above, far above,
We don’t know where we’ll fall.
Far above, far above.
What once was great is rendered small.

Maul could no longer remember where he had heard it, or what it meant. He was broken, helpless, useless.
“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”

As a Jedi shuttle settled to the landing deck outside, the shadow sent its mind into the far deeper night within one of the several pieces of sculpture that graced the office: an abstract twist of solid neuranium, so heavy that the office floor had been specially reinforced to bear its weight, so dense that more sensitive species might, from very close range, actually perceive the tiny warping of the fabric of space-time that was its gravitation.
Neuranium of more than roughly a millimeter thick is impervious to sensors; the standard security scans undergone by all equipment and furniture to enter the Senate Office Building had shown nothing at all. If anyone had thought to use an advanced gravimetric detector, however, they might have discovered that one smallish section of the sculpture massed slightly less than it should have, given that the manifest that had accompanied it, when it was brought from Naboo among the then-ambassador's personal effects, clearly stated that it was a single piece of solid-forged neuranium. 
The manifest was a lie. The sculpture was not entirely solid, and not all of it was neuranium. Within a long, slim, rod-shaped cavity around which the sculpture had been forged rested a device that had lain, waiting, in absolute darkness—darkness beyond darkness—for decades. Waiting for night to fall on the Republic. 
The shadow felt Jedi Masters stride the vast echoic emptiness of the vaulted halls outside. It could practically hear the cadence of their boot heels on the Alderaanian marble. The darkness within the sculpture whispered of the shape and the feel and every intimate resonance of the device it cradled. With a twist of its will, the shadow triggered the device. The neuranium got warm. A small round spot, smaller than the circle a human child might make of thumb and forefinger, turned the color of old blood. 
Then fresh blood. 
Then open flame. 
Finally a spear of scarlet energy lanced free, painting the office with the color of stars seen through the smoke of burning planets. The spear of energy lengthened, drawing with it out from the darkness the device, then the scarlet blade shrank away and the device slid itself within the softer darkness of a sleeve.

Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."
He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.

One of Emperor Palpatine's many dark side warriors was Sedriss, a young mercenary who displayed an aptitude for using the Force, if not any particular desire to join the ranks of the Imperial military. Various Imperial organizations tried to recruit Sedriss but found him insolent, insubordinate, and violently opposed to authority. He was awaiting execution for the deaths of a handful of Imperial officers when he was spirited away by members of the Inquisitorium, and dragged before the Emperor himself, who asked Sedriss simply, "Would you like to kill me?" 
The Emperor looked inside Sedriss's heart and in his own way cut to the core of Sedriss's problem. Sedriss could not respect anyone whom he knew he could easily kill—which included most of his superiors in the military. The Emperor made a bargain with Sedriss: They would duel, and if Sedriss won, he could take the Emperor's life. But if Sedriss lost, he would serve the Emperor with unquestioning loyalty, or suffer the most terrible, lingering, ignominious death he could imagine. Confident of his chances against the frail old man, Sedriss agreed—and was promptly crushed to the ground by the Emperor's power. Sedriss admitted that the Emperor had defeated him and promised to honor their agreement. The Emperor didn't desist. Sedriss felt his ribs collapsing, and swore that he would serve the Emperor. Still the Emperor did not stop, until Sedriss felt his heartbeat slowly coming to a stop and begged to serve the Emperor. When he was finally able to stand, he instead knelt—convinced that this was a superior who was truly superior to him.

The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
This was what the rage could do for him. This was what pathetic Jedi had never understood, as they rejected their anger, letting cowardice block their path to the dark side. This was why they had been eliminated, and why the Emperor reigned supreme, his power unquestioned. His iron rule unassailable.
Until now.
"My Lord, the Death Star has been...destroyed."
The Emperor played with his memory of the moment, polishing it in his mind like a precious gem. Remembering: Darth Vader's voice as he delivered the news. Vader's anger, so forceful the Emperor could feel it from halfway across the galaxy. And with the anger, terror, for Vader knew how terribly he had disappointed his Master. Vader knew it was not the first time.
The Emperor curled his fingers into a gnarled fist. The Death Star, his most powerful weapon, perhaps the greatest achievement of his reign, the key to destroying the tedious Rebel Alliance once and for all...destroyed. Even now, the detestable Rebels were no doubt celebrating their victory. It was a meaningless victory, of course, and only a fool would think differently. But then, only a fool would join the ridiculous battle against the Empire.
Only a fool challenges the inevitable.
The Rebel Alliance was nothing but a nuisance, a millfly to be swatted away. But even a meaningless victory was unacceptable. The Rebels would be punished. The Emperor smiled—the Rebels would be crushed. And soon. His impatience swelled. Fury boiled his blood at the thought of waiting any longer. The rage called for release, and the Emperor knew that with a thought he could destroy his opulent office. He could crack the building's foundation, rain rubble on the heads of those unlucky beings trapped within. He could, with the full power of his anger, unleash a fireball of death.
But he chose to wait. He chose control.
It was another thing the Jedi had never understood. A lesson that even Darth Vader, such a quick study in the school of darkness, had yet to learn. The rage was only a beginning.
Control, that was the key. Patience. The ability to channel the flood, bend it to your will. Anger was the fuel that powered the dark side of the Force. But success depended on mastery of the anger. Vader spent his anger without thought; the Emperor hoarded his, as a Hutt hoarded his treasure.
The destruction of the Death Star had been a setback, but every defeat masked an opportunity. And this was an opportunity the Emperor fully intended to seize.
In fact, he already had a plan.

Lemelisk glanced up at a clattering sound and saw a flexible wire cage released from the vaulted ceiling above. He ducked, but the cage fell squarely down over him, seating itself to the floor as if Palpatine were directing it with invisible powers. The cage was made of fine mesh, the grid barely large enough to stick his smallest finger through.

“Welcome, young Skywalker.” The Evil One smiled graciously. “I have been expecting you.”
Luke stared back brazenly at the bent, hooded figure. Defiantly. The Emperor’s smile grew even softer, though; even more fatherly. He looked at Luke’s manacles.
“You no longer need those,” he added with no-bless oblige—and made the slightest motion with his finger in the direction of Luke’s wrists. At that, Luke’s binders simply fell away, clattering noisily to the floor.

During the Clone Wars, Palpatine conducted Sith rituals on Coruscant that radiated unnerving ripples in the Force, which caused anxiety among most Jedi throughout the galaxy, but also served to increase Anakin Skywalker's hunger for power.

Palpatine: Curse you, Jedi! No. A curse is not necessary. I have something better for you. Skywalker! I have broken you. Now, prove yourself worthy of serving me. (Sound of lightsaber activating.)
Luke: Yes, my master.
Palpatine: Bring your sister over to the dark side. You have the power.
Leia: (Sounds of waving lightsabers.) I don't know what he's done to you, Luke, but this time we're really leaving.
Luke: Leia, put the lightsaber away. I don't want to hurt you.
Leia: The last thing I'd do is hurt you, Luke. What's happened to you is not final.
Palpatine: (Palpatine laughs.) He cannot hear you, child. To him, you are a ghost. The faint memory of a former life.
Leia: Luke...listen. (Sound of lightsaber deactivating.) Luke. Oh, what have you done? What's behind his vacant stare?
Palpatine: Why, nothing, my child. Nothing. (Sound of the Force being used. Sound of speech echoing within Luke's mind.)
Luke: Nothing.
Palpatine: You are nothing.
Luke: Where am I?
Palpatine: Alone.
Luke: No. Help me.
Palpatine: There is no one. There is only the dark side.
Luke: I am a Jedi. (Luke screams.)
Palpatine: You are not a Jedi. You are nothing. You have no name.
Luke: My name is Skywalker. (Luke screams.)
Palpatine: You...have...no...name!
Luke: I...
Palpatine: Accept the dark side. You have no name.
Luke: I have no name.
Palpatine: You serve the dark side.
Luke: I serve...
Palpatine: Listen to the voices.
Luke: The voices...
Palpatine: Of the dark side.
Luke: Yes.
Palpatine: The one law is fear. The one fear is power. The one power is hate.
Luke: Hate.
Leia: Luke.
Palpatine: Hate.
Leia: Luke, clear your mind.
Luke: Leia?
Palpatine: The one law is fear. The one fear is power!
Leia: Luke, I'm your sister. I need you.
Luke: My sister.
Palpatine: You are alone.
Leia: Luke, listen to my voice. My child...will be a very great Jedi, because you will train him. You will train all my children in the ways of the Force.
Palpatine: Do not listen!
Luke: The Force... Leia... The Force... I am not alone. I am never alone!
(Sound of Force fades. Sound of voices returning to normal audibility.)
Palpatine: No! This can't be. No one returns from the dark side. You're mine!
Luke: Leia, help me. I've gone too far. I've found knowledge, all the dark things Father knew so well. The ability to control others, to destroy others if he chose, if I chose. Ben warned me; Yoda warned me. But I had to do it, Leia! I had to know what happened to our father! I had to know why he chose the dark side.
Leia: And now you know what happened to our father. It's time to come home, Luke.
Palpatine: Do not listen to her. Listen to the voice of the dark side. Your power is immense.
Luke: No. The powers of control and destruction weren't the only things I found in the dark side, Emperor. I also found great isolation and sadness. I found fear. These are the feelings my father felt. The feelings you feel, in your moments of darkest triumph.
Palpatine: Nonsense! Curse you Skywalkers, both of you! I'll tell you the truth about your father. (Sound of the Force being used. Luke screams. Sound of Force fades.)
Palpatine: The great Darth Vader was a sick man in an iron mask! Yes, that mask inspired terror throughout the galaxy, but the feeble heart within was forever possessed by the impotent side of the Force. You can be far stronger than he was. Dark Jedi, are you going to let your weak sister get the better of you? Get up! I can give you the power to break her. You will kill your sister, if I demand it!
Luke: No! I made a mistake. I thought I had to save the galaxy alone, all by myself. But the way of the Jedi is not a solitary path.
Leia: (Leia gasps.) The Holocron! Luke, the Holocron told me to join with my brother!
Luke: Yes. The Force binds us. Brings us together. Many people are fighting this war together. Our ally is the Force. Through the strength of the Force, your shroud of evil has been lifted from my mind!

They got up from the bench and began to amble back toward the university complex. Plagueis submerged himself deeply in the Force to study Palpatine, but he was unable to glean very much. Humans were difficult to read in the easiest of cases, and Palpatine’s mind was awash in conflict. So much going on in that small brain, Plagueis told himself. So much emotional current and self-interest. So unlike the predictable, focused intellects of the Outer Rim sentients, especially the hive-minded among them.

“Palpatine, I wonder how you would feel about working with us—Damask Holdings, I mean.”
Palpatine’s thick eyebrows beetled. “In what capacity?”
“To be perfectly blunt, as a kind of spy.” He went on before Palpatine could speak. “I won’t say that you and I want the same things for Naboo, because clearly—and notwithstanding your feelings about the architecture—you hold your world dear. My group, however, is less interested in Naboo’s government than it is in Naboo’s plasma and what it will fetch on the open market.”
Palpatine looked as if the plain truth was something new to him. “If you had phrased that any differently, I would have rejected your offer out of hand.”
“Then you accept? You’re willing to update us regarding whatever political machinations your father’s group may have in the works?”
“Only if I can report directly to you.”
Plagueis tried once more to see him in the Force. “Is that your wish?”
Palpatine returned a sober nod. “It is.”
“Then by all means, you’ll report exclusively to me,” Plagueis said. “I’ll see to it that the necessary arrangements are made.” He stepped away from the speeder as Palpatine powered it up.

Palpatine’s expression softened. “For a time I thought about adopting the name of our distaff line. I haven’t rejected the dynasty I was born into. I’ve rejected the name I was given. But not for the grandiose reasons some think. Just the opposite, actually. I’m certain that you, of all beings, understand as much.”
There it was again, Plagueis thought: the deceptive cadence; the use of flattery, charm, and self-effacement as if rapier feints in a duel. The need to be seen as guileless, unassuming, empathetic. A youth with no desire to enter politics, and yet born for it.
Tenebrous had told him from the start that the Republic, with help from the Sith, would continue to descend into corruption and disorder, and that a time would come when it would have to rely on the strengths of an enlightened leader, capable of saving the lesser masses from being ruled by their unruly passions, jealousies, and desires. In the face of a common enemy, real or manufactured, they would set aside all their differences and embrace the leadership of anyone who promised a brighter future. Could this Palpatine, with Plagueis’s help, be the one to bring about such a transformation?
Again he tried to see deeper into Palpatine, but without success. The psychic walls the youth had raised were impenetrable, which made the young human something rare indeed. Had Palpatine somehow learned to corral the Force within himself, as Plagueis had concealed his own powers as a youth?
“Of course I understand,” he said finally.

Palpatine’s expression darkened. “You know nothing of my true nature.” He paced away from Plagueis, then stopped and turned to him. “You never asked about the killings.”
“I’ve never been one for grim details,” Plagueis said. “But if you need to unburden yourself, do so.”
Palpatine raised his clawed hands. “I executed them with these! And with the power of my mind. I became a storm, Magister—a weapon strong enough to warp bulkheads and hurl bodies across cabinspaces. I was death itself!”
Plagueis sat tall in the chair, in genuine astonishment.
He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.
Oh, what a cautious taming he would require! Plagueis thought. But what an ally he might make. What an ally!

Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit.

Elsewhere on the broad avenue—at key intersections, taxi stops, and mag-lev exits—stood groups of Jedi, a few with the hilts of their lightsabers conspicuously visible. For Palpatine the sight of so many of them in one place was at once exhilarating and sobering. Though thoroughly cloaked in the everyday, he could feel their collective pride trickle into him through the Force.

Sidious adopted a look of wide-eyed innocence as he sat down opposite the Sullustan. They began to talk in a general way about current events and Senate business, before the lobbyist steered the conversation toward STP’s need for Senate approval to expand its operations along the Rimma Trade Route. Drinks and appetizers were ordered and reordered, and before too long Palpatine’s interest began to wane.
“I think you may have overvalued my worth to STP,” he said at last. “I’m nothing more than the voice of Naboo’s regent.”
The Sullustan waved his small hand in a gesture of dismissal. “And I think you undervalue yourself. Your short speech to the Senate put you on the map, Senator. Beings are talking about you. STP believes that you can be of great service.”
“And to myself, you said.”
“Naturally—” the Sullustan started, but Sidious interrupted him.
“In fact, you’re not here to recruit me.” Motioning negligently, he repeated: “You’re not here to recruit me.”
The Sullustan blinked in confusion. “In fact, I’m not really here to recruit you.”
“Then why are we here?”
“I don’t know why we’re here. I was instructed to meet with you.”
“Instructed by whom?”
“I, I—”
Sidious decided not to press him too hard. “You were saying?”
Again the Sullustan blinked. “I was saying... Just what was I saying?”
They both laughed and sipped at their drinks.

Pestage gritted his teeth. “The Maladian commander I did business with during the Kim affair.”
“What of him?”
“He contacted me—two, maybe three hours ago. He said that he felt humiliated because of the manner in which the Kim contract had been implemented, and wanted to make it up to me. He said he’d just received word that a Maladian faction had accepted a contract to carry out a major hit on Coruscant, involving someone closely affiliated with Damask Holdings.” Pestage kept his eyes on Palpatine. “I feared it might be you.”
Palpatine swung back to the window to think. Had the Santhe guards planned to turn him over to the Maladians following the holocommunication with Pax Teem?
He turned to Pestage. “Who took out the contract?
“Members of the Gran Protectorate.”
“It fits,” Palpatine said, more to himself.
“What fits?”
“Where are these Gran now?”
“As soon as I heard from the Maladian, I asked Kinman to keep an eye on them. They’re holed up in the Malastare ambassador’s residence.”
Palpatine blinked. “Here? On Coruscant?”
“Of course, here.”
“It’s not possible that they’re offworld?”
“No, they’re downside.”
Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.
“Palpatine!” Pestage said from behind him.
“Hego Damask,” Palpatine said, without turning around.

Although Darth Sidious did not hear anyone enter his secret lair, he sensed a great malevolence flow into the room. From behind him, a deep voice spoke, "What is thy bidding, my Master?"

"This rivalry between Lommite Limited and InterGalactic Ore intrigues me," Sidious was saying as he moved about the cavernous den that was both his sanctuary and repository. The hood of his cowl was raised over his lined face, and the hem of his robe trailed on the gleaming floor. His voice was a rasp, absent emotion but not without instances of intentional inflection.
"I see a way that we might exploit this entanglement to our own gain," he continued. "A push here, a shove there, and both mining companies will collapse. Thus, we will be able to deliver Dorvalla to the Trade Federation—the ore, the trade routes, Dorvalla's vote in the senate—and, in so doing, gain the further allegiance of Viceroy Gunray and his lackeys."
Sidious removed his hands from the ample sleeves of his robe. "Viceroy Gunray claims to be persuaded of the worth of serving us, but I want him fully in our grasp, so that there can be no doubt of his heeding my commands. With Dorvalla secured, he will likely be promoted to a permanent position on the Trade Federation Directorate. We can then further our larger plan."
Sidious cast his hooded gaze across the room to a deeply shadowed area in which Darth Maul sat silent as a statue, his tattooed face lowered, so that all Sidious could see was the crown of vestigial horns that sprouted from his hairless skull.
"Your thoughts betray you, my young apprentice," he remarked. "You are puzzled by my steadfast interest in the Neimoidians."
Darth Maul lifted his face, and what scant light there was seemed to recoil. Where his Master represented all that was concealed and mysterious in the Sith, Maul was the personification of all that was to be feared.
"From you, Master, I cannot hide what I feel. The Neimoidians are greedy and weak-willed. I find them unworthy."

“To be sure. But I warned you that this was coming. Supreme Chancellor Valorum has lost all credibility, and after what occurred at Eriadu, the Senate is determined to weaken the Trade Federation further. King Veruna may have been able to stall the Senate, but he has abdicated, and young Queen Amidala and Naboo’s Senator are leading the call for taxation. With the Senate preoccupied, the moment is right for you to begin assembling a fleet of armed freighters to impose a blockade.”
“A blockade? Of what system, Lord Sidious?”
“I will inform you in due time.” When Gunray didn’t respond, Sidious said, “What is it, Viceroy? Across the vastness of space, I can perceive the reeling of your feeble brain.”
“Forgive me, Lord Sidious, but, as my advisers have pointed out, the redistribution of our vessels carries with it considerable financial risk. To begin with, there is the cost of fuel. Then, with so many ships allocated to an embargo, a disruption in trade in the Mid and Outer Rims for however long the blockade is maintained. Finally, there is no telling how our investors might react to the news."

"You may be wondering: when did he begin to change? The truth is that I haven’t changed. As we have clouded the minds of the Jedi, I clouded yours. Never once did I have any intention of sharing power with you. I needed to learn from you; no more, no less. To learn all of your secrets, which I trusted you would eventually reveal. But what made you think that I would need you after that? Vanity, perhaps; your sense of self-importance. You’ve been nothing more than a pawn in a game played by a genuine Master.
“The Sith’ari.”
A cruel laugh escaped him.
“Reflect back on even the past few years—assuming you have the capacity. Yinchorr, Dorvalla, Eriadu, Maul, the Neimoidians, Naboo, an army of clones, the fallen Jedi Dooku... You think these were your ideas, when in fact they were mine, cleverly suggested to you so that you could feed them back to me. You were far too trusting, Plagueis. No true Sith can ever really care about another. This has always been known. There is no way but my way.”

Palpatine interlinked the fingers of his hands. “I’m told that you grew up on Tatooine. I visited there, many years ago.”
Anakin’s eyes narrowed for the briefest moment. “I did, sir, but I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
Palpatine watched him glance up at Obi-Wan. “And why is that?”
“My mother—”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan snapped in reprimand.
Palpatine reclined slightly, studying the two of them. Obi-Wan seemed not to have noticed the fury simmering in the boy, but for an instant Palpatine perceived a touch of his younger self in Skywalker. The need to challenge authority; the gift for masking his emotions. The yet-unrecognized power.

The fact that Palpatine was flustered, confused, possibly frightened was obvious. But when Shaak Ti attempted to read him through the Force, she found it difficult to get a sense of what he was truly feeling.

"Welcome to the general's quarters," he said while he did input at a console built into the table. Shortly the bulkhead behind the swivel chair became a hologrammic display, showing the battle of Coruscant. The flick of a final switch summoned a stalked, eyeball-shaped holocam from the tabletop. "You're about to make an unscheduled appearance on the HoloNet, Chancellor," Grievous said. "I apologize for not providing a mirror, hairbrush, and cosmetics, so that you might at least camouflage some of your fear."
Palpatine's voice was sinister when he spoke. "You can display me, but I won't speak."
Grievous nodded at what seemed an obvious statement. "I'll display you, but you won't speak. Is that understood?"
"You will do all the talking."
"That's correct. I will do all the talking."
"Very good."
For no apparent reason, Grievous felt uncertain. "Lord Tyranus will soon be here to take charge of you."
Palpatine smiled without showing his teeth. "Then I am assured of being greatly entertained."

In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.

When Mace Windu led a team of Jedi Masters to apprehend Darth Sidious, none of them expected to face the power of the Sith Lord. His innocent appearance as Chancellor Palpatine, along with an application of a concentrated dark side confusion haze, enabled Darth Sidious to take down Agen Kolar, Kit Fisto, and Saesee Tiin.

Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."
He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.
He remembered playing a Force game with a shuura fruit, sitting across a long table from Padme in the retreat by the lake on Naboo. He remembered telling her how grumpy Obi-Wan would be to see him use the Force so casually.
Palpatine seemed to catch his thought; he gave a yellow sidelong glance as the robe settled onto his shoulders.
"You must learn to cast off the petty restraints that the Jedi have tried to place upon your power," he said. "Anakin, it's time. I need you to help me restore order to the galaxy."

"Keep still," Sidious interrupted, "before you damage yourself all the more." He gave Vader a moment to compose himself. "First, let me reiterate that the Jedi mean nothing to us. In having survived, Yoda and Obi-Wan aren't exceptions to the rule. I'm certain that dozens of Jedi escaped with their lives, and in due time you will have the pleasure of killing many of them. But of greater import is the fact that their order has been crushed. Finished, Lord Vader. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Master," Vader muttered. 
"In burying their heads in the sands and snows of remote worlds, the surviving Jedi humble themselves before the Sith. So let them: let them atone for one thousand years of arrogance and self-absorption."
Sidious watched Vader, displeased. "Once more your thoughts betray you. I see that you are not yet fully convinced."

Mon Mothma hasn’t much combat experience, but she is as much a fighter as any commodore or commando. The only difference is the battlefield she commands is one of diplomacy and etiquette. As a leading Senator, she fought the rise of Palpatine with every tool at her command. At the time, she was unaware that Palpatine used the Dark Side of the Force to sway the less conscientious Senators.

There was no great collection of Dark Side lore, nor any gather of its masters. Realizing the task that lay before him, Palpatine knew he must begin at once to attain control over the Dark Side. With the resources of the galaxy at his disposal, he gathered the greatest works of knowledge from over a million worlds. He studied the Force in all its guises throughout the galaxy, whether it was the shamanism of Jarvashqiine or the tales of the Tyia. Coupled with the perversions of the secrets he ripped from the living minds of Jedi he captured during the Purge, he learned more than ever expected.

But the Force, of course, was quite real—and the black tentacles of its dark side had hardened Palpatine and his new pupil, Darth Vader, into evil incarnate. They shared its horrible energies, and used them to fill the minds of their subservient military minions with fear.

Almost mindless under the oppression of the Emperor's dark side influence, the people of Byss find their life energies constantly leeched off during the Emperor's vile machinations.

Throughout the worlds submissive to the Empire, Byss is renowned as a paradise, whose siren call multitudes to willingly apply for emigration to its shores. Once there, wrapped in the power of the dark side, the immigrants become completely submissive, their life energy forever enslaved to the mind that would devour a galaxy.

What better lure for multitudes than Byss's siren call of beauty and peace? Once there, their wills are destroyed by the Emperor and his Adepts, and replaced with an illusion of tranquility as they blissfully surrender their life energy to sustain the Emperor.

The Lusankya—a Super Star Destroyer eight kilometers length—laid waste to the area beneath which it had lain buried for years. Green turbolaser bolts pounded the cityscape, freeing the ship from the ferrocrete and transparisteel prison in which it had laired. Wedge knew Super Star Destroyers had only come into service after the Battle of Yavin, which meant the Lusankya had to have been created and hidden on Coruscant before the battle of Endor. Unless the constructor droids just built it there, then built over it. The idea that a hundred-square-kilometer area of the planet could have been razed and rebuilt to hide a Super Star Destroyer seemed beyond belief, especially with no one noticing the ship's insertion into the hole. Could the Emperor's power through the dark side of the Force have been sufficient to compel thousands or millions of people to forget having seen the Lusankya being buried? As hideous as that idea seemed, Wedge hoped it was the truth. The likely alternative—that the Emperor had ordered the deaths of all the witnesses—seemed that much more horrible.

Now director of the Imperial Intelligence, Ysanne worked to demonstrate the usefulness of her office to the only person that mattered—the Emperor. Impressed with her suggestion to build a combination internment center and brainwashing facility, Palpatine gave her the Super Star DesteroyerExecutor from the Kuat shipyards—a twin to Vader’s Executor from Fondor. She renamed the vessel Lusankya, and, with help from the Emperor’s mind-fogging powers, Imperial engineers buried the tremendous battleship beneath the cityscape in Coruscant’s Manarai Mountain district.

Luke fought back to consciousness. He felt a powerful presence in the Force and sat up too quickly. Invisible hammers bashed both sides of his skull. The screen stood dark. On the foot of his flotation bed sat Ben Kenobi, robed as usual in unbleached homespun, shimmering under the cabin's faint night glims. "Obi-wan?" Luke murmered. "What's happening at Bakura?" 
Ionized air danced around the figure. "You are going to Bakura," it answered. 
"Is it that bad?" Luke asked bluntly, not really expecting an answer. Ben rarely gave them. He seemed to come mostly to reprimand Luke, like a teacher who could not give up hounding his student after graduation (not that Ben had stayed around to finish his training). 
Obi-wan shifted on the bed, but the bed didn't shift with him. The manifestation wasn't literally physical. "Emperor Palatine achieved first contact with the aliens attacking Bakura," said the apparition, "during one of his Force meditations. He offered them a deal, one that can no longer be honored."

The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
This was what the rage could do for him. This was what pathetic Jedi had never understood, as they rejected their anger, letting cowardice block their path to the dark side. This was why they had been eliminated, and why the Emperor reigned supreme, his power unquestioned. His iron rule unassailable.
Until now.
"My Lord, the Death Star has been...destroyed."
The Emperor played with his memory of the moment, polishing it in his mind like a precious gem. Remembering: Darth Vader's voice as he delivered the news. Vader's anger, so forceful the Emperor could feel it from halfway across the galaxy. And with the anger, terror, for Vader knew how terribly he had disappointed his Master. Vader knew it was not the first time.

Ten of the most powerful men and women in the galaxy faced the Emperor, fear rolling off of them in waves. These were beings who could destroy ships—or cities—with a single word. Their hearts knew no mercy; their lives were founded on cruelties great and small; their names struck terror in their enemies. And yet they trembled before him, made small and weak by their own fear.
The most elite members of his Royal Guard flanked the group, their expressions hidden by their featureless scarlet masks. The Emperor had taken great pains to ensure that his throne room was an awesome and intimidating sight, from the towering walls to the gleaming dais. Behind his shadowed throne, a wall of permaplas windows looked into the heart of the Coruscant night. But his servants ignored the trappings of power. All attention was fixed on the Emperor.
"The Death Star has been destroyed," he informed them, carefully noting their reactions.
Captain Thrawn betrayed no emotion. Complete control, the Emperor thought with approval. This one will go far. Crix Madine, leader of the elite Storm Commandos, frowned, conflicted emotions swirling deep beneath his surface. The fool thought he could hide his doubts from the Emperor. This foolishness would prove useful, thus the Emperor allowed it. For now.
Commander Grev T'Ran looked somber at the news. But before the expression dropped across his face, the Emperor had sensed something else. The beginnings of a smile. Such a small thing—a tensed muscle, a nearly imperceptible flinch—but it was enough. The Emperor had had his suspicions about T'Ran. Now they were confirmed.
He raised a finger, catching the attention of the Royal Guard. Then nodded. T'Ran's face paled as one of the guards peeled away from the line. His crimson robes swept the floor as he padded silently toward the traitor. The other officers looked away, their faces grim.
"Noooo!" T'Ran drew his blaster. "You can't—"
The guard's force pike jabbed into T'Ran's neck, silencing him forever. His body shuddered once, then dropped to the ground. The silent red figure waited on the Emperor's command, but the Emperor shook his head. They could take out the garbage later. For now, let the traitor stay where he was. It would serve as a helpful reminder.
"How did it happen, sir?" one of the officers asked. "The Death Star was invincible."
"So we were led to believe," the Emperor agreed.
He peered closely at the man who had spoken. His face was blank, his features composed into a perfect mask of calm loyalty. But there was something beneath the surface. Not betrayal, no. But something...the Emperor reached out with the dark side of the Force, probing the man's depths.
"The Rebels found a weakness," the Emperor said, searching for a reaction that would reveal the truth. "Wisely, they exploited it."
Quickly, he ran through what he knew of the man: Rezi Soresh, of the planet Dreizan, a loyal, if plodding commander, his brilliance blunted by blind obedience. Just as the Emperor preferred it. Cold, ambitious, cautious—not the kind of man to speak up first, or at all, when silence would serve him better. And in the Emperor's presence, silence always served better.
"Were there any...survivors?" Soresh asked. There was a disturbance in the Force as something flared within him, something sharp and bright.
Hope.
Ah, yes. It made sense now. Rezi Soresh, husband to Ilaani Soresh, father to Kimali Soresh—or was. Two years before, fresh out of the Academy, Kimali had fallen in with a group of Rebel sympathizers. When the group came under suspicion, his mother had helped him evade arrest. She had procured him the text docs he would need to run away and take on a new identity—and then she revealed the truth to Soresh, giving him the chance to say a final farewell to his son.
Soresh had turned them both in. His reward: a promotion to Commander. His family's reward: a life sentence in the Gree Baaker Labor Camp. Several prisoner work squads had been assigned to the Death Star, the Emperor now remembered. Among them, the prisoners from Gree Baaker.
The Emperor smiled. "No survivors."
Soresh's face remained blank as his hope died. The Emperor suspected that Soresh himself was ignorant of the emotions that roiled beneath his surface. Likely, he thought he had left his family—and his guilt—far behind. The Emperor knew better.
"Only Lord Vader escaped," he added, enjoying the disappointment that filled the room. He of course knew of the petty jealousies directed at his most favored subordinate. No one could hope to understand the bond that existed between a Sith Master and his dark apprentice. Darth Vader had failed him before, and would surely fail again, but he remained the Emperor's only option.
True, if there were another—a being with Vader's power and potential, a Jedi with a susceptible mind and a healthy body who could rule by his Master's side—Vader would become disposable. But the Jedi were gone forever. He had seen to that.
"Lord Vader is making his way back to Coruscant," the Emperor said. "And when he returns, we will make arrangements to eradicate the Rebel threat once and for all."
"But sir, why wait?" Captain Thrawn asked. "We know the location of the Rebel base. Surely we can—"
"We can do many things," the Emperor said coolly, enjoying the way even Thrawn cowered before his glare. "We will bide our time. I will not risk generating sympathy for the Rebellion—when it is crushed, it must be crushed completely. This does not, however, mean we will do nothing." He pointed a spindly finger at the line of officers. "You will identify the top Rebel leaders. You will use this knowledge to destroy them, thus ensuring that the Alliance begins to crumble from within. And you will discover the name of the pilot responsible for destroying the Death Star." The Emperor savored the rage that burned within him at the thought of it. "The pilot will die—and whoever makes this possible will find himself richly rewarded."
Again, he probed the emotions of his officers. Beneath their fear, and their hatred, he sensed loyalty. An eagerness to act. They wanted to please him. But Soresh wanted more than that. He wanted to kill: a bloodlust for the man who had slaughtered his family.
Good, the Emperor thought. Loyalty was useful. Vengeance more so.
The officers filed out, followed by the Red Guard, leaving the Emperor alone with his thoughts. Things were proceeding as they should, he realized now. As they must.
He would never doubt the power of the dark side of the Force to show him the way forward. The destruction of the Death Star was surely necessary, as it would guide him to this new path. Darkness was gathering, and the Emperor sensed that this pilot was at the heart of it. The dark side of the Force had brought him to light. The Emperor had only to find him—and the Emperor would find him. He knew that with an iron certainty. The pilot would be found. An ordered galaxy would follow. It was his destiny.

Boarding his shuttle, he ordered the pilot to lift off. A pity, my son, he thought. You could have joined me and together...we could have destroyed the Emperor and ruled the galaxy in his place. As he stared at the severed appendage in his hands, a sudden flash of insight struck the Dark Lord, realization dawning like the sunrise of Bespin. Perhaps, if you will not be turned, little Jedi, a suitable substitute may be arranged.
Suddenly, Vader was struck to his knees by the horribly powerful voice that rolled like fiery thunder through his brain. The pilots struggled vainly to ignore the Dark Lord's...discomfort. "Yes, my servant," the voice boomed in his mind, dripping raw evil. "Come to Mount Tantiss, immediately. I shall meet you there, and we will discuss my new trophy."
"Yes...my Master," Vader gasped, feeling an icy stab of dread in his soul, as the Emperor's mocking chuckle still echoed in his mind. His Master had detected his rebellious thoughts. This discussion would be most unpleasant. Most unpleasant indeed.

Moff Jerjerrod knelt before the Emperor in his vast throne room. He bowed his head and hoped he would leave the Imperial Palace alive.
"Rise, my friend. I have a special challenge for you," the Emperor said. "I want you to ease your campaign against the Rebels and leave your work in Logistics and Supply."
Jerjerrod shifted uneasily. He didn't dare voice his concern that he was needed in that ministry to make sure Imperial resources weren't overextended.
"Do not concern yourself with the logistical status of the Empire," Palpatine stated, as if he had read the Moff's mind.

Although Vader knows better than to disobey Palpatine, he questions the Emperor's command to delay the search for Luke Skywalker. He has also voiced strong objections to the Emperor's increasing reliance on Falleen prince Xizor.
Surprisingly, Palpatine has not disciplined Vader for these doubts. It seems that the Emperor already knows every thought that crosses his servant's mind, and knows how every event will unfold.

"The Death Star will be completed on schedule, my master," Vader breathed.
"Yes, I know," replied the Emperor. "You have done well, Lord Vader...and now I sense you wish to continue your search for the young Skywalker." 
Vader smiled beneath his armored mask. The Emperor always knew the sense of what was in his heart; even if he didn't know the specifics. "Yes, my master."
"Patience, my friend," the Supreme Ruler cautioned. "You always had difficulty showing patience. In time, he will seek you out..and when he does, you must bring him before me. He has grown strong. Only together can we turn him to the dark side of the Force."

The Emperor sat before him, smiling. The moment was convulsive with possibilities... The moment passed. He did nothing.
"Tell me, young Skywalker," the Emperor said when he saw Luke's first struggle had taken its course. "Who has been involved in your training until now?" The smile was thin, open-mouthed, hollow. Luke was silent. He would reveal nothing. "Oh, I know it was Obi-Wan Kenobi at first," the wicked ruler continued, rubbing his fingers together as if trying to remember. Then pausing, his lips creased into a sneer. "Of course, we are familiar with the talent Obi-Wan Kenobi had, when it came to training Jedi." He nodded politely in Vader's direction, indicating Obi-Wan's previous star pupil. Vader stood without responding, without moving.
Luke tensed with fury at the Emperor’s defamation of Ben—though, of course, to the Emperor it was praise. And he bridled even more, knowing the Emperor was so nearly right. He tried to bring his anger under control, though, for it seemed to please the malevolent dictator greatly.
Palpatine noted the emotions on Luke’s face and chuckled. “So, in your early training you have followed your father’s path, it would seem. But alas, Obi-Wan is now dead, I believe; his elder student, here, saw to that—“ Again, he made a hand motion toward Vader. “So tell me, young Skywalker—who continued your training?”
That smile, again, like a knife. Luke held silent, struggling to regain his composure. The Emperor tapped his fingers on the arm of the throne, recalling. “There was one called…Yoda. An aged Master Jed…Ah, I see by your countenance I have hit a chord, a resonant chord indeed. Yoda, then.”
Luke flashed with anger at himself, now, to have revealed so much, unwillingly, unwittingly. Anger and self-doubt. He strove to calm himself—to see all, to show nothing; only to be.
“This Yoda,” the Emperor mused. “Lives he still?”
Luke focused on the emptiness of space beyond the window behind the Emperor’s chair. The deep void, where nothing was. Nothing. He filled his mind with this black nothing. Opaque, save for the occasional flickering of starlight that filtered through the ether.
“Ah,” cried Emperor Palpatine. “He lives not. Very good, young Skywalker, you almost hid this from me. But you could not. And you can not. Your deepest flickerings are to me apparent. Your nakedest soul. That is my first lesson to you.” He beamed.

The Emperor smiled. “Good. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless—take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete.”

Then, Vader and Palpatine both gained access to Luke's innermost thoughts, those that protected his sister, Princess Leia Organa.

"My monstrous chrysalides, with their magnificent metal-piercing fangs, guard the ramparts of my citadel. My mute Imperial sentinels stand by my throne, their annihilated minds and enslaved wills clear evidence the dark side can manipulate clones for any imaginative purpose. Although alchemy can create perfect beings, I have designed a weakness into all of these creations. The flaws are minute and known only to me. It would not do for any creature to be stronger than its creator."

Luke: I sense your old life. Before the dark side ensnared you. When the Force flowed through you.
Kam: No! No! No! (Sound of lightsaber turning off.) My life is forfeit, Jedi. Kill me.
Luke: I do not take life unless I must. Yours I give back to you.
Kam: Why? When I lured you here...I would have made this derelict space station your grave. The tomb of the last Jedi Master.
Luke: Instead, I will make it the place of your rebirth. You were a Dark Jedi once. But only because you fell under the Emperor's spell. Now that spell is broken! (Sound of the Force being used. Kam screams.) Kam Solusar, I give you back your life. I give you your freedom. I give you the power that is already yours—the power of the Jedi. (Sound of the Force fades.)
Kam: I...Skywalker...I'm free.
Luke: The Force is strong in you.
Kam: My old life...I remember it now. I...my father was a Jedi. I was a Jedi.
Luke: You are a Jedi, Kam Solusar.
Kam: I...I owe you my life.

As a Jedi, she would have been trained in the bending of minds.
Luke had seen Ben do it, had done it himself. The Emperor Palpatine had been a genius at evoking that kind of desperate loyalty, that need to serve him, calling forth the echoes of one's own fears like a skilled musician calling forth beauty from a flute.

Sidious took a moment to respond. It was odd to think now that he had once known fear. Though never incapacitating fear, and never for very long. But as a child, he’d experienced fear as a conditioned response to threat. Despite a reassuring voice inside him that had promised no harm could come, there had been, for a time, a chance that something terrible could happen. More than once his father’s raised hand had made him cringe. Eventually, he had understood that he had conjured that voice; that he hadn’t been fooling himself by exercising some infantile belief in invulnerability. And he understood now that it had been the dark side telling him that no harm could come to him, precisely because he was invulnerable. Since the start of his training, the voice had quieted by becoming internalized. Teem’s belief that he had power over him might long ago have moved him to pity instead of stirring anger and loathing. Raw emotion was a consequence of leading a double life. While he relished his secret identity, he wanted at the same time for it to be known that he was a being who could not be trifled with; that he wielded ultimate authority; that merely to gaze on him was tantamount to glimpsing the dark matter that bound and drove the galaxy...

The planet Chandrila sponsored a monthlong retreat for members of the Legislative Youth Program. Once a year young beings from a host of worlds arrived to participate in mock Senate trials in and around Hanna City and to tour Chandrila’s vast agricultural projects, wilderness areas, coral reefs, and garden parks. It was in Gladean Park—a game reserve outside coastal Hanna—that Plagueis paid young Palpatine an unannounced visit. But it was Plagueis who was surprised.
“I knew you would come, Magister,” Palpatine said when Plagueis and 11-4D turned up at one of the game reserve’s viewing blinds.
“How did you know?”
“I knew, that’s all.”
“And just how often are your premonitions correct?”
“Almost always.”
“Curious,” 11-4D remarked while Palpatine was hurrying away to excuse himself from the company of two friends.

Palpatine’s lip curled in anger and menace. “Is this the wisdom you offer—the tenets of some arcane cult?”
“The test of its value is whether you can live by it, Palpatine.”
“If I had wanted that I would have forced my parents years ago to surrender me to the Jedi Order instead of transferring me from school to private school.”
Plagueis planted his hands on his hips and laughed without mirth. “And of what possible use do you think a person of your nature would be to the Jedi Order? You’re heartless, ambitious, arrogant, insidious, and without shame or empathy. More, you’re a murderer.” He held Palpatine’s hooded gaze and watched the youth’s hands clench in fists of rage. “Careful, boy,” he said after a moment. “You are not the only being in this plush stateroom with the power to kill.”
Palpatine’s eyes opened wide and he took a step back. “I can sense it...”
Plagueis grew deliberately haughty. “What you sense is a fraction of what I can bring to bear.”

Blended into the herd, the animal Sidious had fixed his sight on would have been indistinguishable to normal beings. But Sidious had the animal in his mind and was now looking through its eyes, one with it.

Pax Teem was about to speak when a Gran messenger intruded on the privacy canopy.
“Senator Kim, we are in receipt of an urgent communiqué from Naboo.”
While Kim was excusing himself, Palpatine dropped into the Force. Conversation at the table grew faint, and the physical forms of Pax Teem and the others became indistinct—more like blurs of lambent energy.

Some combination of the strictures—or perhaps recognition on Plagueis’s part for his apprentice’s unabated craving to visit Sith worlds—had landed Palpatine on scenic Dathomir. Sparsely populated and largely unexplored, Dathomir wasn’t Korriban or Ziost, but it was powerful in the Force, in part because of its fecundity, but mainly due to the presence of groups of female adepts who practiced dark side magicks.
He was meandering without clear purpose through one of Blue Desert City’s dustier quarters, far from the city center, when became aware of a faint pulse of Force energy, the origin of which was indistinct but close at hand.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit.

The hood of his stylish robe raised against a chill wind, Palpatine hurried through the streets of Theed. The sudden turn in the weather abetted his desire to avoid making eye contact with strangers or, worse, encountering anyone he knew. As he grew stronger in the dark side, the profane world became a stranger and stranger place, swept by currents he’d had no previous awareness of and populated by vaguely outlined life-forms he saw as magnitudes of the Force.

Palpatine sensed scrutiny from someone outside the circle the ten of them had formed. Just short of the Senate Building's Great Door, Pax Teem had stopped and was gazing at Palpatine, his eyestalks extended. And Palpatine could hardly blame him, since even he had been caught off guard by Plagueis's eagerness to acknowledge him in public.

No sooner did the holoimage dissolve than two of the security men began to advance on him. Sidious readied himself for action. A Force blow to send them reeling back toward the holoprojector, then a leap, arms extended, hands curled into claws, one for each windpipe, which he would tear from their throats—
The Force intruded, drawing his attention to the windows in the upper walls.
At once, the sound of repeating blasters and pained cries echoed from adjacent rooms; then a nerve-jangling shattering of glass as Sun Guards crashed through the high windows and began to rappel to the filthy floor, firing as they slid down on their microfilament lines, catching the Santhe men and the Rodian with so many bolts that their bodies were left quartered by the volleys.

He was standing in the center of the room when he sensed someone in the corridor outside. Fists pummeled the door; then it slid to one side and Sate Pestage burst into the room. Seeing Palpatine, he came to a sudden stop, and the panicked look he wore on entering transformed to one of visible relief.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he nearly screamed, running a hand over his forehead.
Palpatine regarded him quizzically. “I was occupied. What has happened?”
Pestage sank into a chair and looked up at him. “Are you sure you want to know?” He paused, then said, “In the interest of separating what I do from what you do—”
Palpatine’s eyes blazed. “Stop wasting my time and come to the point.”
Pestage gritted his teeth. “The Maladian commander I did business with during the Kim affair.”
“What of him?”
“He contacted me—two, maybe three hours ago. He said that he felt humiliated because of the manner in which the Kim contract had been implemented, and wanted to make it up to me. He said he’d just received word that a Maladian faction had accepted a contract to carry out a major hit on Coruscant, involving someone closely affiliated with Damask Holdings.” Pestage kept his eyes on Palpatine. “I feared it might be you.”
Palpatine swung back to the window to think. Had the Santhe guards planned to turn him over to the Maladians following the holocommunication with Pax Teem?
He turned to Pestage. “Who took out the contract?
“Members of the Gran Protectorate.”
“It fits,” Palpatine said, more to himself.
“What fits?”
“Where are these Gran now?”
“As soon as I heard from the Maladian, I asked Kinman to keep an eye on them. They’re holed up in the Malastare ambassador’s residence.”
Palpatine blinked. “Here? On Coruscant?”
“Of course, here.”
“It’s not possible that they’re offworld?”
“No, they’re downside.”
Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.
“Palpatine!” Pestage said from behind him.
“Hego Damask,” Palpatine said, without turning around.

A standard month after the events on Coruscant, Plagueis summoned Sidious to Muunilinst. Sidious had visited the High Port skyhook but had never been invited downside, and now he found himself soaring over one of the planet’s unspoiled blue oceans in a stylish airspeeder piloted by two Sun Guards. As the speeder approached Aborah, he settled deeply into the Force and was rewarded with a vision of the mountain island as a transcendent vortex of dark energy unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was something he would have expected to encounter only on Korriban or some other Sith world.

Sidious was still trying to make sense of the droid’s statements when they entered a long corridor lined with windowless cells. Through the Force he could sense life-forms behind each locked door.

"I know you're still upset about the snake that bit you," Sidious said, continuing around the watery orb until he had a clear view of Maul. "I know everything about you, Maul. Everything."

Maul's steps did not falter as he continued following the droid, but his mind was suddenly racing. He wondered what consequences he might suffer because of the drawing. He said, "Did Master Sidious see the drawing?"
"I don't know. I erased it right after you fell asleep."
"Then how would he even know about the drawing...unless you told him?"
"I didn't have to tell him," TD-D9 said. "You should know by now, child...Sidious knows everything."

Just arrived on the Hunters’ Moon, Sidious studied Plagueis as the Sith Lord and his droid, 11-4D, viewed a holorecording of a black-robed Zabrak assassin making short work of combat automata in his home on Coruscant, some hovering, some advancing on two legs, others on treads, and all firing blasters.
Twenty years had added a slight stoop to the Muun’s posture and veins that stood out under his thinning white skin. He wore a dark green utility suit that hugged his delicate frame, a green cloak that fell from his bony shoulders to the fort’s stone floor, and a headpiece that hewed to his large cranium. A triangular breath mask covered his ruined, prognathus lower jaw, his mouth, part of his long neck, and what remained of the craggy nose he’d had before the surprise attack in the Fobosi. A device of his own invention, the alloy mask featured two vertical slits and a pair of thin, stiff conduits that linked it to a transpirator affixed to his upper chest, beneath an armored torso harness. He had learned to ingest and imbibe through feeding tubes, and through his nose.
Seen through the Force, he was a nuclear oval of mottled light, a rotating orb of terrifying energy. If the Maladian attack had weakened him physically, it had also helped to shape his etheric body into a vessel sufficiently strong to contain the full power of the dark side.

Maul bowed his head and hurried up the rear boarding ramp into the cockpit module. Sidious lingered to watch the ship rise and edge out of the hangar, becoming invisible as it flew over The Works. Through the dark side, he continued to track the Scimitar as it angled north toward the Jedi Temple rather than south, and away from the Senate District.

Sidious stood motionless and silent on the transmission grid, his fingers steepled, his mind meditating on the eddies and currents of the Force. Those of lesser sensitivity were oblivious to it, but to him it was like an omnipresent mist, invisible but nonetheless tangible, that swirled and drifted constantly about him. No words, no descriptions could begin to convey what it was like; the only way to understand it was to experience it. He had learned over long years of study and meditation how to interpret each and every vagary of its restless flow, no matter how slight. Even without that ability, however, he would have known that Nute Gunray was lying about Hath Monchar's whereabouts.

Darth Sidious could feel a slight disturbance in the Force before his scrambled comlink chimed, and knew by this that his apprentice was about to contact him. He stepped to the holoprojector and activated the grid. Privacy failsafes glowed green before he spoke. 
"My apprentice. Your mission is complete." It was a statement, not a question. Sidious knew Darth Maul would not call to report failure, and there were no untoward signs in the energies that surrounded his image.
"Yes, my master. The Jedi Padawan died in combat. She fought well, for a neophyte. An explosion generated from our battle destroyed Lorn Pavan and his droid." Darth Sidious nodded. He could feel the truth of the statement even at this distance. This was excellent news.

A few meters distant, Sidious came to a halt, gazing at Plagueis for a long moment, as though making up his mind about something. Then, blowing out his breath, he set his own glass down and reached for the cloak he had draped over a chair. Swirling it around himself, he started for the door, only to stop shortly before he reached it. Turning and stretching out with the Force, he glanced around the room, as one might to fix a memory in the mind. Briefly his gaze fell on the droid, its glowing photoreceptors whirring to regard him in evident curiosity.
A look of sinister purpose contorted Sidious’s face.
Again, his eyes darted around the room, and the dark side whispered:
Your election assured, the Sun Guards absent, Plagueis unsuspecting and asleep...
And he moved in a blur.

Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. "Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis."

A tremor took hold of the planet.
Sprung from death, it unleashed itself in a powerful wave, at once burrowing deep into the world’s core and radiating through its saccharine atmosphere to shake the stars themselves. At the quake’s epicenter stood Sidious, one elegant hand vised on the burnished sill of an expansive translucency, a vessel filled suddenly to bursting, the Force so strong within him that he feared he might disappear into it, never to return. But the moment didn’t constitute an ending so much as a true beginning, long overdue; it was less a transformation than an intensification—a gravitic shift.
A welter of voices, near and far, present and from eons past, drowned his thoughts. Raised in praise, the voices proclaimed his reign and cheered the inauguration of a new order. Yellow eyes lifted to the night sky, he saw the trembling stars flare, and in the depth of his being he felt the power of the dark side anoint him.

Sidious had never learned how Plagueis’s own Master had met his end. Had he died at Plagueis’s hand? Had Plagueis, too, experienced a similar exultation on becoming a sole Sith Lord? Had the beast of the end time risen then to peek at the world it was to inhabit, knowing its release was imminent?
He raised his gaze to the ecliptic. The answers were out there, coded in light, speeding through space and time. Liquid fire coursing through him, visions of past and future riffling through his mind, he opened himself to the reconfigured galaxy, as if in an effort to peel away the decades...

Sidious moved back into the room to take a closer look at Plagueis. Then, after a long moment, he returned to the window and pulled the drapes aside.
His spirit soared, but briefly.
Something was shading his sense of triumph: a vague awareness of a power greater than himself. Was it Plagueis reaching out from the far side of death to vex him? Or was the feeling a mere consequence of apotheosis?
Outside, the summits of the tallest buildings were gilded by the first rays of daylight.

With the Battle of Naboo concluded—lost, in his estimation—Palpatine had no time to bask in adulation or celebrate his win. His first order of business, indeed his first official duty, was to travel to his homeworld to congratulate Queen Amidala and her new allies, the Gungans, on their surprise victory.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Theed and learned of Darth Maul’s defeat at the hands of the Jedi in a power-generator station that he understood in part the reason for the sense of loss and profound solitude he had experienced following the murder of Plagueis.

But strong as he had become, Maul found himself in awe of Sidious. The Sith Lord was astonishingly fast and efficient, and the Force flowed through him effortlessly. His sabers stabbed and slashed through the smallest hole in an opponent’s guard, his movements never carried him a millimeter out of position, and he could sense every attack Maul and Savage made before it developed.

Even via hologram, the flickering figure of Darth Sidious, hideous in blue and shadows, seemed to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension. "These are the envoys from Troxar," his Master said. How could he know? Dooku didn't ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.

Once again, Darth Sidious had divined the actions they would take well in advance of their own deciding. The talent had less to do with being able to peer into the future, than with having access to streams of possibilities. Sidious wasn't unerring. He could be surprised or taken off his guard—as at Geonosis, as in the case of Gunray's mechno-chair—but not for long. His mastery of the dark side of the Force endowed him with the power to decipher the currents that comprised the future, and to comprehend that while those currents were manifold, they were not boundless. Such mastery was one of the skills that distinguished Sidious from Yoda, who believed the future was so much in motion it could not be read with any clarity—especially during times when the dark side was on the ascendant. But how could Yoda be expected to see the whole picture with one eye closed? Deliberately closed. 

The Coruscant nightfall was spreading through the galaxy. The darkness in the Force was no hindrance to the shadow in the Chancellor's office; it was the darkness. Wherever darkness dwelled, the shadow could send perception. In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.

Sidious raised the hood of his robe and draped it to shadow the ruin of his face.
"Kneel before me, Anakin Skywalker."
Anakin dropped to one knee. He lowered his head.
"It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?"
There was no hesitation. "Yes."
Darth Sidious laid a pale hand on Anakin's brow. "Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth..."
A pause; a questioning in the Force—
An answer, dark as the gap between galaxies—
He heard Sidious say it: his new name.
Vader.
A pair of syllables that meant him. Vader, he said to himself. Vader.

A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful.
"The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition, Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader—I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps...
"How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan... "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had...redecorated...the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste...

The holding office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic comprised the nether vertex of the Senate Arena; it was little more than a circular preparations area, a green room, where guests of the Chancellor might be entertained before entering the Senate Podium—the circular pod on its immense hydraulic pillar, which contained controls that coordinated the movement of floating Senate delegation pods—and rising into the focal point of the chamber above. Above that podium, the vast holopresence of a kneeling Sith bowed before a shadow that stood below. Guards in scarlet flanked the shadow; a Chagrian toady cringed nearby.
"But the danger is real; be mindful."
"I will, my Master. Thank you."
The holopresence faded, and where its huge translucency had knelt was now revealed another presence, a physical presence, tiny and aged, clad in robes and leaning on a twist of wood. But his physical presence was an illusion; the truth of him could be seen only in the Force. In the Force, he was a fountain of light. "Pity your new disciple I do; so lately an apprentice, so soon without a Master."
"Why, Master Yoda, what a delightful surprise! Welcome!" The voice of the shadow hummed with anticipation. "Let me be the first to wish you Happy Empire Day!"
"Find it happy, you will not. Nor will the murderer you call Vader."
"Ah." The shadow stepped closer to the light. "So that is the threat I felt. Who is it, if I may ask? Who have you sent to kill him?"
"Enough it is that you know your own destroyer."
"Oh, pish, Master Yoda. It wouldn't be Kenobi, would it? Please say it's Kenobi—Lord Vader gets such a thrill from killing people who care for him..."
Behind the shadow, some meters away, Mas Amedda—the Chagrian toady who was Speaker of the Galactic Senate—heard a whisper in Palpatine's voice. Flee.
He did.
Neither light nor shadow gave his exit a glance.
"So easily slain, Obi-Wan is not."
"Neither are you, apparently; but that is about to change." The shadow took another step, and another.

The end came with astonishing suddenness. The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength.

Clone troops were already swarming into it. "It was Yoda," he said as he swung out of the pod. "Another assassination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building." He didn't have time to direct the search personally. The Force hummed a warning in his bones: Lord Vader was in danger. Mortal danger.

Alert to a mild disturbance in the Force, he swung toward the throne room holoprojector a moment before a half-life-size image of Mas Amedda resolved from thin air.

Sidious was pleased. Vader had done well. He had sensed the change in him, even in the brief conversation they had had following the events on Kashyyyk. Now that Vader had begun to tap deeply into the power of the dark side, his true apprenticeship could begin.

The Tarkin Doctrine offered two important elements. The first was a cogent and important plan for the Empire's future: "Rule through the fear of force, rather than through force itself." The second was to establish an invulnerable and powerful superweapon, part dramatic symbol, part real threat. Tarkin himself was developing plans for the weapon and he had established a hidden think tank of designers and scientists in a black-hole cluster known as the Maw. The Grand Moff didn't think the Emperor yet knew of his secrets, and intended to present the plans for any weapons developed himself, taking all the credit. Palpatine did know though, as he knew of Tarkin's ambitions.

Palpatine knew precisely why the Empire couldn’t last without his dread power: he had designed it that way. No one ever suspected how much he relied on the Dark Side of the Force. He shaped those of his government by using the Force against them. He used it to control his fleets and to drive his soldiers on to victory. He used it to destroy his enemies from a distance and learn of conspiracies against him. Without it, there was no way the Empire could endure, as he had designed it. The Dark Side flowed through him like some primordial ichor and was the key to all his power.

"The Death Star has been destroyed," he informed them, carefully noting their reactions.
Captain Thrawn betrayed no emotion. Complete control, the Emperor thought with approval. This one will go far. Crix Madine, leader of the elite Storm Commandos, frowned, conflicted emotions swirling deep beneath his surface. The fool thought he could hide his doubts from the Emperor. This foolishness would prove useful, thus the Emperor allowed it. For now.
Commander Grev T'Ran looked somber at the news. But before the expression dropped across his face, the Emperor had sensed something else. The beginnings of a smile. Such a small thing—a tensed muscle, a nearly imperceptible flinch—but it was enough. The Emperor had had his suspicions about T'Ran. Now they were confirmed.
He raised a finger, catching the attention of the Royal Guard. Then nodded. T'Ran's face paled as one of the guards peeled away from the line. His crimson robes swept the floor as he padded silently toward the traitor. The other officers looked away, their faces grim.
"Noooo!" T'Ran drew his blaster. "You can't—"
The guard's force pike jabbed into T'Ran's neck, silencing him forever. His body shuddered once, then dropped to the ground. The silent red figure waited on the Emperor's command, but the Emperor shook his head. They could take out the garbage later. For now, let the traitor stay where he was. It would serve as a helpful reminder.

The officers filed out, followed by the Red Guard, leaving the Emperor alone with his thoughts. Things were proceeding as they should, he realized now. As they must.
He would never doubt the power of the dark side of the Force to show him the way forward. The destruction of the Death Star was surely necessary, as it would guide him to this new path. Darkness was gathering, and the Emperor sensed that this pilot was at the heart of it. The dark side of the Force had brought him to light. The Emperor had only to find him—and the Emperor would find him. He knew that with an iron certainty. The pilot would be found. An ordered galaxy would follow. It was his destiny.

But then the Emperor sensed a new current in the ever-flowing energy of the Force. It began as a subtle, barely perceptible power surge, but in a frighteningly short time grew into the bright light that he came to know as Luke Skywalker. Lord Vader had sensed it too, but he lacked the vision that the Emperor possessed. As soon as this new power became known to him, the Emperor began plotting to corrupt it.
He worked his scheme with the guile and cunning that were his trademarks. The Emperor's plans may have reached further back in time than anyone could possibly imagine, for his ability to foresee the future was astounding. Perhaps the Emperor did not destroy Obi-Wan Kenobi with the rest of the Jedi because he foresaw the old man taking young Luke under his wing some day in the distant future. Obi-Wan had failed once, and had created Vader, the Emperor's greatest servant. Perhaps the Emperor expected him to fail again, giving the Emperor an even more powerful tool.
Perhaps he also foresaw the boy's part in the destruction of the first Death Star. Perhaps he knew that if Luke succeeded, his overconfidence in his newfound powers would cause him to make a mistake, to attempt to turn his father, to dare to beard the Emperor in his own den. The Emperor was fully capable of sacrificing the Death Star if it would gain him the last Jedi.
This is all merely speculation, for no one, not even Vader, ever really knew what was going on in the black recesses of the Emperor's mind. It is clear, however, that the Emperor was not surprised that Lord Vader failed to turn his son to the Dark Side—he had, in fact, counted upon it.

When the hologram of the Galactic Emperor finally spoke, it did so with a voice even deeper than Vader's. The Emperor's presence was awesome enough, but the sound of his voice sent a thrill of terror coursing through Vader's powerful frame. "You may rise, my servant," the Emperor commanded.
Immediately Vader straightened up. But he did not dare gaze into his master's face, and instead cast his eyes down at his own black boots.
"What is thy bidding, my master?" Vader asked with all the solemnity of a priest attending his god.
"There is a grave disturbance in the Force," the Emperor said.
"I have felt it," the Dark Lord replied solemnly.
The Emperor emphasized the danger as he continued. "Our situation is most precarious. We have a new enemy who could bring about our destruction."
"Our destruction? Who?"
"The son of Skywalker. You must destroy him, or he will be our undoing."
Skywalker!
The thought was impossible. How could the Emperor be concerned with this insignificant youth?
"He's not a Jedi," Vader reasoned. "He's just a boy. Obi-Wan could not have taught him so much that—"
The Emperor broke in. "The Force is strong in him," he insisted. "He must be destroyed."
The Dark Lord reflected a moment. Perhaps there was another way to deal with the boy, a way that might benefit the Imperial cause. "If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally," Vader suggested.
Silently the Emperor considered the possibility.
After a moment, he spoke again. "Yes...yes," he said thoughtfully. "He would be a great asset. Can it be done?"
For the first time in their meeting, Vader lifted his head to face his master directly. "He will join us," he answered firmly, "or die, my master."
With that, the encounter had come to an end. Vader kneeled before the Galactic Emperor, who passed his hand over his obedient servant. In the next moment, the holographic image had completely disappeared, leaving Darth Vader alone to formulate what would be, perhaps, his most subtle plan of attack.

Still, when Luke, if only momentarily, gave in to rage at the Emperor and swung his lightsaber blade down to finish the old man, he found Vader’s blade already blocking his. Luke relented and tried to avoid any further surrender to the Dark Side, but Palpatine knew the Skywalker anger too well. He had foreseen just how powerful Luke could be if he turned to the way of destruction. More powerful than Vader.

Palpatine is a master of manipulation and has no qualms about using crime lords, Grand Moffs, or other powerful figures as pawns in his game. Strangely, it always seems that he knows how all of his pieces will move several turns before they do.

"One wonders how that hotheaded young man managed to get into a protected corridor," the Emperor said. But there was no wonder in the Emperor's voice, none at all. Vader's face froze. He knew. It was not possible, for the guard who had admitted the would-be assassin into the corridor was no longer among the living, and none but that single man had known who ordered him to allow the young man access—but somehow, the Emperor knew. The Emperor's mastery of the dark side was great indeed.

Lord Vader stepped out of the elevator and stood at the entrance to the throne room. The light-cables hummed either side of the shaft, casing an eerie glow on the royal guards who waited there. He matched resolutely down the walkway, up the stairs, and paused subserviently behind the throne. He kneeled, motionless. 
Almost immediately, he heard the Emperor’s voice. “Rise. Rise and speak, my friend.”
Vader rose, as the throne swiveled around, and the Emperor faced him. They made eye contact from light-years and a soul’s breath away. Across that abyss, Vader responded. “My master, a small Rebel force has penetrated the shield and landed on Endor.”
“Yes, I know.” There was no hint of surprise in his tone; rather, fulfillment.
Vader noted this, then went on. “My son is with them.”
The Emperor’s brow furrowed less than a millimeter. His voice remained cool, unruffled, slightly curious. “Are you sure?”
“I felt him, my master.” It was almost a taunt. He knew the Emperor was frightened of young Skywalker, afraid of his power. Only together could Vader and the Emperor hope to pull the Jedi Knight over to the dark side. He said it again, emphasizing his own singularity. “I felt him.”
“Strange, that I have not,” the Emperor murmured, his eyes becoming slits. They both knew the Force wasn’t all-powerful—and no one was infallible with its use. It had everything to do with awareness, with vision. Certainly, Vader and his son were more closely linked than was the Emperor with young Skywalker—but, in addition, the Emperor was now aware of a cross-current he hadn’t read before, a buckle in the Force he couldn’t quite understand. “I wonder if your feelings on this matter are clear, Lord Vader.”
“They are clear, my master.” He knew his son’s presence, it galled him and fueled him and lured him and howled in a voice of its own.
“Then you must go to the Sanctuary Moon and wait for him,” Emperor Palpatine said simply. As long as things were clear, things were clear.
“He will come to me?” Vader asked skeptically. This was not what he felt. He felt drawn.
“Of his own free will,” the Emperor assured him. It must be of his own free will, else all was lost. A spirit could not be coerced into corruption, it had to be seduced. It had to participate actively. It had to crave. Luke Skywalker knew these things, and still he circled the black fire, like a cat. Destinies could never be read with absolute certainty—but Skywalker would come. That much was clear. “I have foreseen it. His compassion for you will be his undoing.” Compassion had always been the weak belly of the Jedi, and forever would be. It was the ultimate vulnerability. The Emperor had none. “The boy will come to you, and you will then bring him before me.”
“Vader bowed low. “As you wish.” With casual malice, the Emperor dismissed the Dark Lord. With grim anticipation, Vader strode out of the throne room, to board the shuttle for Endor. 

Young Luke had tasted the power of the Dark Side through his anger and his fear. Doubt clouded his mind, and he was unsure he could survive another confrontation with his father. Yet he was also sure that there was still good in his father; he was willing to risk everything to attempt to bring it out. The Emperor counted upon this, as he thought, "mistaken" belief to draw the boy into his trap. Once Luke was in his power, the Emperor would destroy Luke's friends and loved ones. Then he would force him to kill his father. Luke would be his, and the last hope would fade from the galaxy.

Pax Teem was about to speak when a Gran messenger intruded on the privacy canopy.
“Senator Kim, we are in receipt of an urgent communiqué from Naboo.”
While Kim was excusing himself, Palpatine dropped into the Force. Conversation at the table grew faint, and the physical forms of Pax Teem and the others became indistinct—more like blurs of lambent energy. He kept himself still as a disturbing echo reached him. By the time an ashen Kim was returning to the table, Palpatine was already out of his seat and hurrying to meet him.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
Kim stared at him as if from another world. “They’re dead. Everyone. My wife, my sons...”

The crepuscular chill of the Senate Rotunda had a way of lulling many to sleep. Sharpening his senses, Palpatine could hear the gentle snoring of human and nonhuman Senators seated in hover platforms adjacent to his station; more clearly, Sate Pestage and Kinman Doriana, opposite himon the platform's circular seat, gossiping maliciously.

Palpatine smiled tightly.
“What brings you to the docks, Senator?” Jobal asked.
“More than coincidence, m’lady. In fact, a matter of utmost urgency that involves your daughter, Padmé.”
“She’s here,” Ruwee said.
Palpatine looked at him. “On Coruscant?”
“Here, at Tannik.” He pointed to a nearby dock, where an energetic dark-haired girl was directing an antigrav pallet of foodstuffs into the bay of a waiting freighter. Catching sight of her father, Padmé waved.
“Who is the young man with her?” Palpatine asked.
“Ian Lago,” Jobal said.
Palpatine sharpened his vision. “The son of King Veruna’s counselor?”
Jobal nodded. “He’s become a bit lovesick.”
“And Padmé with him?”
“We hope not,” Ruwee said. “Ian’s a nice boy, but... Well, let’s just say that Kun Lago would not be happy to learn that his son has been fraternizing with the enemy, so to speak.”
Realizing that young Ian was eyeing him with sudden interest, Palpatine returned the look for a moment, then said, “This brings me directly to the point of my visit. As you’re no doubt aware, our King has instructed me to support the Trade Federation on the issue of taxation of the free-trade zones.”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.
Or was he?
Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning? Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise—for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?
If he hadn’t been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him. Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.
Sidious took care, still reaching out with the Force. On closer inspection, he saw that Plagueis’s already cyanotic flesh was smoothing out, his features relaxing.
Faintly aware of the whir of air scrubbers and sounds of the outside world infiltrating the luxurious suite, he continued the vigil; then, in relief, he pulled himself up to his full height and let out his breath. This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone.
Wry amusement narrowed his eyes.

The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.

They got up from the bench and began to amble back toward the university complex. Plagueis submerged himself deeply in the Force to study Palpatine, but he was unable to glean very much. Humans were difficult to read in the easiest of cases, and Palpatine’s mind was awash in conflict. So much going on in that small brain, Plagueis told himself. So much emotional current and self-interest. So unlike the predictable, focused intellects of the Outer Rim sentients, especially the hive-minded among them.

Palpatine’s expression softened. “For a time I thought about adopting the name of our distaff line. I haven’t rejected the dynasty I was born into. I’ve rejected the name I was given. But not for the grandiose reasons some think. Just the opposite, actually. I’m certain that you, of all beings, understand as much.”
There it was again, Plagueis thought: the deceptive cadence; the use of flattery, charm, and self-effacement as if rapier feints in a duel. The need to be seen as guileless, unassuming, empathetic. A youth with no desire to enter politics, and yet born for it.
Tenebrous had told him from the start that the Republic, with help from the Sith, would continue to descend into corruption and disorder, and that a time would come when it would have to rely on the strengths of an enlightened leader, capable of saving the lesser masses from being ruled by their unruly passions, jealousies, and desires. In the face of a common enemy, real or manufactured, they would set aside all their differences and embrace the leadership of anyone who promised a brighter future. Could this Palpatine, with Plagueis’s help, be the one to bring about such a transformation?
Again he tried to see deeper into Palpatine, but without success. The psychic walls the youth had raised were impenetrable, which made the young human something rare indeed. Had Palpatine somehow learned to corral the Force within himself, as Plagueis had concealed his own powers as a youth?
“Of course I understand,” he said finally.
“But...when you were young, did you question your motivations, especially when they ran counter to everyone else’s?”
Plagueis held his challenging gaze. “I never asked why this or why that, what if this or what if that. I simply responded to my own determination.”
Palpatine sat back in the speeder seat as if a great weight had been lifted from him.
“Some of us are required to do what others cannot,” Plagueis added in a conspiratorial way.
Without a word, Palpatine nodded.
Plagueis had no need to delve any further into whatever traumas had given rise to Palpatine’s cunning, secretive nature. He simply needed to know: Does this young human have the Force?

“We’ll have to keep this meeting brief,” Plagueis told Palpatine while they were following an elevated pathway that connected the viewing blind to one of the park’s rustic lodges. “Your father may have dispatched surveillance personnel.”
 Palpatine ridiculed the idea. “He is monitoring my offworld communiqués—that’s why you haven’t heard from me—but even he knows better than to have me watched.”
“You underestimate him, Palpatine,” Plagueis said, stopping in the middle of the pathway. “I spoke with him at Convergence.”
Palpatine’s mouth fell open. “The lake house? When? How—”
Plagueis made a soothing gesture and explained in great detail what had taken place. Concluding, he said, “He threatened, too, to place you out of reach.”
All the while Plagueis spoke, Palpatine was storming through circles on the narrow path, shaking his head in anger and balling his fists. “He can’t do this!” he snarled. “He hasn’t the right! I won’t allow it!”
Palpatine’s fury buffeted Plagueis. Blossoms growing along the sides of the pathway folded in on themselves, and their pollinators began to buzz in agitation. FourDee reacted, as well, wobbling on its feet, as if in the grip of a powerful electromagnet. Had this human truly been born of flesh-and-blood parents? Plagueis asked himself. When, in fact, he seemed sprung from nature itself. Was the Force so strong in him that it had concealed itself?

Palpatine’s expression darkened. “You know nothing of my true nature.” He paced away from Plagueis, then stopped and turned to him. “You never asked about the killings.”
“I’ve never been one for grim details,” Plagueis said. “But if you need to unburden yourself, do so.”
Palpatine raised his clawed hands. “I executed them with these! And with the power of my mind. I became a storm, Magister—a weapon strong enough to warp bulkheads and hurl bodies across cabinspaces. I was death itself!”
Plagueis sat tall in the chair, in genuine astonishment.
He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.
Oh, what a cautious taming he would require! Plagueis thought. But what an ally he might make. What an ally!

Some combination of the strictures—or perhaps recognition on Plagueis’s part for his apprentice’s unabated craving to visit Sith worlds—had landed Palpatine on scenic Dathomir. Sparsely populated and largely unexplored, Dathomir wasn’t Korriban or Ziost, but it was powerful in the Force, in part because of its fecundity, but mainly due to the presence of groups of female adepts who practiced dark side magicks.
He was meandering without clear purpose through one of Blue Desert City’s dustier quarters, far from the city center, when became aware of a faint pulse of Force energy, the origin of which was indistinct but close at hand.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit. Abruptly he made himself discernible in the Force, and immediately she turned her head in his direction and began to hurry across the square in his direction.
“Good sir,” she said in Basic as she drew near.
Feigning interest in the cheap wares of an itinerant trader, he pretended to be taken by surprise when she approached him from his blind side.
“Are you addressing me?” he asked, turning to her.
“I am, sir, if you’ve a moment to indulge a being in need.”
Her oblique eyes were rimmed by dark blemishes that matched the tint of her thick lips; poking from the wide sleeves of her robe, the tapered fingers of her hands bore long, talon-like nails.
Palpatine pretended impatience. “Why single me out, among this crowd of more richly attired beings?”
“Because you’ve the look and bearing of a man of intelligence and influence.” She gestured broadly. “The rest are rabble, despite their fine cloaks and headwear.”
He made a decorous show of suppressing a yawn. “Save your adulation for the rubes, woman. But since you’ve correctly identified me as better than the rest, you’re obviously aware that I’ve no time to waste on confidence games or tricks. So if its mere credits you’re after, I suggest you widen your search for someone more charitable.”
“I don’t ask for credits,” she said, studying him openly.
“What then? Come to the point.”
“It’s a gift I offer.”
Palpatine laughed without merriment. “What could you possibly have to offer someone like me?”
“Just this.” She opened the soft shoulder bag to reveal a humanoid infant of less than a standard year in age. The infant’s hairless head was stippled with an array of short but still pliant horns, and its entire body had been garishly and ceremonially tattooed in red and black pigments.
A male Zabrak, Palpatine told himself. But not of the Iridonian sort; rather, a Dathomirian. “How do you come by this newborn? Have you stolen him?”
“You misunderstand, good sir. My own child, this one is.”
Palpatine glowered. “You say that he is a gift, and yet you dissemble. Have you had dealings that have led you into such deep debt that you would part with your own flesh and blood? Or perhaps you’re addicted to spice or some other intoxicant?”
She stiffened. “Neither. I seek only to save his life.”
Palpatine’s expression changed. “Then speak honestly. You’re a long way from your coven, Nightsister. And a practitioner of magicks more than sufficient to keep your child from harm.”
Her eyes opened wide and bored into him, in search of explanation. “How—”
“Never mind how I know, Witch,” Palpatine said sharply. “The child, whether yours or not, is a Nightbrother, conceived for the purpose of serving the sisterhood as a warrior and slave.”

Orders to attend Vidar Kim's funeral had come from Naboo and from Plagueis, who said that he should us the opportunity to seek out Ronhar Kim and speak with him personally. Palpatine had yet to meet one-on-one with a Jedi, and a conversation with Ronhar would allow him to test his ability to conceal his true nature from another Force-user.
As wicked as Coruscant is, Plagueis had told him, the Force is strong there because of the presence of so many Jedi. If you are successful in hiding in plain sight, you will be able to conceal your nature from the most powerful among them. Take Ronhar into your confidence, and once you have, spend some of your time on Coruscant acquainting yourself with the spired headquarters of our enemy, and ask yourself: Is this not a fortress designed to hold the dark at bay?
Otherwise, Plagueis's silence on the matter of Kim's assassination had been deafening. On learning that King Tapalo had appointed Palpatine interim Senator, Plagueis had offered his congratulations, but nothing more. After months of not seeing him, Palpatine had hoped to find Plagueis waiting for him on Coruscant, but Hego Damask and the Muuns who made up Damask Holdings were conducting unspecified business on distant Serenno.
The funeral service was held at Naboo's embassy, which was located below and to the west of the Monument Plaza and the Senate. Dressed in a high-collared cape and purple robes, Palpatine arrived at the ornate monad in the company of Kinman Doriana, Sate Pestage, and Janus Greejatus, who had been dispatched to Coruscant by Tapalo, and whom Palpatine suspected had some strength in the Force. Kinman and Sate had forged an instant bond. The youthful Doriana wad made for a world like Coruscant, and he couldn't have asked for a better guide to the galactic capital's titillating underbelly than Pestage, who seemed to know every nook and cranny of the place. Ronhar Kim was among several dozen guests who were attending the service. Palpatine waited until the Jedi was alone in the viewing room before approaching him.
In concealing yourself, you will not be able to rely on your dark gifts, Plagueis said. Instead you must be yourself, submerged in the unified pattern to which the Jedi are attuned; visible in the Force, but not as a Sith. Since you cannot allow yourself to be seen, you must make certain that you are taken for granted. Disguised in the profane; camouflaged in the routine—in those same realms from which you can attack without warning when necessary.
A tall, muscular young man attired in black robes, Ronhar had thick black hair pulled into a bun behind, and with long strands in front dangling from temples to chin. In him, Palpatine could see Vidar, whose body was lying in state, supine on a massive rectangular stone bier. A simple blanket covered the corpse from shoulders to knees, and on the chest sat a shallow metallic bowel containing purple flowers and a lighted candle meant to symbolize the Livet Tower's Eternal Flame. Janus Greejatus would transport the cremation ashes to Naboo, where they would be scattered in the Solleu River.
"Jedi Ronhar Kim," Palpatine said as he entered the room, "please forgive the intrusion, but I wanted to offer my condolences in person."
Roused from his thoughts, Ronhar whirled on him, almost in defense, and scanned head-to-toe. "Who are you?"
"Palpatine," he said, "I've been appointed to succeed Vidar Kim as Senator of Naboo. I knew your father well."
Ronhar's vigilance eased. "Forgive me for not knowing more about Naboo, Senator...Palpatine. But in fact, until several weeks ago I wasn't aware that Vidar Kim was my biological father, or even that Naboo was my homeworld.
Palpatine feigned understanding. "No need to apologize. I imagine that the Force is, in some sense, its own domain."
Ronhar nodded. "I scarcely knew the man. Were it not for the fact that the was a Republic Senator, the Jedi Council would not have granted dispensation for me to meet with him."
Palpatine allowed himself to stretch out with the Force, but only for a moment, and chiefly to gauge the Jedi's reaction, which proved to be indiscernible. "Excuse me for asking, but why then did you choose to attend the service?"
Ronhar grew pensive. "No doubt you know about the tragedy that claimed the lives of his wife and sons."
"I do."
"Vidar Kim contacted me to ask if I would consider renouncing my pledge to the Jedi, in order to become the bearer of the family name."
Palpatine moved closer to him and added compassion to his voice. "He told me, Ronhar. Does your presence here reflect doubt as to your obligations?"
"No," the Jedi said, perhaps more firmly than he intended. "I'm only here out of respect for the man. As you may also know, he died at the hands of an assassin while in my company." Ronhar's voice betrayed disappointment rather than anger. "If I had acted sooner, he would be alive, and at present I can't be certain that the assassin's blaster bolts weren't meant for me, rather than Vider Kim."
"Who in their right mind would target a Jedi Knight?"
The Jedi sniffed and narrowed his dark eyes. "The Jedi do not lack for enemies, Senator. Doling out justice and ensuring that peace doesn't sit well with some beings."
"The world of politics is no safer, Ronhar. Not in this era, with so many in need. Thank the Force we have the Jedi."
"I wonder," Kim said.
Palpatine regarded him with interest. The Jedi was less interested in solving them murder of Vidar than he was in agonizing over his failure to prevent it. "You wonder about what, Ronhar?"
"What my life would have been had I not become a Jedi."
Palpatine adopted a look of shock. "The choice was not yours to make. You have the Force. Your destiny was a forgone conclusion."
Ronhar mulled it over. "And if Vidar Kim had elected not to surrender me to the Order?"
"A line of thought impossible to follow to any conclusion," Palpatine said.
The Jedi looked at him and squared his shoulders. "There are many forks in the path, Senator. Had I remained on Naboo I might have followed Vidar Kim's footsteps and entered politics. Perhaps it's not too late."
Palpatine showed him a tolerant smile and came alongside him, confident now that his true nature was beyond detection. "I have to admit that the notion of a politician with Jedi values is not without its appeal. In fact, the Republic was once overseen by Jedi chancellors only. But I'm afraid you're something of an anachronism, Ronhar. The galaxy appears to have rejected the idea of enlightened leadership. The best politician presently is merely exceptional, where every Jedi is extraordinary."
Ronhar laughed shortly. "More and more, Senator Palpatine, you begin to sound like my former Master."
"Would that I had such talents," Palpatine said, making light of it. "But I do have a proposition, Ronhar. Not only am I new to the Senate, I'm new to Coruscant. And it would be good to have someone to count on as a friend. So what would you say to an alliance between a politician and a Jedi? Through me you gain insight into the workings of the Republic, and through you I might better understand the Jedi, in their roles as peacekeepers."
Ronhar inclined his head in a bow. "I respect Vidar Kim all the more for bringing us together. May the Force be with you, Senator Palpatine."

Elsewhere on the broad avenue—at key intersections, taxi stops, and mag-lev exits—stood groups of Jedi, a few with the hilts of their lightsabers conspicuously visible. For Palpatine the sight of so many of them in one place was at once exhilarating and sobering. Though thoroughly cloaked in the everyday, he could feel their collective pride trickle into him through the Force.

The contingent of Senators had scarcely left when Palpatine heard his name called; turning, he saw Ronhar Kim in the company of two older human Jedi. Quietly he pulled his powers deeper into himself and adopted a mask of cordiality.
"Jedi Ronhar," he said, inclining his head in greeting.
The black-haired Jedi returned the nod. "Senator Palpatine, may I introduce Masters Dooku and Sifo-Dyas."
Palpatine was familiar with the former, but only by reputation. "A great honor, Masters."
Dooku appraised him openly, then arched his eyebrow. "Excuse me for staring, Senator, but Ronhar's descriptions of you led me to expect someone older."
"I disguise myself well, Master Dooku. My age, that is."
"Either way," Sifo-Dyas remarked, "a talent required by your position."
"An ignoble truth, Master Sifo-Dyas. But we strive to remain faithful to our conscience."
Dooku smiled with purpose. "Hold tight to that, Senator Palpatine. Coruscant will surely need your resolve."

One of his earliest memories was that of being taken to the Jedi Temple. Both he and Sidious had been disguised as tourists. His master's command of the dark side had been sufficient to cloak them from being sensed by their enemies, as long as they did not enter the building. That had been unlikely anyway—the Jedi Temple was not open for tourism. They had stood there for the better part of the day, Darth Sidious pointing out to him the various faces of their foes as the latter came and went. It had been thrilling to Maul to realize that he could stand in the presence of the Jedi, could listen to his master whisper to him of their ultimate downfall, without the having any inkling of the fate that ultimately awaited them.

Suddenly, my lightsaber is gone. It flies from my hand across the room. It lands in the hand of my Master. I never see him enter. Not if he doesn't want me to. The smile of triumph fades from my face.
"Do you think," Lord Sidious says, walking toward me, "you can ever relax your guard?"
"No, Master." What a clumsy, weak mistake. I should be prepared for him to enter at all times. How could I have forgotten that, even for a moment?

"It's a great pity that our paths have never crossed before, Obi-Wan," he said, his voice warm and inviting. "Qui-Gon always spoke very highly of you. I wish he was still alive—I could use his help right now." 
"Qui-Gon Jinn would never join you." 
"Don't be so sure, my young Jedi," Count Dooku immediately replied, an offsetting smile on his face, one of confidence and calm. "You forget that Qui-Gon was once my apprentice just as you were once his." 
"You believe that brings loyalty above his loyalty to the Jedi Council and the Republic?" 
"He knew all about the corruption in the Senate," Dooku went on without missing a beat. "They all do, of course. Yoda and Mace Windu. But Qui-Gon would never have gone along with the status quo, with that corruption, if he had known the truth as I have." The pause was dramatic, demanding a prompt from Obi-Wan. 
"The truth?" 
"The truth," said a confident Dooku. "What if I told you that the Republic was now under the control of the Dark Lords of the Sith?" 
That hit Obi-Wan as profoundly as any of the electric bolts holding him ever could. "No! That's not possible." His mind whirled, needing a denial. He alone among the living Jedi had battled a Sith Lord, and that contest had cost his beloved Master Qui-Gon his life. "The Jedi would be aware of it." 
"The dark side of the Force has clouded their vision, my friend," Dooku calmly explained. "Hundreds of Senators are now under the influence of a Sith Lord called Darth Sidious."

Yoda surrendered himself to the current of the Force. Sometimes, when the current was swift and steadfast, he could see through the eyes of his fellow Jedi, almost as if they were the Temple's remote sensors. And sometimes, when the current was especially forceful, he could hear the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn, as clearly as if h were still alive. Master Yoda, he might say, we still have much to learn. The Force remains a code only partially deciphered. But another key has been found. We will become stronger than we ever have been...  
Today was not one of those days. Today the current was interrupted by eddies and whirlpools, hydraulic traps whose roar overpowered the voices Yoda sought to hear. Today the current was not pellucid, but muddied by red soil eroded from distant shores, treacherous with obstacles, tainted. Though he was scarcely aware of it, his eyelids were squeezed tight, his eyeballs dancing beneath as if incapable of focusing on any one thing. He had an image of himself drawing aside a veil only to find another, and another beyond that. The dark side frustrated his every effort to see clearly. The experiences was still something new to him.

For that reason he understood just how dangerous this new Sith Lord was. He hadn't had a sense of that danger until he had fought Dooku on Geonosis. Then he understood. In self-exile for a thousand years, the Sith had not merely been waiting for an appropriate time to reemerge and exact revenge, but for the birth of one strong enough to embrace the dark side fully and become its dedicated instrument. 
This was Sidious: powerful enough to hide in plain sight. Powerful enough to instruct his apprentice, Dooku, to expose him, and still remain hidden from the Jedi. And as arrogant as the Jedi. Convinced that his way was the one and only way. 

Thrawn needed C'baoth to coordinate his military forces in much the same way Emperor Palpatine consolidated the fighting spirit of his followers through the Force.

Palpatine knew precisely why the Empire couldn’t last without his dread power: he had designed it that way. No one ever suspected how much he relied on the Dark Side of the Force. He shaped those of his government by using the Force against them. He used it to control his fleets and to drive his soldiers on to victory. He used it to destroy his enemies from a distance and learn of conspiracies against him. Without it, there was no way the Empire could endure, as he had designed it. The Dark Side flowed through him like some primordial ichor and was the key to all his power.

For the first time, the Death Star rocked. The collision with the exploding Destroyer was only the beginning, leading to various systems breakdowns, which led to reactor meltdowns, which led to personnel panic, abandonment of posts, further malfunctions, and general chaos. Smoke was everywhere, substantial ramblings came from all directions at once, people were running and shouting. Electrical fires, steam explosions, cabin depressurizations, disruption of chain-of-command. Added to this, the continued bombardment by Rebel cruisers—smelling fear in the enemy—merely heightened the sense of hysteria that was already pervasive. 
For the Emperor was dead. The central, powerful evil that had been the cohesive force to the Empire was gone; and when the dark side was this diffused, this nondirected—this was simply where it led.
Confusion. 
Desperation. 
Damp fear.

Thrawn smiled back. "It is indeed. Tell me, Master C'baoth: are you familiar with the Imperial Fleet's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Endor five years ago?"
"I've heard rumors. One of the offworlders who came here spoke about it." C'baoth's gaze drifted to the window, to the palace/crypt visible across the square. "Though only briefly."
Pellaeon swallowed. Thrawn himself didn't seem to notice the implication. "Then you must have wondered how a few dozen Rebel ships could possibly rout an Imperial force that outgunned it by at least ten to one "I didn't spend much time with such wonderings," C'baoth said dryly. "I assumed that the Rebels were simply better warriors."
"In a sense, that's true," Thrawn agreed. "The Rebels did indeed fight better, but not because of any special abilities or training. They fought better than the Fleet because the Emperor was dead."
He turned to look at Pellaeon. "You were there, Captain—you must have noticed it. The sudden loss of coordination between crew members and ships; the loss of efficiency and discipline. The loss, in short, of that elusive quality we call fighting spirit."
"There was some confusion, yes," Pellaeon said stiffly. He was starting to see where Thrawn was going with this, and he didn't like it a bit. "But nothing that can't be explained by the normal stresses of battle."
One blue-black eyebrow went up, just slightly. "Really? The loss of the Executor—the sudden, last-minute TIE fighter incompetence that brought about the destruction of the Death Star itself—the loss of six other Star Destroyers in engagements that none of them should have had trouble with? All of that nothing but normal battle stress?"
"The Emperor was not directing the battle," Pellaeon snapped with a fire that startled him. "Not in any way. I was there, Admiral—I know."
"Yes, Captain, you were there," Thrawn said, his voice abruptly hard. "And it's time you gave up your blindfold and faced the truth, no matter how bitter you find it. You had no real fighting spirit of your own anymore—none of you in the Imperial Fleet did. It was the Emperor's will that drove you; the Emperor's mind that provided you with strength and resolve and efficiency. You were as dependent on that presence as if you were all borg-implanted into a combat computer."

From the exterior, the Death Star's habitable surface was divided into two hemispheres, each with 12 zones. It had a crew of more than 265,000 soldiers. The total personnel soared to more than one million with the addition of gunners, ground troopers, and starship support crews and pilots.

At the chamber's center, an enormous orb of transparent greenish blue liquid, nearly two meters in diameter, was suspended in the air above a circular dining table. Dozens of small, multicolored aquatic creatures swam within the orb, some so close to the surface that their swishing tails sent ripples around the orb's circumference.

Sidious smiled. "Excellent." He stepped past the boy and stopped beside the floating orb. Maul noticed that all the aquatic creatures within the orb swam to the far side, putting distance between themselves and Sidious. Sidious glanced at the creatures as if he found them only mildly interesting. "Maul, I have something important to tell you. I want you to listen carefully."
Maul listened.
Speaking slowly, Sidious said, "You...are...remarkable." Looking away from the watery orb, he faced Maul and added, "Very remarkable."
Maul did not know why he might be considered remarkable, or how Sidious expected him to respond. He decided to remain silent.
"Our galaxy is home to trillions of life-forms. Some are large, others small. But as diverse as they are, the truth is that most life-forms are just like these fish. Sidious gestured at the fish with a dismissive wave, and the fish appeared to shiver within the orb. "They seldom stray from where they were born. They spend their time worrying about their next meal, about how they might avoid pain, and how long they might live. They live in fear of one another. And then, they die. It does not matter if they are an insect, a fish, a man, or...a snake."

Sidious beamed at the boy. "Good." He glanced at the watery orb. "Ah! Look there, are those two fish."
Maul followed Sidious's gaze and saw a small fish with red and black stripes hovering beside a larger dark gray fish that had moved away from the other creatures to the bottom of the orb. Maul replied, "Yes, Master Sidious." He noticed that the smaller fish had yellow eyes, the same color as his own. The small fish stared back at Maul.
"How amusing," Sidious said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say those two were pretending to be us. If they were, I wonder where that would leave the rest."
Maul looked at the fish in the orb's upper area and saw them begin to jerk and spasm. Several fish puffed up twice their original size, shuddered violently, and suddenly deflated. Others rolled erratically through the water, their eyes bulging as their gills pumped furiously. But after a few seconds, all the fish except for the two at the bottom stopped swimming entirely and began drifting off in different directions. Some floated toward the top of the orb, but most sank down beside the two surviving fish, who continued to hover next to each other. As the fish sank, Sidious recited a strange verse:

"Far above, far above,
We don't know where we'll fall.
Far above, far above,
What once was great is rendered small."

Maul wondered what the words meant. He knew Sidious had somehow selected the two fish and maneuvered them to the bottom of the orb and caused all the others to die. He didn't know how Sidious had done this, but he suspected it was some kind of magic.

At that instant, Vader sprang up and grabbed the Emperor from behind, pinning Palpatine's upper arms to his torso. Weaker than he'd ever been, Vader had lain still these last few minutes, focusing his very fiber of being on this one, concentrated act—the only action possible; his last, if he failed. Ignoring pain, ignoring his shame and his weakness, ignoring the bone-crushing noise in his head, he focused solely and sightlessly on his will—his will to defeat the evil embodied in the Emperor.
Palpatine struggled in the grip of Vader's unfeeling embrace, his hands still shooting bolts of malign energy out of in all directions. In his wild flailing, the lightning ripped across the room, tearing into Vader. The Dark Lord fell again, electric currents crackling down his helmet, over his cape, into his heart. Vader stumbled with his load to the middle of the bridge over the black chasm leading to the power core. He held the wailing despot high over his head, and with a final spasm of strength, hurled him into the abyss.
Palpatine's body, still spewing bolts of light, spun out of control, into the void, bouncing back and forth off the sides of the shaft as it fell. It disappeared at last; but then, a few seconds later, a distant explosion could be heard, far down at the core. A rush of air billowed out of the shaft, into the throne room. The wind whipped at Lord Vader's cape, as he staggered and collapsed toward the hole, trying to follow his master to the end. Luke crawled to his father's side, though, and pulled the Dark Lord away from the edge of the chasm, to safety.

But Luke surprised Palpatine by surrendering, refusing to continue the fight that would have resulted in his father's death and made him the Emperor's new Sith Apprentice. A livid Palpatine then used his own dark powers to attack, searing Luke with blasts of blue lightning. As he watched the agony of his son and the Emperor's glee, Vader finally broke the hold of evil that had suffocated him for so long. Vader grabbed the energy-seething Palpatine and hurled him into the Death Star reactor shaft, where the evil leader was disintegrated. The shock waves of dark power mortally wounded Vader. Luke Skywalker could do nothing for his dying father, the terrible enemy who had saved him in the end.

Maul snarled as he jumped to his feet and swiped at the air with both hands. Dozens of rocks launched up from around Maul and raced toward Sidious. Sidious moved his other hand out from behind his back and flexed his fingers. The approaching rocks rebounded as if they had struck an invisible shield. Some of the rebounding rocks fell near Maul's feet. Surprised, he stumbled back. He wasn't sure what had just happened.

"Already, I have perfected the Force maelstrom, which creates an invulnerable energy sphere to block incoming attacks while bombarding enemies with debris and electrifying them with bolts of lightning."

"The galaxy is choked with beings. Billions die every instant. It is better to make use of this resource. At my retreat on Byss, the life force of its colonists supplied an energy pool to sustain my dark side experiments."

Imperial ships ferried millions of immigrants to the planet Byss, where the Emperor fed off their life energies through the dark side.

After choosing Byss as his resort world, Palpatine lured eager nobles to the planet—then used his dark powers to enslave its people, channeling their life energies for use in his own vile experiments within the fell Imperial Citadel.

Years ago, Emperor Palpatine chose Byss as his private retreat, and Imperial architects and engineers were commissioned to build him an opulent palace. Several million humans were allowed to emigrate to the world, where the Emperor and his adepts used the dark side to feed off their life energies. The planet's population eventually reached almost 20 billion, and all outgoing communications were censored by security agents.

Now Sidious gave full vent to his ire. Crashing through the doors, he landed in the center of a table covered with plates of grains and grassy plans and surrounded by a herd of grazing Gran, whose boisterous laughs froze in their throats. From the head of the table, Pax Teem gawked at him as if he might be a creature escaped from his most horrifying nightmare. And yet he wouldn't be the first to taste Plagueis's blade but the last; once he had been forced to watch the rest of his party butchered, from hooves to eyestalks; the painted ceiling brought down by Sidious's Force pull; the flames of a gentle gas blaze in the room's fireplace incited to a blistering inferno that Sidious tugged behind him as he soared from the table to the floor and closed on his final victim.
In desperate flight from the Sith and the spreading flames, Pax Teem had backed himself to a tall window framed by floor-to-ceiling curtains. Entreaties of whatever sort tried to thrust themselves through his stricken voice box and past his square teeth, but none succeeded.
Deactivating the lightsaber, Sidious beckoned the flames with his fingers, encouraging them to leap from the table to the curtains. A bleating scream finally emerged from Teem's narrow muzzle of a mouth as the blazing fabric collapsed around him, and Sidious watched him roast to death.

"Not fast enough," Sidious said as a stone smashed into Maul's lower back.
Maul crouched and grabbed the nearest rock. He no sooner lifted it from the ground than he felt it burning into his hand. He yelped as he reflexively opened his fingers and let the rock fall. How could the rock have generated such intense heat? He suspected it was his Master's trickery.
"Oh, come now," Sidious said impatiently. "Almost any humanoid with fingers can do that."

"Anger concentrated by Will in the vital center of the body creates a portal through which vast energies are released—the energies of the Dark Side of the Force. Standing watch with the mind, in my meditation of Anger, I have slain my enemies from great distances, through the Dark Side Power that permeates the Galaxy. I have created lightning, and unleashed its destructive fire."

Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half-kilometer drop. Out where the shadow's fear made it hesitate. Out where the shadow's fear turned some of its Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.

"Of all the monsters I have created, I still regard Darth Vader as something of a minor masterpiece. No, he was not an entirely alchemical creation, but he was my monster nonetheless. Even though he failed to live up to his full potential, there was much pleasure in transforming Anakin Skywalker from a bright-eyed, tousle-haired youth into the greatest Jedi killer of all time. Yes, he ultimately turned against his Master, but that was my fault, not his. Given the opportunity to create Vader again, I would, and with zeal."

Darth Sidious fashioned heavy armor for his new apprentice, Lord Vader, in the traditions of Sith Lords of the past, though none ever succeeded in looking so terrifying.

The mysterious darksider called Azrakel was an experiment born in the mind of the Emperor and given life by the High Prophet Kadann. The Emperor found the young man, strong in the Force, and decided to expose him to the full force of the dark side. For weeks on end, the Emperor conducted his dark side experiments, hoping to see how long it would take for an unprepared mind to shatter. Time passed, and the Emperor grew bored and moved on to other matters. He left the youth to wither and die in one of his hidden retreats, forgetting all about him. 
High Prophet Kadann, who assisted the Emperor in a few of those experiments, decided to take the young man and nurse him back to health. The youth had been opened to the dark side, but his mind had been wiped clean. He was a blank slate upon which Kadann could create his own apprentice—a tool to use when and if he made his own play for control of the Empire.

"My monstrous chrysalides, with their magnificent metal-piercing fangs, guard the ramparts of my citadel. My mute Imperial sentinels stand by my throne, their annihilated minds and enslaved wills clear evidence the dark side can manipulate clones for any imaginative purpose. Although alchemy can create perfect beings, I have designed a weakness into all of these creations. The flaws are minute and known only to me. It would not do for any creature to be stronger than its creator."

The Sentinels are clones, mutated by the Dark Side Adepts as part of their training. During the growth cycle, odd chemicals that suppress the growth of higher brain functions are introduced. Simultaneously, the Adepts attempt to form a mental link to them. If the process is successful, the Sentinels end up as automatons: living statues dependent on the will of the Adepts themselves for purpose or movement. If the process is unsuccessful, the living monstrosities are disposed of. For the duration of the wretched being’s existence, it is the slave of the Dark Side Adept, knowing no other will than the Adept’s.

As often as Plagueis maintained that the Rule of Two had ended with their partnership, the Muun remained the powerful one, and Palpatine the covetous one. Bane’s dictum notwithstanding, denial was still a key factor in Sith training; a key factor in being “broken,” as Plagueis put it—of being shaped by the dark side of the Force. Cruelly, at times, and painfully. But Palpatine was grateful, for the Force had slowly groomed him into a being of dark power and granted him a secret identity, as well. The life he had been leading—as the noble head of House Palpatine, legislator, and most recently ambassador-at-large—was nothing more than the trappings of an alter ego; his wealth, a subterfuge; his handsome face, a mask. In the realm of the Force his thoughts ordered reality, and his dreams prepared the galaxy for monumental change. He was a manifestation of dark purpose, helping to advance the Sith Grand Plan and gradually gaining power over himself so that he might one day—in the words of his Master—be able to gain control over another, then a group of others, then an order, a world, a species, the Republic itself.

"Darth Plagueis was my Master. He taught me the key to his power," the shadow said, dryly matter-of-fact, "before I killed him."
Without understanding how he had moved, without even intending to move, without any transition of realization or dawning understanding, Anakin found himself on his feet. A blue bar of sizzling energy terminated a centimeter from Palpatine's chin, its glow casting red-edged shadows up his face and across the ceiling. Only gradually did Anakin come to understand that this was his lightsaber, and that it was in his hand.
"You," he said. Suddenly he was neither dizzy nor tired.
Suddenly everything made sense.
"It's you. It's been you all along!"
In the clean blue light of his blade he stared into the face of a man whose features were as familiar to him as his own, but now seemed as alien as an extragalactic comet—because now he finally understood that those familiar features were only a mask.
He had never seen this man's real face.

Anakin Skywaker knelt in the rain. He was looking at a hand. The hand had brown skin. The hand held a lightsaber. The hand had a charred oval of tissue where it should have been attached to an arm.
"What have I done?"
Was it his voice? It must have been. Because it was his question.
"What have I done?"
Another hand, a warm and human hand, laid itself softly on his shoulder.
"You're following your destiny, Anakin," said a familiar gentle voice. "The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You can see that, can't you?"
"You were right," Anakin heard himself saying. "Why didn't I know?"
"You couldn't have. They cloaked themselves in deception, my boy. Because they feared your power, they could never trust you."
Anakin stared at the hand, but he no longer saw it. "Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan trusts me..."
"Not enough to tell you of their plot."
Treason echoed in his memory.
...this is not an assignment for the record...
That warm and human hand gave his shoulder a warm and human squeeze. "I do not fear your power, Anakin, I embrace it. You are the greatest of the Jedi. You can be the greatest of the Sith. I believe that, Anakin. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you."
Anakin looked from the dead hand on the ledge to the living one on his shoulder, then up to the face of the man who stood above him, and what he saw there choked him like an invisible fist crushing his throat. The hand on his shoulder was human. The face...wasn't.
The eyes were a cold and feral yellow, and they gleamed like those of a predator lurking beyond a fringe of firelight; the bone around those feral eyes had swollen and melted and flowed like durasteel spilled from a fusion smelter, and the flesh that blanketed it had gone corpse-gray and coarse as rotten synthplast. Stunned with horror, stunned with revulsion, Anakin could only stare at the creature. At the shadow. Looking into the face of the darkness, he saw his future.
"Now come inside," the darkness said.
After a moment, he did.

Anakin stood just within the office. Motionless. Palpatine examined the damage to his face in a broad expanse of wall mirror. Anakin couldn't tell if his expression might be revulsion, or if this were merely the new shape of his features. Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."

"Always two there are"—not only master and apprentice, but persona and true face. Unmasked by deflected lightning during his duel with Mace Windu, the Sith Lord's true face is revealed to the world.

"Maul had but one reason for being: to exact vengeance against the Jedi Order for the decimation of the Sith ranks. Oh, how he dreamed of burning the Jedi Temple to the ground. I know, for I gave him that dream repeatedly."

One structure in particular—columnar in shape, round-topped, propped by angular ramparts—rising from the defiled core of The Works like a stake driven into its heart. Strong in the dark side—made so by Darth Sidious—the building had been the place of Dooku's apprenticeship, just as it had served as a training ground for Darth Maul before Dooku, and who knew who or how many other Sith disciples before Maul.

"Think of it, Anakin." Palpatine stood close by his shoulder, opposite to Obi-Wan, so close he needed only to whisper. "You have destroyed their political head. Take their military commander, and you will have practically won the war. Single-handed. Who else could do that, Anakin? Yoda? Mace Windu? They couldn't even capture Dooku. Who would have a chance against Grievous, if not Anakin Skywalker? The Jedi have never faced a crisis like the Clone Wars—but also they have never had a hero like you. You can save them. You can save everyone."
Anakin jerked, startled. He turned a sharp glance toward Palpatine. The way he said that...
Like a voice out of his dreams.

The mysterious planet Byss lies at the heart of the Imperial holdings in the Deep Core. A pleasant resort world used by Emperor Palpatine as a personal retreat, Byss was once a lush and fertile planet that was used as a lure to attract willing followers to settle in the Core. Over time, the Emperor's dark side energies slowly corrupted the world and transformed it into one of the most powerful dark side sites in the entire galaxy.

And from the Emperor himself, Mara Jade learned to develop her Force powers. She learned to listen for his telepathic "voice," even across the galaxy, and to draw strength from his own vast reserves of power.

Chancellor Palpatine spent many years studying ancient Holocrons to learn the secrets of the Sith. The Holocrons enabled him to channel Sith spirits, who taught him how to harness dark-side energy and release lethal bolts of lightning. During the Clone Wars, Palpatine conducted Sith rituals on Coruscant that radiated unnerving ripples in the Force, which caused anxiety among most Jedi throughout the galaxy, but also served to increase Anakin Skywalker's hunger for power.

Vader's lifesaving transformation is a complicated procedure that incorporates advanced technology with arcane Sith healing techniques.

At the same time, Sidious used the Force to shift the apron of one of the waiters just enough to reveal the grip of a hold-out blaster the man was wearing at his waist. Lifting his glass for another swallow, he did the same to another of the waiters, whose apron concealed an identical weapon. Both had been manufactured by BlasTech, but not for common consumption. The E-series 1-9—the aptly named Swiftkick—was available only to elite members of Santhe Security, headquartered on Lianna.
“I had better slow down,” he said with purposeful awkwardness. “I believe I’m becoming a bit light-headed.”
The Sullustan’s demeanor changed, though almost imperceptibly. “You just need some more food.” He slid a menu across the table. “Choose whatever you wish. Cost is no issue.” He stood. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, we’ll order as soon as I return.”
Sidious noted that the Sullustan wasn’t the only one getting to his feet. Under low-voiced orders from the waiters, patrons were calling for their checks and exiting. In moments he would be the Shimmersilk’s sole customer. As he swung slightly in his chair to stare into the corner of the room, a scenario began to emerge in his imaginings. The Sullustan, STP’s link to Malastare, Santhe Security agents, even the Dug bartender... Their issues were not with him but with Damask Holdings. He wasn’t being set up for an eventual allegation of corruption; a far more sinister deception was unfolding, and his interest was immediately renewed.
His first thought was that they had attempted to drug him. His investigations into Sith sorcery had taught him how to nullify the effects of many common poisons and venoms—a practice he had performed routinely before he’d even seated himself at the table. Perhaps, then, they were waiting for him to slump forward and lapse into unconscious or froth at the mouth and be shaken by spasms...
Just when he was thinking that it was his acting ability that was going to be put to the test, two of the waiters converged on him, now showing their discreet but powerful weapons.
“Someone wants a word with you, Senator,” the taller of the pair said.
“Here?” Sidious said in apparent confusion.
The other one motioned to a door. “Through there.”
Sidious masked his smile: the Shimmersilk had a back room.
He stood clumsily, leaning deliberately toward one of the security men, gauging his body temperature, heart rate, and respiration. “I’m slightly intoxicated. I may have to count on you for support.”
The man made a sound of exasperation but allowed Sidious to place one arm on his shoulder.
How effortless it would be, he thought, as the dark began to rise in him, searing and hungry, yearning to assume control of his body and unleash itself, to break the necks of both of them, to tear their beating hearts from their chests, to hurl and plaster them against the walls, to bring the entire sour-smelling place down on their heads...
But he didn’t. He needed to meet his abductor. He needed to learn the names of all those responsible. He needed to prove to his Master that he was adroit and capable—a true Sith Lord.

Plagueis had given the Sun Guards the night off, and the only other intelligence in the sprawling apartment was the droid 11-4D, their servant for the occasion, pouring wine into expensive glassware as they removed their cloaks.
“Sullustan,” Plagueis said, holding the glass up to the light and swirling its claret contents. “More than half a century old.”
“A toast, then,” Sidious said. “To the culmination of decades of brilliant planning and execution.”
“And to the new meaning we will tomorrow impart to the Rule of Two.”
They drained their glasses, and 11-4D immediately refilled them.
“Only you could have brought this to fruition, Darth Plagueis,” Sidious said, settling into a chair. “I will endeavor to live up your expectations and fulfill my responsibility.”
Plagueis took the compliment in stride, neither haughty nor embarrassed. “With my guidance and your charisma, we will soon be in a position to initiate the final act of the Grand Plan.” Making himself more comfortable on the couch, he signaled for 11-4D to open a second bottle of the vintage. “Have you given thought to what you will say tomorrow?”
“I have prepared some remarks,” Sidious said. “Shall I spoil the surprise?”
“Why not.”
Sidious took a moment to compose himself. “To begin, I thought I would say, that, while we in the Senate have managed to keep the Republic intact for a thousand years, we would never have been able to do so without the assistance of a few beings, largely invisible to the public eye, whose accomplishments now need to be brought into the light of day.”
Plagueis smiled. “I’m pleased. Go on.”
Speaking in a low monotone, Sidious said, “Hego Damask is one of those beings. It was Hego Damask who was responsible for overseeing development of the Republic Reserve Administration and for providing financial support for the Resettlement Acts that enabled beings to blaze new hyperspace routes to the outlying systems and colonize distant worlds.”
“That will come as a revelation to some.”
“In a similar fashion, it was Hego Damask who transformed the Trade Federation 
“No, no,” Plagueis interrupted. “Now is not the time to mention the Trade Federation.”
“I thought—”
“I don’t see any problem with calling attention to the arrangements I facilitated between the Republic and the Corporate Alliance and the Techno Union. But we must take care to avoid areas of controversy.”
“Of course,” Sidious said, as if chastised. “I was speaking off the top of my head.”
“Try a different approach.”
So Sidious did.
And as the night wore on, he continued to amend and improvise, touching on Damask’s childhood on Mygeeto and on the elder Damask’s contributions to the InterGalactic Banking Clan during his term as co-chair. Wineglass in hand, Sidious paced the richly carpeted floor, often vacillating between confidence and misgiving. More than once, Plagueis voiced satisfaction with everything he heard, but he urged Sidious to save his energy for the morning. By then, though, Sidious was too wound up to heed the advice and kept reworking the order of the remarks and the emphasis he gave to certain points.
The droid brought out a third, then a fourth bottle of the Sullustan wine.
Pleasantly intoxicated, Plagueis, who had wanted nothing more than to revel in the sweet taste of victory, was beginning to find his collaborator’s performance exhausting, and wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and drift into imaginings of his march into the Senate Rotunda; the looks of surprise, astonishment, and trepidation on the faces of the gathered Senators; his long-anticipated emergence from the shadows; his ascension to galactic power...
Unfortunately, Sidious wouldn’t let him.
“That’s enough for now,” Plagueis tried one final time. “You should probably return home and get at least a few hours’ rest before—”
“Just one more time—from the beginning.”
“The beginning?”
“Lord Plagueis, you said you wouldn’t rest until our win was a matter of fact.”
“So it is, and so I shall, Darth Sidious.”
“Then let us celebrate that, as well.” Sidious beckoned to 11-4D. “Fill our glasses, droid.”
With dreamy weariness beginning to get the better of him, it was all Plagueis could do to lift the glass to his nose. No sooner did he set the drink down than it tipped over, saturating the tablecloth. His eyelids began to flicker and close, and his breathing slowed. In twenty years of never having had to contend with Plagueis in a state of sleep, the transpirator clicked repeatedly in adjustment, almost as if in panic.
A few meters distant, Sidious came to a halt, gazing at Plagueis for a long moment, as though making up his mind about something. Then, blowing out his breath, he set his own glass down and reached for the cloak he had draped over a chair. Swirling it around himself, he started for the door, only to stop shortly before he reached it. Turning and stretching out with the Force, he glanced around the room, as one might to fix a memory in the mind. Briefly his gaze fell on the droid, its glowing photoreceptors whirring to regard him in evident curiosity.

Scarcely listening, Sidious moved with utmost care, his hands and knees seeking firm purchase on the stones. For weeks Darth Plagueis had deprived him of sleep, food, and water. Now if only he could reach the Muun, his thirst would be slaked, his hunger sated, his contusions healed. Countless times the broad expanse of rock debris had slipped and he’d had to ride the slide almost to the shore of the lake, tumbling, surfing on his front and back, abrading his ruddy skin, bruising nearly every part of himself. Only to have to pick his way back to the top. Seething in silence, he managed to scale a meter more of the slope, calling on the Force to ensure his balance, to render him weightless.

Aboard Grievous's devastated flagship, Papatine shows remarkable strength and dexterity by negotiating a precarious elevator shaft and corridors turned topsy-turvy by ruined gravity projectors.

In the inner recesses of his private office, the Jedi confronted the Chancellor. Palpatine produced a lightsaber hidden in his sleeve and let the dark side flow through him. It granted him unnatural dexterity and speed—enough to quickly kill three Jedi Masters and force the mighty Mace Windu back.

Scarcely listening, Sidious moved with utmost care, his hands and knees seeking firm purchase on the stones. For weeks Darth Plagueis had deprived him of sleep, food, and water. Now if only he could reach the Muun, his thirst would be slaked, his hunger sated, his contusions healed.

The Muun’s shadow fell over him. Arms folded across his chest, Plagueis loomed.
“If you’re to succeed in inhabiting both realms, Sidious—the profane world and that of the Force—you need to learn how to use guile to your advantage, and to recognize when others are employing it.” Without extending a hand, Plagueis tugged him to his feet. “If you can survive a few more days without sustenance or rest, I may be inclined to teach you.”

Envy, hatred, betrayal... They were essential to mastering the dark side, but only as a means of distancing oneself from all common notions of morality in the interest of a higher goal. Only when Sidious had understood this fully had he acted on it, killing his Master while he slept. Unlike Plagueis, Sidious knew better than to sleep.

Close aides say that Palpatine sometimes works for days without sleeping.

Scarcely listening, Sidious moved with utmost care, his hands and knees seeking firm purchase on the stones. For weeks Darth Plagueis had deprived him of sleep, food, and water. Now if only he could reach the Muun, his thirst would be slaked, his hunger sated, his contusions healed. Countless times the broad expanse of rock debris had slipped and he’d had to ride the slide almost to the shore of the lake, tumbling, surfing on his front and back, abrading his ruddy skin, bruising nearly every part of himself. Only to have to pick his way back to the top.
Seething in silence, he managed to scale a meter more of the slope, calling on the Force to ensure his balance, to render him weightless.
“Fool,” Plagueis derided him. “Success doesn’t come from summoning help from the Force, but from taking control of it and generating the power from within yourself.” He sighed theatrically. “Still, I’m somewhat encouraged by the progress you’ve made. Mere centimeters from me now, almost within arm’s reach. Soon I’ll be able to feel your breath on my neck and perceive the heat of your rage—your desire to kill me, as if by doing so, you could lay claim to the authority I embody.” He paused but didn’t move, much less glance over his shoulder. “You want to strangle me, like you did your poor, misunderstood mother; tear me limb from limb as you did the bodyguards. Fair enough. But to do so you will have to make a greater effort, Apprentice.”
Like a feline, Sidious leapt from the scree, his curled fingers aimed for Plagueis. But instead of vising themselves around the Muun’s slender neck, his hands went through thin air and met each other, leaving him to collapse face-first atop the outcropping. Off to one side he heard his Master laugh in scorn. Either Plagueis had moved faster than Sidious could discern or, worse yet, he had never been there to begin with.
“So easily tricked,” Plagueis said, confirming the latter. “You waste my time. More of this and the dark side will never take an interest in you.”
Sidious whirled, flinging himself at Plagueis, only to meet an irresistible force and be hurled backward to the frozen ground.
The Muun’s shadow fell over him. Arms folded across his chest, Plagueis loomed.
“If you’re to succeed in inhabiting both realms, Sidious—the profane world and that of the Force—you need to learn how to use guile to your advantage, and to recognize when others are employing it.” Without extending a hand, Plagueis tugged him to his feet. “If you can survive a few more days without sustenance or rest, I may be inclined to teach you.”

In mad pursuit of their prey and all but taking flight, the two Sith, Master and apprentice for eleven years now, bounded across the grassy terrain, their short capes snapping behind them, vibroblades clenched in their hands and bare forearms flecked with gore; blood caked in the human's long hair and dried on the Muun's hairless brow. Twisting and swirling around them was a herd of agile, long-necked quadrupeds with brown-and-black fur; identical and moving as if possessed of a single mind, leaping at the same instant, reversing direction, cycloning gregariously over the short-napped savanna.
“This is not a chase,” Plagueis said as he ran, “this is a summoning. You need to get behind the eyes of your target and become the object of its desire. The same holds true when you summon the Force: you must make yourself desirable, fascinating, addictive, and whatever power you need will be at your command.”
Blended into the herd, the animal Sidious had fixed his sight on would have been indistinguishable to normal beings. But Sidious had the animal in his mind and was now looking through its eyes, one with it. Alongside him suddenly, the creature seemed to intuit its end and tipped its head to one side to expose its muscular neck. The moment the vibroblade stuck, the creature’s eyes rolled back and grew opaque; hot blood spurted but quickly ceased to flow—the Force departing, and Sidious drawing its power deep into himself.

Then: through a warren of expensively appointed rooms to another set of closed doors, from behind which issued the sounds of a banquet in progress—one that had probably commenced hours earlier and wasn’t meant to end until hours later, with the deaths of Senator Palpatine, Hego Damask, and the other Muuns an accomplished fact.
Now Sidious gave full vent to his ire. Crashing through the doors, he landed in the center of a table covered with plates of grains and grassy plants and surrounded by a herd of grazing Gran, whose boisterous laughs froze in their throats.

Clawing his way across the tundra, his body rashed with lightsaber burns, Sidious looked up at Plagueis, imploringly.
“How much longer, Master?”
Plagueis deactivated his weapon’s crimson blade and scowled. “Perhaps a moment, perhaps an eternity. Stop thinking of the future, and anchor yourself in the present. A Sith apprentice is the antithesis of a Jedi youngling nurtured in the Temple, battling a floating remote with a training lightsaber. A Sith acquaints himself with pain from the start, and inflicts it, as well. A Sith goes for the throat, just as you did on your family’s starship.”
Sidious continued to gaze at him. “I meant, how much longer will it take me to learn?”
The Muun sized him up with a look. “Hard to tell. Humans are their own worst enemies. Your body isn’t meant to withstand real punishment. It is easily injured and slow to heal. Your olfactory and tactile senses are relatively acute, but your auditory and visual senses are extremely limited.”
“Have I no strengths, Master?”
Plagueis dropped to one knee in front of him. “You have the Force, apprentice, and the talent to lead. More, you have the bloodlust of a serial killer, though we need to hold that in reserve unless violence serves some extraordinary purpose. We are not butchers, Sidious, like some past Sith Lords. We are architects of the future.”
Sidious swallowed and found his voice. “How long?”
Plagueis stood, reigniting the lightsaber as he did so. “Not a standard day sooner than a decade.”

By the time he left Kim's office the weather had turned sharply colder. Snow flurries were swirling around the palace towers, and the shallows to the Solleu tributaries were sheened with ice. The agent from Coruscant whom Plagueis had provided—Sate Pestage—was waiting in a small plaza behind the Parnelli Art Museum, warming his hands with his breath.
"The Naboo have never heard of climate control?" he commented as Palpatine approached.
Recalling his early conditioning sessions on glacial Mygeeto, Palpatine almost laughed at the man's remarks.

The Malastare ambassador’s residence occupied three mid-tier stories of a slender building located at the edge of the government district. The front of the residence looked out on the stand-alone Galactic Courts of the Justice Building, but the rear faced a narrow canyon that was more than fifty levels deep and off limits to traffic. Following directions furnished by Pestage, Sidious rode turbolifts and pedestrian walkways to a meager balcony ten levels above the upper story of the residence. His fury notwithstanding, he would have preferred to linger until nightfall, which came early to that part of Coruscant, but he was certain that the Gran were expecting word that the Maladians had satisfied the terms of the contract, and he couldn’t risk having them flee for the stars before he got to them. So he lingered on the balcony until it and the walkway in both directions were unoccupied, then jumped from the overlook and called on the Force to deliver him safely to a narrow ledge that ran beneath the lowest floor of the residence.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.

When Leia tried to kill the Emperor by dropping a cooling unit on him, Palpatine shrugged off the crushing impact of a ton of machinery.

Cosinga exhaled deeply. “I know that you are of my blood, because I had you tested, just to be certain. But in truth, I don’t know where you came from—who or what you’re actually descended from.” He glared at Palpatine. “Yes, there it is: that glower I have been on the receiving end of for seventeen long years. As if you want to murder me. Murder has always been in your thoughts, hasn’t it? You’ve merely been waiting for someone to grant you permission to act.”
A darkness came over Palpatine’s face. “I don’t need anyone’s permission.”
“Precisely. You’re an animal at heart.”
“King of the beasts, Father,” Palpatine said.
“I knew this day would come. I’ve known it since the first moment I tried to swaddle you, and you fought me with a strength that was too powerful for your size or age.”
Palpatine looked out from beneath his quirked brows. “I was born mature, Father, fully grown, and you hated me for it, because you grasped that I was everything you can never be.”
“Hated you more than you know,” Cosinga said, allowing his ire to rise once more. “Enough to want to kill you from the start.”
Palpatine stood his ground. “Then you had better do it now.”
Cosinga took a step in Palpatine’s direction, only to be hurled back against the bulkhead separating the communications room from the main cabin. A female voice from behind the closed hatch asked in distress, “What was that?”
Nursing an injured shoulder, Cosinga looked suddenly like a trapped animal, his eyes wide with surprise and fear. He made a move to strike the handplate that opened the hatch, but Palpatine thwarted his effort without raising a finger. Twisting violently around, Cosinga fell over one of the acceleration chairs, bloodying his face as it struck the armrest.
A pounding began on the hatch.
“Guards!” Cosinga shouted, but the word had barely left his lips when the bulkhead against which he was slouched buckled inward, heaving him face-first to the floor and driving the breath from him.
Palpatine stood rooted in place, his hands trembling in front of him and his face stricken. Something stirred behind his incandescent eyes. He heard the pounding on the hatch and whirled.
“Don’t come in! Stay away from me!”
“What have you done?” It was his mother’s voice, panicked. “What have you done?”
Cosinga pushed himself to his knees and began a terrified retreat, leaving smears of blood on the deck. But Palpatine was advancing on him now.
“If the Force birthed you, then I curse it!” Cosinga rasped. “I curse it!”
“As I do,” Palpatine growled.
The hatch began to slide to, and he heard the voice of the guard who had escorted him from the Jafan III. “Stop!”
“Cosinga!” his mother screamed.
Palpatine pressed the palms of his hands to his head, then in eerie calm streaked to the hatch, pulled the surprised guard through the threshold, and tossed him clear across the cabin.

Once more Sidious allowed his memories to unfold, and he relived the crime—the event, as he had at last come to think of it. His father's limp and bloodied body. The smashed skulls of the bodyguards.

“Fool,” Plagueis derided him. “Success doesn’t come from summoning help from the Force, but from taking control of it and generating the power from within yourself.” He sighed theatrically. “Still, I’m somewhat encouraged by the progress you’ve made. Mere centimeters from me now, almost within arm’s reach. Soon I’ll be able to feel your breath on my neck and perceive the heat of your rage—your desire to kill me, as if by doing so, you could lay claim to the authority I embody.” He paused but didn’t move, much less glance over his shoulder. “You want to strangle me, like you did your poor, misunderstood mother; tear me limb from limb as you did the bodyguards. Fair enough. But to do so you will have to make a greater effort, Apprentice.”
Like a feline, Sidious leapt from the scree, his curled fingers aimed for Plagueis.

Maul sprang to his feet and ignited his lightsaber. Savage did the same. The two Zabraks stared grimly at the hooded figure. Sidious retrieved a pair of elegant-looking lightsabers from within the depths of his robes and ignited them. The blades turned his pale face a hellish red.
Maul and Savage didn’t waste time seeking an advantageous position. They simply charged, blades shimmering, trying to overpower Sidious with the animal ferocity of their attack. Sidious caught their sabers on his, the weapons howling and crackling where they touched. Maul saw that Savage was startled by the seemingly frail man’s enormous strength. Maul stared at his Master’s face. He saw the strain as Sidious called upon the Force to keep the brothers at bay. But there was something else there, too—a terrible pleasure. Sidious began to grin.

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!

He heard the pounding on the hatch and whirled.
"Don't come in! Stay away from me!"
"What have you done?" It was his mother's voice, panicked. "What have you done?"
Cosinga pushed himself to his knees and began a terrified retreat, leaving smears of blood on the deck. But Palpatine was advancing on him now.
"If the Force birthed you, then I curse it!" Cosinga rasped. "I curse it!"
"As I do," Palpatine growled.
The hatch began to slide to, and he heard the voice of the guard who had escorted him from the Jafan III. "Stop!"
"Cosinga!" his mother screamed.
Palpatine pressed the palms of his hands to his head, then in eerie calm streaked to the hatch, pulled the surprised guard through the threshold, and tossed him clear across the cabin.

On Hypori they were the prey, standing back-to-back in their black zeyd-cloth hooded robes at the center of concentric rings of droids, retrofitted by Baktoid Armor to function as combat automata. Two hundred programmed assailants—bipedal, treaded, some levitated by antigrav generators—armed with a variety of weapons, ranging from hand blasters to short-barreled burst-rifles. Plagueis hadn't allowed his young apprentice to wield a lightsaber until a few years earlier, but Sidious was brandishing one now, self-constructed of phrik alloy and aurodium, and powered by a synthetic crystal. Made for delicate, long-fingered hands—as much a work of art as a weapon—the lightsaber thrummed as he waved the blade from side to side in front of him.
"Every weapon, manufactured by whatever species, has its own properties and peculiarities," Plagueis was saying, his own blade angled toward the ferrocrete floor of the battledome's fabricated cityscape, as if to light a fuse. "Range, penetrating power, refresh rate... In some instances your life might depend on your ability to focus on the weapon rather than the wielder. You must train yourself to identify a weapon instantly—whether it's a product of BlasTech or Merr-Sonn, Tenloss or Prax—so that you will know where to position yourself, and the several ways to best deflect a well-aimed bolt."
Plagueis put his words into action as the first ring of droids began to converge on them, staggering the attack and triggering bursts at random. Orbiting Sidious, the Muun's blade warded off every volley, returning the bolts to their sources, or deflecting them into the facades of the faux buildings surrounding them or into other droids. At other times Plagueis made no attempt to redirect the attacks, but simply torqued his rangy body, allowing the bolts to miss him by centimeters. Around the two Sith, the automata collapsed one after the next, gushing lubricants from holed reservoirs or exploding in a hail of alloy parts, until all were heaped on the ferrocrete floor.
"The next ring is yours," Plagueis said.
Rugged, uninhabited Hypori belonged to the Techno Union, whose Skakoan foreman, Wat Tambor, owed his seat in the Republic Senate to Damask Holdings. In exchange, the bionic humanoid had made Hypori available as a training ground for members of the Echani Sun Guard and provided the necessary battle droids. Calling in another favor, Hego Damask had requested a private session in the fabricated cityscape, so that Plagueis and his apprentice could be free to employ lightsabers—though only for the purpose of deflecting bolts rather than dismemberment or penetration.
When it came Sidious's turn to demonstrate his skill, Plagueis spoke continuously from behind him, adding distraction to the distinct possibility of inadvertent disintegration.
"A being trained in the killing arts doesn't wait for you to acquire him as a target, or establish him or herself as an opponent, as if in some martial arts contest. Your reactions must be instantaneous and nothing less than lethal, for you are a Sith Lord, and will be marked for death."
The droids continued to converge, ring after ring of them, until the floor was piled high with smoking husks. Plagueis issued a voice command that brought the onslaught to an abrupt end and deactivated his lightsaber. The pinging of cooling weapons, the hiss of escaping gas, the unsteady whir of failing servomotors punctuated the sudden silence. Alloy limbs spasmed and photoreceptors winked out, surrendering their eerie glow. The recycled air was rotten with the smell of fried circuitry.

The location of the planet known to the Sith as Kursid had been expunged from the Republic records in distant times, and for the past six hundred years had been reserved for use as a place of spectacle. Masters and apprentices of the Bane lineage had visited with enough regularity that a cult had come into being in that part of the world based on the periodic return of the sky visitors. The Sith hadn't bothered to investigate what Kursid's indigenous humanoids thought about the visits—whether in their belief systems the Sith were regarded as the equivalent of deities or demons—since it was unlikely that the primitives had yet so much as named their world. However, visiting as apprentice and—more often than not—as Master, each Sith Lord had remarked on the slow advancement of Kursid's civilization. How, on the early visits, the primitives had defended themselves with wooden war clubs and smooth rocks hurled from slings. Two hundred years later, many of the small settlements had grown to become cities or ceremonial centers built of a crude sort, and magical guardian symbols had been emblazoned on the sloping sides of defensive walls. At some point previous to Darth Tenebrous's visit as an apprentice, replicas of the Sith ships had been constructed in the center of the arid plateau that served as a battleground, and enormous totemic figures—visible only from above—had been outlined by removing tens of thousands of fists-sized volcanic stones that covered the ground. On Plagueis's first visit, some fifty years earlier, the warriors he and Tenebrous had faced had been armed with longbows and metal-tipped lances.
That the Sith had never demanded anything other than battle hadn't kept the primitives from attempting to adopt a policy of appeasement, leaving at the ships' perpetual landing site foodstuffs, sacrificial victims, and works of what they considered art, forged of materials they held precious or sacred. But the Sith had simply ignored the offerings, waiting instead on the stony plain for the primitives to deploy their warriors, as the primitives did now with Plagueis and Sidious waiting. Announcing their arrival with low runs over the city, they had set the ship down and waited for six days, while the mournful calls of breath-driven horns had disturbed the dry silences, and groups of primitives had flocked in to gather on the hillsides that overlooked the battleground.
"Do you recall what Darth Bane said regarding the killing of innocents?" Plagueis had asked.
"Our mission," Sidious paraphrased, "is not to bring death on all those unfit to live. All we do must serve our true purpose—the preservation of our Order and the survival of the Sith. We must work to grow our power, and to accomplish that we will need to interact with individuals of many species across many worlds. Eventually word of our existence will reach the ears of the Jedi."
To refrain from senseless killing, they wielded force pikes rather than lightsabers. Meter-long melee weapons used by the Echani and carried by the Senate Guard, the pikes were equipped with stun-module tips capable of delivering a shock that could overwhelm the nervous systems of most sentients, without causing permanent damage.
"The next few hours will test the limits of your agility, speed, and accuracy," Plagueis said, as several hundred of the biggest, bravest, and most skilled warriors—their bodies daubed in pigments derived from plants, clay, and soil—began to separate themselves from the crowds. "But this is more than some simple exercise in our rise to ultimate power, and therefore servants of the dark side of the Force. Centuries from now, advanced by the Sith, they might confront us with projectile weapons or energy beams. But then we will have evolved, as well, perhaps past the need for this rite, and we will come instead to honor rather than engage them in battle. Through power we gain victory, and through victory our chains are broken. But power is only a means to an end."
To the clamorous beating of drums and the wailing of the onlookers, the warriors brandished their weapons, raised a deafening war cry, and attacked. A nod from Plagueis, and the two Sith sped across the plain to meet them, flying among them like wraiths, evading arrows, gleaming spear tips, and blows from battle-axes, going one against one, two, or three, but felling opponent after opponent with taps from the force pikes, until among the hundreds of jerking, twitching bodies sprawled on the rough ground, only one was left standing. That was when Plagueis tossed aside the stun pike and ignited his crimson blade, and a collective lament rose from the crowds on the hillsides.
"Execute one, terrify one thousand," he said.
Hurling the warrior to the ground with a Force push, he used the lightsaber to deftly open the primitive's chest cavity; then he reached a hand inside and extracted his still beating heart.

Crawling to the first egress—a distance of scarcely ten meters—he lowered himself into a murky storage room and once more called the weapon’s crimson blade from the hilt. Constructed to fit the Muun’s large hand, the lightsaber felt unwieldy in Sidious’s, so he switched to a two-handed grip. Moving with a caution that belied his murderous intent, and on the alert for cams or other security devices, he eased out of the room into a tight corridor and followed it toward the front of the building. There, in a formal entryway, two Dugs were standing guard in a desultory way. Moving quickly, a blur to human senses, he caught them by surprise, splitting open the chest and abdomen of one and beheading the other while the first was attempting to prevent his entrails from spilling onto the glossy mosaic floor. A brief scan of the foyer revealed the presence of cams installed in the walls and high ceiling. He wondered how the killings appeared to anyone monitoring a display screen. It must have seemed as if the two Dugs had been butchered by a phantom.
Still, all the more reason to hurry.
He sprinted up the stairs to the next floor, where he heard a cacophony of human voices muffled by the thick door to a nearby room. Blowing the door inward with a Force push, he took a wide stance in the shattered doorway and positioned the blade of the thrumming lightsaber vertically in front of him. Through the weapon’s glow he saw a dozen or more Santhe guards in uniform seated around a table littered with food and drink containers gape at him in disbelief before reaching for weapons fastened to their hips or scurrying for others buried beneath the rubble of their celebratory meal.
Sidious waded into the room, returning volleys of blaster bolts from those first to fire, then attacked, raising his left hand to levitate two guards into midair before running his blade through each of them. Snarling like a beast, he whirled through a circle, ridding three guards of their heads and cutting a fourth in half at the waist. The blade impaled a guard who had flattened himself to the floor in abject terror, then went straight into the shrieking mouth of the last of them.

Maul parried the blow and reversed, coming at Sidious from the opposite side. But Sidious had already vanished, leaving Maul to lunge at the empty air. As Maul lost his balance, his body fell against the cave's wall.
Sidious said from behind Maul, "You are that pathetic. You are weak. Not worthy of being a Sith Lord. I have misjudged you."
Maul's anger burned to rage. He spun fast and swung his lightsaber again, but again he failed to strike Sidious, who moved faster than he could follow.

Suddenly, my lightsaber is gone. It flies from my hand across the room. It lands in the hand of my Master. I never see him enter. Not if he doesn't want me to. The smile of triumph fades from my face.
"Do you think," Lord Sidious says, walking toward me, "you can ever relax your guard?"
"No, Master." What a clumsy, weak mistake. I should be prepared for him to enter at all times. How could I have forgotten that, even for a moment?
The lightsaber whirls in the air, twirling, held in my Master's hand. I can't track it, it moves so fast. But I know it's heading for me. Lord Sidious moves faster than my eye can follow. I smell heat and smoke. The laser traces the outline of my body, my face, my hands. The buzz is loud in my ear. One flinch, one involuntary twitch of a muscle, and I am dead.
I do not flinch.
At last, Lord Sidious deactivates my weapon. He tosses it toward me. The sweat on my palm almost causes me to drop it.
"Do not let me see you relax your guard again," my Master says. His eyes burn. "You are valuable, yes. But you are not indispensable, Lord Maul. I can do without you."
A flick of his robe, and he is gone.

The Sith apprentice stood in the middle of the training chamber as the four droids circled him. His breathing was calm, his heartbeat even and slow. He was aware of his body's reactions to the danger—aware and in control.
Two of the droids—Rapier and Chain, he silently named them—were within his field of vision. The other two—Cudgel and Hachete—were not, being behind him. It did not matter; through his awareness of the Force he could sense their movements as plainly as if he had eyes in the back of his head.
Maul raised his own weapon, the double-bladed lightsaber, and triggered the power control. Twin lances of pure energy boiled forth, hissing and crackling in crimson loops that began and ended at the two flux apertures on either end of the device. Any Jedi Knight could wield a single-bladed lightsaber; only a master fighter could use the weapon first designed by the legendary Dark Lord Exar Kun millennia ago. Unless one was in perfect attunement with it, the weapon could be as deadly to the user as to the opponent.
Rapier lunged at full extension, its metal knee joint bent almost to the floor. The needle point flickered toward Maul's heart, almost too fast to see.
The dark side blossomed in Darth Maul, the power of it resonating in him like black lightning, augmenting his years of training, guiding his reactions. Time seemed to slow, to stretch.
It would have been easy to chop the blade itself in half, as few metals could resist the frictionless edge of a lightsaber. But there was no challenge to that. Maul spun toward the point, twisted around the outside, and snapped his hands horizontally at chest level. The left blade of the lightsaber sheared through Rapier's sword arm. Both arm and weapon clattered to the floor.

Its rider rode out of the glare of the suns and was revealed. Bold markings of red and black covered a demonic face in strange, jagged patterns beneath a crown of stunted horns encircling its head. Man shaped and humanoid, his slitted eyes and hooked teeth were nevertheless feral and predatory, and his how was a hunter's challenge to his prey.
The primal scream had barely sounded before he was on top of Qui-Gon, wheeling the speeder aside deftly at the last moment, closing off its thruster, and leaping from the seat, all in one swift movement. He carried a lightsaber of another make, and the weapon was cutting at the Jedi Master even before the attacker's feet had touched the ground. Qui-Gon, surprised by the other's quickness and ferocity, barely blocked the blow with his own weapon, the blades sliding apart with a harsh rasp. The attacker spun away in a whirl of dark clothing, then attacked anew, lightsaber slashing at his intended prey, face alight with a killing frenzy that promised no quarter.
Anakin was back on his feet, staring at them, clearly unable to decide what he should do. Fighting to hold his ground, Qui-Gon caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye.
"Annie! Get out of here!" he cried out.
His attacker closed with him again, forcing him back, striking at him from every angle. Even without knowing anything else, Qui-Gon knew this man was trained in the fighting arts of a Jedi, a skilled and dangerous adversary. Worse, he was younger, quicker, and stronger than Qui-Gon, and he was gaining ground rapidly.

The deserted city of stately domes and elegant spires struck him as an artifact—or perhaps a quaint historical replica closed for routine maintenance. Squads of B1 battle droids armed with blaster rifles patrolled the narrow streets and stood sentry outside the Theed Palace and other major buildings. Evading them effortlessly, Maul timed the patrols, made note of their numbers, and used the Force to create sounds that tricked the droids into moving in one direction or another. The idea of using droids as combatants annoyed him, for droids were only as good as their programming, and the bipedal, slender-headed B1 had limited skills and no ability to perform autonomously. Only the fact that the droids, too, were integral to his Master’s more far-reaching plan kept Maul from revulsion. The deeper he ventured into the galaxy, the less honor he found.
But the Sith would redress that deficit once the Jedi were exterminated and the Republic brought down.
Maul stowed the speeder in an alley that ran alongside Theed’s space force hangar, which was perched on the edge of an escarpment. Inside the domed building he took stock of Naboo’s smart yellow-and-chromium Nubian fighters, neatly arranged in berths on several tiers, with an R2 astromech droid assigned to each ship. Despite the success of the occupation, the Neimoidians would have been wise to disable the fighters, but they were apparently incapable of tampering with anything of value. As with the control ship, Maul was tempted to show them the error of their ways, but again he did nothing.
Emerging from the hangar, he allowed himself to be detected and confronted by a patrol of droids. In a metallic voice, their officer unit ordered him to halt and raised its E-5 rifle. Reared by Darth Sidious’s custodial droids on Mustafar, Maul—for many years—had had a complex relationship with droids of any sort. Certainly his fascination with technology owed in part to the circumstances of his abnormal upbringing, but he had no compunction about destroying droids when the need arose, whether in training sessions or on missions. Still, he derived no enduring satisfaction from the contests, even when combating the most sophisticated among them.
Calling his long lightsaber to his hand, he made short work of the squad, decapitating them with his blade or exploding them by deflecting blaster bolts back at them. The brief altercation drew several more patrols, the members of which he similarly dismembered.

Squad (8 battle droids): A squad consists of eight battle droids. While organic squads were led by a sergeant, droid squads didn't need an officer, as the squad members were directed remotely or programmed before an arrangement.

Now Tenebrous touched upon his apprentice's powers of foresight, which were also vastly more developed than Tenebrous had believed. For a moment, Tenebrous found his perception cast far forward in time—to Plagueis' own death at the hands of his apprentice, who was himself only visible as a smear of darkness...
A shadow!

A look of sinister purpose contorted Sidious’s face.
Again, his eyes darted around the room, and the dark side whispered:
Your election assured, the Sun Guards absent, Plagueis unsuspecting and asleep...
And he moved in a blur.

Sidious raised his saber and flew at Maul, who parried desperately, his mechanical legs whirring as he sought to counter his former Master’s blows. Sidious’s sabers were a blur, a whirling cage of deadly plasma. Maul danced away from one blow, then reversed his movement to avoid another, and then there were too many to count, and then there were even more than that.
Maul’s saber spun out of his hand, bouncing away across the floor.

A fountain of amethyst energy burst from Mace Windu's fist. "Don't try to resist."
The song of his blade was echoed by green fire from the hands of Kit Fisto, Agen Kolar, and Saesee Tiin. Kolar and Tiin closed on Palpatine, blocking the path to the door. Shadows dripped and oozed color, weaving and coiling up office walls slipping over chairs, spreading along the floor.
"Resist? How could I possibly resist?" Still seated at the desk Palpatine shook an empty fist helplessly, the perfect image of a tired, frightened old man. "This is murder, you Jedi traitors! How can I be any threat to you?"
He turned desperately to Saesee Tiin. "Master Tiin—you're the telepath. What am I thinking right now?" Tiin frowned and cocked his head. His blade dipped. A smear of red-flashing darkness hurtled from behind the desk. Saesee Tiin's head bounced when it hit the floor. Smoke curled from the neck, and from the twin stumps of the horns, severed just below the chin.
Kit Fisto gasped, "Saesee!"
The headless corpse, still standing, twisted as its knees buckled, and a thin sigh escaped from its trachea as it folded to the floor.
"It doesn't..." Agen Kolar swayed. His emerald blade shrank away, and the handgrip tumbled from his opening fingers. A small, neat hole in the middle of his forehead leaked smoke, showing light from the back of his head. "...hurt..." He pitched forward onto his face, and lay still.

Not far away, Saesee Tiin led another pair of judicials in a charge against a half a dozen terrorists entrenched in a narrow alley between two of the pyramids, his blade a blur of cobalt as it parried bolts and sent blasters flying from outstretched hands.

Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Tiin, and Ki-Adi-Mundi surged from the pyramid entrance, engaging the terrorists that had driven them back. A quarter of the way across the immense plaza, the Jedi spread out in a wedge formation, their constantly moving blades fending off blaster bolts loosed from ahead and to either side. Behind the energy barrier fashioned by the lightsabers, Yaddle, Depa, Vergere, and two of the judicials raced out to divert fire from the rear.

Before Mace realizes what has happened, Kolar, Tiin, and Fisto have fallen to Sidious's blade.

Obi-Wan was already making that exact move as Anakin spoke. But they were inverted to each other: breaking right shot him one way while Anakin whipped the other. The tri-fighters' cannons ripped space between them, tracking faster than their starfighters could slip. His onboard threat display chimed a warning: two of the droids had remote sensor locks on him. The others must have lit up his partner. "Anakin! Slip-jaws!"
"My thought exactly."
They blew past the tri-fighters, looping in evasive spirals. The droid ships wrenched themselves into pursuit maneuvers that would have killed any living pilot. The slip-jaws maneuver was named for the scissorlike mandibles of the Kashyyyk slash-spider. Droids closing rapidly on their tails, cannonfire stitching space on all sides, the two Jedi pulled their ships through perfectly mirrored rolls that sent them streaking head-on for each other from opposite ends of a vast Republic cruiser. For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the time you can see your partner's starfighter streaking toward you at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, it's already too late for your merely human reflexes to react.
But these particular pilots were far from merely human.
The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedi starfighters twisted and flashed past each other belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other's paint.

Anakin's speeder shrieked through the rain, dodging forked bolts of lightning that shot up from towers into the clouds, slicing across traffic lanes, screaming past spacescrapers so fast that his shock-wake cracked windows as he passed.

Anakin blinked and rubbed his eyes again. Maybe he was still a bit flash-blind—the Korun Master seemed to be fading in and out of existence, half swallowed by a thickening black haze in which danced a meter-long bar of sunfire. Mace pressed back the darkness with a relentless straight-ahead march; his own blade, that distinctive amethyst blaze that had been the final sight of so many evil beings across the galaxy, made a haze of its own: an oblate sphere of purple fire within which there seemed to be dozens of swords slashing in all directions at once.
The shadow he fought, that blur of speed—could that be Palpatine? 
Their blades flared and flashed, crashing together with bursts of fire, weaving nets of killing energy in exchanges so fast that Anakin could not truly see them—but he could feel them in the Force. The Force itself roiled and burst and crashed around them, boiling with power and lightspeed ricochets of lethal intent. And it was darkening.

 He could feel the end of this battle approaching, and so could the blur of Sith he faced; in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear.

In that lightning-speared tornado of feet and fists and blades and bashing machines, his vision finally pierced the darkness that had clouded the Force.

Luke: Yes. The Force binds us. Brings us together. Many people are fighting this war together. Our ally is the Force. Through the strength of the Force, your shroud of evil has been lifted from my mind! (Sound of lightsaber activating.)
Palpatine: So be it. Through the power of the Force, you will die!
(Sound of lightsaber activating. Sound of lightsabers clashing together. Sound of Luke and Palpatine grunting.)
Leia: Be careful, Luke! The Emperor is so strong... They’re both moving so fast, I can hardly see them.

"I took inspiration from the Jedi tradition of indoctrinating Force-sensitive infants when I selected one apprentice, whom I named Darth Maul. I took him from his home world, Iridonia, and raised him as I would construct the perfect weapon. I trained him in numerous exotic and forbidden martial arts, disciplined him constantly, and personally applied the Sith tattoos that were evidence of his complete dedication to the dark side."

The location of the planet known to the Sith as Kursid had been expunged from the Republic records in distant times, and for the past six hundred years had been reserved for use as a place of spectacle. Masters and apprentices of the Bane lineage had visited with enough regularity that a cult had come into being in that part of the world based on the periodic return of the sky visitors. The Sith hadn't bothered to investigate what Kursid's indigenous humanoids thought about the visits—whether in their belief systems the Sith were regarded as the equivalent of deities or demons—since it was unlikely that the primitives had yet so much as named their world. However, visiting as apprentice and—more often than not—as Master, each Sith Lord had remarked on the slow advancement of Kursid's civilization. How, on the early visits, the primitives had defended themselves with wooden war clubs and smooth rocks hurled from slings. Two hundred years later, many of the small settlements had grown to become cities or ceremonial centers built of a crude sort, and magical guardian symbols had been emblazoned on the sloping sides of defensive walls. At some point previous to Darth Tenebrous's visit as an apprentice, replicas of the Sith ships had been constructed in the center of the arid plateau that served as a battleground, and enormous totemic figures—visible only from above—had been outlined by removing tens of thousands of fists-sized volcanic stones that covered the ground. On Plagueis's first visit, some fifty years earlier, the warriors he and Tenebrous had faced had been armed with longbows and metal-tipped lances.
That the Sith had never demanded anything other than battle hadn't kept the primitives from attempting to adopt a policy of appeasement, leaving at the ships' perpetual landing site foodstuffs, sacrificial victims, and works of what they considered art, forged of materials they held precious or sacred. But the Sith had simply ignored the offerings, waiting instead on the stony plain for the primitives to deploy their warriors, as the primitives did now with Plagueis and Sidious waiting. Announcing their arrival with low runs over the city, they had set the ship down and waited for six days, while the mournful calls of breath-driven horns had disturbed the dry silences, and groups of primitives had flocked in to gather on the hillsides that overlooked the battleground.
"Do you recall what Darth Bane said regarding the killing of innocents?" Plagueis had asked.
"Our mission," Sidious paraphrased, "is not to bring death on all those unfit to live. All we do must serve our true purpose—the preservation of our Order and the survival of the Sith. We must work to grow our power, and to accomplish that we will need to interact with individuals of many species across many worlds. Eventually word of our existence will reach the ears of the Jedi."
To refrain from senseless killing, they wielded force pikes rather than lightsabers. Meter-long melee weapons used by the Echani and carried by the Senate Guard, the pikes were equipped with stun-module tips capable of delivering a shock that could overwhelm the nervous systems of most sentients, without causing permanent damage.
"The next few hours will test the limits of your agility, speed, and accuracy," Plagueis said, as several hundred of the biggest, bravest, and most skilled warriors—their bodies daubed in pigments derived from plants, clay, and soil—began to separate themselves from the crowds. "But this is more than some simple exercise in our rise to ultimate power, and therefore servants of the dark side of the Force. Centuries from now, advanced by the Sith, they might confront us with projectile weapons or energy beams. But then we will have evolved, as well, perhaps past the need for this rite, and we will come instead to honor rather than engage them in battle. Through power we gain victory, and through victory our chains are broken. But power is only a means to an end."
To the clamorous beating of drums and the wailing of the onlookers, the warriors brandished their weapons, raised a deafening war cry, and attacked. A nod from Plagueis, and the two Sith sped across the plain to meet them, flying among them like wraiths, evading arrows, gleaming spear tips, and blows from battle-axes, going one against one, two, or three, but felling opponent after opponent with taps from the force pikes, until among the hundreds of jerking, twitching bodies sprawled on the rough ground, only one was left standing. That was when Plagueis tossed aside the stun pike and ignited his crimson blade, and a collective lament rose from the crowds on the hillsides.
"Execute one, terrify one thousand," he said.
Hurling the warrior to the ground with a Force push, he used the lightsaber to deftly open the primitive's chest cavity; then he reached a hand inside and extracted his still beating heart.

It was while he was trying to eat a tough-skinned lizard at the base of a cliff that two droids attacked. Maul defeated both droids but sustained a blaster wound to his thigh. Limping into a ravine, he found a large cave and hauled his body into it. Maul knew he had to recover before he could fight again. But without his survival pack, he had no healing bacta or bandages. The wound festered. The pain was blinding. He listened for approaching droids but heard none. The days blurred, but Maul was almost certain that a full month had passed since he had arrived on Hypori. As he fell into and out of restless sleep, Maul began to wonder if his Master had forgotten him.
His wound became worse. The pain was beyond excruciating. He had no doubt that death would come soon. He thought he was hallucinating when he saw a cloaked figure appear at the mouth of the cave.
It was Sidious.
Maul could not believe his eyes. He felt not only relieved to see his Master, but genuinely glad. His Master would help him.
Sidious moved into the cave. He came to a stop near Maul. Smiling as he looked down at his apprentice, he said, "Now it is time for your final battle."
Maul wondered if he had heard correctly. He knew his Master must have been able to see plainly that he was not fit to stand. And yet he also knew his Master never tolerated weakness of any kind. Maul scrabbled at the cave's walls and pulled himself up. His balance was off. Searing pain shot through his leg as he lurched forward. Sidious handed Maul a lightsaber. Maul fumbled with the weapon and activated it. The cave's walls shimmered with light.
Maul did not realize how parched his throat was until he rasped, "Where is the assassin droid, Master?"
Stepping back from Maul, Sidious drew his own lightsaber and ignited its red blade. "I will be your opponent."
Maul stared at his Master with disbelief. And then his disbelief changed to anger. He summoned up the dark side of the Force. He felt a burning sensation flicker and grow within him, a trickle of strength. He took a step toward his Master.
Sidious sneered. "You cannot be as pathetic as you look." He raised his lightsaber and attacked.
Maul parried the blow and reversed, coming at Sidious from the opposite side. But Sidious had already vanished, leaving Maul to lunge at the empty air. As Maul lost his balance, his body fell against the cave's wall.
Sidious said from behind Maul, "You are that pathetic. You are weak. Not worthy of being a Sith Lord. I have misjudged you."
Maul's anger turned to rage. He spun fast and swung his lightsaber again, but again he failed to strike Sidious, who moved faster than he could follow. He fell against the opposite wall and gasped for breath.
Sidious howled with laughter. "I expected your failure. I saw your weaknesses long ago. Your doubts in your own abilities. Your lack of faith in my teaching. Your inability to embrace the dark side. And that is why, over these long years, I have secretly trained another apprentice."
Maul stared hard at Sidious.
"Oh, poor Maul. All he ever wanted was a friend. Does it please you to know I have another apprentice? Does it make you fell less alone?"
Still trying to catch his breath, Maul said, "More than one apprentice...is against the rules of the Sith."
"You are right," Sidious said with a grin. "A spark of intelligence, at last." He gestured to the mouth of the cave. "My second apprentice is on the other side of the planet. He conquered all the assassin droids sent after him. He only sustained a flesh wound. He is healthy. He is strong. Unlike the pathetic weakling I see before me."
Maul realized his opponent had not really been the assassin droids. He thought of all the punishment he had endured over the past month, and then of the unending punishments of his entire life. He thought of his true opponent, the unseen adversary, chosen by Sidious to become a Sith Lord. Maul felt robbed of his past and future. And then a rage unlike anything he had ever felt before swelled through him. The rage was so overwhelming that he thought it might consume him.
No. I can direct it. My rage will consume my enemy. It will consume my Master. Glaring at Sidious, Maul saw the true face of his enemy.
Sidious snickered. "Can you understand? Focus. If there can be only one apprentice, then one of you must die. Who do you think I have chosen to die, Maul?"
Maul felt his rage flowing through his veins, pumping energy into every muscle. He felt so powerful that he believed he could accomplish anything. And more than anything else, he wanted his Master's blood.
Maul sprang at Sidious. Sidious barely missed the first blow from Maul's lightsaber, an upward swing that aimed to rip Sidious in half. Maul swung again but Sidious deflected the blow and retreated. As Maul moved across the rough cave floor, sweat stung his eyes, but he did not stumble. He somersaulted through the air, his lightsaber whirling in the darkness. Sidious raised his lightsaber to parry the next move, which was so powerful it made him stagger backward. As Maul struck, he thought, I'm going to kill him.
Sidious parried every blow, but Maul could tell his Master was working hard to keep him at bay. As Sidious backed up against the wall, he said, "You want to kill me? You want to kill your Master?"
"Yes," Maul grunted.
"You hate me?"
"Yes!" Maul screamed through clenched teeth.
Sidious shifted like a liquid shadow, maneuvering around his apprentice. Maul was suddenly up against the wall, gasping for breath as his vision blurred. His strength was evaporating. He turned fast to see Sidious. Sidious lashed out with his lightsaber. Maul parried the blow, but then his lightsaber suddenly flew from his hand. As Maul heard his lightsaber deactivete and clatter across the cave's floor, Sidious raised his own lightsaber and advanced. Maul knew he was about to die, but he did not cringe. As Sidious swung his lightsaber, Maul leaped forward, grabbing Sidious's wrist, and sank his teeth into his hand. Maul tasted blood and spat it back at Sidious.
Sidious brought his lightsaber down on Maul. Maul waited for the pain and the shock of death. He was surprised when the lightsaber's blade bounced off his shoulder.
Sidious cackled merrily. He stood and looked at Maul. Then he tossed the lightsaber aside. Maul realized his Master had been using a harmless training lightsaber.
Maul leaned back against the cave wall. The rock bit into his back but he concentrated on the pain while his Master continued to laugh without mercy. When Sidious was done, he faced Maul and said, "Do you feel the hate?"
Maul nodded.
"Good. It is the source of your strength. You will hate me. No matter. Today you have delivered yourself into my hands. I have the power of life or death over you, Maul. Someday you will hold that power over another. It is the honor of the Sith. You will devote yourself to the idea of domination."
"But...what about the other apprentice?"
"There is no other apprentice."
Maul was astonished. He didn't know what to say.
"You have passed the test."
Maul could still taste his Master's blood on his lips, but his rage was rapidly ebbing. He shifted his feet and realized he was standing on his lost lightsaber. He picked it up and shoved it into his belt.
"From this day forward," Sidious said, "you are a Sith Lord. You have chosen a path of darkness, the path of power. You are Lord Maul. You are my instrument."
"Yes, Master."
Sidious smiled proudly. "Your rage. You enjoyed it? You enjoyed wanting to kill me?"
"I took pleasure in it."
Sidious laughed again, but it was not a mocking laughter. "You will do well, Lord Maul."
Maul realized he no longer felt any anger toward Sidious. He felt only...loyalty.

One battle with two assassin droids almost undoes me. I sustain a bad blaster wound to my thigh. I drag myself to a cave to hide. I have no bacta, no bandages. Yet I know I must recover before I fight again. The wound festers. It is a searing, blinding pain. I am too weak to forage for food. The days blur. I no longer know how long I've been on this planet. Surely it has been more than a month. Has my master forgotten me?
I am close to hallucinating when Lord Sidious appears at the mouth of the cave. I am so glad to see him that my bones turn to water. I look at him hopefully.
"Now it is time for your final battle," he says.
Another battle? I can't even walk.
Yet his power over me is so strong that I rise on my watery legs. The cave walls shimmer in front of my eyes. My balance is off. I fumble for my lightsaber and activate it.
"Where is the assassin droid, Master?" I ask. My voice emerges hoarsely from thick, swollen lips. I need water. I would kill for water.
My Master powers up his lightsaber. "I will be your opponent."
I take a step toward him. I know this is my final test. I summon up the dark side of the Force. I take all my pain and anger and form it into a tightly packed ball. I set that ball aflame in my chest. I feel a trickle of strength enter me. That encourages me. I use that strength to stoke the fire inside me.
"You cannot be as pathetic as you look," my Master says. He raises his lightsaber and attacks.
I parry the blow and reverse, come at him from the opposite side. But he is already gone by the time I am able to make my attack. The lunge throws off my balance. I weave, the cave walls blurring. He laughs.
"I take it back," he says. "You are that pathetic."
He tells me I am weak, not worthy of being a Sith Lord. He tells me he has misjudged me. I attempt to attack him. The ball of anger inside me turns to howling rage. It is painfully obvious that he is playing with me. He can kill me in a heartbeat. Yet something in me will not accept this, even from my Master. My life force won't allow it. I struggle on, even in the face of his laughter. He tells me that he has expected my failure. He saw my weaknesses long ago. Secretly, over the long years, he has trained another apprentice. I have not been alone.
I point out, gasping, that more than one apprentice is against the rules of the Sith.
"You are right," he says. "A spark of intelligence at last."
The second apprentice is on the other side of the planet. He conquered all the assassin droids sent after him. He did not sustain more than a flesh wound. He is healthy and strong.
"Unlike the pathetic weakling I see before me," my Master says.
I realize dully what this means. My opponents had not really been the droids. My opponent had been someone I had never seen. My enemy has been chosen by my Master. He will become a Sith Lord. He will receive the honor I was due. He will reap the glory I had punished my body and disciplined my mind in order to receive. A slow rage begins to burn through me. It is a terrible anger, no less fierce because it starts as a kernel of disbelief and then builds. I have never felt anything like it. I know it can consume me.
No. I can direct it. My rage will consume my enemy. It will consume my Master.
Yes, my Master is now my enemy. He is my betrayer. Hatred sears me, hardens me.
"Can you make the next leap in logic?" Lord Sidious asks me contemptuously. "Try to focus, Maul. If there can be only one apprentice, then one of you must die. Who do you think I have chosen to die. Maul?"
The rage rockets within me, pumping energy into my muscles. I can do anything. I can kill my Master. I want to kill him. My hatred is so huge it blots everything else but my desire for his blood.
With a howl torn from the depths of my belly, I spring at him. He barely misses the first blow from my lightsaber, for even in my rage I have employed strategy, coming at him from below, hoping to rip him in two. He parries my next blow. Sweat stings my eyes as I move across the rough cave floor. I do not stumble. I am nothing but the pulse of my anger, pure energy, pure darkness. I streak across the cave floor and come at him again, somersaulting through the air. My lightsaber whirls in the darkness. When he parries the blow, he staggers.
I am going to kill him. Every beat of my blood exults in my power. Every blow I deliver is meant to be the killing blow. I use reserves of strength I did not know I had. My blows are sure and precise, my footwork flawless. I gather in the power of the dark side. I feel my power clash with his. The air is thick, charged with our dark, titanic powers.
He parries every blow. But I see that he has to work hard to keep me at bay. Triumph roars through me at my Master's weakness. He is not as powerful as he appears.
"You want to kill me?" he taunts. "You want to kill your Master?"
"Yes," I grunt.
"You hate me?"
"Yes!" I scream out the word through gritted teeth.
But I have been weakened by my ordeal, and my Master maneuvers me against the cave wall. I am gasping, trying to suck in enough air to keep going. My vision blurs as Lord Sidious raises his lightsaber. I parry the blow, but my lightsaber suddenly flies out of my hand, torn by the power of my Master directing the dark side. I realize then that he has just begun to tap into his own reserves. Mine are played out.
I will not be able to deflect the next blow. It will rend me in two. In a blur of heat and pain I see the mighty power of my Master raised against me, see the lightsaber come toward me, see my death as clearly as a bone-white moon in an ebony sky. I lunge forward and sink my teeth into his hand. I strike like an animal, so quickly he doesn't have time to step away. I taste his blood and spit it back at him in contempt.
Yes, he will kill me. But I will die with his blood on my lips.
The lightsaber comes down. I wait for the pain and shock. I wait to die.
My Master laughs. He tosses the lightsaber aside. It is a training saber. It does not harm me.
I am alive. He will not kill me. My muscles fail me but I don't let him see it. I lean slightly against the cave wall in back of me. The rock bites into my back and I concentrate on the pain while my Master continues to laugh. I will never forget the sound of that laughter. There is no mercy in it.
"Do you feel the hate?" he asks.
I nod.
"It is the source of your strength. You still hate me," he says. "No matter. Today you have delivered yourself into my hands. I have the power of life or death over you, Maul. Someday, you will hold that power over another. It is the honor of the Sith. You will devote yourself to the idea of domination."
Confused, I ask him about the other apprentice. But there is no other apprentice. It had been a lie.
"You have passed the test," Lord Sidious tells me.
I deactivate my lightsaber and shove it into my belt. I taste my Master's blood on my lips. The world is returning to me slowly. My rage is ebbing, but I have not fully grasped what has happened.
My Master fixes his gaze on me, the ice-gaze that holds such power.
"From this day forward, you are a Sith Lord. You have chosen the path of darkness, the path of power. You are Lord Maul. You are my instrument."
"Yes, Master."
"Your rage," he says. "You enjoyed it? You enjoyed wanting to kill me?"
"I took great pleasure in it," I say.
He laughs again. But this time, his laughter does not mock me. "You will do well, Lord Maul," he says.
And my rage against him leaves, never to return. I am a Sith Lord. I am his instrument.

Just arrived on the Hunters’ Moon, Sidious studied Plagueis as the Sith Lord and his droid, 11-4D, viewed a holorecording of a black-robed Zabrak assassin making short work of combat automata in his home on Coruscant, some hovering, some advancing on two legs, others on treads, and all firing blasters.
Twenty years had added a slight stoop to the Muun’s posture and veins that stood out under his thinning white skin. He wore a dark green utility suit that hugged his delicate frame, a green cloak that fell from his bony shoulders to the fort’s stone floor, and a headpiece that hewed to his large cranium. A triangular breath mask covered his ruined, prognathus lower jaw, his mouth, part of his long neck, and what remained of the craggy nose he’d had before the surprise attack in the Fobosi. A device of his own invention, the alloy mask featured two vertical slits and a pair of thin, stiff conduits that linked it to a transpirator affixed to his upper chest, beneath an armored torso harness. He had learned to ingest and imbibe through feeding tubes, and through his nose.
Seen through the Force, he was a nuclear oval of mottled light, a rotating orb of terrifying energy. If the Maladian attack had weakened him physically, it had also helped to shape his etheric body into a vessel sufficiently strong to contain the full power of the dark side.
Determined never again to be caught off guard, he had trained himself to go without sleep, and had devoted two standard decades to day-and-night experimentation with midi-chlorian manipulation and attempts to wrest a few last secrets from the Force, so that he—and presumably his human apprentice—might live forever. His inward turn had enabled him to master the equally powerful energies of order and disorder, creation and entropy, life and death.
"You have made him fearsome," Plagueis remarked without turning from the recording, as the athletic Zabrak cleaved a Colicoid Eradicator droid down the middle and whirled to cut two others in half. The yellow-eyed humanoid's hairless head bore a crown of small horns and geometrical patterns of black and red markings.
"Fearless, as well," Sidious said.
"Still, they are only droids."
"He's even more formidable against living beings."
Plagueis looked over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed in question. "You've fought him in a serious way?" Reconstructed vocal chords and trachea imparted a metallic quality to his voice, as if he were speaking through an enunciator.
"I stranded him on Hypori for a month without food and with only a horde of assassin droids for company. Then I returned to goad and challenge him. All things considered, he fought well, even after I deprived him of his lightsaber. He wanted to kill me, but was prepared to die at my hand."
Plagueis turned fully to face him. "Rather than punish him for disobedience, you praised his resolve."
"He was already humbled. I chose to leave his honor intact. I proclaimed him my myrmidon; the embodiment of the violent half of our partnership."
"Partnership?" Plagueis repeated harshly.
"His and mine; not ours."
"Regardless, you allowed him to believe that he is more skilled than he actually is."
"Did you not do the same for me?"
Plagueis's eyes reflected disappointment. "Never, Sidious. I have always been truthful with you."
Sidious bowed his head in acknowledgement. "I am not the teacher you are."

Several years before the Battle of Naboo, Darth Maul received the final step in his training. His Master sent him to an Outer Rim planet covered with deserts, swamps, and mountains and ordered him to survive for a month against a legion of assassin droids. Maul persevered, but his final test was to battle his Master in a lightsaber duel. Sidious goaded Maul into opening himself to the vast power of the dark side, and in that moment Darth Maul became a Dark Lord of the Sith.

Suddenly, my lightsaber is gone. It flies from my hand across the room. It lands in the hand of my Master. I never see him enter. Not if he doesn't want me to. The smile of triumph fades from my face.
"Do you think," Lord Sidious says, walking toward me, "you can ever relax your guard?"
"No, Master." What a clumsy, weak mistake. I should be prepared for him to enter at all times. How could I have forgotten that, even for a moment?
The lightsaber whirls in the air, twirling, held in my Master's hand. I can't track it, it moves so fast. But I know it's heading for me. Lord Sidious moves faster than my eye can follow. I smell heat and smoke. The laser traces the outline of my body, my face, my hands. The buzz is loud in my ear. One flinch, one involuntary twitch of a muscle, and I am dead.
I do not flinch.
At last, Lord Sidious deactivates my weapon. He tosses it toward me. The sweat on my palm almost causes me to drop it.
"Do not let me see you relax your guard again," my Master says. His eyes burn. "You are valuable, yes. But you are not indispensable, Lord Maul. I can do without you."
A flick of his robe, and he is gone.

The unmarked shuttle landed on the royal palace’s platform, reserved for Mandalore’s rulers and their most important advisers. The ramp lowered and a hooded figure in dark robes descended. The commandos rushing to intercept him reached for their throats, gagging, and the cloaked figure swept past them without a sideways glance, gaze fixed straight ahead.

The feeling had begun as a faint stirring in the Force, like the tiniest ripple of something moving slowly through deep water, far away but drawing steadily closer. It intensified, until it felt like the Force itself was roiling, heaving like the sea in the grip of an enormous storm.
“I sense a presence,” Maul warned Savage. “A presence I haven’t felt since...”
And then Maul knew.
“Master,” he said, leaning forward on the throne.
The commandos guarding the royal chamber reached for their throats. As Maul watched, an unseen forced lifted them high in the air, then slammed them to the floor, where they lay motionless in their red-and-black armor. The doors opened, then closed behind a figure in dark robes. A deep cowl hid most of the face, leaving only a pale chin and a downturned mouth visible. To most eyes the man in those simple robes of rough cloth was unremarkable, just another being making his way in the universe. But to those who could feel the Force he was anything but ordinary. To them, he was a dark sun blazing with power that was simultaneously hypnotizing and terrifying to behold.
Darth Sidious, the reigning Dark Lord of the Sith, had come to Mandalore.
Savage stared at the new arrival in astonishment, transfixed by the sight. Maul felt himself leap from the throne, mechanical legs clacking down the steps and toward his old Master. The motion was almost automatic, involuntary. Maul’s earliest memories were of that hooded figure—his tests, his teachings, and also his torments. He had been Maul’s father, his protector, his torturer. He had been everything.
Maul halted before Sidious and kneeled, bowing his head.
“Master,” he said simply.
Sidious stopped. For a moment all was silent.
“I am most impressed to see you have survived your injuries,” he said, the voice as rough and cracked as Maul remembered.
“I used your training, Master,” Maul said. “And I have built all of this in hopes of returning to your side.”
Sidious lifted his head slightly, and Maul saw his yellow eyes beneath the hood. They were as cold as space.
“How unfortunate that you are attempting to deceive me,” Sidious said.
“Master?” Maul asked.
“You have become a rival,” Sidious declared.
He raised his arms and both Maul and Savage flew through the air, smashing into the elegantly patterned walls of the royal chamber and crashing to the floor. Maul sprang to his feet and ignited his lightsaber. Savage did the same. The two Zabraks stared grimly at the hooded figure. Sidious retrieved a pair of elegant-looking lightsabers from within the depths of his robes and ignited them. The blades turned his pale face a hellish red.
Maul and Savage didn’t waste time seeking an advantageous position. They simply charged, blades shimmering, trying to overpower Sidious with the animal ferocity of their attack. Sidious caught their sabers on his, the weapons howling and crackling where they touched. Maul saw that Savage was startled by the seemingly frail man’s enormous strength. Maul stared at his Master’s face. He saw the strain as Sidious called upon the Force to keep the brothers at bay. But there was something else there, too—a terrible pleasure. Sidious began to grin.

The three-pronged duel between Sidious, and Maul and Savage had moved, like some deadly ballet, from the throne room to the steps of the palace. Sidious’s lightsabers twirled swiftly and elegantly, turning aside the furious blows Maul and Savage rained down upon him as the three Sith leapt and spun.
Maul had fought his Master many times, starting when he was little more than a child and continuing through his apprenticeship. His body bore innumerable scars from those duels—lessons in the peril of being too slow or two quick, too weak or too distracted. During Maul’s apprenticeship he had always known that Sidious had been willing to kill him. The Sith had not survived their centuries of exile by being sentimental, and a student who couldn’t stand against his Master in a mere training exercise was worse than useless—he was a waste of valuable resources better used elsewhere. But Maul had never faced his Master when he was actually trying to kill him.
Maul had grown more powerful since the last time he’d been in Sidious’s presence, before the Neimoidian invasion of Naboo had turned disastrous and Obi-Wan had bested him inside the Theed power core. His hermitage on Lotho Minor, his lessons on Unbara, his restoration by Mother Talzin, and his training of Savage had all strengthened him, made him a more worthy vessel for the dark side to fill with its power.
But strong as he had become, Maul found himself in awe of Sidious. The Sith Lord was astonishingly fast and efficient, and the Force flowed through him effortlessly. His sabers stabbed and slashed through the smallest hole in an opponent’s guard, his movements never carried him a millimeter out of position, and he could sense every attack Maul and Savage made before it developed.
Maul tried to slash past Sidious’s guard, only to find his Master had given ground, causing Maul to extend his arms too far and leave himself slightly unbalanced. It was the smallest stumble, easily corrected, but Sidious saw it—and pounced before Maul could draw himself back. Snarling, he reached out with the Force and slammed Maul against the wall, leaving him lying stunned in a heap.
Savage knew the dangers of facing the Sith Lord alone, and pressed his attack before Sidious draw his hand back from Force-shoving Maul into the wall. Teeth bared, Savage windmilled his double saber, hoping to disarm Sidious or force him to give ground. If he did, that would allow the yellow-and-black Zabrak to follow his initial attack with a lightning-quick thrust that would penetrate Sidious’s defenses and wound or even kill him.
Maul tried to shake off his attack, rocketing up from the floor. Sidious neatly side-stepped Savage’s assault, drawing back as the massive Zabrak raised his double-bladed saber high to try to pummel him with it. Savage didn’t think Sidious was fast enough to take advantage of the brief opening in his defenses, but he was wrong.
Sidious rammed one of his blades through Savage’s black armor, the glowing crimson tip of the saber appearing between his shoulder blades. Savage gasped, his saber tumbling from his grasp. Sidious yanked his weapon back and Savage seemed to hang suspended for a moment, as if he were being levitated by with the Force. Then he crashed to the ground.
Sidious stepped back as Maul rushed to his fallen brother’s side. A mist seemed to rise from Savage’s body, emerging from his wounds and then from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. As Maul and Sidious watched, Savage’s horns shrank and the massive bands of muscle melted away from his chest and shoulders. The last misty remnants of Mother Talzin’s magic grew hazy and tattered, then dispersed and vanished, leaving the dying Savage lying in the shell of his now-oversized armor.
His eyes turned to Maul.
“Brother, I am an unworthy apprentice,” Savage said. “I am not like you. I never was.”
He took a last breath and lay still.
Maul looked up, saber in his grasp, and stared into Darth Sidious’s blazing eyes.
“Remember the first and only reality of the Sith,” Sidious said. “There can only be two, and you are no longer my apprentice. You have been replaced.”
Sidious raised his saber and flew at Maul, who parried desperately, his mechanical legs whirring as he sought to counter his former Master’s blows. Sidious’s sabers were a blur, a whirling cage of deadly plasma. Maul danced away from one blow, then reversed his movement to avoid another, and then there were too many to count, and then there were even more than that.
Maul’s saber spun out of his hand, bouncing away across the floor. Then Sidious seized his former apprentice with the Force, hurling him against the wall. Maul’s vision swam. He tried to get up, but realized he was already in the air, held aloft by the Force. Sidious slammed him into the floor. Then Maul was off the ground again, legs kicking for purchase in empty air. He could taste blood in his mouth. His head hit the wall with a sickening crunch.
A rhyme crept into his head, a nagging sing-song bit of poetry.

Far above, far above,
We don’t know where we’ll fall.
Far above, far above.
What once was great is rendered small.

Maul could no longer remember where he had heard it, or what it meant. He was broken, helpless, useless.
“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”
“There is no mercy,” Sidious said.
Bolts of energy ripped out from the Sith Lord’s fingers, tendrils of brilliant blue and purple that danced across Maul’s tattooed skin and ripped through his muscles, his organs. His mechanical legs convulsed, shorting out.
“You belong to me,” Sidious said. “Your existence is now perfectly meaningless.”
He stretched out his fingers and the energy tore through Maul again. Sidious watched the lightning build in intensity, his eyes unblinking, his teeth gritted in a triumphant, terrible smile.

The Coruscant nightfall was spreading through the galaxy. The darkness in the Force was no hindrance to the shadow in the Chancellor's office; it was the darkness. Wherever darkness dwelled, the shadow could send perception. In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.
As a Jedi shuttle settled to the landing deck outside, the shadow sent its mind into the far deeper night within one of the several pieces of sculpture that graced the office: an abstract twist of solid neuranium, so heavy that the office floor had been specially reinforced to bear its weight, so dense that more sensitive species might, from very close range, actually perceive the tiny warping of the fabric of space-time that was its gravitation.
Neuranium of more than roughly a millimeter thick is impervious to sensors; the standard security scans undergone by all equipment and furniture to enter the Senate Office Building had shown nothing at all. If anyone had thought to use an advanced gravimetric detector, however, they might have discovered that one smallish section of the sculpture massed slightly less than it should have, given that the manifest that had accompanied it, when it was brought from Naboo among the then-ambassador's personal effects, clearly stated that it was a single piece of solid-forged neuranium.
The manifest was a lie. The sculpture was not entirely solid, and not all of it was neuranium. Within a long, slim, rod-shaped cavity around which the sculpture had been forged rested a device that had lain, waiting, in absolute darkness—darkness beyond darkness—for decades. Waiting for night to fall on the Republic.
The shadow felt Jedi Masters stride the vast echoic emptiness of the vaulted halls outside. It could practically hear the cadence of their boot heels on the Alderaanian marble. The darkness within the sculpture whispered of the shape and the feel and every intimate resonance of the device it cradled. With a twist of its will, the shadow triggered the device. The neuranium got warm. A small round spot, smaller than the circle a human child might make of thumb and forefinger, turned the color of old blood.
Then fresh blood.
Then open flame.
Finally a spear of scarlet energy lanced free, painting the office with the color of stars seen through the smoke of burning planets. The spear of energy lengthened, drawing with it out from the darkness the device, then the scarlet blade shrank away and the device slid itself within the softer darkness of a sleeve.
As shouts of the Force scattered Redrobes beyond the office's outer doors, the shadow gestured and lampdisks ignited. Another shout of the Force burst open the inner door to the private office. As Jedi stormed in, a final flick of the shadow's will triggered a recording device concealed within the desk.
Audio only.
"Why, Master Windu," said the shadow. "What a pleasant surprise."

Shaak Ti felt him coming before she could see him. The infra-and ultrasound-sensitive cavities in the tall, curving montrals to either side of her head gave her a sense analogous to touch: the texture of his approaching footsteps was ragged as old sacking. As he rounded the corner to the landing deck door, his breathing felt like a pile of gravel and his heartbeat was spiking like a Zabrak's head. He didn't look good, either; he was deathly pale, even for a human, and his eyes were raw.
"Anakin," she said warmly. Perhaps a friendly word was what he needed; she doubted he'd gotten many from Mace Windu. "Thank you for what you have done. The Jedi Order is in your debt—the whole galaxy, as well."
"Shaak Ti. Get out of my way."
Shaky as he looked, there was nothing unsteady in his voice: it was deeper than she remembered, more mature, and it carried undertones of authority that she had never heard before. And she was not blind to the fact he had neglected to call her Master.
She put forth a hand, offering calming energies through the Force. "The Temple is sealed, Anakin. The door is code-locked."
"And you're in the way of the pad."
She stepped aside, allowing him to the pad; she had no reason to keep him here against his will. He punched the code hungrily. "If Palpatine retaliates," she said reasonably, "is not your place here, to help with our defense?"
"I'm the chosen one. My place is there." His breathing roughened, and he looked as if he was getting even sicker. "I have to be there. That's the prophecy, isn't it? I have to be there—"
"Anakin, why? The Masters are the best of the Order. What can you possibly do?" The door slid open.
"I'm the chosen one," he repeated. "Prophecy can't be changed. I'll do—" He looked at her with eyes that were dying, and a spasm of unendurable pain passed over his face. Shaak Ti reached for him—he should be in the infirmary, not heading toward what might be a savage battle—but he lurched away from her hand. "I'll do what I'm supposed to do," he said, and sprinted into the night and the rain.

[the following is a transcript of an audio recording presented before the Galactic Senate on the afternoon of the first Empire Day; identities of all speakers verified and confirmed by voiceprint analysis]
PALPATINE: Why, Master Windu. What a pleasant surprise.
MACE WINDU: Hardly a surprise, Chancellor. And it will be pleasant for neither of us.
PALPATINE: I'm sorry? Master Fisto, hello. Master Kolar, greetings. I trust you are well. Master Tiin—I see your horn has regrown; I'm very glad. What brings four Jedi Masters to my office at this hour?
MACE WINDU: We know who you are. What you are. We are here to take you into custody.
PALPATINE: I beg your pardon? What I am? When last I checked, I was Supreme Chancellor of the Republic you are sworn to serve. I hope I misunderstand what you mean by custody, Master Windu. It smacks of treason.
MACE WINDU: You're under arrest.
PALPATINE: Really, Master Windu, you cannot be serious. On what charge?
MACE WINDU: You're a Sith Lord!
PALPATINE: Am I? Even if true, that's hardly a crime. My philosophical outlook is a personal matter. In fact—the last time I read the Constitution, anyway—we have very strict laws against this type of persecution. So I ask you again: what is my alleged crime? How do you expect to justify your mutiny before the Senate? Or do you intend to arrest the Senate as well?
MACE WINDU: We're not here to argue with you.
PALPATINE: No, you're here to imprison me without trial. Without even the pretense of legality. So this is the plan, at last: the Jedi are taking over the Republic.
MACE WINDU: Come with us. Now.
PALPATINE: I shall do no such thing. If you intend to murder me, you can do so right here.
MACE WINDU: Don't try to resist.
[sounds that have been identified by frequency resonances to be the ignition of several lightsabers]
PALPATINE: Resist? How could I possibly resist? This is murder, you Jedi traitors! How can I be any threat to you? Master Tiin—you're the telepath. What am I thinking right now?
[sounds of scuffle]
KIT FISTO: Saesee—
AGEN KOLAR: [garbled; possibly "It doesn't hurt"(?)]
[sounds of scuffle]
PALPATINE: Help! Help! Security—someone! Help me! Murder! Treason!
[recording ends]
A fountain of amethyst energy burst from Mace Windu's fist. "Don't try to resist."
The song of his blade was echoed by green fire from the hands of Kit Fisto, Agen Kolar, and Saesee Tiin. Kolar and Tiin closed on Palpatine, blocking the path to the door. Shadows dripped and oozed color, weaving and coiling up office walls slipping over chairs, spreading along the floor.
"Resist? How could I possibly resist?" Still seated at the desk Palpatine shook an empty fist helplessly, the perfect image of a tired, frightened old man. "This is murder, you Jedi traitors! How can I be any threat to you?"
He turned desperately to Saesee Tiin. "Master Tiin—you're the telepath. What am I thinking right now?" Tiin frowned and cocked his head. His blade dipped. A smear of red-flashing darkness hurtled from behind the desk. Saesee Tiin's head bounced when it hit the floor. Smoke curled from the neck, and from the twin stumps of the horns, severed just below the chin.
Kit Fisto gasped, "Saesee!"
The headless corpse, still standing, twisted as its knees buckled, and a thin sigh escaped from its trachea as it folded to the floor.
"It doesn't..." Agen Kolar swayed. His emerald blade shrank away, and the handgrip tumbled from his opening fingers. A small, neat hole in the middle of his forehead leaked smoke, showing light from the back of his head. "...hurt..." He pitched forward onto his face, and lay still.
Palpatine stood at the doorway, but the door stayed shut. From his right hand extended a blade the color of fire. The door locked itself at his back. 
"Help! Help!" Palpatine cried like a man in desperate fear for his life. "Security—someone! Help me! Murder! Treason!"
Then he smiled. He held one finger to his lips, and, astonishingly, he winked. In the blank second that followed, while Mace Windu and Kit Fisto could do no more than angle their lightsabers to guard, Palpatine swiftly stepped over the bodies back toward his desk, reversed his blade, and drove it in a swift, surgically precise stab down through his desktop.
"That's enough of that."
He let it burn its way free through the front, then he turned, lifting his weapon, appearing to study it as one might study the face of a beloved friend one has long thought dead. Power gathered around him until the Force shimmered with darkness.
"If you only knew," he said softly, perhaps speaking to the Jedi Masters, or perhaps to himself, or perhaps even to the scarlet blade lifted now as though in mocking salute, "how long I have been waiting for this..."

Anakin's speeder shrieked through the rain, dodging forked bolts of lightning that shot up from towers into the clouds, slicing across traffic lanes, screaming past spacescrapers so fast that his shock-wake cracked windows as he passed.
He didn't understand why people didn't just get out of his way. He didn't understand how the trillion beings who jammed Galactic City could go about their trivial business as though the universe hadn't changed. How could they think they counted for anything, compared with him? How could they think they still mattered? Their blind lives meant nothing now. None of them. Because ahead, on the vast cliff face of the Senate Office Building, one window spat lightning into the rain to echo the lightning of the storm outside—but this lightning was the color of clashing lightsabers.
Green fans, sheets of purple—
And crimson flame. He was too late. The green fire faded and winked out; now the lightning was only purple and red.
His repulsorlifts howled as he heeled the speeder up onto its side, skidding through wind-shear turbulence to bring it to a bobbing halt outside the window of Palpatine's private office. A blast of lightning hit the spire of 500 Republica, only a kilometer away, and its white burst flared off the window, flash-blinding him; he blinked furiously, slapping at his eyes in frustration. The colorless glare inside his eyes faded slowly, bringing into focus a jumble of bodies on the floor of Palpatine's private office. Bodies in Jedi robes.
On Palpatine's desk lay the head of Kit Fisto, faceup, scalp-tentacles unbound in a squid-tangle across the ebonite. His lidless eyes stared blindly at the ceiling. Anakin remembered him in the arena at Geonosis, effortlessly carving his way through wave after wave of combat droids, on his lips a gently humorous smile as though the horrific battle were only some friendly jest. His severed head wore that same smile. Maybe he thought death was funny, too.
Anakin's own blade sang blue as it slashed through the window and he dived through the gap. He rolled to his feet among a litter of bodies and sprinted through a shattered door along the small private corridor and through a doorway that flashed and flared with energy-scatter. Anakin skidded to a stop.
Within the public office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, a last Jedi Master battled alone, blade-to-blade, against a living shadow.

Sinking into Vaapad, Mace Windu fought for his life. More than his life: each whirl of blade and whipcrack of lightning was a strike in defense of democracy, of justice and peace, of the rights of ordinary beings to live their own lives in their own ways. He was fighting for the Republic that he loved.
Vaapad, the seventh form of lightsaber combat, takes its name from a notoriously dangerous predator native to the moons of Sarapin: a vaapad attacks its prey with whipping strikes of its blindingly fast tentacles. Most have at least seven. It is not uncommon for them to have as many as twelve; the largest ever killed had twenty-three. With a vaapad, one never knew how many tentacles it had until it was dead: they move too fast to count. Almost too fast to see. So did Mace's blade.
Vaapad is as aggressive and powerful as its namesake, but its power comes at great risk: immersion in Vaapad opens the gates that restrain one's inner darkness. To use Vaapad, a Jedi must allow himself to enjoy the fight; he must give himself over to the thrill of battle. The rush of winning. Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side. Mace Windu created this style, and he was its only living master. This was Vaapad's ultimate test.

Anakin blinked and rubbed his eyes again. Maybe he was still a bit flash-blind—the Korun Master seemed to be fading in and out of existence, half swallowed by a thickening black haze in which danced a meter-long bar of sunfire. Mace pressed back the darkness with a relentless straight-ahead march; his own blade, that distinctive amethyst blaze that had been the final sight of so many evil beings across the galaxy, made a haze of its own: an oblate sphere of purple fire within which there seemed to be dozens of swords slashing in all directions at once.
The shadow he fought, that blur of speed—could that be Palpatine?
Their blades flared and flashed, crashing together with bursts of fire, weaving nets of killing energy in exchanges so fast that Anakin could not truly see them—but he could feel them in the Force. The Force itself roiled and burst and crashed around them, boiling with power and lightspeed ricochets of lethal intent. And it was darkening.
Anakin could feel how the Force fed upon the shadow's murderous exaltation; he could feel fury spray into the Force though some poisonous abscess had crested in both their hearts. There was no Jedi restraint here. Mace Windu was cutting loose.

Mace was deep in it now: submerged in Vaapad, swallowed by it, he no longer truly existed as an independent being. Vaapad is a channel for darkness, and that darkness flowed both ways. He accepted the furious speed of the Sith Lord, drew the shadow's rage and power into his inmost center—
And let it fountain out again. He reflected the fury upon its source as a lightsaber redirects a blaster bolt.
There was a time when Mace Windu had feared the power of the dark; there was a time when he had feared the darkness in himself. But the Clone Wars had given him a gift of understanding: on a world called Haruun Kal, he had faced his darkness and had learned that the power of darkness is not to be feared. He had learned that it is fear that gives the darkness power. He was not afraid. The darkness had no power over him. But—
Neither did he have power over it.
Vaapad made him an open channel, half of a superconducting loop completed by the shadow; they became a standing wave of battle that expanded into every cubic centimeter of the Chancellor's office. There was no scrap of carpet nor shred of chair that might not at any second disintegrate in flares of red or purple; lampstands became brief shields, sliced into segments that whirled through the air; couches became terrain to be climbed for advantage or overleapt in retreat. But there was still only the cycle of power, the endless loop, no wound taken on either side, not even the possibility of fatigue.
Impasse.
Which might have gone on forever, if Vaapad were Mace's only gift. The fighting was effortless for him now; he let his body handle it without the intervention of his mind. While his blade spun and crackled, while his feet slid and his weight shifted and his shoulders turned in precise curves of their own direction, his mind slid along the circuit of dark power, tracing it back to its limitless source. Feeling for its shatterpoint. He found a knot of fault lines in the shadow's future; he chose the largest fracture and followed it back to the here and the now—
And it led him, astonishingly, to a man standing frozen in the slashed-open doorway. Mace had no need to look; the presence in the Force was familiar, and was as uplifting as sunlight breaking through a thunderhead. The chosen one was here.
Mace disengaged from the shadow's blade and leapt for the window; he slashed away the transparisteel with a single flourish. His instant's distraction cost him: a dark surge of the Force nearly blew him right out of the gap he had just cut. Only a desperate Force-push of his own altered his path enough that he slammed into a stanchion instead of plunging half a kilometer from the ledge outside. He bounced off and the Force cleared his head and once again he gave himself to Vaapad.
He could feel the end of this battle approaching, and so could the blur of Sith he faced; in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear. Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow's fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge. Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half-kilometer drop. Out where the shadow's fear made it hesitate. Out where the shadow's fear turned some of its Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete. Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow's lightsaber in half.
One piece flipped back in through the cut-open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain toward the distant alleys below. Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.
"For all your power, you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord," Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, "is under arrest."
"Do you see, Anakin? Do you?" Palpatine's voice once again had the broken cadence of a frightened old man's. "Didn't I warn you of the Jedi and their treason?"
"Save your twisted words, my lord. There are no politicians here. The Sith will never regain control of the Republic. It's over. You've lost." Mace leveled his blade. "You lost for the same reason the Sith always lose: defeated by your own fear."
Palpatine lifted his head. His eyes smoked with hate. "Fool," he said. He lifted his arms, his robes of office spreading wide into raptor's wings, his hands hooking into talons.
"Fool!" His voice was a shout of thunder. "Do you think the fear you feel is mine?"
Lightning blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine's hands, and Mace didn't have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him. Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him. And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source. Palpatine staggered, snarling, but the blistering energy that loured from his hands only intensified. He fed the power with his pain.
"Anakin!" Mace called. His voice sounded distant, blurred, as if it came from the bottom of a well. "Anakin, help me! This is your chance!"
He felt Anakin's leap from the office floor to the ledge, felt his approach behind—And Palpatine was not afraid. Mace could feel it: he wasn't worried at all. "Destroy this traitor," the Chancellor said, his voice raised aver the howl of writhing energy that joined his hands to Mace's blade. "This was never an arrest. It's an assassination!"
That was when Mace finally understood. He had it. The key to final victory. Palpatine's shatterpoint. The absolute shatterpoint of the Sith. The shatterpoint of the dark side itself. Mace thought, blankly astonished, Palpatine trusts Anakin Skywalker...
Now Anakin was at Mace's shoulder. Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace's blade back toward the Korun Master's face.
Palpatine's eyes glowed with power, casting a yellow glare that burned back the rain from around them. "He is a traitor, Anakin. Destroy him."
"You're the chosen one, Anakin," Mace said, his voice going thin with strain. This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade. "Take him. It's your destiny."
Skywalker echoed him faintly. "Destiny..."
"Help me! I can't hold on any longer!" The yellow glare from Palpatine's eyes spread outward through his flesh. His skin flowed like oil, as though the muscle beneath was burning away, as though even the bones of his skull were softening, were bending and bulging, deforming from the heat and pressure of his electric hatred. "He is killing me, Anakin—! Please, Anaaahhh—"
Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me—"
"Ahhh—" Palpatine's roar above the endless blast of lightning became a fading moan of despair. The lightning swallowed itself, leaving only the night and the rain, and an old man crumpled to his knees on a slippery ledge. "I... can't. I give up. I... I am too weak, in the end. Too old, and too weak. Don't kill me, Master Jedi. Please. I surrender."
Victory flooded through Mace's aching body. He lifted his blade. "You Sith disease—"
"Wait—" Skywalker seized his lightsaber arm with desperate strength. "Don't kill him—you can't just kill him, Master—"
"Yes, I can," Mace said, grim and certain. "I have to."
"You came to arrest him. He has to stand trial—"
"A trial would be a joke. He controls the courts. He controls the Senate—"
"So are you going to kill all them, too? Like he said you would?"
Mace yanked his arm free. "He's too dangerous to be left alive. If you could have taken Dooku alive, would you have?"
Skywalker's face swept itself clean of emotion. "That was different—"
Mace turned toward the cringing, beaten Sith Lord. "You can explain the difference after he's dead." He raised his lightsaber.
"I need him alive!" Skywalker shouted. "I need him to save Padme!"
Mace thought blankly, Why? And moved his lightsaber toward the fallen Chancellor. Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord's hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine's hate struck him full-on.
He had been so intent on Palpatine's shatterpoint that he'd never thought to look for Anakin's. Dark lightning blasted away his universe. He fell forever. Anakin Skywalker knelt in the rain. He was looking at a hand. The hand had brown skin. The hand held a lightsaber. The hand had a charred oval of tissue where it should have been attached to an arm.
"What have I done?" Was it his voice? It must have been. Because it was his question. "What have I done?"
Another hand, a warm and human hand, laid itself softly on his shoulder. "You're following your destiny, Anakin," said a familiar gentle voice. "The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You can see that, can't you?"
"You were right," Anakin heard himself saying. "Why didn't I know?"
"You couldn't have. They cloaked themselves in deception, my boy. Because they feared your power, they could never trust you."
Anakin stared at the hand, but he no longer saw it. "Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan trusts me..."
"Not enough to tell you of their plot."
Treason echoed in his memory.
...this is not an assignment for the record...
That warm and human hand gave his shoulder a warm and human squeeze. "I do not fear your power, Anakin, I embrace it. You are the greatest of the Jedi. You can be the greatest of the Sith. I believe that, Anakin. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you."
Anakin looked from the dead hand on the ledge to the living one on his shoulder, then up to the face of the man who stood above him, and what he saw there choked him like an invisible fist crushing his throat. The hand on his shoulder was human. The face...wasn't.
The eyes were a cold and feral yellow, and they gleamed like those of a predator lurking beyond a fringe of firelight; the bone around those feral eyes had swollen and melted and flowed like durasteel spilled from a fusion smelter, and the flesh that blanketed it had gone corpse-gray and coarse as rotten synthplast. Stunned with horror, stunned with revulsion, Anakin could only stare at the creature. At the shadow. Looking into the face of the darkness, he saw his future.
"Now come inside," the darkness said.
After a moment, he did. Anakin stood just within the office. Motionless. Palpatine examined the damage to his face in a broad expanse of wall mirror. Anakin couldn't tell if his expression might be revulsion, or if this were merely the new shape of his features. Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."

Anakin's revelation—that Palpatine and Darth Sidious are one and the same—hollows Mace to the core. Not days earlier, he and other Jedi had risked their lives against Grievous's droid forces to prevent Palpatine from being abducted. Grasping that the abduction and the war itself has been nothing more than a deception, Mace leaps into action, promising to take Palpatine into Jedi custody, dead or alive.

Before Mace realizes what has happened, Kolar, Tiin, and Fisto have fallen to Sidious's blade.

In the inner recesses of his private office, the Jedi confronted the Chancellor. Palpatine produced a lightsaber hidden in his sleeve and let the dark side flow through him. It granted him unnatural dexterity and speed—enough to quickly kill three Jedi Masters and force the mighty Mace Windu back.

Yoda rose.
A gesture opened the grating of the vent shaft where he had waited in meditation, revealing the vast conic well that was the Grand Convocation Chamber of the Galactic Senate. It was sometimes called the Senate Arena. Today, this nickname would be particularly apt.
Yoda stretched blood back into his green flesh. This was his time. Nine hundred years of study and training, of teaching and of meditation, all now focused, and refined, and resolved into this single moment; the sole purpose of his vast span of existence had been to prepare him to enter the heart of night and bring his light against the darkness. He adjusted the angle of his blade against his belt. He draped his robe across his shoulders. With reverence, with gratitude, without fear, and without anger, Yoda went forth to war.

A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful.
"The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition, Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader—I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps...
"How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan... "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had...redecorated...the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste...

The holding office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic comprised the nether vertex of the Senate Arena; it was little more than a circular preparations area, a green room, where guests of the Chancellor might be entertained before entering the Senate Podium—the circular pod on its immense hydraulic pillar, which contained controls that coordinated the movement of floating Senate delegation pods—and rising into the focal point of the chamber above. Above that podium, the vast holopresence of a kneeling Sith bowed before a shadow that stood below. Guards in scarlet flanked the shadow; a Chagrian toady cringed nearby.
"But the danger is real; be mindful."
"I will, my Master. Thank you."
The holopresence faded, and where its huge translucency had knelt was now revealed another presence, a physical presence, tiny and aged, clad in robes and leaning on a twist of wood. But his physical presence was an illusion; the truth of him could be seen only in the Force. In the Force, he was a fountain of light. "Pity your new disciple I do; so lately an apprentice, so soon without a Master."
"Why, Master Yoda, what a delightful surprise! Welcome!" The voice of the shadow hummed with anticipation. "Let me be the first to wish you Happy Empire Day!"
"Find it happy, you will not. Nor will the murderer you call Vader."
"Ah." The shadow stepped closer to the light. "So that is the threat I felt. Who is it, if I may ask? Who have you sent to kill him?"
"Enough it is that you know your own destroyer."
"Oh, pish, Master Yoda. It wouldn't be Kenobi, would it? Please say it's Kenobi—Lord Vader gets such a thrill from killing people who care for him..."
Behind the shadow, some meters away, Mas Amedda—the Chagrian toady who was Speaker of the Galactic Senate—heard a whisper in Palpatine's voice. Flee.
He did.
Neither light nor shadow gave his exit a glance.
"So easily slain, Obi-Wan is not."
"Neither are you, apparently; but that is about to change." The shadow took another step, and another. A lightsaber appeared, green as sunlight in a forest. "The test of that, today will be."
"Even a fraction of the dark side is more power than your Jedi arrogance can conceive; living in the light, you have never seen the depth of the darkness." The shadow spread arms that made its sleeves into black wings. "Until now."
Lightning speared from outstretched hands, and the battle was on.

In the Senate Arena, lightning forked from the hands of a Sith, and bent away from the gesture of a Jedi to shock Redrobes into unconsciousness. Then there were only the two of them.
Their clash transcended the personal; when new lightning blazed, it was not Palpatine burning Yoda with his hate, it was the Lord of all Sith scorching the Master of all Jedi into a smoldering huddle of clothing and green flesh. A thousand years of hidden Sith exulted in their victory.
"Your time is over! The Sith rule the galaxy! Now and forever!"
And it was the whole of the Jedi Order that rocketed from its huddle, making of its own body a weapon to blast the Sith to the ground.
"At an end your rule is, and not short enough it was, I must say." There appeared a blade the color of life.
From the shadow of a black wing, a small weapon—a holdout, an easily concealed backup, a tiny bit of treachery expressing the core of Sith mastery—slid into a withered hand and spat a flame-colored blade of its own.
When those blades met, it was more than Yoda against Palpatine, more the millennia of Sith against the legions of Jedi; this was the expression of the fundamental conflict of the universe itself.
Light against dark.
Winner takes all.

There came a turning point in the clash of the light against the dark. It did not come from a flash of lightning or slash of energy blade, though there were these in plenty; it did not come from a flying kick or a surgically precise punch, though these were traded, too.
It came as the battle shifted from the holding office to the great Chancellor's Podium; it came as the hydraulic lift beneath the Podium raised it on its tower of durasteel a hundred meters and more, so that it became a laserpoint of battle flaring at the focus of the vast emptiness of the Senate Arena; it came as the Force and the podium's controls ripped delegation pods free of the curving walls and made of them hammers, battering rams, catapult stones crashing and crushing against each other in a rolling thunder-roar that echoed the Senate's cheers for the galaxy's new Emperor.
It came when the avatar of light resolved into the lineage of the Jedi; when the lineage of the Jedi refined into one single Jedi. It came when Yoda found himself alone against the dark.
In that lightning-speared tornado of feet and fists and blades and bashing machines, his vision finally pierced the darkness that had clouded the Force. Finally, he saw the truth.
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most implacable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known...
just—
didn't—
have it.
He'd never had it. He had lost before he started. He had lost before he was born. The Sith had changed. The Sith had grown, had adapted, had invested a thousand years' intensive study into every aspect of not only the Force but Jedi lore itself, in preparation for exactly this day. The Sith had remade themselves. They had become new.
While the Jedi—
The Jedi had spent that same millennium training to refight the last war. The new Sith could not be destroyed with a lightsaber; they could not be burned away by any torch of the Force. The brighter his light, the darker their shadow. How could one win a war against the dark, when war itself had become the dark's own weapon?
He knew, at that instant, that this insight held the hope of the galaxy. But if he fell here, that hope would die with him. Hmmm, Yoda thought. A problem this is...

The end came with astonishing suddenness. The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength. The shadow released its power for an instant, long enough only to whirl away through the air and alight upon one of the delegation pods as it flew past, and the creature leapt to follow—
Half a second too slow.
The shadow unleashed its lightning while the creature was still in the air, and the little green freak took its full power. The shock blasted him backward to crash against the podium, and he fell.
He fell a long way.
The base of the Arena was a hundred meters below, littered with twisted scraps and jags of metal from the pods destroyed in the battle, and as the little green freak fell, finally, above, the victorious shadow became once again only Palpatine: a very old, very tired man, gasping for air as he leaned on the pod's rail. Old he might have been, but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight; he scanned the wreckage below, and he did not see a body.
He flicked a finger, and in the Chancellor's Podium a dozen meters away, a switch tripped and sirens sounded throughout the enormous building; another surge of the Force sent his pod streaking in a downward spiral to the holding office at the base of the Podium tower. Clone troops were already swarming into it. "It was Yoda," he said as he swung out of the pod. "Another assassination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building." He didn't have time to direct the search personally. The Force hummed a warning in his bones: Lord Vader was in danger. Mortal danger.
Clones scattered. He stopped one officer. "You. Call the shuttle dock and tell them I'm on my way. Have my ship warmed and ready." The officer saluted, and Palpatine, with vigor that surprised even himself, ran.

With the help of the Force, Yoda sprinted along the service accessway below the Arena faster than a human being could run; he sliced conduits as he passed, filling the accessway behind him with coils of high-voltage cables, twisting and spitting lightning. Every few dozen meters, he paused just long enough to slash a hole in the accessway's wall; once his pursuers got past the cables, they would have to divide their forces to search each of his possible exits. But he knew they could afford to; there were thousands of them.
He pulled his comlink from inside his robe without slowing down; the Force whispered a set of coordinates and he spoke them into the link. "Delay not," he added. "Swiftly closing is the pursuit. Failed I have, and kill me they will."
The Convocation Center of the Galactic Senate was a drum-mounted dome more than a kilometer in diameter; even with the aid of the Force, Yoda was breathing hard by the time he reached its edge. He cut through the floor beneath him and dropped down into another accessway, this one used for maintenance on the huge lighting system that shone downward onto Republic Plaza through transparisteel panels that floored the underside of the huge dome's rim. He cut into the lightwell; the reflected wattage nearly blinded him to the vertiginous drop below the transparisteel on which he stood.
Without hesitation he cut through that as well and dived headlong into the night.
Catching the nether edges of his long cloak to use as an improvised airfoil, he let the Force guide him in a soaring free fall away from the Convocation Center; he was too small to trigger its automated defense perimeter, but the open-cockpit speeder toward which he fell would get blasted from the sky if it deviated one meter inward from its curving course. He released his robe so that it flapped upward, making a sort of drogue that righted him in the air so that he fell feetfirst into the speeder's passenger seat beside Bail Organa.
While Yoda strapped himself in, the Senator from Alderaan pulled the rented speeder through a turn that would have impressed Anakin Skywalker, and shot away toward the nearest intersection of Coruscant's congested skyways.
Yoda's eyes squeezed closed.
"Master Yoda? Are you wounded?"
"Only my pride," Yoda said, and meant it, though Bail could not possibly understand how deep that wound went, nor how it bled. "Only my pride."

Inside the spacious interior of the Galactic Senate chamber, Yoda challenged the Emperor. The two engaged in a spectacular duel—a contest between the most powerful practitioners of the Force's light and dark sides. The Emperor proved too powerful to defeat. Although Yoda held his own for much of the duel, in the end the Sith bested him. He realized that continuing to directly confront Palpatine would mean failure. Defeated, Yoda slunk away into the shadow's of the Senate chamber's cavernous depths, leaping into a waiting getaway speeder piloted by Bail Organa.

Arden Lyn defected from Imperial service and started training her own students. She even tried to help rogue Admiral Zaarin kidnap Palpatine, but Inquisitor Tremayne thwarted the attempt. Arden Lyn fled, hoping to locate an ancient Kashi Mer talisman that would bring her power enough to defeat the Empire. She was eventually hunted down and killed by Palpatine himself.

When the Sith finally emerged from a thousand years of watching and waiting, they numbered—in accordance with the tradition set down by Darth Bane—only two. The most powerful of these was Darth Sidious, an ice-cold, diabolically calculating genius equipped with the strength of the dark side of the Force, as well as an enormous wealth of Sith artifacts, equipment, and knowledge. Perhaps the best weapon in his arsenal was his keen understanding of galactic politics, and his seemingly unlimited ability to engineer situations that ultimately served to further empower the Sith.

Palpatine began his career of evil so subtly that no one noticed. Certainly no outward change evidenced the darkness in his heart. Those who encountered him considered Palpatine a kindly fellow, perhaps even a bit outclassed by the pace and magnitude of the political arena into which he had been thrust when he became a senator. But even then, Palpatine was scheming, forging alliances with influential figures in the Senate and the great learning centers. Political science students pored over his speeches. Military science students absorbed his philosophies. Palpatine even had the ear of a powerful Jedi Master. His circle of supporters and confidants seemed at times to dwarf the power of the Galactic Senate itself.
When Palpatine was elected Supreme Chancellor of the Senate, he made use of its potential. Gradually his sphere of influence grew, his opinions became the Republic's opinions, and his decisions became the Republic's laws. In time, the Republic became an Empire, ruled by the most evil man in the galaxy.

Dooku could not argue. Not only had the Dark Lord introduced Dooku to realms of power beyond his most spectacular fantasies, but Sidious was also a political manipulator so subtle that his abilities might be considered to dwarf even the power of the dark side itself. It was said that whenever the Force closes a hatch, it opens a viewport...and every viewport that had so much as cracked in this past thirteen standard years had found a Dark Lord of the Sith already at the rim, peering in, calculating how best to slip through.

In the heart of the Empire, at the center of a twisted web of bureaucrats, advisors, admirals, and spies, sits Emperor Palpatine. A mysterious man, rarely seen save by the servants who carry out his often cryptic wishes, he pulls the strings which manipulate the Empire. He offers no explanations to underlings, and he confides in no one. Only one man may rule the Empire—and that man is Palpatine—and that rule must be absolute.
Palpatine uses contradictory orders and manipulation to keep his servants vying for favor, a means by which Palpatine prevents his underlings from becoming too powerful. By setting them against each other in the ruthlessly competitive Imperial court, he prevents any of them from advancing a private agenda and ensures all remember who is the master and who is the servant.
Palpatine is a master of manipulation and has no qualms about using crime lords, Grand Moffs, or other powerful figures as pawns in his game. Strangely, it always seems that he knows how all of his pieces will move several turns before they do.

The Sith Lord Darth Sidious sets into motion the final stages of his order's 2,000-year-old plan to destroy the Jedi. Working patiently, Sidious has extended his power and influence deep into the galactic government. Using his grasp of psychology and bureaucracy to stifle justice, he brings about the crisis he needs to make his move for domination.

Palpatine had been on Coruscant for several years, and he felt that he knew the place better than many lifelong residents did. He knew it the way a jungle cat knew its territory. He had an instinctual understanding of its shifting moods, and an instinctual feel for its power spots and dangerous zones. It was almost as if he could see the coiling blackness that inhabited the senate, and the refulgent light that poured from the spires of the Jedi Temple. It was a wonderful place to be for someone who had long been a scholar, a historian, a lover of art, and a collector of rare objects; someone with a passion for exploring life's manifold heights and depths.
Frequently he would shrug off his elaborate cloak and take up the simple dress of a trader or a recluse. He would throw a hood over his head and wander the lightless abysses, the dark paths and neglected plazas, the tunnels and alleyways, the seedy underworld. Anonymous, he would make trips to the equator, the poles, and other remote places. Beneath his ambitions—for himself, for Naboo, for the Republic at large—he had always been unassuming, and that apparent lack of guile allowed him to pass without being recognized; to all but disappear in a crowd, as only a person of solitude might—as one who had kept his own company for so many years.

Still, disappointing as his initial political life may have been, Palpatine discovered that legislative bodies operated under the same basic rules that governed company boards and military regiments. Members of any group, he observed, could be merged into exploitable partnerships given the proper motivation. Like a colossus astride a mountaintop, a leader has power over those beneath him, but becomes a target for their barbs and arrows. Palpatine's writings on the nature of power from this period became popular political texts.

Where Darth Sidious was a strategist, his fearsome apprentice Darth Maul was a blazing lightsaber aimed directly at the heart of the Jedi Order.

Palpatine was a very patient man—even his harshest critics had to admit this. Just how patient most of them could never guess. Such patience came with his long study of the Force, and it was to the Dark Side that he owed his allegiance. For the Dark Side was power. Power to shape the galaxy, to change history, perhaps to live forever. His death he had planned for, just had he had planned for every other contingency.

The Rebel Alliance thought that Emperor Palpatine was killed by Darth Vader just before the destruction of the second Death Star. His death at the hands of Darth Vader was, apparently, merely a setback, and the evil Emperor Palpatine, steeped in the ways of the dark side, seemed prepared for any eventuality.

"Since my days as a young noble on Naboo, long before I joined Darth Plagueis and began my apprenticeship, I collected dark side lore. These rubbings of Sith tablets and untranslatable runic scrolls were coveted and traded on the black markets by cultist, collectors, and museum curators willing to defy the Republic's ban on Sith artifacts.
The very exstence of this illicit trade confirms many vital truths: Rulers seek to control information. The powerful will do anything to hoard their power. And if something is forbidden, it is likely a thing worth knowing. Getting these artifacts past the law officials and into my quarters on Naboo provided new lessons: True power brokers dwell in the shadows. Credits can buy anything, even intangible concepts such as access and silence. It is necessary to lie to achieve anything of value. And a skilled liar is nearly imposible to detect.
Although my experience acquiring the texts provided a practical knowledge of how treasures and secrets change hands, as well as the roles non-Force sensitives play in keeping the galaxy running, the actual dark side tomes deepened my knowledge of the ancient Sith. I realized that I had all the tools that I needed to craft my own system of power, one that fused contemporary politics with Sith ideals.
Under the tutelage of Darth Plagueis, I inherited the Sith Archives—more than a thousand years' worth of teachings passed in secret from master to apprentice. But what I learned was that only a handful of figures had ever truly advanced the cause of the Sith. Thus I made it my goal to recover their most famous writings—not the revisions of misguided chroniclers who lived hundreds of years after them but the parchments bearing their original words and recorded by their own hands. With the fall of the Jedi Temple, I have finally recovered the last of these documents, though only fragments of each have survived the centuries."

More remote than some, Aborah, which had been the province of the Damask clan for several generations, was otherwise typical of the dormant smokers whose thickly forested conical peaks poked from the calm waters of the Western Sea. A maze of interconnected lava tubes ran deep into the mountain island; waterfalls plunged from the sheer heights; and incense trees scented the salty air of the lowland valleys. Conveyed by speeder to Aborah’s north tower complex, Plagueis escorted 11-4D on a tour of the corridors and caverns that constituted his place of sacrosanct solitude.
Motioning to the many droids that were on hand to welcome the pair to Aborah, Plagueis said: “You will come to find yourself at home here, as I have.”
“I’m certain I will, Magister Damask,” 11-4D said, its photoreceptors registering a dozen different types of droids in a single glance. Memo droids, GNK power droids, even a prototype Ubrikkian surgical droid.
“In time we’ll see to having your original appendages restored so that you can earn your keep.”
“I look forward to it, Magister.”
The tour began in the outermost rooms, which were appointed with furnishings and objects of art of the highest quality, gathered from all sectors of the galaxy. But Plagueis was neither as acquisitive as a Neimoidian nor as ostentatious as a Hutt; and so the ornamented chambers quickly gave way to data-gathering rooms crowded with audio-vid receivers and HoloNet projectors; and then to galleries filled to overflowing with ancient documents and tomes, recorded on media ranging from tree trunk parchment through flimsiplast to storage crystal and holocron. The Muuns were said to abhor literature and to loathe keeping records of anything other than loan notices, actuarial tables, and legal writs, and yet Plagueis was guardian of the one of the finest libraries to be found anywhere outside Obroa-skai or the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Here, neatly arranged and cataloged and stored in climate-controlled cases, was a collection of treatises and commentaries accumulated over centuries by the Sith and their often unwitting agents. Ancient histories of the Rakata and the Vjun; texts devoted to the Followers of Palawa, the Chatos Academy, and the Order of Dai Bendu; archives that had once belonged to House Malreaux; annals of the Sorcerers of Tund and of Queen Amanoa of Onderon; biological studies of the ysalimiri and vornskrs of Myrkr, and of the taozin of Va’art. Certain long-lived species, like the Wookiees, Hutts, Falleen, and Toydarians, were afforded galleries of their own.
Deeper in the mountain were laboratories where Plagueis’s real work took place. Confined to cages, stasis fields, bioreactors, and bacta tanks were life-forms brought to Muunilinst from across the galaxy—many from the galaxy’s most remote worlds. Some were creatures of instinct, and others were semisentient. Some were immediately recognizable to 11-4D; others resembled creatures concocted from borrowed parts. Some were newly birthed or hatched, and some looked as if they were being kept at death’s door. More than a few were the subjects of ongoing experiments in what seemed to be vivisection or interbreeding, and others were clearly in suspended animation. OneOne-FourDee noted that many of the animals wore remotes that linked them to biometric monitoring machines, while others were in the direct care of specialist droids. Elsewhere in the hollow of the mountain were sealed enclosures warmed by artificial light, aswirl with mixtures of rarefied gases and luxuriant with flora. And deeper still were test centers crammed with complex machines and glass-fronted cooling units devoted to the storage of chemical compounds, alkaloids derived from both plants and animals, blood and tissue samples, and bodily organs from a host of species.
Plagueis instructed 11-4D to wander about the galleries and laboratories on his own, and then report back to him.
Hours later the droid returned to say: “I recognize that you are involved in research related to species durability and hybridization. But I must confess to being unfamiliar with many of the examples of fauna and flora you have amassed, and few of the arcane documents in your library. Is the data available for upload?”
“Some portion of it,” Plagueis said. “The remainder will have to be scanned.”
“Then the task will require standard years, Magister.”
“I’m aware of that. While there is some urgency, we are in no rush.”
“I understand, sir. Is there specific data you wish me to assimilate first?”
From the breast pocket of his cloak, Plagueis withdrew a storage crystal. “Start with this. It is a history of the Sith.”

A standard month after the events on Coruscant, Plagueis summoned Sidious to Muunilinst. Sidious had visited the High Port skyhook but had never been invited downside, and now he found himself soaring over one of the planet’s unspoiled blue oceans in a stylish airspeeder piloted by two Sun Guards. As the speeder approached Aborah, he settled deeply into the Force and was rewarded with a vision of the mountain island as a transcendent vortex of dark energy unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was something he would have expected to encounter only on Korriban or some other Sith world.
The droid 11-4D—fully repaired—was waiting for him on the landing zone and led him inside, leaving the guards to wait with the airspeeder.
“You appear to be in much better condition than when I last saw you, droid,” Sidious remarked as a turbolift dropped them deep inside the complex.
“Yes, Senator Palpatine, Aborah is a restorative place.”
“And Magister Damask?”
“I leave it to you to judge for yourself, sir.”
Exiting the turbolift, the first thing to catch Sidious’s eye was the library: rack after rack of texts, scrolls, disks, and holocrons—all the data he had been craving since his apprenticeship began. He ran his hands lovingly over the shelves but barely had time to revel in his excitement when 11-4D ushered him onto a descending ramp that led into what might have been a state-of-the-art medical research facility.

From the high-backed chair that was his seat of power, Sidious watched Darth Vader turn and march from the throne room, long black cloak whooshing, black helmet burnished by the lights, anger palpable.
Atop a pedestal alongside the chair sat the holocrons Sidious had asked his apprentice to search out and retrieve from the Jedi archives room. Pyramidal in shape, as opposed to the geodesic Jedi version, the holocrons were repositories of recorded knowledge, accessible only to those who were highly evolved in the use of the Force. Arcane writing inscribed on the holocrons Vader had fetched told Sidious that they had been recorded by Sith during the era of Darth Bane, some one thousand standard years earlier. Sidious didn't have to imagine the content of the devices, because his own Master, Darth Plagueis, had once allowed him access to the actual holocrons. The ones stored in the Temple archives room were nothing more than clever forgeries—Sith disinformation of a sort.

What has proven to be the lasting genius of Palpatine as Emperor is his devotion to collecting all the knowledge of the Dark Side that he can, as well as what Light Side information he can corrupt and preserve. He is no more altruistic than any other, but his newfound immortality has given him the patience that all before him have lacked.

While his Vizier and ministers maintained the day-to-day operation of the Empire, Palpatine spent decades, frequently in seclusion, in meditation and study on a masterwork of his thoughts and teachings. No one can say when he first began work, but his advisors suspect it dates back to the time he first embraced the Dark Side. Numerous beings have succumbed to its temptation over millennia, but few have ever pursued its power as relentlessly as Palpatine.
The Dark Side, as far as its servants are concerned, is obviously stronger and easier than the Light. What Palpatine realized was that the Dark Side had never gained the fame the Light held because it was a personal, secretive thing. The Light was good for simple tricks and for the altruistic, but such things were useless to one who knew the things the Force made one capable of. Palpatine became convinced the Dark Side was ignored because few had the courage to pay the price it demanded. Since the Dark Side didn’t lend itself to sharing and other such weak-minded attitudes, there had not been organizations of Dark Side servants to endure the ages. There was no great collection of Dark Side lore, nor any gathering of its masters. Realizing the task that lay before him, Palpatine knew he must begin at once to attain control over the Dark Side.
With the resources of a galaxy at his disposal, he gathered the greatest works of knowledge from over a million worlds. He studied the Force in all its guises throughout the galaxy, whether it was the shamanism of Jarvashqiine or the tales of the Tyia. Coupled with perversions of the secrets he ripped from the living minds of Jedi he captured during the Purge, he learned more than he ever expected.
One such victim was Ashka Boda, possessor of the famed Jedi Holocron itself. With this artifact in his grasp, he had little need for any more living Jedi, save as pupils.
He sifted this lore till he could find every secret he needed to continue his studies. He had long ago gone beyond any knowledge to be found in the recovered teachings of the Krath or the Heresiarchs. Since then, his studies had principally been experimental. He gathered this knowledge, mostly crude and simplistic variations on traditional Jedi teachings, into a great assemblage of Dark Side Lore. He completed two volumes in this Dark Side Compendium: The Book of Anger and The Weakness of Inferiors. The Emperor’s third volume, The Creation of Monsters, is still in manuscript. Prior to his death above the Pinnacle Moon, the Emperor had planned hundreds of additional volumes. With the immortality his clone tanks provided him, he thought he literally had all the time in the universe with which to probe the limits of the Force.

In these cantos and the hundreds of thousands that follow, it is apparent that the Emperor has plumbed depths of darkness unknown before. Whether has done so out of a need to achieve knowledge, or whether he has been drawn thus far is unknown and perhaps unknowable. What is known is that the Emperor gathered all the greatest lore of the Dark Side and collected. This cost him greatly, as the Dark Side consumes its servants even as its followers consume each other.

In his Master's Sith Holocron, Maul found patterns for Sith speeders, probe droids, and a double-bladed lightsaber, and reproduced them with faithful precision.

On Hypori they were the prey, standing back-to-back in their black zeyd-cloth hooded robes at the center of concentric rings of droids, retrofitted by Baktoid Armor to function as combat automata. Two hundred programmed assailants—bipedal, treaded, some levitated by antigrav generators—armed with a variety of weapons, ranging from hand blasters to short-barreled burst-rifles. Plagueis hadn't allowed his young apprentice to wield a lightsaber until a few years earlier, but Sidious was brandishing one now, self-constructed of phrik alloy and aurodium, and powered by a synthetic crystal. Made for delicate, long-fingered hands—as much a work of art as a weapon—the lightsaber thrummed as he waved the blade from side to side in front of him.
"Every weapon, manufactured by whatever species, has its own properties and peculiarities," Plagueis was saying, his own blade angled toward the ferrocrete floor of the battledome's fabricated cityscape, as if to light a fuse. "Range, penetrating power, refresh rate... In some instances your life might depend on your ability to focus on the weapon rather than the wielder. You must train yourself to identify a weapon instantly—whether it's a product of BlasTech or Merr-Sonn, Tenloss or Prax—so that you will know where to position yourself, and the several ways to best deflect a well-aimed bolt."