(To be completed.)

Yoda is a specifically powerful and skillful Jedi, as well as a renowned one in SW history, and deserves a respect thread.

As with other EU respect threads, however, this will be different in that comics are not the only source material for Star Wars. To represent Yoda's 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 as well as the movies themselves. 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.

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.

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...

A wave of Dooku's free hand sent a piece of machinery flying at the diminutive Jedi Master, seeming as if it would surely crush him. But Yoda was ready, waving his own hand, Force-pushing the flying machinery harmlessly aside.
Dooku clutched up at the ceiling, breaking free great blocks that tumbled down at Yoda. But small hands waved and the boulders dropped to the sides, bouncing across the floor all about the untouched Master Yoda.

"Fought well, you have, my old Padawan," Yoda congratulated, and his lightsaber bean to move out, just a bit, forcing Dooku back. 
"The battle is far from over!" Dooku stubbornly argued. "This is just the beginning!" Reaching into the Force, he took hold of one of the huge cranes within the hangar and threw it down at Obi-Wan and Anakin.  
"Anakin!" Obi-Wan cried. He grabbed at the plummeting crane with the Force, and Anakin, startled awake, did so, as well. Even working together, they hadn't the strength left to stop its crushing descent.  
But Yoda did. 
Yoda grabbed the crane and held it fast, but in doing so, he had to release Dooku. The Count wasted no time, sprinting away, leaping up the ramp to his sail ship. As Yoda began to move the fallen crane harmlessly aside, the sail ship's engine roared to life, and all three Jedi watched helplessly as Count Dooku blasted away.

Yoda squeaked and puffed out his round cheeks with the sudden effort of using the Force to keep the Call from crushing Chuff into a grease spot on the decking bay floor. "Step back!" he barked.

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.

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.

Luke was drained and had to gasp for breath. "I can't," he said dejectedly. "It's too big."
"Size has no meaning," Yoda insisted. "It matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?"
Luke, chastened, just shook his head.
"And well you shouldn't," the Jedi Master advised. For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it and makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," he said as he pinched Luke's skin. Yoda made a grand sweeping gesture to indicate the vastness of the universe about him. "Feel it you must. Feel the flow. Feel the Force around you.Here," he said, as he pointed, "between you and me and that tree and that rock."
While Yoda gave his explanation of the Force, Artoo spun his head around, trying without success to register this "Force" on his scanners. He whistled and beeped in bafflement.
"Yes, everywhere," Yoda continued, ignoring the little droid, "waiting to be felt and used. Yes, even between this land and that ship!"
Then Yoda turned and looked at the swamp, and as he did the water began to swirl. Slowly, from the gently bubbling waters, the nose of the fighter appeared again. Luke gasped in astonishment as the X-wing gracefully rose from its watery tomb and moved majestically toward the shore. He silently vowed never to use the word "impossible" again. For there, standing on his tree root pedestal, was tiny Yoda, effortlessly gliding the ship from the water onto the shore. It was a sight that Luke could scarcely believe. But he knew that it was a potent example of Jedi mastery over the Force.
Artoo, equally astounded but not so philosophical, issued a series of loud whistles, then bolted off to hide behind some giant roots.
The X-wing seemed to float onto the beach, and then gently came to a stop. Luke was humbled by the feat he had witnessed and approached Yoda in awe. "I..." he began, dazzled. "I don't believe it."
"That," Yoda stated emphatically, "is why you fail." Bewildered, Luke shook his head, wondering if he would ever rise to the station of a Jedi.

Yoda's capabilities with the Force give him amazing strength and speed, as well as the ability to levitate.

Dooku saw that he had been tricked. He had no doubt now that he and Lorian had been made team captains deliberately. The Jedi Council had wanted to pit them against each other to see how deep the tensions were.
"Tricked you were not," Yoda said, as if he'd read Dooku's thoughts.

Dooku's slow pace spoke of an underlying arrogance and was in sharp contrast to the briskness of his invasion into Obi-Wan's mind. Obi-Wan bit back a gasp and fled, trying to set new mental barriers in his wake. He'd had other Force users in his mind before. Qui-Gon. Anakin. Even Master Yoda. But where their touches had been gentle, almost a caress, Dooku's was painful and humiliating.

He couldn't wait to be called before the Council. He couldn't wait to tell the truth. He knew the Masters would believe him and not Lorian. A Jedi Master was adept at discerning the truth.

Obi-Wan came out of the shadows. Yoda took in everything in a glance—the small teapot on the tray, the steaming mug, the expression of concern in Obi-Wan’s eyes.
His gaze returned to Qui-Gon. In that gaze Qui-Gon read the truth. Yoda knew of his nighttime walks. Yoda knew of the tea Obi-Wan brought every morning. And perhaps he even knew about Tahl. How could Qui-Gon have forgotten that there was so little that Yoda did not know?

Deep in his meditations, peering through the dark side, Master Yoda felt a sudden surge of anger, of outrage beyond control. The diminutive Master's eyes popped open wide at the overwhelming strength of that rage.
And then he heard a voice, a familiar voice, crying, "No, Anakin! No! Don't! No!"
It was Qui-Gon. Yoda knew it was Qui-Gon. But Qui-Gon was dead, had become one with the Force! One could not retain consciousness and sense of self in that state; one could not speak from beyond the grave. But Yoda had heard the ghostly call, and in his deep meditative state, his thoughts focused as precisely as they had ever been, the Jedi Master knew that he had not been mistaken. He wanted to focus on that, then, perhaps to try to follow that call back to the ghostly source,  but he could not, overwhelmed again by that surge of rage and pain and...power.
He made a noise and lurched forward, then came out of his trance as his door opened and Mace Windu rushed in.
"What is it?" Mace asked.
"Pain. Suffering. Death! I fear something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain."
He didn't tell Mace the rest of it, that somehow Anakin's rush of agony manifesting in the Force had tapped into the spirit of the dead Jedi Master who had discovered him. Too much was happening here. That disembodied voice hung profoundly in Yoda's thoughts. For if it was true, if he had heard what he was sure he had heard...

Narrowing his eyes, Yoda reached out through the Force and caught her not three meters from the ground. Instantly he was in the air himself, spinning away from Dooku's vicious attack before he was even consciously aware it was coming.

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.

Luke sensed a human presence there moments before his danger-trained eye picked out the dull metal of another speeder concealed in the shadows of a broken foundation. He drew around himself the aura of advanced inconspicuousness that Yoda had spoken about and that later Callista, recalling her own training, had taught him: Beyond a doubt the same means by which old Ben had wandered around the Death Star utterly unnoticed by the most highly trained troops of the Empire.

Dooku gave a little growl and thrust forth his hand, loosing a line of blue lightning at the diminutive Master. Yoda caught it in his own hand and turned it aside, but far from easily.  
"Powerful you have become, Dooku," Yoda admitted, and the Count grinned—but Yoda promptly took that grin away by adding, "The dark side I sense in you." 
"I have become more powerful than any Jedi," Dooku countered. "Even you, my old Master!" More lightning poured forth from Dooku's hand, but Yoda continued to catch it and turn it, and seemed to become even more settled in his defensive posture. 
"Much to learn you still have," Yoda remarked.  
Dooku disengaged the futile lightning assault.

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.

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.

Explosive decompression sucked all the air out of the docking bay, plucking chairs, papers, tools, small craft, and most importantly the four assassin droids, and flinging them into the black vault of space. The howling wind nearly jerked Chuff out of the lift tube to follow them, but Master Yoda's hand held him back. A pocket of air remained in the lift, held there by Yoda's will.

Lights flickered on throughout the Last Call, and a deep humming throb began to build in her engines. The ship scraped across the docking bay floor blind, gathering speed, and then with a deafening metal scream, punched into the space station wall. The Call jerked through the opening  and tore free a shower of transparisteel, insulation, and sparking wires. She picked up speed, angling away from the station as her preliminary thrusters kicked in.
Explosive decompression sucked all the air out of the docking bay, plucking chairs, papers, tools, small craft, and most importantly the four assassin droids, and flinging them into the black vault of space. The howling wind nearly jerked Chuff out of the lift tube to follow them, but Master Yoda's hand held him back. A pocket of air remained in the lift, held there by Yoda's will.
Out in the dark of space, the assassin droids spun, tumbling slowly as they drifted farther and farther away, until their erratic blasterfire was only the twinkling of distant lights.

"True Jedi can see in the dark, barúm," Beldorion had rumbled to her once a day or two ago, when he'd asked her to join him for lunch and a bask on the terrace—she no longer even remembered how the subject of Jedi powers had arisen.   
"They see not with their eyes—they see with their noses, with their ears, with the hairs of their head, and with their skins. You have neglected your training, little princess."  He'd shaken a tiny bejeweled finger at her. "They used to have us run races in the Caves of Masposhani, miles below the ground. Used to drop us on the dark sun worlds of Af'El and Y'nybeth, where there is no spectrum of visible light. But the great Jedi, the Masters—Yoda and Thon and Nomi Sunrider—they could summon light, could make metal glow so that their puny little friends wouldn't stumble either. They'd hold apin—so..."
He'd reached one slimy hand to pluck a hairpin from her head, Leia flinching but too dazed with the drug to pull back. The Hutt had held the pin between thumb and forefinger, vast ruby eyes looking past it into hers. And she saw, like a dream she'd dreamed and forgotten, a fragment of his memory, a man's thin face, bone-thin and horribly scarred within a great gray tousle of hair, holding a hairpin as the Hutt was holding hers, the metal curve of its upper end incandescent and shedding light enough to see the pillars and frescoes of the room in which he stood.

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.

She had attended a lecture about battle techniques given by Master Yoda earlier this year, and the memory of it came back to her now. Yoda had faced the assembled students and spoken, his thin reedy voice somehow carrying to the far corners of the lecture hall without benefit of amplifiers.
"Better than training, the Force is. More than experience or speed it gives."
And he had given a demonstration. Three members of the council—Plo Koon, Saesee Tiin, and Depa Billaba, excellent fighters all—had come forward and attacked him. Master Yoda had not been armed, and had not seemed to move more than a meter or so, his tread slow and measured. Nevertheless, none of the three had been able to lay a finger on him.

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.

Depa's blade was everywhere. Mace backpedaled, parrying frantically, absorbing the shock of her attacks with bent arms and a two-handed grip. He was taller than she, with more reach and weight, and vastly more muscle in his upper body, but she drove him backward as though he were a child. Green flame struck through his guard, and only a frantic jerk of his head turned what would have been a brain-burning thrust into a line of char along his cheekbone.

"I'm a slow learner," Anakin replied coolly, and he came on then, so suddenly, so powerfully, his green blade whirling with such speed that he seemed almost encased in green light.

With a sudden burst of sheer power, Master Yoda flew forward, his blade working so mightily that its residual glow outshone even those of both of Anakin's lightsabers when he was at the peak of his dance. 

The Jedi Master Yoda confronted Dooku. The two engaged in a titanic struggle of Force powers, neither besting the other. It came down to a contest of lightsabers. In a blurring tangle of speed and light, the two masters of the Force dueled.

Then the chattering sound of a railgun bit into the dim docking bay, gouging a line of sparks out of the floor, and Yoda was gone. An instant later one of the assassin droids was picked up as if by an invisible hand and hurled into a comrade.

Then their blades clashed together in a lace of fire, green and red: but the green burned hotter. Slowly, slowly, Dooku gave way: and in the dark, drunken Vjun air, Yoda was terrible to behold.

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 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.

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.

Yoda, with his deep emphasis on the Force in all things, is a Form IV master.

Before Obi-Wan had left Coruscant, Mace Windu had told him of facing Grievous in single combat atop a mag-lev train during the general's daring raid to capture Palpatine. Mace had told him how the computers slaved to Grievous's brain had apparently analyzed even Mace's unconventionally lethal Vaapad and had been able to respond in kind after a single exchange.
"He must have been trained by Count Dooku," Mace had said, "so you can expect Makashi as well; given the number of Jedi he has fought and slain, you must expect that he can attack in any style, or all of them. In fact, Obi-Wan, I believe that of all living Jedi, you have the best chance to defeat him."
This pronouncement had startled Obi-Wan, and he had protested. After all, the only form in which he was truly even proficient was Soresu, which was the most common lightsaber form in the Jedi Order. Founded upon the basic deflection principles all Padawans were taught—to enable them to protect themselves from blaster bolts—Soresu was very simple, and so restrained and defense-oriented that it was very nearly downright passive.
"But surely, Master Windu," Obi-Wan had said, "you, with the power of Vaapad—or Yoda's mastery of Ataro—"
Mace Windu had almost smiled. "I created Vaapad to answer my weakness: it channels my own darkness into a weapon of the light. Master Yoda's Ataro is also an answer to weakness: the limitations of reach and mobility imposed by his stature and his age. But for you? What weakness does Soresu answer?"

To the uninitiated, lightsaber combat can seem like a confusing blur of swipes and blade clashes, but on close examination, the secrets of the Jedi Knights become clear. To understand the combat of these warriors, we must delve into the sacred history of the fabled Seven Forms of Jedi lightsaber combat and look at how these have played out in the Star Wars saga. Only then can we understand the extraordinary combat moves of Yoda, perhaps the greatest lightsaber master the Jedi Order has ever seen.

With a stooped, small appearance, Yoda may not look like a warrior, but his skills with a lightsaber were unequaled.

"We've not seen Mace fight yet, and we know that he's second only to Yoda."

"Mace Windu's fighting abilities are second only to Yoda."

Though it was true that he had slowed slightly in the years that Mace Windu had known him, Yoda's skill with a lightsaber was still second to none on the council.

Master Windu was also known within the Order for his unusual fighting style, one that he developed after studying the dueling styles of various lightsaber masters. His attacks consisted of relentless, unpredictable blows, like shots from an autoblaster. Master Windu himself remained perfectly balanced and centered. In the history of the Jedi Order, only two opponents ever overcame him in battle. One was Master Yoda, who some said was the Order's true master of lightsaber combat. The other was former Master Dooku, whose own fighting style was archaic, yet stunningly effective.

On several occasions, Yoda shed blood with his green-bladed lightsaber—only out of necessity, never by choice. He slew many Yinchorri warriors when the reptilian aliens attacked the Jedi Temple.

Even as he spoke, though, the great hangar doors of the tower slid open, smoke from the battle outside pouring in. And through the smoke came a diminutive figure, but one seeming taller than all of them at the moment.
"Master Yoda," Dooku breathed.
"Count Dooku," said Yoda.
Dooku's eyes widened and he stepped back, turning to face Yoda directly. He brought his lightsaber up to his face, shut down the blade, then snapped it to the side in formal salute. "You have interfered with our plans for the last time."
A wave of Dooku's free hand sent a piece of machinery flying at the diminutive Jedi Master, seeming as if it would surely crush him. But Yoda was ready, waving his own hand, Force-pushing the flying machinery harmlessly aside. Dooku clutched up at the ceiling, breaking free giant blocks that tumbled down at Yoda. But small hands waved and the boulders dropped to the sides bouncing across the floor all about the untouched Master Yoda. Dooku gave a little growl and thrust forth his hand, loosing a line of blue lightning at the diminutive Master. Yoda caught it in his own hand and turned it aside, but far from easily.
"Powerful you have become, Dooku," Yoda admitted, and the Count grinned—but Yoda promptly took that grin away by adding, "The dark side I sense in you."
"I have become more powerful than any Jedi," Dooku countered. "Even you, my old Master."
More lightning poured forth from Dooku's hand, but Yoda continued to catch it and turn it, and seemed to become even more settled in his defensive posture.
"Much to learn you still have," Yoda remarked.
Dooku disengaged the futile lightning assault. "It is obvious this contest will not be decided by our knowledge of the Force, but by our skills with a lightsaber."
Yoda reverently drew out his lightsaber, its green blade humming to life. Dooku gave a crisp salute, igniting his own red blade, but then, formalities over, he leapt at Yoda, a sudden and devastating thrust. But one that never got close to hitting. With hardly a movement, Yoda turned the blade aside. Dooku went into a wild flurry then, the likes of which he had not shown against Obi-Wan or Anakin, raining blows at the diminutive Master. But Yoda didn't even seem to move. He didn't step back or to the side, yet his subtle dodges and precision parries kept Dooku's blade slashing and stabbing harmlessly wide. It went on and on for many moments, but eventually Dooku's flurry began to slow, and the Count, recognizing the futility of this attempt to overwhelm, stepped back fast.
Not fast enough.
With a sudden burst of sheer power, Master Yoda flew forward, his blade working so mightily that its residual glow outshone even those of both of Anakin's lightsabers when he was at the peak of his dance. Dooku held strong, though, his red blade parrying brilliantly, each block backed by the power of the Force, or else Yoda's strikes would have driven right through. Just as he was about to launch a counter, though, Yoda was gone, leaping high and turning a somersault to land right behind Dooku, in perfect balance, striking hard. Dooku reversed his grip and stabbed out behind him, intercepting the blow. He let go of his weapon altogether, tossing it just a bit, and spun about, catching it before it had even disengaged from Yoda's blade.
With a growl of rage, Dooku reached more deeply into the Force, letting it flow through him as if his physical form was a mere conduit for its power. His tempo increased suddenly and dramatically, three steps forward, two steps back, perfectly balanced all the while. His fighting style was one based on balance, on the back-and-forth charges, thrusts and sudden retreats, and now he came at Yoda with a series of cunning stabs, angled left and right. Never could he strike low, though, for never did Yoda seem to be on the ground, leaping and spinning, flying all about, parrying each blow and offering cunning counters that had Dooku skipping backward desperately.
Dooku stabbed up high, turning the angle of his lightsaber in anticipation that Yoda would dodge left. But Yoda, as if in complete anticipation of the movement, veered neither left nor right, but rather dropped to the ground. The Count had already retracted the missed thrust, and began a second stab, this time down low, but Yoda had anticipated that, too, and went right back up behind the stabbing blade. A sudden stab by Yoda had Dooku quick-stepping back even more off-balance, for the first time, and then Yoda flew away, up and back. The furious Dooku pursued, thrusting hard for Yoda's head. And in his rage when his stab missed yet again, he reverted to a slashing attack. Yoda's green blade caught the blow, holding the red lightsaber at bay, locking the two in a contest of strength, physical and of the Force.
"Fought well, you have, my old Padawan," Yoda congratulated, and his lightsaber began to move out, just a bit, forcing Dooku back.
"The battle is far from over!" Dooku stubbornly argued. "This is just the beginning!" Reaching into the Force, he took hold of one of the huge cranes within the hangar and threw it down at Obi-Wan and Anakin.
"Anakin!" Obi-Wan cried. He grabbed at the plummeting crane with the Force, and Anakin, startled awake, did so, as well. Even working together, they hadn't the strength left to stop its crushing descent.
But Yoda did.
Yoda grabbed the crane and held it fast, but in doing so, he had to release Dooku. The Count wasted no time, sprinting away, leaping up the ramp to his sail ship. As Yoda began to move the fallen crane harmlessly aside, the sail ship's engine roared to life, and all three Jedi watched helplessly as Count Dooku blasted away. As Anakin and Obi-Wan walked over to the exhausted Yoda, Padmé rushed in, running to Anakin and wrapping the sorely wounded young man in a tight, desperate hug.
"A dark day, it is," Yoda said quietly.

Anakin and Obi-Wan made it their mission to capture Count Dooku. They cornered him in the Geonosian hangar bay, but Dooku's powers proved too great. Far from being merely a disaffected Jedi, Dooku was in fact a Sith Lord, Darth Sidious' replacement for the late Darth Maul. Dooku's crimson lightsaber severed Anakin's right arm at the elbow, and both Jedi would have died had it not been for the arrival of Yoda. The windmilling onslaught of Yoda's lightsaber forced Dooku to flee.

A rush of panicked footsteps, and the housekeeper burst into the room. "Master, which there are Jedi in the ballroom. They're coming to take my Baby!" she shrieked.
Dooku flicked through the security monitors until he found the ballroom. "Ah," he said. Something in his face seemed to freeze, and die. "I see you brought your protege."
"Understand you, I do not," Yoda said.
"You didn't mention bringing young Skywalker," Dooku said, pointing to the holomonitor. "And Obi-Wan, too. That changes the odds considerably. There's your Wonder Boy now, fighting the assassin droids I have standing sentry duty at the front door." His hand was wonderfully steady now. "Your new favorite son."
"Bring him, I did not!"
"And yet, there he stands, with Obi-Wan. A miracle and a prodigy to be sure. I suppose you left him under cover. Perhaps you missed a rendezvous. So easy to lose track of time, chatting with old friends," the Count said.
In the entryway, Whirry was shifting from foot to foot in extremes of agitation. "Please, Master! Don't let the Jedi steal my Baby again! Do something for me, for all my hard work, Master?"
Dooku glanced up. "Do something for you?" His eyes flicked to Yoda and the lightsaber at the Jedi Master's belt. "Of course I'll do something for you." With a flick of his hand, he picked up the heavyset woman with the Force and hurled her through the window casement. Yoda's eyes went wide with shock. "You might want to help her," Dooku said.
With a bound, Yoda was at the casement. Whirry was windmilling down through the black air, screaming and tumbling toward the flagstones. Narrowing his eyes, Yoda reached out through the Force and caught her not three meters from the ground. Instantly he was in the air himself, spinning away from Dooku's vicious attack before he was even consciously aware it was coming. The blinding scarlet blur of Dooku's lightsaber split the air, slashing a burning line along Yoda's side before chopping his desk in half.
Yoda whipped out his blade while trying to set Whirry gently down on the cobblestones below. "Wish to hurt you, I do not!"
"That's odd," Dooku remarked. "I intend to enjoy killing you."
As Yoda released Whirry from his mind's hold, and let her spill gently onto the flagstones far below, the tip of Dooku's lightsaber scored a burning line across his shoulder. The Count's blade was quick as a viper striking. Among the other Jedi, perhaps only Mace Windu would have been his equal on neutral ground: but here on Vjun, steeped in the dark side, his bladework was malice made visible—wickedness cut in red light.
"I've hurt you!" Dooku cried.
"Many times," Yoda said. He considered his pain: let it drop. Now he had nothing but Dooku to focus on, and his lightsaber gleamed with the same fierce green light that flickered from under his heavy-lidded eyes. "But killed me you did not, when you had the chance. A mistake, that was. More than eight hundred years has Yoda survived, through dangers you could not dream."
"I know how to kill," Dooku hissed.
Yoda's eyes opened wide, like balls of green fire. "Yes—but Yoda knows how to live!"
Then their blades clashed together in a lace of fire, green and red: but the green burned hotter. Slowly, slowly, Dooku gave way: and in the dark, drunken Vjun air, Yoda was terrible to behold.
"Yes," Dooku whispered. "Feel me. Feel the treason. All those years of teaching me, raising me. Trusting me. And here am I, the favored son, butchering your precious Jedi, one by one. Hate me Yoda. You know you want to."
Count Dooku lashed out with his lightsaber. Yoda took a quick step back and felt the heat of the red blade as it sliced the air centimeters from his tunic. He jumped, spun, and struck at Dooku's back before he landed. Dooku turned aside at the last moment, whipping his blade across the space where Yoda was seconds earlier. Facing each other again, their blades met, clashed, froze.
"Cunning, are you," Yoda said, breathing hard.
"I've had excellent teachers," Dooku said.
Yoda dropped and rolled to the side, his lightsaber blazing, reaching for Dooku's ankles. Dooku leapt up and flipped backwards landing lightly to face Yoda squarely. On his feet again, Yoda whirled and struck at Dooku, his green blade meeting Dooku's and pushing him back. Dooku attacked with reckless abandon fueled with hatred. Their blades hummed together, hissing and sparking. Dooku brought his blade down toward the diminutive Jedi Master and Yoda parried, locking his blade against Dooku's.
Yoda breathed, calming himself. "And yet, even here on Vjun, where the dark side whispers and whispers to me...love you enough to destroy you I do."
Pushing Dooku back yet again, blades flashed and flared stutters of light, blood red and sea green. Sweat ran in streams through Dooku's beard as he countered Yoda's every move, and his lips were white. Holobattles raged around them as the consoles showed Obi-Wan and Anakin clashing with wave after wave of battle droids. Dooku shot a quick glance at the red button on his desk and, with a Force push, he punched it in.
Yoda cocked his head. "A choice made, have you, Count?"
"I notice I am no longer your apprentice," Dooku said between breaths. "There was always a chance you could overpower me, of course." Yoda attacked: Dooku parried. "So I put a missile in high orbit, slaved to this location. It's falling now. Gathering speed." Dooku stepped warily back to the open window casement. "Can you feel it dropping? A thorn, a needle, an arrow. Faster all the time." He paused to get his breath. "Obi-Wan and your precious Skywalker and your little Padawans will be wiped out when the missile hits. So what you need to decide is, what means more to you, Master Yoda? Saving their lives—or taking mine?"
And with that he leapt backward, out the window. Yoda bounded after him. In the dark Vjun air it was all he could do not to leap after Dooku, to fall on him like a green thunderbolt and annihilate him utterly...But already he could feel the missile, too, dropping in a red scream through the atmosphere, two hundred armored kilos of explosive aimed for Chateau Malreaux. With a snort, Yoda turned his eyes to the sky and picked out the glowing dot racing in from the horizon. Below him, Dooku landed softly on the ground and melted into the rose gardens.
The missile was coming in with terrible speed and power: too much coming at Yoda too fast ever to wholly stop it, even if he had time and perfect peace. But he reached out to pull up the Force binding even Vjun's bitter green moss and twisted thorn-trees, and let it flow through him like a wind: the breath of a world, gathered and released in a push-feather game with all their lives on the line, not to oppose the missile's force with force, but to touch it gently on the side—just enough to send it screaming by the broken window casement to plunge a kilometer offshore into the cold and waiting sea.
A long instant later, water fountained from the ocean in a blaze of light three hundred meters tall, and then fell back.
The château and all those inside it had been spared: but Dooku was gone.

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.