"Anakin?" She settled back into herself, openly stunned--and clearly, astonishingly, saddened. "Little Anakin? A Lord of the Sith? Oh... oh, could it not have been otherwise? What a tragedy... What a waste."
Jacen stared at her in turn, his mouth hanging open. "You say that like you knew him..."
She shook her head. "Knew of him, more. Such promise... Do you know, I met him once, not five hundred meters above where we now sit? He couldn't have been more than twelve, perhaps thirteen standard years old. He was.... so alive. He burned..."
"What... what would Darth Va... I mean, my grandfather... what was he doing on Coruscant? What were you doing on Coruscant? Five hundred meters above us? What was this place?"
"Do you not know? Has this been lost, as well?" She rose, and extended a hand to help him to his feet. She touched the wall nearby, her fingers skittering through a complex pattern on a sweating rectangular slab, which slowly swung wide, opening a doorway into a gloom-filled chamber beyond.
"This way." The chamber threw back a dark resonance, as though she spoke beside a drum. Her gaze was steady once more, and expressionless as the stone of the walls. Lost in wonder, Jacen stepped past her into the darkness.
"This was our tower of guard: our fortress watch upon the dark," she said. The doorway narrowed into a dim yellow stripe of globe-glow, then vanished.
"This was the Jedi Temple."
"This...?" Awe squeezed his chest, and he floundered in the dark; he had to gasp harshly in order to speak. "You--you are a Jedi!"
"No, I am not. Nor am I Sith."
"What are you, then?"
"I am Vergere. What are you?" In the darkness her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.
He turned, seeking her blindly. "No more games, Vergere."
"This has never been a game, Jacen Solo."
"Tell me the truth..."
"I tell you nothing but truth." She sounded so close by that Jacen reached for her in the dark.
"I thought everything you tell me is a lie..."
"Yes. And the truth."
"What kind of truth is that?"
"Is there more than one? Why even ask? You will find no truth in me."
This time her voice came from behind him; he whirled, extending his hands, but found nothing he could grasp.
"No games," he insisted.
"There is nothing that is not a game. A serious game, to be sure: a permanent game. A lethal game. A game so grave that it can be well played only with joyous abandon."
"But you said..."
"Yes. It has never been a game. And it always has. Either way, or both: you had better play to win."
"How can I play if you won't even tell me the rules...? "
"There are no rules." A scamper of footsteps to his right; Jacen moved toward them silently. "But the game does have a name," she said from the opposite side of the room. "We are playing the same game we have been playing ever since Myrkr: we are playing ‘Who is Jacen Solo?'"
He thought with longing of the glow rod, lost with his sliced-open knapsack in the crater above. Thinking of the glow rod, of bright golden light springing from his fist, made him suddenly ache for his lightsaber: he thought of that clean green glow filling the room, cutting through all shadows, making everything clear again. His hands burned to hold it one more time.
In building that lightsaber, he had built himself an identity. He had built himself a destiny. He had built himself.
"If that's the game," he said, "I can end it right now. I know who I am, Vergere. No matter what you do to me. No matter what new torture you put me through. If I never touch the Force again. It doesn't matter. I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes," he said solidly into the darkness. "I'm a Jedi."
A long, long silence, in which he seemed to hear the entire room drawing a slow, slow breath.
"Indeed?" She sounded sad. Disappointed. Resigned to a melancholy fate. "Then the game is over."
"Really?" he said warily. "It is? "
"Yes," she sighed. "And you lose."
The room burst to light; after so long in the dark, Jacen felt like he was being jabbed in the eye with a piece of the sun. He flinched, shading his eyes with an upraised arm. Slowly his eyes cleared; the room was larger than he had thought--a ten-meter ceiling, walls decorated with the same floral mosaics, lit by blazing glow globes the size of the Falcon's cockpit, hanging suspended by tripled chains of verdigris-caked bronze that swung gently above its tiled floor...
And it was full of Yuuzhan Vong. He turned to Vergere. Beyond a ring of warriors, she stood companionably beside a medium-sized male who wore a long, loose-fitting robeskin of black. They spoke, but Jacen could not hear them. His ears roared like a forest fire. The Yuuzhan Vong male spoke again, more sharply, but Jacen did not understand.
Could not understand. Had no need to understand. Jacen had seen this male before. He had seen this male on Duro, with Leia's lightsaber behind his belt.
He had seen this male on the worldship at Myrkr.
He knew this male's name, and he tried to say it. Tried to say...
But before he could even open his mouth...A hot tidal surge of red billowed through him, and washed away the world. Jacen did not swim in the red tide, he floated: drifting, spinning in the eddies, tumbling in the surf. The red tide ebbed, waves washing out, and he bobbed to the surface. The red tide drained from his head, leaving him gasping on the floor. His hands hurt. He looked at them, but he couldn't quite see them, or he couldn't quite make sense of what he saw; his eyes wouldn't quite focus. He let his right hand fall to the chilly mosaic tile of the floor, wondering blankly that the outwash of the red tide had left the floor so cold, and so dry.
A savor of scorched meat hung in the air, as though his father had jury-rigged the autochef again. But Dad couldn't have jury-rigged the autochef. There was no autochef. And Dad wasn't here, couldn't be here, would never be here--and the smell... Nothing made sense.
How had he fallen to this floor? What caused this roil of smoke and dust? A curving wall of rubble choked off three-quarters of the chamber--where had that come from?
Answers were beyond him. But his hands still hurt. He raised his left hand and frowned his vision clear. A circle in the middle of his palm--a disk about the size of a power cell--was blackened, cracked, oozing thick dark blood. Wisps of smoke coiled upward from the cracks.
Oh, he thought. I guess that explains the smell.
"How... how does it feel, Jacen Solo..."
The voice was thin, ragged and harsh, rasping, broken by coughs. The voice was familiar. The voice was Vergere's. "...to once more... touch the Force?" She lay crumpled on the floor a few meters away, just within a ragged archway lipped with jagged stone, as though some incomprehensibly powerful creature had trampled her as it crashed through the wall.
Broken stone littered the floor. Her clothing was shredded, smoldering, red embers sliding along torn edges, and burned flesh beneath it still smoked.
"Vergere!" He was at her side without knowing how he got there. "How...what happened?"
A sickening conviction clotted in his guts. "Did I...?" His voice trailed off. He remembered...
Through a fever-dream haze, red-soaked images leaked back into him: the room filled with Yuuzhan Vong warriors, Vergere standing beside Nom Anor as though the two knew each other, as though they were coworkers. Comrades. Friends. Nom Anor had said something to her, and she something to him, but betrayal had hammered any hope of meaning from his brain.
He remembered a long gathering breath: inhaling a galaxy of hatred and rage--And he remembered channeling that whole galaxy of rage down his arms and hurling it at Vergere. He remembered watching her writhe in the electric arcs of his hatred: remembered the sizzle of his own hands burning as lightning burst through them: remembered how that pain had only fed his anger. And he remembered how good it had felt.
Clean. Pure. No more wrestling with right and wrong, good and evil.
Every knot
ty problem of Jedi ethics had dissolved in one brain-blasting surge; once he had surrendered complexity, he'd found that everything was simple. His hatred became the only law of the universe. Anger alone had meaning, and the only answer to anger was pain.
Someone else's pain. Anyone else's pain. Even now, awake, alert, choking on horror, he could feel the sweet echo of that clean, pure rage. He could hear it calling to him. It coiled inside him: a malignant parasite chewing at the bottom of his mind.
What have I become?
Vergere lay on the floor like a broken doll; her eyes were dull, glazed, empty, and her crest showed only dirty gray.
"Vergere..." he murmured. It had been so easy to hurt her. So simple. Tears spilled onto his cheeks. "I warned you, didn't I? I warned you. The dark side..."
"Don't... make excuses..." Her voice was even fainter now, breathier, more ragged.
"I wouldn't dare," he whispered. There was no possible excuse. No one knew the dangers of the dark side better than he; those dangers had haunted the depths below his entire life... Yet he had fallen so easily. He had fallen so far... The wall of rubble closed off most of the chamber: tumbled hunks of duracrete, fallen in a steep slope from uncountable floors above. The only light in the much-reduced chamber was leakover from glow globes in the ruined hallway outside. The ceiling had collapsed, he remembered that much, remembered the roar, the pounding, the dust and flying splinters of stone.
No, wait, it hadn't collapsed... He had pulled it down. He remembered swirling within the red tide, remembered feeling Vergere lose consciousness, remembered reaching for a new target, a new victim, reaching for Nom Anor with the lightning that had felled Vergere...
And being unable to find him. He could see the Yuuzhan Vong executor, could hear him shouting orders to the warriors around them all, but he could not touch him with the lightning. There had been a circuit missing: the lightning would ground harmlessly into the floor or the walls or arc back to make Vergere's unconscious body spasm in convulsions.
The lightning of his rage could only span gaps between poles of the Force... neither Nom Anor nor his warriors could conduct that current.
Frustration had compounded Jacen's fury; he had thrown himself outward seeking power to do these creatures harm...
And the storm above the crater had answered.
He remembered the wild joy of release as the power of the storm had roared into him and through him and became a mad vortex within the underground chamber, lifting stone and brick and chunks of duracrete to whirl and batter and slash the Yuuzhan Vong, pounding the warriors with pieces of the planet that had once been Jacen's home. A shrug of wind had crushed the Yuuzhan Vong into one corner of the chamber, and he remembered bubbling laughter exploding with malice into a shout of victory as he had reached up his hand and brought down the building around them. He rocked back on his ankles, hands going to his face.
Was it possible? He had buried them alive. All of them. And he didn't care.
No: he did care. That's what made it even worse. He had buried them alive, and he was happy about it. The dark side called to him: a shadow worm whispering promises of ecstasy as it ate into his heart. It murmured infinite release, humming a song of the eternity that lies beyond all shadows of doubt and remorse. He shook himself violently and lurched to his feet.
"I have to get out of here."
"Jacen..." She lifted a hand as though to stay him, as though to ask for his help.
"No, Vergere. No. I have to go... I have to go right now. I'm sorry I hurt you, I'm so sorry, I am..."
Liar, the shadow worm snickered inside him. Just wait, and watch, and she'll give us an excuse to do it again. Vergere's eyes seemed to clear then, and a hint of a smile curved her lips. "The dark side?..."
"It's... it's too strong for me here. I warned you. I warned you what could happen..." She raised her hand once more, reaching for his leg; he took a hasty step back to avoid her touch, and she let her arm fall limp to the floor.
"You see..." she whispered, "... but you do not see. Jacen... why would the Jedi Council... build its Temple upon... a nexus of the dark side?"
"Vergere, I..." He shook his head helplessly. "I have to go. I have to go before--before I..." hurt you again, he finished silently. He couldn't say it out loud. Not here. "I don't have time for guessing games."
"No guessing..." she said. "The answer is... simple. They wouldn't."
He went very, very still. "What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me..."
"No. What you feel is the Force." Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. "This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side."
How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this?
"Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?"
"The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I've told you already: the Force does not take sides. The Force does not even have sides."
"That's not true! It isn't..." The red tide surged into his chest, reaching for his heart. Everything I tell you is a lie. This was only another of her lies. It had to be. If it wasn't... He couldn't let himself think it. He shook his head hard enough to make his ears ring. "It's a lie..."
"No. Search your feelings. You know this to be true. The Force is one."
But he could feel the dark side: he was drowning in it.
"Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand." She seemed to draw strength from his weakness, slowly managing to sit up. "What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion... but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness--true greatness of any kind--requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind."
"But... but the dark side..."
She rose, her smoldering garments wreathing her in coils of smoke. "If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do."
"Me?" The red tide turned black, poisonous, strangling, burning through his ribs from the inside. "No... no, you don't understand... the dark side is, it's, it's, don't you see it? It's the dark side," he insisted desperately, hopelessly. There were no words for the truth inside him; nor were there words for the horror that rolled into him, because he could feel the Force again. He could feel that she was right. But that would make me... does make me... His knees buckled, and he staggered to maintain his balance, stumbling, reaching for the wall, something stone, anything solid, anything certain, anything that he could lean on that wouldn't become smoke and mist and let him fall forever.
He whispered, "The dark side..."
She paced toward him, relentless, inexorable. "The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart."
And in her eyes, he found that certainty, that solidity: the permanent, immutable truth he hoped would keep him upright--His reflection.
Distorted. Leering. Misshapen. An illusion of light, floating on a glossy curve of surface... above depths of infinite black. They say the truth hurts. A gasp of lunatic laughter bubbled wildly through his lips. They have no idea...The Embrace of Pain had been nothing but a scratch, the slave seed only a toothache...
His laughter choked itself to a smothered sob. He threw himself past Vergere into the hallway, and fled.
Running.
Every time Nom Anor glanced back toward the wall of rubble that so easily could have become his tomb, a spectral hand reached into his chest to twist his heart apart.
"You assured me there would be no danger!" he said for the fourth time.
He spoke Basic--it would not do for the warriors to hear him complain--and he gritted his teeth, clenching arms and legs, bec
ause the warriors must not see him tremble.
"Nom Anor," Vergere said with the patience that grows of wounds and exhaustion, "you are alive, and uninjured save for bumps and bruises." She wept a continuous rain, mopping away her burns with tears. "What have you to complain of?"
Nom Anor looked once more at the wall of rubble; he could still feel the strangling panic of being so easily, casually, almost negligently shoved aside--and then the rumble of the ceiling's collapse, and the howl of the maelstrom within the chamber, and the boil of dust, and the absolute night that had swallowed him...
"You should have warned me how dangerous and erratic this ‘Dark Jedi' power can be," he insisted. "Look around you. A dozen warriors, and you. And me. All living. If, instead of wielding this ‘dangerous power' about which you whine, Jacen Solo had been calm, centered, and armed with his lightsaber..."
One arm rippled in a shrug more eloquent than any words.
"You saw what he did in the Nursery. There might have been survivors, but you and I would not be among them." Nom Anor only grunted. "I do not understand the purpose of this Jedi babble of the ‘dark side,' either. What was the use of sparking this crisis? Here I am, at your insistence, lying to the Shaper Lord, manipulating his troops, lurking in this hideous place--not to mention placing my life at considerable risk--to trigger this...what? What has any of this to do with converting Jacen Solo to the True Way
?"
Vergere looked up from tending her wounds. "Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies."
"You mean, our truth. The True Way
." Nom Anor squinted at her. "Don't you?"
"Our truth, Executor?" Her eyes seemed to expand into vast pools of unreadable darkness; in them he could see only his reflection.
"Is there any other?"
NINE
THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Ever deeper, ever darker, farther and farther below even the memory of light--Jacen staggered out from a downlevel stairwell onto some forgotten catwalk, gasping. Had he been running for hours? For days?
His legs refused another step, and there was no reason to force them. No matter how far or fast he fled, he could never outrun himself.
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 14
