Part Six: Emperor's End

 

A longtime ago, in an afterlife far, far away...

The Dark Empire lies in ruins, and the Emperor lies in death. Palpatine finds himself trapped in an afterlife realm of the Light Side, unable to return.

Unbeknownst to Palpatine, a legion of Jedi waits for him. These victims of the Emperor's purge have the power to decide the fate of their greatest enemy.

The fallen Emperor's only chance for survival may rest in the hands of the man who served him in life as the dread Lord Darth Vader...

Palpatine found it difficult to recall with any real clarity the events leading up to his final physical death. His insanity had been responsible for that failing. Mercifully, he had regained his sanity along with his consciousness in this empty world of swirling, reddish-gray mists. He knew it was crucial that he remember. Without understanding how he had come here, Palpatine had no hope of discovering a way out and back to his life. Yes, a return to life...he wanted that very much. A chance to complete his Dark Empire and to have his revenge upon Luke Skywalker and his sister Leia.

Memory had never been a problem for him before. What he could not recall on his own, he drew out with a small exercise of the power of the Force. But now...that was denied to him. That thing which defined him more than anything else - his mastery of the dark side - was gone. He was still recovering from the shock of finding himself unable to sense or use the Force. It had been with him since his childhood. It was impossible that it could be gone now, yet it was. Palpatine was powerless, alone, frail, and defenseless. It galled him. But the former Emperor refused to see himself as helpless. He still had his strong will, and he was determined to understand his situation. If he could not use the Force to remember what had happened to him, he knew of other more primitive techniques. Stiffly, he settled his greatly aged body to the gray desert sands. Assuming a meditative posture, he cleared his mind and concentrated.

The first thing that came to him was that there had been a child. He had wanted the child, wanted it so he could save himself. The child's name had been...Anakin. No, that confused him. Anakin had been Vader's name before he turned. Palpatine cursed impotently. Frustrated, he knew meditation was futile with his emotions in such turmoil. If the Force had been with him, meditating in rage would have worked...but not here. No, he would simply have to start from the beginning in his mind and work through it as best he could, one step at a time.

His last perfectly lucid memory was of his awful defeat aboard the Eclipse, at the hands of the Skywalkers. The very name, Luke Skywalker, sent a shiver of hatred through Palpatine's decrepit form. That man had destroyed everything. No punishment imaginable would be enough for him. The plans for the creation of the Dark Empire had been coming along so well before Luke had come onto the scene. Six years after his defeat at Endor, Palpatine had been ready on Byss with his reclaimed dark side mastery, the Eclipse, a vast fleet, and his World Devastators. Then he had sent a special Force Storm to collect Luke Skywalker, his old enemy. Sate Pestage had once advised his Master that Luke should be made into an ally, and Palpatine had debated the troubling idea with him. In the end, the Emperor had based his decision on two things. He wanted to take away the New Republic's symbol of hope, and he missed having a servant like Darth Vader. Years ago, he had experienced a vision of Luke kneeling to him willingly. When Luke arrived on Byss, the vision finally came to pass. Luke's admitted plan was to find a way to defeat the dark side from within, but Palpatine had known he could not.

Luke had knelt anyway and said, "My father's destiny is my own." But the words "my father's destiny" held more than one meaning. It meant servitude to the dark side, yes, but it also meant the betrayal and murder of the Emperor, with the help of a blood relative. Luke had personally invaded the cloning laboratory and cut down Palpatine's clones with a lightsaber. He had also helped his sister to escape Byss with a Holocron she had stolen from Palpatine's very bedchamber. Vader had never rebelled like that until the end. The enraged Emperor had forced Luke into submission. Palpatine and a tightly controlled Luke had gone after Leia Organa together in the Eclipse, in order to recover the Holocron, and to claim Leia's unborn child.

Yes...the child. It did have something to do with how he had arrived here, he knew it. He had wanted the child...as a new body for himself. Yes. That was it. The clones had always been a flawed solution to the problem of mortality. As mere copies of himself, they were one step removed from the protecting energies of the Force, and they suffered an accelerated rate of decay when he drew on the power of the dark side. For a long time, he had searched for another way. At one point, he had been convinced that he could fabricate a new body from pure dark side energy, but that idea had never borne fruit. Finally, upon learning of Leia's unborn child, he had realized he could take it, raise it in the power of the dark side, and make it an extension of his will. At the appropriate age, he could displace the personality within, and take the body for his own. On the Eclipse, however, Leia had somehow resisted him. She had drawn her brother back to the light, and together, they had severed Palpatine's control over his Force Storm. The chaotic energies had devoured his great flagship. He had been faced with death, unable to escape his own creation. It was a painful memory, but at least it was clear.

Palpatine's ability to survive death had been based on transferring his life essence into one of his own clones. But that ability was limited by distance from his clone body. Ideally, he would have initiated the transfer by himself, inside his citadel on Byss, near the cloning lab. This would have limited the duration of his exposure to the terrifying chaos that awaited powerful servants of the dark side after death. But when the Eclipse was destroyed with Palpatine on board, the Emperor's clones were half a galaxy away on Byss. The dangerous journey his spirit had to make threatened to destroy it.

Once before, he had been in such a dire situation, when the Death Star had exploded over Endor. Then, Palpatine had survived the explosion by mentally connecting with Mara Jade and transferring his essence into her mind. The experience had diminished his power, putting him on a road to recovery that took years, but the desperate plan had worked. Sate Pestage had brought Mara to Byss, and in close proximity to his clones at last, the Emperor had left her and was reborn.

Thinking of Mara Jade and Sate Pestage emotionally distracted Palpatine from his organized recollection. He found that every time he thought of Pestage, there was a pang of regret. Four years ago, the old man had died, the victim of an attempted coup by several dark side adepts. Pestage had been the only man who Palpatine had allowed to become close to him. It was reasonably certain that Pestage had been the biological father of the boy, Espaa, who became Palpatine. It was only after Pestage was dead, however, that the Emperor discovered that the man had meant something to him personally. Pestage's loss had opened Palpatine to a new world of anger, and unlocked the power of Force Storms. There was some small irony in the fact that those same Storms had killed Palpatine over Pinnacle Moon. Pestage had always wanted so much to keep his son alive, and had died fighting an adept, Urn Zelotes, who wanted his son dead. Palpatine sighed. Regrets were useless. Pestage was gone forever. Even though the old man had been cloned, the replacement had never satisfied the Emperor. It was just not the same thing...a mere empty shell. Pestage had totally lacked Force sensitivity, and there had been no way for him to preserve his life essence, as his Master had.

And then there was Mara Jade, the former Emperor's Hand. As much as he wished Pestage was alive, he wanted Jade dead. He had given her a mission to kill Luke Skywalker. If she had followed orders, Palpatine would not have been in his current situation. However, not only had she failed, but she had joined the Rebels as well!

The reborn Emperor had kept track of her from Byss while he regained his dark side power and built up his military forces. After years of living on the fringe of galactic society, Mara finally found Luke during the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn. She should have killed Luke then, but Skywalker had once again turned an enemy into an ally. In the end, Mara had helped Luke to defeat Thrawn and C'Baoth. Palpatine did not see Mara turning against Thrawn as a betrayal of the Empire. After all, Palpatine was the Empire, and he had never meant for Thrawn to succeed anyway. The Grand Admiral was just a distraction for the Rebels while the Emperor gathered forces far beyond those Thrawn was allowed to have. But Mara's failure to kill Skywalker...that was a betrayal. The assassination order for that cursed Jedi had been a direct command! No one disobeyed a direct order from the Emperor and lived. Palpatine had wanted Mara dead, but the woman had wisely dropped out of sight as soon as the Emperor reborn had revealed himself. Once, Palpatine could have located her through the Force, using the mental link that they shared. But that link had vanished along with Mara's Force sensitivity when the Emperor had placed his essence within her mind after Endor. Thus Mara had escaped his wrath entirely.

Palpatine scowled. What was he thinking? She was nothing to him now. Neither she nor Sate Pestage was any part of his current problem. He wrenched his thoughts back to the matter at hand. How had he arrived in this place...wherever it was? A dusty, empty desert, with silence as his only companion. A world where the Force was gone.

All right. He had been on the Eclipse. And the Eclipse had been destroyed. His spirit had been forced to find its way back to Byss, by traveling through a nether-realm where the ravenous chaos of the dark side wanted to claim him forever as payment for all the power it had given him in life. How long had the journey taken? How far had he been forced to go? He had no answers to these questions. Time and distance were very different in that realm. He had only been able to focus on his will to reach his goal, the clones on Byss. Using the skills of Life Transfer which he had taken from the Holocron of Ashka and Vantos Boda, he had defied the forces of dissolution and struggled to regain life. The battle for life had been profoundly traumatic, and for the first time ever, the outcome had been truly in doubt. He was unsure now if he would have won it on his own, for there had been help where he had not expected it. Help from the spirits of the past Dark Lords of the Sith!