Brendon Wahlberg: Star Wars ~ Dark Emperor

Part Six: Emperor's End

The Sith Lords had entombed their bodies on the mausoleum world of Korriban, trapping their essences in temples of Sith Sorcery. They were able to roam the dark side realm beyond death without being consumed there. At the crisis point of his struggle to return to Byss, Palpatine had been found by some of these Dark Lords. They had offered to save him by guiding him to his destination. They even claimed that they had done so once before, after Endor. Palpatine had no recollection of that, but neither did he have a choice about trusting the spirits. The Sith had shown him the way to reach his clones, guiding him through the madness and terror that obscured all pathways. They had taken him to Byss, and opened the way for Palpatine to enter a new, young body. Luke Skywalker had not destroyed all of the clones. Palpatine would never have kept them in one vulnerable location...not after Urn Zelotes' treachery. Deep below the chamber Luke ravaged, there was another collection of waiting clones. As Palpatine inhabited one, he knew he had won again.

Except...that he hadn't. The clone he had entered was flawed. Before long, his scientists told him, it would begin to fill up with necrosis, and finally die. As punishment for this failure, the Constable of Homunculi, Rollo Mon, had been executed along with his coworkers. They had not had enough time to study the clone and realize that its decay would also cause the Emperor to go slowly insane. Unsuspecting, Palpatine had turned his attention to the Rebel Alliance, confident that if his body died, he could take another.

Now, as he considered the matter, it became clear that he had been betrayed, and not only by his scientists. The Sith spirits had been his true enemy. Of all the remaining clones they could have guided him to, they chose the defective one, the one that meant his death. Why had they wanted to destroy him in this way? The reason, he realized, was simply for revenge.

Decades ago, Palpatine had been taken by the only living Dark Lord of the Sith as a boy. For a while, he learned all he could about the dark side from his Master, Darth Shado. Lord Shado had wanted to keep the existence of the Sith a secret, as it had been for a thousand years. But Palpatine was then chosen by the dark side itself to be its greatest servant. He surpassed the Sith, and found he had no taste for hiding from history in their dusty monastery. He knew the time for Sith ascendancy was at hand. The Force told him so. Killing his own Master, who disagreed with him on that issue, Palpatine went away to enter galactic politics.

Eventually, a use for an apprentice of his own presented itself. Palpatine had wanted to destroy the Jedi as an obstacle to his rise. A Sith apprentice seemed like a useful weapon to him. He had trained Darth Maul as a weapon, but was disappointed when that weapon failed him. Palpatine's choice of a replacement was far more successful. The Dark Lord, Darth Vader, had become the Emperor's servant, and was charged with completing the eradication of the Jedi order.

Once that task was done, Palpatine contemplated the future of the Sith, and saw that the order had served its purpose in creating himself, the Emperor Palpatine. The time of the Sith had come to its destined end. There was no further use for it. With a means of immortality in his hands, Palpatine declared himself the pinnacle of Sith evolution, and decided that he would never turn over his authority to an apprentice. Vader was destined to be only a servant, until he needed to be replaced.

Palpatine saw this state of affairs as the proper order of things, but he admitted that the ancient Sith Lords might well have felt differently. Now he strongly suspected that it was their long-delayed revenge to guide him into a defective clone. It suggested that Palpatine might have been able to reach a healthy clone without their help...or perhaps not. Perhaps the Sith Lords hadn't wanted him to die right away. Perhaps they had wanted to enjoy the spectacle of an insane and desperate Emperor before he met his final fate.

And what a spectacle it had been. The slow loss of his sanity meant that many of the more recent events were unclear in his memory, but those that he did recall were enough to fill him with shame and rage for his foolish decisions. No doubt the Sith had enjoyed their revenge. If Palpatine had his way, he would enjoy his even more. Upon returning to life, he would take the Sovereign class Star Destroyer Eclipse II and lay waste to the entire planet of Korriban. But only after having his revenge on Luke Skywalker and his sister.

Palpatine breathed slowly, trying to calm himself. The hard part was now at hand...remembering what had happened while he was insane.

Although he had returned to Byss, he had allowed his survival to remain a secret for a while, hoping to flush out any traitors who would feel free to act in his absence. That had been his first mistake. Two of his dark adepts did betray him, and before they died, they destroyed all of his remaining healthy clones. From that moment, he had been trapped in the one fateful necrotic body. Yet, neither he nor his followers recognized his madness. That did not happen until later, after he had revealed to Luke Skywalker that he was still alive. But surely, the insanity must already have been growing. Palpatine was not making rational decisions. He had toyed with Skywalker, sending a series of incompetent dark side warriors after him, instead of simply using another Force Storm.

As the Emperor's reason leaked away, he made even more mistakes. Remembering them was like reliving a nightmare. Nothing made sense about it to him now, but at the time, he thought he was controlling everything like a master puppeteer. He had a vague memory of infusing several randomly chosen servants with the power of the dark side, and then expecting them to be able to defeat a Jedi Master. And there was a weapon as well, some sort of hyperspace missile launcher, which didn't seem to be able to destroy anything he really wanted it to. What had that been all about? Palpatine cursed again. This wasn't working. He had to find some sort of focus amidst the clutter of these nonsensical images. Whatever he had been doing, it must have been related to survival. His body had been dying, so he must have been trying to find a solution for that problem. He concentrated, and a brief image of a primitive shaman frozen in stone flitted across his mind, and was gone. Madness!

Then another image came to him. A glowing, round stone. He seized on that and coaxed his mind to fill in the details. He had been looking at a stone. It had a name...the Sith oracle stone! He had been on Korriban, the tomb world of the Sith! It was coming back to him at last. He had gone to Korriban to ask...no, to command the Sith spirits to halt his body's decay. The memory brought a deep chagrin with it. If the Sith had already betrayed him, why would they have helped him at all? How they must have laughed at his plight. How they must have mocked him as they refused to help. Instead, they had shown him, in the oracle stone, the location of Leia Organa's child! In his madness, he had still desired it, and the Sith had gleefully pointed the way to his doom.

Then he remembered that he had gone to Onderon after the child, personally, without the protection of his forces...into the hands of his well prepared enemies. Grabbing up handfuls of soft sand on either side of him, he flung it angrily as he raged at himself. What had he been thinking? What could he have hoped to gain? His plan for the child would have been useless! His body had been dying! He had needed a solution right away, not in a decade when the child had grown up! Of course, he thought with disgust as he slumped forward, he had not been thinking. He had been insane.

With suddenly perverse ease, the memories flowed clearly. He had found Leia and the child in an old fortress, but Luke Skywalker had been there with his group of Jedi. Skywalker had demanded his surrender. He had brought a cage...a cage for the Galactic Emperor! The decay of his body made it impossible for him to fight them all. He saw himself goading the smuggler, Solo, into killing his useless, dying body for him. Just as he would have entered one of his own clones, he tried to take over the body of Leia's child. It would have been the worst mistake of all. Inhabiting the mind of Mara Jade had once diminished his power in the dark side. If he had existed in the mind of a baby, he would have been helpless...a prisoner at the mercy of the child's vengeful parents. An infant in a Force cage. He shuddered. Luke's Jedi companion, Empatojayos Brand, had actually done Palpatine a favor by stopping him. The cyborg Jedi had taken the Emperor into himself, holding his spirit prisoner. The Emperor had fought Brand, but to no avail. The Jedi had known exactly what to do. Palpatine wondered if Brand had learned what he needed from the stolen Holocron, the same recording device which had yielded the secret of Life Transfer to the Emperor so long ago.

Brand had been mortally wounded by the Emperor, and he was dying. He vowed that the Emperor would never return, that the Force and all the Jedi who came before would make sure of that. Then he took Palpatine's essence with him into death.

The fallen Emperor hunched over in misery. He knew how he had arrived here now. He was full of anger and remorse at his defeat, and finally remembering what had happened brought him no peace. He had failed utterly, and he had deserved death. But he had always assumed that his death would mean endless madness and terror in a realm belonging to the hungry entropy of the dark side. This fate had been revealed to him during his early studies with the Sith, and all of his efforts to prolong his life had been for the purpose of avoiding it. Now it had come to pass, but it was somehow nothing like he had expected. To his perception, he was physically and mentally intact, though he was as aged as he had been when Vader had betrayed him on the Death Star. He was clothed in his usual black robes, and he was seated on an empty plain of soft sands. Sickly colored mists prevented him from seeing very far in any direction, but as far as he could tell, he was still totally alone. Every shred of his power in the Force was gone. So why was it so different from what he had expected? Stubbornly, he began to reason it out.

His presence here had to be related to the manner of his death. There was no other explanation. He had crossed over while imprisoned by a Jedi, a light side adept. He could have been pulled along to wherever it was that Jedi spirits go. It followed that this was some sort of light side realm. It also explained why he was powerless to call on the dark side. Nevertheless, he did not have to admit to a final defeat. In a way, it was a victory to have avoided being claimed by the endless chaos of the dark side. He was still himself, and until it was proven otherwise, there was still hope.

Palpatine straightened from his despairing slouch, forced his frail limbs to pick himself up, and dusted himself off. Then he began to walk across the sands into the red and gray mists. As it had so many times in the past, his indomitable will held his head high and drove him on into the unknown.