[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(161)

“It’s not a cliche, Jacen. It’s a necessary component of the ethical assumption of our powers.” She gestured out past the shuttle and the hangar doors, to the unseen stars. “The Jedi find their balance through the abandonment of attachment. The Sith celebrate attachment… but find our balance in the deliberate, agonizing sacrifice of some of the things we love most. Only by that means can we retain our appreciation for loss, pain, mortality-those things that ordinary people experience.”

Jacen considered. Her words made sense. Such a philosophy would allow the Sith to retain their passion … but pain would keep those passions in check. Sith like Palpatine had not followed this principle, had followed philosophies of gain without loss, and their greed had doomed them and everyone around them.

Including Jacen’s grandfather, Darth Vader.

“You will be the man your grandfather couldn’t,” Lumiya said. “Go home, do what you can to stop the war, and to free up time to study. Eventually you will need to find yourself an apprentice. Ben may be worthy, but I think he is already too steeped in the Jedi ways of softness and serenity, so look elsewhere, as well as at him. You’ll need to train to open your mind to facets of the Force you’ve been instructed to ignore or despise. And your greatest attainment of knowledge and power will come at the same time as your greatest act of sacrifice, when you give up something that is as dear to you as life-making your love immortal through its sacrifice.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

“Come back and I will help you see.”

She stood watching through the air lock’s transparisteel wall as he boarded, sealed his shuttle, uncoupled the boarding tube. The shuttle rose on its repulsors, gently turned toward the opening doors, and departed.

Tired, drained, jubilant, Lumiya returned to the living chamber at the top of her habitat. She lay on a couch there and stared up through the scratched transparisteel dome at the stars. “I’ve won,” she said.

Jacen-dark-garbed, a gold-and-black lightsaber hilt at his belt, the pupils of his eyes golden-orange-moved out from a shadowy nook and turned to face her. His mouth did not move, but his words carried to Lumiya’s mind: And so I must go. Become nothingness.

“You always were nothingness. You’re a projection-dark side energy from the caverns, shaped by my imagination and Jacen Solo’s form. But you’ll be back. Bit by bit, Jacen Solo will become you.”

And at last I’ll have a name. A Sith name.

“Yes.”

The phantom Sith moved forward to stand over her. He will learn that the attack at Toryaz Station was your doing. That good men were ruined by the phantoms from your mind, phantoms taking the forms of those they loved. That this war to come could have been prevented but for your interference.

“Yes, someday, perhaps. In the meantime, his anger, the anger of his family, will be directed at Thrackan Sal-Solo, who’s more to blame than I am for that attack-since he did what he did out of self-interest. And by the time Jacen discovers the full truth, he will understand how important he is, how he could not come to be without those events occurring, and he will forgive me.”

I feel his emotions. He will hate you for these events.

“But he will love me for them, too.”

Yes.

Lumiya smiled. “Then I know balance. The balance of the Sith.”

The false Jacen nodded, then slowly, and without evident distress, faded to nothingness.

Bleary-eyed, gently rubbing his stomach, Ben moved into the shuttle’s cockpit and dropped into the copilot’s seat. “How long was I unconscious?”

“Hours,” Jacen said.

“Where’s Nelani?”

Jacen paused, looking for the right words. But the gentle ones would, in the long run, do more damage than the cold, short, truthful ones. “Ben, she’s dead.”

Ben sat up straight. The expression he turned on Jacen was pained, disbelieving. “How? The Sith?”

“Yes and no.” Jacen considered his answer; considered the mix of truth and lies he would someday have to unravel. “There was a person in the lower caverns who called himself a Sith. But he wasn’t. He was just a dark side Force-user who’d learned to tap into the powers imbued in the place. They made him very strong … but only there, on that asteroid. He sent deadly illusions against us.”

“I remember. I fought Mom. She kicked the stuffing out of me.”

“Just as she would in real life. Nelani fought the phantoms of her own inadequacy, phantoms I thought I’d helped her deal with when she was just an apprentice, and she was too weak for them. They killed her.”