[Short Stories] - Dark Emperor 1(33)

Vantos wailed as he lay where Palpatine’s wave of pain had made him fall. He was evil! No…it was impossible! He had been chosen! But his dead brother’s words came back to him unbidden…”What if your vision wasn’t from the light side? What if the dark side wants you, and the way to claim you is to have you murder this child?” Murder this child. Murder. Murder. Murder! Thousands of murders happening above him. Vantos had become the thing his beloved Bafforr trees would have hated utterly. He was no savior, after all. He was only a killer.

Emperor Palpatine stepped into view next to him. Vantos saw the ruler’s black robe and boots through a curtain of tears. He had lost. It didn’t matter any more what happened to Palpatine…nothing Vantos did would ever serve the good. He stared at his hands. For years, they had nurtured life in the gardens…for years, they had helped things grow. Now, they were the hands of a common killer.

“I’m going to take you with me now, my servant,” the Emperor said quietly. “This will be painful, but that, too, will be an important lesson for you.”

Vantos heard the crackle of dark side lightning begin to arc between Palpatine’s fingers, but the next moment, a louder sound overwhelmed it. The ceiling of the throne room cracked open from a gigantic impact on the next level up. Great chunks of rock fell everywhere, breaking the marble seats and bouncing down onto the floor of the auditorium. The rainbow-lit throne was covered in rubble and crushed to the ground. Palpatine lifted his arms and released the dreadful lightning he had prepared for Vantos. Writhing electric blue power hammered the falling boulders apart. Many of them exploded into harmless showers of small stones, but the Emperor could not stop all of them. He was beaten to the floor and quickly covered up by the heavy debris. Vantos luckily escaped the worst of it. Several large pieces of the ceiling hit the bench he was cowering next to, tipping it on top of him. Instead of crushing him, the bench back was stopped by the next row of seats, leaving Vantos in a protective stone tent while the wreckage of the ceiling pummeled everything else.

Less than a minute later, it was over. The shaking stopped. The last boulders had fallen. There was silence.

Vantos coughed at the swirling dust and wondered. Something was wrong. The explosions had stopped…but why? The chain reaction should be continuing, as the mirror satellite ignited moss all the way down the side of the Palace. There was enough of it to carry the destruction all the way down through the rest of the Palace below him. He expected to die in the kind of ruin a great earthquake would produce. Instead, the ceiling had come down, and that was all. No fireball racing in from the Grand Corridor. No explosions blasting the floor out from under him. Something had failed! And he was still alive! And the Emperor…

Vantos saw the Emperor’s body half buried in the rubble nearby. He was unconscious, but evidently still breathing, still alive! Neither of them had died, while thousands of others had been killed instead! It was horrifying, and intolerable. Vantos choked on the dust as he pulled himself out from beneath the fallen benches. This could not be how it ended. Palpatine could not live on. He looked at his filthy, bleeding hands. All right then…if he was a killer and no more than that, he would go over to that fallen, pinned man and kill.

He clambered over the rocks and hunched over the Emperor. A single thought possessed his mind. I will kill you, kill you with my own hands. Pushing away the black hood, Vantos dug his fingers into the age-ravaged throat. A thrill of horror went through him as he saw the naked head of Palpatine. The bald skin was cracked with seeping fissures that looked like they reached to the bone. Black, worm like objects nestled in the wounds, shadow-fragments of Palpatine’s power that stopped the progress of his decay. Boda grimaced, and looked away from them, then forced his attention back to the mechanical process of strangling his prone foe. Die, he thought, die…so that my life can have some small meaning…

Darth Vader entered the ruined throne room while cloaked in Sith magic. He was silent and invisible in the shadows, and it took him only moments to find the room’s two other occupants. There was the dark Jedi at last, but the Emperor had fallen before him. It was unthinkable, but there it was in front of him. Boda was trying to choke the Emperor to death—a crude and cowardly method. Vader had been correct about this man. He was killing a helpless opponent, without courage or honor.

For a frozen moment, Darth Vader considered what he would do. Boda would die, that was certain, but what of his Master? Vader had been hoping for the Emperor to die, so that he could take the throne. But the Royal Guards knew Vader was here—he had met them in the Grand Corridor. He had found it difficult to convince them not to follow him into the throne room. The Guards were held back only by Palpatine’s direct orders, and they had been on the verge of defying them. If the Emperor died, and Vader failed to stop it, they would accuse him of being an accessory to the murder. Under those circumstances, he would not take the throne without a great deal of opposition. Vader was not well liked in the Empire, and he knew it. The best way to overcome the opposition and take the throne was to have it officially given to him by the dying Emperor himself. And Palpatine would die soon enough, without the secrets held by Boda to help him.