[Short Stories] - Dark Emperor 6(4)

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 an 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.