Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (Star Wars: Novelizations #3)

by Matthew Woodring Stover

Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.

The dark is generous. Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others. The dark protects us from what we dare not know. Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it is day that is temporary. Day is the illusion. Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self. With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

This is Obi-Wan Kenobi: A phenomenal pilot who doesn’t like to fly. A devastating warrior who’d rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate. Jedi Master. General in the Grand Army of the Republic. Member of the Jedi Council. And yet, inside, he feels like he’s none of these things. Inside, he still feels like a Padawan.

Greatness was never his ambition. He wants only to perform whatever task he is given to the best of his ability.

For Anakin Skywalker, starfighter battles were usually as close to fun as he ever came.

This is Anakin Skywalker: The most powerful Jedi of his generation. Perhaps of any generation. The fastest. The strongest. An unbeatable pilot. An unstoppable warrior. On the ground, in the air or sea or space, there is no one even close. He has not just power, not just skill, but dash: that rare, invaluable combination of boldness and grace. He is the best there is at what he does. The best there has ever been. And he knows it. HoloNet features call him the Hero With No Fear. And why not? What should he be afraid of? Except— Fear lives inside him anyway, chewing away the firewalls around his heart. Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers. But Anakin’s fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind. Not nearly dead enough.

Because his real fear, in a universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will never be quite good enough.

But for Anakin Skywalker, the completely impossible had an eerie way of being merely difficult.