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

by Matthew Woodring Stover

You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you. Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous. Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat. “Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right?” I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her. This burns hotter than the lava had. “No … no, it is not possible!” You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death. Never. But you remember … You remember all of it. You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader’s blood. You remember the furnace of Vader’s fury, and the black hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth— And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker. That it was all you. Is you. Only you. You did it. You killed her. You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself … It is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith— Because now your self is all yo...

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