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

by Matthew Woodring Stover

Inside, he still feels like a Padawan. It is a truism of the Jedi Order that a Jedi Knight’s education truly begins only when he becomes a Master: that everything important about being a Master is learned from one’s student. Obi-Wan feels the truth of this every day.

All things die, Anakin Skywalker. Even stars burn out …

How can one defeat an enemy one thinks is a friend?

Dooku’s decades of combat experience are irrelevant. His mastery of swordplay is useless. His vast wealth, his political influence, impeccable breeding, immaculate manners, exquisite taste—all the pursuits and points of pride to which he has devoted so much of his time and attention over the long, long years of his life—are now chains hung upon his spirit, bending his neck before the ax.

Being a Jedi means allowing things—even things we love—to pass out of our lives.”

There are so few things a Jedi ever owns; even his lightsaber is less a possession than an expression of his identity. To be a Jedi is to renounce possessions. And Anakin had tried so hard, tried for so long, to do just that.

He is all these things, but most important, he is still Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is why he can simply stand. Why he can simply wait. He has no need to attack, or to defend. There will be battle here, but he is perfectly at ease, perfectly content to let the battle start when it will start, and let it end when it will end. Just as he will let himself live, or let himself die. This is how a great Jedi makes war.

It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.

Their lips met, and the universe became, one last time, perfect.

“If I listen hard enough, I can almost hear Qui-Gon reminding me that until the possible becomes actual, it is only a distraction.”

The shadow of greed, attachment is. What you fear to lose, train yourself to release. Let go of fear, and loss cannot harm you.”

“An infinite mystery is the Force,” Yoda said softly. “The more we learn, the more we discover how much we do not know.”

be mindful of the currents of the living Force: to do one’s duty is not always to do right. Concern yourself with right action. Let duty take care of itself.

When you don’t sleep, days smear together into a haze of fatigue so deep it becomes a physical pain.

there is no greater misery than to remember, with bitter regret, a day when you were happy

It’s as though Dooku was right—to save the Republic, we’ll have to destroy it

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

The Clone Wars have always been, in and of themselves, from their very inception, the revenge of the Sith.

The Clone Wars were the perfect Jedi trap. By fighting at all, the Jedi lost.

But even grief is an attachment, and Obi-Wan let it flow out of his life. Good-bye, my friend.

When those blades met, it was more than Yoda against Palpatine, more than millennia of Sith against the legions of Jedi; this was the expression of the fundamental conflict of the universe itself. Light against dark. Winner take all.

“Only Sith deal in absolutes, Anakin. The truth is never black and white.”

The Jedi had spent that same millennium training to re-fight the last war. The new Sith could not be destroyed with a lightsaber; they could not be burned away by any torch of the Force. The brighter his light, the darker their shadow. How could one win a war against the dark, when war itself had become the dark’s own weapon?

Blade-to-blade, they were identical. After thousands of hours in lightsaber sparring, they knew each other better than brothers, more intimately than lovers; they were complementary halves of a single warrior.

This was not Sith against Jedi. This was not light against dark or good against evil; it had nothing to do with duty or philosophy, religion or morals. It was Anakin against Obi-Wan. Personally. Just the two of them, and the damage they had done to each other.

Obi-Wan knew there was, in the end, only one answer for attachment … He let it go.

Yoda had failed. He might have died. He might have left Obi-Wan alone: the last Jedi.

“Eternal life …” The ultimate goal of the Sith, yet they can never achieve it; it comes only by the release of self, not the exaltation of self. It comes through compassion, not greed. Love is the answer to the darkness.

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 you will ever have.

But even in the deepest night, there are some who dream of dawn.

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins—but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars.