The summons arrives in the corridor outside the maintenance chamber.
A droid. Black-and-red livery. Personal courier from the Emperor's office. It steps into my path before I have walked six paces from the door I just left.
"Lord Vader. His Excellency requests your presence."
It does not specify where, and likely did not have any sense ofneeding to.
I follow.
The droid leads. Down through the upper Palace levels first, the levels where the staff has clearance; thechamberlains' offices, secretaries' corridors, and small rooms where the work of running an empire is shelved and forgotten. The droid does not stop at any of them. The descent continues, each successive level has fewer beings on it. By the fifth level there is only the droid and me, the corridor lights coming on as we approach and going dark behind us.
I have been to this chamber before. Some number of times since the reconstruction of my body into what it is now. Each visit the route has been the same, and each visit the destination has been the same.
Palpatine has been there before me each time, waiting.
My HUD reads my body to me as the corridor lights pass. The synthskin grafts have not yet set. The catch in my lower spine where the sander went deep is still firing every other step. Palpatine's medical droids had spent forty minutes running a cycle he could have ordered shorter and ordered to its full length instead of what was instead down. He wanted me arriving in this exact condition.
I hold the leviathan low. Not here, not in the corridor, not where his attention can reach me before I am inside the chamber and committed to whatever he has come to do.
The reservoir behind my chest plate is full from the maintenance session, the pain having acted as an appetizer. I have not had time to discharge any of it. The leviathan is patient and well-fed.
The droid halts at the door.
I stand in front of it and the door knows me, keyed to my biometrics on the first visit and never updated since. It opens at my approach, but the droid does not enter. The droid turns and goes back the way we came.
I step through, and am met by the interior of the chamber.
Larger than the maintenance room above. Round shaped, the durasteel vault overhead lost in shadow. The lighting is low, a faint gold, set in recesses along the floor so the ceiling stays dark. Sith design, obvious about it, but new and crisp colour and not the dull and aged look. This was built recently. The floor stone is real but the vault overhead is durasteel painted to look like stone, and the recessed lighting and the air-cycle vents and the powered fittings for the pedestals along the walls are all current technology dressed in five-thousand-year-old aesthetics.
A pedestal at the far wall holds a holocron. Faintly glowing red. Dormant. And mounted upright on a stasis cradle.
On the pedestal beside it, there is a mask. Sith, broken across the cheekbone where its previous owner was cut down. I cannot read the lineage from here.
Beyond that, a curved vibrosaber from before the modern saber. The blade is laid out on velvet, edge up in display.
The chamber is a museum. Well curated. Each piece selected for what he wants me to see, to ask about, to study; ach piece a partial disclosure. The holocron, my gaze flits to it again, dormant on its stasis cradle, he has decided I am allowed to know exists. He wants me to wonder about the mask. The vibrosaber's lineage, when I look for it, will lead exactly where he means me to look.
There is more beneath this chamber. I do not know what or how much, and I have never asked. To ask would mark me as already aware, which would force him to either lie or confirm, and either answer would be his choice and not mine.
The chamber's depth is the chamber's depth in every Palpatine room. The bottom is always somewhere further down.
Palpatine stands in the center of the floor.
His back is to me.
He is robed in the post-Order-66 cut he has favoured, the cowl down, the chamber's recessed lighting catching the white at the back of his head and the dark fabric of his shoulders. His hands are inside his sleeves. He took this same stance at the observation window upstairs. It is the stance he adopts, from what I've gathered, when he wants project a flat neutrality that disguises whether he is pleased, displeased, bored, or inquisitive.
In other words, I cannot read him by sight.
The black hole he has been in the Force since Mustafar reaches for me before I am three paces into the chamber. It tests the edges of me, tastes the darkness I have brought back from Corellia, and the weight of his attention settles behind my eyes like a hook set into the back of my skull. I have learned to stand inside this pressure.
There is something else underneath it tonight, a stillness I do not have a previous reading for. The pulse-of-enjoyment that has flickered through him every meeting since the reconstruction is gone, and beneath the constant pull I am used to there is only a deeper patience, ancient and waiting, the patience of a creature that has been holding still for a very long time and intends to keep holding still until I have given it whatever it has come for.
The door seals behind me.
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He does not turn.
"Come closer."
I cross the floor. Twenty paces. Eighteen. Ten.
I stop where one stops in the presence of the Emperor.
He still does not turn.
"We have much to discuss, my friend." A pause. The voice carries through the chamber. Designed acoustics. Every word lands twice if he wants it to, once when he says it and once where the vault returns it. "I sense you have settled and grown much since I sent you to Corellia." Another pause. "You have grown in the dark side. And in your power."
The compliment is warm. It is also accurate.
He recites what has occurred;the Bloodstripe read, the dual governorship as a thing a master would have devised, the framing of the houses' choice as theater that built the houses up rather than humiliating them. He uses my own observations from the debrief and returns them to me as praise. Each one true. Each one extracted from the chamber upstairs and brought down here as evidence.
He turns.
The cowl is down. The face is uncovered; skin gone slack at the cheekbones, scars and near rot worked into the lines around his mouth, the yellow of the eyes wet and unblinking above all of it.
He is smiling.
"The dark side is appetite, my apprentice. It grows by being fed. The apprentice who feeds himself becomes the apprentice who can stand." He pauses. "You have been feeding yourself."
"Yes, master."
The two words come out clipped. My respirator catching on the wrong moment.
He hears the catch and does not comment on it.
"The question, when an apprentice begins to feed himself, is what the apprentice does with the strength that follows. Whether he understands that strength is a thing that serves." His hands come out of the sleeves. Folded in front of him. "Whether he remembers, in his strength, that he was given the capacity to grow strong. By another's hand."
The Force around him does not move.
He is informing me of the lesson before he teaches it.
"You will spar with me, Lord Vader. We will see what you have become."
"Yes, master."
He smiles wider.
"Draw your blade."
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My saber comes off my belt and into my prosthetic palm with the weight I have learned to trust over six months of relearning every grip I once knew. I do not ignite it yet.
He raises his own hand. His saber leaves his sleeve into his palm as though it has been waiting there for him to remember it, the cross-guard already canted at his hip in the starting position he favors when he intends to come forward.
He ignites first.
Bloodshine bleeds across the white at the back of his head and the dark fabric of his shoulders, the hum settling into a pitch identical to my own.
I ignite mine. Wine-dark red to his clean blood. The two beams meet across the chamber's center, the recessed lighting along the floor strobing into a third color the vault overhead returns to us in a single low note.
He moves.
He is not careful. Even at the speed he is allowing himself — holding back the speed I have only seen him use twice , in the maintenance chamber my second week in the suit when he demonstrated to me what lightsaber combat looks like at the upper edge of his ability, and when he and Windu seemingly flickered in an out of existence, one a leviathan and the other a single mote of light riding the hurricane of pitchest black— he comes forward with the appetite of a predator that has been pacing its enclosure for hours and is finally allowed to close. His blade arcs in from my high-left in a strike I have to throw motor commands one full half-second early to catch, and even with the head start his point is past my guard before mine arrives. The cut grazes my chest plate's left edge with a low, sizzling screech. Sparks explode out as the Blade tip melts a line of scorch across the obsidian armour. The smell of burnt plastoid reaches through my respirator before the air-cycle clears it.
He pulls his blade back without committing it further.
He has touched me. He has shown me he can. Then, in the same motion, he declines to push the touch into a wound.
I bring my blade back down to centerline.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.
The form I have rebuilt around this suit settles into me — Djem So at its core, the brutal vertical strikes my prosthetics can still produce, Soresu layered across my chest and throat where the kill switch he believes he holds is housed. A juggernaut's form, slow and efficient and built for absorbing damage I cannot avoid.
He comes again.
Faster this time. Lower. A diagonal from my right that turns at the last instant into a rising thrust toward my throat — exactly the kind of misdirection my prosthetic lag was built to defeat me at. I read the misdirection through the Force a heartbeat before my eyes catch it; my blade catches his thrust at chest height and rolls it past me; his point passes within a hand's breadth of my respirator intake.
The room swallows the hum of plasma close to metal close to wet throat-tissue. The dark side hums beneath my plating, pleased to have been close to its own end.
He stops the strike a finger's width short of where it would have ended my breathing.
He has been here before. The suit and its limits are mapped in his head, and he is showing me — blade by blade — that he could have killed me in any of these exchanges if he wished.
I push back. Brutal vertical strike from high-left, the Djem So my body still remembers how to throw, the long handle giving me the leverage my prosthetics need to compensate for what they cannot do alone. His blade catches it and rolls it past him without effort, and he is already turning the parry into a riposte I have to throw a Soresu block to catch in time. The block holds.
A pulse moves in the Force around him.
The first pulse I have felt in him since the maintenance chamber upstairs. Faint and at the edge of his signature. He is pleased that the form holds and that I have remembered I am allowed to attack.
He is also weighing the next test.
The first lightning comes mid-exchange.
His left hand snaps up at the same instant his saber comes down through my high guard, and the blue branches out of his fingers — small, deliberate, hardly more than the test-stroke of a master who knows exactly how much voltage my suit can take before the leash he believes he holds becomes redundant. It catches the synthskin at the back of my left arm where the prosthetic seam is freshest. Cybernetics shriek. My HUD blooms red across the entire left peripheral. The current wants the floor, and I give it the floor — the same Tutaminis Anakin learned as a Jedi and that I have been relearning to use through prosthetics for half a year now, the lightning grounding through my soles and into the stone with a flash that scorches a black line across the chamber between us. Along the floor the recessed lighting flickers and steadies, and the walls and ceiling overhead returns the sound of discharge as a crack like something hard breaking in a room with no other sound.
Even controlled, it costs.
My left arm goes numb to the elbow for the count of two heartbeats; the hand at the end of it does not answer me until the third; my respirator catches once and runs.
"Channel what is left of the pain, my apprentice."
I feed it down. Cold suction opens behind my sternum, the dark side drawing breath through the hollow of my chest, and the residual fire of the synthskin finds the channel and converts, agony transmuting into pressure and pressure into a hum that settles beneath my plating. The leviathan, low in the reservoir, stirs at the meal and goes still again.
I bring my blade up.
"Good."
He resumes. The next exchange is faster than the last, and the one after faster again. He is not pushing me to my limit — he is pushing me to the place where my limit is visible to him, where he can examine the shape of it and decide what he wants to do with the information. The form holds because I have spent every spar-session for six months learning how to make it hold, every motor command thrown a half-second early, every blade-angle calculated against the lag, every joint between Djem So and Soresu drilled into reflex until it no longer requires thought to find.
The second lightning comes thirty seconds later. Heavier than the first, across my chest plate. I ground it again — through the plate, through the spine I no longer fully own, into the floor — and the cost is heavier with it. My central panel hiccups; the HUD flickers and recovers; one of my respirator's intake servos catches and releases on a stutter that takes three breaths to clear; the grafts along my spine begin to weep beneath the compression sheath, the synthskin lifted by the temperature of the discharge before the discharge could leave me. The pedestal at the far wall trembles in its stasis cradle while the mask beside it does not, and the vibrosaber's velvet darkens with the heat that has come off me.
"You are not channeling it through the dark, my apprentice. You are setting it aside. Through some channel I did not teach you." His blade keeps moving. "Tell me what you have done with the resources I have given you. What you have not yet had occasion to share."
The question lands between exchanges, his point already returning from a thrust I have caught and rolled past me. I keep the form moving while the answer assembles itself.
He gave me the question in its softer form upstairs. He had the surface of my thoughts, the mask. But he is now telling me he wants what lives underneath it, what I have been doing aside from what I've share so far.
I have prepared an order of surfacing for this question — prepared it since I left the maintenance chamber upstairs. I begin with the one that costs me least.
"Olee Starstone, master. The methodology beneath the surface I gave you upstairs. Guilt-anchors set in Chatak's death, framed as her own choice-points so the lash-points draw on her conviction and not on external pressure." A breath. "The slavery-rage cover holds because real slavery-rage feeds it. Both corruptions proceed together."
"What else."
His blade comes in across my upper line; mine catches it. His slides off mine and toward my prosthetic shoulder; mine then drops to intercept and his is already retreating.
"The neural bridge, master. Force-projection has stabilized into conscious-reception. Rivoche Bel Iblis received her first projection outside the maintenance chamber door this evening. The capability is new. I did not have it on Corellia. It opened after the last debridement session."
"What else."
His blade comes for my high-right; the long handle catches it and the impact rings through my prosthetic.
"The dreadnought-frame work has accelerated past the public commission, the Aldrete yards running at capacities the Navy will not see in any audit until the second hull is keeled. The acceleration is mine to surface to you when I choose."
The lightning hits again. Lower-left. The freshest sander-scars from the morning. The grafts there are still setting and have nothing between them and the lightning's path; the ground-line crawls across the stone in a new direction because my soles are starting to score where the previous discharges landed.
The pain wants out.
I feed it down with the rest again, the cold suction behind my sternum expanding as the dark side draws a baleful breath through the hollow of my chest; the leviathan stirs lower in the reservoir than it has stirred for any meal in months, content with the volume of the offering, patient with what is still coming.
"What else, my apprentice."
The order of surfacing has run out. What he wants now is the thing I have not prepared to give him.
The shi—
The word almost finishes. My respirator catches on it. I close the word off mid-syllable, push the fragment back into the reservoir with the rest of the pain.
The cover holds.
"Nothing else of consequence, master."
There is a pause like an eternity passes between us.
"And what else, Skywalker."
The name lands harder than the lightning did. He has not used it since the chamber upstairs; the word in his mouth means he is enjoying himself and chooses to remind me he can produce it whenever he wishes.
I channel the response into the reservoir before the response can reach my body.
"Nothing else of consequence, master."
The lightning that comes now is the lightning that has been waiting. Not a test-stroke; the real thing. It catches my saber-hand at the wrist and runs up through my prosthetic and into the neural spike at the base of my spine, and for two full seconds my body simply does not belong to me — every motor command I have issued overwritten by a voltage my suit was not designed to ground all at once. My defensive form collapses. My saber arm drops. He could close the duel and does not.
He stops the lightning.
The duel pauses.
He has both blades extended. Mine is loose in my hand. His is six inches from my throat.
"My apprentice." The voice carries softly. "Are you sure there is nothing else of consequence."
I do not answer.
The Force around him does not move.
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We resume.
He gives me back the duel and I bring the form back up; we are circling again, the saber-points crossing again, and the lightning that comes now is no longer the test-stroke he was making it. He is no longer asking questions; he is teaching, and the lesson is what the saber-work has been covering for the entire duel.
"Strength," he says between the strokes, "is a thing that must serve."
The blue branches into my right shoulder. I ground it, barely, the grounding-line crawling across the stone in a different direction now because my soles are starting to score where the previous discharges landed.
"Strength that decides for itself."
Across my chest plate. The central panel hiccups for longer this time. My HUD throws a cascade of red warnings the helmet-overrides are struggling to keep ahead of. My respirator stutters, catches, runs.
"Becomes a problem for its master."
The freshest of the spinal grafts. I cannot ground all of it this time; some of it stays in me, and where it stays in me the synthskin gives up and starts coming away in sheets even before the lightning has finished its work.
The leviathan rises higher in the reservoir than I have ever let it rise inside the Palace, called by the volume of the offering, and I do not have the discipline left to push it back down.
He is not even pretending it is training now.
The shi—
I close the word off again.
The cover holds.
But I am angry.
I have been angry since the maintenance chamber upstairs — since the absence of the pulse, the mismatch of warmth and stillness, the word he refused to say, the grafts coming apart under a punishment he refuses to name. The anger sits in me now the way the leviathan sits in the reservoir; it has been gathering since he asked the first question, building under every lightning-strike I have grounded, and there is nowhere left for it to go that he has not already pressed shut.
He is telling me to channel it through the dark.
I channel it the other way.
The Force surges through me the way it surged in the medbay when I crushed the old pectoral plate, the way it surged on Murkhana when I fed it the souls of a city — rage opening every channel I have, the leviathan rising fully now, the dark side answering with hunger that has been gathering in the reservoir all evening and finally has somewhere to go.
The first pedestal goes. The holocron tears free of its stasis cradle and crosses the floor at his back like a shot from a railgun, and he catches it without turning his head — a casual snap of will that hangs the artifact in the air behind him as though he had asked it to wait there.
So I reach past the pedestals. I reach for the air around him, for the column of atmosphere standing between his shoulders and the vault overhead, and I pull. The chamber's pressurized air collapses inward; the column slams down through the space above him with enough mass to drive a being into the floor.
He stops it.
The Force between us locks — his will and mine pressing against each other through the conduit of the falling air — and for the space of a breath the chamber's recessed lighting strobes once and steadies, before his strength simply dwarfs mine and the column dissipates into harmless atmosphere.
Lightning leaves both his hands.
The duel ends. My saber falls from my grip and clatters on the stone next to me; I am on my knees and then on the ground, and the lightning is coming through my chest plate, through my helmet's seals, through my prosthetics, through every wire of my nervous system the suit was built to insulate and is no longer insulating. My HUD goes dark in a single sweep. My respirator catches and stays caught, the breath sealed inside my body where it can no longer find a way out.
The reservoir of power overflows as the leviathan rises from the depths — enormous, ravenous, hungrier than I have ever fed it. And Palpatine sees it.
The lightning stops.
He is smiling. Not in the Force. With his face. The face is in front of mine now because he has stepped into the duel's center and is standing over me. The smile widens. He has spent six months building me up to this moment and the moment has arrived in the shape he wanted.
"There. Yes. That."
He kneels.
The robes settle around him.
His hand comes to my chest plate. It rests there. The hand is warm through the damaged plate. The lightning is gone but the pleasure of the lightning is still in his face.
"This. This is what I needed to see, Skywalker. You have grown by your own hand. You have built a reservoir I did not give you. You have learned to feed it without my instruction. You have learned to pull from a room without being taught how to pull from a room."
He pats the chest plate.
"You are dangerous, my apprentice. You are exactly the kind of dangerous I hoped you would become."
He stands.
He extends his hand to me.
His hand is the Emperor's hand, lined and old, the skin gone papery with the decades of channeling things no body should channel; the Sith eyes above it wait for me to take it.
I take it.
He pulls me up. My respirator catches and releases on the first breath, then settles; my HUD wakes one panel at a time, the warnings cascading down its edge in red columns less full than they should be after a session of this magnitude — he has dialed his last blast back somewhere short of what would kill the suit, and what was left I have grounded through the floor and through whatever wiring my body can still pretend is grounded. My body underneath is worse than when I walked into the chamber. Fresh grafts gone. Synthskin will need to be reapplied. My neural spike at the base of my spine is misaligned, and my fingers are answering motor commands two full seconds late.
I stand.
He is looking up at me.
"My apprentice." The voice is the warm voice from the maintenance chamber upstairs. He is ready to deliver his conclusion. "You have just been taught a great deal. About what you are. About what you can do. About what I will permit and what I will not. About what the consequences are when you forget whose hand made you what you are."
He pauses.
"Reflect on it."
The Sith eyes hold mine.
"Then forget it. We will not speak of this session again. We will not refer to it. It will not appear in any record. It happened in this chamber and it will stay in this chamber."
His fingers come up to my chest plate one more time.
"What we will speak of, henceforth, is what comes next."
He turns.
He walks toward the chamber's far door — not the one I came in through. The other one. I have stood in this chamber three times now and never been brought through the far door, never been told what is past it, never had it open for me. Tonight it opens.
He pauses at the door.
"Follow me, Lord Vader. I have a gift for you."