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IMMOLATION
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes"
The newly anointed Dark Lord of the Sith took a moment to survey his handiwork.
It pleased him.
A certain poetic justice that it was in their last and supposedly most secure bastion, that the Confederacy met its end.
A sham, in truth, for all the good it did them.
He had seen the schematics while en route and he could agree that the Mustafar citadel was indeed an impressive fortress.
If he were a lesser being, maybe it would have held and Viceroy Gunray and the others might still be alive.
If he were still Anakin Skywalker, things might have gone differently.
I am Darth Vader.
He held all the power of the Force in the grip of a white-hot fist.
Then again, he always had...but only after he had embraced the dark did he realize just how much power he truly wielded.
Had Lord Sidious not given him the access codes to the citadel, he would still have gotten through, even if he had to tear the entire citadel apart with his bare hands.
He knew he could have done that.
Anything was possible with the Force.
After all, he was its most powerful vessel.
Though he had bowed down to the self-declared Emperor, the Dark Lord of the Sith who had so masterfully bent the entire galaxy under his whim—he did so in order to learn the only power he needed.
Even as his new Master exalted...he did not miss something unmistakable from deep within the event horizon that was Darth Sidious.
Fear.
Fear of him; and rightly so...it was something he intended to justify very soon.
But for now, he had to play his part.
With each life he would take, Darth Sidious had promised, his power and understanding would grow exponentially.
He could attest to that. Every drop of blood he had shed, every scream given out by those who had fallen to his blade felt like an offering…
For her, no price was too dire.
He gazed out a viewport onto what served for Mustafar's horizon.
An inferno of molten rock and volcanic smog met his eyes, and the light from Mustafar's primary reached him in a muted red shade from behind sulphurous black clouds.
A vision of fire and blood...
So why then, did he feel so cold?
His mind then whispered in a voice that was not his own.
Traitor.
The young Sith Lord closed his eyes, a chill spreading through him despite the stifling heat.
"Please! I'll give you anything!" Wat Tambor's begging voice echoed in his mind, and he saw the Skakoan chairman of the Techno Union begging for his life as if he were right in front of him. "Anything you want!"
He shuddered. It was so easy taking his life...as it had been for all the rest. Why did he feel...so afraid just then?
Eyes still closed, his troubled mind swam and then Wat Tambor was gone, replaced instead by the last surviving member of the Separatists' Leadership Council.
Nute Gunray begged him with tears of pure terror on his green face right before he had burnt open his torso, "The war is over—Lord Sidious promised—promised us peace!"
And in his mind, he actually had to will himself to cut down the crying, cringing Neimoidian viceroy.
It had been laughably effortless during the slaughter earlier.
Where had this doubt come from?
He deserved it at least, or that was what Vader told himself.
Did he?
His eyes snapped open...the voice that spoke sounded like his own.
But it was not Darth Vader's voice, but Anakin Skywalker's.
I am Darth Vader! he told himself, no longer seeing the volcanic wasteland before him, breaking a cold sweat beneath his clothes.
Did they? Anakin Skywalker's calmly asked.
The Force then hurtled through him in a violent torrent he never knew possible—and the man who called himself Darth Vader could no longer see, hear, speak nor feel.
He was tumbling through darkness so complete and so silent that it was all he could do to wish he could still scream.
Did they deserve it? Skywalker's quiet voice asked.
Plunging into infinite night, Vader found himself again in the Jedi Temple...but felt he was looking through the eyes of someone else...
He had already smashed through the Temple's great gates by effortlessly flinging through it a massive permacrete pillar that had been felled during the 501st's assault on the gatekeepers.
The Sith Lord witnessed his own hand and blade doing battle with Master Cin Drallig. The venerable Jedi battlemaster had valiantly taken a last stand, taking down every single clone who had gone to face him in an attempt to allow any survivors a chance to escape the besieged temple.
So much so that Darth Vader had to take charge.
Through Vader's eyes, his blue lightsaber smashed away and finally conquered Master Drallig's green one, cleaving deep into the old Jedi's shoulder.
The Force once again inexorably rushed through him, and suddenly he was inside that chamber where a group of younglings had taken refuge from the holocaust outside.
He beheld their terrified faces through Vader's fearsome visage.
How they thought he was going to save them!
"Master Skywalker!" a young initiate had asked him fearfully, "There are too many of them, what are we going to do?"
The boy was no older than eight...and there were others far younger than he.
His heart raced in horror when a sword of blue fire exploded into life in a hand that was at once his own and as alien as intergalactic space.
Not one of them was spared by that blade or from the monster that had once worn the face of Anakin Skywalker.
Their tortured last screams and pleas sent shards of black guilt and agony through his very being.
He wanted all this to just stop. He could not understand what was happening or why.
It was a kind of pain he could not bear.
A dead kind...worse than even the agony he felt when Palpatine had revealed himself to be the Sith Lord.
STOP! NO! he tried to beg...but found he could no longer speak.
Could not do anything against the shades that plagued him.
Once again his mind shot through the dark. A strangling infinity of cold and silence.
In the blink of an eye, Count Dooku knelt before him, hands severed and cringing, at his neck his own crimson lightsaber and the glowing blue sword of his murderer's.
No!
The defeated Sith Lord knelt in stunned and fearful silence, his face a silent plea for deliverance.
"DO IT!" the preternatural darkness roared in the voice of the then-Chancellor Palpatine.
No! Stop! Vader tried to shout, to beg the darkness, DON'T!
And Lord Vader saw the two blades held in his hands uncross—
NOOOO!
Pain shot through every fiber of his being— he had not only been Dooku's killer, but Dooku himself—he had beheaded himself.
As suddenly as the vision of his first real murder come alive was he devoured again by endless dark.
Did he deserve it? Anakin Skywalker's voice whispered.
Vader did not know what to do.
He could not even think. In the darkness in which he fell, the voices of each and every being he had slain rang and their faces slipped past him, each somehow branding themselves in his memory forever.
Haunting him from beyond death.
I AM DARTH VADER! was all he could say in his attempt to rail against the voices, against his fear, but found himself failing, falling...
The chorus of the whispering voices of the dead grew louder and louder until it became a cacophony of horrific magnitude.
"TRAITOR!"
"NO, SPARE ME! PLEASE!"
"HE'S TOO DANGEROUS TO BE KEPT ALIVE!" Mace Windu's furious voice shouted before the scream of agony he emitted after a sword of blue fire severed his hand.
"NO! PLEASE! WE SURRENDER—" Rune Haako cried before being fed half a meter of plasma.
The Sith Lord felt his sanity slipping away like dew on a Tatooine morning even as the tunnel of faces once again turned into shadow while the voices remained.
And then he heard it...
His own voice, all others having vanished just as suddenly as they had erupted into life.
"I…I killed them," Anakin Skywalker's voice rang hollow, "I killed them all…"
Not this, he begged. Anything but this...please!
"They're dead," his voice trembled, "Every single one of them—and not just the men, but the women…and the children too!"
The darkness abruptly abated again, and this time he truly found himself someplace else.
There in his arms, barely alive in the light of a small brazier within a primitive dwelling of Tusken design, was the broken form of his mother.
His breath caught in his throat and his heart pounded in horror within his chest.
"Ani?" Shmi Skywalker choked, " Ani? Is it you?"
The Sith Lord felt hot tears stinging on his cheek and black agony stabbing at his heart.
"I'm here, Mom," his voice shook, saying the same words he had uttered all those years ago, "you're...you're safe now."
"My son…oh, my grown up son…," she rasped, her trembling hand stroking his cheek and tracing the scar across his eye, "I am so proud of you, Ani…"
He could not breathe.
The terrified Sith Lord knew what was going to happen next.
"Now...I am complete," her voice faded, "I love...I...I love..."
Just as the fire in the brazier flickered away...once more did so his mother's life.
And the madness that had consumed him when he had annihilated the Tusken camp claimed him again...but this time, detached as he was from Anakin Skywalker, did he feel the sheer agony his former self endured.
The darkness again devoured him while his mother's corpse disappeared like ashes in the desert wind.
That was when Darth Vader wanted to die.
Wanted everything to end.
All the power in the universe he had...but he could not...
He could never—
The ghosts would always haunt him...
You deserve this...Anakin Skywalker's voice whispered from the gloom.
And the truth hit him with the force of a supernova.
He was a monster, and this pain would be his penance...
He wanted to give in then. To the darkness. To the madness that had gnawed at his mind and tortured his soul...
"Anakin..." her voice cried out clear as crystal from the consuming darkness, "I'm sorry...I love you...I love you!"
And his vision of her—that fateful and most terrible dream—came to him with a clarity that was stronger than anything the darkness had hurled at him.
I...am Darth Vader, he commanded, and for the first time the darkness recoiled from him and his power.
He remembered why he had to act, why he had chosen to do such abominable deeds.
Padmé…
He had to save her and their unborn child.
No matter what the cost. No matter who had to pay the price.
"I love you..." he heard her voice caress him, and it gave him the strength he needed.
The shadows attempted to consume him once more even as it spoke in the voice of Anakin Skywalker.
You deserve it.
The darkness then attempted to wrest him away for good, but the Sith Lord sensed its fear, turned that into a weapon and then used it against its source.
I am Darth Vader.
He reached out through the Force, and in his hand of metal found the darkness for the first time.
He felt it...and it was cold.
Colder than space...colder than death...so cold it burned through his soul.
You deserve it, it rasped in Skywalker's voice even as Vader held it squarely in his grasp.
No.
His mechanical hand started to crush the shadow's neck.
I am stronger than you.
His hand then burst into a white-hot flame and the darkness recoiled and reeled in exquisite agony.
Inexorably, the inferno in his fist began to consume the shadow and as it did, revealed its true face.
The Sith Lord paused in a moment of absolute shock.
The darkness wore his face...
You deserve this...it whispered in his voice.
In that moment, the fire flickered...
"ANAKIN!" her voice called out once again from beyond nothingness.
He regained his resolve, and his next choice was no choice at all.
I am Darth Vader, embracing the truth of himself.
He no longer felt afraid.
And you...are nothing.
With an almighty surge of rage, his burning hand shone brighter than the preternatural explosion that had birthed the universe, obliterating the darkness in cruel and crushing finality.
The last thing Lord Vader saw was his own self consumed and immolated by the flames of his hate.
For an infinitesimal amount of time, he was nothing...
Anakin...
Her soft voice, a caressing echo from beyond oblivion, called for him and gave him back his being and purpose.
He breathed heavily and opened his eyes.
He was back inside the bunker as if no time had passed at all.
The ordeal, whatever it had been, had exhausted him.
I will save you.
He understood then that he would no longer fall prey to his fear, not when so much was at stake.
No matter what.
If he had to tear the universe apart limb-from-limb, so be it.
Only one life mattered.
He still had much to do, and thought he deserved a moment to breathe.
The Sith Lord then willed open a hatch and stepped onto a viewdeck outside the red chamber of death he had created only minutes before.
Once again, he beheld the hellish landscape of Mustafar and thought he was finally free of his doubts.
But as Darth Vader looked out onto the red-and-black horizon, the last tear of Anakin Skywalker flowed down upon his face.