He felt the cold seeping into his senatorial apartments early that morning, so early it was really still late. The cold was almost a physical presence, invisible tendrils of frost creeping in under the door. He awoke shivering under the thick, soft, warm blankets, skin clammy against the silky sheets. The bedchamber was dark, even with the city lights filtering through the blinds, and even with the city's sounds, the bedchamber was silent. It felt remote, and he felt disoriented and afraid, a feeling he had not had in years. It was as if he had never seen the room before in his life.

Afraid of the dark, he taunted himself. Like a child. But it didn't seem funny. Part of him was afraid that if he laughed, if he even thought about the dark in the wrong way…never mind.

Moving more quickly than he would have believed he could outside of battle, he reached over and switched his lamps up to full power, heaving a sigh of relief that he hadn't known he was holding.

But there was still the cold. The warm yellow glow of the lights didn't help. He had a feeling that turning up the heat wouldn't help either.

He reached out through the Force, but it was foggy, and seemed to repel him. He felt blind. The fear surged back up, nearly taking the contents of his stomach with it.

He dressed quickly, pulling a thick, official-looking robe on over his sleep shirt, and pulling his boots on without lacing them.

What Force-connection still remained open to him pointed him toward the Senate building, like a star hidden behind a dust cloud, pulling planets into orbit around it. Every cell in his body shrank back from that building tonight, screamed for him to go far away from it. Which, of course, meant that it was where he needed to go.

At this time of night, the Senate building was lit sparingly, by sickly neon glowstrips. The front desk was long closed, of course, but it was a simple matter to disable the alarms through the Force, and to slip through.

He knew that whatever was happening was on the top floor, in the Chancellor's office. The lift was operational, but he didn't ride it up all the way. He took the emergency stairwell the last few floors. He didn't want the lift to be heard docking on the top floor. On the last stair, he tripped over nothing and nearly fell forward. He realized, after a moment, that it was because his knees were shaking.

It was getting darker, the farther up he went. The lights stayed on, but the shadows grew deeper, and seemed to move at the corners of his eyes. There were so many of them.

Outside Valorum's office, the cold was like a solid layer of ice in the air, but sweaty. He peered into the room, trying to remain mostly out of sight. The office would be empty, of course; Valorum wouldn't be there at this hour. Even he would be at home by now.

The door hissed open before him. He had not pressed the panel, and anyway, it should be locked by now.

The universe seemed to be silent, holding its breath. At last, he forced himself to walk through the doorway.

Valorum was there. He was sitting at his desk. Slowly, his chair turned to face the newcomer.

As the chair turned, a beam of light- from some passing traffic outside, perhaps- illuminated Valorum's face.

After the night and early morning Sidious had faced, his nerves were scraped raw with disorientation, separation from the Force, fear, nausea, and sleep deprivation. As his cool blue eyes, so usually calm and placid, fell on the thing in the chair's face- it couldn't be Valorum, his sensible brain said later, and it was right- a cry tore from his throat and echoed around the chamber.

The Valorum in the chair, watching him now, was a rotting corpse that stared at him through wide, distant, misshapen eyeballs bulging grotesquely from its face. It sat limply in the chair, leering blankly at him, the only sign of animation a faint blue-black light deep in its pupils.

After a few more silent, horrible moments of the dead man's stare, the thing- Valorum as a decomposing body- began to change. It dissolved into black smoke, which reformed itself almost elegantly into a thing- a being- an entity that was most certainly not Valorum.

The cold was still there, but Sidious no longer noticed it, because now the cold was inside him, as if his blood and muscles were frozen solid, weighing him down, anchoring him to that spot before the desk of the Supreme Chancellor. Later, he would half-convince himself it was a bad dream, and some days, he would believe himself. But now, he could only stand, mute and immobilized, before the Master of the Dark Side.