Chapter 34: Had Abbadon
Luke...Luke...Luke...
The voice was without form, without word, and it called to his essence-self though it knew not what it did.
Thus, Master Skywalker knew he was ready.
He stood up, and there was crystallized fire in his eyes. The stormtroopers at the door pointed blasters at his chest and gestured for him to come out of the narrow cell the Imperials had placed him in aboard Bitter Heart. Darth Vader had instructed them to not bother taking Luke's lightsaber, because he would not use it.
They led him to a Lambda shuttle, dark inside, that curved over the capital ship from whence it emerged and began to descend toward the planet below...
Had Abbadon's eastern hemisphere was a tan forest of rock broken at times to reveal black strata, and streams ran through this maze and smoke rose from cracks that showed a violent sub-surface. There were a few man-made landing pads, often at the tops of spires of rock with stairways spiraling down them to disappear into caves of canyons. The hemisphere opposite was less rocky, maybe less blighted, with vegetation and animal life of its own. An atmosphereless moon made with a few bubbles of shield into an inhabitable meeting place floated beside the skeletal remains or beginnings of a Death Star.
The
Lambda settled on one of the spires, and Luke walked out and
descended the railless stairs in the company of two stormtroopers and
with the attitude of a warrior assessing his enemies' prowess,
which he was. Had Abbadon was some secret canter of the Empire,
focusing point of the dark side of the Force as Coruscant was for
political power. It was this universe's Vjun...or did Vjun have
importance here as well?
Luke cleared his thoughts of all this,
and calmed his rushing thoughts at the base of the stairs. Ahead was
an open place, and beyond it a door of thick metal. Beyond this was
the emperor, and Luke had decided that Palpatine much die.
No, not by my hands...
No, it would have to be Vader again, because this time maybe there would be a chance for more than minutes of rediscovered good. Luke shifted the black cloak about his shoulders, feeling the chill wind of this thin-aired world attempt to work into his bones. it had been years since Luke had gone against at evil like that of the emperor, or faced such a dire mental and physical challenge. He did not doubt himself, because he could not doubt the Force. The troopers opened the black door.
The first impressions were of red-tan rock, heat, and black strips of metal lighting marching toward the apex of the room, and there at that apex sat a throne, and within that throne sat Palpatine of the Empire. Darth Vader stood beside him like a pillar of onyx, silent, only the dark side filling his mind. The room was small, smaller than the Emperor's Quarters on the Death Star, filled with a fiery warmth that banished the chill outside. This heat though was no less natural. A river of lava, pure as if diverted here for only the purpose of intimidation, ran from the left and in a fall obscured by the walkway above it plunged into a pit so deep it was dark, splashed by random reflections of fire. The Emperor's chair sat on a balcony above them almost mirroring the Death Star spire, the shadows under the metal, corrugated stairway concealing cave formations of stalagmites growing unsmoothed. The stormtroopers had not entirely silently turned and marched away. Tan rock walls rose in all directions. Luke saw this all and turned his gaze back to the Emperor, calm, unfathomable.
"Welcome, young Skywalker." said the emperor, a trace of a laugh in his voice, a much more than a trace of arrogance on his ruined, hooded face. "I have been expecting you."
What must Darth Vader think of all this? This place...
I've been expecting you.
"That is as it should be." The Force said through Luke, quietly, humbly.
"You have walked into your dying place, Jedi." Palpatine snapped, anger seeming a part of the pale, yellow eyes and wrinkled, curving hands. He stood with the force of his anger, then became passive again, folding his hands into his robes. "If you do not see the power of the dark side."
Luke allowed himself a smile, a quirk. "I have turned from the dark path many times before." The Force brought his hand of durasteel and wiring to the hilt of his lightsaber, to end the life of an Evil One without rage or personal wish.
It is uncertain, to the scientists and theologians, whether the Force can be surprised or whether indeed it should be personified to presume such. A wise Jedi once said, we speak of the will of the Force as someone ignorant of gravity might say it is the will of a river to flow to the ocean.
All this aside, Luke, as immersed in the Force as he was, was surprised at what the emperor said next.
Palpatine laughed, a haughtily hollow sound. "You believe so easily in your arcane knowledge." The emperor scoffed, turning his back on Luke., manipulating the fingertip controls of the throne. He looked back for just a moment, the fearsomely withered face floating between the black of cowl and cloaked shoulder." And your arrogance reeks of the dark side."
Luke waited, knowing his rightness with the tiniest nibble of wonder that certainty itself was wrong, a lifetime telling him it was not.
The emperor turned around slowly with a universe-spanning machine in his hands, its tail twined about his shrouded arms.