Hey folks.

Here is the latest chapter of my Rise of the Empire story.

This chapter, and several more like it, is based on superb material from the ROTS novelization, and the now-canon Darth Vader comic series.

Hope you enjoy.

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Mustafar.

Just moments after a Naboo Skiff shot up into the sky, and below the red thunder of a volcano, a Sith Lord had already snatched from the sand of black glass the charred torso and head of what once had been a man, and had already leapt for the cliffbank above with effortless strength, and roared out an order to the clone stormtroopers nearby.

"Bring the medical capsule immediately!"

"Yes Sir," the lead trooper said, before he gestured to one of his men to follow him back to the shuttle.

The Sith Lord lowered the limbless man tenderly to the cool ground above, and laid his hand across the cracked and blackened mess that once had been his brow and he set his will upon him.

'Live, Lord Vader. Live my apprentice.'

Live.

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Polis Massa, observation dome.

Beyond the transparent crystal of the observation dome on the airless crags of Polis Massa, the galaxy wheeled in a spray of hard, cold pinpricks through the veil of infinite night.

Beneath that dome sat Yoda. He did not look at the stars.

He sat a very long time.

Even after nearly nine hundred years, the road to self-knowledge was rugged enough to leave him bruised and bleeding. He spoke softly, but not to himself. Though no one was with him, he was not alone.

"My failure, this was. Failed the Jedi, I did." He said, speaking to the Force.

And the Force answered him. "Do not blame yourself, my old friend."

As it sometimes had these past thirteen years, when the Force spoke to him, it spoke in the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn.

"Too old I was," Yoda said. "Too rigid. Too arrogant to see that the old way is not the only way. These Jedi, I trained to become the Jedi who had trained me, long centuries ago - but those ancient Jedi, of a different time they were. Changed, has the galaxy. Changed, the Order did not - because let it change, I did not."

'More easily said than done, my friend'.

"An infinite mystery is the Force," Yoda lifted his head and turned his gaze out into the wheel of stars. "Much to learn, there still is."

'And you will have time to learn it'.

"Infinite knowledge . . ." Yoda shook his head. "Infinite time, does that require."

'With my help, you can learn to join with the Force, yet retain consciousness. You can join your light to it forever. Perhaps, in time, even your physical self'.

Yoda did not move. "Eternal life . . ."

'The ultimate goal of the Sith, et 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.'

"Become one with the Force, yet influence still to have . . ." Yoda mused. "A power greater than all, it is."

'It cannot be granted; it can only be taught. It is yours to learn, if you wish it.'

Slowly, Yoda nodded. "A very great Jedi Master you have become, Qui-Gon Jinn. A very great Jedi Master you always were, but too blind I was to see it." He rose, and folded his hands before him, and inclined his head in the Jedi bow of respect. The bow of the student, in the presence of the Master. "Your apprentice, I gratefully become."

He was well into his first lesson when the hatch cycled open behind him. He turned.

In the corridor beyond stood Bail Organa. he looked stricken.

"Obi-Wan is asking for you at the surgical theater," he said. "It's Padme. She's dying."

Surgical theater.

Obi-Wan sat beside her, holding one cold, still hand in both of his. "Don't give up, Padme."

"Is it . . ." Her eyes rolled blindly. "It's a girl. Anakin thinks it's a girl."

"We don't know yet. In a minute . . . you have to stay with us."

Below the opaque tent that shrouded her from chest down, a pair of surgical droids assisted with her labor. A general medcal droid fussed and tinkered among the clutter of scanners and equipment.

"It it's . . . a girl - oh, oh, oh no . . ."

Obi-Wan cast an appeal toward the medical droid. "Can't you do something?"

"All organic damage has been repaired." The droid checked another readout. "This systemic failure cannot be explained."

'Not physically,' Obi-Wan thought. he squeezed her hand as though he could keep life within her body by simple pressure. "Padme, you have to hold on."

"If it's a girl . . . ," she gasped, "name her Leia . . ."

One of the surgical droids circled out from behind the tent, cradling in its padded arms a tiny infant, already swabbed clean and breathing, but without even the hint of tears.

The droid announced softly, "It's a boy."

Padme reached for him with her trembling free hand, but she had no strength to take him; she could only touch her fingers to the baby's forehead.

She smiled weakly. "Luke . . ."

The other droid now rounded the tent as well with another clean, quietly solemn infant. ". . . and a girl."

But Padme had already allen back against her pillow.

"Padme, you have twins," Obi-Wan said desperately. "They need you - please hang on . . ."

"Anakin . . ."

"Anakin . . . isn't here, Padme," he said, though he didn't think she could hear.

"Anakin, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry . . . Anakin, please, I love you . . ."

In the Force, Obi-Wan felt Yoda's approach, and he looked up to see the ancient Master beside Bail Organa, both starring the same grave question down through the surgical theater's observation panel.

The only answer Obi-Wan had was a helpless shake of his head.

Padme reached across with her free hand, with the hand she had laid upon the brow of her firstborn son, and pressed something into Obi-Wan's palm. For a moment, her eyes cleared, and she knew him.

"Obi-Wan . . . there . . . is still good in him. I know there is . . . still . . ."

Her voice faded to an empty sigh, and she sagged back against the pillow. Half a dozen different scanners buzzed with conflicting alarm tones, and the medical droids shooed him from the room.

Obi-Wan stepped into the hall outside, looking down at what she had pressed into his hand. It was a pendant of some kind, an amulet, unfamiliar sigils carved into some sort of organic material, strung on a loop of leather. In the Force, he could feel traces of the touch of her skin.

When Yoda and Bail came for him, he was still standing there, staring at it.

"She put this in my hand-" For what seemed the dozenth time this day, he found himself blinking back tears. "-and I don't even know what it is."

"Precious to her, it must have been," Yoda said slowly. "Buried with her, perhaps it should be."

Obi-Wan looked down at the simple, child-like symbols carved into it, and felt from it in the Force soaring echoes of transcendent love, and the bleak, black despair of unendurable heartbreak.

"Yes," he said. "Yes. Perhaps that would be best."

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Medical Facility, Imperial Center.

In the newly renamed Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center on Coruscant, guarded by clone troopers from stood watch under the seemingly endless rain, a hyper-sophisticated prototype Ubrikkian DD-13 surgical droid moved away from the project that it and an enhanced FX-6 medical droid had spent the the last few hours rebuilding.

It beckoned to a dark-robed shadow that stood at the edge of the pool of high-intensity light. "My lord, the construction is finished. He lives."

"Good. Good."

The shadow flowed into the pool of light as though the overhead illuminators had malfunctioned.

Droid stepped back as it came to the rim of the surgical table.

On the table was strapped the very first patient of the EmPal. SuRecon. Center.

To some eyes, it might have been a pieced-together hybrid of droid and human, encased in a life-support shell of gleaming black, managed by a thoracic processor that winked pale color against the shadow's cloak. To some eyes, its jointed limbs might have looked ungainly, clumsy, even monstrous; the featureless curves of black that served it for eyes might have appeared inhuman, and the underthrust grillwork of its vocabulator might have suggested the jaws of a saurian predator built of polished blast armor, but to the shadow...

It was glorious.

A magnificent jewel bow, created both to protect and to exhibit the greatest treasure of the Sith.

Terrifying.

Mesmerizing.

Perfect.

The table slowly rotated to vertical, and the shadow leaned close.

"Lord Vader?" The Shadow asked. "Can you hear me?"

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever: The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain. The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.

You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.

You don't even have lungs anymore.

Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.

"Lord Vader? Can you hear me?"

And you can't, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.

You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you. Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.

Padme? Are you here? Are you all right? You try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat.

"Padme? Are you here? Are you all right?"

"I'm very sorry, Lord Vader. I'm afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her."

Those words burn hotter than the lava ever could.

"No . . . no, it is not possible!"

You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.

Never.

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.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you.

The machine that had once been a man named Anakin Skywalker ripped away from the surgical table. He reached out with the Force in a fit of rage, causing machines and equipment to implode around him, in front of a smiling Lord Sidious.

But when Lord Vader said 'No' in a pained scream, Sidious's smile immediately disappeared when he was thrown into the wall.

"UNGH!" Sidious exclaimed when his back hit the wall.

As Vader used the Force to keep Sidious pined to the wall, he clenched his fist and tried to choke the Sith Lord. "You told me you could save her."

"In your rage, you chose..." Sidious hissed as he tried to use the Force to lessen Vader's hold on him. "...A different Path."

But Vader didn't relent, maintaining his grip on Sidious.

"Padme... is dead, my friend. Even the power of the Dark Side cannot bring her back. But in her death, she has given you a gift: Pain."

Vader froze, and began to falter.

"Now... you must choose. Will you accept that gift? Will you use it . . . or will you die?"

Vader let go of Sidious, allowing the Dark Lord to slide down from the dent left in the wall. Then Vader collapsed on all fours, defeated.

"I.. will live." Vader said, all but bowing.

Sidious walked in front of a bowing Vader, and then stopped in front of him.

"Good. And now..." Sidious said before he unleashed an arc of Sith lightning at Vader, electrifying his body and locking down what was left of his charred muscles.

"NNNNGH!" Vader groaned in pain, as his cackling Master taught him a lesson.

"Where is your lightsaber, Lord Vader? Use its power! Defend Yourself!"

Darth Vader strained to to speak through the pain. "Lost in the fight with... Obi-Wan. He took it."

"NO!" Sidious shouted before finishing his lightning strike. Smoke began to pour off of Vader's during back. But his pain wasn't going to stop Palpatine from lecturing him. "That blade belonged to another. A Jedi." He said before he summoned and activated his red lightsaber, making the dark and smoking room glow red. "You are a Sith!" He then pointed the blade at Vader's chin, forcing him to look up at his new master. "I realize this has been a traumatic time for you. But if you touch me with the Force again, I will finish what Kenobi could not."

He then deactivated his blade.

"You are my friend, Lord Vader. I do hope we never find ourselves in this position again. Rise. The great work must continue." He then turned away from Vader, and began to contemplate the plans that he had for the future. "You think of revenge. You wish to leave, to find the source of all your pain. I can sense it. Set such feelings aside. Your personal vendettas pale next to the needs of our Galactic Empire. Now, come with me." Sidious said as he began to walk out of the room, with Vader rising to his feet, and following him. "I wish to show you something."

At that moment, Vader wanted nothing more than to unleash his world-destroying fury upon the Shadow that was his Master.

But he was much less now than what he ever was, more than half machine, like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf. He could remember where the power was but the power he could touch was only a memory.

In the end, he cannot touch the shadow.

In the end, he did not even want to.

In the end, the shadow is all he had left.

Because the shadow understood him, the shadow forgave him, the shadow gathered Vader unto itself-

And within his furnace heart, He began to burn in his own flame.

This is how it felt to be Anakin Skywalker.

Forever . . .

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Well folks, that was the latest chapter.

I'll be working on the next two, and final chapters as much as possible to finally put an end to this story, and start working on the other stories that I have planned.

Anyway, until next time, as always, this is Grubkiller, over and out.