I hope you readers enjoy this. This chapter is pretty intense--but please correct me if I get something wrong, and that wrong will most likely occur in my info about Exar Kun's history. The Force's workings are rather tweaked here to facilitate my Plot and also metaphor or allusion, so if you're not sufficiently pulled into the fantasy here then just remember that I think it's not really the Force I'm talking about any more.

XVII

Kyp's energetic spirit dropped from him as a fuzzy bud from an expanding ( poisonous) flower. The dark green cloak hung messily about his shoulders. His eyes were sunken, his sense of confetti of fear, retreat, and strange happiness or satisfaction. Luke sensed a dark taint not native to Kyp's downtrodden and gritty but moral soul.

"You mentioned a new Sith, Master Skywalker."

Luke shook his head. "No I didn't."

"The Sith can hide himself very well, Master Skywalker. He knows where strength lies. Strength which can, like a Jedi could defeat a normal person, defeat the light side ."

"Maybe some warriors of the light side," said Master Skywalker. The wellspring of alien emotion in Kyp Durron gained a face in his mind, and then in his peripheral vision. An aquiline face, with small, even features and old scars as if from claws cutting across the right cheek. A transparent, half-remembered, false face.

The voice billowed like his ash-colored shroud in nonexistent wind or pretended zeal for life. Wedge's unchanging crouch beside the chair reminded Luke that the voice existed only in his thoughts.

"Good day, Master Skywalker." It said. "I have been the scourge of the Jedi, the catalyst of wars, the Master of Ulic Qel-Droma and of Aleema, the creator of the slave Massassi. The dark side controls all life through me. I'm going to get the Jedi out of my way before idealistic weaklings challenge my reign and rule. I do not need aid."

The ancient whirlwind gathered itself to leap. All around Kun's speech closed the curtains of ritual, and the standoff became two noble savages proclaiming their lineage for combat.

Luke knew how his own strength peaked with the lightsaber, not with comparable dexterity of the mind. With the forward will of the trench run he opened his thoughts to Kun--to how to...kill? No--to neutralize--to finally send him to the Force.

The curtains, torn, fell and broke among the audience.

Master Skywalker followed his joyous impulse and reached into Exar Kun's memories. He pulled out faces, places, powers and tears. Blue flowers...diggings and scorchings. Mastery and submission; alien and human, and no family at all.

He pulled out strings of influence and life, and they stretched to his lifting hands like slick liquefying plastic.

Exar Kun raised no hands and snatched Luke physically up. Vertigo, and realization of how the Force connected them. Luke hurtled backwards and felt the thick glass break around his back, sharp corners falling away from the window designed to cushion speeder crashes. He caught a black ledge outside the apartment and slammed to a stop. Breath came painful at his chest, but his battlecry had saved him and he could pull himself up, gritting his teeth.

The Force bridged the planes of existence. Like the shadow of a ghost Kun stood in the window before him again and Luke seized him around the shoulders with Force-power. For a moment it affected him and, Luke stood.

Ready for more than ever before, now that this level-up hateful opponent is before me.

He knows to use my material body against me.

"You were wrong about one thing." Luke said. "The dark side does not control life." In the back of his mind the Force flowed through his/its own passion and exultation and justice as he had learned from the light side.

"Certainly it does," said Exar Kun, and the apartment blocks' denizens screamed. Did the other side of the planet crack and pull toward this, as though a black hole had opened in Exar Kun? Pure life energy flowed into it. Did people on the streets look up and stare, or were only the near ones jolted, dropped, terrified on the ride down?

Luke Skywalker suddenly felt faint and tired. He knew no theory or practice of this power.But I love them, and I love the fight--

Without snap or loss the black hole no longer existed.

'They're mine."

"They're not all yours, Skywalker."

But when another pit opened in the soul-realm and the radius of suffering spread, Luke, feeling faint like eyes-closed-on-stage and the words are coming out all by themselves, rescued them again.

He had the smallest split of a second to wonder how he had done it. Kun pushed him again.

Luke let himself fall. The Force rearranged gravity and tore Exar Kun after Skywalker, and it formed flickering fires of solidity around his face and cloak-body.

They stood on glass miles of windows. Luke stared at the blue-gray sky in the distance, and Kun forward into the shadows of Coruscant's stomach. The shadows stretched along the rust-red and silver building-plane to Skywalker's feet, and faintly he glowed with the opposite and epitome of them.

Grins slipped onto their faces at the cleverness of it all.

They were going to be given a showdown.

Spheres of lightning formed through Dark Lord Kun's hands, and juggling them like throwing stars he leapt at Master Skywalker.