Chapter Twenty – The Fall of Rey
Rey walked down the stone steps from the maze of tunnels into the hall filled with machines and droids. Her eyes were locked on the four pyramids, glowing read atop the pillars in the center of the room. Having gone further in she could see the human beings in the distance, if that is truly what the stooped, hooded figures scurrying around at the edge of the shadow were.
"Who are they?" Rey asked.
"Loyal followers, committed to saving the galaxy from the Jedi and their ways," came Palpatine's voice.
"What are those things?" Rey asked, pointing at the pillars.
"A contingency plan, sadly necessary given the volatility of my apprentice," Palpatine answered sadly.
"Vader," Rey said.
"Yes, in the beginning of his apprenticeship his irrational hatred for me was outweighed only by his fear of losing his wife. Then it was surpassed by his hatred of the Jedi. I thought time had extinguished that fire, but I knew it could come back again. So I prepared," he explained.
"You said you made me. Why? What did you want? What do you want now?" Rey asked as she approached the dais on which the pillars rested.
"There is not much left to be done. You will need my knowledge. Of the Force, yes, but also of politics. I will give these things to you. It must be you who leads the galaxy, Rey. Ben Solo killed the leaders of the Resistance Fleet. Your friends have all perished. He and the First Order must be hunted down and destroyed! Only then can you lead the galaxy into an age of peace. You will be the only one left. The only one that the people of the galaxy will be able to turn to, to rely on. And with my help you will bring them order and justice," Palpatine said.
Rey, climbing the steps to reach the area between the pillars, said, "This is it. This is what Ben was talking about. On Endor. What Snoke was after." When she got there her expression, which had been that of a vulnerable child, began to take on a more skeptical cast.
"The pretender Snoke's reasons for searching for them, I can only guess," Palpatine said. "But they were the only means by which I was able to survive long enough to find you, my greatest creation."
"You didn't answer my question," Rey said suspiciously.
"What question my child?" Palpatine asked innocently.
"Why make me?" she repeated. "It wasn't to take over for the Resistance and the First Order. They didn't exist when I was born."
"The Jedi had their multitudes. The Sith tried for millennia to stand against the Jedi horde. The only way for the few to stand against the many is for the few to achieve perfection," Palpatine said.
Rey shook her head and said, "It was just Luke, and Leia. Ben was just a child at the time."
"The seeds were being planted. Skywalker would have rebuilt the order," Palpatine said.
Rey felt both increasingly worried and increasingly distracted. She was trying to concentrate on the aspects of his answers that did not make sense. She felt sure they didn't, that it was all nonsense, but whenever she tried to put that certainty into words she failed. It was as though there was someone shouting in her ear, except she couldn't hear anything but the low thrumming coming from the pillars. She looked up at them and saw that the pyramids were glowing brighter.
"Snoke was speaking to Ben, when he was a boy. Pretending to be Vader," Rey said, trying to force her way through the haze in her mind.
"A boy's imagination. One of his weaknesses, the obsession with his grandfather," Palpatine said soothingly.
"No," Rey said. "It was you. You turned him against Luke." She reached for her lightsaber but did not find it on her belt. She tried to think of when it had left her hand but could not. She tried to remember how she had gotten to this place, but all was a blur.
"Skywalker feared the boy's power. Feared a new Vader. He tried to kill the boy," Palpatine said.
"Snoke told Ben to kill me," Rey said haltingly, "…in the throne room."
"No one will threaten you ever again my child," Palpatine said, though Rey could hear his voice slowly and subtly changing. The eager pleasantness was fading away into something deeper and more sinister. She looked around and saw her lightsaber sitting on a table a dozen feet away. Or was it closer? The more she looked at it the less distinct it became.
"Who was Snoke? Ben was looking…," she said.
"All in the past my dear," came Palpatine's now deep and rumbling voice.
"Snoke went looking for these," she said, looking up again at the pyramids. "On Endor. Ben said you were there."
"He lied to you. He was lying all along," Palpatine said.
As Rey looked at the pyramids currents of red energy began to pass between them, forming a square at the top of the pillars. "He never lied to me. He said you were there, and to…remember," she said as she tried to reach out to pull her lightsaber to her, but when she lifted her arm she was overcome by dizziness and stumbled back a step.
"Forget the past, the future lies before us. We could do anything," Palpatine said.
"It was you; you were Snoke. You told him to kill me. Why?" she demanded.
"You are confused. Don't you feel confused?" Palpatine said.
"What do you want from me?" Rey yelled. "What did you want from him?" Rey's question was followed only be silence, as, from the shadows, the wrinkled old men she had seen in the distance emerged from the darkness. They looked at Rey with a mixture of fear and longing in their eyes as they set about working the machines nearest the pillars. "Answer me!" she shouted.
Rey tried to step forward, to get out from in between the pillars, to leave the cave, but she moved as though she was struggled against some unseen substance all around her. The currents of energy now stretched from the top of the pillars to the floor, creating walls of energy around her. In that red, pulsing energy an image formed in front of her. It was an old man wearing heavy robes. When she looked into the hood, she saw the deep pitted eyes and the scars all over his face.
The Emperor smiled back at her and said, "So long in the darkness. So long! Then years in that disgusting, weak, broken alien body. I needed a form that could accept me, that could give me the strength that is mine by right."
The Palpatine composed of the red energy reached out his hand and touched Rey on the forehead. She grabbed her head and began to scream, just as Snoke had one day done in his ship above Endor.
"I thought perhaps that your exposure to Skywalker meant you were already too tainted by the Jedi's ways to be a proper receptacle. I could see their trace in your mind. And I feared what further exposure to you would do to Ben Solo. So, I thought, you had to die, and I would have to start again, and to continue my dependence on that wretched, impudent boy," the Emperor said.
Rey fell to the ground in agony, the energy from the pyramids flowing into her.
"He was like these devices, only ever meant as a failsafe. Too wild, that Skywalker spirit. They refuse to obey! He would have fought me. I would never have had control. But you, my child? You were a fool. You came here. To my home. Here, where I am strongest. Here, where you are mine."