Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

victory as he had reached up his hand and brought down the building around them.

He rocked back on his ankles, hands going to his face. Was it possible? He had buried them alive. All of them. And he didn’t care.

No: he did care. That’s what made it even worse.

He had buried them alive, and he was happy about it.

The dark side called to him: a shadow worm whispering promises of ecstasy as it ate into his heart. It murmured infinite release, humming a song of the eternity that lies beyond all shadows of doubt and remorse.

He shook himself violently and lurched to his feet. “I have to get out of here.”

“Jacen …” She lifted a hand as though to stay him, as though to ask for his help.

“No, Vergere. No. I have to go—I have to go right now. I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m so sorry, I am—” Liar, the shadow worm snickered inside him. Just wait, and watch, and she’ll give us an excuse to do it again.

Vergere’s eyes seemed to clear then, and a hint of a smile curved her lips. “The dark side?…”

“It’s—it’s too strong for me here. I warned you. I warned you what could happen—”

She raised her hand once more, reaching for his leg; he took a hasty step back to avoid her touch, and she let her arm fall limp to the floor. “You see …” she whispered, “…  but you do not see. Jacen … why would the Jedi Council … build its Temple upon … a nexus of the dark side?”

“Vergere, I—” He shook his head helplessly. “I have to go. I have to go before—before I …” hurt you again, he finished silently. He couldn’t say it out loud. Not here. “I don’t have time for guessing games.”

“No guessing …” she said. “The answer is … simple. They wouldn’t.”

He went very, very still. “What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me—”

“No. What you feel is the Force.” Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. “This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side.”

How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this? “Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?”

“The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I’ve told you already: the Force does not take sides. The Force does not even have sides.”

“That’s not true! It isn’t—” The red tide surged into his chest, reaching for his heart. Everything I tell you is a lie. This was only another of her lies. It had to be. If it wasn’t—

He couldn’t let himself think it. He shook his head hard enough to make his ears ring. “It’s a lie—”

“No. Search your feelings. You know this to be true. The Force is one.”

But he could feel the dark side: he was drowning in it.

“Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand.” She seemed to draw strength from his weakness, slowly managing to sit up. “What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion … but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness—true greatness of any kind—requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind.”

“But—but the dark side—”

She rose, her smoldering garments wreathing her in coils of smoke. “If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do.”

“Me?” The red tide turned black, poisonous, strangling, burning through his ribs from the inside. “No—no, you don’t understand—the dark side is, it’s, it’s, don’t you see it? It’s the dark side,” he insisted desperately, hopelessly. There were no words for the truth inside him; nor were there words for the horror that rolled into him, because he could feel the Force again.

He could feel that she was right.

But that would make me—does make me … His knees buckled, and he staggered to maintain his balance, stumbling, reaching for the wall, something stone, anything solid, anything certain, anything that he could lean on that wouldn’t become smoke and mist and let him fall forever. He whispered, “The dark side …”

She paced toward him, relentless, inexorable. “The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart.”

And in her eyes, he found that certainty, that solidity: the permanent, immutable truth he hoped would keep him upright—

His reflection.

Distorted. Leering. Misshapen. An illusion of light, floating on a glossy curve of surface … above depths of infinite black.

They say the truth hurts. A gasp of lunatic laughter bubbled wildly through his lips. They have no idea … The Embrace of Pain had been nothing but a scratch, the slave seed only a toothache—

His laughter choked itself to a smothered sob. He threw himself past Vergere into the hallway, and fled.

Running.

   Every time Nom Anor glanced back toward the wall of rubble that so easily could have become his tomb, a spectral hand reached into his chest to twist his heart apart. “You assured me there would be no danger!” he said for the fourth time.

He spoke Basic—it would not do for the warriors to hear him complain—and he gritted his teeth, clenching arms and legs, because the warriors must not see him tremble.

“Nom Anor,” Vergere said with the patience that grows of wounds and exhaustion, “you are alive, and uninjured save for bumps and bruises.” She wept a continuous rain, mopping away her burns with tears. “What have you to complain of?”

Nom Anor looked once more at the wall of rubble; he could still feel the strangling panic of being so easily, casually, almost negligently shoved aside—and then the rumble of the ceiling’s collapse, and the howl of the maelstrom within the