Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

Jacen does not notice.

His attention is filled with the hollow in his chest.

His empty center rings with anger and mistrust and hungry triumph: the emotions of the World Brain, which has caught the former friend who tried to murder it.

The former friend it had trusted, and by whom it had been betrayed.

Mobile teeth like swords protrude from humps of muscle like multiple tongues, and begin to circle and clash within the tentacle-ringed mouth.

Jacen can answer only with regret and sadness.

Yes. I betrayed you. I taught you to trust, and I taught you what it means to trust a traitor.

He cannot teach it forgiveness. He has not learned that lesson yet himself: there is too much he will never forgive.

The tentacles contract, drawing him into the gaping maw, and the sword-teeth close upon his flesh.

He does not recoil in fear.

He does not resist.

He does not struggle.

Instead, he opens himself. In his most secret center, that gap in his being that once fed him pain, he offers an embrace.

Into the hollow in his center, he pours compassion. Absolute empathy. Perfect understanding.

He accepts the pain he caused the dhuryam with his betrayal; he shares with the dhuryam the pain that betrayal had caused him.

He shares with the dhuryam all his experience with the spectrum of life: the featureless whiteout of agony, the red tide of rage, the black hole of despair, the gamma-sleet of loss … and the lush verdure of growing things, the grays of stone and duracrete, the glisten of gemstones and transparisteel, the blue-white sizzle of the noonday sun and its exact echo in a lightsaber’s blade.

He shares how much he loves it all: for all these things are all one thing: pain and joy, loss and reunion, life and death. To love any is to love all, for none can exist without every other.

The Universe.

The Force.

All is one.

The Yuuzhan Vong and the species of the New Republic.

Jacen and the World Brain.

When I betrayed you, I betrayed myself. When I killed your siblings, I killed pieces of myself. You may kill me, but I will live on in you.

We are One.

And Jacen cannot tell if those words come from him to the World Brain, or from the World Brain to him, for Jacen and the World Brain are only different faces of the same thing. Call it the Universe, or the Force, or Existence: those are only words.

They are half truths. Less.

They are lies.

The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it.

   The skirl of lightblade along amphistaff, a thrusting bind that sizzles disintegrating energy through the web of skin between a Yuuzhan Vong thumb and forefinger where hand meets amphistaff—

A world-whirl of airborne somersault over the heads of two warriors lunging side by side, and their boneless collapse as a single lightsaber slash opens the napes of two necks and unstrings their limbs—

The astonished blink of a warrior’s eyes as an amethyst shaft of energy spears into his open mouth, angling upward to burn open a three-centimeter-wide tunnel from his hard palate through the roof of his skull—

Of such brief flickers is built the death of Ganner Rhysode.

—burned-milk reek of Yuuzhan Vong blood sizzling into smoke on his blade—

—lines of burning ice that are the slices left in his flesh by amphistaffs—

—cold flame of amphistaff venom consuming his nerves—

These are mere flicks of melody in Ganner’s symphony of the Force. The Force does more than give him strength, more than lift him, spin him: the Force surges though his veins to tune his heart to the rhythm of the Universe.

He has become the Force, and the Force has become him.

He is not directly aware of the sequence of his death; time vanished along with fear, and doubt, and pain in that eternal second when he surrendered his self-command. Standing in the archway, waiting for the Yuuzhan Vong, Ganner realized that this, right now, right here, was what his whole life had been for.

The day of his birth set his feet upon this path; every triumph and tragedy, every foolish stunt and humiliation, each random useless twist of cruel fate built a pressure within him, piled up in tidal surge behind the dikes of his control. Those dikes had been built by his parents, trying to smooth the rough edges of his arrogance; they had been built by the mocking laughter of his playmates, when they jeered his every attempt to impress them; they had been built even by Luke Skywalker’s Jedi training—“A Jedi doesn’t show off, Ganner. Fighting is not a game. For the Jedi, combat is failure. It is a tragedy. When blood must be shed, a Jedi does so quickly, surgically, with solemn reverence. With grief.”

Ganner tried for so long, tried so hard to be what everyone told him he was supposed to be, tried to control his flair for the dramatic, for the elegant, the graceful, the artistic, tried to be a good son, a good friend, a humble man, a good Jedi …

But in the archway, he finds the end of trying.

There is reason no longer to resist the truth of himself. Playacting the hero’s part is not only permissible—

It is necessary.

To hold the archway it is not enough to merely wound and kill, is not enough to be calm, and surgical, and grieving.

To hold the archway, he must not only slaughter, but slaughter effortlessly, carelessly, laughingly. Joyfully.

To hold the archway, he must dance and whirl and leap and spin, calling out for more opponents. More victims.

He must make them hesitate to face him.

He must make them fear.

He had spoken the words: he had found a magical incantation to crack the dikes within him and unleash the flood.

None shall pass.

He wields the blade of a fallen hero, but now he is the hero, and it is others who fall.

He is rising.

The Force thunders through him, and he thunders through the Force. Letting slip the bonds of control, leaving aside conscious thought, answering only the surge of his passion and his joy, he