He turned back to Vastor. “Now it’s your turn, Blackhole. Go back to your own body. You might still make it into hyperspace before Nick kills you.”

Vastor lowered himself into a crouch. I understand now. I understand how you have defeated me.

It is because I lost my way. I have been trying to create. To build, when I should have destroyed. I abandoned the Way of the Dark, and the Dark abandoned me.

“I don’t care,” Luke said. “All I care about is whether we’re going to have to kill you. Now if you’ll just abandon that body, we can all go home.”

I will. But not yet. First, answer a question for me, Skywalker.

Luke shrugged. “If it will end this, sure.”

Oh, yes. This will end. And very shortly. Answer me this: Why is the armor of my stormtroopers black?

Luke frowned. He’d never thought about it; he’d sort of assumed it was merely a style. An element of uniform, to set them apart from Palpatine’s stormtroopers.

I’ll give you a hint: It’s not just paint.

Luke squinted up at the company of black-armored commandos above while with his mind he reached into the Force. Even with all the Force perception he could muster, he could detect nothing unusual about the armor beyond its color. And the color was, well, just black. Wasn’t it? Black with faint opalescent highlights, kind of a pearly glitter. It reminded him of something  … but he couldn’t quite bring it to the surface of his consciousness, because there was something nagging at him, a kind of tickle that grew to an itch that swelled into actual pain … but it was a pain he didn’t really feel so much as sense, as if it were happening to someone else.

It was his shadow nerves, that’s where he felt it, in his internal crystalline network of …

He couldn’t breathe.

The ceramic base of that black armor, its fundamental structure, was not ceramic at all.

He could only stand and blink, and mouth a single word: meltmassif.

As if in confirmation, Vastor collapsed, just crumpled, folding to the deck like a dead man.

“Han …?” Luke said uncertainly. “Han, I think we need to go.”

“Luke!” his comlink crackled. “There’s something wrong with Leia—she’s, I don’t know, she’s having some kind of seizure or something. Luke, what do I do?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said as he watched Vastor’s body do the same: writhe in slow, twisting convulsions like a Riddellian bloodworm baking on a hot fry-rock. There came a clatter from above: blaster rifles slipping from stormtrooper hands to bounce on the stone of the ring ledge. The stormtroopers, each and every one, began to buckle at the knees. They twisted and jerked, bucking in slow motion, clutching at their helmets with gauntleted fingers as though to claw out their own eyes.

“Han,” Luke said. “Go. Go now.”

He reached out with the Force and slammed shut the Falcon’s hatch just as the Vastor body lurched to its feet and reached Luke in one lightning bound. Impossibly powerful hands seized Luke’s shoulders as Vastor lifted him like a doll, and shook him and roared rage and bloodlust into his face, and there was nothing human left in Vastor’s eyes. He sank his teeth into Luke’s throat, and bit down.

And on the ring ledge above, the stormtoopers started to scream.

[...]

Air Marshal Klick could not identify the sound. Even through his consuming agony, pain so intense that he could no longer stand, he was quite certain that he’d never heard this particular sound before, and right now he couldn’t guess what it might be. The agony, however, he understood very well.

The inside of his armor had turned into needles.

Big needles.

They stabbed every centimeter of him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. And they didn’t stop once they had pierced his skin. Instead, they grew, lancing deeper into his flesh; they seemed to enter his bloodstream and splinter off, tearing at him from the inside. They went up his nose and in behind his eye sockets, drilling right through the bone of his skull and slicing into his brain. Inside his brain they didn’t hurt—no pain nerves—but he could feel them by what they cut away.

They cut away his honor, and his discipline. They cut away his devotion to the emperor, and his pride in his men. They cut away his memory, and his dreams, his hopes, and his fears. The needles in his brain destroyed everything he had ever been, but they didn’t leave mere emptiness behind …

Each of those empty parts of him boiled with savage unreasoning rage.

His final thought as a conscious being was Ah, that’s what the sound is. It’s me.

Screaming.

The sound of his own screams was all he took with him into the dark. Then there was only rage, and a burning need to kill someone.

Anyone.


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapters 17 and 18