There was, after all, that slight issue about his puppet Shadowspawn surviving the climax of Cronal’s little holothriller. That punch to the forehead … it was all wrong. The final blow should have been delivered with the blade of Skywalker’s lightsaber. That was how Cronal had planned it. How he had seen it.

The lesson was clear: something could still go wrong. No more time would he waste in rehearsal. He must finish this. Now.

He closed his eyes and drove his mind into the Dark.

First he set his will upon the hairline web of meltmassif he’d grown within his own body: an ultrafine network that replicated his nervous system like a shadow cast in mineral crystals. Then he reached forth his hand in the darkness of his life-support shell and stroked the control that would lower the Sunset Crown from its compartment behind his headrest. Once the Sunset Crown was in place upon his head, he no longer had need of controls. He had no need of hands, or mouth, or eyes.

The Sunset Crown was his great achievement, the device that had been the object of his long quest into the depths of Sith alchemy; it was a transmitter, a transformer, that worked via the Force instead of electromagnetism. It converted his disciplined will into a signal that could interact directly with the unique electrochemical structure of meltmassif … and with the alien beings who used meltmassif as an anchor, a physical form to localize their energy-based consciousness, even as a human nervous system anchored and localized the energy-based consciousness called the human mind.

He had used this device to create the Pawns, those mind-locked technozombies who had become Cronal’s eyes and mouths and hands; the Pawns were not only a conduit for his orders, but a necessary stepping-stone on his path toward self-transformation. Each Pawn had been chosen because he or she could touch the Dark—what the ignorant Jedi and the deluded Sith called being “Force-sensitive”—and because their wills could be utterly controlled by his own, through the Sunset Crown’s influence over the crystals of meltmassif seeded within their skulls. On his command, their wills would align with his own and provide the added boost to his own Dark-touch necessary to make the transfer of his consciousness permanent.

When his mind awakened the power of the Sunset Crown, it sent his consciousness outward, an expanding sphere of will. When it touched the crystals in the meltmassif that lined every tunnel, every chamber, every nook and cranny of his entire vast base, the crystals resonated with the frequency of his desire, like a sounding board the size of the surrounding volcanic dome. He became the base, and the base became him; all within the base registered in the part of his brain that had once only registered his kinesthetic sense of his body position.

Throughout the base, his thirty-nine most Force-powerful Pawns instantly dropped what they were doing and converged on the Election Center, where Luke Skywalker already lay embedded in the hardened stone of the primary Pawning Table, his lightsaber buried in the rock beside him.

The fortieth, and most powerful, Pawn was already there: his puppet Shadowspawn, having unexpectedly survived the climax of Cronal’s little holothriller, had been delivered to the same chamber. When this was all over, Cronal intended to discover exactly why the deadman interlock in “Shadowspawn” ’s Crown had failed to activate, but until then, there was no reason to simply discard him; he had a great deal of Force potential—worth ten of the others—and so Cronal had simply directed that “Shadowspawn” ’s Crown be recovered and replaced. Adding him to the Pawns for the focusing would substantially accelerate both the neurocrystalline interpenetration and the consciousness transfer itself.

Unlike what occurred during the standard Pawning process that Cronal had painstakingly developed, Skywalker had not had his hair flash-burned away, had not had his skull opened and crystals implanted in his brain. No neurosurgery, not for Skywalker, nothing that might leave a suspicion-arousing scar.

He lay wholly within the meltmassif, buried alive with not even a breathing tube. Well, semi-alive: in full thanatizine II suspension, he had at least another hour before he would next need to take a breath. Before that breath would come, the combined power and perception Cronal channeled through the Pawns would have induced the meltmassif surrounding Skywalker’s body to pierce his skin with invisibly fine needles of living crystal … they would enter through every pore, through his mouth and his nose, his ears, his tongue … and with the arcane powers he had ripped from the spirit of the ancient King of the Sith, Cronal would shape those crystals within Skywalker’s body as he had shaped the ones in his own: into a webwork mirror of the young Jedi’s nervous system.

Then Cronal would simply close his eyes and pour forth his consciousness like water into a waiting jug. With a twist of will—for thanatizine II only affected the organic body and would have no effect upon the crystalline neuroweb—he would liquefy the meltmassif of the Pawning Table and arise, quite literally, a new man. When he opened his eyes again, those eyes would be blue.

And he would extend his hand, and the Force would answer his call, bringing Skywalker’s lightsaber—no, Cronal’s lightsaber—up from the same meltmassif, because what was a Jedi without the Jedi weapon?


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 10