One by one, inside his head, Luke felt the stars wink out.

Linked through Kar to Cronal, through Cronal to the Shadow Crown, and through the Crown’s ancient powers of Sith alchemy to every Melter mind in every scrap of meltmassif in the galaxy, Luke had shone upon them with the light of the Force. This light had drawn them as moonlight draws a shadowmoth, and they found that its inexhaustible flood could fill them to overflowing. Never again would they feed upon light; there would never be the need. They would forever shine with light of their own.

And so they came out from every place the Dark had put them.

Luke felt them go.

He felt them leave the gravity stations. He felt them leave the Shadow Crown, and Cronal’s body, and Leia’s and Kar’s and his own.

And he felt the stormtroopers, in all their thousands throughout the system. He felt every single man who wore Cronal’s black armor. He felt the uncontrollable rage and bloodlust, the almost-mindless battle frenzy that the crystals in their brains had triggered and now sustained. He felt the damage that had been done by the brutal force of the crystals’ growth.

He felt what the crystals’ exit would do.

He did not look away. He did not withdraw his perception. He owed these men that much. Enemies they might be, but still they were men.

None of them had wanted this. None had volunteered for this. None had even cooperated. This had been done to them with casual disregard for their humanity; Luke could not allow its undoing to be the same.

So he stayed with them as the meltmassif in their bodies and their brains liquefied. He stayed with them as it poured forth from their every pore. He stayed with them as the exit of the meltmassif triggered their deadman interlocks.

He stayed with them while every stormtrooper in the entire system, all at once in all their thousands, sagged and shuddered.

And died.

Luke felt every death.

It was all he could do for them.

When he finally withdrew his mind from the Dark, Luke found himself in darkness of the wholly ordinary sort. The flicker of the energy discharge had fled from the chamber that had once been the Election Center.

He knelt in darkness, and from that darkness came a long, slow growl that the Force allowed him to understand as words. Jedi Luke Skywalker. Is it done?

By reaching into the Force, he could feel the surviving Republic ships jump away as the artificial mass-shadows of the destroyed gravity stations shrank and vanished. He felt the final breakup of the Shadow Base, and the final destruction of Mindor under the killing radiation of Taspan’s flares.

All gone, now. Everything was gone.

No more shadows.

“Yes,” Luke said. “Yes, it is done.”

Is this where we die?

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Probably.”

How long?

Luke sighed. “I don’t know that either. I sealed the chamber when I came in, so we’ll have air. For a while. But I don’t know how thick the stone around us might be, now that the mountain’s broken up. I don’t know how much radiation it can block. We could be cooking right now.”

And there is no one who can come for us.

“Their ships can’t protect them. Not from radiation like this.”

Then this will be where our lives end.

“Probably.”


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 18