Excerpt from Matthew Stoverâs Revenge Of The Sith:
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain. The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.
You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.
You donât have lungs anymore.
Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your blood stream forever.
Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?
And you canât, not in the way you once did. Sensors in that shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.
You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.
Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.
Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat.
âPadmĂ©? Are you here? Are you all right?â
Iâm very sorry, Lord Vader. Iâm afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.
This burns hotter than the lava had.
âNo . . . no, it is not possible!â
You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.
You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vaderâs hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouthâ
And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.
You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself . . .
It is this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sithâ Because now your self is all you will ever have.
