He cannot remember if he is on a ship, or still planetbound. But when he looks away from Anakin, there is nothing to see but pain. Each flash of Anakin-his reckless grin so like their father's, his eyes smoldering with fierce will mirroring their mother's, his effortlessly athletic warrior's grace, so much like Uncle Luke's-these are the gamma bursts that burn the marrow of his bones, that cook his brain until its boil threatens to burst his skull. An image that Jacen cannot even let himself see. Now, the only person who is Anakin is the image Jacen carries in his heart. In one impossible instant, Anakin ceased to be the brother Jacen played with, teased, looked after played tricks on, fought with, cared for trained with, loved-and became. Saw his lifeless body in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Something in the universe has tilted to one side and opened a gap in reality through that gap, death has slipped into his family.Īnakin.
When the moon crashed on Sernpidal, it shattered not only Chewbacca's life but also the magic charm that had always seemed to guard them all. In the end, they always came back to him. He has grieved, mourned them-but it was always a mistake, it was a misunderstanding, sometimes even a deliberate trick. Anakin, how can you be dead? He has faced deaths in his family before more than once, he thought Jaina lost, or his father, or mother or Uncle Luke. Those gamma-ray bursts are the color of his brother's death.Īnakin, he moans, somewhere deep within himself. And higher still, now far beyond the ultraviolet betrayal thatīrought him here-the betrayal that delivered him into the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong, the betrayal that gathered him into the Embrace of Pain, the betrayal by Vergere, whom he had trusted-he finds silent shattering gamma-ray bursts sleeting into his brain.
There is green here, too-bubbling tongues of acid hungrily lick his nerves-as well as lightning-blue shocks that spasm his overloaded body into convulsion. Higher, up in the visible wavelengths, gleam the crimson wire-stretched ligaments that sizzle within his shoulders grinding glass-shard screams howl from his hip joints like the death shrieks of golden Ithorian starflowers. In the far infrared, he finds cinders of thirst that bake his throat. Jacen Solo hangs in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. Tsavong Lah warmaster (male Yuuzhan Vong) Ch'Gang Hool master shaper (male Yuuzhan Vong)
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