darth plagueis-$nihar$^^

Manipulate them, say, to prolong Tenebrous’s life.

Looking at the Bith through the Force, he perceived that the midichlorians were already beginning to die out, as were the neurons that made up Tenebrous’s lofty brain and the muscle cells that powered his once-able heart. A common misconception held that midi-chlorians were Force-carrying particles, when in fact they functioned more as translators, interlocutors of the will of the Force. Plagueis considered his long-standing fascination with the organelles to be as natural as had been Tenebrous’s fixation on shaping the future. Where Bith intelligence was grounded in mathematics and computation, Muun intelligence was driven by a will to profit. As a Muun, Plagueis viewed his allegiance to the Force as an investment that could, with proper effort, be maximized to yield great returns. True, too, to Muun psychology and tradition, he had through the decades hoarded his successes, and never once taken Tenebrous into his confidence.

The Bith’s moribund midi-chlorians were winking out, like lights slowly deprived of a power source, and yet Plagueis could still perceive Tenebrous in the Force. One day he would succeed in imposing his will on the midi-chlorians to keep them aggregate. But such speculations were for another time. Just now Tenebrous and all he had been in life were beyond Plagueis’s reach.

He wondered if the Jedi were subsumed in similar fashion. Even in life, did midi-chlorians behave in a Jedi as they did in a devotee of the dark side? Were the organelles invigorated by different impulses, prompted into action by different desires? He had encountered many Jedi during his long life, but he had never made an attempt to study one in the same way he appraised Tenebrous now, out of concern for revealing the power of his alliance with the dark side. That, too, might have to change.

Tenebrous died while Plagueis observed.

In Bane’s age a Sith might have had to guard against an attempt at essence transfer by the deceased—a leap into the consciousness of the Sith who survived—but those times were long past and of no relevance; not since the teachings had been sabotaged, the technique lost. The last Sith possessed of the knowledge had been inexplicably drawn to the light side and killed, taking the secret process with him …

2: THE INNER LANDSCAPE

Plagueis wasn’t certain how long he remained at Tenebrous’s side. Long enough, though, that when he rose his legs were quivering and some of the dust from the explosion had settled. Only when he took a few backward steps did he realize that the event had not left him unscathed. At some point, probably when he was focused on murder, a rock or some other projectile had pulped a large area of his lower back, and now the thin tunic he wore beneath the enviro-suit was saturated with blood.

Despite the swirling dust, he inhaled deeply, eliciting a stab of pain from his rib cage and a cough that spewed blood into the hot air. Drawing on the Force, he numbed himself to the pain and tasked his body to limit the damage as best it could. When the injury ceased to preoccupy him, he surveyed the grotto, remaining anchored in place but turning a full circle. Littering the hard ground, injured hawk-bats were chirping in distress and clawing through circles of their own. Far above him, a beam of oblique and dust-moted daylight streamed through the dome’s large oculus—itself the result of an earlier collapse. Close to the jumble of stones the collapse had piled on the grotto floor sat Tenebrous’s small but priceless starship—a Rugess Nome design—alloy wings and snubbed nose poking from the artless mausoleum the explosion had fashioned. And finally, not meters away, lay Tenebrous, similarly interred.

Approaching the ship, Plagueis scanned the damage that had been inflicted on the deflector shield and navigation arrays, coolant ducts, sensors, and antennas. Tenebrous would surely have been able to effect repairs to some of the components, but Plagueis was out of his depth, lacking not only the Bith’s fine motor skills but his knowledge of the ship’s systems. Though unique, a marvel of engineering, the ship couldn’t be traced to Tenebrous, since both the registry and title were counterfeit. It was possible that the rescue beacon was still functional, but Plagueis was reluctant to activate it. They had arrived on Bal’demnic in stealth, and he intended to depart in like manner.