THE SHADOW IN THE CLOUDS

A retelling of The Empire Strikes Back in the style of H.P. Lovecraft

Even now as the howling winds of that infinite cloud choked abyss swirl beneath me, it pains me to call to memory the events of the past three days. If I am able to reach the story's end it will be only because the torturous recollection has been sufficient to dull the corporeal pain I suffer now from the mutilated half wrist that terminates my right arm where once was a hand. I can only wish now that that lost appendage had been the only thing taken from me when I encountered that hideous shadow in the clouds.

Before I was drawn into the web of that skybound horror I had been living the quiet life of a student on the swamp world of Dagobah, studying to be a Jedi Knight. To any from the region of Coruscant and its environs my family name, Skywalker, may be familiar as that of a line of respectible Jedi Knights, in whose footsteps I now humbly hoped to follow. I had grown by then frustrated with my studies — my father's name and his blood had set me on this path, but did nothing now to ease the slow march through which knowledge of the Force, it seemed, must be earned. But this frustration was nothing until compounded by a new distraction — one which preyed nightly upon me in my dreams.

The visions were vague at first, but soon became as vivid as if I were living them in earnest each night. In my dream I would find myself walking through the long windowed corridors of a sprawling nameless city in the clouds. Through the windows at first was the blood red light of the setting sun, but, as I descended deeper into the winding halls of the city, night seemed to fall, leaving only the grim pallor of artificial light. The streets of that flying metropolis teemed with life from every far flung star: half-drunk Corellian gamblers staggering from one sinkhole cantina to another, hunched and secretive Ugnaughts scanning the alleys and shops suspiciously, and some creatures whose origins I could not recognize but who gave off the sense of an eldritch mixing of biologies wholly alien to one another.

Then the crowds would thin, and I would come to the core of city and find myself alone. But I never felt alone. All around me I heard voices, constant, and pleading. Voices afraid, voices in pain, and surrounding them, smothering them, the monstrous labored mechanical breathing of some unknown creature which I could not see. Eventually I came to recognize that the voices were not unknown to me, but belonged to friends and loved ones. First I might hear my friend Solo, a pilot who I fought alongside at Yavin, wailing and screaming in pain, begging for an end to his suffering, while the thing he pleaded to wordlessly inhaled and exhaled. Another night it might be Leia, screaming in terror and weeping over some horrible loss, or Chewbacca, or any other of my friends, all unfindable but all wailing in the face of some implacable monster, something which I could hear as its breath reverberated through the walls, as if the thing torturing my friends was the city itself, and the narrow corridors its endless wheezing trachea.

Then the wind would come, roaring past me, sweeping up debris in its path and knocking me through a lone window at the end of the corridor. Beyond that window was nothing, and as I fell through it I would always wake sweating in my bare and lonely bedroom on Dagobah. My Jedi teacher, when the visions came once during our meditation together, warned me of the danger of the dark side of the force, how it hung over the universe threatening to poison the mind of any who sought power. In the shadowy presence that haunted my dreams that malignant energy seemed to have been given physical form. I thought of the words of that half-mad desert hermit the Tatooinians called Old Ben — "A pupil of mine until he turned to evil. He betrayed and murdered your father."

The person he spoke of was a being I had heard of only in the whispered scraps of legends that reached my remote desert home. My uncle would speak of him sometimes, but would always stop and change the subject when he caught me listening. I knew only that the thing was a nexus of evil power whose very name men feared to speak. That name I would learn only from the lips of Old Ben himself: Darth Vader.

Once I attached the name to the formless creature in my dreams I could not shake it. This thing which had devoured my father and Ben both — was it now to consume the rest of my friends as well? Was there anything that could be done to stop it?

I listened at first to my teacher's pedantic cautioning, his entreaties for patience, for discipline. But after weeks of nightly torment I could bear that terrible ignorance no longer — I had to know what lay at the heart of that city in the clouds, to pull my friends from its gluttonous maw, or I would go mad in speculating.

My droid R2 was my only companion in the long journey through the immense dark of space to the distant city. His company had been some comfort during my long days of study on Dagobah, and I was not eager to part with him now as I raced, perhaps madly, to confront the horror that menaced my friends. But his presence by my side did little to calm the unease that rose in my stomach as the sky-hanging metropolis I had seen so many times before came into view for the first time in my waking life. Its main structure was a vast disk like a saucer, with towers rising up off its surface, resting on an enormous downward-pointing spire that dipped into the orange-lit clouds below.

My ship was a one-man craft, small enough to go unnoticed as I landed on the underside of the great disk, and as I stepped from the cockpit I guessed I was far from the teeming crowds of my nightmares. None of that city's conglomerate denizenry surrounded the landing bay, or stalked the halls which I traveled through from there.

If I had been asked then to say in detail which way I was going I could have only shrugged in resignation to whatever power had been drawing me in to the dark heart of the city in the clouds since Dagobah, like the constant galaxy-spanning pull of gravity. I realized now without reaction or change in course that the power was the very dark presence my teachers had cautioned me against — that black miasma whose nucleus was Darth Vader, the shadow who was once a man, who had pursued the arcane skills of the dark side and allowed the infinite reach of its crawling tentacles to subsume his mind until it had torn from him every piece of himself that was truly his. His first crime had been my father’s murder, and none could say in full what atrocities had been brought to pass since by his influence. I clenched my fist around the hilt of my father's lightsaber. It would not be vengeance, I told myself. If I found myself at the core of the city where that shadow lurked and would not plunge my sword through his heart for the sake of all mankind, then I was as lost as Vader.

Stil following that relentless dark pull, I tried a door, and found myself in a dim room lit only by the neon aura of technical readouts, and silent but for the hissing of gas through pipes in the walls, some of which poured out into the room as a pale misty steam. Yet though I saw no one, I did not for a moment think that I was alone. I could feel the presence that was with me in that vast dark chamber, and it was neither Leia nor Solo. Then I heard it: a long inhalation, the click of a mechanical filter, and the release of breath.

"The force is with you, young Skywalker," a baritone voice echoed through the room. "But you are not a Jedi yet."

It was unnerving to hear the dark force speak. In my mind the thing called Vader was scarcely material, let alone human. I had seen it only once before, seen it draw its crimson sword and cut down that same old desert hermit from whom I'd first learned of the force and my father's fate. But to hear its voice reminded me of Ben's words -- that the nightmare creature I now saw sillhouetted before me had once, a lifetime ago, when the age-stooped hermit Ben was still the great knight Obi-wan, been only a man.

I tightened my grip on my sword. With a crackling hiss my father's blade burst to life in my hand. Slowly, the scarlet beam of my my adversary's weapon emerged in answer to my threat. I approached the Dark Lord where he stood at the top of a wide staircase, and moved to make the first attack. He blocked effortlessly but did not reply with an assault of his own, staying instead on the defensive as I struck at him again and again, hoping each blow might be the one that would mark this malignant presence's permanent end.

"You have learned much, young one." He spoke quietly, then, taking a single step backwards, was still, his saber raised before him. It reminded me once more of Ben, passively waiting to be cut down by the red blade, and seeing my opportunity I feinted a thrust, then lunged sideways, slashing at the black-cloaked form before me.

Vader anticipated my move perfectly, and before I could make another my sword had been hooked from my hand by a wheel of red light and sent clattering down the stairs. I staggered back to dodge his next blow and fell down after it. I managed to grab my lightsaber again just in time to look up and be met with the sight of a shadow like a hideous great black bird soaring down upon me, and with no time to block I desperately rolled out of its path, raising my blue blade again in defense. The Dark Lord was motionless again now, his breath still rising and falling in that terrible unbreaking rhythm, untouched by the remotest signs of exertion or fear.

"Your destiny lies with me, Skywalker. Obi-wan knew this to be true."

He lowered his saber. I knew this must be some trick, some deception, and yet I could feel that this lowering of his guard was real, that if I offered to stop the attack and join him, he really did intend to spare my life. Again I lunged, he blocked, stepping backward, letting me gain control of the direction of our battle, until I had driven him to the edge of what was maybe a fifteen foot drop, cornering him against the precipice. As I ran him back with a relentless attack I felt the fear and dread leave me, felt hope returning, then with a powerful blow from my weapon he lost his footing, and careened over the ledge into the darkness below.

I peered over the side where he had fallen. Then recklessly, perhaps madly, I gripped the ladder that led down the scaffolding and followed after him.

I reached the bottom and found myself at one end of a long, pitch-dark hallway, flickering control panels on either side and a gaping window at the end. Like a blind man I spun from one side to another, peering down the narrow corridors that branched off of the hall fruitlessly seeking what I thought was my prey. Then a fast-moving object just outside my field of vision made me whirl to protect myself. A loose piece of machinery, sent hurtling through the air at me, struck me in the shoulder. I caught my balance again just in time to see a length of pipe fly at me, and to cut it in two with my lightsaber. As I did, a metallic blur swept along the floor and knocked my feet out from under me. The narrow corridor had become a wind-tunnel, with debris of all kinds flying out from the branching halls and hurling itself at me as if I was in not a hallway but a vertical shaft, with that wide round window at the end the bottom into which I would inevitable fall.

I tried to clamber to my feet, but before I could steady myself I was plummeting with that sudden wind. I knew then that this was no natural power but rather the swirling madness of the dark side of the force, imprinted upon the physical world by the will of my eldritch enemy. No sooner did I understand this than I was thrown bodily through the plate glass of the round window at the end of the hall, landing in a heap on a long catwalk reaching out over a chasm that stretched down into the infinite depths of that city in the sky.

I looked up, and Lord Vader stood before me.

"You are beaten. Don't let yourself be destroyed as Obi-wan did."

With all my hate and fury I attacked, but now the shadow gave no ground. Its patience had run dry, and as I tried to make each wild blow more unpredictable than the last it blocked them without exertion, stepping slowly forward and backing me out farther onto the catwalk. This indifference in the face of the most fierce attack I could make confronted me with the utter meaninglessness of the power I'd thought I possessed. I could do nothing to the dark cursed machine that advanced against me, not as it blocked my every strike like so many harmless drops of rain, nor as it finally caught my blade and knocked it clear out of the way, nor as it struck my arm at the wrist and in a flash of red light cut off my right hand.

As I saw my hand and my father's sword careen down into the pit I could scarcely muster shock. All of this had been inevitable from the beginning, and I had only walked the twisted path laid out for me. But that, I think, I could have believed. That, I could have come to terms with, and come to understand. If the horror I'd confronted there had been only the mutilation of my body and the despair of absolute defeat, I think that someday I could have been whole again.

Even once I plummeted down into the infinite chasm, even as I hung upside-down over the twilit abyss of the planet's open sky, mangled and beaten, I could have found solace. I could have survived that encounter intact if not for those damnable four words that escaped before I fell from within the hideous black form of that demoniacal shadow in the clouds.

"I am your father."