Meet Luke Skywalker’s Mysterious Sith Foe in This Shadow of the Sith Excerpt

This week we’re about to enterprise again to the early days of the Clone Wars in Mike Chen’s Star Wars: Brotherhood, however all the time in movement, the longer term is—and there’s all the time extra Star Wars fiction to tease. Up subsequent is Shadows of the Sith from Adam Christopher, and io9 has a glance inside… and a have a look at the e book’s mysterious villain.

Set between the occasions of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens—practically 20 years after the previous, in truth—Shadow of the Sith sees Jedi Master Luke Skywalker workforce up along with his outdated Rebel ally, Lando Calrissian, because the pair workforce as much as examine some dire rumors. Not solely has Lando heard rumblings of a returned Sith menace, mendacity in wait on the planet Exegol, his younger daughter has been kidnapped—and the one lead he’s bought has despatched him into the trail of Ochi of Bestoon, a Sith murderer on his personal private mission to seek out a baby who will change the galaxy ceaselessly…

Suffice to say, there’s a lot of Sith-y issues occurring in Shadow of the Sith (it’s within the title, actually). But whereas Luke and Lando discover themselves on the path of The Rise of Skywalker’s mysterious murderer, Ochi will not be the one Sith agent that the novel goes to be coping with. There Is Another, as Star Wars so typically likes, searching them in flip, and io9 has your first have a look at this secretive adversary, within the type of an unique look contained in the Barnes & Noble unique model of the novel, together with a poster of this new enemy:

Who is that this unusual, lightsaber-wielding determine? We don’t know for certain but, however io9 can affirm that when you’ve been studying the canon Star Wars novels, the true id of this masked determine will be a well-recognized face to you. And whilst you ponder on that, you may learn an excerpt from Shadows of the Sith under, as this mysterious girl receives a dire message from her darkish masters…

THE SEPULCHRE, COORDINATES UNKNOWN

NOW

Something strikes within the darkness—a shadow, solid lengthy, crawling by way of the abyssal night time. The shadow is a factor aside: neither alive nor useless.

It is a relic. It is an . . . echo. A presence from an older time, a malignancy that in some way survived, in some way discovered a means.

Found a path.

She can see it now. Black and blacker nonetheless, transferring, all the time transferring. An intelligence, sure. A thoughts, however one with out kind or substance.

But right here—current—nonetheless.

She closes her eyes. It makes no distinction. There is nothing to see however a gulf, a nothing, the place the shadow lives.

Where the shadow thrives.

In the darkness, within the ceaselessly night time inside her head.

And the void will not be silent. It is something however. It is a cacophony, a sound so loud it lights up each nerve fiber of her whole being, though she is aware of there’s nothing to listen to, bodily.

It is the sound of ache. The sound of dying. The sound of a thousand thousand thousand souls crying out in sorrow and agony earlier than they’re snuffed out instantly. Brothers and sisters. Sons and daughters. Mothers and fathers. Podlings, branchlings, kithkin. Sporechilds and denmothers; house fathers and their brethren, and their gene-clusters and their shoots. Spawn, and offspring. Children.

Entire generations of the residing, consumed, their dying cries absorbed and left to replicate ceaselessly, trapped inside a darkish vessel crafted centuries in the past by an influence unusual, inhuman.

By a darkness.

By a shadow, solid lengthy.

And there’s one other sound. A voice, from the traditional previous. It is way distant, a name echoing throughout an enormous valley of house and time.

The voice is horrible.

The voice is as acquainted as her personal.

SOON.

She opens her golden eyes. The room is brilliant and, mercifully, silent. Her ears ring like a bell, the sudden absence of screams virtually as painful, the echo of the voice nonetheless reverberating in her thoughts.

Slowly, slowly, she remembers the place she is. As she lies on the ground and blinks the world into existence round her, she pulls up a hand and touches her face. It is heat, and moist, the blood on her fingertips the brilliant blue of the Pantoran sky.

The place is lit by flickering flame, and the flickering flame lights the plinth of meteoric iron, and beside the plinth lies the masks fabricated from the identical starstuff. The masks faces away from her. It rocks, gently, prefer it has simply been thrown.

She stares behind it, the curve of nothing, of darkness, of deep shadow.

And she hears the voice once more.

SOON.
SOON.

She closes her eyes, and he or she sleeps, exchanging one nightmare for an additional, at midnight, within the useless of house. She wakes to a different sound, one technological, trendy. She lifts herself from her nest, ignoring the throbbing in her head, the ache of her limbs.

Because she will be able to’t maintain them ready. They are affected person, sure. Infuriatingly so.

But they’re additionally fast to anger, and if there’s one factor she dares not do, it’s make them offended.

She agreed to assist them. They agreed to point out her the best way.

This is the way it was.

And she would do nothing to jeopardize that.

Standing, she prompts the communicator, and her nest is lit within the sudden electrical blue of a hologram. The picture shimmers and pulses, tinged with the identical static and interference that protects the caller’s level of origin.

She kneels earlier than the determine, cloaked in darkness, the hood barely concealing a face that’s wrapped tightly in heavy black bandages, within the method all cultists of the Sith Eternal cover their options.

She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t care.

But she does obey.

“What is thy bidding, my Master,” she intones, repeating the litany that echoed by way of time just like the screams contained in the masks she knew she must placed on once more, quickly.

The looming determine speaks, and he or she listens, and he or she wonders whether or not this would be the final time or whether or not they’ll ever honor their promise.

Perhaps sooner or later, they’ll ask an excessive amount of.

You’ll have the ability to discover out extra when Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith hits cabinets on June 28, 2022.

Want extra io9 information? Check out when to anticipate the most recent Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and all the pieces you must learn about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.