Galan007
|Quantum Observer|
Another leaked excerpt confirms how Palpatine survived the fall, and details the cloning process a bit:
"She will take her revenge", Palpatine boomed.
Rey continued to approach. His power was intoxicating. She found herself raising her weapon, almost against her will. If not for the other presence in her mind, bright and shining with light, she would not have been able to resist him.
"And with the stroke of her saber, the Sith are reborn! The Jedi are dead!"
Wave after wave of triumph emanated from him, and along with it came knowledge, memories. Maybe it was their shared blood that enabled her to see his thoughts, but somehow she could, and Rey saw it then, how he'd done it, what he was about to do again:
Falling...Falling...Falling... down a massive shaft, the betrayal sharp and stinging, a figure high above, black clad and helmeted and shrinking fast. His very own apprentice had turned against him, the way he himself had turned against Plagueis...whose secret to immortality he had stolen.
Plagueis had not acted fast enough in his own moment of death. But Sidious, sensing the flickering light in his apprentice, had been ready for years. So the falling, dying Emperor called on all the dark power of the Force to thrust his consciousness far, far away to a secret place he had been preparing. His body was dead, an empty vessel, long before it found the bottom of the reactor shaft, and his mind jolted to new awareness in a new body--a painful one, a temporary one.
It was too soon. The secret place had not completed its preparations. The transfer was imperfect, and the cloned body wasn't enough. Perhaps Plagueis was having the last laugh after all. Maybe his secret remained secret. Because Palpatine was trapped in a broken, dying form.
The heretics of the Sith Eternal toiled, splicing genes, bolstering tissue, creating unnatural abominations in the hope that one of these strandcasts would succeed and become a worthy receptacle. The heretics would do anything, risk anything, sacrifice anything, to create a cradle for their god-consciousness. Nothing worked, but their efforts were not entirely in vain.
Rey's vision shifted. It was Luke, sitting cross-legged on the island of Ahch-To, trembling with effort as he projected himself onto the battlefield of Crait... And yet another flash. This time of Leia in her jungle corridors, giving everything she had to send a final thought to Ben... They were all manifestations of the same power, and now Rey would use it her own way. She lifted her saber as if to strike...
