"That's all for today. I'll take my leave, Chancellor," Vice Chair Mas Amedda said with a slight nod, hurrying toward the exit of Sheev Palpatine's office.
After several hours spent coordinating the agenda for the upcoming Senate session, the foremost figure of the galaxy-spanning state could finally allow himself to stretch his old bones a little. Unfortunately, the Chancellor's chair not only endowed a person with power, but also burdened them with a downright indecent amount of routine bureaucracy…
Sheev Palpatine rose from his chair and took a few steps toward the panoramic window of his office. Outside, life was in full swing. The menacing silhouettes of the capital fleet's cruisers stood out in the skies, countless spacecraft entered the planet's atmosphere and departed it. Civilian traffic flowed in a raging stream, like a circulatory system, sustaining the very life of the galactic capital.
The realization that all these lives, all this might, were in his hands warmed the Chancellor's soul. The Sith of the past had always striven for power, and here he, Sheev Palpatine, could give them a considerable head start. No, of course the Dark Lord had no intention of stopping at what he had achieved. The Chancellor's chair had never been an end in itself for Darth Plagueis's apprentice—only a means to achieve the goals he had set. There was still so much to do, so much to accomplish… The ambitions of the Sith Lord extended far beyond the office of Chancellor of the Republic.
It was already the third year of the bloody galactic civil war. For three years, supporters and opponents of the old order of the Great Republic had been tearing at each other's throats in a fierce struggle for their ideals. Adherents of democratic principles opposed the insurgents who, with cruelty and inhumanity, trampled the humane foundations thanks to which the stars of this galaxy had known no truly great war for a full millennium.
The Separatists, whose ranks had swelled considerably, had their own view of the matter. The Republic had rotted from within and sunk into corruption. The Galactic Senate had turned into a tool for corporations to advance their own commercial interests. Senators who completely forgot about the people who had voted for them the moment they arrived on Coruscant. In their eyes, the Republic was a regime that could no longer be tolerated.
As Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine, of course, condemned such a point of view. His speeches dripped with calls for patriotism and faith in the ideals on which the state had been founded—the state that extended its power across an entire galaxy. As the Dark Lord of the Sith and the root cause of all recent historical events, Darth Sidious could not miss the subtle irony in the war organized through his efforts.
While declaring their opposition to a treacherous enemy, the Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems were indecently alike. It cost both sides nothing to smear the opponent, turning them into a true spawn of hell. Both sides, so loudly proclaiming their devotion to ideals, duty, and patriotism, in reality sent droids and an artificially grown army of clones to fight in their stead. Both sides were being led by the nose, like blind kittens, by those they revered as their leaders…
Events were unfolding according to the script he had written, but that was no reason to lower his guard. The old enemy—the defenders of peace and order in the Republic, the hated Jedi Order—stripped of popular support and bleeding out, though greatly weakened, still posed a serious threat to the old Sith. Those fools could not sense the Dark Lord even when he was right under their noses. There was nothing surprising in the fact that they had lost their way.
Indeed, the Jedi were arrogant, blind, and lost. They had lost the moment they decided to serve as generals in this war. All that remained was to take the final step in the plan, in which his new apprentice would inevitably play the decisive role. The old world would fall, and upon its ruins the Dark Lord would build a new one… For now, Sheev Palpatine only had to set the stage for the final act and wait a little. Truly, the old Sith stood a single step away from his inevitable triumph.
Lost in thought, the Sith Lord did not notice as the outlines of the megalopolis before his eyes blurred, blending into a single smear. An unfamiliar and rather painful sensation washed over his entire body. The Force… the Force screamed in pain, as if something terrible were tearing it apart from within.
"Shh-s-s," the Chancellor hissed, biting his lip as he hurried to brace himself against the cool surface of the window's stained glass.
Something had just happened, the consequences of which Sheev Palpatine himself could not yet fully comprehend. All his life, the Dark Lord had relied on the Force, learned to listen to it and compel it to serve him. The cry of pain it had let out boded nothing good, and now the framework of his perfectly planned scheme could be swallowed by a storm of new, unforeseen variables…