We are about to go back to the early days of the Clone Wars in Mike Chen's Star Wars: Brotherhood, but always in motion. io9 has a look at Shadow of the Sith from Adam Christopher. Shadow of the Sith is set between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and features Jedi Masterluke Skywalker teaming up with Lando Calrissian. Lando's daughter has been kidnapped and the only lead he has is that of Ochi of Bestoon, which is why Lando is in the path of Ochi. There is a lot of Sith-y things going on in Shadow of the Sith. Ochi is not the only Sith agent that the novel is going to be dealing with. io9 has an exclusive look at this new enemy in the Barnes & Noble exclusive version of the novel, including a poster of it.
Who is this figure? io9 can confirm that if you've been reading the Star Wars novels, the masked figure will be familiar to you. While you ponder, you can read an excerpt from Shadow of the Sith, as this mysterious woman receives a dire message from her dark masters.
The name of the city is unknown.
Now is the right time.
A shadow is cast long, crawling through the darkness. The shadow is not alive or dead.
It is not new. It is an echo. A presence from an older time, a malignancy that somehow survived, somehow found a way.
A path was found.
She can see it now. Black and blacker are still moving. Yes, an intelligence. A mind without form or substance.
Here, present,nonetheless.
She closes her eyes. It doesn't make a difference. There is nothing to see except a gulf and a shadow.
The shadow thrives there.
In the dark, inside her head.
The void is not silent. It isn't anything but. Even though she knows there is nothing to hear, the noise of it lights up every nerve fiber in her body.
It's the sound of pain. The sound of death. The sound of a thousand thousand thousand thousand souls crying out in pain before they are killed. Brothers and sisters. There are two sons and two daughters. There are mothers and fathers. Branchlings, kithkin. Space fathers and their brethren, as well as their gene-clusters and their shoots. Spawn and offspring. There are children.
Entire generations of the living, consumed, their dying cries absorbed and left to reflect forever, trapped inside a dark vessel crafted centuries ago by a power uncommon, inhuman.
By a dark place.
By a shadow.
There is more than one sound. A voice from the past. It is a long way from here, a call that echoes across a huge valley of time and space.
The voice is terrible.
The voice is familiar to her.
She opens her eyes. The room is bright and silent. Her ears ring like a bell, the sudden absence of screams almost as painful as the echo of the voice still echoes in her mind.
Slowly, she remembers where she is. She pulls up a hand and touches her face as she lies on the floor. She has blood on her fingertips because it is warm and wet.
The place is lit by a flickering flame, and a mask made of the same starstuff is beside the plinth. The mask is facing away from her. It is like it has just been thrown.
She looks at the back of it and sees a curve of darkness and a deep shadow.
She hears the voice again.
Soon.
She closes her eyes at night and sleeps in the dead of space. She hears a sound that is modern. She ignores the throbbing in her head and the ache of her limbs as she lifts herself from her nest.
She can keep them waiting. Yes, they are patient. It was infuriatingly so.
They are quick to anger, and if there is one thing she dares not do, it is make them angry.
She agreed to help them. They agreed to show her the way.
This is how it was.
She wouldn't do anything to jeopardize that.
Her nest is lit by a hologram when she stands. The static and interference that protects the caller's point of origin is what shimmers and pulse the image.
All cultists of the Sith Eternal hide their features by covering their faces with bandages and shrouding them in darkness.
She doesn't know why. She doesn't care.
She does obey.
She repeats the list of things that echoed through time like the screams inside the mask she knew she would have to put on again.
She wonders if this will be the last time or if they will ever honor their promise.
They will ask too much in the future.
You will be able to pre-order Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith when it hits shelves in June of 2022.
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