The life of Darth Vader's secret student took a strange and deadly turn the day his
Master first spoke of General Rahm Kota.
He'd had no warning that a moment of such significance was approaching. During his
nightly meditations, kneeling on the metal floor of his chamber while construction
droids built the Executor, unaware of his existence, he had seen no visions in the
pure, angry red of the lightsaber that he held like a burning brand in front of his
eyes. Although he had stared until the world vanished and the dark side flowed
through him in a bloody tide, the future had remained closed.
Nothing, therefore, prepared him for the sudden deviation from the day's punishing
and unpredictable exercises. His Master was not a patient teacher; neither was he a
talkative one. He preferred action to debate, just as he preferred recrimination to
reward. Never once in all the days they had sparred together, with lightsaber,
telekinesis, or suggestion, had the Dark Lord offered a single word of
encouragement. And that was as it should be, he knew. A teacher's job was not to
drag a student along a single, well worn path. Rather it was to let the student
forge his or her own way through the forest, intervening only when the student was
hopelessly lost and needed to be corrected.
Even on the Wrong paths, he knew, lay some wisdom. What didn't kill him only made
him more powerful in the dark side.
And there had been many, many times he had thought he might die...
Breathing heavily after a punishing round of blows, lightsaber lowered in
submission, he knelt before his Master and prepared for the killing strike. He could
feel the wrath radiating from the Dark Lord like heat-a visceral, angry heat that
brought out his skin in gooseflesh. For a moment that seemed to stretch for years,
all he could hear was the regular, implacable respiration that kept the man inside
the mask alive.
"You were weak when I found you." The voice seemed to come from the far end of a
long, deep tunnel. "You should never have survived my training."
He closed his eyes. He had heard these words before. They were the closest thing to
a bedtime story he'd had as a child. The moral he had taken from them was burned.

Chapter 1