TLJ - Mind Reading

“Oh?” Snoke asked, radiating mock concern. “Have you seen something? A weakness in my apprentice? Is that why you came?”

He laughed at the dawning horror on her face, and her attempt to hide it. There was nothing she could hide from him—not with her defenses so inadequate. Not even her thoughts—her deepest fears and secrets—were safe from him.

[...]

“And now you will give me Skywalker,” he told her. “Then I will kill you with the cruelest stroke.”

He saw horror in her eyes—followed by stubborn defiance.

“No!” she managed.

“Yes!” Snoke replied, exultant. He raised his hand and hurled her across the room with the Force, then held her in the air as he smashed aside her resistance and began rifling through her thoughts, her memories, making them his to do with as he would. The skin at Rey’s temples pulsed in waves, a physical manifestation of the violent intrusion into her mind.

“Give me everything,” Snoke commanded.

The very air between them bent and wavered as Snoke harnessed the Force and made it his weapon. Rey thrashed in pain, screaming and seeking an escape that didn’t exist.

Kylo could feel Rey’s pain and panic, a bright roar in the Force that overwhelmed all else—even the dark presence of Snoke. But he did not intervene. Instead, he lowered his head and awaited his master’s command.

[...]

Rey could feel Snoke in her head, his consciousness a live, hungry thing, carelessly sifting and sorting through what wasn’t his, what he had no right to.

The Supreme Leader must have taught Kylo this ability, she realized. But he was far more skilled than his apprentice. Rey was unable to push back against him—his mere presence threatened to overwhelm her. And unlike with Kylo, she had no sense of that mind being left open to her. Snoke’s presence felt like a pit, empty and cold and dark—as if the dark-side cave beneath Ahch-To had gone on forever.

Random bits of memory came back to her as the Supreme Leader scrutinized them and cast them aside. Here she was, alone at sunset on Jakku. Waking from a dream of a cool island in a gray sea. Stunned and reeling beneath Maz’s castle. Holding a lightsaber hilt out in mute appeal.

She felt his interest quicken at that last moment burned into her mind. That was what he wanted: Skywalker’s island, and the planet of which it was a part, and what it was called and how she had reached it.

Rey tried to blank her mind, to shut him out, to fight him off.

None of it worked. Snoke found what he wanted, took it, and discarded her.

She found herself on the floor of his throne room, writhing in pain, consumed by hatred for him.

He just laughed at her.

“Well, well,” he said, voice oozing satisfaction. “I did not expect Skywalker to be so wise. We will give him and the Jedi Order the death he longs for. After the rebels are gone we will go to his planet and obliterate the entire island.”

Rey raised her hand toward Luke’s lightsaber, sitting next to Snoke on the arm of his throne. She willed it into her hand—and it flew into the air, in a perfect arc that would end in her grasp.

Watching Rey struggle against him, Snoke smiled. Calling a lightsaber into one’s hand was such a trivial use of the Force—a trick for the greenest apprentice, its workings almost beneath the dignity of a master of the Force. Nevertheless, he admired the girl’s resolve. She was beaten but persisted.

Such hubris would have to be punished.



- The Last Jedi: Expanded Edition, Chapters 25 and 26