Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

that it is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords.”
    Palpatine stared at the floor, then genuflected, uttering, “It is my will to join my destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords.”
    Plagueis extended his left hand to touch him on the crown of the head. “Then it is done. From this day forward, the truth of you, now and forever more, will be Sidious .”
    When Palpatine stood, Plagueis took him by the shoulders.
    “In time you will come to understand that you are one with the dark side of the Force, and that your power is beyond contradiction. But just now, and until I tell you differently, abiding submission is your only road to salvation.”

12: SEDUCED BY THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE
    The obedient orphan stood shivering in swirling snow. Around him rose ice pinnacles shaped like jagged teeth; a glacial wind howled through them. Plagueis stood nearby, flakes of snow and ice gyrating around him but never lighting on him, melting before they reached him. Unlike Sidious, who was outfitted in a thin enviro-suit, the Sith Lord was wearing only a cloak, narrow trousers, and a skullcap.
    “It was on this world that I first became aware of my Force powers and dark impulses,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the wind. “Compared with temperate Muunilinst, Mygeeto is ruthless and uncompromising, but I learned to adapt to its harsh conditions, and before the age of eight I could venture out into the most violent storm dressed in less than you wear now. But I haven’t brought you here to acquaint you with my past, Sidious. If you were of a species acclimatized to these conditions, I would have brought you instead to a desert world. If you were an aquatic being, I would have stranded you on dry land. The divide between the ways of the Force as practiced by the Sith and the Jedi has less to do with the distinction between darkness or the presence of light than between—in your case—naked cold and the presence of warmth. Between distress and comfort, entropy and predictability.”
    Plagueis paused to regard Sidious. “Your blood is close to frozen. Too much time here and you will die. That is what you will think at the beginning, when the dark side has sniffed you out and sidled upto you. You will think: I will die; the dark side will kill me . And it’s true, you will die, but only to be reborn. You must take deeply into yourself the knowledge of what it means to be removed; you must feel it in the marrow of your bones, because it will ever be thus.”
    Plagueis laughed shortly. “Perhaps I sound like some professor of philosophy in that fine college of yours in Theed. But this isn’t a lecture, nor should you think of it as physical conditioning. We need instead to prepare you for what awaits you should the dark side opt to take an interest in you. The comingling of fear and joy; of being humbled and empowered; of being escalated while at the same time used, as if an instrument. To be singled out and yet subsumed by an overarching grandness.”
    A predatory look came to his wan face as he advanced on Sidious.
    “Now tell me again, apprentice. And in greater detail.”
    Once more Sidious allowed his memories to unfold, and he relived the crime—the event, as he had at last come to think of it. His father’s limp and bloodied body. The smashed skulls of the bodyguards. His hands clenched around his mother’s slender throat—but not really, only in his mind, strangling her with his thoughts. The lifeless forms of his siblings, slumped here and there … In telling and retelling it, in reliving it, he had finally gained a kind of authority over it, the ability to see the event merely for what it was, without emotion, without judgment. It was as if the event had occurred years rather than months earlier, and as if someone else had authored the crime. When that defining moment had come, a transforming power had curled up inside him, as dark as space without stars, born of hated and fear but one he could now draw upon.
    “Very good,” Plagueis said, after the recounted tale had forced itself between Sidious’s blue and trembling lips. “I can feel your remove, and sense your increasing power.” He continued to appraise Sidious while the snow whirled between them. “I can’t have your will tempered by feelings of regret or compassion. You were brought into being to lead. Therefore you must see every living thing as nothing more than a tool to elevate you, to