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Starwars Iii

REVENGE
OF THE SITH

Star Wars, Episode III

by Matthew Stover

This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.
It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst.
It is the story of the end of an age.
A strange thing about stories—
Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.
It is happening as you read these words.
This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. This is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.
This is the twilight of the Jedi.
The end starts now.

=Introduction=
THE AGE OF HEROES

The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.
The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by star¬burst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track er¬ratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.
From the inside, it's different.
The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hair¬lines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships.
The battle from the inside is a storm of confusion and panic, of galvened particle beams flashing past your starfighter so close that your cockpit rings like a broken annunciator, of the boot-sole shock of concussion missiles...