This week we’re about to venture back to the early days of the Clone Wars in Mike Chen’s Star Wars: Brotherhood, but always in motion, the future is — and there’s always more Star Wars fiction to tease. Up next is Shadows of the Sith from Adam Christopher, and Gizmodo has a look inside… and a look at the book’s mysterious villain.
Set between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens — nearly 20 years after the former, in fact — Shadow of the Sith sees Jedi Master Luke Skywalker team up with his old Rebel ally, Lando Calrissian, as the pair team up to investigate some dire rumours. Not only has Lando heard rumblings of a returned Sith menace, lying in wait on the planet Exegol, his young daughter has been kidnapped — and the only lead he’s got has sent him into the path of Ochi of Bestoon, a Sith assassin on his own personal mission to hunt down a child who will change the galaxy forever…
Suffice to say, there’s a lot of Sith-y things going on in Shadow of the Sith (it’s in the name, really). But while Luke and Lando find themselves on the trail of The Rise of Skywalker’s mysterious assassin, Ochi is not the only Sith agent that the novel is going to be dealing with. There Is Another, as Star Wars so often likes, hunting them in turn, and Gizmodo has your first look at this secretive adversary, in the form of an exclusive look inside the Barnes & Noble exclusive version of the novel, including a poster of this new enemy:
Who is this strange, lightsaber-wielding figure? We don’t know for sure yet, but Gizmodo can confirm that if you’ve been reading the canon Star Wars novels, the true identity of this masked figure will be a familiar face to you. And while you ponder on that, you can read an excerpt from Shadows of the Sith below, as this mysterious woman receives a dire message from her dark masters…
THE SEPULCHRE, COORDINATES UNKNOWN
NOW
Something moves in the darkness — a shadow, cast long, crawling through the abyssal night. The shadow is a thing apart: neither alive nor dead.
It is a relic. It is an . . . echo. A presence from an older time, a malignancy that somehow survived, somehow found a way.
Found a path.
She can see it now. Black and blacker still, moving, always moving. An intelligence, yes. A mind, but one without form or substance.
But here — present — nonetheless.
She closes her eyes. It makes no difference. There is nothing to see but a gulf, a nothing, where the shadow lives.
Where the shadow thrives.
In the darkness, in the forever night inside her head.
And the void is not silent. It is anything but. It is a cacophony, a sound so loud it lights up every nerve fibre of her entire being, even though she knows there is nothing to hear, physically.
It is the sound of pain. The sound of death. The sound of a thousand thousand thousand souls crying out in sorrow and agony before they are snuffed out in an instant. Brothers and sisters. Sons and daughters. Mothers and fathers. Podlings, branchlings, kithkin. Sporechilds and denmothers; space fathers and their brethren, and their gene-clusters and their shoots. Spawn, and offspring. 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 darkness.
By a shadow, cast long.
And there is another sound. A voice, from the ancient past. It is far distant, a call echoing across a huge valley of space and time.
The voice is terrible.
The voice is as familiar as her own.
SOON.
She opens her golden eyes. The room is bright and, mercifully, silent. Her ears ring like a bell, the sudden absence of screams almost as painful, the echo of the voice still reverberating in her mind.
Slowly, slowly, she remembers where she is. As she lies on the floor and blinks the world into existence around her, she pulls up a hand and touches her face. It is warm, and wet, the blood on her fingertips the bright blue of the Pantoran sky.
The place is lit by flickering flame, and the flickering flame lights the plinth of meteoric iron, and beside the plinth lies the mask made of the same starstuff. The mask faces away from her. It rocks, gently, like it has just been thrown.
She stares at the back of it, the curve of nothing, of darkness, of deep shadow.
And she hears the voice again.
SOON.
SOON.
She closes her eyes, and she sleeps, exchanging one nightmare for another, in the dead of night, in the dead of space. She wakes to another sound, one technological, modern. She lifts herself from her nest, ignoring the throbbing in her head, the ache of her limbs.
Because she can’t keep them waiting. They are patient, yes. Infuriatingly so.
But they are also 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.
And she would do nothing to jeopardize that.
Standing, she activates the communicator, and her nest is lit in the sudden electric blue of a hologram. The image shimmers and pulses, tinged with the same static and interference that protects the caller’s point of origin.
She kneels before the figure, cloaked in darkness, the hood barely concealing a face that is wrapped tightly in heavy black bandages, in the manner all cultists of the Sith Eternal hide their features.
She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t care.
But she does obey.
“What is thy bidding, my Master,” she intones, repeating the litany that echoed through time like the screams inside the mask she knew she would have to put on again, soon.
The looming figure speaks, and she listens, and she wonders whether this will be the last time or whether they will ever honour their promise.
Perhaps one day, they will ask too much.
You’ll be able to find out more when Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith hits shelves on June 28, 2022.
Want more Gizmodo news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.