Afterlife...
by: Jenny Dare
Warning: Angst! Oh the angst!
Summary: Maul's POV...on being One with the Force. (damn that sounds
like a comedy and it's really not!)
Rating: PG-ish
Feedback: Yes! Please! Lots!
Archive: Sith_Chicks...anyone else just let me know...


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Here, the empty vacuum of nothingness swirls around me.

It shapes my shapeless self, for there is no self, only the luminous
residue of what I once was.
I was a Sith Lord. I was proud and fearsome, strong and vital.

When I lived.

All that I was, I am still.
I possess conscious thought, I retain knowledge of those which were
my experiences, all that was my hopes and ambitions.

All the things I left behind when I breathed my last choke of breath.
I gave everything that I was to a cause. A cause that I died for, the
domination of the Sith. It is a proud and worthy cause. I failed it,
and myself, at the vengeful stroke of a Jedi's lightsaber.

In life, I issued the death blow with calculated ease, ravenously
drank in the fear and despair of my victims as they fell.

Ironic now, I am the product of the death blow I so often reveled in.

The Force which I wielded with supreme precision, I am part of,
evermore. It streams and ebbs, it pitches me hither, tumbles me fro.
I have no control over it now, that which was my power, my charm. I
am one with it, but it does not accommodate me, I am merely a
shapeless space within its construct.

There is no peace. 


I miss the burn. The burn of hatred I felt toward my abusive Master,
the searing heat of my disdain over his contrived methods of
manipulation. In life, I felt him infallible. In life, I feared what
punishment awaited me when I faltered.

In life, I was a powerful strength, driven by anger and pain.
And now, in death...

In death, nothing drives me at all.

And yet there is something; emotions heretofore never experienced
when the heat of existence coursed through my veins, feelings of
longing I only toyed with entertaining, a sense of loss at what I
could have been.

Still, I am forever cursed so it would seem, forever destined to
dwell on my years of breathing air, of having a physical body. These
sense memories I ache for, long for, ever now, ever still.
I wish to live again, to be again.



In my solitude, my true solitude, I have come to realize many things.

That my hatred was limiting.

That my rage was an energy best used elsewhere.

I know now that my power was not merely in my capacity to hate. My
strength came from the living, tangible being that I was, from the
sum of my self, of what beat and burned within. I chose, was trained,
to focus on my rage.

I could have been so much more.

Here now, I have eternity to ponder these such thoughts.

I can observe, but not experience. I can remember, but never act.
The loneliness would be drowning were I not already dead.

To exist with no sense of existence, to be consumed with longing, to
be the actual longing itself, in absence of a body with which to
contain it. To be the unfulfilled soul and spirit, and be nothing
beyond that.

Ever, the empty vacuum of nothingness swirls around me.

Ever, it will.


.~fin~.