A long time ago, in a Galaxy far, far away, on the planet Bespin...

"There is no escape," the Dark Lord of the Sith warned, looming over Luke like a black angel of death. "Don't make me destroy you. You are strong with the Force. Now you must learn to use the dark side. Join me and together we will be more powerful than the Emperor. Come, I will complete your training and we will rule the Galaxy."

Luke refused to give in to Vader's taunts. "I will never join you!"

"If you only knew the power of the dark side," Vader continued. "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father, did he?"

Mention of his father aroused Luke's anger. "He told me enough!" he yelled. "He told me you killed him."

"No," Vader replied calmly. "I am your father."

Stunned, Luke stared with disbelief at the black-clad warrior and then pulled away at this revelation. The two warriors stood staring at one another, father and son.

"No, no! That's not true..." Luke said, refusing to believe what he had just heard. "That's impossible."

"Search your feelings," Vader said, sounding like an evil version of Yoda, "you know it to be true."

Then Vader turned off the blade of his lightsabre and extended a steady and inviting hand.

Bewildered and horror-stricken at Vader's words, Luke shouted, "No! No!"

Vader continued persuasively. "Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny. Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Come with me. It is the only way."

Luke's mind whirled with these words. Everything was finally beginning to coalesce in his brain. Or was it? He wondered if Vader were telling him the truth--if the training of Yoda, the teaching of saintly old Ben, his own strivings for good and his abhorrence of evil, if everything he had fought for were no more than a lie.

He didn't want to believe Vader, tried convincing himself that it was Vader who lied to him--but somehow he could feel the truth in the Dark Lord's words. But, if Darth Vader did speak the truth, why, he wondered, had Ben Kenobi lied to him? Why? His mind screamed louder than any wind the Dark Lord could ever summon against him.

The answers no longer seemed to matter.

His Father.

Why had Kenobi lied to him? This question brought up more than simply bewilderment, but on its heels came more questions and a bubbling anger. Obi-Wan, Yoda, even his foster parents Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru...they had lied to him. Had his whole life been based on lies? His own parentage denied to him? As he continued to question, the bubbling anger burst forth, and the power of the dark side began to envelop him. He was angry that he was deceived, and angry that he had been trapped on the backwater planet of Tatooine, hidden away from his own father, forced to live on that desert prison his whole life.

Calmly, he deactivated his lightsabre and clipped it to his belt--the lightsabre that had once belonged to this man before him, his father, yet another link to his heritage. He extended his arm, and took the Dark Lord's hand, and soon found himself being pulled from the outcropping back onto the catwalk by his father. The dark side flowed between them, the young man's angst from all the years he spent looking to the stars but unable to leave, his anger at having been lied to by those he trusted, all fueling the dark side as it seeped into his very being.

The Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader, looked down at his son, and felt the raw power between them. His son would join him, now, their power combined becoming an overwhelming force which could not be stopped. He had lost family before; he would not lose his son the same way. The dark side would give them the strength to control their destinies forever.

Vader had not been lying when he said that Luke could destroy the Emperor. Weeks later, upon having returned from Bespin to his master's sanctuary on Coruscant, Vader knelt before the Emperor for the last time. Luke and his attacked and, in a fierce battle in which Luke was seriously wounded, overthrew Lord Sidious and siezed control of the Empire. Luke lost the use of his arm from the duel with Palpatine, but like his father he was soon fitted for a cybernetic replacement.

Under the rule of the Dark Lord of the Sith and his young son/apprentice, the Empire was revitalized. Using Skywalker's knowledge of the Rebellion, the Empire began a daring series of strikes against Rebel elements, which had devastating results on their enemies. Luke's knowledge of the strategies, routes, bases, command codes, and other things used by the Alliance made mopping up the Rebellion a simple task. A precision strike at the shipyards at Mon Calamari took out the Rebellion's main naval backbone, and, with Luke Skywalker leading the Imperial Fleet, the Empire crushed the Rebellion at their rendezvous point at the edge of the Galaxy.

The Death Star II project was well underway by this point, but neither Vader nor his son shared the vision of having a superweapon such as this in the Empire's arsenal. The construction was too far along to simply scrap, and it was seen as a waste of resources to end the project so abruptly. Given that both Luke and his father were pilots as well as Jedi, they altered the plans for construction and enlisted the aid of engineers such as Bevel Lemelisk to remove the majority of the command and crew quarters, troop compliment, and streamlined the design to contain just the Superlaser Mk II, power generator, and supplementary equipment. The design was altered from space station to that of a capital ship, roughly the size of a Super Star Destroyer, looked like a cross between an Imperial Star Destroyer and a lightsabre. Fittingly, the father and son team of Dark Jedi christened the massive ship Darksabre.

Luke knew, though, that there were still those who could oppose him, those who had been close enough to him to know his weaknesses. With Han Solo safely tucked away in Jabba the Hutt's personal collection, the only other beings who could be a threat were Leia, Chewbacca, and Yoda. Assembling a strike force, Luke and Vader arrived at Dagobah just days after Leia had fled. Angered that his timing was off by such a short time, Luke's attack on Dagobah was nothing short of devastating. Yoda fell in the battle, and the task force struck off in search of Leia.

Following Leia to Kashyyyk, Luke saw that perhaps his timing had been fortuitous after all. In one swift blow, he eradicated the remaining two threats to his power, Leia and and Chewbacca, in an assault on the jungle planet. The devastation was incredible, and the Dark Side surrounding him rejoiced at the plentiful sacrifice he had made to it. His power had grown, and none were left to oppose him -- or so he thought.

With the Rebellion all but eliminated, Vader decided it was time to fulfill the promise of completing Luke's training. He took his son deep into the Core, to the Emperor's stronghold planet of Byss. There, the two went into seclusion, studying the Emperor's ancient texts while furthering Luke's training. Having left the Empire in the capable hands of Ysanne Isard and Admiral Thrawn (who had returned from his exile upon hearing that the Emperor had been defeated), they continued to send orders to their underlings which were carried out with amazing efficiency. After nearly two years of seclusion on the planet Byss, Lord Vader emerged with his son and now apprentice, who in the Sith tradition he had given a new name: Darth Gadrel. In the tongue of the ancient Sith, gadrel meant "weapon of war" or simply "weapon," a fitting name for the apprentice who had been trained even by Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi as a weapon for use against the Emperor.

Under the control of Darth Vader and Darth Gadrel, the Galactic Empire became more than simply a political body. The continued training of Dark Side Adepts, as well as the High Inquisitors and others, ushered in a new era of strength for the dark side. The Empire grew to levels that matched the Sith Empire of 5,000 years gone, and the dark side flourished. Unlike the xenophobic Palpatine, Vader and Gadrel appointed Thrawn to the position of leader of the Imperial armed forces, where he made sure the Empire's military ran with lethal efficiency.

Over the next several years, Lord Vader and Lord Gadrel led the Empire to conquer vast amounts of space, expanding (at Thrawn's insistence) into the Unkown regions, and adding the Chiss to their Empire. When invaders from outside the Galaxy made their first attacks in the Outer Rim, the powerful Empire was ready for them. Although the battles were bloody from the beginning, and the Vong's alien technology was difficult to counteract, Darth Gadrel devoted the full extent of him time to finding new ways to combat the extragalactic aliens, leaving Vader and the other leaders in charge of the war.

When word reached Gadrel that his father had been slain aboard the Darksabre, he was not surprised. He had known the Organa woman had grown strong, as over the years he had pursued her a great many times. He could not afford to divide his attentions between the Jedi and the Vong, but certainly he knew he had to take both threats equally as seriously. Perhaps it was time that he took an apprentice, and carried on the Sith tradition. The woman, Mara Jade, had long since become useless after so many experimentations on her fragile mind. There would be another apprentice, soon, he would see to that...