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No light casts the shadow that has infiltrated the center of the Republic. He has cast himself; once, there was a shaping hand, but that was long ago, now.
No one sees the shadow for what he is. So many around him do their dealings in the shade that he passes for one of them, the backdrop of darkness blunting sight and sense until details are blotted out into an apparent dreary sameness that conceals that the shadow is something much worse than his surroundings. And because he speaks words of condemnation against those surroundings, some choose not to see even what he does not conceal. And the warnings of those who do see go unheeded.
His condemnation is not entirely false. Indeed, the shadow sneers at the corrupt fools he uses and manipulates. Their ambitions he finds petty and shortsighted. They want, they crave, they grasp for more just as he does, but none of them, he thinks, have the strength of mind to aspire to anything great; they cannot even conceive of it, squabbling for scraps. But even if they had, he would crush them.
This, in his mind, is why he will, and should, rule the galaxy. He has the means, he has the will, he has power the pawns around him can only gape at.
But there are powers that even he does not yet have. Power that he can only take by drawing them all into himself, until they can only ever conceive of him at the center of the galaxy, and nothing before or after could ever be or have been.
So the shadow grows.
But his victory is never permanent. First opposition, then rebellion, whispering in the places that slip free of shadow.
For all his power, he is powerless to stop it.