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Obi-Wan had felt the repercussions of Order 66 in the Force, though he hadn’t immediately understood what he was sensing at the time, distracted with the attempt on his own life.
But understanding had come, slowly, horribly, that what he had felt had been countless candles, countless lives snuffed out one by one. Death was, of course, a part of the Force, but this had been unnatural; a brutal execution carried out too quickly for most Jedi to even realize what was happening, what the disturbance they felt indicated for themselves and the rest of their people.
Blood spilled over and over into the Force, and screams abruptly cut short echoed across space to haunt the few survivors. The pain of that day lingered in the Force for a long time, the galaxy forever altered by the rise of the Empire and the calamity that had been inflicted on the Jedi.
Even decades later, Obi-Wan remembered well that uniquely terrible sensation in the Force, unlike even the horrors of the war that had preceded it. When he felt it again, he recognized it immediately for what it was, even if the shape of it was different.
Instead of lives snuffed out one by one in short sequence, the brutal efficiency of the execution had been perfected, cutting everything off at once in a mere instance. The immediacy and scale of it overwhelmed Obi-Wan, leaving him reeling and unsteady. He did not even know yet the lives he grieved for – not Jedi, not his family, not this time. There simply weren’t that many alive now for the deaths he felt to have been Jedi – but he grieved them, because he knew that the Empire had killed them.
Whatever terrible weapon the Empire had devised, it, too, had irrevocably altered the galaxy.