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The hallway stank of melting plastoid and burnt flesh. For several long beats after the laserfire had died away, Kellan remained motionless, senses frayed by an adrenal dose large enough to choke a rancor. The motions and stimuli were different, but at the heart of the thing, the experience...

A peel of laughter as he slouched into his chair, as though physically stricken by her good-natured barb. The offered conviviality was a path back towards the comfortably familiar, a way out of the nettlesome tangle of emotions he’d found himself mired in. Kellan gladly accepted her life...

Somehow, as Merian's face was swallowed by the helmet's bulk Kellan felt dreadfully alone. There, lined up amongst the commandos and their scarlet vanguard, he was uniquely aware of just how out of place he was. He studied the faces of the soldiers as they slid their own helms into place, their...

I’m glad you chose us as your family. Despite their shared candor, something in Merian’s offhanded remark struck him deeply. With a flush of embarrassment, he realized that she put to word perhaps his most earnest of desires and in doing so had uncorked a wall of emotion that threatened to pour...

He drained his glass dry and felt his throat ignite, not altogether unpleasantly. It was true, he didn’t share a TIE pilot’s typical penchant for drinking. Despite often accompanying his fellow pilots to the canteen, he often did so armored in a fabricated joviality. Joviality built solely for...

The bridge was a chaotic mural, underpinned by the tension-stricken expressions of the crew. The Eclipse’s lacerated hull had filled the compartment with the stink of ozone and charred circuitry. Kellan’s chest felt constricted, head leaden. Like Merian, he was all too aware of his own inutility...

”Knight-Captain Sere.” he nodded. A hint of a smile at their shared fortune. If the trajectory of the Empire had left him with a sense of listlessness, Merian’s presence on the bridge served as a welcomed anchorage. “Blackout Fleet would like to know precisely who’s making overtures to Imperial...

Events seemed to unspool around Kellan as though they were mere holorecordings being played back to him. He could understand the scope of the task before them and grasped the vitality of the optics such a stern response would provide. And yet as he watched Merian deftly calibrate the captain’s...

“We rid the Empire of the Sith just so we could hand it over to the bleedin’ Hutts?!” Lieutenant Brax’s face was flushed an angry mauve. His eyes darted from face to face, searching his fellow pilots for a similar vein of outrage. Kellan thought the big man must’ve liked what he had seen...

”Some hide their scars. Some wear them proudly.” He gave his head a solemn shake. “But for the rest of us, they’re the only thing holding us together.” It wasn’t until the waiter’s intrusion that Kellan realized just how raw and disarmed he truly felt. Like a fresh wound, exposed and voltaic...

Twenty-seven thousand plus souls. That was the standard complement of crewmen on a Oneger-Class Star Destroyer such as The Detente. A city’s worth of humanity piloting a floating metropolis through the expanse of space. And every single face in twenty-seven thousand wore shock and dismay as...

Bloody Bantha Cantina Aaloth System 1900 Hours The death toll metrics pouring out of the HoloNet display saw a suffocating pall spread across the normally raucous cantina. Beings from all walks of life stood in stunned disbelief, incredulous faces blank and upturned, listening intently to the...

As she spoke, some indefinable ache resonated within Kellan. Duty, honor, strength; her words evoked all the familiar vanguards of the Imperial esprit de corps. The same qualities that he, as a younger man, had built his personal ethos upon, that had guided nearly every decision that had brought...

With Merian he found levity a hard sell. To Kellan, she seemed always pressing, ever-searching. He wondered how such a tenacious curiosity served her within the ranks of the Imperial Knights. Had such idiosyncrasies guided her down a mystics path in the first place? A shiver of vulnerability...

He watched her as she spoke, his expression even and impartial. At the knight’s mention of her own restraint, he noted the momentary flicker of discomfort reflected in her eyes. The reaction was keenly familiar to Kellan, as he suspected it would be to anyone who had seen extended action. Such...

The muscles in Kellan’s jaw bunched. The old man had been intolerable as a flight leader and had against all odds proven to be equally intolerable as a subordinate. Searing images of violence pressed through his thoughts. He turned his head slightly but did not meet the man’s provoking stare...

Kellan had been near adulthood the first time he had come face-to-face with any body of water larger than a lake. When he had at last planted his bare feet in an ocean for the first time and watched the waves tirelessly sprout, swell, break and crash in endless repetition he had found the...

The atmosphere of Saleucami warmed to a plush orange in anticipation of dusk, painting the interior of Kellan’s cockpit in pastels. He confirmed their approach vector and studied the desolate landscape below. The barren, mountainous topography was reminiscent of Ryloth, where as a youth he had...

They had reached the lower deck faster than Kellan might have anticipated. The distaste Lieutenant Hamber held for him came slaking off the man in waves and it was all Solari could do to avoid sprinting down the deepdock’s corridors to avoid another protracted moment with the adversarial pilot...

The Interceptors of Alpha Squadron raked the gunships like birds of prey, unleashing destructive torrents of laserfire across the armored but largely helpless vessels. The LAATs exteriors were durable but the baleful output of the fighters soon began to prove too much as concussive blasts began...