Star Wars: Episode 6.1 - The Ancient Dark

[Erasmar]

A long time ago, in a galaxy
far, far away…

STAR WARS
THE ANCIENT DARK

The heroes of the Rebel Alliance have formed a new
GALACTIC REPUBLIC, but strife remains among
the stars.

The evil FLAME EMPIRE stands against the
fledgling Republic. Led by the Lady Anathema,
its dark forces scour the galaxy for ancient
relics of immeasurable power. What worlds
they cannot take, they burn.

As their legions threaten the peaceful world of
DEMETER, Republic pilots attempt to relieve
the struggling resistance, desperate for aid...

The four X-Wings and the bulk freighter in their charge came under fire as soon as they flashed out of hyperspace. The smaller starfighters darted around each other like fish as the oblong freighter executed what vague maneuvers it could afford in its dash toward the planet. Green bursts of laser fire traced all their movements.

“Capital ship, one kilometer and closing,” said one of the X-Wing pilots, grunting out the words as he jinked his craft through a series of turns.

“TIEs everywhere,” said another.

“Stay with the Ray -- watch for bombers.”

“A Star Destroyer, here?”

“Focus, Rogues!”

TIE Fighters followed them gamely, far nimbler though undoubtedly less durable. Three exploded in quick succession as a fourth carromed into space, one wing vaporized. Six others swarmed to take their places, with many more spilling from the bowels of the massive Star Destroyer that loomed now close behind.

The Ray, thus far unscathed, began adjusting its course to allow for descent through the planet’s atmosphere through a heavily clouded portion of its southern hemisphere, hoping to disorient any pursuers that followed it down.

But the Star Destroyer was swift despite its mass and bore down on them, opening up with targeted turbolaser fire that lanced toward the freighter’s blazing engines. An X-Wing barely managed to roll away from a salvo but in the process tumbled through the sights of an enemy pilot. Lasers raked across the split wings and back of the starfighter, prompting a howl from its R2 unit.

“You alright back there?”

“Rogue Three, are you hit?”

The pilot risked removing one of his hands from the rudder so he could pull up a readout, his eyes glancing to the translation from his R2 unit. He juked away from more fire from another TIE, swooping under the bulk freighter and twisting vertical on the other side.

“Dev?”

“I’m OK, Rogue Leader. Couple good scores on the aft--” A pop-pop and jolting bang snapped his head forward and slammed it back into the headrest, dazing him. As he struggled to regain his wits, he saw the brown and white planet below circling the edges of his cockpit canopy, growing larger and larger. He jostled the flightstick, but the craft didn’t respond.

“Dev!”

“Hit again -- or,” he said, pulling out a console above his knees, fingers flying across its controls, “or just collateral. R2 unit,” he glanced at the translator, “no connection. Might’ve been hit. Don’t know. No controls.”

The planet now filled his canopy. He could see the whorls of clouds, storms sweeping across the prairies that made up most of the world. A burst of green lasers appeared in front of him, a near miss from behind, before suddenly cutting out. He checked his scopes, still functional, and saw the telltales of starfighter debris behind him, an X-Wing streaking away.

“Thanks, Luke.”

“Still nothing?”

“Just keep the Ray safe,” he said, working rapidly. “Sir.”

The X-Wing pulled away and engaged three other TIEs at once, darting through them, destroying them in two passes. The other two X-Wings were still operational, flanking the freighter that had begun to outpace the Star Destroyer, which could not keep up as the atmosphere thickened. Soon it altered its course, opting for a level orbit, firing a few more spiteful shots from its turbolasers before it lost all range.

He had to work fast. Still spinning, his X-Wing began to tumble and vibrate as the air built up in front of it. Too steep like this, without controls, without deflectors, and the ship would heat up and explode in an instant, its remains mingling with his in a pattern like fleeting white scars on the surface of the sky.

He input one command, followed by another. Success, accepted, he entered another. Doing anything with dexterity grew increasingly difficult. Another command: failure. Another: failure. He grit his teeth, fighting against the mounting gravity. He slapped off his comm unit -- they didn’t need to hear him, not like this.

In frustration, rage against fate, he shouted, kicking his feet into his rudders, pulling on his flightstick with all his strength. He felt sweat trickling down his face and into the corners of his mouth. The metallic tang of it told him it was blood, at least in part, undoubtedly from some injury incurred during the explosion. He yelled into the planet below, growing more and more obscured by the glow from the nose of his starfighter.

Suddenly -- a beep, a series of beeps. His eyes flicked to the translator. Back online, it read.

“Controls!”

On it.

“Now!”

Done.

The nose of his X-Wing yanked up, but only so far. There was no pulling away from the planet now, but maybe he could slip through its thickening atmosphere and make a landing, of some sort, ideally one that he would survive.

Engines one, two, three: offline. Engine four: thirty-percent integrity.

“Stabilizers?” he read the translation. “‘Enough?’ What the hell does that--”

They will hold for ten seconds of sustained burn.

“Right,” he said, swallowing. “Right... Should be enough. Here we go.”

He nosed the craft back down, his R2 unit offering a suggested flightpath on his heads-up display that looked, to one well-educated on atmospheric entry, questionable at best and possibly insane. At key moments he pulled back on his flightstick, easing off the throttle, skipping across and through the atmosphere, steadily burning away the X-Wing’s vital heat shield.

Clouds surrounded him, night turning periodically and terrifyingly to day as balls and bolts of lightning erupted from hammerheads. He began spiraling, tighter and tighter, eyes skipping from his flight path to his altimeter, altimeter to speedometer, willing numbers to hold and descend as appropriate for saving his life.

The surface burst into existence beneath him. Windswept amber and purple grasslands, approaching fast. His vertical velocity was still too strong, horizontal nearly gone, a flat spin: a death sentence.

He slammed the throttle forward and heard his last engine roar--

[Erasmar]

From the bridge of the Star Destroyer Virulence, they watched the Rebel ships recede from view, becoming too small to see with the naked eye, mingling with the haze of the planet’s atmosphere, sparkling into existence only now and then as bursts of flame as they passed through toward the surface. When no other transports appeared from hyperspace, the commanders ordered a general stand down and return to normal alert conditions.

“The last, it would seem,” said Captain Willoxe. “Not a bad record as these things go.”

“It will be too many,” said Lieutenant Plath.

The captain glanced down at the sensor readout displaying on the ensign’s console before him. Debris everywhere, the ruined husks of five bulk transports, splintered and staggered, their orbits decaying in a path that would burn them up over the planet over the coming weeks.

“Send shuttles and recovery parties,” said Willoxe. “I want to know, as precisely as possible, what these transports were carrying. We will need to know what the Lady’s stormtroopers should expect on the ground, should they encounter these…”

“Rebels, sir,” said Plath. “Certainly, sir. Message received from the Conflagration. The Lady requests a full report on the battle, sir. Casualties inflicted and sustained, interdiction failures.”

“Thank you, lieutenant, that will be all.”

The captain decided on delivering the results personally. The Virulence was in good hands under Plath’s command in his absence -- favored hands, he knew, as the younger man, stricter, more fanatical, had the Lady’s eye and confidence at the moment. Willoxe was old guard, less trustworthy though he felt he had proven himself adequately, a holdover from the Old Imperial Navy and one of Pellaeon’s best. He would undoubtedly earn favor by kowtowing personally to the Lady and also elevating one of her esteemed at the same time.

As was customary, his shuttle was escorted by a pair of TIE Fighters toward the massive Conflagration, a Star Destroyer that dwarfed most others, nearly double the size of the Virulence. It had a mottled appearance, a disgrace by old Imperial standards, as constant construction added armor, weapons, and systems whenever it was not in hyperspace. An aggregate of devastated defense and conquered worlds, consuming the best of everything that had once stood in the Lady’s way. No other ships of the Flame Empire were like this, only the Lady’s. Her thirst for power grew, never to be sated, with each dead world left in her legions’ wake.

His shuttle approached one of the Conflagration’s hangars and his escorts peeled away. He remembered stories of other commanders who had brought battle reports personally to the Dark Lord Darth Vader, in a different time. Many of those had never returned to their vessels, slain in punishment for slights and failures, real or perceived, their bodies dragged away by once-trembling and quickly hardened ensigns, off to the incinerator, no proper naval burial deserving a failure to the Emperor.

Willoxe had heard no such stories regarding the Lady Anathema. Punishments, to be sure, for particularly egregious failures, usually of the professional kind however, a demotion or reassignment to some obscure post where one would be lucky to be heard from again by loved ones. Still others reported psychological disturbances or memories of their encounters with the Lady not quite adding up, they would say, time-wise and memory-wise, as if pieces were missing or had been excised, or others would say that their commanders had returned as if they were different men entirely, hollowed out, vacant, unfaltering in their desire to serve the Lady and the Flame. Some sort of hypnosis, no doubt.

There was no contingent of stormtroopers to greet his arrival. Only an aide offering a refreshment prior to his meeting with the Lady, which he declined out of habit, wishing to stick to the business at hand, immediately dispensing with any pleasantries as had been ingrained in him since his earliest days at the Academy. These and other irregularities irritated him like an eyelash caught under his eyelid, blinking at it to no avail.

The Lady’s quarters were minimal but not spartan. A wide open room with an additional room to the right and left, one for sleep and the other for study or storage, Willoxe had never been sure. He had never seen either, as he doubt many had. Despite the many young fanatics that she favored, despite her rumored beauty -- rumored because she always wore her mask -- no one had ever been able to confirm if she had a lover or not, or anyone close to her at all rather. Her lust, it was said, was confined to power, dark power, and utter control of all that she encountered.

The central room was dominated in its center by a circular fire pit nearly six feet in diameter, which could be stoked into a great blaze or easily tended, as it was now, to a cozy family of flames dancing over glowing embers. Three terraced steps that could serve as benches descended to the sides of the pit in a square. Beyond the pit were a couple couches and a large, clean desk, and behind that, a wall of windows opening to space.

“Hail the Fire.”

“May it burn forever,” said Willoxe without even meaning to, watching the Lady Anathema emerge from her bedroom.

The only light in her chambers was the dim flickering of the fire in its pit. The Lady approached it, gliding across the floor, tall and thin, a white gown draped over her lithe form, thick waving hair, a deep fire red itself, cascading around her shoulders and down her back. On her face, as always, her mask: white, oval, featureless at this distance and in this light except for a black slit over her mouth and two empty black circles for her eyes, eyes that no one had ever seen. Willoxe expected that they were green.

“Come, captain, and sit with me.” Her mask ever so slightly muffled her voice. “You are the last to report. You have come to me directly. Why?”

Willoxe smoothed his uniform and took a seat on one side of the fire with the exit to his left. The Lady sat directly across from him so that her white mask seemed to float solitarily above the flames.

“We destroyed five transports attempting to relieve the resistance on the ground,” he said. “Six escort starfighters, four X-Wing class and two Y-Wing class, also destroyed. One X-Wing class unconfirmed, likely burned up in the atmosphere. Seventeen TIE Fighters lost. One transport and three X-Wings … escaped.”

The Lady’s mask did not waver. “That is all?”

“My Lady?”

“Surely that is not all you wished to report, having come all this way.”

“They were Rogues, my Lady,” said Willoxe. “The last group to come through.”

“Well, that is more interesting.”

“There is more,” he said. “Their transmissions are scrambled, of course, encoded. Our decryptors are working hard. However, from my time in the … the, eh, old navy, I do remember some bits -- I heard something that I had heard before, long ago. It translates to a name: Luke.”

The fire between them blew down suddenly as if a great wind had blown over it, nearly extinguishing it, though Willoxe felt nothing. It startled him, he hoped not too noticeably. In that brief second or two, the Lady’s mask appeared almost black, blacker than the darkest depths of space.

The flames returned to their previous calm, and the Lady’s mask was white again.

“Skywalker,” she said.

“I believe so, my Lady.”

For nearly a minute, silence. “Thank you, captain. Return to your ship.”

“Thank you, my Lady.”

“And captain? Share this with no one.”

[Erasmar]

(So, this started as an extrapolation on what Episode 7 might turn out to be based on the original trailers, photos, and artwork. I ended up hating Episode 7 and it almost turned me away from Star Wars altogether. But now I’ve got some time, so I figured I'd go ahead with my original plan. Characters will have some vague resemblances in a few cases; that's by design.)



Low guttural sounds, lots of them. Moans. They weren’t his. He realized it over the course of seconds that felt like minutes. He tried to open his eyes, but the slightest bit of light sent his head spinning through a storm of pain.

He was wet, but the rain had stopped. The rain?

Quiet, rhythmic pulses. These also weren’t his. Too late he recognized them as footsteps, cautious and light. He tried to reach for the blaster at his side, but the effort almost made him throw up. This time the moan was his.

“Wouldn’t do that,” said a digitized voice.

Any strength he had managed to gather immediately left his arm. Darkness threatened to overwhelm his mind.

“Well. Look at you.”

Something jostled him, and he passed out.

* * *

Crackling, almost like a fire. Heat, almost like a fire. His clothes were still soaked. His skin felt thick with sweat and oil. Was he on fire? Was the whole world ablaze?

* * *

Water trickling into some vessel, dripping and tapping across his flight suit. It gathered at his lips, pooled, until they gave way and it flooded in.

He sputtered, trying to sit up, trying to open his eyes, before it seemed like a force slammed him back down again. His head still spun, but the pain had lessened. Nausea still threatened to roll him over and spill what remained in his stomach up beside him.

“Easy,” said a man, “take it slow. You’re dehydrated, need to drink.” More water at his lips. This time he parted them ever so slightly, let it in a little at a time. “Good. Drink.” More trickling from something like a jar or bucket, more water to drink. “I’m going to replace this cloth on your forehead now -- try not to open your eyes.”

His forehead felt lighter, then colder, and the dizziness strengthened. Then a new wet heaviness on his brow, the scent of medicinal herbs, warmth seeping slowly into the depths of his head.

“Need to rest. Sleep now.” A sigh: hesitant, labored. “You are safe.”

* * *

Dev awoke from a dream that left fragments in his mind like tattered clouds, dissipating in the breeze as he sought to shape them into meaning. A light, or something like a light, had burned him. It had seared his very soul. Perhaps it was a memory of the crash.

The crash.

He opened his eyes, truly awake now. He was in a hut made of carbon-fiber poles and animal skins. He lay on a bed of furs. His orange and white flight suit was draped over a rack; he could see some tears and scorches. Hanging at the end of the rack was his holster and blaster. Gathering his strength, he reached for it. An outstretched hand…

“Uh-uh,” said a girl. “You don’t need that.”

He saw her there in the hut with him, in the flickering shadows. He registered the fire then in the center, radiating, fortifying. She wasn’t even looking at him. Her head was down, looking at a datapad. It resembled his own datapad.

“Hey,” he said in something like a garble. “That’s...mine, I think.”

Her eyebrows raised but she still didn’t look at him. “So it is.”

He didn’t know whether to object or, strangely, laugh. Callous, confident. Attractive.

Just then he heard rustling flap, then a portion of the hut lifted to betray itself as a door, and in hunched a man. Aging but not aged. Older than Dev by a generation or two. Resembled the girl; same dark hair, skin tone. Eyebrows. And there was an indifference in the man’s appraisal of him.

“So you’re awake.”

“Where am I?”

“You’re on the planet Demeter. This is my home.”

“Figured that.”

“And yet, he asked,” said the girl. “A real hero of the Republic we have here.”

Dev tried on his best lopsided grin. “Sorry, things are a little foggy -- who are you?”

The man spoke instead. “My name is Foresh. You were found on the plains and brought here. I have … some skill with medicine. Sympathies for your Republic and its wars, however…”

“Well, I don’t mean to impose.” Dev grunted, trying to sit up, waving Foresh away when the man lurched forward to assist. “If you can get me to my ship, I need to see how damaged it is.”

“I don’t think it’ll fly.”

“You have skill with starfighter mechanics too?”

“You have skill with molten scrap?” said the girl. “It’s gone.”

Dev looked to each of them. He could feel the panic creeping, tried to keep it from showing. “Was there a droid? An astromech? Did you find a droid?”

Man and girl looked at each other. “No one could get to the wreck.”

“But I thought you found me…”

“You were found some distance from it. It seems you had crawled there. Or been moved.” Foresh sat, running his hands over the flight suit. He pulled the blaster from its holster, carefully, holding it this way and that but never by the grip, then put it back. He gave the blaster and holster to Dev. “We saw the wreck from afar. The scavengers were at it.” He shrugged: it cannot be helped.

Dev looked at the blaster in his hands, mouth agape. No ship, no R2. Just like that.

“I’m sorry, my Republic friend. It seems that you are stranded.”

[Erasmar]

Captain Willoxe watched from an observation balcony as the Lambda shuttle folded its wings and entered the hangar. He felt that this exact scene occupied at least one-third of his time as an officer in the Imperial Navy, both the Old and the New. The arriving guest, however, was atypical: not an Imperial dignitary nor an Imperial officer. He was not Imperial at all.

The shuttle settled onto the deck as its boarding ramp opened, ten black troopers filing down to create a path, five to a side. They resembled stormtroopers, only larger, more imposing. Yet armored from head to toe. Masks with death’s heads painted over the faces in dark silver. Subtle, almost not even there.

“Mercenaries,” said Lieutenant Plath. “We don’t need their scum.”

Willoxe arched an eyebrow, eyes on the shuttle ramp. “And yet the Lady utilizes them.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Every tool has its use,” said Willoxe. “Including listening devices, both mechanical and,” glancing at the few ensigns standing at attention nearby, “organic.”

Plath swallowed hard. “Yessir.”

There he was. Striding down the ramp, imposing, nearly the size of his troopers yet lacking any visible armor. Dark navy uniform with crimson piping, black short cape with red lining beneath it. Black hair, ivory skin.

He stopped at the foot of the ramp and looked directly up at Willoxe. One nodded to the other. The mercenary continued walking, trailed by his bodyguards. Willoxe left the balcony, trailed by Plath and aides.

Domeskus Pall, mercenary-general of the Harx Legion, had arrived.

* * *

“Welcome aboard the Virulence, General Pall,” said Willoxe. He led him into the officer’s briefing chamber. Plath followed. Bodyguards and aides remained in the corridor.

“The Lady requested that I speak with you,” said Pall, not sitting, not breaking eye contact with Willoxe. He spoke slowly, evenly. Dispassionately. “You, and only you.”

“The lieutenant is already privy to this knowledge,” said Willoxe.

Pall did nothing.

Willoxe decided he would not sit either. He pressed a key on the conference table and the door to the room sealed quietly behind them. “We surmise that Skywalker is here.”

“You surmise.”

“Based on intercepted rebel communications.”

“Encrypted.”

“The code-word for ‘Luke’ was confirmed.”

Pall stood lifeless and silent. Then his eyes narrowed. “I will have needs.”

“The Virulence, its flotilla, and its resources are at your disposal.”

“I will use them. Captain.” Pall turned for the door, which opened at his approach.

“General?” said Willoxe. “Does this supercede the original mission for Demeter? I have already committed a full brigade to the search--”

“I do this as a favor earned by the Lady. No more. And no less,” said Pall. “You have your orders, captain.” And he was gone.

* * *

Plath exhaled audibly when the door closed again. Willoxe had wanted to do the same. Hearing it from his XO, he realized how unseemly that would have been. Unbecoming, really.

“What do we do now, sir?”

“We continue with the mission as planned,” said Willoxe, looking at the door. “If Pall has need of us, he will only tell us in the moment, that much I’m sure of. Is there an update?”

“Not yet, sir,” said Plath. “They are still tracing signal sources for the relic. It is only a matter of time.”

“Very well,” said Willoxe. “I will be in my quarters. Carry on.”