For the sake of preservation, I will be republishing/reuploading lost Star Wars content to my blog. There are other sites out there that already do this, but I'm always paranoid of data being lost, so... what's one more resource?
THE IMPERIAL WARLORDS: DESPOILERS OF AN EMPIRE
By Abel G. Pena and Daniel Wallace
The Sick Genius of Warlord Zsinj (~0-4 Years After Endor)
Of all the post-Endor warlords, Zsinj controlled the greatest number of star systems. Had he not overplayed his hand and warred against the galaxy, his kingdom might have coexisted alongside the New Republic and the Empire.
The son of a Fondorian mechanic, Zsinj bore no first name, per the traditions of his father’s people. But he was also the son and pupil of “Ace of the Spacelanes” Mme. Maarisa Zsinj—a Chandrila native and admiral in the Republic Outland Regions Security Force. After attending the Prefsbelt IV naval academy, young Zsinj served competently enough under his mother during the Clone Wars. But with the coming of the Empire, he catapulted through the naval hierarchy. Indeed, as males seemed to swell the higher military echelons irrespective of experience, Mme. Zsinj was relegated to less and less important duties until finally her Venator-class Star Destroyer Retaliation was recalled for decommissioning. Her son, eager to prove himself a “great warrior” then jumped at the opportunity, volunteering to take command of her vessel.
There was only one problem. Mme. Zsinj refused. Blasting the Empire as corrupt, she announced her intention to take the Retaliation and prey on government ships. The Ace of the Spacelanes had turned pirate, and the task of neutralizing her fell to the individual most familiar with her tactics. Young Zsinj was promised the Victory-class Star Destroyer Iron Fist — also slated for retirement — if he hunted down the traitor. Though torn, he ultimately decided to put his emotions aside and vowed to take his mother down. The ensuing ferocious campaign earned Captain Zsinj the title of first Warlord of the Empire…as well as the distinction of matricide. Mme. Zsinj’s admiralty was retroactively stripped and her Imperial service record expunged. Whether her son felt any remorse was unclear, though this apparently marked the beginning of the absurdist turn his mind took regarding the nature of the universe, a view which would only grow more perverse with time, and he reportedly adopted a lifelong disdain for all things Chandrilan.
But that was only the beginning. When Zsinj blockaded the planet Dathomir shortly after the Battle of Yavin in order to prevent its Force-using witches from spreading their dark side chaos, Emperor Palpatine — grateful to Zsinj for bottling up a potential threat to his rule — gave him his command rank of admiral in addition to the Super Star Destroyer Brawl. On top of that, he soon became the high admiral of the Crimson Command, a fleet of Victory-class Star Destroyers, and achieved the position of grand moff, assuming total domination of the Quellii Oversector, a vast wedge of the territories in the galactic northern quadrant. All the while, Zsinj cultivated the obtuse persona of a mustachioed and portly buffoon, a charade with which he lured his political and military enemies into lowering their guards before destroying them.
It was Zsinj who involuntarily popularized the epithet “Warlord” that became common in reference to Imperial renegades. In the immediate upheaval following the Battle of Endor, Zsinj never denied his loyalty to the Empire Proper—a lesson seemingly learned from the bombastic politic denunciation of his proud mother. Yet he set up base on the planet Serenno, began referring to himself first and foremost by his title of Warlord of the Empire and symbolically renamed his Super Star Destroyer Iron Fist after his old ship, locking down Quellii Oversector with staggering viciousness and success. At the height of his power, Zsinj had gained control over a mammoth area of the known galaxy, absorbing the provinces of rivals Grand Moff Nigel Nivers and Admiral Terrinald Screed, and challenging the authority of the burgeoning New Republic and collapsing Empire alike. But approximately four years after Endor, when he decided to expand his territory by striking at New Republic colonies on New Alderaan and Selacron, General Han Solo led a fleet to oppose him. In addition, the members of Wraith Squadron—a joint commando and starfighter unit—threw a hydrospanner into the warlord’s warped plots, which included an attempt on the life of the Chandrila-born New Republic Chief of State, Mon Mothma.
At the Battle of Selaggis, Zsinj hoodwinked the New Republic into believing he had died by presenting the wreckage of a ruined Super Star Destroyer (the Razor’s Kiss) as that of the Iron Fist. General Solo, however, caught up with Zsinj at the Dathomir stardocks and obliterated both the warlord and his flagship with a pair of the Millennium Falcon’s well-aimed Arakyd concussion missiles. The most dangerous of the Imperial warlords was at last put down. He died not unlike the audacious mother he slew: a traitor to his government yet an unfaltering believer in his cause — his own personal glory. Indeed, as Zsinj faced down death, audio recordings from the Falcon attest the warlord’s faint and final word was the equivalent of his very first: “Mama.”
Moff Kentor Sarne and the DarkStryder Threat (~0-4 Years After Endor)
It is said that a man can’t be certain just what he’s capable of until confronted with the given situation. When sent on an Imperial Survey Corps mission with a scouting team into the mysterious Kathol Outback, a young Lieutenant Kentor Sarne proved capable of murder in order to keep a secret that would become his unending obsession: the power of DarkStryder.
The monstrous centipedal Force-sensitive creature Sarne christened DarkStryder—its true name was unpronounceable—was a highly intelligent bio-construct. A clone/supercomputer hybrid, it was created by and in the image of an advanced, primeval race known as the Kathol: biotech scientists who DarkStryder at times called “the Old Ones.” Tasked as the Kathols’ caretaker after they had locked their life-energies into a “Lifewell” device to escape the Rift Disaster cataclysm, DarkStryder in time decided instead to find a way off the ravaged planet and indulge in its newfound existence. The being studied its masters’ biotechnology and learned to tap into their stored energies to create debilitating Force-imbued weaponry. Yet it could not fully replicate their unique form of hyperspace travel by way of their “launch gates.”
Having enlisted in the Imperial military mere years into its formation, Lieutenant Sarne had already proven himself a resourceful, true believer in the New Order when he stumbled upon the ages-old DarkStryder. Seeing in one another the means of achieving a future dominated by his or its own will, the ambitious Imperial and sinister serpentine construct came to an accord. In exchange for DarkStryder’s deadly modules, Sarne would give the beast the means to escape its imprisonment on the planet.
After testing the alien artillery on his own colleagues, Sarne returned the lone survivor of the Kathol survey team. He continued to serve the Emperor faithfully and was consequently among the elect to serve in the 15th Deep Core Reserve Fleet as captain of the Corellian Corvette
Sarne’s peculiar combination of paranoia, ruthlessness, and inherent insecurity saw him rapidly promoted, and success served to inflate his sense of self-importance. Hence, approximately a decade after his discovery of DarkStryder, Sarne used his political clout to acquire an appointment as moff of the remote Kathol sector and make good on his promise to DarkStryder.
Except Sarne had no actual intention of liberating the eerie alien-thing. Bordering Wild Space, there was very little opportunity for civilized justice in Kathol sector, and Moff Sarne ruled accordingly. While securing a stranglehold on the region, Sarne made excursions out to DarkStryder, occasionally evoking its fury (as when it left his face disfigured from a lightning module’s crawling scar). But by presenting the bio-construct with sublight-capable ships, promising it Force-sensitive captives for “study” and outright lying, he procured thousands of samples of its potent devices over the next decade. Eager though the moff was to unlock the technology’s mysteries, though, his researchers could not duplicate DarkStryder’s occult science.
With the loss of the Emperor, a disillusioned Sarne cut ties with the Empire, blaming Palpatine’s overconfidence for the dying of a dynasty that might have lasted eons. Stepping up his use of DarkStryder machinery, he began making incursions into the Minos Cluster and wiping out whole New Republic armies in seemingly inexplicable reversals of fortune. Though the New Republic was busy in a monumental campaign against Warlord Zsinj, these phenomenal turns of tide in battle were enough to induce a small taskforce to storm the Kathol sector capital and attempt to neutralize the rogue Imperial. The devious moff led them on a wild mynock-chase to the dazzling Kathol Rift — a spatial anomaly resulting from a hyperspace-warping explosion by one of the Old Ones’ seismic launch gates — before the final showdown on and above the DarkStryder planet itself. With Sarne and the New Republic at the fore of the bedlam that became known as the Battle of Kathol System, every major force in the sector, from the Qektoth Federation to the Skandrei Bandits to the mysterious Aing-Tii monks, brought their personal grudges with one another to full destructive bloom.
Ultimately, however, the DarkStryder creature was eradicated when the pursuing New Republic taskforce freed the life-energies of the aboriginal Kathol from the Lifewell, ripping apart the bio-construct connected to the machine in a backlash of emancipated power. Sarne, meanwhile, nearly escaped in his Imperial Star Destroyer Bastion when he fell victim to the very technology he so prized. Jessa Dajus, a Force-sensitive Imperial officer whom Sarne had tortured in preparation for proffer to DarkStryder, turned one of the bio-engineered being’s firespray modules on her tormentor, and incinerated him in a consuming torrent of green alien flames.
The Sadistic Reign of Prince-Admiral Delak Krennel (~0.5-5.5 Years After Endor)
For Delak Krennel, violence was an exquisitely effective, practical means toward attaining a desired end. His introduction to its virtues came during his childhood, when he burned down alien farmlands with his intolerant father on Corulag. Those were some of the happiest times of his life. Then, in his Imperial Academy days at Prefsbelt IV, competing in the unarmed combat arena, his brutality earned him accolades as the intramural champion. But once he began active service, Krennel’s vicious tendencies did not go over well with his refined superior, Grand Admiral Rufaan Tigellinus. He was exiled in disgrace to the backwater Unknown Regions to vex Admiral Thrawn (whom Tigellinus also had managed to have expelled there). It was early in his tour under this art-loving nonhuman, whom Krennel regarded a pushover, that he comprehended the true relevance of pain.
Thrawn and Krennel were a mismatch if there ever was one. Where the red-eyed Chiss’ quick mind always resorted to violence of a psychological sort, Krennel’s abuse was considerably more traditional. Though captain of the Star Destroyer Reckoning, he bristled at having to take orders from a nonhuman. What’s more, merely being in the Unknown Regions—which seemed to him a veritable parade of disturbing encounters with bizarre organisms—made Krennel’s skin crawl. Unable to take out his frustrations on Thrawn, he consistently escalated his savagery in his interactions with alien populations and prisoners. But the last straw proved to be when Krennel raised a force pike to pulverize Thrawn’s favorite art piece, in ridicule of his commander’s method of supposedly extrapolating species’ tactical weaknesses per study of their artworks. In that split second, Thrawn signaled to his silent Noghri Death Commando who drew a kaysa sickle and unceremoniously cleaved Krennel’s offending appendage at the elbow. As vital fluids poured from each half of his severed arm, Krennel, always the bully and never the bullied, marveled at the effective power of this single, simple lesson. Alongside a newfound fear and respect for the militant commander, one epiphanic thought crystallized in Krennel’s brain—pain is good.
Krennel replaced the sundered limb with an “improved” mechanical prosthetic and tamped down his aggression, though only enough to avoid Thrawn’s wrath. He was eventually written off by Thrawn as a savage without reform, however, and ordered back to Imperial Center to face punishment from Emperor Palpatine himself. Luckily, though, when Krennel returned to the Empire it was one without an Emperor.
Instead of having his career ruined, Krennel received a promotion to admiral in the wake of the slaughter at Endor. Thereafter, Krennel used the opportunity to full advantage, declaring loyalty to the Empire only to apparently murder Imperial regent Sate Pestage and take the dozen worlds of the Ciutric Hegemony for his own. He also relocated prisoners from the infamous Lusankya asylum, including famed Rebellion General Jan Dodonna, to within the boundaries of his own principality.
For years, Krennel ruled as the crown “prince-admiral” of Ciutric, expanding his influence to nearby sectors by means of his barbarous methods, running other warlords like Gaen Drommel and Walang Grazz out of business. But following Thrawn’s return to known space and his ensuing defeat, the New Republic made a push to eliminate the remaining Imperial warlords. As the big cheese after Zsinj, Krennel was first on the list. Touting his domain “human-friendly,” the prince-admiral used the media to spin-doctor xenophobic ideals into an effective political tool against the New Republic’s encroachment, but a head-to-head confrontation proved inevitable. At the Battle of Ciutric, Admiral Gial Ackbar led an assault on Krennel’s throneworld, ending in the liberation of General Dodonna and the death of the prince-admiral when a missile hurtled into the Reckoning’s command tower viewport, showering Krennel in super-accelerated transparisteel. Krennel’s only perverse consolation in the moments before the warhead detonated was perhaps only how blasted much it hurt.
Grand Moff Ardus Kaine and the Pentastar Alignment of Powers (~0-6 Years After Endor)
Since his childhood, Grand Moff Ardus Kaine dreamed of ruling a New Galactic Empire. Yet the very fount that birthed this outsized ambition simultaneously sowed the seeds of his crippling self-doubt and inconsequential fizzle.
Native to Sartinaynian—an Outer Rim world settled by humans opposed to alien equality — Ardus was born to a father with a drive that exceeded his abilities. Vilardo Kaine was a moderately successful trader and unapologetic speciesist that longed for prestige and political influence. Foisting all his aspirations on his son, he insisted it was his boy’s duty to reach the highest echelon of galactic power. Ardus himself was prone to cooperation rather than self-aggrandizement and wasn’t particularly hateful of nonhumans, but he worked hard to embrace his father’s values. Intelligent and a gifted rhetorician, he was already spiritedly ascending the Republic’s hierarchy when Vilardo was killed by Iridium pirates in a surprise attack.
Kaine served as a government functionary since the final days of the Old Republic, and bereaved by his father’s untimely passing, he bought into the Emperor’s inspiring vision of a New Order hook, line and sinker. He smoothed the galaxy’s transition to Imperial law by implementing his talents for organization and oratory, solidifying military support for Palpatine and spearheading the overhaul of the Commission for the Protection of the Republic into COMPNOR, the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order — an organization renowned for its anti-alien bigotry and political zealotry—something he thought would’ve made his father proud.
For his efforts, Palpatine rewarded Kaine by making him a moff of the Braxant sector. But that wasn’t all. After Wilhuff Tarkin perished in the explosion of the first Death Star, Kaine took his place as grand moff of Oversector Outer, containing the enormous Outer Rim Territories. Kaine, who shared Tarkin’s predatory sharpness and cold formality, seemed a fitting choice. Oddly, however, he viewed his promotion as a condemnation. His true goal had always been an appointment in the Core Worlds, where he could bend the Emperor’s ear and be a player in the epicenter of galactic politics—something even that blackguard Ennix Devian had accomplished. Ardus could almost hear his father’s sigh of disappointment from beyond the Great Void. Nevertheless, the posting did come with its own perks, including the two dozen Star Destroyers of Scourge Squadron and Kaine’s new command ship, the magnificent Super Star Destroyer Reaper. With only a hint of resentment, Kaine accepted the advancement, moving the headquarters of Oversector Outer to Entralla, closer to his homeworld.
Following the Emperor’s fatality at Endor, Kaine was shocked at the almost total collapse of the Imperial chain of command. Cutting his losses, he buckled down, isolating a satrapy of his own—in a northern quadrant of the galaxy—from the pandemonium of treason and incompetence. This portion of the Outer Rim that Kaine and his corporate partners managed to unite became known as the Pentastar Alignment of Powers. A distorted mirror of Palpatine’s Empire, it adhered strictly to the ethos of the New Order, with his business associates insisting on the continued exploitation of alien slave labor and Kaine consolidating redundant Imperial organizations into a scrupulously efficient machine.
This included the Alignment’s two most feared branches, Judgment and Enforcement. After Kaine granted refuge to High Inquisitor Jerec, the darksider brought many of his compeers with him to form the Great InQuestors of Judgment, who “inquired” (mostly through interrogations) into the populace’s adherence to Alignment decrees. The latter branch, on the other hand, consisted of law enforcement, and the Pentastar Patrol—the so-called embodiment of “justice, fairness and the galactic way” — made up its largest part, becoming the most ubiquitous symbol of the Alignment’s authority. Kaine’s origins and carefully crafted rhetoric led many to believe that he disdained the weak, pro-alien policies of the Old Republic, but nonhumans actually made up a sizable portion of the Pentastar Patrol’s ranks, betraying the grand moff’s pragmatism and genuine indifference toward the prejudice precepts of High Human Culture.
In forming the Alignment, Kaine’s motives were immediately under suspicion, for the better and worse. When his partners openly questioned whether he had designs on becoming the new Galactic Emperor, the grand moff judiciously answered, “I have no desire for such a title, nor the position” — disillusioning allies like Grand Admiral Octavian Grant who believed his friend was truly the best human for the job. The truth was Kaine wanted to rule the galaxy…but only because his father had driven the suggestion like a sonic drill into his brain for as far back as he could remember.
For the truth Kaine admitted not to a soul, not even his own…was that he was afraid.
Within the Alignment, he was a sando aqua monster in a small pond, Emperor in fact if not in name. And he feared losing everything which he had built, on the merit of his strengths, on a fool’s gambit for the glory of a dead patriarch: his father and Palpatine alike. In internal conflict, Kaine thus demurred, claiming willingness to commit his forces only to a worthy successor to the Emperor. So as warlord after warlord overreached or imploded, Kaine waited and waited, until he was almost the last one standing and certainly the one with the most territory. And then, he waited some more — never seizing his best chance at legitimizing his claim as heir to the Empire by coming to the rescue of Coruscant even as it fell to the New Republic.
Alas, Kaine’s reluctance became his ruin when Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from exile in the Unknown Regions. The grand moff’s supporters and Pentastar Patrol officers called his bluff, pressuring Kaine to relinquish control of Alignment forces to the red-eyed alien luminary whom they viewed as the Empire’s salvation — not just because of his tactical prowess and victories but because many Pentastar Patrol officers were themselves aliens. Angered at being shoved aside during Thrawn’s campaign, Kaine then eagerly joined the resurrected Emperor for a chance to storm New Republic forces on Coruscant at last. Instead, though, he fell prey to an elaborate deception during the Operation Shadow Hand campaign. Believing the retired Grand Admiral Grant was returning to fight for the Pentastar Alignment, Kaine was lured into the open in his private shuttle. He died in pitched battle above Palanhi with New Republic E-wings, echoing the ambush that did in his malcontented father. The grand moff’s kingdom and Super Star Destroyer subsequently became part of the reformed Imperial Remnant under Admiral Gilad Pellaeon.
Superior General Sander Delvardus in Love (~0-8 Years After Endor)
Superior General Delvardus would have traded his entire empire for the love of one woman.
Although married at an early age to an heiress of the influential Tarkin family of Eriadu, Sander Delvardus gained a reputation as the kind of Imperial officer with a lady in every port. By the time he became captain of the Star Destroyer Brilliant, he had fallen hard for a refugee aid worker, Seledra-Zin, on Clak’dor VII. Just to be near her, Delvardus successfully lobbied to become the naval overseer of the Rimma Trade Route under Grand Moff Ardus Kaine so his fleet could stage from Clak’dor.
By all accounts his relationship with his mistress was stormy and, during one argument, he allegedly struck her with a dynamic-hammer, knocking her into a coma. Now an admiral, Delvardus arranged for the installation of a suspended-animation casket in his quarters aboard the Brilliant, guilt-stricken and desperate to restore his love to health.
After the Battle of Endor—with his concern over his mistress’ condition now a full-blown obsession—Delvardus split from Kaine and followed the examples of Harrsk and the Teradocs, laying claim to many worlds on or near the Rimma and Hydian Way in what he proclaimed the Eriadu Authority. His acquisition of a huge ground force of AT-ATs and other walkers from Vondarc caused him to invent the impressive title “Superior General” for himself, a move that irritated the army officers serving under his command, especially the no-nonsense General Maximilian Veers. Delvardus spent years seizing planets where new medical technologies might be found, driven by determination and remorse, at the same time fending off his foremost rival Moff Utoxx Prentioch. But when nothing seemed to revitalize his beloved, he started conquering toward Coruscant and thereupon lost the support of Eriadu’s prominent ruling families. Then, after suffering a string of defeats at the hands of New Republic commanders, including the loss of his hulking battlecruiser Thalassa, he was pushed away completely from the Rimma and to the Deep Core, where he maintained a capital on the world Kampe as the other surviving warlords drew him into a war of attrition.
All seemed lost for the penitent warlord. Yet it was in the Deep Core that the Omnipotent Battle Leader—Emperor Palpatine, who had himself seemingly come back from death—promised Delvardus the means of bringing Seledra-Zin out of her coma in exchange for the superior general’s allegiance.
Desperate, Delvardus agreed. But to his dismay, after the Imperial re-conquest of Coruscant, his fellow warlords fell upon one another once more. Delvardus became convinced that only a devastating tool could impart to him the strength he needed to bring all his rivals to heel. Using nearly every credit in his empire, he finished construction on the Super Star Destroyer Night Hammer—rumored to describe the very circumstances that plunged his beloved into unconsciousness—and installed a sterile med chamber for his dormant mistress in the vessel’s prow.
Tragically, Delvardus was never able to see his plan through to fruition. Recognizing a possibility to end the fighting, he agreed to peace talks with twelve other warlords, and died along with them at the hands of Admiral Natasi Daala. Daala then took the Night Hammer for her own (renaming it the Knight Hammer), as well as commandeering the services of Delvardus’ second-in-command, Colonel Ivan Cronus. Delvardus’ Super Star Destroyer later disintegrated inside the gas giant Yavin during Daala’s attack on Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi academy, taking Delvardus’ sleeping love to her permanent grave.
The Madness of Supreme Warlord Blitzer Harrsk (~0-8 Years After Endor)
Prior to the Battle of Endor, Blitzer Harrsk was one of the Imperial Navy's brightest stars and most respected military minds. Never did anyone expect that doing a friend a favor would turn him into a madman.
Commanding the Star Destroyer Whirlwind, he held sway over the Arrowhead, that portion of the galactic “Slice” region falling within the Core Worlds. However, at the urging of his friend Admiral Firmus Piett of the Super Star Destroyer Executor, Harrsk attached his Arrowhead Command to Darth Vader's feared Death Squadron to strengthen the Emperor's trap at Endor. Nonetheless, the Rebels gained the upper hand in the fray and an exploding console sent a durasteel chunk stabbing through his left eye and the left frontal lobe of his brain. With Harrsk temporarily incapacitated, his second-in-command Bolla Thoath agreed to follow Captain Pellaeon's orders that the Imperial fleet flee Endor and regroup at Annaj.
Within the hour, Harrsk had regained consciousness in a bacta tank, though he was forever a changed man. Blind in the pierced eye with his face half melted, he was suddenly cruel to his subordinates and megalomaniacal in the extreme. He argued and raved against Pellaeon and others until, fed up, he departed with a fleet loyal to him for the hidden Imperial systems in the nearly-unnavigable Deep Galactic Core—a move that was considered just shy of insane. But such was Harrsk's fame for brilliance that many followed him, including Captain Bolla Thoath. Indeed, Harrsk found a safe path through the hazardously dense region of space and commandeered an instant empire, which he dubbed Zero Command, becoming the first of the post-Endor Imperial warlords. Other self-proclaimed warlords soon followed suit, but Harrsk—who had replaced his slagged eye with a synthetic droid optical sensor—kept an edge thanks to his reputation, which lead to the acquisition of fleet elements from Imperials hoping to cast their lot with the ultimate victor. That included the forces formerly under the command of the late Grand Admiral Batch, assassinated by his own mutinous crew.
Captain Thoath, however, noticed just how erratic his commander's decision-making process was becoming. He attacked his rivals without rhyme or reason, and at times it was only Thoath's last-minute intervention that saved them from a crushing defeat. Furthermore, Harrsk's reliance on the Deep Core seemed to the captain to ultimately prove his undoing. It was from here that a resurrected Darth Sidious surreptitiously planned a titanic offensive against the New Republic, and when the Omnipotent Battle Leader revealed himself, the newly-anointed Supreme Warlord Harrsk immediately committed to him—apparently not completely remembering or realizing the Emperor was supposed to be dead, much to Thoath's dismay. When Palpatine absorbed Harrsk's fringe kingdom, much of his military perished in the battles that followed. Then, after the detonation of the reborn Emperor's throneworld Byss, Harrsk restored what power he could, but the Deep Core soon erupted in full-scale “warlord wars.”
Supreme Warlord Harrsk later forced Admiral Daala to lead his fleet against High Admiral Treuten Teradoc, but she betrayed him and arranged for all thirteen Deep Core warlords to meet for a peace conference on the asteroid Tsoss Beacon. When none of the participants could put aside their bickering, Daala used poison gas to exterminate them all, including Harrsk.
Ironically, however, many of the vital centers in Harrsk's brain necessary for the gas to take effect had already been destroyed during his accident at the Battle of Endor. Leaving the other warlords' carcasses to fester, a disoriented Harrsk escaped the would-be tomb, determined to revenge himself on Daala. The warlord wasn't exactly ungrateful, either, seeing as how Daala had eliminated his chief competition—and believing him already dead, she would never see him coming.
But vengeance was not to be. When Harrsk boarded his TIE shuttle, piloted by Thoath, he told his surprised subordinate of his narrow escape of Daala's treachery. Unsure if Harrsk had finally gone utterly stark raving mad or was simply unkillable, Thoath, who had often contemplated the mutiny of Grand Admiral Batch's crew, suddenly took courage from Daala's action and took matters into his own hands to end the madness of Supreme Warlord Harrsk once and for all. He abruptly sent the shuttle into a tailspin, grappling with the warlord as Harrsk fought to wrest control of the transport now spiraling inexorably toward the asteroid below, his yellow optical eye flashing incandescent with rage. But as the two men thrashed, a very distant part of Harrsk's devastated brain vaguely realized that Captain Thoath in fact couldn't be here—for he recalled watching Thoath die in the same explosion that had claimed his own sanity at the Battle of Endor...
And in that moment, as the terrible truth dawned on him, the once-genius admiral—who had been one of the most admired minds in the Imperial military... who had become the madman Harrsk/Thoath—slammed the TIE shuttle into the asteroid, suicidally annihilating them both.
The Brothers Teradoc and the Crimson Command (~0-9 Years After Endor)
Tactically brilliant, the brothers Teradoc were bitter rivals almost from the moment they were born. One considered himself a fearless combatant, the other a holochess master moving pieces around the dejarik board. In reality, their fraternal animosity turned them both into pawns of others’ machinations.
Treuten and Kosh Teradoc, born a year apart into a hardscrabble family on Er’Kit, joined the Imperial Navy to live out their boyhood dreams of playing at Piethet Brighteyes and the raiders of the Ryloth Ark—the only time they’d ever really gotten along. Although poor physical specimens, the Teradocs excelled at naval theory and worked fanatically to outperform one another in the Corulag Academy. This one-upmanship paid off when they achieved the rank of captain almost simultaneously, part of a Victory-class Star Destroyer rapid-response taskforce under High Admiral Zsinj, assigned to quell threats in the Quelii Oversector. Part of the reason for their fast promotion was that the 100 VSDs of the “Crimson Command” were old and small, and hull-plated with distinctive red havod alloy instead of traditional, battleship-gray doonium. These puny “pink” antiques did not match the masculine ideal of most young Imperial officers; in their sibling rivalry, however, Treuten and Kosh didn’t care—until, that is, Treuten was promoted to high admiral over his younger brother and took command of the fleet. The situation became intolerable for Kosh as the older Teradoc took every opportunity to rub it in his face—thus goading Kosh into clutching an admiralty of his own aboard a bigger, more modern Imperial II-class Star Destroyer, Lancet, and scorning his big brother’s outdated girly boats.
As neither of the Teradocs was present at the Endor debacle, both took a cue from the rash of Imperials going renegade and acted immediately—mostly in fear of his near relation getting the better of him. Perhaps the most reckless was Kosh, who, with little to lose, followed the example of the wily Admiral Harrsk and hastily struck out for the perilous promise of the Deep Core. Treuten, on the other hand, offered several frightened Imperial planets guaranteed protection by the Crimson Command in exchange for their loyalty. With their planetary militias added to his own might, Treuten put Grand Moff Ambris Selit under house arrest and attracted still more worlds until he had amassed a good-sized Mid-Rim kingdom in the Greater Maldrood Sector—which he knew Kosh would envy with every atom of his being.
But Kosh did well himself. Fighting for his very survival amongst the ludicrously clustered stars, plasma-writhing leviathans like colossal deities of war, he became more introspective, disciplined and dedicated to the art of warfare than ever. Alternately allying with and against Harrsk, Kosh set up a miniature empire around the Deep Core, constantly fighting off and absorbing opposing Imperial contenders. His wild success filled Kosh with immense arrogance, laying claim to the rank of high admiral, and instead of aspiring to comparison with a mere pirate, as in the days of his youth, the golden-haired conqueror now likened himself to the the near-invincible warlords Mandalore the First or Zakrinand Minus of the Republic’s early Unification Wars: ruling by brute strength and providence.
By comparison, Treuten stayed far from combat, sending other ships of the Crimson Command to die in his place in hit-and-run tactics, stealing the spectacular treasure stockpile of Space Station Scardia and growing fat from too much time spent in his ship’s galley. Yet, he viewed his holdings as evidence that he was a charming, daring rogue and took to brandishing an obsolete cutlass in imitation of the legendary raider Piethet Brighteyes while striding the bridge of his flagship 13X. Four years after Endor, however, he received a reality check when he barged into a fight between the New Republic and the Empire over the scraps of Warlord Zsinj’s territory, and made himself such an irritant that both governments vowed to squash him. Suddenly, Treuten had to beg for help from the vast new military force his little brother had accumulated.
After smugly coming to Treuten’s rescue, Kosh consolidated their Deep Core and Mid-Rim territories under the Federated Teradoc Union, a sizable kingdom which they kept expanding by conquering each toward the other. At one point, their alliance almost fell apart as the coquettish moff-turned-pirate Leonia Tavira played the covetous brothers against one another. Yet, they managed to curb their jealousies long enough to pledge allegiance to the shadowy Omnipotent Battle Leader on the throneworld of Byss. All-out war with the New Republic broke out soon after.
Treuten fared badly during this conflict—orchestrated by the reincarnated Emperor Palpatine — and though he held on to most of his Crimson Command, a disgusted Kosh ordered his ineffectual brother and his battered fleet to the Deep Core while he himself attempted to preserve their Mid-Rim holdings. However, now with Vice-Admiral Pellaeon in charge of his ships — and wishing to prove himself to his runt sibling — Treuten prepared a new campaign to unseat the Teradocs’ chief Deep Core adversary, the increasingly insane Supreme Warlord Harrsk. What he didn’t count on, though, was Pellaeon’s impatience for petty feuds, and the vice-admiral’s treasonous alliance instead with Admiral Daala…who asphyxiated the principal Deep Core warlords on poison gas, including Treuten, at the conclusion of a failed round of peace talks and claimed their assets.
Treuten’s death dealt a profound blow to Kosh, who now saw all their years of bitter squabbling for what it was. He held onto a reduced Greater Maldrood for another year until succumbing to sentimentality and the temptation of retirement. New Republic Intelligence’s agents, the Wraiths, tricked Kosh into accepting a seemingly priceless artifact, to add to Treuten’s treasure hoard, originating from the brothers’ childhood infatuation: the fabled plunder of the Palace of Piethet Brighteyes. Sadly, in truth this bejeweled antiquity was a specially dressed bomb. And so finally the last brother Teradoc joined his departed sibling in fraternal tranquility.
Supreme Commander Ennix Devian and the Hardliners (~0-9 Years After Endor)
Reviled as a thug who wielded his hyper-conservative values like a deadly club, Ennix Devian himself claimed to be but a loyal soldier simply intent on returning the Empire to its days of misogynistic, anti-alien glory under Palpatine. Yet, while veiling himself in humility, his insatiable hunger for absolute dominion bred his downfall.
In his youth, the blond and blue-eyed killer was believed to have grown up in the alien slums of Abregado-Rae before joining the Commission for the Protection of the Republic—a patriotic organization sponsored by Palpatine while still Supreme Chancellor—where he acquired a reputation for harassing his less dedicated peers. When the group evolved to become the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order, or COMPNOR, under the Galactic Empire, it was just a short jump for Devian to its militarized arm, the Imperial Security Bureau. There Devian’s flair for brutally ferreting out of any deficiency of jingoism disgusted party founder Ardus Kaine, beginning a lifelong feud. However, his rabid behavior also garnered party leader Crueya Vandron’s approval … and ultimately Palpatine’s personal notice.
Devian appertained to a rare elite that admitted Admiral Screed, Advisor Doriana and Moff Trachta: Imperials who, while not Force-sensitive, were extremely close to the Emperor. Assigned to Vader for “refinement,” Devian was thrown into the deep end, compelled to spar with darksiders such as Antinnis Tremayne. It was during these duels that Vader robbed Devian’s sight from his right eye, cybernetically replacing it as was the Sith Lord’s cathartic predilection. Still, Devian held his own, coming to favor a Falleen bladed-trident in combat. Yet the cruelest trial to which Vader put him was dropping the would-be assassin unarmed on Honoghr, siccing a hunting party of Noghri Death Commandos after him—a test typically reserved only for Vader’s most promising apprentices, such as the firebrand Tao or codename: Starkiller.
Amazingly, Devian survived, slaying most of the alien killing machines, and Vader grudgingly acknowledged to Darth Sidious that the man was ready. Palpatine dubbed Devian his Kaarenth Impaler— after the unyieldingly faithful protectors of the extinct Paecian Empire — deploying the butcher after stormtrooper deserters, military defectors to the Rebel Alliance, Lusankya prisoners and escapees beyond rehabilitation or anyone the Emperor perceived as betraying their oath to him. With the assistance of his old COMPNOR compatriot Bernard Vota, he also setup a secret storehouse on the lifeless planetoid RZ7-6113-23. Rerouting and stashing weapons and ships there over the years, scheduled for decommission or destruction, Devian repaired and maintained them, telling himself his actions were a failsafe against some catastrophe — for his master’s sake, of course.
When Palpatine and Vader died at Endor, Devian retreated to the RZ7-6113-23 base on the galactic outskirts, ringed by disloyal Imperials like Drommel, Krennel and Zsinj. But the one that most got under his skin was Grand Moff Ardus Kaine. The pompous fop had always questioned Devian’s sincere allegiance to Palpatine, while the blond enforcer likewise doubted the Sartinaynian’s honest commitment to the High Human Culture principles of COMPNOR. Bordered by all these self-serving traitors, Devian initiated a clandestine crusade, the Kaarenth Dissension: hardliners dedicated to “the sacred Restoration of the True Empire of Palpatine.”
Devian’s initial forays into warlordism were audacious if discrete. One of his coups of apparatus procurement were two incomplete types of habitation sphere known as worldcrafts being built in Coruscant’s orbit. One of these hyperspace-capable artificial planetoids, in fact, had been intended as a gift for Devian from Palpatine himself, in recognition of his merciless service. (The other, to Devian’s delight, had been intended for Kaine.) The cost of completing them, however, would’ve proven exorbitant. So Devian rerouted them to opposite ends of the galaxy: one to the Moddell sector and the other to the Spawn Nebula.
Given the unfinished worldcrafts’ similarity in appearance to Death Stars, he mocked one of these up to bamboozle Rebel forces with a sophisticated feint at their temporary Alliance of Free Planets capital on Endor. Though the pseudo-battle station was destroyed (with the help of a Star Tours spaceliner, no less), the diversion allowed Dissension forces to stealthily hijack countless warships from neighboring Alliance shipyards. Meanwhile, the second habitation sphere remained hidden, repurposed into a repair facility and shipyard hub. With the fall of Grand Moff Nivers, Zsinj and others to the New Republic, Devian collected these warlords’ castoffs to cultivate another Dissension fleet secluded in the Spawn Nebula.
For all his furtive planning, however, Devian never anticipated the resurrection of the master whose legacy he was supposedly upholding. When he heard the rumors of the mysterious Omnipotent Battle Leader and saw the Imperial factions reunited, he couldn’t believe the Emperor was reborn — and, indeed, he chose not to. Instead, Devian took advantage of the chaos, as the warlords reverted to their old hostilities almost immediately. This included aligning himself with his old fanatical comrades, COMPNOR and the Imperial Security Bureau, many of which had already joined his cause when Kaine’s Pentastar Alignment made the decision to merge their division with their despicable competitors, Imperial Intelligence. Among these recruits was the silver-tongued Commander Meres Ulcane, whom Devian charged with fanning the enmity of the Outer Rim’s nonhumans against the New Republic.
Kiara Schmong was one of these dim-witted Sullustan turncoats, helping the Dissension seize heavy ion cannon technology—based on the Separatist superweapon Malevolence—from the laboratories of the Federated Teradoc Union and providing Devian with New Republic E-wings that would help lure Grand Moff Kaine to his satisfactory demise. Arming many of his ships with this firepower, Devian turned the ion technology against Imperial and New Republic targets alike. But the Kaarenth Dissension suffered a setback when an infiltration team armed with unstable illerium havocked the worldcraft in the Spawn Nebula along with much of the fleet, liquidating Ulcane.
But the attack actually gave Devian an idea. If he could obtain enough illerium of his own, or some other volatile substance such as zinethium or Nergon-14, he could decimate the galactic capital and its leadership, bringing down the New Republic. Leaving nothing to chance, he also enlisted the aid of a wayward darksider named Durrei, hoping he might locate an arcane artifact that possibly precipitated the supernova of the Kashi system’s sun many millennia prior — though when Durrei’s usefulness ran its course, Devian betrayed him and his lover, the cyborg Arden Lyn, to his old sparring partner High Inquisitor Tremayne.
Finally, the mysterious freelancer Nom Anor not only appropriated the explosive zinethium Devian required for his galactic capital attack but offered to pick up where Ulcane had left off, rousing the elements of the Outer Rim against the New Republic, and positioned the Imperial Ruling Council to cannibalize itself.
After the other warlords had fought themselves to pieces in civil war, their remains became united under Admiral Gilad Pellaeon and prepared to engage in a peace treaty with the New Republic. Sensing weakness, Devian — who had laid claim to Vader’s old title of Supreme Commander of the Imperial Forces — unleashed his full might, throwing the Dissension’s entire fleet at these Imperial capitulators while tricking the last of Palpatine’s Royal Guards, Kir Kanos, into delivering a payload of zinethium to the Presidential Palace’s doorstep on Coruscant. Unfortunately, the bomb plot was foiled by Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, and Pellaeon outmaneuvered the Dissension fleet, thanks to a warning by Kanos. Devian, believing his training under Vader made him a match for the former Royal Guard, engaged Kanos in combat, nearly defeating him. In a moment of arrogance, however, as Devian confessed that his loyalty to Palpatine after all these years had merely served his own ambitions, Kanos drove his blade through the hypocrite’s heart, ending the Kaarenth Dissension and Devian’s dream of supremacy over a restored Empire.
The Nihilism and Artistry of Lord Shadowspawn (~0.3-11 Years After Endor)
Who, or what, is Lord Shadowspawn? The answer to that is a riddle wrapped in a Lodi mystery inside a Rakata mind trap.
The simplest answer is that he was not one man, but many. NewsNet reporter Andor Javin of TriNebulon News, known for its flagrant sensationalism, had identified him as the Arkanian genetics master K’am’ir Zaarin in league with a warrior army of clones…including one of the dead Grand Moff Tarkin. Ironically, this outlandish tabloidism was not so far from the truth. In reality, Shadowspawn was both a persona of the dark side adept Lord Cronal — playing on his Imperial codename of “Blackhole” — and the designation he applied to the Force-sensitive generals he used as his decoys and mind-controlled puppets, a.k.a. Lord Shadow’s Pawns.
Lord Cronal’s path to enigmatic Imperial warlord exceeded a Tlönian labyrinth in its perplexity. Ripped from his mother’s chest shortly after his birth—Cronal suspected her a Dathomiri witch — the centuried sorcerer reached adulthood among the frightening warlocks of the planet Rhand in the Unknown Regions, committed to a philosophy idealizing impermanence (and therefore ultimately worshiping destruction) known as the Way of the Dark. In the spirit of Karnak the Maleficent and the pureblooded Sith of Tund, the Rhandites’ unique perspective gave these Force-sensitives access to inordinate capabilities, such as Exceptional Senectitude and the Darkshear — described as a piercing metaphysical spear of midnight black. But of these abilities, the most cherished was Darksight: the capacity to foresee viable futures and beget the fate one most favored among them—so long as it aligned with maximum annihilation.
A master of Darksight, Cronal prided himself on his view of the universe, transcending the dualistic classification of the Force into light and dark sides…though whether this entropic philosophy was an expression or the cause of his general obsession with data and information theory is difficult to say. All the same, it was this insatiable craving for knowledge, past and prospective, that led him to the enclave of the Prophets of the Dark Side, a group of Sith heretics with incomparable gifts of divination. Cronal spent many years with them on Dromund Kaas, perfecting his aptitude for Darksight and passing it on to the raven-haired Nightsister and prophetess Merili, whom he considered his greatest pupil. Inculcated by Cronal with such mania, Merili amalgamated this skill with learnings in Aing-Tii flow-walking, Dathomirian Heartshadow and her own dark side deconstructions of spacetime — superseding her guru’s own proficiency notwithstanding her being driven supertemporally insane. Cronal spared his own daughter, Sariss, this horror of the mind only to scar her far more deeply. Born of his tryst with a fellow Prophetess, Cronal shamefully deemed his offspring’s existence a tribute to creation and hence a transgression against the nihilism of the Dark. Thus he disavowed his daughter in the most heinous way possible: allowing not only the other Prophets of the Dark Side to freely engage her in congress but partaking in this revulsion himself. All the better to venerate the Way of the Dark.
Sometime before the Clone Wars, Darth Sidious rediscovered this Sith splinter group, securing its service. In due course, as Cronal clashed with the ex-Jedi Kadann for the title of Supreme Prophet, the Dark Lord summoned the Rhandite to work for him directly. Cronal became Palpatine’s “monster maker” and chief dark side adept exploring the “Science of Darkness” in the tradition of Darth Plagueis. As an Emperor’s Hand, he used his sorcery to create Sithspawn — alchemically mutated beings — and to refine the machine-manipulating Sith technique mechu-deru to infuse thaissen crystal-based Force Detectors with the ability to ascertain a subject’s Force-sensitivity and light or dark side affinity.
Cronal, however, saw these technological tricks, transmogrifications and philosophical reductionisms as annoyances to be tolerated while he fulfilled the will of the Dark. His chance came when the Director of Imperial Intelligence was executed by his own protégé and daughter Ysanne Isard. Palpatine subsequently installed Cronal as the interim director, giving him the infamous codename “Blackhole.” With the Empire’s immense intelligence network under his control, all the galaxy’s knowledge was at the mage’s emaciated fingertips, now free to travel in his own stygian-triprismatic camouflaged Star Destroyer Singularity searching for Force artifacts, guided by his Darksight. Even once Isard officially took over Imperial Intelligence, Cronal never relinquished his newly acquired mandate or surveillance powers, assuming an equivalent role overseeing the Imperial Security Bureau as part of the Emperor’s shadow government: a dark side theocracy named the Dark Empire intended to inevitably supplant the First Galactic Empire. Maintaining his anonymity, Cronal utilized the HoloNet to project his menacing identity of “Blackhole” — a wraith-like holographic phantom—across the cosmos, terrorizing civilians and Imperial officers alike.
Then came his fateful encounter with Luke Skywalker.
Cronal always knew his primary obstacle to achieving prepotency, besides the Emperor, was Palpatine’s lapdog Darth Vader. Therefore, to obtain leverage on Vader, Cronal had his shadowtroopers kidnap Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia during their mission to contact President Natala Vanden of Vorzyd V — for his visions and gnostic algorithms had exposed to him the secret of the Skywalker genealogy. In his holographic guise as Blackhole, Cronal tortured the Rebels, but they escaped, and Skywalker vowed to call the Rhandite to reckoning.
Not only was Cronal impressed by the siblings’ puissant wills, he perceived Skywalker as an innate agent of the Dark by very virtue of his prodigious destruction of the Death Star. Thus, he began conspiring to transfer his consciousness from his increasingly withering body into one of these robust Force receptacles. Part of that plot involved his agreement with Grand Vizier Sate Pestage to set up an Imperial-sanctioned religion, the Church of the Dark Side, upon Palpatine’s demise at Endor. Cronal saw this venture as a means of drawing attention away from his own plans and a satisfying mockery of the traitorous Kadann and his Prophets. Soon after, however, Cronal disappeared.
And that’s when macabre tales of the unknown Lord Shadowspawn’s raids, and the thousands of civilian lives they claimed, began pouring in. Tracking advanced TIE Defender starfighters to the Imperial warlord’s Shadow Realm on the planet Mindor, the New Republic launched its Rapid Response Task Force led by General Skywalker, who realized Shadowspawn was his old nemesis Blackhole. Though the Jedi successfully defeated Cronal’s Pawns and shadowtroopers, the sorcerer nearly succeeded in transplanting his essence into Skywalker’s body and then his sister’s. In the end, though, the wizened Rhandite’s gambit backfired and, as he fled Mindor in hyperspace, Skywalker turned Cronal’s own black arts against him, seemingly decohering the warlord to his fundamental atoms through the Force—all despite never even having truly seen his enemy face to face.
Yet, almost unimaginably, that was not the end of Cronal, though what happened next is not clear.
Most likely is the possibility that the mystic’s spirit was summoned back from Chaos by necromancing Dathomiri shamans, or even his former co-conspirator Sate Pestage. Even more portentously, however, the warlock potentially negated his own oblivion by reaching out with his infinite dying thought and every last gram of his olamic cowardice to cross the ineffable threshold from hyperspace to Otherspace: an aberrant dimension where he accessed a perverted dynamism denominated the anti-Force. In any case, Cronal lived … albeit at tremendous cost. His body, save for his head and neck, was completely cybernetically reconstituted via mechu-deru — much as Nightsisters regenerated the bisected body of Darth Maul — while his mind itself was all but shattered from transcendental combat with Skywalker.
Much like his offspring, Cronal’s very persistence in existing now became a criminal iniquity against the Dark itself. Forsaken by his faith, the profligate father thus sought out his daughter to beg her forgiveness for his unforgivable abuses … finding her, at last, a worm-eaten corpse on the planet Ruusan, apparently cut down in a lightsaber duel.
In that eternal instant of guilt and heartbreak, the deranged Rhandite lost all grip on reality and his philosophy of entropy. Wholly embracing mechu-deru and his cold corporal circuitry, he began blending technology with Sith alchemy to therapeutically sow creation from the seed of destruction: what he baptized his Stygian Art. He experimented first by “resculpting” the natives, fauna and flora of the lush, Force-steeped planet Trailia. He spent many years performing these permutational experiments, but eventually abandoned the world, accompanied by the finest of his Trailian technobeasts, in favor of the bowels of Coruscant. There he conducted the transformation of the Force-sensitive miscreant Irek Ismaren into a colossal cyborg, intending to forge a runic masterpiece. But the subject proved unstable and, sacrificing his teratogenic Trailian squires, Cronal barely survived the titan’s rampage, hammering a lightsaber through Ismaren’s mind.
Fleeing, the sorcerer set up in an abandoned droid depot on the industrial world Andooweel, reinventing himself as the cyber-artist Perek — said to be his pre-Rhandite birthname. The place would prove to be his grave. While in thrall to the reborn Emperor, Skywalker’s mechanical right hand had been replaced by one polluted with mechu-deru, and this alchemically-altered appendage drew the Jedi instinctively to Andooweel and into a final confrontation with Cronal. The mage used technobeast nanodroids to infect the circuitry of Skywalker’s hand and precipitate a monstrous metamorphosis into a totemic ativism of the Force — his most magnificent creation! — for Cronal to possess.
Yet, it was all in vain for, in his madness, Lord Cronal had already foreseen his final fate. Almost taking on a life of its own, Skywalker’s grotesque hand wrapped itself around sorcerer’s neck and strangled every last drop of life out of him, even as the Jedi hacked off his own malevolent limb with a lightsaber. And at last, the decrepit man who was a plenitude of men—warlock, intelligencer, warlord, scientist, artist—had become…nothing.
The Delusions of Grandeur of Admiral Gaen Drommel (~0-12 Years After Endor)
Lowly petty officers on the Guardian liked to remind themselves of an old Imperial truism: There’s something small about a man who needs a Super Star Destroyer to feel big.
Admiral Gaen Drommel certainly thought of himself as a giant among Patitites and not without some justification. Not only was he counted among the few endowed with stewardship of one of the Emperor’s handful of 19,000-meter-long Executor-class Star Dreadnoughts — bestowed after Drommel’s timely decimation of Rebel bases on Aargonar 3, Randa and the Valsedian asteroid belt—but he also commanded a group of three Imperial Star Destroyers and a throng of supporting attack vessels. When Drommel began sporting a custom-made black Imperial uniform, complete with a cape and Tusk-cat riding whip, some thought the prestigious appointment had gone to his head. Others, such as his executive officer Gastos Niovi, confirmed these delusions of grandeur first hand, as when he was ordered to personally pick up the fine Oplovis linens from Drommel’s homeworld for the admiral’s new personal quarters.
For all that, Drommel was without question a brilliant if cruel man, earning equal parts respect — at least, early on — and fear from his crew. He spent much of his free time reading works of classic literature, particularly Lyechusas’ celebrated plays of Xim the Despot and the Oplovian love poems of Sumi Zanthe. Modern masterpieces such as Tarkin’s “Doctrine of Fear” and Palpatine’s political treatise The Paths to Power also ranked highly on Drommel’s reading list. But the admiral considered himself superior to all these thinkers. After all, in the end, the measure of a man’s ideas was their practical benefit — and Tarkin and Palpatine were, in the end, very dead.
This logic served Drommel’s psyche well. After Endor, he abandoned his Imperial masters and started his own campaign against the New Republic. Headquartered around his home system, he gained allies and momentum in a string of easy victories (most called them massacres) against defenseless Alliance safeworlds. But disinformation lured Drommel into the Tantive system where the Guardian was routed by New Republic forces in conjunction with the opportunistic warlord Admiral Krennel. The Guardian limped to the Soullex system where, sans hyperdrive, Drommel rotted for a dozen years, becoming increasingly delusional. He watched impotently as Zsinj, Thrawn, the reborn Emperor and Admirals Daala and Pellaeon all launched massive campaigns against the New Republic. Drommel was comforted by their failures—particularly since no one bothered to contact him—and nurtured his ego by torturing and executing his subordinates for the slightest infractions of military protocol.
Drommel’s glorious moment seemed at hand when, after more than a decade of cautiously assembling hyperdrive components, the Guardian was finally hyperspace capable again. But in a cruel twist of fate, Drommel successfully test jumped the behemoth battleship into the waiting arms of a New Republic armada. The livid admiral opted for a fight to the last man rather than capitulation, but Drommel’s second-in-command Colonel Niovi, fueled by years of odium and aggravation, took the admiral’s own Tusk-cat riding crop and choked him dead with it, surrendering to the New Republic on behalf of the Guardian’s weary crew.
Governor Foga Brill and the Agonies of the Afterlife (0-14 Years After Endor)
Foga Brill may have been the most miserable man in the galaxy. But he was never happier than when he found a sanctified reason for making everyone else suffer as much as humanly possible.
Brill was a Director of Investigation for the Republic Judicial Department disgusted with his tired job pursuing petty criminals at the time Palpatine declared his First Galactic Empire. As such, Brill welcomed the change, hoping something better for him might come along. What Brill didn’t realize was that Palpatine’s new regime was only a prelude to the Emperor’s true vision: the institution of an unholy Dark Empire.
In fact, things didn’t change much for Brill. He took a stab at politics, becoming a mediocre local senator in the planetary congress of his overcrowded homeworld Taris—and by the end of his term, he felt about ready to exit life’s airlock mid-hyperspace jump. But that’s when he started hearing the whispers about the Emperor’s private retreat on Byss. They were alluring stories of a paradisiacal planet, some said in the Deep Galactic Core, with sublime, breathtaking vistas, rejuvenating waters and ambrosial airs reputed to expand life spans by dozens of years — a place of perpetual bliss. Calling in every favor and pulling every string, particularly with his fellow Tarisian native Admiral Peccati Syn, Brill did everything to lockdown a governorship in the enchanted Deep Core.
What he got was the infernal world of Prakith.
Far from being paradise, if a hell existed, this was it. Prakith was a Deep Core fortress world shaped by volcanism, overrun by deadly jagged terrain and treacherous seas, and wracked by paranoia. The latter was chiefly due to quartering the dreaded Citadel Inquisitorius, home to Imperial torturers and Jedi hunters. Brill never even realized that these Inquisitors were feeding their putrilaginous spirits by leeching the life energies out of the populace, rendering Brill loathsomer and loathsomer.
Still, he tried making the most of his new gubernatorial position, ingratiating himself with the darksiders by lavishing fawning praise on their mutilative techniques as well as becoming the confidant of Admiral Malfkla Yzu of the 15th Deep Core Reserve Fleet. Even so, his true solace came in the form of his closeted adoption of the fatalist creed of Maryx Minor’s Ancient Order of Pessimists along with the stimulating theological debates he engaged in with his religious colleague Syn, whose military achievements and vitality he admired. It wasn’t long, however, before he witnessed yet another political revolution: this time as the Rebel Alliance burst the Empire’s Death Stars and murdered Palpatine. Of course, as a devotee of Pessimistic dogmata, Brill had already known the worst was fated to happen.
In the aftermath, Yzu declared himself a warlord and awarded Brill the title of moff. Meanwhile, Grand Admiral Syn came calling on Brill with extraordinary news. The dead Emperor’s steward, Sate Pestage, had sanctioned an exciting, new Imperial religion: the Church of the Dark Side. Trusting in Syn’s keen judgment, Brill converted to the innovative faith, coming to possess the belief that all beings suffered relentlessly in an afterlife alluded to as Chaos, and that the Emperor was prophesied to defy death. Faced with this prospect of eternal torment, the moff suddenly stopped contemplating suicide — mourning for Syn when his old friend was unceremoniously delivered unto Chaos in a New Republic attack.
It was at that point that the neophyte Brill, having spent so much time around the Inquisitors’ diabolical cruciations, took a doctrinal leap. If all beings suffered in the afterlife, Brill concluded that he could appease the netherworld’s demons and lessen his own suffering by tormenting the living! The epiphany ushered in a reign of absolute terror. Brill’s jackbooted Red Police, intoxicated with their orders and authority, began rousting Prakith citizens in the dead of night and commanding them to dig their own graves before their summary executions. Others endured the horrors of Brill’s torture chambers, where victims were forced to engage in cannibalism. Indeed, Brill felt his actions were justified when, spectacularly, Palpatine did rise from the dead — after all, Darth Sidious had manufactured the faux religion predicting it — and the besotted moff joined his Dark Empire with demented glee. When the reincarnated Emperor soon returned to dust, Brill only became more committed to his bloodthirsty depravity, more panic-stricken than ever in his fear of the hereafter.
Brill cultivated influence under Yzu’s political lackey based around Odik, Grand Moff Cinzero Gann, until Yzu fell dead, victim of Admiral Daala’s mass murder of the region’s ranking warlords. In the power vacuum, Brill shrewdly promoted Gann as a figurehead ruler to succeed Yzu, established the Constitutional Protectorate of Prakith and gave himself the title “His Glory,” earning a sick notoriety in the next ten years. He and the other second-rate “replacement warlords” of the Deep Core soon enough banded together under Daala’s leadership, and during this time General Lando Calrissian — his rank reactivated by the New Republic—ran afoul of Brill’s deep patrols. Though he managed to escape, Calrissian’s outrage at Brill’s tyrannical lunacy eventually blossomed into a final mission of his famed irregulars, Lando’s Commandos…this time including a fleet of starship-sized droids called Silentium. The people of Prakith broke out in tearful celebrations when His Glory was enticed into a trap by these guerillas, disguised as the governor’s loyal officers. The vile despot was thusly dissolved by pinpoint orbital neutron dissembler ray, expediting Brill’s reunion with his Sith messiah in the everlasting agony of Chaos and establishing a global holiday.
No comments:
Post a Comment