Throne Room
The Dark Ascent
Arx System
39 ABY

Darth Nehalem let the holocron fall into his open hand. Its worn edges had long lost their sharpness, dull and tame, much like the contents it held. Every fool and his Tooka had seemed to make one over the ages. Without a word it shot from his hand, flying the full length of the throne room before shattering against the far wall. Its broken shards joined the pile of their brethren that had been amassing there.

A graveyard of lost thoughts, a sea of forgotten wisdom.

Of course, he knew what the real issue was: those who had true power and accomplished things worth recording didn’t just leave their knowledge lying about. Their secrets were protected, treasured. These broken holocrons were just ones that rose to the surface amid the ripples of greater men.

The Grand Master refused to be swept away in the tide of others. His ever-elusive enemy continued to play with his thoughts.

He grabbed another holocron from the pile provided to him by the Headmistress. Somewhere Ciara was overseeing the rebuilding of the Academy, likely exceptionally irate without knowing why.

After a moment of examination of the holocron’s contents, it too gently fell into his hand. He carefully placed it on a table, alongside several other select ones that had merited actually keeping. He continued to evaluate one after another, some being saved, many meeting their end against the far wall. His mind had been made up long before he had started the examination process, yet he went through the motions, rolling the idea around in his head.

CRACK!

With that, the last of the holocrons he had been given had been evaluated. There were many more, and artifacts to go along with them, all still within the Academy’s vaults. Darth Nehalem opened a comm line.

“Send me the Headmistress. There is work I think she will find especially tantalizing to be done.”

He would not be the ripple. He would be the stone.

Read the complete fiction here.

Summary

• Darth Nehalem reviews the extensive holocron collection, judging many to be worthless.
• Focused on ensuring his legacy thrives, he calls for the Headmistress to aid him on a secret project.
• Fractures among the Revenants take hold as Zyft Yadar, First Mate to Rasha Hawee, is charged with a conspiracy to commit mutiny.
• Hawee maintains that the only way the Revenants will be free is if the Principate is destroyed.
• Only an absolute form of Retribution would suffice.
• Zyft maintains that it would be suicide to fight the Principate, and that they should use their new weapons to instead Expand their influence in the Outer Rim, far away from the Principate.
• A guilt ridden Avitus Oligard, helps free Zyft, so that she might escape to find other Revenants who are like minded.
• Vairya Muktiba scores a win against those in the Principate looking to eradicate the Revenants, as the Imperial Harmony Party is recognized within their senate.
• The other two Triumvir however seek other means to Restore the Principates standing, with augmented troopers of their own.
• The Seer communicates with her leader. She has set the pieces in motion, and now waits for the Hutts to light the fuse of war.