The Crystals of Lorrd

Kellaro stared hard at his big toe and attempted to move it. He thought the light shifted, just a little, where it reflected off his toenail, but he couldn’t be sure. He slammed his head back on the baseboard irritably and stared up at the ceiling.

“Seetwo? What time is it?”

“Approximately 0436 hours, sir,” said the protocol droid standing by the bedroom door. “Exactly 1 minute and 57 seconds since last you asked.”

“Ugh!” Kellaro tried to roll over on his side, but that hurt, and he was left to straining with one arm to reach the datapad on his bedside table. Brant had cleverly left it just out of reach, to encourage him to rest, but instead it was probably the most stretching Kellaro had done since he had been transferred to the Lord Commander’s manor on Dromund Fels to convalesce from his broken leg.

“Droid? What time is it now?”

“Approximately 0437 hours, sir. Exactly 30 seconds–”

“Nevermind!” Kellaro shouted, and he slumped to stare at the ceiling.

“Master Lok’kar, you have a visitor,” said Seetwo suddenly.

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Another Vision

“I thought I told you never to come back here!”

“Yeah, you did. But we need to talk.”

“Get out! Guards!”

Kellaro felt the Imperial Guards surround him and grab his arms. He quickly fused his magnet boots to the floor, but made no other move, his eyes seeking Brant’s. He said quietly, “I found the fugitives.”

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Blue and Red

Commander Auretal was surprisingly young.

When Lathril first met him, the Sith had been wearing a mask. Lathril had imagined an old man — or perhaps an alien species — barely holding together under the ravages of the Dark Side under that mask, but when Auretal took the bit of metal off to smooth his moustache, he was revealed to be a brown-skinned human barely into adulthood, with the only sign of his Sith status the yellowing of his eyes.

The yellowing of his eyes… and his chronic impatience. Lathril disliked him immediately.

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The Power of Speed

When Lathril met with his subordinates assembled in the hangar, Lathril thought he understood why Sarak assigned him to this particular squad. They stood carefully separated from each other, giving each other suspicious side-eyes just as much as they did to him. The one woman stood with her arms crossed; the oldest seemed to have a permanent frown etched onto his face, and the other two men shifted and leered as if they had a background of backroom dealing on a Hutt world somewhere. When Lathril stepped before them and cleared his throat to get their attention, they haphazardly came to a salute, then went back to staring at him.

“Sloppy,” said Lathril. “Let’s try that again, in unison. Atten… HUT!”

This time the salute was more in sync. Lathril studied the bunch a second time as they came back to a rest. They were reluctant, frightened, staring at his cybernetic and then at the vibroblade sheathed on his waist, likely making up stories in their head of how this Sith had lost his eye, Lathril thought. He bit back an internal sigh.

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Floating Lost

He awoke to a vision of glass cracking like a spider’s web and the sound of screaming in his ears. The screaming he had heard before: it was his mother’s, when he had killed her.

Brant dragged himself up from where he’d fallen asleep lolled across his desk. For a second, he wasn’t even sure which desk it was. Navy, the Covenant? The one he hardly used at Velmor? They all started to look the same after a while. He pressed his face against the cool glass of the window, cognition slowly trickling back in. He was on a ship, without helmet or mask. That ruled out two desks, and as for the other… the sigil on the wall was wrong. So not Navy, but the ISS-Relentless. Close enough.

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