Ice Queen is what they called her. She didn't remember exactly when the nickname stuck, but the men and women under her command as well as anyone that met her would corroborate the rumors. Not a twitch of a smile, not a hint of laughter, not a wrinkle of mirth would ever light up her face. Her features were carved in stone, her dark eyes hard enough to betray nothing that went on in her head.
Perhaps it started the day that she forced her men to walk through mines, knowing full well the carnage that would ensue. The heat, or in some cases tears, flared bright in their eyes and hot on their cheeks as they compared her to a block of ice.
It seemed an understatement, really. Lucky there wasn't a mutiny, or a seizure of command. She was sure that once she would have been the first to rebel against such a tyrant.
But they loved their tyrant. To them she was an unbreakable beacon - not of hope - but of victory, in the hellish fog of this endless war.
To her, they were toy soldiers. A cost paid in rivers of blood. She was sure her blood mingled with that of the others, but she couldn't feel the pain of such a wound anymore.
Oh, it didn't begin as a lack of feeling. It had always been so much more than that. Intense and familiar, once she was a child of the sun, bursting to the seems with warmth. It was keen intuition tugging at her core, a mother's guiding hand, a soft smile to ease another's sorrows. She was that guiding hand, that soft smile, that very intuition. At the end of the day she knew it to be pain. Pain and a love so pure and bright that it burned in and through her, radiating to those she called friends.
She remembered exactly when the nickname stuck, and the men and women of the galaxy as well as anyone that met her would corroborate the rumors.
Butcher of Malachor is what they called her.