Part XXI-
This was Ava. She was shocked to discover an entry regarding herself, including her arrival on Korriban at age six. She turned the next page and stopped cold. There in blood, the original 224 members of her entering class. By the time Ava graduated, twelve years later, her graduating class consisted of five students, including herself. In essence, her complete family history was well-chronicled in the Sith Archives, accessible only by the Dark Council, and the Emperor, when Vitiate lived. Ava's most immediate ancestor, her great-great grandmother, Sheva of Echan, married into a great Sith Noble House who happened to be placed in charge of chronicling the histories in the Imperial Archives. Ava's family history had been classified as one lowly bureaucrat put it, "a record of note due an Imperial citizen." In fact, much to Ava's surprise, every single member of her family, from the disembarking after Revan's final arrival on Dromund Kaas, to Ava's birth on Echan, had served in the Imperial Sith military in varying capacities, from intelligence, infantry, combat support, to mobile armor, navy, air and space supremacy, special forces, and more. With Ava, that life path had changed once she had been identified as Force sensitive. Each generation in her family, from her great grandmother on down, had made the pilgrimage from Echan to Sith Space in order to serve the Empire in the military, and lend their abilities to the Vaiken Doctrine's authority. When their term of service was up, her family members had honorably been discharged, ventured back to Echan, and started their family. In Ava's case it was slightly different. Her father was a Sith Lord, whom she had recently killed. He had commanded a small Sith outpost on the Outer Rim; a backwater planet with no name, importance, or value. It was an assignment designed as a punishment. Ava had killed her father as a mercy, and as far as she was concerned, it was far more than he deserved. He had been responsible for sending hunters after Ava and her mother on Echan for years, from her birth until her eventual abduction. It turns out her father was behind that action as well. Ava blinked in the dim light of the office, closing the book, staring at the leatheris-bound cover. She did not even realize the title when she started reading - "The Campaigns and Families of the Revanite Conquest." Ava actually teared up, feeling strangely vulnerable: It was her family. Finally, in intimate detail, over three hundred years-worth, her great, great grandmother, her aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, even her short-lived daughters, Raine and Ranna. She broke down upon the digging up of the memory, then she read about her mother, whom she had also killed on the day of her abduction at age six, without ever really getting to know her. Her reaction lasted only a moment, but was noticeable given her power, as rain started to batter the transparisteel windows outside where it had been a clear night just moments before. The murder of her mother was not a pleasant memory from Ava but the Sith Lord who compelled her to do so. In essence, Ava's murder of her mother was not the same as the conscious act she performed against her father, but rather an act of dark compulsion urged at the behest of that now-deceased Sith Lord who brought her home to Korriban. Though Ava will never regard the Academy as her home. It was her personal, familiar, interminable Hell. Yet it forged her will, her being, her mind, It was the prison her mind grew up in that shaped her thoughts, actions, and resolve. Her treatment within and outside of the Academy, as her power and rage grew, her pain did as well, and her desire to reshape and reforge the dying stagnant beast that was the Sith Empire took on a reality and began to coalesce. Her vision was to reforge the dying super-state into one of true greatness, not merely an autocratic empirical state based on an alliance of hatred regarding the Republic, led by families and councilors who didn't know what greatness was. Would Ava abolish such institutions as slavery? No, absolutely not.
Ava was in favor of slavery, having been a slave for a sizable part of her life. Instead, she sought to reform the institution. She would make it mandatory for slave-owners to care for, provide for, and even conditionally free their slaves. Slaves would be owned first and foremost by the Imperial state, not individual Noble families. This would be done primarily, not to care for the slaves, but to put the slave-based economic infrastructure to work for the Empire, not just giving busy projects to slave workers then working them to death, which Ava saw as a disgraceful waste of resources. The slave labor force would be governed under the authority of the Ministry of Labor and Resettlement, instead of individual Sith Spheres of Influence under the auspices of the Dark Council. Ava's military campaigns against the Sith Empire were patterned after Revan's campaigns against the Galactic Republic; she would leave infrastructure intact, while annihilating key strategic targets. Some star systems she would completely bypass, planet-hopping of sorts. Darth Malgus, a hero of Ava's whom she had wrote on back at the Academy, infamously stated "the Sith Empire is war made manifest, that is why it is perfect." With respect to Malgus, Ava disagreed and recognized she would have to change this outlook eventually. For now, it suited her purposes. War could not sustain the Sith Empire, no matter what form the Sith Empire took, Sanguine or otherwise. War is not sustainable, regardless, Ava knew. It would eat at and kill the Sith. In a note, Ava wrote "Hatred and rage were fine and good," she mused, "but passion takes on many forms. The Sith need to embrace lust far more than pain, given the choice between the two." Another sweeping change Ava would institute would be a new Representative Dark Council. The Empress would have absolute authority, but Advisors would have fail-safes and checks in place. Dark Councilors would be elected from eligible from a pool of recognized successful Sith Lords and Ladies. Ava was, in essence, using her studies to wipe the Imperial slate clean and start over, forcing a sense of egalitarianism between Dark Councilors, and Imperial Advisors. There would be no more Spheres of Influence, at all. Ava would thus redefine the Sith Empire. No longer would Sith Lords simply attain command positions in areas such as labor, medicine and health, intelligence, or military and trade for the sheer fact of them being a Lord, Lady, or Darth. Further, the Empress was the only person authorized to grant the rank of Darth. Without Her permission, the highest rank any Sith could attain was Lord or Lady depending on position and/or gender. Ava would not allow what she saw as "wanton idiocy" to usurp the proper military or civilian /municipal authorities and commanders, notably the proper Moffs, Generals, and Admirals of any given Sector. This constant interference in the old Sith Empire where Sith interference would ruin entire campaigns, and the military would, in turn, suffer for it. No more would this happen under Sanguine rule. Meritocratic hierarchy would rule the day, once more, as it was intended. No one would command anything of any sort if they did not rule from the front, or as Ava came to call it, proactively commanding. "Never order your troops to do anything for you that you would not do for them." She had intoned in a lecture to her apprentice.
Ava's new system debuted in her small fledgling military force a mere seven months into the war against the old Sith Empire. Admittedly, part of her reasoning was merely pragmatic: she could not afford to waste her loyal soldiers on high-stakes gambles and careless operations. She needed to be strategically intelligent. Each operation required careful planning. Each setback meant more lives lost that could not be easily replaced, material, ships, vehicles, starfighters, even warships that were so precious they had to be carefully allocated. The Sith Empire outweighed them in every conceivable category; numerical advantages, firepower, ruthlessness, and dominance. The Sanguine Empire had to be cunning, and carefully build forces while simultaneously stripping advantages from the Sith. Ava's meritocratic system was roughly sketched out, but already it was paying dividends, as the Sith Empire was overly fond of wasting lives and drowning the enemy in Sith blood. She refused to entertain blind loyalty, and absent-minded tactics. She took strategic risks, but only when the payout was judged to be worth it. The Sith Empire had a plethora of Sith...Ava refused to call them Lords, but rather disposable Force-sensitive infantry who thought themselves as Lords. The Sanguine Empire had Ava and a select precious few other former Jedi Knights and Sith Acolytes. Few realized how brutal the Sith Empire and the Sanguine Empire were to each other. Ava also did not embrace the expendable swarm tactics of the Imperial Navy Starfighter Corps. Instead, she invested her own financial assets in buying, and building starfighters that were sturdier, more powerful, and more punishing towards the enemy. At the finishing of Kuat, as Rex finished sweet-talking and coercing the Kuati family and board-members, Ava's entire First Fleet hyperspaced in, with the Endurance at the fleet's head.
