The sound of explosions burst in her ears, all around her, so that she couldn't decipher where they were coming from. The clone trooper held her by her shoulders, his fingers pressing hard into her pale skin. The battlefield erupted with dirt, plant material, and bodies.

"Your highness!" he yelled in her face. All the clone troopers called her and Uri 'your highness', copying what their Jedi general had done upon arriving on Astarrax to fight the Separatists. They couldn't seem to grasp that she wasn't a highness, that was her mother. She was one too many spaces removed from the title of the complex royal system of the planet. He gave her a shake. "Your highness, can you hear me?"

She nodded, wincing as an explosion rocked them close by.

The clone trooper let go of her shoulders and grabbed a hypo. He pushed it into her hand. "You look for troopers that are still alive and you give them a dose of this. You press it to their skin and then press the trigger."

She looked at the hypodermic gun stupidly, as if she'd never seen one before.

"Do you understand how to use it, your highness?" the trooper asked. His voice was barely discernible above the din.

She nodded again. She couldn't make her voice work. It was as if the noise from the blasts and explosions had stolen it from her.

"If it looks like a person is bleeding out, leave them," he continued, pressing her hand to her chest, as if she would understand better with the hypo closer to her body.

Bleeding out? Why would she leave someone who was still alive?

"You only have a limited amount of morpho," he yelled, as if he had intuited her unspoken question. "Use it on those who are going to survive."

Tears leapt to her eyes. They flowed over as she winced again at shelling that landed too close to her and the trooper. She knew she wasn't going to survive here in this jungle. There was no way she could. The laser fire, the explosions were everywhere. It was only a matter of time before one hit them.

"Your highness! Go!" The trooper pushed her gently before turning around and leaving her kneeling on the battlefield.

She watched his back retreat from her, stop at a fallen identical comrade and begin to minister aid to him. She didn't want to move. She wanted to get up and run away into the jungle. Taking a deep breath, she turned in the opposite direction and began to look for troopers.

There were bodies everywhere.

On her hands and knees, she crawled to the nearest one, only to find he was dead. So was the next one. The third one was bleeding profusely, the vegetation of the jungle underneath him becoming crimson. All of them looked exactly the same.

"Highness," the clone trooper tried to raise an arm to her, but couldn't. "Help."

She moved his head to the side and pressed the hypo to his neck. It didn't do anything. Fear gripped her.

What happened?

She pressed it again, and then realized she hadn't pushed the trigger. As soon as she did, she heard the hiss of the morpho deployment and saw the trooper relax. His eyes closed slowly. She had an awful feeling that he was dead, but couldn't bring herself to check his pulse, so she left him to find another soldier.

Again and again the hiss of the hypo punctuated the sound of laser fire and humanoid screaming. Both troopers and the planetary Astarrax army lay scattered on the field. It was a macabre collage of white armored Republic uniforms and lavender skinned locals. Some of them missed body parts, some of them were fully intact, but dead anyway. As she went on, she began to feel numb, a blessed nothing permeating her being only edged out by the pain in her knees as she crawled from body to body. She didn't know how long she had been on the battlefield. It could have been a few minutes, it could have been hours.

Then, lying away from her was a Republic officer, his back covered in blood. He still wore his cap, blonde hair peeked out from underneath the back brim. Terror grabbed her chest and neck like a hand and squeezed the breath out of her.

Oh my stars, Father!

She ran to the body, the uniform more maroon now than gray, and turned the body over, fully expecting to see her golden headed, blue eyed father staring blankly into the exploding heavens.

She was too young for all of this. She was too young to have been forced from her home in the palace by Separatist droids. She was too young to be on a battlefield in the jungle outside Capital City fighting for her planet's freedom. She was too young to lose her father. She was only fourteen.

She turned the man over, the face was one she recognized, but not Colonel Viita. She breathed a sigh of relief and then felt immediately guilty that she was relieved when one of her father's officers lay dead on the ground. She reached for his eyes and closed them. His skin was unnaturally cold and it was much harder to do than it looked in the holodramas.

"What have we here? A human in the middle of a group of Astarraxians? A little princess that has lost her way, perhaps?"

As the Serennian accented Basic hit her ears, she turned around to see a man with long black hair wearing a cloak staring down at her. The explosions had stopped, the sound of battle droids had ceased.

When did that happen?

The look in the man's face was one of victorious malice. She held up the hypo as if it were a turboblaster. Her bladder wanted to empty.

"And they sent you out here without a weapon?" The Serennian laughed. "You people are stupider than I thought." He reached down to grab her, fear freezing her in place, when a green lightsaber came down in front of her face. The man's hand fell into her lap.

She finally found her voice and screamed.

The scream woke her up. Sola bolted upright in the plush bed she was lying in, her body covered in sweat. The room was pitch dark for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light in her bedroom. The cold of the Ryloth desert night hit her wet skin, covering her in goosebumps. Her heart pounded in her chest as the remnants of the nightmare faded into the black.

She had to pee something awful.

Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath to steady herself. She hadn't thought of that memory in years, much less had a nightmare about it. Why would it return now?

Because you were in a battle earlier today, stupid, she told herself, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Making her way into the hallway, and then the lavatory, she noticed that the complex was very quiet. It must be very late, she noted, wishing she had a chronometer in her bedroom. But this entire complex was lacking in modernity, despite the fact that it had been retrofitted with electricity.

After relieving herself, she decided to get a drink to calm her still fast beating heart. Padding her way toward the kitchen, she felt a presence out on the main balcony of the second story, like a pull in her gut. Making her way to the upper sitting room, she saw the white uniform and blue skin of Grand Admiral Thrawn staring out into the night, his hands clasped behind his back. He was alone, his back to her. Standing erect and still as a statue, he was quite the sight with the black of the sky as the backdrop. She felt her heartbeat speed up for a reason totally unrelated to her nightmare.

She smiled and went down the stairs to the kitchen on the ground floor. Yes, a drink sounded very nice at the moment.