Night on the Sun

All alone in the dark, a star was burning.

It was bright. Bright as any star coalescing in the vast nightscape of space could be. A twinkle on a faraway spacer's map. A light to guide the way home.

Day and night the star would burn. Its fire the basis of life for all those who called the star their home. Big as it ever would be, bright as it could hope for, but growing weaker all the same. Day by day, cycle by cycle. For its light would not burn eternal, no star's could. But this star's day would arrive a little sooner, fade a little quicker. Not by choice, but by force. A fire intended to warm the souls of its people would be used to silence them instead.

Not all stars burned the same.

34 ABY

Starkiller Base

It was cold.

Even with a heat oscillator the size of a small moon, it was always cold. The perpetual torrent of snow made sure of that.

In a clearing not far from the generator, a group of armor-clad soldiers thousands strong huddled together for warmth. At the head of the procession was their leader - the General of the First Order. He towered over them all on a dais, proudly dictating the tenets of his legion's new galactic order.

It was a rather loud dictation. Loud enough that the words reached Silus and his fellow mountain dwellers in their tents on the peaks far above.

The General's speech was short, all things considered. Abrasive, obnoxious, but short, to the point. It put a particular emphasis on how the old government would fall and how their new regime would rise from the ruins. Standard war propaganda by Silus' measure, but with the added benefit of a weapons demonstration to reinforce the point.

Actions tended to speak louder than words, something the speaker was no doubt aware of and dutifully intending to ignore.

It was something Silus knew well. The malevolent intent in the General's words weren't so uncommon. That lust for power never was. Even here, on the frozen remains of a planet in a region unknown.

Silus was a native to this place, after all. A productive member of a long-ago society. A cog in the once brimming circle that the ecosystem had been cultivating for generations. Back when harsh winters were an aberration, not the norm. When lush forests had populated the grounds, home to animal and human alike. When sailors navigated the vast seas. Seas that had since been drained away, exchanged for a trench dozens of kilometers wide brimming to its core with a dark energy.

When the First Order had been a myth and not the architects of their star's demise.

As Silus acknowledged that bitter reality, it seemed to acknowledge him. At the General's command, crimson light flooded from that same heat oscillator, that one source of warmth the planet still possessed. A warmth that had been ripped from the sun itself.

The energy came thundering from the planet's abyss all at once, first expunged then clasped. Starlight wasn't meant to be controlled, to be harnessed and tamed. It would sooner flail in protest, fill the vacuum that darkness left. And it would do so, for a time. But it would relent soon enough, contort itself into a pillar of death that ringed into the skies, casting the snow in a red light. The pillar would grow tall, so tall that it tore apart the clouds, wrenching through the heavens themselves.

Silus cowered at the sight, drew further back into the mountains. He could hear his neighbors cry in alarm, in fear of the unknown. He would cry too, but for a different reason. For this wasn't the first time he would see a planet warped to dust by the machinations of a mad man.

The first had been Alderaan, a long ago jewel of the Core Worlds. These days it wasn't known as a planet but as an event, something to carbon date people with. It was the inciting action of a dozen Holodramas, a trivia question on excessive force. Its fate had long been forgotten, doomed to repeat itself.

And so now would come the Hosnian System. A bureaucratic mess of a system, perhaps, but a well-meaning one. A fledgeling government that had shepherded the promise of peace back to its galaxy. But even at the government's peak it hadn't reached the heights of the former regime it was trying to best. A failure not in vision, but by the limited means in which they had to execute it.

Silus didn't know that that would be its mark, not yet. He could only watch as the night's light stretched past entire solars systems right before his eyes. Perhaps the Hosnian children wouldn't know it either, perhaps they'd think the light a shooting star that burnt a little brighter, soared a little closer. Came to grant a wish like all stars promised.

No wishes would be fulfilled though. Instead, a feeble band of X-Wings were surging forward to heed that call, to punish that star. They traveled at speeds as quick as the celestial scar that Starkiller Base's main cannon was burning in its wake.

There was a chaotic beauty in the First Order's methods, a unison that would drive the heroic pilots to their limits, challenge their convictions. For their foe was greater in number, more unified in cause, driven by the sole purpose of destruction. And at the head of it all, they had another mad man who thought he could harness the unharnessable.

Silus grew silent as the sun began to dissipate, as the planet's surroundings dimmed back to white. There was nothing left to say, not when it had all been said before. If there was one thing he was growing more certain of in all his year's of living, it was that the star's death wouldn't be a true death, just a rebirth. A proclamation of old thinkings and older hatreds. An embracement of failure.

For as much as things changed, the more they insisted on staying the same. It was like a balance at odds with itself, always waiting to be fought for, and with so many unknowing soldiers there to fight for it.

That fight was an eternal one. One full of cosmics and beliefs. Of people, inherently good and inherently bad. Of life, death, and all the things in between. A fight that vowed to go on for eternity, until the end was mutually assured, until all the light in the stars went out.

End