A/N: Thank you all for the reviews and for making this story a favorite. Please bear with me in this chapter. I know that many people are fans of Grand Admiral Thrawn (myself being one of them!) and this might paint him in a very negative light. Trust me, it has a purpose and that will come out in later chapters. Until then, please read, review and enjoy! :D

Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars or the characters/universe in it. Please don't sue. This is purely for fun.

Chapter 2

He let the doors close behind the Shadow before shifting his grip on her still kneeling form. Tapered fingers slipped further down her arms, grasping her just above the elbow and lifting her to her feet. "It will be impossible for me to carry out my duties with you kneeling in the center of my bridge," Admiral Thrawn put in, chasing away the silence that had permeated the room in the dark lord's absence.

Irena stood on reflex, eyes slightly wide and unseeing. The dreams had been wrong, she wanted to scream. Always when she had knelt and said those words in her dreams, the Shadow would leave her world in peace. But the words hadn't worked, just like mother's soft singing hadn't stopped the dreams in the first place. Her mother had been wrong, so wrong. Love didn't conquer all. Self-sacrifice didn't save the world like in all those stories her mother had loved to read to her at night. Father had been wrong, too. Simply ignoring the dreams and their horrible events hadn't worked, either.

Mother was wrong. Father was wrong. The books were wrong. Everyone had been wrong. Every day of her life had been wrong.

"Come with me," the Admiral was saying, his hands leaving her arms.

There was a flash of something silvery, and suddenly her hands were free. She looked down in time to see the bindings, the cream silk shreds of her mother's shirt, dotted here and there with flecks of dried crimson, fall to the deck. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Admiral hand a slender knife back to one of the stormtroopers. Her mother swam in the halo of the trooper's victims, and Irena stared at him, eyes starting to focus again. The trooper met her wide, empty stare behind the protection of his helmet, blaster shifting in his hands a fraction of an inch.

He was nervous, she realized. She could taste it in the air, a spiky sour sensation on her tongue. She had just made the man that had killed her mother nervous. A strange sort of satisfaction slipped through her benumbed mind, spreading a cold fire through the emptiness inside her. She could fill the ache, plug the hole in her heart caused by grief and guilt with this cold fire. If she did, she knew she would never be warm again, but at least she wouldn't be so empty.

"That will be all, Lieutenant," Admiral Thrawn said, drawing her attention back to him.

The Admiral was staring at her, watching her with an odd sort of glitter to his glowing red eyes. Irena blinked, startled by that scarlet gaze. All the faces she'd seen on the bridge--indeed all the faces she'd ever seen in Imperial uniform--had been human. Of course, they all had halos of victims dancing around their heads, but at their core they had still been human. This Admiral wasn't. Glowing red eyes peered out of a lean, pale blue tinted face. His blue black hair shimmered slightly in the muted lights, cut in that short, military style that kept it away from his collar. He was tall, his humanoid frame slender without being willowy, and muscled enough to show he'd come through the Imperial ranks the hard way.

Irena stared back, a sort of fear settling into her stomach under that gaze, and yet she was still unable to react to it. The cold fire inside her fizzled to embers when she looked at him, as if recognizing a larger, more dangerous conflagration beneath that deceptively cool exterior. It was still there, that cold flame, burning just behind her grey-blue eyes. It was the only thing that kept her standing, that kept her from shying away from the Admiral's glowing stare as others had done in the past.

Admiral Thrawn raised a blue-black eyebrow slightly, extending his hand to her. "You can walk with me, Irena Morgan," he said, voice smooth and yet frosty all at once. "Or you can be carried. Either way, Lord Vader's commands will be carried out. It is your choice as to how this will be accomplished."

She looked to his outstretched fingers, at the clean, crisp sleeve of his uniform jacket. Suddenly she was reminded of her dirty coveralls, of the thin T-shirt that she wore beneath them. Her fingers were dust covered, nails torn and caked with dried blood from where she'd tried to run from the stormtroopers, tried to climb the hills behind her family's home. A home that would be nothing more than memory, soon enough.

The Admiral's hand withdrew, rising up before him to wave the stormtroopers over to his side once again. The cold fire flared up inside her, a tiny spark of fuel that made her move. She did not want those men to touch her again, not with their stench of new death, not with the hands that had so casually murdered her parents. Her hands reached out, fingers curling around his wrist before she realized what she was doing. She had only wanted him to stop that signal to his men. He turned those eyes upon her, both eyebrows lifting slightly. The look said enough. He was an Imperial Admiral now, and Imperial Admiral's were not randomly grabbed at. Irena released his wrist, slowly taking a step back from him.

His expression smoothed, the ends of his mouth curling up in a slight smile. "Very good," he said, extending his hand once again. "You may not understand your position, but you are bright enough to respect it."

Trembling, dirty fingers met the clean pale blue of his own, and he turned her back to the viewport. "Lieutenant Eddard," Thrawn continued. "Give the order to the rest of the fleet: Nothing is to remain here, not one building, not one life. Concentrate your firepower on the northern ice caps."

"Yes, sir," came the reply from behind them.

"Afterward," he added. "Fire at the seas, themselves. The ocean basin of this planet is particularly shallow. We should be able to flash burn the water to steam in no time at all."

Irena turned her head, wanting to see the man that would carry out this command. It all seemed unreal, like a bad dream returning after she had awakened. If she could see this lieutenant Eddard, then maybe it would become real. Maybe she could will that cold fire inside her to grow again, and then just maybe she'd be able to use it to stop what was happening.

Thrawn shifted until he was standing directly behind her. She was barely more than a girl and he had to bend his neck forward to look down at her. One arm wrapped high around her shoulders, pulling her back against him. His other hand reached under her chin, cupping her face in a gentle imitation of Vader's earlier action, and turned her back to the viewport. "You are to watch, Irena Morgan, and you are to learn. Tell me, what was your first lesson today?"

The first flash of red streaked across her vision, and she jerked back against him. He stood firm behind her, the arm around her shoulders keeping her from moving very much. A second flash, and then a third, little white clouds of destruction blossoming in their wake. It all seemed too quiet, too simple, too distant to be real. But it was real. The presence of his hand under her chin, firmly holding her face toward the spectacle, ensured that.

"N-Nothing is e-ever going to b-be the same," she whispered, unable to not reply. Shock was settling in, numbing her from head to toe.

"Close enough," he responded. "What was the second lesson?"

More red flashed across the blackness of space, so much more that the shots criss-crossed before her eyes, becoming almost a latticework of energy blasts. The face of her world exploded here and there with tiny white flowers of death where the turbolazer fire found its mark. And then from the northernmost point of her planet, a blanket of white and gray began to unfold. It slid further downward, enveloping everything in its path. From the west and east horizons, a blue-gray wall was growing, superheated vapor from the evaporated oceans spreading across the landmasses.

Her mouth fell open, eyes widening until she though they would fall out of her head. Out of that vaporous mist came the souls of her people, soundlessly wailing in their final agonies. It wouldn't be long until the gray-white from north and south met with the blue-gray from the east and west. Then it would be all over. Anything and everything would have been melted to slag or drowned and crushed beneath falling ice. She felt herself begin to fall, to drift backward into the sweet oblivion of blackness. This was all her fault... If she'd only said what the Lord Vader had wanted to hear...

The hand beneath her chin vanished, and she was suddenly moving forward. Her forehead collided with the transparisteel viewport, not enough to damage her, but enough to get her attention. Thrawn's grip on the back of her neck was strong, his other arm wrapping back around her shoulders painfully tight. "You will watch and remember, Irena Morgan," he said coldly. "Open your eyes and answer me. What was the second lesson?"

Grey-white had joined with the blue-gray, the atmosphere of her home corrupted beyond repair. And still the Star Destroyers spewed their red turbolazer fire, their captains no longer choosing specific targets. There was nothing left to choose from, nothing to locate. Instead, they simply rained destruction until they were told to stop, and she realized that the man behind her was the only one that could order them to stop.

And he wouldn't until she answered his question.

It took her a couple of attempts to find her voice, and even then it sounded hollow, not like herself. "N-nothing I do i-is going to s-save me."

She felt him frown behind her. "Incorrect. Try again."

She tried to shake her head, and his hand contracted until she remained still. What other lesson had there been? Irena turned her mind inward, trying to remember the words of the Shadow, trying to remember what she had felt, kneeling there at the Admiral's feet. "Di-disobedience carries a price," she said at last.

The tension in his arm faded and he pulled her back from the viewport. "Indeed it does. But so does choice. This planet was going to be destroyed, regardless of your decision to bow to the Lord Vader's will. You chose to kneel, to accept his rule without thinking about the later consequences or options. You chose to watch the destruction of your world. What will you choose next?"

His words were a whirlwind in her head, his calm explanations shocking her as much as Vader's harsh demonstration of power on her world. "Why?" She asked, a tear sliding down her face again. She had to know why he was bothering to speak with her at all. Something inside her knew that this wasn't what Vader had had in mind when he'd ordered the Admiral to keep her with him.

He raised an eyebrow again. "Why, what?"

"Why are you helping me?"

"Am I?"

She closed her eyes, breathing in and out slowly, trying to bring order to the chaos of her soul. There was nothing to center herself upon, her insides emptied by the loss of everything she'd ever loved. All that remained was the cold wind that Vader had blown through her soul, and that wind seemed to fuel the embers of her own cold fire. The spark grew a bit brighter, a promise of vengeance if only she could live long enough... "Yes," she answered, voice steady.

"Are you certain of that?"

Again she nodded. "Yes."

He chuckled darkly, releasing her shoulders though his hand remained steady on the back of her neck. "And why would I do that?"

It was a good question. Why would he help her? An even better question was what he hoped to gain from helping her. Her eyes opened, her gaze turning slowly from the remains of her homeworld to meet his own. "Because I'm going to see the Emperor," she whispered, answering both his question and her own. "And what I tell him is a choice you can use to your advantage."

A tight, wolfish smile crossed his lips. "It's a choice," he agreed, eyes glittering with that odd look again, as if she had suddenly become interesting to him. "And like before, there will be a price for disobedience."

Irena did not know what to say to that, and so chose to remain silent. Her eyes flickered back to the mass of white and brownish gray that her world had become, and let another tear fall. Another ten minutes would pass before Admiral Thrawn called off the bombardment, and then he took her to a small briefing room just off the bridge. Thirty minutes after that, she was taken to one of the empty senior officer's quarters and locked inside, left alone while the Storm's End carried her to Coruscant.