Note to Readers: This work builds off the stories told in KOTOR by the Sand People and the Rakatan remnants on Lehon of what happened to the Infinite Empire, as well as some work from Legends continuity comic books. It conflicts with some Legends work, but not, as far as I know, any canon material at the time of its publication. While the locations and species will be mostly familiar, all but two of the characters are new and those two characters are secondary characters and have been significantly reimagined.
Story is long and entirely drafted, although editing will require chapters to be released serially. Chapters will be numbered but not have individual titles.
The Fall of the Infinite Empire
Chapter One
A Rakatan stood alone upon a hill of shimmering shards of glass. He looked down on a sea of such glass, piled into sparkling dunes and stretching to the horizon. Some of the pieces of glass were large enough that one could stand entirely on a single one, while an uncounted number were small enough to fit in your hand. In the skies above there was a single large sun, along with an odd sight. A red planet, almost as large in the sky as the sun, was roiling. Occasional flashes of light burst forth from its surface, leaving behind glowing sections of the planet in the spots where the light erupted.
A second Rakatan, dressed in an ornate multicolored tunic, replete with medals and other signs of rank which contrasted starkly with the plain tunic of the first, ascended the glass hill. He did not climb the hill, he levitated just above the glass, coming to rest behind the first Rakatan, who had not moved or even acknowledged the second's arrival, but simply stared up at the red planet above. After gently lowering himself to stand on the glass, the second Rakatan spoke.
"It will be completed soon."
The first Rakatan, still looking skyward, breathed in deeply before responding.
"Yes Fa-Rush, it will all be over soon."
"Will you return to see it, when the process is complete?' asked Fa-Rush. As usual, Fa-Rush spoke formally, a hint of obsequiousness in his voice. Fa-Rush considered one of his greatest traits his firm grasp of rank and his place in the hierarchy. Never would Fa-Rush be accused of a lack of respect for those whose station was above his own, and Fa-Rush always knew who stood above and who stood beneath him.
"I doubt it Fa-Rush. Much work awaits me on Lehon."
"Of course your excellency," Fa-Rush responded with some nervousness. He silently chided himself for his boldness in asking the question. He was growing lax. For years he had been serving this Elder before him, and Fa-Rush knew he had grown too used to the unnatural calm the Elder exhibited. But that calm did not make him safe. Only the truly powerful and ruthless could become Elders, and only the truly horrifying could stay Elders for as long as this one. Overstepping would be fatal. He must watch every word, every movement.
Without saying a word the Elder began to walk down the hill of glass. Fa-Rush was at first shocked. He had tried to walk up the hill when he first saw the Elder waiting above, but every time he had tried to put his weight onto the glass the shards would become displaced and move beneath him. He had quickly decided to use his skills to levitate instead. He had thought to impress the Elder with his abilities. Learning to lift one's own body weight in this fashion, even if it was only a few inches, was a trick he had spent a long time perfecting Now Fa-Rush took the Elder's actions as a rebuke. Was it so easy to walk on this shifting surface, Fa-Rush wondered?
It took him a moment to realize that the Elder, was reordering the thousands of glass shards, large and small, along his path down the hill so that they created a stable structure on which he could walk. Fa-Rush had been correct. It was a rebuke, but not for using his skills instead of walking, but for using them in such a paltry way. This was power. The power of the Elders. He must watch, listen, and learn, he thought. Only then could he ascend, and only by ascending could he survive.
Fa-Rush walked behind the Elder on the glass structure which started to collapse beneath his feet as the Elder ceased holding it together, and reached the bottom of the hill shortly after him. At the base of the hill was just more finely crushed glass. A heavy wind was known to send these small shards into the air, and they could cut deeply. A minor functionary had been caught in the open for one such windstorm. The shards had ripped the flesh from his bones. At least Fa-Rush assumed it was a minor functionary. The injuries had been too great to identify him, but who else would have been out of doors during a storm? Anyone of importance would have some minor functionary to go fetch them things. Fa-Rush himself had a dozen pages answering to him who could be sent on little errands. Only the Elder's inexplicable penchant for walking among the glass dunes had brought Fa-Rush outside of the compound.
When the dunes had first formed, two hundred years prior, they had been a sight that drew a great deal of attention. From across the Infinite Empire those that could afford it traveled to see them. In the daylight the glass, cleaner and clearer then than it was today, had dazzled the tourists, splitting the sunlight and sending all the colors out in every direction.
But its beauty was not the true attraction. Rakatans had come from across the hundreds of worlds to look on this testament to the power of their Empire. The people of this world had rebelled against that Empire. They had rejected their place in the galactic order. And they had persisted, through years of defeat. The impudence even now made Fa-Rush, born after the war had ended, enraged. Despite the totality and completeness of the Empire's victory, Fa-Rush kept the anger fresh. Good Rakatans knew how to nurse old hatreds, knew how to keep them strong and vital.
The bombardment from space had followed years of uninterrupted victory on the ground. But the victories that had done nothing to stop resistance, so the decision had been made that this world was to serve as an example for all the others. Every living thing on the surface had been killed. The oceans had boiled away. The sandy soil had baked, turned to glass. The glass, shattered by the repeated impacts, had collected into great heaps. These hills and mountains of glass had been attractions for a time, but their time was done.
But for some reason the Elder liked to walk among these dunes. Walk! His scientific studies could easily be overseen from the one city, really just the last remaining military settlement, on this shell of a world. And if he had to go out there was transportation. But he walked. And so Fa-Rush walked, as being away from the Elder for too long defeated his whole purpose in being here.
The Elder wove his way through the glass dunes, his boots making a crunching sound as they shattered small pieces of glass underneath them. Even the small dunes were high enough that it was impossible to see around them. The horizon hidden from them and one dune looking much the same as the next it was easy to lose one's way. But the Elder never seemed to be lost. And so Fa-Rush followed. Had Fa-Rush been of a more whimsical or metaphorical mindset he would have noted to himself that following the Elder through the dunes as he went Fa-Rush knew not where, was much like his whole life. Rakatan society was a dangerous place. The safest place to be was in the close service of an Elder. In their wake was the only calm water to be found. To be close enough that one's murder would draw the attention and the anger of an Elder, that was the key. The alternative was the face the constant struggle for dominance. The struggle through which the weak were eliminated and the strong created. But Fa-Rush knew this path was not for him. He knew he would not survive long unattached to a great power. But, lacking in military aptitude as he was, Fa-Rush would have had a hard time attaching himself to most Elders. His assignment to this blasted world had been his salvation. For on this world had long worked one of the two Elders not directly concerned with warfare.
What drew the Elder here was well known enough. He was studying the natives, or what was left of them. As their revolution turned into their failed revolution many had fled into the massive cave systems on this planet, and those caves went deep enough that some survived the bombardment even in the equatorial regions where the bombardment was most intense. If one went deep enough one could find what remained of the moist world this had once been; underground lakes of massive size, almost entirely insulated from the hell on the surface. Or so Fa-Rush had been told. He had of course never gone down into the caves himself. There had been attempts to drag the natives from their caves, but those attempts had led to the only real defeats the Rakatans had suffered in the fighting here. They were clever, the native population, and seemed to have adapted swiftly to life in the caves.
But for all the danger going into the caves represented to the Rakatan overlords, some natives were still caught from time to time. Droids were sent in to patrol the upper reaches of the caves. Eventually each droid would be destroyed, but sometimes they would detect groups of natives on the move, and send word back to the Rakatan forces. And occasionally the group could be caught. Today was one of the rare days when that had happened. There were new prisoners, new subjects for the experiments. What the Elder sought to learn by his experiments Fa-Rush did not know. He had no idea what the Elder was doing. But this did not worry Fa-Rush, as no one else knew either, save the Elder himself. He had been so long in his position that no living Rakatan could match or even approach his knowledge of issues biological. Fa-Rush's role here did not require him to understand what the project was about, however. He was no scientist. Logistics and organization were his purview. Everyone needed someone to handle such things. That was vital. This Elder, old and powerful as he was, would not be around forever. Fa-Rush needed transferable skills, something to make him useful to another Elder when the time came. Something to make him essential. Something to keep him safe.
Today he expected to have new subjects to process. Space and food would need to be found for them. Fa-Rush was pleased at today's catch. It would provide him an opportunity to show to the Elder his usefulness. It was important to be useful.
"I hope these newest slaves will be useful to you, your excellency," Fa-Rush called out. He had been falling behind. Old as he was the Elder was in top condition. Fa-Rush was not used to walking so much.
"They are all useful to me Fa-Rush," replied the Elder.
"Of course! Of course!" Fa-Rush could not believe he had done it again. Convince him you are a fool and he will cast you out, he thought to himself. But was he supposed to just follow in silence? Where were they even going?
Eventually Fa-Rush's question was answered. They wound their way through the glass dunes until the came into a clearing. After they came out of the dunes Fa-Rush could see a great rock wall before them. In front of the cliff was a line of natives, bound, on their knees. Standing above and in front of them were three Rakatan warriors, in obsidian armor, wielding lances at the top of which there crackled a strange sort of light. It was like a pale blue lightning swirling around the point of the lance.
The two centuries the natives had spent underground had sapped their brown skin of the richness the complexions of the natives of this part of the planet had once possessed. Or so it seemed to Fa-Rush, who had seen pictures of the natives from before the rebellion when he had been assigned here. He had never seen a native that had not lived underground, and those always looked sickly. These creatures that knelt on the glass covered ground had likely never seen the sunshine, unless it was through some small hole in the rock. As the Elder came to a stop, several feet from the prisoners and their guards, Fa-Rush stepped forward.
"Soldiers, report!" Fa-Rush exclaimed pompously. The three obsidian armored soldiers would have sneered at him, had they not known whose servant he was, or if his master had not been present. But then, if his master had not been present, Fa-Rush would not have wanted to show off so much.
"Droid found them, not far in. Call went out and we went in," said one of them.
"No traps, no ambushes," said another.
Fa-Rush looked down imperiously at the prisoners as he walked in front of them. He walked so that his legs almost touched their faces. They flinched and tried to turn away as he came close to them, but he kept their faces in place. Fa-Rush's moment to preen was, however, cut short by an unfortunate moment of recollection. He stopped and turned to the nearest guard.
"How many?" he said.
"Do you wish for me to count them for you my lord?" said the guard. At this Fa-Rush straightened up and stared at the guard. He would have done more but he did not know if the Elder would have looked on an aggressive response as showing spirit or wasting time. Fa-Rush was saved from having to decide how to handle the impertinence of this underling by the Elder himself.
"How many originally? How many did you kill?"
The guard, so recently staring at Fa-Rush in disdain turned on his heel to look at the Elder. The disdain was gone. The guard looked at the Elder for a moment before replying.
"None, excellency. They surrendered easily."
The Elder looked from the guard who spoke to his companion, who avoided the Elder's gaze. The movements of his head and eyes were unhurried and smooth. He brought his gaze back to the first guard.
"Did you think lying to me would mean that your punishment for failing to preserve the specimens would be less?" The Elder's voice was calm. His tone almost suggested the question was genuine. The offending guard took a step back as the Elder lifted his arm, his clawed hand open. The guard's breath caught in his throat and he grabbed at his chest. He started to fall to his knees but they didn't hit the ground. His body hung oddly in the air, halfway through its fall for a moment before the Elder let go. The guard fell, gasping, sucking in huge breaths of air. He braced himself against his lance and began to push himself up using it when it flew from his hands and into the waiting hand of the Elder, who in one fluid movement brought it down, its tip cutting through the air right next to the guards long tall head, until it cut away his left eye stalk. The stalk, and the eyeball it held, fell to the ground, cut clean off the guard's head. The guard moved his mouth as if to scream but no sound came out. This seemed to make him more terrified and his face looked as though he was trying to yell harder. This went on for around 20 seconds before his mouth closed. Only then did he start to breathe again.
The Elder, who had looked impassively at the guard the entire time, dropped the lance to the ground next to guard's hands and said, "Pick it up."
The guard picked up the lance with one hand, and with the other grabbed at his head where the eyestalk had been. There was no blood, for the lances cauterized as they cut. Into his one remaining eye the Elder stared. Fa-Rush was certain the guard would be killed, that the Elder was toying with him for a moment before delivering the killing blow. But the Elder, after staring for a while, turned back towards the prisoners.
Most of them had been too scared to look up during the altercation, their eyes firmly on the fine shards glass covering the ground. But two had watched the entire thing. A male and a female Fa-Rush thought, though he had a great deal of trouble telling the natives apart. He saw them rarely and then only ever at a distance, in the holding pens. He would select a few for the Elder's experiments, arrange for their transport to his facility, and then never see them again. The events of today, seeing natives freshly caught, was a new experience for Fa-Rush. He hoped very much that it would not become common.
There was something irksome about the way the two natives looked at Fa-Rush and his fellow Rakatans, especially the one he thought was a female. It was hard to read emotions in their faces though, and Fa-Rush had never seen any reason to get better at it. Why learn the intricacies of non-verbal communication among a race that would soon be extinct? But if forced to guess he would have said that these were looks of defiance.
The two had drawn the attention of the Elder as well. He stepped toward them, and they returned his attention, staring impudently at one who could crush every bone in their bodies with a thought. Whether they felt fear is not something that Fa-Rush could tell, but the Elder could. Long years of training had honed his abilities, and the minds of others were not mysteries to him. As he came to a stop in front of them he reached out his clawed hand to grab the face of the woman. She kept her face as still as she could, and her gaze shifted from the Elder to the male native to her left, hoping to prevent him from some suicidal gesture on her behalf. This fact escaped Fa-Rush, busy with fantasies about ambitions achieved, and the guards, filled with fear themselves. But it did not escape the Elder. He turned the woman's face towards his, forcing her eyes to look on him. Their faces were both locked in place, as stone. But one was so through effort and the other was a face of genuine calm. The Elder looked down at the woman for a time, then released her. He turned to Fa-Rush.
"All of them," he said.
"All to the research facility?" Fa-Rush said with some surprise. This was more than he had been expecting. He had places for them all, but not supplies for them all. It would be a scramble to accommodate them, a scramble the Elder must not see.
"Yes," the elder replied, "The female will go to my ship."
"Your ship? I do not understand your excellency," Fa-Rush said, his voice almost a whine.
The Elder ignored Fa-Rush's implied complaint. "When the others reach the facility, you will arrange transport for them. To Lehon."
"Shall I accompany them?" Fa-Rush failed to keep the excitement and hope out of his voice. Lehon! The heart of all power in the galaxy. To return home in the company of the Elder would put Fa-Rush in the center of everything that mattered. His family would see him raised up, safe in the protection of the one of the great powers.
"Yes Fa-Rush, as shall he," the Elder said pointing at the one-eyed guard without looking at him. "He will serve my needs better there than he has here." The guard stood, his mouth agape. His unexpected reprieve appeared to have been snatched away. The guard wondered what horrors awaited him in the Elder's service, now that he had become an object of attention. Fa-Rush smiled at the guard, thinking that he now understood the reason for the Elder's mercy. The guard was being kept alive to toy with. Perhaps, Fa-Rush though, the Elder would eat him.
"All shall be done as you command your Excellency!" Fa-Rush laughed to himself at his own recent worries. All his patience, all his care, it had all paid off.
As the Elder walked away he said, "They will all survive the trip unharmed Fa-Rush."
Fa-Rush heard the words but not the implied threat. He was far too thrilled. He showed his teeth to the guards. Some might confuse it for a smile, but it was not a sign of mirth. Fa-Rush felt powerful, more powerful than these miserable guards, one of whom was almost certainly about to die. The showing of teeth was an assertion of dominance favored by the young and the stupid among Rakatan males.
Fa-Rush walked up to the natives, intentionally kicking up little clouds of the glass particles, forcing the prisoners to avert their eyes. He stood above them, as though it was by his abilities they had been caught, or by his command that they would now be taken from their home. Looking down he struck as imperious a pose as a bureaucrat could manage, he shouted "Rejoice! For you have been saved. All hail Elder Zhed-Hai!"
The moment for Fa-Rush was spoiled, however. All but one of the prisoners ignored him, not understanding his words. But the woman had, while still kneeling, straightened her back and looked at him without fear. In place of the fear was something else, but Fa-Rush could not tell what it was. The thought crossed his mind for a moment that the savage had somehow understood him or what was happening to it, but the thought flitted through and out of Fa-Rush's mind quickly, as so many did.