Hi again! Sorry this is late. I rolled immediately from my holiday into a run of night shifts. And this chapter turned out to be far longer than intended... once again, we'll have to wait a little longer for the next Han/Leia update. There's a lot happening on Mandalore today.

Chapter 51: Mand'alor

Korkie stared at the body on the ice before him, a blaster bolt over Saxon's unbeating heart, and up to the young woman still holding vibro-cuffs in her faintly trembling hands. The horror of what he had almost done sunk in hard and heavy. There were subtle ribbons of pink on either side of Saxon's neck, where the proximity of the blades had burned him. Korkie had so very nearly become the tyrants who had killed his ancestors. There was the strange feeling of the galaxy having frozen all around him, entrapping him in this moment, but blood was still pulsing from his forehead down his face so time must have been moving on after all. With effort, he looked up. Ursa was approaching now, embracing her daughter, inspecting her for injury, and behind her, Fenn Rau.

"You had orders, Fenn."

The anger that Korkie could no longer direct at Saxon was not easily discarded; it bubbled up now, unruly and unwanted, from within him.

"You're supposed to be at the settlement. What about the villagers?"

Fenn wore the rebuke with good grace.

"Bo-Katan and the rest of them have matters well under control. The survivors of Krownest are able soldiers. They're driving the stormtroopers out now."

"They are still better off with our swords than without," Korkie argued.

He took a step back towards the fortress but was met solidly by Fenn's protesting hand.

"Mand'alor," he warned. "You're hurt."

One hand still on his chest, the other reached up and probed the wound on his forehead.

"Oi! Ow!"

Fenn grimaced.

"Star's sakes. I can see your karking skull."

He used his teeth to tear off a bit of fabric from beneath his armour. He folded it and pressed it against Korkie's wound.

"Hold that there. Firm pressure."

Finally returning his weapons to his belt, Korkie grudgingly obliged.

"There'll be something proper for the wound in the fortress?" Fenn asked of Ursa and Sabine.

Korkie cringed at the attention.

"It's a kriffing cut, Fenn-"

"Mhmm. Wait 'til you see it."

"You probably have a concussion too," Sabine contributed unhelpfully. "I saw the hit. It was a good one."

Fenn, Ursa and Sabine all began the high-stepping march back towards the fortress. Korkie hesitated. None of this felt right. This wasn't the glorious victory he'd perhaps been foolish enough to hope for. He looked at the body left sprawled on the ice. Ursa seemed to read him.

"I'm sorry, Mand'alor," she acquiesced. "I know this was never the plan."

And she could have defended herself – how little time she'd had, how close he had been to shooting Sabine – but she said nothing more.

"It was necessary," Korkie conceded. "You're pardoned, I suppose."

Ursa's shoulders slumped with relief and Korkie marvelled at this bizarre universe in which his words were law.

"We'll bring the body with us to Mandalore and return it to his family," he resolved. "They can grieve as they see fit."

He sighed, steadied himself. He was already beginning to bleed through Fenn's rag.

"I suppose we could make just a quick stop at the fortress, before we go help Ba'vodu."

"And what about the blaster wound?"

The Mand'alor was still occupied inspecting the job that Fenn had done on his forehead. The sutures weren't exactly evenly spaced and the knots had taken a few goes but the sickening sheen of white skull was hidden away now, the muscles and skin joined again above Korkie's left eyebrow.

"No need, Fenn. It's fine."

Fenn inclined his head illustratively at the Wren family, who had, with all the blood and probably with Fenn and Korkie's squabbling, wandered back to the balcony and become absorbed in their own quiet discussion.

"They're not in any hurry," he pointed out.

Korkie scowled.

"I'm in a hurry."

"Bo-Katan doesn't need us."

"A Mandalorian never shies away from a fight."

"I know. Which is why we should put some bacta on it now, while we've got the chance."

Fenn brandished the open pot.

"It'll take two seconds if you stop arguing."

Korkie groaned his acquiescence and unfastened his armour at the shoulder joints, slipped it down beneath his shoulder blades.

"See? It's nothing."

Fenn beheld the deep scorch, the weeping tissue and blistered skin, and tried not to sound too queasy.

"Easy for you to say. You can't see it."

"I can feel it."

Fenn smeared on the bacta in coarse, quick strokes.

"Judging by the depth of the burn, Mand'alor, I don't think you can."

The nerves would have been destroyed with all the rest of it.

"Didn't know you were a healer," Korkie grumbled.

"Seen plenty of blaster wounds."

Korkie shrugged his armour back into place and turned to face Fenn again.

"You've got to stop calling me that, by the way."

"Calling you what?"

"Mand'alor."

Fenn frowned.

"Why?"

"Because we're friends," Korkie reasoned, as though this were obvious. "And, besides-"

He gave Fenn a light whack on the back of his head.

"-because you never follow any of my orders, when I give them to you."

Fenn scowled but could not quite bite back a smile.

"I've followed plenty of orders."

"None today."

"You just can't remember, Mand'alor, because of your concussion."

Korkie, striding over to join the Wren family now, shot him a glare over his shoulder, not entirely devoid of warmth.

"You're mocking me, Alor'ad."

He lifted an arm to beckon the Wrens, moving as though the wound on his back were nothing but a scratch.

"Come on, ad'ika! Enough karking chatter. We've got stormtroopers to expel from your planet, no?"

It was the most beautiful and terrible sight Korkie had beheld in his life. A wave of Mando'ade, seething with righteous fury, fighting back the soldiers that had for two decades rendered them prisoners on their home soil. They fought with weapons homemade and weapons that could have belonged in museums. They fought armoured in ancient beskar and in the leather of the animals they had hunted through the snow. The fought more ferociously still when their Mand'alor appeared amongst them, when the word spread like the howling winds that Saxon was dead at the fortress, that a new era was beginning.

The stormtroopers were without a leader and without a home. Their files fragmented and their shots fell astray. They evacuated first as solitary deserters and then in droves. Their Emperor had brought them here for nothing. They did not love this land of perpetual winter. Korkie thought of Han Solo, of the years his friend had told him about, in which he'd worn that armour. The refuge of the homeless, the persecuted, the poor. This war was not their own.

Bo-Katan led a charge on the Imperial armament. Ruma and her seven foundlings, grown each of them to adulthood, created a fearsome wall of impassible blaster fire around the old, the young, and the unarmed. Ursa Wren and her son and daughter, now, were joining the fray. Driving the stormtroopers out of the township and into the barren snow.

"Told you they didn't need us," Fenn told him.

Korkie unclipped the Darksaber from his belt. The blaster bolt was beginning to hurt just a tiny bit. One blade would suffice.

"Someone's got to figure out what we're going with all these prisoners, no? We'll drive them into the armoury; we can contain them there while I decide what to do with them. Come on."

If Fenn had disagreements, he did not voice them. An armoury full of disarmed stormtroopers. Korkie knew that it was absurd. That no Mand'alor before him would have done this. It was dangerous, perhaps. But the Empire would not come, Korkie thought, for that alone. And what did it matter? The Empire would come, one day. Sooner or later, they would come. He threw himself into the battle before him and his mind was anywhere but the present moment. The Emperor's apprentice, who had hunted him to Yaga Minor when he had thought he'd finally found a reprieve. The survivors amongst Gar Saxon's supercommandos, standing amidst the wreckage on the third moon of Concord Dawn. They might have called him Mand'alor, had he severed Saxon's head. But instead, he had enemies, still, on all sides.

"We'll drive them into the armoury, strip them of their weapons and armour, and send them off-planet to make their own luck," Korkie decided. "They won't be back for revenge. And I don't think they'll skulk home to the Emperor, either."

Fenn eyed him warily over the sweeps of their sparking blades.

"I wouldn't advise devising strategy while actively engaged in combat."

"Do you think I'm going to be felled by an Imperial stormtrooper?" Korkie scoffed.

Fenn shrugged.

"You do have a concussion."

"Do I, Doctor Rau?"

Korkie helped the scrabbling soldiers along their way to their armoury-turned-prison with a dextrous prod in the Force. Fenn did not seem much impressed.

"Yes, probably."

"You're impossible," Korkie grumbled.

But protests from his overprotective Alor'ad or not, they were rounding up the stormtroopers with the ease of a shepherd to his shatual, now, as other Mando'ade caught onto the plan. The time was drawing near to declare victory on Krownest. To stake his claim on his planet proper. Korkie was the Mand'alor whether he deserved it or not, whether he liked it or not. His decisions would be upheld, whether they were right or not. Enemies on all sides. But a friend to his right, and his Ba'vodu, now, emerging victorious over a crest of snow. She beheld the Imperial resistance, rapidly deteriorating to Imperial surrender, with an approving warmth in the Force that neither the beskar of her helmet nor the horrors of the overnight raid could entirely quash.

"Well, it's been a messy kriffing cycle," she mused. "But I guess we're starting the tidy-up."

And Korkie felt just a little bit better about all this leading-the-system business. Enemies all over the galaxy, but family at his side. Together. One job at a time.

Messy was the right word for it. Sewlen Jerac beheld the latest of her long history of field hospitals as it was assembled; the various tents and gurneys and operative kits had been the fruit of years of designing and manufacturing in the relative peacetime of years gone past. The fortress of the Clan Wren provided ample space for the construction of this tiny settlement in its vast entrance hall. The echoing chamber was soon filled with the roar of the landing retrieval craft from the third moon of Concord Dawn. The makeshift hospital was about to get a whole lot kriffing messier, then.

They'd already been at work for an hour or so but this would be the worst of it. The Imperial efforts on Krownest had been almost half-hearted, leaving some villagers but very few armoured soldiers with substantial injuries, but the surprise raid on the base had been brutal. Sewlen approached the ships as they off-loaded their patients and scanned her eyes over the triage acuity tags. There were no red tags but this was not particularly reassuring. Those that had been severely injured would have died of their wounds on Concord Dawn before the medical retrieval team could arrive.

"Alright. Get the yellows down here."

A leg requiring amputation. Scores of burns. A neck injury that looked like it might be trouble. An abdominal injury that looked like more trouble.

"You know the drill, Meri. Those ten all need lines. Blood for these two and crystalloids for the burns, Saka. And T12, I need the limb kit."

Sewlen did not work alone anymore, as she had done in the days of the first war of her life, when the Old Guard had killed near all of her profession in Sundari. She was not alone as she had been with the Duchess Satine and that pain in her belly. Some of Ruma's foundlings had showed an interest, thank the stars, beyond the weapon-wielding brilliance of their adoptive mother, and were capable assistants now. Sewlen set her gaze down and worked. It seemed all she knew how to do, these days. Somewhere in the third war of her lifetime, somewhere along with those thousands of surgeries and shots of tihaar and words unsaid with Bo-Katan Kryze across the table from her, Sewlen feared she had forgotten how to be a proper human. She was barely any better a conversationalist than T12 anymore. But she didn't worry about those inadequacies on days like these. She worked as the glare of the fluorescent lights, set up on collapsible poles, became sharper with the falling dusk and stung her eyes as dusk stretched into night. She worked until her assistants presented to her no more operative cases, when all of the yellow tags and even the greens and the blues had been dealt with, and Korkie Kryze appeared somehow by her side, a hand upon her shoulder. His face was bloodied and his silhouette bulky with wound dressings upon his back, beneath his black underarmour.

"Oh, kriff," Sewlen breathed. "I should have realised you were hurt."

Korkie waved a dismissive hand.

"If I'd needed you, I'd have come. I've sent our former stormtroopers on their way instead. I only came around to thank you for fixing my elbow earlier. Couldn't have defeated Saxon without it."

Sewlen did not really hear him, eyes narrowing at the sutured wound upon his forehead.

"You are hurt."

Korkie shook his head.

"Minor injuries. Esteemed surgeon Fenn Rau has already seen to them."

The suture job was novice at best.

"In a manner of speaking," Sewlen sighed. "It will scar."

"All cuts scar," Korkie reminded her, placidly. "You taught me that."

"My suture job would have scarred a whole lot less than-"

"Please, Sewlen. Let's not hurt Fenn's feelings. Besides. Something to remember the day by."

Sewlen rubbed at her eyes, disgruntled.

"I'm going to remember all of this and yet none of this. Does that make sense?"

Korkie grimaced.

"It does."

He gave her a squeeze on the shoulder, mustered something of a smile.

"Keldabe in the morning," he mused. "We'll leave your patients here? Or transport them to Concord Dawn?"

"Here's fine. We won't make any unstable transports. More trouble than it's worth."

Korkie hummed his vague agreement.

"I'll just have to imagine you're with me, then. For moral support. When I make my big speech in Keldabe."

Sewlen rolled her eyes, finding a faint smile of her own.

"You won't need my support. You've been giving stirring speeches since you were a toddler."

"Not the type that impressed soldiers," Korkie muttered.

"The type that impressed everyone."

Korkie shrugged, but he seemed to sense her earnestness, and did not argue further.

"How'd you get that gash on your forehead?" Sewlen probed.

"I thought we were agreeing that problem was already fixed."

"I need to assess you for head injury, though."

"No need," Korkie grumbled, with grudging humour. "Fenn covered that, too. He's decided I have a concussion and that I should rest. I've gracefully accepted the mandate. It's three hours until dawn and I intend to sleep at least one of them. Maybe two."

Sewlen snickered, rubbing again at her aching eyes.

"Perhaps it's for the best I let you give headaches to another doctor."

Korkie gave a weary smile.

"Fenn's not a doctor. He just worries like one. But yes, by all means, let's save you another headache, Ba'vodu."

Sewlen was exhausted but she did not miss that stray word. She stood suddenly taller by his side, a strange solemnity between them.

"You've never called me that before."

Korkie dipped his head.

"Forgive me. It took me far too long to realise. But you are my family."

Sewlen looked at the man before her. Crooked nose and now crooked of eyebrow, too. But so strong. In his radiant prime. He reached out an arm and she felt suddenly old, almost frail, within his embrace.

"You've always looked after me," he told her. "Right from the very beginning. Before Ba'vodu Bo came back into my life, even."

She nodded in quiet agreement. He had been a beautiful child. The closest she'd ever had to a child of her own. She had ached for a child, in those years of her youth. And now he stood grown before her, calling her aunt. She looked out across her sea of patients in their makeshift cots.

"You will be a great Mand'alor, Korkie. Greater than our people deserve, perhaps."

He shook his head.

"That's not true."

Sewlen sighed.

"There is so much violence, amongst us."

Korkie acquiesced the point with a sombre nod.

"Yes."

"We've lived so few years in peacetime."

"I can hardly remember it."

They stood in silence. It would be no simple feat, to erase that past. To overcome this war of wars.

"Something to dream of," Korkie murmured. "Something to hope for."

The Mand'alor was not meant to deal in hopes and dreams. But peace would not materialise in the galaxy as it stood. Peace today could be no more than a glimmering wonder, somewhere a long way beyond their reach. It was a good thing, Sewlen thought, to have a Mand'alor who dreamed.

"I'm very proud of you," she told him.

Korkie stifled a roll of his eyes and gracefully accepted the compliment.

"And I'm very grateful to you, Ba'vodu."

They stood together a long while, until the moaning of a man in pain reached out across the hospital floor and climbed to a crescendo. The leg amputation. Sewlen bade Korkie a silent farewell and went to attend to her patient. In the blur of the day, she had forgotten his name.

The straggly survivors of Keldabe hadn't the faintest indication of the great change until a new ship touched down shortly before dusk in the landing bay before the fortress that belonged to their leader Gar Saxon. The Clans of Keldabe and the Clans of Krownest and Concord Dawn had in the age of the Empire returned to their insular nature of ancient eras gone past, when no one's family was large enough to span multiple planets and the simple act of communication with other Mandalorian Clans was enough to be considered subversive. Besides, everyone knew that despite alleging to be on the same side, Gar Saxon and Fenn Rau never had been and never would be friends, nor even allies, and that by eking out an existence in the ruins of Keldabe one was an enemy of Concord Dawn by default. It was nothing malicious nor personal. The survivors on Krownest, too, had developed their own reputation as being both overly complicit with Imperial interference – the Imperial barracks were larger on Krownest than anywhere else in the Mandalore system – and simultaneously quietly volatile. Word had eventually got out of Sabine Wren's defection to the rebels and everyone had known that when a daughter of that sort of might strayed, someone in the family would follow. For the people of Keldabe, to associate with those upon Krownest would be risk being tarred with the same brush.

And so they had received no word at all of Saxon's secret massacre on the third moon of Concord Dawn, nor of the duel on Krownest and the revolt in the settlements that had followed. The news should have been conveyed, of course, between the stormtroopers stationed on the respective planets, but Bo-Katan Kryze's first act upon entering Krownest's airspace and then Mandalore's had been to destroy its comms satellites, and the stormtroopers of Keldabe had been lounging at typically woeful attention – even worse than usual, perhaps, given the Viceroy's temporary absence – when Korkie Kryze's troops had arrived and surrounded their compounds and advised that they would be wisest to leave without a fight.

"Mandalore is no longer under the jurisdiction of the Empire," it was announced, plainly, by the armoured soldiers, as though the world had not been turned on its head.

The people flocked to the town square but said nothing. What was there to say? The armour of the Clan Wren, the Clan Rau. The Nite Owls. Great forces of Mandalorian history, alive before them again, after long exile. After years of stormtroopers in white plastoid and false leaders in white beskar.

And in the shocked silence, the lost prince had emerged from his ship with a battered brow and a body in his arms, held like a child.

"Where is Tiber Saxon?"

He turned and faced the fortress, patient and expectant. Weapons on his belt but out of his reach. His arms full with the body of the Viceroy.

Tiber Saxon emerged from the fortress flanked by soldiers and beheld the body of his brother in the arms of Korkaran Kryze. The Darksaber at his challenger's belt. The watching crowd. Would they have rallied with him, had he attacked? Tiber weighed the gamble. Gar Saxon had preached a return to the warrior's creed. But now the damned pacifist had killed him. Tiber did not fancy his own chances at vengeance; there was a reason, he could admit to himself, that it had been Gar to seize the title of Viceroy in the first place. The soldiers of Keldabe would not fight for him. Not against this victor. Not against the battle-hardened troops who lifted their weapons at nervous stormtroopers, an act that none under the leadership of the Viceroy had dared. In the silence, the hands of Keldabe's citizens were loosening upon their weapons. There was the feeling of grudging respect in the dusk air.

"I'm sorry," Kryze offered.

It would not have been wise, but Tiber near shot him then. The gall. The detestable false honour.

"Don't insult me."

Kryze shook his head, opened his mouth as though there were something more to say, but in the end said nothing. He knelt to lay the body of Gar Saxon on the rough stone of the fortress steps. But when he straightened, he stood tall.

"You can leave with your stormtroopers, should you find my leadership untenable."

Stars, Tiber would have liked to shoot him. But there were two blades at his belt and Kryze's hands were free now to grasp them. Tiber had not been the strong brother. But he had been the cleverer of the two. He regarded Gar's body at his feet. Did he feel any stirring fondness for him now, the brother who had all his life been his rival? No. He did not owe Gar that. Gar had pressed him down all of these years, and now had failed him, after all his delusions of grandeur, his talk of destiny.

"You needn't have returned him to me," Tiber snapped.

Girding himself against the rising hatred, Tiber managed the fractional bend of a knee, the dip of his head.

"I take your leave, Mand'alor."

The great soldier of the Clan Saxon had failed. Tiber turned on his heel and beckoned his escort to follow. Four obeyed. Four hesitated, lingered behind. Tiber stalked to his ship and did not look back at the unfaithful. He would not beg and he would not accept anything other than unwavering loyalty, even if his forces were consequently few. Gar Saxon had made many mistakes in his years of leadership and that, Tiber realised, recognising the hole in his brother's chest that belonged not to the sabers of the Mand'alor but more likely to the long-range blaster cannon worn on the shoulder of the Countess Wren, had been his fatal error.

He would return, Tiber told himself, and wreak a vengeance more horrible than anything Gar Saxon or any of these new invaders had ever mustered. But for now, the Clan Kryze had sent him into exile once more.

The voice of the Mand'alor rang out across the square.

"Remove the stormtroopers."

The clanking and pinging of blaster fire in a lopsided battle. Tiber watched his people, his enemies, like insects beneath him as he rose through the atmosphere. Citizens of Keldabe had joined in the fight against their occupiers. They had already forgotten about him. It would be, ultimately, to their detriment.

"Where the hell did all those soldiers come from, huh?" Officer Marsh cursed.

He watched his troops from the upper level of the Keldabe base, fighting a hopeless battle against better-armed, better-armoured Mandalorian soldiers. The cheap shit the Empire had given them was karking useless. If they were going to keep Keldabe, they would have to fight with the forces and the weapons that had claimed it.

"Call for naval back-up, Torren."

The junior officer at his left grimaced.

"They've taken out our comms, Sir."

"Entirely?"

"Yes, Sir. On their way in."

Officer Marsh released an effortful breath. It wasn't even worth his anger. Even if they had been able to call for help, would high command have granted them any? Mandalore was the worst posting in the karking galaxy; the landscape had been ruined a hundred times over and there were no resources to export; the population was tiny and not the industrious type. It was a waste of the Empire's money – everyone knew that – held onto as some matter of symbolism, of political significance. But even that had seemed useless, in the years that Korkaran Kryze had been unpatriotically affiliated with the Rebel Alliance. All these years without opposition. And now Kryze's forces had come from nowhere and crippled them before they'd even begun to fire.

It had been a reckless and politically disastrous romantic affair gone wrong that had landed Officer Marsh the posting to begin with. He still had vague plans for retribution against the spiteful leader who'd sent him here. He wasn't dying for this karking cause. And his assembled soldiers might have been the worst in the Imperial Army but they didn't deserve to die for it either.

"Kriff it," Marsh decided. "There's too many of them. Kryze is known for his mercy. We'll surrender."

"Oh! The master! How ghastly!"

The tarnished golden protocol droid looked up from the body of the Viceroy, eyes glowing in the falling dusk. He swivelled fretfully at his waist, looking for answers. A battered astromech rolled up beside him, let out a disdainful whistle of binary.

"Well, yes, I know he wasn't very kind-hearted, but…"

"It wasn't how I wanted it to end either, Threepio," Korkie sighed, kneeling once more to lift the abandoned body. "We'll arrange a burial for the morning."

The droid faltered a moment, analysing his face against his limited memory files.

"You are Korkaran Kryze. The new leader of Mandalore?"

"I suppose so."

The droid bowed.

"Master Kryze."

Korkie didn't yet have the energy nor the eloquence to explain to the C-3PO that they were actually on a first name basis. There would be time for their shared past in the coming days. The armoured body was heavy in his arms, and the blaster wound beginning now to ache deep in his upper back despite Fenn's bacta. Korkie's whole body felt dense and lifeless as beskar. The battle with the stormtroopers had devolved into another disorderly retreat and the calls and cries of battle had faded now to a low rumble of activity. There were occasional shouts of greeting, of celebration, but mostly, the Force spoke to Korkie of guarded, pensive contemplation. It was a victory, to have ejected the occupiers from the city. But the past three generations of Mando'ade had seen four leaderships rise and fall now and were not ready optimists.

Neither was Korkie. He crossed the compact threshold into Saxon's main meeting hall – it was the utilitarian complex of a soldier, with few airs of royalty – and placed the body on the stone table. Footsteps echoed fast behind him.

"We've just about tidied up out there. Are you ready to speak?"

It was his Ba'vodu, pulling her hair from its tie and rubbing her aching scalp. There were the first streaks of grey in that auburn hair now.

"The people are gathered?"

"Yes. You can use the balcony on the second floor."

Korkie thought of his history lessons, of the General Iadon and the 'saber in his gut. He shook his head.

"I'll use the front stairs."

The reign of the Clan Kryze would, again, begin in Keldabe. There was a satisfying sort of irony to it, to claim leadership in a city that had been so hostile to their Clan in decades recent and long ago. Iadon dead on his balcony, Satine on the roof of the train. Bo-Katan had missed her sister's speech on that historic day; she had been alone on her way to Concordia in the lost era of her life. She had seen the recordings enough times. Seen the way her sister had spread her arms wide, opened her chest, thrown back her head and bared her neck to that crowd. Satine, never a soldier, had tamed a city of them.

There was none of that jubilation tonight. Korkie was as solemn as Bo-Katan had ever seen him. He'd fought the wars of the Rebellion with a grin and easy laughter never far beyond his reach. But he had devoted himself to this cause with utmost gravity. It was the battle not only of Korkie's lifetime but that of his entire lineage.

"I have returned to Mandalore to claim my birthright," Korkie began, "and to claim the title that was ceded to me in battle with Gar Saxon."

Bo-Katan wasn't supposed to be the sentimental type but she'd have killed to see that battle. To have seen her nephew win that fight. It had never been Satine's dream for her child but it made a sort of pride swell in her chest that Bo-Katan had never felt for anyone else. The closest thing she had known, she supposed, to a mother's pride. The Clan Kryze had been long overdue a great soldier, and now he stood, a few fine drops of blood still spattering his cheek, on the stairs of the Viceroy's house.

"This is the beginning of a provisional wartime government that will be formally established in the coming days. The Imperial forces have retreated from our soil today but the Emperor remains the most powerful military and political force in our galaxy. It would be naïve to hope he would never come for us again."

There were nods of solemn agreement in the crowd.

"We will live now as our ancestors lived in the wake of the Excision," Korkie declared. "We will live armed and vigilant."

There was the faintest trace of regret in this profession.

"The Emperor's forces are spread thin in the wake of the destruction of the Death Star. But they will rally, and they will return. When the order comes to evacuate, you will do so without hesitation."

Bo-Katan would never forget the sight of those Imperial ships looming over her home. Could still see them, almost, in the fading light. She did not know if she had the strength, now, to fight them again.

"But this life of uncertainty, this life of displacement, is not my plan for you all," Korkie resolved, finding new strength in his voice. "This war, too, will end with our victory. And when the Emperor is dead, we will rebuild."

Had to put Sewlen on a night shift and share some of the delirium.

Next chapter, after Korkie finally gets a couple of hours of sleep, we begin our new era on Mandalore. The Emperor and his apprentice hear the news. Leia and Han do, finally, do that mission on Cymoon.

With regards to work at the moment and when the next chapter will be... I'm aiming for this weekend, but writing is definitely harder with night brain. Might make it a 1-2 week estimated chapter frequency for the next little while.

Thanks for reading :)

xx - S.