A Von Strauss Story - Chapter Two: Iron in the Veins, Fire in the Mind

Initiating Access to BLOODLINE ARCHIVE // VON STRAUSS // PRIMARY NODE
Data Vault 1-A // #$! #$%& Sector // Clearance: KARL-PRIME

ENTER USERNAME: Karl.VS001
VERIFY IDENTITY: Biometrics Confirmed (Pulse + DNA Match)
RETINAL SCAN: Complete
Neural Lattice Sync: Active
Secondary Key: Celestia-Class Override Accepted

STATUS: PATRIARCH ACCESS GRANTED

INITIATE LINEAGE RECORD? [Y/N]: Y

CAUTION: This Archive contains highly classified material. Genetic drift logs, experimental ancestry records, indoctrination transcriptions, and classified memories extracted from generational implants.

DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE? [Y/N]: Y

RECORD TYPE: The Commander's Personal Logs
ACCESSING SUBJECT: File Designate [TVR-2V-A]
LOADING MEMORY...

WARNING: Audio-visual logs may cause psychological destabilization in uninitiated recipients. Proceed at your own risk.
Engage Uploads 0-6? [Y/N]: Y


Date: 3,573 BBY
Author: Commander Darian Von Strauss

The ground was still warm when I stepped upon it. The once green field was choked with ash, veined with the blackened trail of plasma burns. The air was filled with the smoke of countless artillery volleys, and scattered were the remains of men I once addressed by name. They had died well. Not because they wanted to. Because I told them to.

We held the ridge for thirty-seven minutes longer than projected. Long enough to secure the eastern flank. Long enough to render the Sith's reckless charge less disastrous than it might've been. That margin was paid in fire, bone, and blood. It was not my first victory. It was my first loss.

Not tactically, of course. I do not lose tactically.

It began, as most failures do, with arrogance from above.


Strategy Meeting ~~~~

The Sith Lord Malvek was not incompetent. He was simply indifferent to constraint. I presented him with an operational theatre mapped in full. Supply corridors, terrain vulnerabilities, the tempo of allied advances, every vector was accounted for. The plan was efficient, elegant, and would have won the campaign in half the time my superiors estimated.

He dismissed it after glancing at the cover page.

I remember my jaw tightening to a degree it never had before. I didn't do it in defiance. That would've been... difficult. But something in me recoiled, as if my very genome quivered beneath the weight of his words. I wanted to protest, and I nearly did. My tongue held back, not out of discipline, but because it couldn't.

That was my first glimpse of a flaw that could be fatal: obedience woven too deep.


Deployment ~~~~

We deployed under Malvek's assault plan. It was an offensive hammer-blow straight through heavily fortified terrain. No subtlety, no staggered reserves. It took two hours to confirm what I'd predicted: Flanking manoevures from the enemy's second line broke our rear guard. Communication faltered. I watched from the command posts as the lines buckled.

We stabilised them, barely. But not before losing two-hundred and eleven soldiers. Eighty-seven of them were under my direct command. They died assaulting a position we could've taken two days later with a tenth of the blood. Malvek did not care. He called it a "lesson to the enemy."

I still remember the name of the youngest dead: Ensign Rialle Kaon. Eighteen. Smart. Sharp tongue. Good instincts. I'd written her a commendation the night before the assault. It was signed, but never delivered.


Doubt ~~~~

I wrote to father that evening. I already knew what he'd say, but I didn't write it for guidance; I wrote it so someone else could see. He would, if anyone could, understand that I had done everything right, and it hadn't mattered. That the Empire, for all its precision and rigid efficiency, still knelt before power when it wore black robes and a sneer across its face.

"Malvek's tactics cost us the field hospital. Twenty-three medics dead. I protested. I complied. I have never hated myself more than I did in that moment."

I never sent it.


Flowers ~~~~

After the last engagement, a silence settled over the front. We got supplies that were in desperate need, wounded were evacuated. I found myself walking alone into the battlefield's edge. A flower had begun to grow, a small poppy. I dug it up and potted it in a damaged helmet. I decided to keep it alive for the length of the campaign. It was a useless gesture; symbolism in a place ruled by strategy. But it was mine.

I wondered how many more I would find before we had won. Or if, by then, it would've become a number too large to count.


Arrangement ~~~~

In the weeks following the end of Malvek's brutal campaign, a victory marked by countless losses, I received an encrypted communique from my father's estate on Kaas. It detailed an arranged marriage between myself and the eldest daughter of the Damaris family. It came straight from command to "improve bloodlines." Lirae was her name; she worked as a diplomatic attache. I was to meet her before Malvek's next campaign.

I stared at the message for a long while. Not with shock, or with resentment, but with a sort of weary acceptance. I realized that even in the quietest moments, we are not free.


Personal Log Entry ~~~~

It has been a week into Malvek's newest meatgrinder of a campaign. I lost an entire company today. I have lost certainty. Yet I march. Not because I believe, but because I must.


End Logs