Had I known the invasion of Thyferra would have such explosive consequences, I might have thought twice before partaking. As I told the Mandalorian Empire's visiting members some time ago, I reserve the right to choose when, where, and against who I go to war.
My so-called superiors are welcome to dispute this right, but so far, they all seem to lack the spine. Typical.
In any case, it's been an amusing past few weeks behind the Blackwall, expanded as it has to swallow up one more bombed-out ruin of a world. At least I got to unwind a bit there before it was off to the next trash-fire. There's a lot of big plans by big people to rebuild Thyferra's smoking remains into something... big. My countrymen never lack for originality, whatever their other faults.
I've been watching our Republic counterparts across the veil, and they do not seem to be handling the loss well. The holonews feeds are instructive. Supply riots are an emerging problem. Their Senate meets to try to figure out how to deal with the devils behind the ever-expanding wall.
As one of those devils myself, I could enlighten them if only they asked. After all, I created the thing that transformed so many of their people, turned them into something straight out of a nightmare.
Of course, nobody ever does ask. You don't need to understand the enemy, just shoot them full of holes and hope it sticks. These days, it very often doesn't. I remember a time when a blade to the heart or a bolt to the brain meant you were done.
I don't mean to suggest that reasoned dialogue could have staved off the horrors that consumed Thyferra. The Sith are, and always have been, beyond reason.
That is what they all fail to understand. The Republic, the Mandalorian marauder-state, all of them. The Sith are a coalition of individuals, not a unified entity. They are held together only by selfish mutual interests and fear of what the regime will do should they act out. Should one or both of those things fail, then so too does that coalition. If a half-dozen select individuals died, I suspect the Sith would die with them.
They aid one another only because they are drawn to the scent of war like drochs to fresh blood.
One cannot reason with the Sith because there is no "The Sith", not as a true organization as they would understand it. Just because you might talk one out of participation in a war does not mean the rest will follow suit.
To be frank, I cannot see matters taking a different trajectory. One cannot bandy words with the vornskr as his jaws close around your throat. One can only snap his neck and do the galaxy a favor.
The Sith's enemies simply lack the stomach and the will to do what would need to be done, or maybe they've got a little too much heart. Slap a rifle in the hands of everyone able to draw breath from nine years old to ninety, and you might make some headway.
At that juncture, very little would separate them from the Sith in practical terms. I can hardly blame them for not selling their souls to obtain victory. It would simply be exchanging one terror for another.
I participated in the slaughter, even orchestrated much of it with my Blight, but still, I can understand the enemy's position. For us, this is a simple matter of manifest destiny, a cynical land grab in a neverending quest to paint the galactic map. For them, to lose means annihilation.
Once upon a time, that would have lit a fire in my belly, proverbially speaking. The Alliance to Restore the Republic would have been proud of their ideological successors, in a way. I despised the Republic of the late BBYs, and despised the Empire that followed it even more so, but the ones who wanted to restore the old order were the lesser evil by far. I fought shoulder to shoulder with them against tyranny, just as I had battled it in the service of the CIS.
I see much of the old ways cropping up again in this newest manifestation of the Republic's ideals. The same slow, creeping centralization of power. So it always is.
How time changes us. Even I am not immune to it. Here I am, standing alongside the very ills I once spent centuries opposing.
I've often found myself wondering when that happened, exactly.
When did I cross over from there to here? When did the transition from freedom fighter to status-quo-protecting thug occur? Few alive can claim to have suffered more in battling tyranny than myself, yet now I see my likeness adorning propaganda posters, scrolling across newsfeeds, painted on the sides of buildings, personified as just one more facet of the Sith's unstoppable advance. "Join the Army, keep him from our planet!"
At other times, I tell myself that I never stopped rebelling. Maybe I just learned what effective rebellion looks like. To rebel is to be a criminal after all, by nature if not by definition.
I suppose I finally pared down the act of rebellion, trimmed it to its barest essentials. Time has taught me the futility of belief in anything larger than the self, and rebellion is a selfish act. A tossing off of the chains, to use my comrades' ancient verbiage. Everything I've ever fought for, believed in, or cared about has long been whisked away by the river of time or flattened under the treads of war. Only I remain, so I must conclude that my own self has more intrinsic merit than an ideal.
I enjoy greater freedom with the Sith than anyone else would or could ever offer me. There's something to be said for a society that doesn't judge, or even care, how one spends their time. Everyone else is playing the same game, too wrapped up in their own little palaces to take a look at mine.
Again, that's all there is to any of this. A collection of predators all sharing the same zoo, and occasionally breaking out when prey is dangled in front of them. Until then, they gnaw on their own separate bones. One could argue that's all any of it is. Not just the Sith, but the entire damned galaxy. Everyone's trying to get their cut before they take the long walk to the Netherworld one day. All the rules and regulations and laws, that's just window dressing. It's window dressing outside the Blackwall, and it's window dressing within it.
I'm just a little more honest about it than most, I suppose. A realist in a galaxy of those who veer too far down the road of idealism, or the road of cynicism. Freedom is precious, now as it was then. Even after everything, I still believe that down in my core. It might be the only thing that hasn't changed.
What has changed is my sense of perspective. The problem is that freedom's a limited resource. If you want more, some poor fool has to have less sooner or later.
That fool won't ever be me, not if I can help it, because I know two things for sure. One, my freedom is the only freedom that matters. And two, the guy on the other side of the battlefield is thinking the exact same thing.
