Keren
Training Center
The obstacle course at the Keren Royal Defense Complex stretched across the training grounds in long, unforgiving lines of walls, ropes, beams, and trenches. The Naboo air was cool when he started, still carrying traces of lake mist, but hours later it had warmed against his skin, mixing with sweat that soaked through his shirt and stung his eyes.
He had been running it for nearly four hours, four hours with little to no rest.
His muscles burned with every movement. His hands were scraped raw from climbing and dropping, his legs trembling each time he landed from a jump or drove himself forward into another sprint. His breathing came hard and uneven, but he did not stop. He vaulted a barrier, rolled through the gravel, and surged back to his feet, forcing his body to keep pace with the ache spreading through his joints.
"It's not your fault."
He repeated it under his breath as he climbed, as he ran, as he dragged himself over another wall.
"It's not your fault."
The words followed him through every section of the course, a fragile mantra he clung to when his thoughts began to spiral.
Because the truth was harder to face. He had never been trained for war. He was student at the Royal Academy of Naboo. An aspiring pilot who was forced to cancel that because of his eyesight.
Now he carried the weight of his friends' deaths like a shadow that never left his side. Someone had to be responsible. There had to be someone to blame, and that person was him. In his mind it was his fault. It sounded stupid when the full details were explained, but still. Friends he had grown up with, his best friends. And now he had no one, he wondered if perhaps Cassian was right.
He hauled himself up a cargo net, arms shaking under the strain, fingers digging into the rope until they ached. Faces surfaced in his memory, laughing voices in hangars, cafeterias, classrooms, at his home when Caleb would school them all in Pazaak, when Sibylla would tease Elian about Ellema's crush on him, easy smiles shared over plans for the future. Then came the rage, the chaos, the silence that followed. He crested the top and dropped down the other side, landing harder this time. His knees buckled briefly before he forced himself upright again, gravel biting into his palms as he steadied his balance.
He was not a soldier. He was just a kid who had been too carefree, too clever without direction, with more intelligence than he had known how to channel. He had dreamed of cockpits and open skies, not battlefields and body counts. Everything had been stacked against him, and he had walked straight into it anyway.
This was what his brother had warned him about. Not with anger, and not with judgment, but with quiet honesty. He had been told that this was not a game, that proximity to danger did not make you immune to its consequences. Elian had listened back then with half his attention, already imagining starships lifting off into sunlight.
Now the lesson lived in his bones. He broke into another run, jaw clenched tight, heart pounding in his ears. His lungs screamed for air as he pushed through the final stretch and pulled himself up onto the last wall. He stayed there for a moment, shoulders slumped, chest heaving, sweat dripping from his hair onto the stone below.
"It's not your fault," he whispered again, his voice rough.
This time, he did not try to force belief into the words. He simply let them exist. Even if forgiveness still felt far away, even if the guilt pressed heavy against his ribs, he was here. He was moving. He was learning what his limits were and how to push beyond them. This was not punishment. This was him trying to survive what the galaxy had taken from him.
Elian slid down the far side of the wall and straightened slowly, every muscle protesting. Then he turned back toward the start of the course.
