Private Ad Aurorae

[Aurelian Sigismund]

✠ Avenging Knight of the Empire ✠

Aurelian

Imperator · Lord Indomitus · Hegemon

✠ Directive ✠

Resolution

✠ Sector ✠

Nirauan · Hand of Thrawn

✠ Wargear ✠

Armor · Sword

The Hand of Thrawn had endured the indignities of history with the patience of stone and durasteel. It had watched banners change, heard rival oaths spoken beneath its vaulted approaches, suffered siege, occupation, neglect, reclamation and the hollow vanity of men who mistook possession for mastery. Yet the fortress had remained what it had always been: a monument to Imperial will, raised above Nirauan like a clenched hand against the weakness of the galaxy. Now the damage of past decades had been cut away with deliberate severity. The spire had been rebuilt, its old wounds sealed beneath new armourglass, reinforced plating and black structural ribs. The city beneath it no longer carried the exhausted look of a frontier holding passed between dying causes; New Carannia prospered under the administration of the Fist of the Empire, its traffic ordered, its garrisons drilled, its industries fed and watched. Deep below, the foundations once more served as armouries, magazines and hardened command stores. Along the height of the Hand, landing platforms jutted from the superstructure like blades, anti-air emplacements tracked the sky in patient silence, and soldiers moved through illuminated corridors beneath the severe insignia of the iron sun. There was no Dark Empire here, no Galactic Empire, no Confederation, no inherited ruin wrapped in nostalgia and paraded as legitimacy. Those who came to Nirauan came to serve the New Order, or they did not remain.

Aurelian had never pretended indifference to height. It was not wonder that drew him upward, nor vanity, nor the vulgar pleasure of looking down upon others. Height imposed clarity. It reduced the disorder of life into lines of movement, into sectors, patterns, chokepoints, arteries and obligations. He had valued that truth atop the Spire where the Eternal Throne had once cast its shadow over Zakuul, and he valued it here in the Hand of Thrawn, where the city and its military organism unfolded beneath him with a discipline he could measure. From behind the transparisteel viewports of his solar he could see the starport and the long approaches to the Myrmidon quarters, the cargo lifters rising and descending in controlled intervals, the battalions turning across their parade squares in blocks of dark precision. Beyond them the ordinary life of noon moved in its allotted channels: office workers, officers, clerks, technicians and aides passing between bistros and cafés, eating quickly before returning to the machinery that sustained the fortress-world. It was not peace, not in the soft and sentimental meaning the Core had once sold to itself, but it was order. That was the more honest virtue.

He turned from the viewport and let the city remain behind him. The solar was austere by design and by habit. A large desk of dark metal stood near the windows, its surface broken only by integrated screens, secure controls and the restrained geometry of military function. In the centre of the chamber waited a small round meeting table, several chairs arranged around it without ornament or excess. Databanks lined one wall, silent and watchful. There were no trophies, no indulgent collections, no banners arranged to flatter memory. Aurelian had little use for rooms that attempted to explain their owner. The office served because it was sufficient. It offered privacy, command access, a defensible vantage, and enough space for the kind of conversation that did not belong in council chambers or before listening subordinates. Today, that would be enough.

The report of Mordane's survival had been unexpected. More than that, it had been useful. Aurelian did not confuse usefulness with affection, but neither did he deny merit when it presented itself. Mordane had been an exceptional martial commander and a capable military administrator, a man of discipline, structure and operational sense, even when those qualities had been spent in service to a tyrant who had vanished too often to deserve the loyalty he demanded. Aurelian had last seen him on Coruscant, amid debate and fracture, at a moment when it had become clear that Solipsis' regime was no longer something to be served, only something to be survived or escaped. He had expected Mordane to fall in the convulsions that followed, either swallowed by the Covenant's advance into the Core or consumed by the inevitable purges of defeated ambition. Yet there had always been calculation in the man, a hard intelligence beneath the soldier's discipline, and that quality had apparently preserved him where louder men had perished. So an invitation had been sent. Not a summons, but an invitation to the Allegiant-General to come to Nirauan, to walk the rebuilt corridors of the Hand of Thrawn, and to speak with the man he had once served beside before the galaxy had again rearranged its ruins.

Now Aurelian waited. The General had arrived on the planet, and the message confirming his approach had already passed through the secure channel. Outside the viewports, New Carannia continued its ordered motion beneath the noon light. Inside the solar, nothing moved except the slow change of data across the desk displays and the faint reflection of the iron sun across the transparisteel. Aurelian stood with his hands folded behind his back, silent, composed, and unreadable, allowing the fortress to speak before he did.

✠ Dispatch Directed To ✠

Domaric Mordane

Eternal Duty · Eternal Loyalty · Eternal Order

 

[Domaric Mordane]

​

The rebuilt corridors of the Hand of Thrawn were unfamiliar to Domaric Mordane, though they possessed the reassuring proportions of every fortress worth building. The ceilings were high enough to humble a visitor, the walls thick enough to survive an argument between admirals, and every intersection had been designed with fields of fire in mind rather than architectural vanity. He had never served the New Imperial Order, nor Tavlar, nor any of the Imperators who had inherited the fortress after him. By the time Nirauan had become the heart of another Imperial experiment, he had been elsewhere, serving another banner, then no banner at all.​

​

The two stormtroopers walking a respectful pace behind him belonged to no legion presently recognized by the galaxy. Their armor had once been that of the old 323rd Legion, the Sunfyre Legion, but decades had left their mark upon it. Black enamel traced the seams of white plastoid in deliberate geometric patterns, while polished white inlays climbed the vambraces and greaves in designs that recalled old military carvings more than modern armor. Upon each right pauldron rested the altered Imperial cog that had become the emblem of Mordane's forces, and between them they carried the folded standard of the legion itself, a black and white banner upon which the Sunfyre dragon coiled with wings spread as though preparing to descend upon an unsuspecting world.​

​

These were his men. Not merely because he commanded them, but because they had chosen to follow him after Coruscant, through exile, through obscurity, and now back into history. Most had become farmers, mechanics, surveyors and shipwrights, living quiet lives until their Allegiant-General had sent word that the time had come to put the uniforms back on. They had done so without complaint, altering the armor with their own hands until it represented not a fallen Empire but something still unfinished.​

​

Mordane himself wore white instead of grey, the uniform cut with dark shoulders and silver epaulettes. The insignia upon his collar identified him as a Grand Moff, a title he had accepted only because governments required titles to function. To those who served him he remained the Allegiant-General, and he suspected that would outlive every office he might yet hold.​

​

The doors slid open.​

​

His artificial eyes swept across the solar, lingering on its severe lines before settling upon Aurelian, and for the first time since arriving on Nirauan the old soldier allowed himself a genuine smile.​

​

"Well I'll be damned."​

 

[Aurelian Sigismund]

✠ Avenging Knight of the Empire ✠

Aurelian

Imperator · Lord Indomitus · Hegemon

✠ Directive ✠

Resolution

✠ Sector ✠

Nirauan · Hand of Thrawn

✠ Wargear ✠

Armor · Sword

Aurelian did not answer the smile with one of his own. Not at first. His gaze moved from Mordane to the two stormtroopers behind him, then to the folded standard borne between them with the careful reverence of men who understood that some objects were heavier than their material weight. The Sunfyre dragon, black and white, coiled upon cloth that had survived exile, obscurity and the long humiliation of history's indifference. There was a discipline in that which Aurelian did not dismiss. Men changed banners easily when banners were merely employment. They did not return from farms, workshops and frontier settlements to carry old standards into strange fortresses unless something more durable than ambition had kept them intact. His eyes lingered on the altered armour, the marked pauldrons, the deliberate handwork of soldiers who had refused to let their identity be buried with the regime that had first issued them their equipment. It was not nostalgia. Nostalgia was the disease of defeated men. This was continuity, scarred but living, and therefore worth attention.

Only then did Aurelian look back to Mordane. The artificial eyes, the white uniform, the dark shoulders, the silver epaulettes, the collar insignia that declared a civil authority he suspected the man wore with functional impatience rather than personal hunger. Grand Moff was a necessary title. Allegiant-General was the truer one. Some ranks were given by governments. Others were confirmed by the men who kept following after the governments had failed.

"Reports of your damnation were more convincing than reports of your survival," Aurelian said at last, his voice level, dry and stripped of ceremony. "I had considered you dead, Mordane. Or worse, politically absorbed by whatever carrion apparatus survived the Core's collapse long enough to print new seals and issue old lies."

He stepped away from the viewport, the noon-lit city falling behind him as a field of ordered motion beyond the transparisteel. There was no flourish in the movement, no theatrical welcome, no indulgence granted to the reunion. Aurelian crossed the solar with the measured calm of a man who had long ago made discipline indistinguishable from instinct, stopping before the round meeting table without immediately taking a seat. The chamber's austere lines seemed to frame him rather than contain him, black metal, silent databanks and military glass composing a setting severe enough to suit the conversation that would follow.

"And yet here you are," he continued, "with your eyes replaced, your uniform amended, your standard intact, and soldiers behind you who appear to have remembered their oath more faithfully than most governments remember their own constitutions."

That, at last, earned something close to a smile. It was brief, narrow and without warmth in the ordinary sense, but it was not mockery. Aurelian inclined his head by a fraction, a gesture too restrained to be called affection and too deliberate to be dismissed as courtesy.

"Welcome to Nirauan, Allegiant-General."

He let the title settle between them before gesturing to the table. Not the desk. The desk was for subordinates, petitions, reports and decisions already made. The table was for men who still possessed agency.

"I trust your journey was uneventful. If it was not, I expect the responsible parties have either been corrected or made irrelevant. Sit. We have enough ghosts in this fortress without forcing the living to stand on ceremony."

Aurelian took his own chair only after Mordane had been invited to take his. His attention passed once more over the stormtroopers, then the standard, then returned to the man himself. "You arrive at an interesting hour. The galaxy is cluttered with claimants, remnants, restorations, pretenders and provincial emperors who mistake survival for destiny. Everyone has a cog to polish, a throne to invoke, a dead tyrant to reinterpret in their favour. Very few have soldiers. Fewer still have soldiers who come back when called."

His hands rested lightly upon the edge of the table, gloved fingers still.

"That makes you valuable. It also makes you dangerous. I assume you already know both."

✠ Dispatch Directed To ✠

Domaric Mordane

Eternal Duty · Eternal Loyalty · Eternal Order