OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: Further flesh out the Shadow Knights.
Image Credit: Here. Eldar Ranger from 40k.
Role: Saboteurs, strike team, partisans.
Permissions: Access to Firemane gear since I'm the owner. Permission for all ArmaTech gear and all other subs made by Laira Darkhold's writer here and here.
Links: Eldorai Exodus
GENERAL INFORMATION
Unit Name: Caerith Haraya. Eldarai for Shadow Hunters.
Affiliation: Blades of Reason, Cadera Naeyra, Shadow Knights
Classification: Special forces.
Equipment:
Armour:
Rifles:
- Verpine Shatter Rifle
- DC-19 Stealth Carbine
- Nightstinger Sporting Rifle.
- DXR-6 Disruptor Rifle (with zoom scope).
- Bolt-Thrower.
- Optional: MGL-1 or CSPL-12 (can be equipped with PL/1G adapter.
- SR-2
- Dart Gun (variable chemical payload).
- Taozin Amulet
- Anti security blade, scrambler key, data breaker, communication wave descrambler, no-show, baffler, holographic disguise matrix, Comtech, individual field disruptors.
- Comlink implant, Force-focusing visors, suicide pills.
- Berserk.
- Seeker Droid.
- Access to Whisper Jetpacks and Sky Swoopers.
- Verpine Shattergun
- SP-3.
- Sonic Stunner
- A280 CFE
- MSD-32
- Adjudicator Slugthrower
- Renegade Blaster Pistol
- Flechette Pistol
- Holdout Bolter.
- Palm Stunner.
Explosives:
- Grenades, Dampener aerosol grenades. Sometimes equipped with coma gas grenades.
- IEDs, det charges.
Being a force of irregulars and special purpose operators, the Shadow Hunters have a somewhat laxer view of military propriety and formal protocol. Saluting is extremely rare among them. This clashes with the ironclad beliefs of hard-edged military professionals like Kaida Taldir, who regards them as undisciplined anarchists. However, they display grim determination, focus, skill and discipline on the job. The nature of their work can require them to disguise themselves as civilians or as the enemy. They are ideal for intelligence gathering, small-scale raids, ambushes, sabotage, slicing and assassinations. Not equipped for frontal assault, they use their training, experience in irregular warfare and speed to achieve their objectives.
Due to their emphasis on speed and mobility, they can just as easily appear in one place for a moment, then vanish and show up somewhere else. They can harass and wear down opponents by targeting their supply chains, lines of communications, spaceports and chain of command. Not bound by regular procedure, they can also perform assassination or abduction missions against high-value targets. One could compare their mission profile to that of Rebel Alliance Special Forces, though they are probably more willing to accept civilian casualties than most members of the Rebel Alliance of yore.
They are willing to do whatever is necessary to win a fight. The Shadow Knights are morally grey, but prioritise survival over tender moral questions. The Haraya have also taken to inflicting a form of 'shadow justice' on individuals they believe have wronged the Eldorai people. It is standard procedure for members of the unit to carry suicide pills when on a mission. They receive extensive training to make them resistant to mental manipulation and interrogation. In addition to their combat skills, many of them are capable slicers. Outside of its obvious applications in combat and infiltration situations, it is also a way for them to make money.
Lydia Faestina is an long-time member of the group. She was born in a small textile town on Kaeshana. Her parents were poor. For a while her mother worked as a sign painter and waitress. She developed a strong resentment of the local nobility in her youth. While a child, she learned to wait at banquets and paint signs. Her mother found employment for her as an errand girl in a factory. However, Lydia refused. Her family managed to pay for teachers to educate her.
For a while Lydia lived in Santaissa, where she managed to become a teacher. She soon drifted into radical circles and became acquainted with subversive literature. Indeed, she became involved with a clandestine cell and used her teaching position to spread radical ideas, which led to her losing her job. For a while she acted as a courier between radicals on Kaeshana and emigre circles, but she found the latter to be too dilatory and indecisive. A close friend of Aelene Nenaias, she was a founding member of the Caerith Haraya. Lydia is quite devoted to her dead friend's memory. Lydia has written a poem about her, as well as a revolutionary manifesto that promotes the utter destruction of the forces of reaction.
Zelphra Farona is one of the prominent male members of the group. His parents were minor nobility. He spent much of his childhood off-world because his family had been banished for backing the wrong claimant. Growing up off-world exposed him to foreign ideas and new ways of doing things, which were frowned upon on conservative Kaeshana. His family eventually made their peace with the Matriarchy and returned home after the promulgation of an amnesty for those who had backed the 'wrong queen'. However, Zelphra found Kaeshana to be backward. He questioned and ultimately rejected the passive and submissive gender role that was demanded of Eldorai males. His family was liberal in a superficial way. The nobles' fixation with power and status seemed shallow to him.
Change was coming to the Matriarchy, but the pace of reform seemed too slow to him, and he saw it as trying to keep a moribund, corrupt system alive. Zelphra conducted revolutionary propaganda, using his money and connections. For a while this allowed him to escape serious consequences. Sexism was a thing among revolutionaries and so at first he was given menial jobs. Eventually they used him to lure an influential government procurator, who was a friend of the family, into a trap. As purges whittled down their numbers, he found himself running his own cell. The underground apparatus has been decimated by arrests and loss of equipment. He turned out to be good at the job.
A prominent member of the group is Daena Faenor, an experienced Dark Eldorai rebel and insurgent. Once she worked for the the Eldorai Matriarchy as a black ops operative, fighting those who sought to topple the Monarchy. She was a supporter of Queen Tirathana VI and a loyalist to the Matriarchy until the Netherworld Event, when she was raptured. Her loyalty was shaken when she saw the pain she had caused by meeting the shades of the fallen.
Daena was born a Non-Force-User, but gained a connection to the Force through the suffering she endured during her trials in the Netherworld. When she managed to escape the realm of the dead, she was a changed woman. From a certain point of view, she had seen the light. She fell in line with the rebels and became an enthusiastic convert to their cause. Indeed, she became a hardline republican. Purges had whittled down the numbers of the Caerith Haraya, but also radicalised them. This allowed her to rise in the ranks, though she had prove the sincerity of her conversion to the cause of the revolution.
She has learned some Force skills from non-Eldorai Force groups, such as Theran Listening and has passed them on to her comrades. She is also skilled in intelligence gathering. Daena is very independent-minded, does not fawn or stand on parade. She works best when being given a general objective and the necessary resources, and then being allowed to implement it as she sees fit. She has fully repudiated the ancien régime and feels strong disdain for those who still serve it. She has a lot of experience in special operations and wet work.
COMBAT INFORMATION
Unit Size: Medium
Unit Availability: Unique
Unit Experience: Elite.
Combat Function: The Caerith Haraya are a crack unit composed of Force-Sensitive Eldorai. Their skills lie in surprise, assassination, asymmetrical warfare, sabotage and infiltration, but not in frontal assaults or brute force. They have great experience as resistance fighters, saboteurs and irregulars. Or, depending on your point of view, terrorists. Composed of Eldorai radicals, they are dedicated and zealous, willing to put their life on the line for the cause they espouse. Many years in the underground have made them rather creative. Their backers lack the funds and resources of an interstellar government, so they have learned to get creative with the tools they have. They have a knack for stealth, sharpshooting and hand-to-hand combat. They are quite crafty with improvised explosive devices. They are a group of insurgents and take targets of opportunity, meaning that they accept there will be a certain amount of civilian casualties.
Their Force abilities are a bit unconventional. Rather than focus on flashy or destructive powers, they specialise in concealment and sense abilities. Similar to the classic Sith Assassins, they are adept at Force Cloak and Force Concealment. This enables them to cloak themselves from sight, conceal their Force presence, hide their alignment or pass as 'mundanes' by obscuring their Force signature. Their Sense abilities are rather advanced, which gives them good precognitive abilities in combat. They can use the Force to improve their senses, enabling them to better notice something they may otherwise miss under normal conditions.
They have also learnt a variant of Theran listening, which enables them to understand words in another language or listen to people from a distance. They are skilled in Control Pain, Telepathy and Force Flash. Several of them have some skill in mechu-deru. Their Force abilities and training make them highly skilled marksmen. They can also be used as spotters, marking targets for allies. The Caerith Haraya cannot rely on a constant suply train or significant monetary capabilities. As a result, they have learned to get creative both with their strategy and in combat when it comes to resisting oppression and striking at their enemies. They rely heavily on snipers and traps such as land mines and IEDs. Several members of the unit have skill as slicers or demolition experts. Their skills as slicers and technopaths make them useful for information warfare and sabotaging infrastructure. They are a good support unit for raiders and battle troops.
However, as their name implies, they are not a frontline combat unit. They are a small unit and thus suffer in prolonged engagements. They are not equipped to storm entrenched enemy fortifications or take on 'heavy' combat formations such as tanks and walkers on. Being infantry, they are vulnerable to long range bombardment if exposed. Aside from hiding or obfuscating their presence, they lack the means to defend themselves against air or artillery strikes. But then if it comes to that it would probably be best for them to perform a tactical retreat anyway. They are militants, but know when it is best to pull back so that they can live to fight another day.
Their defensive powers are comparatively weak, which means they cannot tank attacks in the way a more combat-orientated Force-user, such as someone with the skill set of a Jedi Guardian or Sith Warrior, would be able to. Thus they will not be able to tank heavy attacks by summoning powerful force fields. Their telekinetic abilities are weak and more useful for utility than defence or attack. Overall, they are weak when it comes to offensive Force powers. Their emphasis on mobility and stealth means they lack heavy weapons such as rotary cannons, heavy repeating blasters and missile launchers. They are meant for ambushes, espionage, assassinations, bombings and sabotage, not head-on combat with large enemy forces.
Strengths:
- Excel at irregular warfare, assassinations and slicing. The Caerith Haraya are masters of stealth and excel at blending into their environment. They are lethal, mobule and committed to their cause.
- Strong Force connection. They are particularly adept in powers of stealth, concealment, technopathy and sense.
- Lack of heavy weapons, heavy armour or support forces.
- Lack the hard-hitting, offensive powers of more combat-orientated Force-Users. Their supernatural powers focus on precision and stealth, not brute force or tankiness.
Officially, all Eldorai owed their fealty to the Star Queen of the Eldorai Matriarchy. She was not only a temporal monarch, but also the emissary and viceroy of the Great Goddess Ashira in the mortal realm. Yet there were always forces who opposed the 'rightful' Queen. They were called Dashdae Eldorai, or Dark Eldorai. They wanted to overthrow the Star Queen and topple the ancien régime. They were traitors and heretics, and any loyal Eldorai was duty-bound to oppose their machinations. Of course, it was more complex than that, and the Dark Eldorai included a myriad of different and competing groups under a broad general banner. In the best tradition of rebels, they often spent as much time fighting each other as they did the government. Some wanted a magocracy, some a military dictatorship, some wanted equal male rights, some just wanted to put a different dynasty on the throne and others wanted to get rid of the monarchy entirely and build a Republic. Yet they were all lumped together as Dark Eldorai, a name which automatically prejudiced opinion.
Today, the dream of one Eldorai Matriarchy is dead. Many factions compete for the mandate, believing that they are the ones deserving of the allegiance of all Eldorai. Some look to the past, believing that the Eldorai must embrace the teachings of their foremothers and reject foreign ideas in favour of their traditions. Others are revolutionary iconoclasts who argue that the past calamities have shown that only a radical break with the past can lead the Eldorai to prosperity and freedom. Others seek to chart a middle course between these two extremes. The Eldorai are fractured, polarised and often become extreme towards a mode of government be it Republic, Theocracy or Monarchy.
The Caerith Haraya are a product of this fracturing. They have their roots in a militant insurgent group that fought against the Eldorai Matriarchy, seeking to topple the Monarchy. Theirs is a bloody history of being active in the revolutionary underground, a world of conspiracies, paranoia, secrecy and glamourised violence. Star Queen Tirathana VI ruled Kaeshana with an iron fist, seeking to keep it insulated from the rest of the Galaxy. Not without justification, she feared that exposure would cause Eldorai to question the old ways and undermine her power. Hers was a deeply reactionary régime, defined by rigid class barriers, misandry and religious conformism. Innovation was discouraged, for the Eldorai did not need to learn from obviously inferior outsiders. Religious nonconformists were hunted down, incarcerated, banished or executed.
This stabilised her power, but lack of innovation meant that Kaeshana stagnated. This left the Eldorai homeworld vulnerable to raids by foreign slavers, who possessed superior technology. Such slave raids were a cause of great anger and shame among the natives. Moreover, repression bred resentment and since there was no way to bring about change through legal means, many oppositionists turned to terrorism. Moderate voices gained little traction in the underground. The Caerith Haraya were formed by a group of young radicals. Some of them were veterans of the False Aspasia's Rebellion. This was an uprising named after a demagogue and impostor who claimed to be Aspasia Evora, the 'rightful' heiress to the Crown who had been murdered during Tirathana's coup. Her rebellion was a bloody one defined by brutality and atrocities on both sides, but it was defeated by loyalists.
A radical political activist called Aelene Nenaias founded the Caerith Haraya as an underground group. She favoured the use of secret society-led terrorism as an attempt to violently destabilise the Eldorai Matriarchy. This was justified as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite an uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime's use of violence against the revolutionaries. The group endorsed targeted killing of the 'leaders of oppression'. Much of its philosophy was inspired by the concept of propaganda by the deed. The group rationalised political assassination as capital punishment and self-defence for crimes against the nation. It also looked to regicide as the highest manifestion of political action. Aelene said that "ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free."
They also conducted robberies to raise funds, or abducted the family members of aristocrats so that they could be held for ransom, though some members criticised this practice out of fear that it might corrut the group. The group grew close to the Blades of Reason. This dissident group that stood in opposition to the power of the Church of Ashira and the Crown. It sought to replace the Monarchy with a secular republic and abolish feudal privileges.
Depending on one's point of view, the Caerith Haraya were terrorists or freedom fighters. Their methods were certainly ruthless. For a while they worked together with Talsir Vanaeth, a former starship engineer who had become an insurgent after being arrested and tortured on false charges of treason. Their campaign to topple the Matriarchy gave them plenty of experience in irregular warfare, though they also suffered from purges and internal betrayals. It also fostered a strong esprit de corps - and an 'us' and 'them' mentality. They were shaped by the Dark Eldorai's underworld of revolutionary politics, with all its schisms, suspicion and violence. Their actions included sabotaging power plants, tunnelling under and then blowing up one of the offices of the security police and a failed attempt to abduct one of the Matriarchs of the Church of Ashira so that she could be 'put on trial for crimes against the people'. Perhaps their greatest success was the assassination of Tirathana VI's aunt, the Duchess of Nylaenalon.
She was killed when the rebels blew up her skimmer with some well-placed bombs. However, the assassination sparked a harsh government crackdown. Many members of the group were killed, arrested or forced into exile. The group went through a period of organisational and ideological crisis. Moderates voices denounced it. Aelene Nenaias, who had masterminded the terrorist attack, had to flee into exile. However, the Crown's agents abducted her and brought her back to Kaeshana in chains. There she was given a public execution.
Some revolutionaries made their peace with the ancien régime after the liberal Tirathana VII. came to power and initiated a reform programme that was meant to liberalise the Matriarchy and open it up to the outside Galaxy. The hard core of the Caerith Haraya were not among them. To them the reforms did not go far enough. Moreover, they were Eldorai nationalists and thus critical of the new monarch's alliance with Firemane. Some had hoped that the humans would push for greater reforms, but the corporation propped up the monarchy. The rebels aligned themselves with the hardline members of the Blades of Reason.
They struck in full force during the Netherworld Event. Kaeshana experienced a wave of bloodletting. Eldorai engaged in paroxysm of violence. Ashiran militants, believing that the rapture portended the End of Days, rose up against 'foreign devils' and alleged heretics. The Caerith Haraya engaged in violence against the militants as well as the government. But attempts at instigating an uprising failed. The government responded with a harsh crackdown. Daena Faenor joined the group around this time, giving them a new focus on cyber-attacks and targeted assassinations.
In the days of preparation leading up to the Exodus, slicers connected with the group stole information about the plans of Firemane and the Eldorai Matriarchy for the evacuation of the planet. Firemane intended to evacuate as many of Kaeshana's natives as possible before the planet was devastated by an asteroid, but would be unable to save all. Daena leaked details to the public. In her eyes, it was her obligation as a patriot, but it also helped cause a mass panic and contributed to the breakdown of civil order.
During the Long Night, they fought raiders and warlords that took advantage of Kaeshana's desolation. Later on, they were part of the Eldorai rebels who sided with the Tygaran Alliance and the Galactic Alliance to oppose the First Order during the Kaeshana Rebellion. The Caerith Haraya would continue to combat the First Order, but found it difficult to continue the struggle after the First Galactic Alliance-First Order War ended with an armistice. They joined forces with the Shadow Knights, a faction of Eldorai dissidents that had originally been formed during the Great Exodus to protect the Forsaken. With Kaeshana lost for good after it had been wrecked by a warp storm, the Caerith Haraya devoted themselves to the rebel cause. The goal was now to find a new home for the Eldorai exiles.
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