Private Children of the Same Fire

[Veyla Krinn]

The Kyr'am Bazaar was louder than she remembered.

Vendors barked over one another in half a dozen dialects, the smell of spice and forge oils blended into something uniquely Mandalorian, and the clang of fresh-forged beskar rang from every direction. Sunlight flashed off armor plates and weapon racks, catching Veyla's eye as she moved through the crowd with her helmet hooked at her hip.

She had come looking for a replacement component for her vambrace—nothing urgent, nothing dramatic. Just a quiet errand in a place she hadn't walked in years.

And yet the bazaar felt different now, more crowded, more alive. Or maybe she was the one who'd changed.

Her attention drifted to a weapons stall where a smith was loudly arguing with a customer about the merits of plasma-edged steel versus traditional iron. The debate grew heated enough that it took her a moment to realize the real reason her focus had shifted.

The name "Kryze" cut across the noise. Not shouted—spoken. Low. Respectful. She turned.

A tall man stood near the stall's edge, examining the balance of a beskad with practiced familiarity. His movements were calm, precise, and entirely unselfconscious—the kind that came from someone raised with a blade in hand. His armor, though mostly muted, carried subtle markings she'd know anywhere.

Clan Kryze.

A name she wore by blood and by choice.

Veyla stepped closer, boots silent on the dust-packed ground. When she spoke, it was with the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly how to hold attention without demanding it.

"Not many people handle a beskad like that without showing off," she said, amusement warm in her voice. "Kryze training… or just natural talent?"

He looked up, and for the first time, she saw the resolve behind his eyes—steady, grounded, unmistakably Kryze.

She offered a small, genuine nod.

"Veyla Krinn. Clan Kryze—though I've been gone long enough that some of our kin think I'm a ghost." A soft, teasing smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Feels right to meet someone carrying the name who isn't shouting it across a battlefield."

Her gaze flicked to the blade in his hands, then back to him—curious, open, not probing but welcoming. "You new to the Bazaar?" A beat. "Or new to me?"

The crowd surged around them, noise and color and life filling the air, but in that small pocket of space between two Kryze warriors, the moment settled into calm recognition.

Two strangers. Same clan. No hostility—only the start of something familiar.

 

[Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze]

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon‘s that is dreaming.” — Edgar Allan Poe​

Location - Kyr'am Bazaar
Tags - Veyla Krinn

[

Ajalurk-Chaidth moved through the Kyr'am Bazaar like a wandering shard of starlight, his presence gliding between stalls draped in beskar-gray canopies and banners that shimmered with ancient clan sigils. The air was thick with the scent of forge-smoke, spiced meats, and the hum of low-powered engines, all weaving together into a chorus older than half the clans represented here.

The Mandalorian vendors, broad-shouldered, visor-glinted, each armored in colors that told their family's long and blood-marked histories, called out their wares with the confidence of warriors who forged every item with their own hands. To Ajalurk-Chaidth, their voices resonated like constellations shifting, each offer a star flickering with intent, each negotiation a miniature duel waged with words rather than blades.

He paused at a stall selling jetpack components carved with intricate designs of old Concord Dawn, their metal throbbing with an energy that felt half mechanical, half mythic. Farther on, an elder armorer displayed knives whose hilts whispered of battles fought on moons abandoned by time, while another vendor hawked shimmering fabrics that shifted colors like nebulae as one moved past them.

Ajalurk-Chaidth absorbed it all, the clang of beskar being tested on an anvil, the thrum of energy cells being recharged, the low laughter of seasoned fighters sharing tales that bent the edge of reality. And through it, he walked with the effortless grace of someone moving through a living legend, knowing the bazaar itself was watching him back with a thousand unseen eyes.

"Part Kryze training, part natural talent, and more," Ajalurk-Chaidth murmured, his voice carrying the resonance of distant astral tides as he examined the female Mandalorian with a gaze that seemed to read both armor and soul.

Ajalurk-Chaidth. reaching down, picked up a blaster and slowly began turning the lower-class blaster pistol over in his hands, its scuffed plating and uneven energy coil humming like a tired star struggling to stay alight. Even so, he handled it with an almost reverent curiosity, as though every flawed component whispered a history only, he could hear. "Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze," he said at last, his name rolling out like a ripple across some distant cosmic sea, before offering her a subtle, knowing incline of the head. "A pleasure to meet you, ghost."

Ajalurk-Chaidth's gaze drifted over the labyrinthine sprawl of the Kyr'am Bazaar, and a rare shadow of nostalgia crossed his visor. "It has been some time since I last walked these alleys," he murmured, voice low and resonant, carrying across the hum of the crowd like a note caught between worlds. Time had stretched and fractured around him, years lost to distant campaigns, shifting stars, and forgotten skirmishes, but here, amid the clatter of beskar and the scent of molten metal, the bazaar remained untouched, a frozen heartbeat in the galaxy's relentless pulse.

"Years may pass," he continued, almost to himself, "and yet this place endures, holding its stories, its struggles, its glories as if time itself were afraid to intrude." Even as the crowd surged around him; hunters, artisans, wanderers, and children of clans that had long since spread across countless worlds: Ajalurk-Chaidth felt the Bazaar's heartbeat synchronize with his own, a reminder that some sanctuaries, like certain stars, remained eternal.

Ajalurk-Chaidth turned his full gaze onto Veyla Krinn, sharp and probing as a comet slicing through night, and he asked, "What brings you to the bazaar, and why walk among its shadows without carrying the Kryze name?"

Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Armor
  • The Black Devil's Armor

• Weapons
  • Veritas et Iustitia (Dual Revolvers
  • "Widowmaker" (Sniper Rifle
  • Moonshadow (Slugthrower Scatter Gun
• Ship
  • The Black Revenant

 

[Veyla Krinn]

The noise of the Bazaar washed around them—clanging beskar, sharp vendor calls, the hum of engines and forge-smoke rising like incense—but Veyla felt none of it press in on her. Not with Ajalurk's question hanging between them like something weightier than the air they breathed. The lights from the jetpack stall flickered across his visor like shifting constellations, but his words rooted her more firmly than any sound or movement around them.

So she stepped closer, her red hair lifting in the warm forge breeze, and answered him honestly—the only way a Kryze ever should.

"You're not wrong to call me a ghost," she said, voice soft but carrying through the noise like a knife drawn slow from its sheath.
"I left Mandalorian space before most of these younglings could lift a vibroknife. Civil wars… shifting Empires… clan politics turning vicious. I'd had my fill."

Her fingers brushed the edge of a half-assembled vambrace on the vendor's table, as if touching a relic of a life she had once walked away from.

"I took work wherever the galaxy would have me. Mercenary contracts. Bodyguarding. Sometimes, bounty hunting when coin mattered more than pride."
"Long enough that people stopped asking what clan I was from—and long enough that I started believing maybe I didn't have one anymore."

But her gaze rose to meet Ajalurk's again—open, unflinching, steady in a way that was no longer haunted… just grounded.

"But ghosts are tethered to something. Mine was always Kryze."

The din of the Bazaar swelled around them—old clan songs drifting like smoke, the heartbeat of Mandalorian culture vibrating through the floor beneath their boots. Veyla let it wash over her for a breath, then spoke with quiet conviction.

"What brings me back?"
"Purpose. And a reminder of what we were before everything fractured. The Bazaar holds the truth of our people even when the rest of the clans forget it."

Her chin lifted slightly.

"Mandalore has changed. Kryze has changed. And I'm not the girl who ran from the fire anymore."

She took another step—a warrior's step, not hesitant, not intruding, simply present—letting him see the steel beneath the warmth, the woman she had reforged herself into.

"As for walking without the Kryze name?" A faint, wry smile touched her lips.
"You don't carry a banner until you deserve to raise it again. I intend to earn my place back—not demand it."

The forge-light caught the crimson streak in her hair as she added, softer but heavier:

"Some of us want to meet our clan as we are now… not as the ghosts we used to be."

A breath.
A moment.
Then her eyes sharpened with curiosity—not prying, just returning the weight he had offered.

"And you, Ajalurk Kryze?"
"Not many of our clan speak like wandering stars. That kind of voice comes from distance… or loss."

She let that truth stand between them, warm and grounding.

"So tell me—what brings you back to our fire?"

Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze

 

[Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze]

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon‘s that is dreaming.” — Edgar Allan Poe​

Location - Kyr'am Bazaar
Tags - Veyla Krinn

[

He studied her with the calm of one who had watched galaxies wheel through ages. "You speak often," he murmured, not unkindly, "but not to fill silence, rather to chase something lurking behind it." His eyes shimmered like distant quasars behind his darkened visor. "You speak your words proudly, but to...openly."

The black-armored Mando had folded his arms, feeling the weight of millennia settle across his shoulders, as each syllable she had offered was a ripple in the astral sea; and he had watched them carefully, searching for intention, vulnerability, or omen. Yet as her voice had faded, he found himself caught upon a precipice older than her entire world.


Should he speak his purpose? Reveal why he had returned after so many cycles vanished into myth? His reasons were forged of sorrow, oath, and cosmic ruin, but there was something in her insistence, in the brave clumsiness of her questions, that tugged at the deep strata of his resolve.

"You speak of your past as though it were a torch you can simply hold up to the darkness," he said, a low hum of amusement threading through his voice that broke his momentary silence. "Most souls, myself included, keep such torches extinguished. Not every history wishes to be summoned into the light." His voice softened, though it remained edged with aeons of caution. "You are… disarmingly open, little starling."

Then, with a slow tapping of a single finger against his helmet, he added, "Still, I suppose even someone like me might be persuaded to loosen his tongue."

Ajalurk-Chaidth ceased his rhythmic tapping, removed his finger, and pointed at his kin. "A bribe of sufficient magnitude, perhaps, a secret traded for a secret, or a story bold enough to rival mine. Convince me the universe won't tremble if we speak of such things…and I might just consider it."

Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Armor
  • The Black Devil's Armor

• Weapons
  • Veritas et Iustitia (Dual Revolvers
  • "Widowmaker" (Sniper Rifle
  • Moonshadow (Slugthrower Scatter Gun
• Ship
  • The Black Revenant

 

[Veyla Krinn]

For a moment, Veyla didn't answer him at all. The Bazaar's noise rolled around them in waves—vendors arguing over the price of ion fuses, children weaving through the crowd with training blades, the rhythmic clang of beskar being tested on an anvil—but she let it all fade into the distance. Ajalurk's voice carried too much gravity, too much ancient echo, to treat lightly.

Her red hair shifted in the forge-warm air as she lifted her chin, studying him—not his armor, not his weaponry, but the strange, starborne cadence in his words. Behind her green eyes wasn't fear or confusion, but thoughtfulness…and a spark that might have been curiosity. Or challenge.

When she finally spoke, it was with the quiet confidence of someone who had earned every scar on her soul.

"You're right," she said, her voice low but clear through the bustle.
"I speak openly. Not because I don't know how to keep my past buried—but because I've already spent years letting silence do the talking for me."

She moved a half-step closer, enough that the reflection of her hair brushed the black of his visor, but not close enough to crowd him. Just close enough to show she wasn't intimidated by the enormity he carried.

"Exile strips things from you. Honor. Name. Certainty. And in the end you're left with only your own voice… if you choose to use it."

Her gaze drifted across the Bazaar—past the weaponsmiths, the banners, the flow of Mandalorians of every creed—before returning to him with purpose.

"I learned the hard way that some truths don't belong in the dark. Some deserve to be spoken aloud, even if they hurt. Even if they burn."

The vendor's stall beside her hissed as a fresh vent of forge-heat burst upward, painting her hair with molten gold. She didn't flinch.

"So if I speak openly, it isn't because I'm naïve. Or because I think everyone earns that piece of me."
"It's because hiding from my own story almost cost me the right to claim it."

Her fingers brushed the edge of a polished vambrace on the table, thoughtful, almost reverent.

Then she looked back at him—fully, directly, almost challengingly.

"You think I'm disarming?"
A soft laugh warmed the edges of her words.
"Maybe. Or maybe you just aren't used to someone meeting you without flinching from the weight you carry."

She let him sit with that for a breath before continuing, gentler now.

"You asked why I walk the bazaar without our clan's name."
She exhaled slowly, releasing something she didn't realize she'd been holding.
"Because I left it once. On purpose. And I won't take it up again until I'm certain I can honor it—not as the girl who ran, but the woman who returned."

The crowd shifted, the songs changed, metal clattered—but between them, the air felt still.

Then, with a spark of boldness, she stepped into the shadow of his question.

"You want a bribe for your story?"
Her voice dipped, soft but steady.
"Fine. Here's mine."

She leaned in—not flirting for show, but sharing something real.

"I came back because somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't done with my people. Or with my clan. Or with the fight."
"And because some fires don't fade just because you walk away. They wait."

She withdrew just enough to meet him eye-to-visor, her expression strong, unshielded.

"Now it's your turn, Ajalurk Kryze."
"What brings a man who speaks like an ancient star to our bazaar? What weight pulls someone like you back into the orbit of clan and culture?"

A final beat. A knowing tilt of her lips.

"Or do you still need a larger secret to tempt you?"

Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze

 

[Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze]

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon‘s that is dreaming.” — Edgar Allan Poe​

Location - Kyr'am Bazaar
Tags - Veyla Krinn

[

Ajalurk-Chaidth tilted his head, the full measure of his focus on the Mando girl as she spoke. Her voice carried the wary steel of a people shaped by war, yet beneath it thrummed a sincerity that vibrated through the arcane lattice of the track's ambient energies. Each syllable spoke; rough-hewn, pragmatic, shaped by a warrior culture that measured truth in scars rather than scripture, reverberated through the fractal membranes of his perception.

Her words did not carry the labyrinthine cadence of cosmic hierophants or the alchemical riddles of heretic sages, yet their simplicity struck an unexpected harmonic.

And as she continued, Ajalurk-Chaidth felt a peculiar resonance, an unexpected alignment between her grounded pragmatism and the vast, star born philosophies coursing through him. Something in her perspective, blunt and unadorned, clutched at a forgotten corner of his past, reminding him that even titans of the astral weave could overlook simple truths.

He watched her with new gravity. Yes, there was truth in her words, truth sharp enough to pierce the toughest armors. "I understand, and I agree in part with the weave of meaning your words carry." A soft ripple of astral resonance followed as he added, "And I honor the courage it takes to speak them aloud."

He let a slow breath coil from his lungs, as though exhaling fragments of constellations long forgotten. "My past is not so simple," he said, his voice carrying the weight of half-shattered epochs and battles whose names had been swallowed by the universe. "It is a labyrinth of oaths broken and honored, of friendship and betrayals, of wars fought in shadows, and of choices that even now echo through the marrow of my being."

He now took a deep breath, allowing it to slowly exhale, letting his voice unfurl like embers drifting from a dying star. "I've ended lives, some for profit through mercenary work or the occasional bounty...some for the bare, brutal arithmetic of survival."

"Each death", he continued, "carved a mark deeper than any blade could reach, a quiet ledger written not on flesh but on the shadowed corridors of my soul. There was no pride in it, no warrior's boast, only the weary acknowledgment of a path long walked in blood and necessity."

He nodded for her to follow him as he walked through the crowded bazzar. "Tradition, those old constellations of rules and rites I once thought immutable now revealed themselves not as truths but as illusions clung to out of fear."

"When they collapsed, I felt something inside me collapse as well," leaving those words to drift quietly in the air between them, "It was there, in that moment, that I abandoned the fragile comfort of inherited purpose."

He paused, long enough to briefly examine a derelict power converter, upon which he decided was far past any wizardry-magic to resurrect it. "The creeds, the expectations, the ghosts of clan tales long dead, all of it. It was like an awakening, a cosmic firestorm that reshaped my spirit. Only in that furnace," he paused, "did I learn what I truly was, and what I would never again allow myself to be."

Ajalurk-Chaidth let his gaze drift toward the bazzar's horizon, voice low as though speaking to the quiet pulse of the planet itself. "I cannot say why my steps led me back to Mandalore," he admitted, the confession rippling like distant thunder through the air between them. "But it was something, perhaps old as the stars, perhaps older still than blood or creed that pulled at me, and I can only assume its reason will reveal itself in time."

Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Armor
  • The Black Devil's Armor

• Weapons
  • Veritas et Iustitia (Dual Revolvers
  • "Widowmaker" (Sniper Rifle
  • Moonshadow (Slugthrower Scatter Gun
• Ship
  • The Black Revenant

 

[Veyla Krinn]

Veyla walked beside him through the shifting pulse of the bazaar, her stride steady, shoulders relaxed in the way of someone who had spent a lifetime carrying weight without advertising it. But inside? She was processing every word he'd spoken—not with fear, not with awe, but with the kind of focused scrutiny only a seasoned warrior could give.

The clang of beskar, the scent of forge smoke, the rhythmic hum of jetpack vents—all of it blurred as something in his voice caught her attention like a blade tip pressed gently to the ribs.

Not the talk of battles. Not the wandering. Not even the betrayals or cosmic metaphors he wielded so effortlessly. But that one line. The one that cut deeper than he likely meant:

Only in that furnace did I learn what I truly was.

She slowed her steps, turning toward him enough that the forge-light banked off her hair in a red-gold halo. Her green eyes held his visor—not with fear, not with pity, but with a steady, unyielding clarity.

And then she asked him the only question that mattered. "What are you, Ajalurk?" The words were soft, but they carried the weight of a hammer striking an anvil.

She wasn't intimidated. She wasn't dazzled by the cosmic drift of his speech. She wasn't fishing for poetry. She just wanted the truth. Her voice dropped lower, almost intimate in its honesty.

"You talk like someone who's lived longer than he should. Like someone who's seen things most warriors don't survive long enough to name." A breath. A heartbeat.

"But you don't speak like a ghost. Or a veteran. Or even a mystic." She stepped closer—subtle, respectful, but close enough that the din of the bazaar faded around the edges. "You talk like something…other."

Not an accusation. Not fear. Just truth. Her eyes held him without flinching.

"So I'm asking you plainly, because I respect you enough not to dance around it." Her chin lifted a fraction, a Mandalorian challenge in its simplest form. "You told me what you've done. Now tell me what you are."

And she stood there, steady and unshaken—not pressing him, not crowding him, just waiting with the quiet patience of a warrior who only asks questions she's ready to hear the answers to.

Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze

 

[Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze]

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon‘s that is dreaming.” — Edgar Allan Poe​

Location - Kyr'am Bazaar
Tags - Veyla Krinn

[

In the drifting hush between constellations, where nebulae unfurled like luminous tapestries and the breath of creation curled in quiet spirals, Ajalurk-Chaidth's voice carried with a gravity older than stars. "They call me the Black Devil, for starters," he said, each syllable a low symphony woven from shadow-fire and forgotten epochs. "And you can probably figure out why." His presence rippled through the astral veil, a silhouette carved from voidlight, trailing memories of battles that stained entire sectors with their aftermath. Yet in his tone was no pride.

He turned his gaze toward Veyla, and the cosmos around them seemed to dim, as if listening for his next breath. "But what am I now, good question," he murmured, the words resonating like the toll of an ancient stellar bell. The eddies of power surrounding him twisted in indecipherable patterns, as though even the universe hesitated to assign him form or fate. In that moment he was neither myth nor monster, neither savior nor scourge, only a soul unmoored from everything it had been, drifting on the brink of some new definition.

Ajalurk-Chaidth's silhouette flickered against the argent glow of Mandalore's twilight skies, his presence bending the light as though reality itself recoiled from naming him. "I'm not a hero," he said, the words drifting like shards of dark starlight.

"Not a villain. Not even one of those convenient in-between archetypes the galaxy likes to cling to." A faint, crooked smile ghosted across his hidden features. "Perhaps anti-person is more fitting. A being who slips through the seams of every definition. I do what I want, when I want, no cosmic ledger, no moral compass, no prophecy binding my steps."

He stepped closer to Veyla, and the air around them hummed with the tension of two intersecting destinies. Behind his eyes, galaxies seemed to collide and reform, as though his very identity was an unstable constellation searching for alignment. "Truth is," he murmured, lowering his voice to a resonance that felt carved from the bones of dying stars, "I'm not sure what I am anymore."

"Every title I've worn feels like an echo, an old story trying to claim a being who's already moved on." His aura rippled outward, momentarily revealing the raw, unshaped potential swirling beneath the persona he presented.

He turned his gaze toward the iron horizon, where Mandalore's scars and legends lay buried beneath its renewed surface. "Maybe that's why I'm back here," he continued, his tone softer yet carrying the weight of an ancient oath undone. "To discover myself in the place where my old selves once clashed and crumbled. Mandalore remembers every fracture of who I was; and maybe, in its silence, I can hear who I'm meant to become."

Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Armor
  • The Black Devil's Armor

• Weapons
  • Veritas et Iustitia (Dual Revolvers
  • "Widowmaker" (Sniper Rifle
  • Moonshadow (Slugthrower Scatter Gun
• Ship
  • The Black Revenant

 

[Veyla Krinn]

Veyla listened to him in stillness, letting the weight of his confession settle between them like dust drifting through forge-light. He spoke in the language of voids and collapsed eras, a man circling his own identity like a wounded star—but beneath the cosmic varnish she heard something far simpler. Something raw. Something human.

She shifted her stance, her red hair catching the faint glow of the bazaar torches, and she studied him not with awe, not with fear—but with the grounded clarity of someone who had seen too many men lose themselves to grand legends.

"You know…" she said quietly, her voice cutting clean through the mythic haze he wrapped around himself, "for someone who claims to be undefinable, you just described yourself like a man trying very hard to outrun the shape he already knows."

She didn't step back. Didn't flinch from the strange gravity around him. If anything, she leaned in a fraction, green eyes steady.

"Black Devil, anti-person, wandering shadow—fine. Those are titles. Masks." Her lips curved into a faint, wry smirk. "Mandalorians wear them too. Doesn't make them true."

The bazaar's noise swelled around them—hammer strikes, haggling voices, the heartbeat of Mandalorian life—but she spoke as if the world had narrowed to the two of them.

"You keep saying you don't know what you are anymore," she said, softer now, but not fragile, "but you came back to Mandalore. You came to a place that remembers you. That means something."

Her gaze didn't waver.

"People who truly want to disappear don't return to the ashes that made them."

She let that linger, then added with a quiet conviction that was unmistakably Kryze: "Maybe you're not lost. Maybe you're just not done." A breath. Not dramatic—just steady. "You don't need to be a hero. Or a villain. Or the cosmos' favorite disaster. None of that matters here."

Her hand brushed a hanging jetpack part on the vendor's table beside them—an idle, grounding gesture.

"On Mandalore, you're clan if you choose to be. You're a warrior if you prove it. And you're alive if you want to stay that way." Her smirk returned, edged with dry humor. "Everything else is just noise."

She tilted her head, red hair brushing her cheek.

"So ask whatever question is really sitting under all that starlight and mystery."
"Because I don't care about the legend of who you were."
"I'm trying to figure out who you are now."

Ajalurk-Chaidth Kryze