Private Interview #1821 - Codename: Crusader

[Serina Calis]

"Burn bright."

Tags - Itzhal Volkihar



The air was thin here—filtered, reprocessed, sterile to the point of insult. Polis Massa offered no breeze, no scent of soil, no sky to reflect in the eyes of the living. It was a tomb world, a hushed mausoleum of stone and silence, and Serina Calis had made it sing with industry, warfare, and ambition.

She sat alone on a metal bench just outside the debriefing chamber, one leg elegantly crossed over the other, clad in the obsidian layers of her custom command attire. Her silhouette was severe against the dull white light of the corridor's recessed lamps, angular and immaculate—like a dagger left carelessly on a surgeon's table. Her arms were draped over the backrest like a monarch waiting to be adored—or a spider in her chosen corner.

Behind her, beyond sealed doors and bioscan thresholds, a databank waited: a vault of mercenary dossiers, field recordings, bounty manifests, and decrypted combat reports. Each file was a soul for hire, a weapon waiting to be triggered—most of them unaware of the game they were walking into.

Serina's eyes, cold and patient, lingered on the sealed blast door ahead as she waited for the next one.

Another mercenary. Another gamble. Another tool.

But tools could be sharpened.

Or broken.

She exhaled slowly through her nose and let the silence stretch. It gave her time to think, to reflect, to meditate not in the Jedi sense—but in the Sith manner. Coldly. Strategically. With disdain and purpose.

Why, she mused, were mercenaries so undervalued?

The galaxy was overflowing with them. Sellswords, pirates, bounty hunters, gunrunners, rogue knights—most viewed as rabble, unreliable opportunists, paid trash in armor. The aristocracies of the Core and the war councils of the Sith both considered them crude, inefficient, and beneath formal military doctrine. Jedi regarded them with spiritual revulsion. Even the underworld used them more as disposable cannon fodder than long-term assets.

It was idiocy.

Serina saw something they didn't.

Mercenaries were not liabilities—they were reflections. Of the times. Of desperation. Of hunger. Of power, pure and unsentimental. They were the ones who had cut the galaxy's throat a thousand times across its long, bleeding history. Armies marched because they were paid to march. Planets burned because someone didn't mind the bill. No empire rose without them, no rebellion endured long enough to matter unless it knew how to bargain.

She had made it a policy, in her private arm of governance, to cultivate them.

Not just hire. Not just deploy. Cultivate.

The trick wasn't in throwing credits at a killer and hoping they pointed the right direction. The trick was in understanding what they wanted. Control that—fear, revenge, glory, status, survival, indulgence—and you had them more completely than any oath-sworn conscript.

Serina played that game with a smile and a scalpel.

Some of the best soldiers she had ever wielded were mercenaries. Broken people. People with nothing left to give except violence. She respected that. She knew it intimately. Power divorced from ideology was pure. Mercenaries reminded her of herself, before she gave the galaxy her name and made it kneel.

Her fingers tapped slowly against her knee, black-polished nails clicking like distant percussion.

The last one she interviewed—a Trandoshan heavy with ritual scarring and a crude hunger for trophies—had shown promise. Unruly, yes. But promising. Before that, a slicer from Eriadu with a background in ghost network sabotage and a fondness for fine cigarras. That one, she had seduced not with charm but with access: a corridor into systems too secret for most to know existed.

They always had a price. And she always found it.

The hiss of hydraulics pulled her from her thoughts. The blast door began to open.

She did not rise.

Let them see her like this: perfectly composed, perfectly still, as if this meeting were their interview and their judgment.

The mercenary would enter. She would weigh them, not as a soldier, but as a resource to be manipulated, refined—or discarded. The rest of the galaxy might overlook them. She did not. And that was why her armies grew while others crumbled.

Her voice, when she finally spoke, was not loud.

But it was precise.

"Step forward," she said, the words laced with gravity. "And tell me… how much is your loyalty worth?"

And in her mind, she already knew the answer: Whatever I decide it is.

 

[Itzhal Volkihar]

| Location | Polis Massa, Outer Rim Territories

Itzhal Volkihar sat alone, his back pressed into the harsh embrace of a crash-rated seat with straps clamped over the solid beskar plates that covered his torso. Not unlike the dozens of other seats that sat empty, a bleak grey tomb, with only a single occupant. The room was deathly silent, even the faint sound of the Mandalorian's breathing muffled by the pressure seals of his helmet. There were no screens here to entertain, no company to pass the time, nor a view to absorb, only the same bleak grey walls that had surrounded Itzhal since the vessel had first picked him up.

With only his thoughts to accompany him, the Morellian lay back, the base of his skull cushioned by the padded cover of his buy'ce. He knew little of the woman he was scheduled to meet, a name and titles more than anything else: Serina Calis, Governor of Polis Massa. Most of the information he had was based on hearsay, shared by new acquaintances through a mix of word-of-mouth accounts and stories from people he barely knew. It wasn't sufficient to determine whether the tales of a Witch Queen in search of mercenaries were true or merely fictional, though his current circumstances certainly leaned towards the former.

Regardless, the tales rarely spoke of why she cared to acquire such individuals.

Itzhal understood the unspoken truth: she planned to wield them as instruments of power, vital assets for one surrounded by adversaries, many of whom were likely her fellow Imperials, with allegiances and loyalties acquired over centuries of service from homegrown units that would leave little for a sole individual to exploit. In fact, if his suspicions were correct, then despite their reputation, Mercenaries might just be one of the most obtainable sources of 'loyal' servants. Yet a lingering question loomed—would they be treated as mere commodities, as was often the fate of those who exchanged their talents for credits? A few weeks spent in the heart of Imperial territory had offered the Mandalorian keen insight into the customary practices governing her kind. The dynamics of allegiance and betrayal were as complex as the politics that had once both unified and divided his people, each interaction laden with potential peril.

None of this exactly answered why Itzhal himself had been contacted, opportunistic as it might have been, during his journey across the Outer Rim Territories, searching for trouble that the New Mandalorians might intervene in. He wondered then what had made him worth considering, a relative newcomer to the grand stage, yet not one instinctively aligned with a Sith agenda. Rare as they'd been during his time, the tales of Dar'jetii had still been spoken of and rarely positively, even for the most hidebound of Mandalorians. His research into the so-called 'Governor' of Mandalore, the very same one that had tried to claim his eye, had hardly left him feeling any better about the monstrous faction.

Such thoughts passed the time without a solid answer as the shuttle finally stopped, the rumble of landing gear deployed with a faint thump as the transport landed. Previously, there was a hazy natural glow, but the ceiling lamp flickered green as Itzhal detached himself from the straps with practised movements that left him to linger a moment longer than intended as the landing ramp slinked into place.

His steps were quiet, in contrast to the hiss of displaced gas from pistons in the ramp and the flurry of movement from below as masked individuals roamed the hangar bay, sensor equipment in hand as they passed him by on the way to the ray shield generator. A few others remained on the edges, their faceless figures revealing nothing of what they thought of his arrival as the shuttle ramp retracted and the vessel began to rise again into the air, they stepped forward into the absence, checking for deformation in the surface plates and where the transport had distributed it's weight.

After that, his attention shifted to the few unoccupied staff, though that description wasn't entirely accurate; they might not have had repairs to perform or surveys to review, but the rifle in their grips provided an ample explanation for their purpose here. They were a security team, although the black armour lacked any identifying markers, intentionally so as he scanned for an Imperial emblem or even something that could be later identified as a house symbol. He found nothing.

With a hushed intensity, they glided through the dimly lit corridors, an appointed escort leading the way while the others encircled him like an elite honour guard—or, he mused with a fleeting sense of irony, like the well-worn formation of a prisoner detail. Each step that followed echoed with a silent tension that filled the air. The others' movements were tracked through sensors in his helmet, as he calmly strode forward, hands almost casually at his side, ready to pass judgment.

It was not that he particularly intended to resort to violence. The numerous hallways were a maze without the assistance of his tracking software and over a century of experience hunting through places he wasn't meant to be, never mind the number of passages that would end in a crossfire, if he was fortunate enough not just to run into a bolthole. None of that even considered the fact that his transport had already left. A fighting retreat would only be more complicated when he had to figure out a new evacuation strategy.

With that in mind, he passed through the security check, his weapons and armour scanned in a noteworthy time, even with his help as he stepped where needed and avoided the temptation to manoeuvre some of his more discreet weaponry out of sight from the scanner. As he left with the same amount of gear as he entered, a pleasant surprise, though he could acknowledge none of his equipment was particularly outrageous. Pistols, a rifle, a flamethrower, a repulsor gauntlet, a whipcord thrower, wrist-mounted rockets, a railgun, a gauntlet-attached vibroblade, thermal detonators, electromagnetic grenades, flashbangs, and even an anti-armour missile attached to his jetpack. Practically light-weight for a Mandalorian.

After all that, the next minute of walking was almost calm as they reached a doorway and began to peel off. The almost oppressive weight on the back of Itzhal's neck lightened as the figures departed, and his escort pressed the door control before they waved him onwards, straight into the growing breach.

He stepped forward.

Highlighted in the room's framed white light, Serina Calis was perhaps not what he'd expected, her pale white skin sculpted by the shadows that caressed her form. Her posture was wielded like a knife, poised and elegant as any blade he'd ever seen, yet a weapon nonetheless as her arms stretched across the edge of her backrest, in a way that left the eye to linger on the careful precision that made such a gesture look effortless, ingrained rather than perfected over countless hours of practice. All the more impressive was the way she made it look comfortable, as if her stillness was because she'd found perfection, rather than another part of the presentation.

Yet despite it all, Itzhal couldn't help but notice that the woman before him was young. Far younger than he'd been when he'd first taken steps outside of the comfort of his family's protection and guidance, even then, he'd been little more than a sheriff for a town that rarely caused trouble. Back then, the problems had always been more likely to come from the stars than the people around him. Yet, that was nothing towards the governance of an entire planet, even if Polis Massa was nothing compared to the most populated worlds, it was a burden and opportunity that Itzhal could hardly imagine forced upon his shoulders.

However, as he stepped forward, Itzhal could acknowledge that from everything he'd seen, this was hardly a position forced upon her. Her youth may have disadvantaged her, but that didn't mean she wasn't dangerous. He'd seen enough to know that. If anything, she'd risen in spite of it.

Of course, then she spoke and the business began.

"Are you attempting to buy it, or are you asking what a person gains from it?" Itzhal wondered aloud, with a slight tilt to his head as his eyes roamed across her dress, searching for the weapon that was typical of Dar'jetii, before he allowed his eyes to linger across the room and over the visual displays on his HuD.

Tags: Serina Calis​

 

[Serina Calis]

"Burn bright."

Tags - Itzhal Volkihar



She watched him with a stillness honed to surgical precision, the way one might study the tip of a scalpel before making the first incision. Itzhal Volkihar—the name had carried little meaning at first glance. Just another armored ghost, another hired blade with delusions of independence. But then came the deeper layers, peeled back through careful intelligence work, shadow-net cross-referencing, and interrogation of whispers from the Outer Rim. The name that mattered wasn't his.

Jenn Kryze .

Serina didn't blink as he stepped into the room, but inwardly, her thoughts coiled like a serpent around that title.

The Duchess.

It was not a name given lightly. Nor did it belong to some delicate aristocrat clinging to ancient bloodlines. Jenn Kryze was a warlord, a revolutionary in beskar, a visionary for a new Mandalore. Serina had met her twice, and both encounters were carved into the flesh and soul of her memory like ritual scars.

The first had been Vassek—a tomb world where shadows clung like moss, and everything stank of the rising dead. There, Serina had unmade her in a subtle way, not through dominance of arms but through a bit of luck and revelation. She had drawn the truth out of Jenn with a scalpel tongue, laid her hunger bare in front of herself. Power. That's what Jenn wanted. Not Mandalorian unity. Not tradition. Not glory. Just power. The kind you shape a galaxy with. And Serina had let her go—a kindness, an arrogance, a lesson.

The second meeting had been on Woostri, during the Sith push. There, the roles reversed. Serina had tasted failure, true failure—the kind that doesn't just sting, but burns. Jenn hadn't bested her in debate or strategy. She had beaten her, brutalized her. Laid waste to her defenses, stripped her of pride, gouged out her eye and left her drowning in the debris-choked waters of a sinking ruin. It had taken all of Serina's talents—innate Dark Side regeneration, desperate survival instinct, and the infuriating grace of Aadihr Lidos —to crawl back from that defeat.

But she had.

And now, here he stood.

Itzhal Volkihar. Loyal to Jenn Kryze. Hers. A man who called her Mandalore not in jest or scorn, but in allegiance.

Serina's expression didn't waver. Her body did not shift. But deep beneath the polished mask of composure, her mind churned with purpose. This meeting had nothing to do with hiring a mercenary.

It was about leverage.

She didn't need to kill Jenn. That would be an ending. Too simple. Too kind. What Serina wanted was corruption. To ruin the Duchess, not merely on the battlefield, but from within. To peel back the steel and fire and expose the programmable girl beneath. To twist her ideals into weapons against her. To force her to watch her house fracture from the inside out until there was nothing left but Serina.

Only, Serina.

Start with the men she trusts.

Itzhal. A Morellian hunter. Disciplined. Self-reliant. Not a zealot, not naive. That made him pliable. Not through deception, but through mutual interest. Let him believe in the job, in the credits, in the quiet professionalism of an honorable contract. Let him lower his defenses over time, let him start to see her not as a Sith or a monster—but as a powerful, necessary ally. Let the seeds be sown gently.

The seduction of ideology came later.

Her eyes tracked the way he glanced across the room, his sensors mapping exits and weapons placements, calculating odds. Good. She wanted him cautious. Wary. Trust was best forged in tension, not comfort. In that fragile, electric space where both parties knew the other could kill them, and chose instead to listen.

She wondered if Jenn knew how easy it would be. How little it might take. Not with threats. Not even with credits. But with a vision.

Serina had hers.

And now, she would see whether this man could be made to serve it.

She inhaled once, softly. The artificial air still tasted of antiseptic and ionized steel.

Her fingers flexed once against the bench, slow and graceful, as if drawing a silent line in the air.

Then, at last, she prepared to speak.

But not yet.

First, let him wonder what she was thinking.

Let him feel the gravity of the moment press against his chestplate like a loaded pistol.

Serina let the silence breathe a moment longer.

Then, like silk being drawn across the edge of a blade, her voice slid into the space between them.

"Mr. Volkihar," she said, low and measured, every syllable resting precisely where it was meant to. "Thank you for coming."

There was no rush to her tone. No manufactured warmth. But neither was there cruelty. The voice was—like the woman herself—perfectly seated between mystery and poise. It invited curiosity without inviting challenge. It suggested interest without attachment.

She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward slightly, elbows gliding to her knees in a movement that was too natural to be rehearsed but too deliberate to be unintentional. Her hands, gloved in obsidian synthleather, clasped loosely as her eyes studied him—not in hostility, but in the way a strategist examines a newly acquired asset: with intent.

"I imagine you've endured worse receptions," she continued. A faint curve touched the corner of her lips—not a smile, but the echo of one, just enough to convey civility without affection. "But I hope this meeting proves... worthwhile."

There was no bravado in her voice. No arrogance. Just quiet, unreadable certainty, like someone who knew how the game ended and was still gracious enough to play the first move with elegance.

She let her gaze fall to his armor—not in disdain, but with genuine interest, as if cataloguing the tools of his trade. He was formidable. That much was plain. Not simply because of the armament or the way he held himself, but because of the discipline. Serina prized that. It wasn't bloodlust or pride that guided this one. It was control.

"I've reviewed your work," she said. "There's precision to it. Efficiency."

Another pause. Intentional. Letting the compliment settle without dwelling on it. Then:

"I value those things."

She tilted her head slightly, just enough to offer the illusion of intimacy without lowering her guard. Just enough to invite him in, without ever truly opening the door.

"You weren't summoned to impress," she said at last. "You were summoned to speak."

And now, the tone shifted—just subtly. The warmth thinned. The poise remained. But there was a new gravity beneath it.

"I want to hear, in your own words, who you are when no one's buying the answer."

That was the only opening she gave him.

She offered no rank, no titles, no defense of Polis Massa or her governance. She made no effort to sell herself or the position. In doing so, she reasserted dominance in the most gracious way possible.

You're not here to judge me. You're here to offer yourself.

Now she waited, eyes unblinking, still as glass.

A Queen on a throne she did not need to name.

 

[Itzhal Volkihar]

| Location | Polis Massa, Outer Rim Territories

The door that Itzhal had entered through closed behind him with another hiss of hydraulics as the metal plates settled into place, smooth like the form of a holstered blade. It was still dangerous, yet not an oblique threat, even if it blocked his only real form of escape, at least for the moment. Itzhal had enough experience with explosives and doors like that to know they wouldn't hold for longer than a few seconds. Still, that was hardly a warm comfort when he had an inkling of what a woman like Serina was capable of, especially when a few steps would close the distance between them.

In the same regard, though, Itzhal had been brought here for a purpose. He had enough experience in situations like this to know he wasn't here for a quick execution. There weren't enough men to hold him down, or even the hint of presentation that such a fiasco desired. Unfortunately, it probably said something about him that he had a clue about what to look out for if that had been the case.

That didn't mean he was safe, however, not when even a glance at the room's only other occupant revealed eyes lost in thought. A perfect storm of considerations and balances played on a battlefield he couldn't see, though even what he could gleam gave an inkling of what to expect. To say she saw a person beneath the armour wouldn't be incorrect. Still, Itzhal had seen eyes like that before, the type of person that looked upon others and weighed them up like statistics on a spreadsheet, reduced to their value and what they brought to the cogs of unrepentant progress. It wasn't uncommon in his line of work. Not when the wrong choice could cost lives.

Actually, in some ways, it was almost nostalgic. The New Mandalorians had looked upon him, yes, but their ways had been simple. An assertion of purpose and duty, a mere reflection of what he expected from himself, brought out into the world rather than a challenge. Years ago, similar eyes had looked down upon him in judgment. He'd never bothered to ask what they had seen in him then; it had been clear enough then that he had passed.

Those years of service had ended in blood and fire.

Whether the same would happen with the New Mandalorians, he wasn't sure. In the end, did it really matter?

All things end. Itzhal already knew what would happen when he lost it all.

So he waited, confident in himself, even as the entire Galaxy changed. Behind the dark gleam of his T-shaped visor, Itzhal Volkihar refocused his attention on Serina Calis, a tilt of his visor as he looked down upon her seated presence. His hands rested before him, the polished surface of the metal gauntlets glinted under the overhead light, sharp reflections danced and twisted around the barrels of weapons and tools that remained unused, even as it brought his fingers a little further away from the grips of his blaster pistols. As she leaned forward, her hands clasped in a way that most people associated with plots and more profound thoughts.

As if she hadn't plotted this entire encounter since the moment she decided a meeting was beneficial.

The script that followed was pleasant, a tasteful mix of civility and compliments for all that he'd heard much the same before. He permitted her to continue, not out of any misguided belief that he held the reins of the conversation, but because he understood that an abrupt interruption would shatter the delicate performance, transforming it into something far more adversarial than either party truly wanted.

So, with a simple desire, she asked a question that was as simple as can be yet dazzling in its complexity.

Who was Itzhal Volkihar?

"Not an easy question," Itzhal admitted, his voice laced with contemplation. He paused deliberately, allowing the weight of the inquiry to settle upon his shoulders, a tension that hung in the air, a noose around his throat, not so easily loosened. Not when the question mattered as much to him as to the lady upon the throne. "I ask you a question, not to divert from your own, but because I think it's relevant. When you look upon this Galaxy, what do you see?"

His helm tilted slightly upwards, the glare of his visor pointed towards a sky that he couldn't see.

"I'm a repercussion of everything that's come before; I'm a violent man, governor. I don't think I always was," Itzhal shrugged, loosening a weight upon his shoulders that felt just a little lighter for the admission. "Oh, I had the skills."

"My parents weren't idealists, they knew I'd eventually need to defend myself, so they did all they could to ensure when the time came that I was ready, but they didn't give me the conviction to look upon another person and decide they need to be stopped, even killed if necessary," His voice was soft, a truth shared between them. "That came later. I grew used to peace; it settled in my bones and made me happy in a way that I'm not quite sure I even remember. I was blind. As it always does, peace, what I knew of it, was fleeting, and the Galaxy did what it always does. It burns it all to the ground."

Itzhal's hands were clasped together, each finger interlocking with a firm yet reassuring pressure that detracted from the desire to turn them into talons, ready to rip and tear.

"I woke up and I saw the truth of this Galaxy. We fight, we hurt, we die, and we keep on fighting. It doesn't even matter who, the Empire, the Mandalorians, we all jump in, like a madness we can't escape. It burns, seeing my people turn upon the Galaxy again and again, as if past glories and endless slaughter are something to pride themselves upon. It burns that the closest thing to stability this Galaxy has reached is a civilisation that looked upon history and believed the lies of the Republic. It burns that an Empire that claims to uplift gods can't even drag the rest of its people out of the dirt. It burns, knowing that peace is never going to be simple. It burns because I know that outside there are a thousand different problems I can't fix, but that's never stopped me from trying."

Soft breaths moved his chest, barely visible under the mountain of Beskar that protected him, as his visor turned back towards Serina.

"This Galaxy is a cesspit; it enjoys it, basks in the chaos and strife that history has worn into the groove of its existence. I am sick of it. Some days, I would like nothing more than to burn it all to the ground," His right hand broke free of the fingers that wrapped them together, released with a suddenness that transferred into the harsh thump as he brought his fist down upon his waiting palm. "But that's not good enough. That's throwing out the table because you give up. I want people to be safe, to not worry about the next danger. I want prosperity, civilisations that don't need to fight, that don't want to fight. I want to one day look upon this Galaxy and know it's better, because I beat it at its own game."

"At the base of it, stripped of all else, I'm a violent man who wants to change it all. Whom are you, who desires to know me?"

Tags: Serina Calis​