Character
| Location | Nam Chorios, Outer Rim Territories
Nam Chorios was neither the infamous city-world of Coruscant, where trade routes flowed, and people straggled along in a desperate hope to thrive at the top rather than sink beneath the levels of detritus and woe, nor was it the war-torn mess that characterised the Mandalorian soul, a world to which its people returned time and again, battered and bloodied, but so very rarely broken. It was a desolate world, scattered with cragged mountain tops formed of brittle crystals and ancient deserts, where travellers vanished, never to be seen again—their final moments, an echo, dark and filled with torment.
In the past, it had served as a prison complex. Squat buildings dotted the landscape, covered in dull, tarnished layers of durasteel, filled with screaming souls and buried bodies beneath the surface. Dust and ruin stretched across the bleak horizon, from the mountain range of shattered crystals in the west, towards the black deserts of the east. Grey towers of untold suffering marked the border, streaked in charred wounds and ravaged fissures, reaching towards the storm-torn skies in worship of an uncaring world deserted by the light that dared not show its face.
It was a cursed land.
And yet, despite it all, people lived on Nam Chorios.
Sitting on a crumpled old hill, Itzhal was struck with the fact that he had no idea why. It wasn't the weather. It wasn't the fauna—dominated by a species of parasitic insect that burrowed beneath the skin, and once there, was practically indistinguishable from the host body. It wasn't even the fact that it had multiple prisons half-buried across the planes, the remnants of former colonies—worn, disused, and left to rust after countless lifetimes of atrocities.
People here still lived, wandering beneath the light of luminous crystals and tightly packed tunnels, where villages nestled amongst sprawling caverns and plunging canyons. Rarely deeming to look beyond the troubling storms, and towards the distant stars that twinkled in the night sky. Would they have even noticed the Mandalorian Empire's existence, if not for the report of a crashed ship?
The old Morellian couldn't say; he wasn't sure if he even wanted to ask.
All he knew was that twelve days ago, a vessel registered crossing over into the Meridian Sector, then shortly after, crash landed upon the surface of Nam Chorios. Two days later, a distress signal from a village about two hours to the south of his location reported a raid, and yet, Protectorate Patrol Crafts in the area had confirmed no ships were lurking in the system to transfer goods offworld. If not for the mysterious vessel, it would have been dismissed as a homegrown issue, though, one that the Protectorate would have ultimately still investigated.
Now, it was something more.
Tags:
Aether Verd
Aether Verd