He'd wished there was blood. Some form of a grievous, primal penance self inflicted for this failure. It was a gut wrenching agony that paralyzed him to the core of his mortal shell. No defeat should've had this effect. No defeat before this ever did.
The way of man was to kill. To find your tribe, protect it and kill anything that ever threatened it. He'd done just that from the start. Protected his tribe.
Dantooine...was a selfish excursion. It was...home. To him, it mean't something. To leave led by the collar and chain only to return its liberator...its sovereign would've been the most serene of personal triumph. It would've mean't something more than the rest did.
But ultimately...Dantooine is...nothing. It means...nothing.
It took the lives of several thousand New Imperial sons and daughters to beat that into his stubborn skull. Lives he couldn't ever get back, potential that could never be harnessed again. Because he got all fucking sentimental over a place that'd left him beaten and downtrodden, built up the only attachment to self he'd ever recognized only to rip it away and burn the evidence.
Good.
He couldn’t help the spark of another cigara to life, tucking it between his lips with a strong pull of the sweetened herb. The half closed shutters of the windowpanes painted a spooty array of light from Ravelin in dusk across the room.
He leaned back in his seat, into the shadows. The eyepatch normal fixed across his face abandoned in favor for the cybernetic that was concealed beneath, isolated and enveloped with an in the faded burning and scarring that ever marred the organic eye once in its place before.
Irveric was barely fit for his station in this state. He’d lost thousands of his own time and time again...something made all of this different.
“I wanted to go home, Croaker.” He states outright.
“I don’t miss ‘home’...but it would’ve...made right in me that there’s nothing they have that they can take from me anymore. Then the whole fucking Galaxy made sure I couldn’t…” Tavlar says before he takes in another puff of the cigara.
Croaker scribbled something onto his holopad with the freehand stylus gripped in his right hand. His foot tapped twice against the steel tiles of the floor, a contemplative motion that eased him through the points he’d already taken down. Butt-end of the stylus raised to the corner of his mouth, egress of his lips gripping at the plastoid utensil.
“Dantooine was where your relationship with loss began, wasn’t it? It isn’t home to you, but you fixate on it as a monument to your grief,” Croaker stated softly.
It felt strange to be talking to the Imperator in such an advisory manner. Once he cracked the shell, though, Irverics yolk was just the same as anyone else’s. It should have been obvious, leaders are people too, but perception had a way of betraying the obvious. Rare was the man who exuded the aura of being above the normal man. Yet, the Imperator was just as much a horrible mess as any ‘normal man’ he’d treasted.
Go figure.
It was time to dig deeper. Croaker reached down and retrieved a holo-recorder from a bag he’d sat by the table. “If you don’t mind,” he offered before clicking the record button and placing it on the table beside him. Every word would be on this small record going forward.
“Let’s talk about Dantooine, then. Growing up there, living there, and so on.”
“It’s a shit hole...always was, always will be. I grew up, me, my brother...my mother. That was it. Had to take the reins early on, she couldn’t raise us herself...she was never ‘there’ all the time, apparently she was different before my father left. I don’t know, never met- or I- didn’t meet him until much later.” Irveric states candidly.
“If I could’ve gone back there...taken it back...I would’ve been free from all that. I wouldn’t have that part of my past looming over me, that wayward world I could never return to again. Born the street filth I was...only to return as its conqueror.”
“And I failed…”
Croaker hummed contemplatively, tapping the stylus against a stubbled chin. More scribbling soon followed, an uncomfortable silence alongside it.
“You have to forgive yourself for the loss of Kenth and Kyla, Irveric. You internalize a guilt that doesn’t belong to you, and now you project it on our failure. I’m not telling you to forget them, or Dantooine, but you have to come to terms with it. You’re eating yourself for nothing.”
He was right. It was time to kill his past.
"Yeah...you're right. I can't mourn them forever, I can't redeem what I failed to do..." He stated before he slowly rose from his seat.
The fires of war enveloped the Braxant again. Though the smoldering ashes had settled on Dantooine, the salt and smoke still shrouded Bastion to a peculiar fate.
Good.
He could have only assumed the Sith went for the heart to gather the call of arms of the New Order to its aid, to leave weaker points along their line. But the Imperator...was no where to be seen. His fate left to whispers, here say.
He entered the hangar bay of the Dissident Aggressor with measured metallic steps. Awaiting him, the truest sons of the Empire.
The 501st.
The punished.
Some of those men and women had been with him since the trenches of Kintan, the burning ash of Sundari and everything since. So too, were the souls of those he'd lost.
TK-1878, TK-4602, TK-2718. Kan Belisarius, Sam Deckard, Adrial Magnus. Agrippa, Waylon Treicolt. All of those valiant sons dead in the ashes and broken grounds of the Braxant. Harnaidan, Cassel Point, Target Beach Hoth, Ravelin all might have taken them. But they would finish the fight with him.
Each of those designation numbers embedded within hundreds more unto the composite metal plating of his armor. It was a personal ode to those fallen, one which he took upon alone.
Until he looked over the Legion before him. Each of them had gone about the same ritual, the field of auric and cobalt marred by the metallic etchings of each slain trooper. Letters and numbers...but to him, to the rest of them. Names, faces, souls...brothers, sisters.
He stood before them, his gaze painted in cold shades of stoic beneath his own gaze, painted part way with the argent skull across the right half of his face, the punished.
He looked on in silence, out of respect for the names they all bared today.
Before he spoke.
<"Remember what we lose...remember the price we had to pay to stand before ourselves here, now...alive. Those brothers and sisters that paid a much higher toll...so we could carry on the fight. We have to make good on that sacrifice."> He states.
<"The Sith Empire remains...">
<"We're going to make it burn.">
The Imperator states before he raises his right hand into the air, clenching it into a fist before he slams it down against his breastplate, over his heart.
There was no forgiveness left to cede. Helgard, these frozen wastes were home to a warrior race who'd paid patron to
Kascalion Giedfield
, the Devil. The beast who'd been a plague to the New Order since its very inception.
They'd encountered one another face-to-face, seemingly in mutual respect in the fire soaked streets of Sundari and since, the
Devil and the
Slayer had met several times on the field. Kascalion 'died' on Velmor and the two nearly sent the other to their deaths on Cassel Point.
He didn't know if he'd see him on the field today.
He didn't care.
He wanted to make Helgard burn.
Hjallaheim had come under the Imperator's will. To be put alight. The Helgardi were not the farm folk of Dantooine, the Imperial citizens of Bastion. They were a warrior caste who'd adhered themselves fully to Sith.
There was no hearts and minds to win here.
Only a war to win.
Artillery battered the fortifications and gunships blotted the skies with the New Imperial advance.
The Iron Imperator would be here to lead them all. His absence from the beginning of the Sith Imperial siege at Bastion was inexcusable, no more of his men would fight and die enmasse lest he was there to endure the struggle alongside them.
Were he void from the field, he'd be just another one of the useless glad hands wasting away in their offices and meeting chambers. As
Natasi Fortan herself determined-
He was born to die.
His feet landed against the earth, rappelled from a RDAG before the gunship was quick to fly off shortly after delivering its payload. Enigma-actual and his 501st.
The frozen streets in the shadow of the mountain fortress were a daunting ambitions.
With the Helgardi swift approach bearing down on their position enveloped in crimson danger, he was quick to abandon the rifle, slinging it over his shoulder.
And instead, the halberd, the very same he'd used to cleave through the heart of
The Devil came out in its place.
The Phrik composite blade fixed itself in the abdomen of a charging Helgardi screamer before he wrenched it out to the spill of crimson ichor, swinging it over his head and bearing it down into the skull of the alien warrior, ending him immediately.
It was a long road to Hjallaheim, a path to be carved in broken bones and rivers of blood.
<"I want that gate pounded to dust. Sooner we breach the fortress, the sooner its over for them."> Until the armored support could arrive to drop the hammer, it was up to Irveric and the rest of those dropped into the city to carve through.
Shades of Harnaidan, the New Order's first great triumph. Except now, there was no remorse, no restraint.
<"We'll blow our own entrance in the mean time, Enigma on me."> Irveric ordered as they continued the march of blood and gore forward.
<"Copy, we should have the mass to cut open our path."> The Umbaran replied in kind, one of his more trusted subordinates. Vizek.
<"Get eyes on all the airborne units, we need to consolidate and move as one if we're going to break it open."> The Imperator commanded.
The more things changed...the more they stayed the same.
War.
ALLIES |
NIO |
SOM |
Willan Tal
|
DECEASED Erskine Barran
|
Jorus Fel
|
Kosca Gaelt |
Ravraa Vyshraal
|
Ragnar the Untested
ENEMIES |
TSE |
CIS |
