Scherezade deWinter
The Blood Hound
Shuklaar Kyrdol
The Smuggler's Moon never slept, but inside the invisible dome Scherezade had commissioned, it almost felt like it did. Outside, Nar Shaddaa screamed with noise as speeders and hawkers, holoads and blasterfire blended into a ceaseless metallic heartbeat that kept the planet alive at all hours of its spin around its sun. But step through the thin shimmer of her bubble, and the noise fell away. The air stilled. Everything inside was… Quiet. A stark difference from areas Scherezade more typically spent most of her time in.
Her temporary office for the time being was a repurposed caravan parked at the heart of the construction site and looked almost modest from the outside. But the closer one came, the more her it became. Crates stamped with transit codes from half the galaxy were stacked high around it, some cracked open to reveal flashes of pink silk, lacquered armor plates, and glitter cartridges. The glitter was still the safe kind that just clung to you forever, not the acid covered kind. Not yet, anyway. A handful of droids buzzed around like fat metal bees, fitting cables and power couplings into the growing skeleton of what would soon be her headquarters.
For now, the caravan was enough.
Scherezade stood at the viewport, watching the construction mechs work. Every strike of the plasma torch, every line of new durasteel, felt to the Sithling like she was carving a new place for herself int eh galaxy, one beam at a time. She helped built empires before. Burned them too. But this time, the thrill coiled in her belly felt somehow different.
This time, she wasn't fighting to prove herself. She was building something.
And today, she was doing it with a name from the other side of her war.
The irony of it all made her grin. Strill Securities. Professionals, Mandalorians (eww) that she, her sister, and everyone else during the Agents of Chaos days, they'd been on opposite ends of the field, and the only reason either side still breathed was because the universe had been cruelly generous.
Now, years later, the galaxy had shifted. Old banners were ashes, old debts irrelevant. Scherezade didn't care that they had fought against her before. They were mercenaries, so it wasn't personal. And though she had been on the winning side, she knew worth when she saw it, and wanted to dip her fingers into it.
And that was what today's meeting was going to be about. With her official joining into the Black Sun, she was going to need more than pink and glitter. She was going to need blood.
