Supreme Leader's Flagship - Near the Hapes Cluster
It was one of the great disappointments of the cosmos: that the luminescent gases of nebulae like the Transitory Mists beyond the Supreme Leader's viewport did not drift and swirl the way that one might have imagined. Intellectually, Xaanan understood why. Such phenomena spanned parsecs: the Hapes Cluster itself was vast enough to contain 63 inhabited systems, and several hundred other stars. Any variations in the motion of the energised particles surrounding it would be imperceptible at this distance. Even the discharges that made the Mists so treacherous were tiny pinpricks from this far away, so slight and subtle that one could never be sure if they were real, or merely the conjurings of a wishful mind. It was disheartening, though, the glowing cloud of gas hanging frozen in the sky, paralysed from the opportunity for evolution and progress.
So much of the galaxy was the same. Especially the politics. Explosions of causality made the promise of change, but on a vast scale everything advanced so slowly, the shockwaves crossing the lightyears at a soul destroying crawl. Sheev Palpatine had plunged the galaxy into the Clone Wars, using it as a fire to gradually forge himself into an Emperor, and his Republic into an Empire. Yet, despite all the promise of that diametric shift, progress had advanced at a glacial pace. Two decades had passed before the Senate had finally been eradicated, and it took only one decade more before the Alliance of Free Planets had revived it from the ashes. Even the Empire itself had not lasted, blurring together with the Alliance to form a New Republic like some elastic regression to the way that things had always been for countless millennia.
The leather on Xaanan's gloved, mechanical hand creaked as he idly clenched it into a fist. Where had the Empire gone wrong? Why had the order and efficiency it promised ultimately amounted to nothing? These were the questions that occupied his thoughts, each day more than before. To learn from the mistakes of the Empire, to avoid every error and circumvent every flaw, that was his ambition; his driving motivation. He would finish what so many had started: the vision of Valkorion, of Palpatine, of Callidus, and so many more would weave together with his own, and he would imprint it irrevocably on the face of the galaxy.
He felt a tug across his consciousness, familiarity brushing across the edges of his perceptions as the Knight and the Marshal approached. His two greatest allies. His two greatest assets. His hands clasped themselves loosely behind his back as he continued his vigil of the Mists, his mind reaching across the vastness of his dimply lit private chambers, triggering the mechanism of the doorway before either of his visitors had the chance.
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