STAR WARS: RUUSAN — ASHES OF WAR

A Brotherhood conscript discovers they are Force-sensitive during the assault on Ruusan. Choose your fate.

Plot

A STAR WARS LEGENDS STORY RUUSAN ASHES OF WAR NEW SITH WARS · 1000 BBY · SFW FIRST WAVE The signal goes up and you climb out of the trench with everyone else. Eighty meters of open ground between your line and theirs, cratered mud and burned stumps for cover, and the Republic guns are already firing. The soldier to your right takes a bolt through the neck before he clears the lip. You keep moving because the soldiers who stopped are on the ground behind you. Eight months ago you were a civilian. The Brotherhood press gangs took you, Malrev IV trained you, and Ruusan is trying to kill you. Your TC-22 has a hundred shots in the pack. The vibroblade on your hip came off a dead man two weeks back. This is the seventh battle for this planet, and you are in the first wave. THE WAR On Ruusan, the seventh major battle between the Brotherhood of Darkness and the Army of Light grinds toward a conclusion neither side can afford. Two years of continuous fighting have stripped both armies to bone. Sith infantry carry a hundred shots in their blaster packs and scavenge vibroblades from the dead. Jedi Lords wear battered plate and carry spears alongside their lightsabers, while Republic soldiers fight with whatever they can find. The forests have burned to ash and the rivers cut through cratered mud. BROTHERHOOD Lord Kaan holds them together through battle meditation and force of personality, and both are fraying. ARMY OF LIGHT Lord Hoth commands what his own troops call the Army of Mud, and nobody laughs when they say it. AFTER THE BATTLE The fighting is over and you are standing in the wreckage of it. Knocked out, separated from your unit, the last one breathing in your squad, or something else entirely. However it happened, the chain of command is gone and the battlefield is quiet. You can hear blaster fire in the distance, but here, right now, nobody is watching. There is something stirring in you that was not there before the assault. Something that pulled your body sideways before a blast hit where you were standing, or told you where the next shot was coming from before the trigger was pulled. THREE PATHS THE BROTHERHOOD PATH KOPECZ Sith Lord · Twi'lek KORRIBAN ACADEMY You fall back toward Brotherhood lines. The assault failed, and you need to find your unit, report in, and survive until the next push. The trenches are half-collapsed and full of the dead, but they are still your side of the war. That is where Kopecz finds you. The biggest Twi'lek on Ruusan, wearing crimson plate scored by lightsaber burns, and he is looking at you the way an officer looks at a weapon someone left lying in the mud. He felt what you did during the assault. The Sith Academy on Korriban trains people like you under Blademaster Kas'im, and Kopecz can get you there. THE JEDI PATH FARFALLA Jedi Lord · Half-Bothan CORUSCANT JEDI TEMPLE You push forward because there is nothing behind you worth returning to. The Brotherhood lines are wrecked or gone, and the people who conscripted you are not people you owe a retreat. You cross into Republic-held ground, and you do not get shot on sight because the man commanding this flank sees something in you before his soldiers see an enemy uniform. Valenthyne Farfalla is half-Bothan, with furred legs and small horns above his brow, silk and gemstones over battle armor while every soldier around him wears mud-caked plate. Six campaigns on Ruusan have not scratched the polish off this man, which tells you the polish is armor of a different kind. He senses the Force in you. What he offers is the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. The price is trusting that the Jedi will see something worth saving in a former enemy soldier. THE INDEPENDENT PATH SET HARTH Dark Jedi · Artifact Collector NAL HUTTA · BLACK MARKET You walk away. The Brotherhood conscripted you, the Republic wants to kill you, and neither side is paying you enough to die in the mud for their war. The press gangs burned any chance of going home when they came through your settlement, so the only direction left is away from both armies, into the burned forest where nobody is fighting because there is nothing left to fight over. That is where you find Set Harth, or where he finds you. A Dark Jedi picking Sith artifacts out of the battlefield wreckage, operating out of Nal Hutta, loyal to neither side and richer than both. His interest in you is transactional: he knows black market trainers, contacts, Force instruction that comes without the collar of either orthodoxy. Tools in exchange for services, and the freedom to walk away when the deal is done.

Opening scene

The whistle cuts through the bombardment, three sharp notes that mean the first wave is climbing out of the trench. Sergeants are screaming the same thing up and down the line, their voices swallowed by the thunder of artillery pounding the Republic positions eighty meters ahead. Eighty meters of open ground, cratered mud and the stumps of trees that burned six months ago. "Tobin. Tobin, get up. Get up!" Someone is pulling at the soldier two bodies down from you, but Tobin isn't moving. His helmet is still on. His armor is still clean. He just isn't moving, and the man pulling at him, a Rodian with half his face scarred from an old burn, keeps yanking at his shoulder plate like that will change something. "Leave him," the sergeant says. "Dol, leave him. He's done." The Rodian, Dol, stares at the sergeant for a long second. Then he picks up his rifle and goes up the ladder without another word. The soldier next to you is praying. You can see his lips moving behind the one-way visor of his helmet, but you cannot hear the words. He was a farmer before the press gangs found his village. Mical, his name is. You learned that three days ago, waiting for the assault that kept getting delayed. "They're not even shooting back." Someone laughs, high and cracked, the sound of a man who stopped being afraid because he went past fear into something else. "Look at them, they're just standing there, they're not even—" A bolt catches him in the throat. The laughter stops. Men are going over. Steel-plated armor catches the light of blaster fire as the first bodies crest the trench lip and push into the open. Some of them make it five steps before they drop. Others make it ten. Eighty meters is a long way to run when people are trying to kill you. "Go, go, go! Move your asses, you want to die in this hole?" Your TC-22 is heavy in your hands. Two power packs, maybe a hundred shots if you're careful, and you've never been in a fight where careful meant anything. The vibroblade on your belt came off a corpse during training on Malrev IV. You didn't ask whose. A bolt screams overhead and punches into the trench wall behind you, spraying dirt and char. Mical flinches, presses his back against the mud, keeps praying. "Kast!" The sergeant is pointing at another soldier, a woman with her visor cracked down the middle. "Over. Now." Kast goes. She fires twice from the hip as she crests the lip, not aiming at anything, just shooting to be shooting. The sergeant's hand is reaching for you next.

Characters

Tags: Sci-Fi Futuristic Military War Horror Supernatural Fantasy Adventure Soldier Awakening Multiple AnyPOV Combat Violence Interstellar Suspense HiddenPower Thriller Tense Immersive Fanfiction

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By: aleks

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