Of Wolves and Wind - A Star Wars Story

It was a bloody, bloody day for Howler’s Regiment.

Every Imperial aspirant - seasoned veterans with hard eyes, arrogant noble sons with soft hands - endured months of screaming sergeants and live blaster fire before they were even considered for Howler. Four months of being broken down and rebuilt, of flinching or facing it when a bolt seared the air past their faces. It weeded out the stupid from the clever, the suicidally brave from the intelligently cautious, the hesitant from the decisive.

But Howler had been run by a Sith for a long time now, and his final test bore his mark.

Lord Reverentus stood in the arena ring with a vibroblade in each hand. His broad chest was bare and pale, his musculature carved by a lifetime of war. Even in simple black trousers, he towered over most of the recruits and most of his own men. Cybernetics gleamed along one side of his skull; where a Trandoshan Jedi had taken his eye, a metal socket now housed a dull, angry red machine.

He looked like a wayward war god dragged out of some backwater mythology and dropped onto duracrete and steel.

The task was simple: reach him and touch him with a stun baton without being killed.

Simple. Not easy.

Minutes in, the ring was slick with blood. Bodies sprawled at Reverentus’ feet, armour split, faces slack, eyes staring. He moved through them like a storm, directionless to the untrained eye, but every movement purposeful to those with the skill to discern them. The lucky few who managed to dart in and land a strike before his blades took them apart were yanked clear by tugs of the Force or the intervention of handlers. The others were left where they fell.

In the stands, the regiment - his regiment - howled and roared its bloody approval.

In the highest booth, Lord Krosis watched from behind a silver mask, today’s an expressionless thing turned down towards the carnage. Beside him sat a young woman in white and gold, hands folded neatly in her lap as if she were at the opera instead of bathing in the psychic stench of blood and fear.

Aea’s eyes were bright and mismatched - one blue, one green. One for her father, one for her mother, so she’d been told. The blue iris was circled by a pale, hesitant ring where the colour gave up early. Krosis had admired that once. Very Sith, he’d said: something that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be, so it tried to be everything. It had made him chuckle.

“What do you think, child?” His voice came, almost fatherly, above the baying of Howler hounds.

Think? Aea didn’t think so much as react. The air was thick with copper and adrenaline, fear and exultation, and that visceral mix tugged at her more reliably than philosophy ever had. She let her senses past their self-imposed chains and outwards, away from the carnage below and into the cluster of minds waiting their turn at the arena’s edge.

“Third on the right,” her voice is a murmur, gaze resting on a trembling aspirant, “he’s repeating a lullaby his mother taught him. In his head, at least. Unlikely candidate.”

Krosis shifted a fraction beside her, following her line of sight.

“Second from the left is about ten seconds from relieving himself on the dirt,” She added, tone as cool and matter-of-fact as if she were cataloguing books. “His strike wasn’t born of skill, it was-”

The man in question bolted forward in a panic and swung, wild and desperate. The blow veered wide and caught only air, and Reverentus’ blade took his arm at the elbow. The stump fountained red. He went down screaming.

And his trousers darkened.

“-more like five seconds.” Aea amended lightly, a faint smile touching one corner of her mouth. “As ever, my lord, your fist is mighty.”

Krosis laughed, a low, indulgent sound.

“You are far too kind, little one,” He looked back to the battle. “And trained far too well to be reflexively polite.”

Below, Reverentus fought like something feral, unchained. One sweep of his blades took a man’s head clean off, the follow-through eviscerated another from hip to shoulder. He waded through blood that hugged his boots, the hum of his vibroblades tearing through armour and bone alike. One aspirant lose everything from the waist down in an ugly spray of ichor and shredded durasteel, another crumpled around a blade driven deep into his chest.

He did not flag. For an hour he kept at it without pause, without mercy, until the only men still breathing were those thirty out of two hundred who had managed to touch him with their stun batons and live.

At last the noise changed. Not the roar of slaughter, but the roar that follows it.

Reverentus lifted his crossed blades high in salute to the watching Darth. The vibroblades hummed against each other, spitting tiny flecks of ozone and energy, and his voice boomed across the arena.

“There are no more! Salute your brethren, Howlers!”

The regiment erupted. Men vaulted the railing, howling with animal joy as they surged into the ring to seize the bloodied, triumphant few. They hauled the new Howlers away to baths and food, to men and women and narcotics, to every crude comfort that told the body it had survived.

Not so for Reverentus.

Wordless, he turned and strode from the carnage without looking back, vanishing into one of the arena’s shadowed alcoves.

Krosis rose as soon as his prodigy disappeared from view. With a brief tilt of his head - a wordless command - he swept from the booth. Aea followed like a well-trained hound in silks, the heavy skirts of her alabaster and gold robes whispering along the stone steps.

They descended narrow staircases and moved through tight corridors that threaded behind the arena’s walls until they reached Reverentus’ chambers.

The room surprised her.

She had expected the lair of a champion of the Sith to be crowded with exhausted pleasure-slaves, palm leaves, rich cushions and sweet-smelling oils. Instead, she found a sparse, almost monastic space. Bare, functional furniture. No trinkets. No decadence. The only indulgence was a low table with a basin and cloth, where Reverentus stood, stripping off blood and viscera with slow, methodical motions.

Krosis paused inside the threshold, then inclinded his head towards the Sith Lord. The gesture he made over his shoulder toward Aea was simple. Introduce yourself.

And so, she stepped forward, expression settling into something serene, eyes lowered just enough to be respectful without suggesting fear. Jedi training had given her the choreography for moments like this, and the Sith had refined it. Every motion, a calculation.

Her skirts made a soft, almost enchanting sound as she sank into a curtsey so low her off-knee touched the floor, a flat palm over her chest. Near-white hair spilled forward, framing unblemished features, save for a thin scar that cut through her right eyebrow and traced down tot he top of her cheekbone.

“My lord,” she said, and didn’t rise. “I am Aea.”

And in that sparse room, with blood still drying on his skin and the roar of his Howlers faint in the distance, Reverentus finally turned to look upon the girl Darth Krosis had brought him.