The shadow-veiled halls of Korriban trembled.
At the center of the ancient command spire, Queen Suama stood tall and sovereign, her mantle of darkness woven with imperial glyphs of dominion. The air around her shimmered with the weight of millennia—the pulsing rhythm of hibernating gods echoing through the cyclopean metal bones of the Darkstar Aldre buried beneath the planet's crust.
Beside her stood the legendary revenant of Mahasimu history: Grand Star Lord Malgus. His pale, scarred visage was illuminated by ancient stasis lights, respirator hissing in slow intervals. Cold yellow eyes locked with the Queen's as their hands brushed against the activation core.
"I will deliver annihilation, not victory," Malgus said. "Aldre must rise now."
From the massive gate behind them emerged Eid-Varak, the awakened Shadow Trooper slave handler, tall and imposing in his gleaming silver armor marked by crimson rank-etchings. He knelt only slightly—not in subservience, but in readiness.
"Systems are stable, my Queen. My Lord," Eid-Varak reported, his voice distorted through his filtered vox-plate. "Key slave cadres are active. Structural integrity is confirmed across the primary cathedrals and crucible towers. Orders?"
"Begin the awakening," Malgus commanded. "But only key units. This ship must be clean of ichor and rot before we breathe war through its lungs again."
The Struggles of the Sand People
In the bowels of Aldre, twenty Sand People stirred at Eid-Varak's earlier command—gnarled slaves with sunburnt gray skin and eyes like coal behind protective visors. Their breath rasped through cracked filters. They had been awakened first, burdened with the sacred and impossible task of cleaning the stasis halls before the full awakening.
Slipping in pools of viscous black stasis ichor, they heaved rust-welded tools, scraping the acidic slime off the crystal-glass stasis pods. The sludge burned on contact with air and sizzled across the cold alloy flooring, staining their robes and scarring exposed limbs. Some dropped to the floor, overwhelmed by fumes. Others screamed as they were trampled by reviving Mahasimu warriors, towering titans still half-blinded by the long sleep.
Eid-Varak patrolled the corridors in silence, electro-flail humming in hand, watching the slaves stumble through mists of purification vapor, muttering half-formed prayers and smearing ichor with rags older than their bloodlines.
One ancient trooper emerged too fast from his stasis pod—eyes blank, armored hands twitching—and seized a Sand Person by the throat, crushing it into the deck. Eid-Varak did not interfere. There were more. Always more.
Above, thousands more key Mahasimu personnel—Shadow pilots, crucible engineers, and primary war priests—were being revived in phases. Stasis coffins hissed open like iron tombs, spilling black sludge and steam, each one a slow breath of awakening death.
The Rise of Aldre – Planetary Devastation
Korriban itself began to shudder beneath Aldre.
Malgus and Suama stood on the obsidian command dais as seismic sirens activated—relic klaxons that hadn't echoed in over a billion cycles.
Miles below, the Darkstar Aldre began to awaken in full.
Massive repulsor engines, the size of cities, ignited in screaming silence. The tomb-planet cracked along sacred tectonic seams, ancient mechanisms rending mountain ranges apart as the station began to rise—half the planet's mass still clinging to its armored underhull like corpses on a god's back.
Spire after cathedral, thruster after fortress-buttress, ascended in columns of fire and debris. Korriban screamed—oceans turned to vapor, desert continents split like broken eggshells. Crystalline temples and forgotten crypts vanished into the rupturing abyss. Aldre devoured its birthplace.
Black clouds, drawn into orbit, swirled into a glowing maelstrom of ash and broken land as the Darkstar Aldre, a structure half the size of Korriban itself, tore free of its planetary womb.
Mountains collapsed. Cities fell. The atmosphere caught fire.
Then, as Aldre reached full velocity, what remained of Korriban's crust cracked completely, half the planet disintegrating into fire and nothingness. The other half was dragged in orbit behind the vessel, forming a ring of debris as it began rotating around Aldre like a mourning halo.
The Docking of the Giza Mtuji
From above, Queen Suama's mothership, the Giza Mtuji, approached. Vast and majestic, flanked by ceremonial escort ships, its hull bore the scars of a thousand wars and the sigils of unbroken imperial might.
As it neared, Hangar Prime opened—one of millions of massive docking arms extending from Aldre like the limbs of a machine-god. Already, millions of Mahasimu motherships are docked, forming a constellation of death around the reviving Darkstar.
The Giza Mtuji slid smoothly into its berth. Automated locks snapped into place. The interior glowed in eerie purple and black hues, lit by torches and plasma veins alike.
Within the sacred hangar, the war clerics bowed. The shadow troopers saluted.
And the Sand People, crawling across stained floors, kept scrubbing the ichor with bleeding hands, knowing that before the true war could begin, the temple had to be clean.
The Order of War
Inside the throne chamber, now hovering above a ruined Korriban, Eid-Varak returned and bowed slightly again.
"My Lord, stasis sectors 01 through 13 are operational. Clean. Shall I initiate the next phase?"
Malgus looked to Suama. No bow. Just kinship born of conquest.
"Soon the stars will scream," he said.
Then, after a pause:
"Begin final phase. Awaken the rest. Let the Darkstar Aldre rise whole."
And far below, tens of trillions of Mahasimu, Thal'karn monstrosities, abomination war-beasts, and world-breaker units began to stir in the depths.
The stars would never be safe again.