On Korriban, within the durasteel walls of the Imperial Academy, Inquistor Cia was deep in meditation. The dark side of the Force flowed easily through her, focusing her mind and empowering her light physique with the strength of a man three times her size. More than that, though, it guided her actions, showing her the potential future and giving her the power to change it. For many years it had guided her, ever since the fateful day she unknowingly called on it in a moment of anger and struck down an irritant. Throughout her trial and exile from the Chiss Ascendency for murder it had guided her. Through the miserable weeks she had spent on the wild, unnamed jungle planet she had been left on it had guided her. To her it had brought salvation in the form of a ship from the newly-formed Galactic Empire and an Inquisitor aboard it. Since that day, she had never looked back.

All around her were other beings immersing themselves in the dark side. The students she taught – those that had survived this long, at any rate – were following her example, concentrating on the Force around them. Through her efforts, the flow I this room was even stronger, bolstering the apprentices’ abilities. For said apprentices, this was a decisive moment. Around each and every one of them floated a dizzying array of mechanical parts that the Inquisitor had provided. Each piece was the potential component of lightsaber, though there were far too many in front of each pupil to fit into one weapon. A proper lightsaber must customized and built by the user, with the Force itself to guide them. Only them would the weapon be appropriately attuned to its master and function at its full potential. A standardized machine-built sword could never compare.

The construction was difficult and lengthy, for there were no instructions. Everyone had to make the weapons precisely to their own specifications, with hundreds of different styles and configurations to choose from. The blades would all be red, naturally – the synthetic crystals the Empire had provided would see to that – but otherwise there would be no uniformity. Beyond that, it behooved every being in the school to take special care when aligning the components. Should certain systems not be perfectly in place, with a margin of error best described as infinitesimal, the lightsaber might not function at all. Or it might simply explode the moment it was turned on.

For precisely how long she knelt there on the floor, deep in the Force’s embrace, Cia did not know. Nor did it matter to her. A day, a week, an hour… what did any of it matter? So long as progress was being made, so long as the dark side was there to ease her body’s requirements, she could sit there as long as her pupils needed her.

It was some time into her meditation that Cia was abruptly torn from her half-trance by the feeling of a powerful new presence on the scene. The currents of the dark side shifted, temporarily breaking the Chiss’ orderly flow. It took her but a moment to reassert herself and restore the flow of power throughout the building. Scrunching her eyes tightly, Cia reached out to get a sense of who it was…

Cia got to her feet.

The Inquisitor strode confidently through the miniature living maze between herself and the room’s exit, taking care to avoid disrupting the students’ working. She walked through the double doors and down several sets of hallways, arms behind her back. As she went, Chiss could feel the dark side crashing around her like an angry sea against cliff. The feeling she could sense radiating from the newcomer was exhilarating, enough to put a very slight smile on even her face. It seemed her idea had worked after all. At last she came to the academy’s exit, guarded by a pair of ever-vigilant MagnaGuards.

Or, rather, it had been.

What Cia found when she emerged from the Imperial Academy’s front door were two piles of smoking scrap. The two former Separatist droids had been cut and ripped apart in a manner that looked to have been supremely vicious. Limbs, heads, and mechanical guts were scattered widely across the red sands. To Cia’s experienced eye for murder, it looked as though their attacker hadn’t bothered to stop when the bodyguard droids had gone down, instead abusing their corpses for some time before taking up her current position.

The dark-colored equine she had sent away, Princess Luna, stood before her. Looking tall and proud, though lean and somewhat sunken, her blue eyes met the red of Cia’s head on. Power, the Inquisitor noticed, was flowing through her body freely now, causing her mane and tail to sway in a breeze that only they could feel. Through the Force, Cia could sense the psychic scars on the equine, feel the bitterness and hatred that seemed to seep from her every pore despite the stony indifference of her facial expression.

“So,” Cia said. “I trust you have my artifact?”

“Here is your trinket,” Luna answered, and a small metal cylinder flung itself from the ruins of her saddle-bag.

Cia caught it easily in one hand, giving the lightsaber a cursory examination before returning her attention to Luna. “You did well to bring it to me,” she admitted. “I trust you now know what the true power of the dark side is.”

“I learned much in the Valley, Inquisitor,” replied Luna.

“Then I trust we shall have no more incidents?”

“Of course not.”

“Good,” Cia paused, glancing down briefly at the scrap near her feet. When their eyes met again, the Chiss raised a single black eyebrow.

“They got in my way.”

Cia smiled.

Far away, on Serenno, an Imperial Lambda-class shuttle was touching itself down into one of the countless small clearing spread throughout the forested world. The rebel hijackers had, of course, sabotaged the ship’s communications and homing beacon virtually as soon as they had taken off, but all knew it was only a matter of time before the Empire located its stolen ship. They needed to be as far away from it as possible by the time that happened.

Inside the ship’s hold sat Twilight Sparkle, still making an effort to restore full sensation to her electrified limbs without resorting to visible magic. Alongside her were Spike, the wounded female rebel called Kylee, and an exhausted-looking man by the name of Harkon. Sylkes and one other man – Twilight had learned his name was Yules – had remained in ship’s cockpit to ensure its three remaining pilots didn’t try anything. After their Lieutenant had been shot trying to fight back, they had proven quite cooperative.

As the boarding ramp slowly descended onto the forest floor with a drawn-out hiss, three men in Imperial uniforms walked slowly out of the shuttle’s cockpit, hands on the backs of their heads. Behind them came Sylkes and Yules, each brandishing a gun. The three of them sank to their knees in the center of a rough circle of rebels, eyes darting nervously from one to the other. None, Twilight observed, looked as though they had been carrying any weapons.

“So,” Sylkes began without delay. “We need to get out here before there are a hundred TIE fighters over our heads. But first: what do we do with these three?” He looked around. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“I say we kill them,” said Harkon. “No one to tell the Empire anything more about us.”

“I’m with him,” Kylee added her voice. “No sense risking them seeing which way we went.”

There were vague murmurs between the former prisoners that Twilight couldn’t quite make out, but to her horror she saw the other two beginning to nod. With a pained groan she forced herself to her still-stiff feet.

“No!” she managed, her voice sounding distorted with the wrap around her broken nose. “I know they’re our enemies, but they still gave up! You can’t just shoot them!”

“Why not?” countered Harkon. “They’re dogs of the Emperor. They don’t deserve to live. And they pose a risk to us, however slight.”

“And,” Kylee put in. “Do you think they’d show us any mercy?”

Even with all the culture shock she had experienced over the past few years, Twilight still found it difficult to hear such sentiments from the mouths of those she considered the good guys. Briefly the princess had to remind herself that not everyone shared her cultural background and biological imperatives. The death penalty had long been abolished in Equestria – since shortly after Nightmare Moon’s banishment – and was regarded as an archaic relic of a barbaric time. But those rules didn’t apply here.

“And do you want to be like the Empire?” Twilight asked. “Are you going to kill everyone who’s against you, no matter the circumstances?”

“You’re overdramatizing this,” Sylkes joined the debate. “And besides, what else would we do with them? We don’t exactly have a jail, and if we let them go we might very well end up fighting them in the future,” he gestured at the shuttle. “This is a military ship, you know. What’s your alternative?”

Twilight bit her lip. She really didn’t know what else could be done besides binding the men and leaving them on the ship. But the others had a point: these were Imperial Navy pilots, and virtually certain to rejoin the Empire’s fight to control the galaxy if they were allowed to escape. Still, her gut feelings told her that executing them on the spot was wrong, and she didn’t want to simply dismiss morality for expediency.

“Look, this taking too long,” Yules piped up, looking pointedly at the open ramp. “The Empire will have dozens of fighters sweeping the skies for this ship right now, and maybe even orbital scans. We need to not be here when they arrive.”

“You’re right,” said Sylkes with a heavy sigh. “Alright, enough dawdling, we need to shoot them n-”

“NO!” Twilight virtually shouted, holding her hands up as if to stop what was coming “Tie them up and leave them here! Blindfold them if you like! But don’t shoot helpless prisoners!” she looked around, eyes pleading. “Please, be better than the Empire.”

“We are,” Harkon’s face hardened, and he leveled a stolen E-11 blaster rifle at the back of one man’s head. “We’re giving them a quick death.”

“It’s more than the Empire would give us,” Yules agreed.

“NO!” Twilight waved her hands and shook her head with frantic energy.

Harkon’s finger hovered over the trigger.

Desperately, Twilight pulled her trump card. “You owe me!”

The former prisoner paused, looking up at the shapeshifted alicorn. He frowned deeply. “We owe you, do we?”

She nodded hurriedly.

“We owe you,” Harkon repeated, narrowing his eyes. “What do you think we owe you for?”

“Well, I did kinda break you out of-”

“And you got most of us killed!” the mustachioed man snarled openly. “Because of your bungling “rescue”, my brother is dead!”

Twilight’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“Think? You didn’t realize that the people we left behind were people too?” he chuckled bitterly. “My brother wasn’t the first member of my family to die fighting Palpatine and his flunkies, you know…” Harkon’s eyes were briefly downcast. “But he was the last family I had.” He glared at Twilight.

She shrank back a little under his piercing gaze. “I’m sorry…”

“Yeah, well you can take your apologies and shove them where the sun don’t shine, you incompetent piece of bantha sh-”

“Harkon!” Sylkes cut the man off, and attention returned to the small group’s leader. “You know that she’s right: we do owe her. You we were all dead anyway. If not for her you, me, your brother, and everyone else would be aboard some floating ISB torture dungeon by now, and that’s a fact.”

Harkon said nothing.

“It’s not her fault your brother died,” Sylkes pressed. “She didn’t kill him, the Imperials did. If anything, it’s my fault for getting careless and letting us get captured in the first place. At least this way he died fighting and not in some execution chamber,” he put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “And we can carry on his work.”

There was silence in the captured shuttle for some time.

“Fine,” Harkon spoke up at last. “We owe her.”

“Then, please,” Twilight said. “Don’t kill these men. Not like this.”

“And what do you propose we do?” asked Kylee.

“Bind them. Blindfold them. Leave them with their shuttle.”

Everyone looked, consciously or not, to Sylkes for his reply. It took a few seconds before the bearded man decided on a course.

“Alright,” he said with a sigh. “If you want to leave them alive that badly, we’ll do it. This time.”

The freed prisoners hurried to tie and bind the Imperials as best they could. Fortunately, this was a prisoner shuttle and as such possessed plenty of restraining devices to be used. The rather relieved-looking officers of the Galactic Empire were slapped in their own handcuffs and seated on the shuttle’s transport seats. After a good blindfolding and a secondary pair of cuffs binding the men’s feet, the surviving rebels fled down the shuttle’s ramp in a rather hasty manner. They proceeded at once out into one of Serenno’s countless forests, stolen emergency ration packs atop their backs. Kylee, still bearing a blaster wound through her leg, had to be half-carried by Harkon. Spike, for his part, could keep up with the humans because of the slowed pace this necessitated.

“I know we’re going to regret sparing them,” Harkon muttered to Twilight as the shuttle faded into the distance.

The alicorn glanced backwards, briefly. “I don’t think so.”

“We’ll see.”

Back at Imperial Outpost FS-523, Agent Kallus stood waiting impatiently as a pair of Sentinel-class shuttles touched down on the facility’s damaged landing platform. Both troop transport shuttles opened their ramps to unveil nearly one hundred Imperial Stormtroopers. They filed off with characteristic precision and unity, moving quickly to surround and secure the perimeter. Kallus watched, arms folded across his chest and disdain evident on his face.

The Stormbreaker had been slow to respond to his calls for reinforcements. Its captain was an old hand from the Republic Navy, and evidently felt slighted to be answerable to some young upstart from the ISB, especially on his own turf. He had dispatched shuttles and fighters yes, but only at the most leisurely pace he could manage without looking a traitor. It was political maneuvering at its most petty, risking the escape of rebel prisoners simply to make the Imperial Security Bureau look incompetent. Kallus scowled even as he watched older Clone Wars era fightercraft zip overhead. Of course Captain August hadn’t dispatched any of his TIE squadrons. Of course.

The ISB agent shook his head in frustration before barking orders to few squads of Stormtroopers. The base’s main computer had proven frustratingly obstinate, and a few blast doors would simply have to be cut open by fusion torches or even shaped explosive charges. The outpost would need some time to return to full working order, and even more time to actually be dubbed secure.

The reminder of what had happened to the base’s computer brought the day’s most puzzling mystery back into the forefront of the agent’s mind. Who had that woman been? How had she been able to subvert what should have been a well-protected Imperial computer by herself? Kallus had no doubt it had been her – security recordings showed that she had indisputably come alone, save for a small, strange purple reptile of a species he couldn’t identify. If she had had backup, that would have been the time to bring them along. Her escape attempt had nearly ended in disaster, after all, with the majority of the rebel filth killed before they could flee.

Still, the woman had proven dangerous, and competent enough to shut down the entire base, kill several troopers, and break the prisoners from their cells almost unaided. Moreover, she was an unknown variable. The Empire knew a good deal about the rebel prisoners it had held, however briefly, but absolutely nothing was on file about the mystery woman. And nothing vexed the Imperial Security Bureau like an unsolved mystery.

Who was this woman? Where had she come from? Why did she rescue the rebels? What was that strange reptilian that had accompanied her? And what would she do now? Agent Kallus needed answers.

And, he reflected with a slight smirk, holding up the small DC-17 blaster pistol he had knocked from the woman’s hand, he knew just where to start looking.