Battle of Alsakan: Legacies Collide

[Brandon Rhea]

The Star Wars RP
Battle of Alsakan

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Nearly 14,000 years ago
The warm winds gently brushed across the landscape of Alsakan, carrying with them all the elements of the surface—but they were not what one would have expected. Fire, brimstone, dirt, death; the scorched earth that had once been an oasis was a stark reminder of the worst costs of war. Millions of bodies either littered the ground or were completely vaporized in the fires of the planet’s self-inflicted holocaust.

It was the people of this planet that launched the Alsakan Crisis in 13,000 BBY, but it was not from the surface. No, they were a religious people, believing in the supreme sanctity of nature and that sentient beings that trampled upon sacred ground did nothing but corrupt it. That was why they built Xenvear, the great orbiting city where all Alsakans lived. Only the Alsakan Vicar and the most holy of the Jintu Priests could set foot on the surface, stepping on the well of the goddess Shalharra. No longer could the Alsakans worship in the old temple of Shalharra, confined to their city-world where the surface of Alsakan was nothing more than a distant memory for their civilization.

For many centuries, the Alsakans were strongly opposed to Coruscant being the central planet of the Old Republic. The idea of conducting the business of the great government on a world so devoid of nature was blasphemy. Several conflicts ensued, but none as devastating as the one that came to be known as the Alsakan Crisis. That was a fitting name, for it was the Alsakans themselves who suffered the devastation after they captured Coruscant. The Republic was barely harmed after they re-took Coruscant, perhaps too little indeed—the Republic grew arrogant after the war and believed that no harm could befall them, something they learned was anything but true when the Hutt Emperor Tusa Ujalli Hai nearly destroyed the Republic a few decades later.

Yet it was the Alsakans who truly suffered for their unnecessary war. In the final battle, over the skies of Alsakan itself, the Republic was poised for victory. Rather than surrender or accept an honorable defeat, the religious zealots in the Alsakan military destabilized the orbital integrity of Xenvear. The city-world crashed into the surface, completely scorching it and leaving it only barely habitable. Almost every Alsakan was killed, with only a few thousand refuges managing to escape. There was perhaps no greater self-inflicted and avoidable catastrophe to ever befall a civilization in galactic history. It took millennia for the Alsakans to recover.

Although Alsakan was the source of the conflict that convinced the Republic it should expand into the Mid Rim, expansion that led to confrontation with the Hutt Empire and a thousand years of the Great Hutt Wars, it belied a darker secret, a secret long forgotten to the galaxy. For while the Hutt Empire came and went, and the Republic recovered and fell, one empire fell almost as quickly as it came and was swept onto the ash heap of history where no one remembered it.

On the surface, a dark figure walked across the landscape, through fire and blood, as it made its way to a mountaintop overlooking the twisted remains of Xenvear. This was the dark emperor who led that long-forgotten empire. This was Banik Kelrada: Jedi Grand Master, Bogan of the Dark Jedi, Emperor of the Bogan Empire, and, in the end, no one who history cared to remember. Yet while his name may have been forgotten, his legacy lived on. He simply stood there, looking at the flaming wreckage, and began speaking to himself, for he knew that, someday, someone would be forced to listen.

“Alsakan. It’s been over twenty-five years since the orbiting city of Xenvear fell onto the surface, twenty-five years since the holocaust that followed... twenty-five years since I was exiled by the Jedi after that Lightell whore branded me a traitor and a murderer, after I tried to bring peace to the Republic and the Alsakan Union.

This planet is where the future began. It was from this planet that a war was launched against the Republic. The Alsakans thought they were so powerful, but they were nothing more than environmentalists with guns. They fell almost as swiftly as they attacked, bungled by their own incompetence. Yet the war left more scars than just the fires that still burn on the surface after all these years.

I tried to make peace, but the Alsakans murdered their own leader and implicated me, the Grand Master of the Jedi, in the assassination. I called the Conclave on Ossus so the Order could decide what to do in the war, but instead Sarina Lightell manipulated me. She entered my mind and caused me to lash out at Jedi Master Edo Tesu, her own husband, and I took his hand. The next morning he was found murdered, with his own sword plunged through his heart while he hanged from the tree in the center of the enclave on Ossus. Lightell led a group of Jedi away from the Order and founded their own, and I was an outcast. That was why, years later, I hunted Lightell down and murdered her.

What I also knew was that her followers had been corrupted into the Dark Jedi of the Bogan, so I sought them out, killed their leader, and took their throne, all the while telling them about my great goals for their glorious new dawn. I cannot begin to describe how little I cared about them or what they wanted. All I wanted was to destroy them, the ones who betrayed me, but I needed them for just a short while more.

As Emperor Banik Kelrada the First, I’ve told the galaxy about my endgame, a threat that I hold over them, but that’s just a ruse. I’ve already had my vengeance against the Jedi. I had it the moment I brought the Dark Jedi to Conscio and made them an empire. The dark side was more powerful in that empire than ever before, so now the Force won’t give up that darkness easily. The Bogan will not be the warriors who bring about millennia of darkness, but we are the forefathers of those who will.

The Bogan Empire may now be crumbling, but the Force has had its first true taste of a dark empire. Balance has forever been shifted, and those who inherit our legacy will return to Alsakan and use it to fulfill their destiny. Darkness will descend upon the galaxy, the Jedi will become the outcasts, and my legacy will live on. The Jedi will face empire after empire, and each time they can remember the name Banik Kelrada.

Enjoy whatever peace you have left, Jedi. The moment you see the warships of our descendants enter the skies of Alsakan, that peace will surely be broken.”

Present Day
Brentaal IV and Anaxes had fallen. The Galactic Alliance was losing the Third Galactic Civil War, and the New Sith Imperium and Mandalorians were making significant gains into the Core Worlds towards their ultimate destination—Coruscant, the seat of power in the Alliance. Before they could reach Coruscant, however, there was another planet that stood in there way, a planet that Banik Kelrada knew the armies of evil would arrive at someday.

Alsakan.

The Mandalorians, along with a Sith warship at its head, dropped out of hyperspace on the edge of the system. At the head of the fleet, alongside Mandalore, was the Dark Lord of the Sith, the leader of the dark warriors for this age. In the end, Banik Kelrada was right. He did shift the balance of the Force in favor of dark empire after dark empire; the Bogan Empire, the Sith Empire, the Brotherhood of Sith, and so many more, culminating in the New Sith Imperium. The descendants of the Bogan had returned, and their ancestors would not be forgotten this time.

The Road to Coruscant Continues....


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Battle of Alsakan Thread Index

• Battle of Alsakan: Boarding Action #1 (space)
• Battle of Alsakan: Boarding Action #2 (space)
• Battle of Alsakan: The Well of Shalharra (ground)
• Battle of Alsakan: New Xenvaer (ground)
• Battle of Alsakan: The Temple of Shalharra (ground)
• Battle of Alsakan: The Ark of Xenvaer (ground)