Private Ashwake’s Wake And The Space Between

[Emberlyn Rekali]

Exegol
900 ABY
Twin Suns Leader, 170th Special Operations Wing, Galactic Alliance Defense Forces

Three against one. No backup. No escape. Just instinct, wreckage… and the will to survive.​

The stars are chaos—fractured light and fire, streaking through the void as Emberlyn twists her fighter through the thick of it. The hiss of comm static crackles around her, warnings drowned by the scream of overtaxed engines. Twin Suns is scattered. Ashwake is burning. And Emberlyn is flying on instinct.

"Fox Three. Hard turn. Break now—"

One interceptor buckles beneath a clean vector shot—vaporizing mid-roll as she cuts under its debris trail. The other two are smarter. Tighter. They ride her wake like bloodhounds, forcing her into maneuvers that claw at the edge of G-limit tolerance. She grits her teeth, slams the stick into a wild spiral, and lets the fighter drift—nose swinging wide, hull groaning under lateral thrust as she slings herself against the airframe.

System alerts scream. Overheat. Power instability. Structural stress nearing breach.

She silences them all.

The second target clips her wing with a near-miss—Emberlyn flips inverted, throws throttle reverse and burns lateral jets in one suicidal swoop. The angle is impossible. The kill is clean.

Two down.

That leaves the third.

It hits her clean—twice—before she can recover heading. Port shielding collapses. Her starboard wing rattles under concussive feedback. She flies anyway. Cuts speed, lets the enemy overshoot, and slams the fighter into a knife-edged barrel roll, loosing a burst that tears through the third ship's rear engine.

The kill is sloppy. Desperate. But it's hers.

She wins.

And then everything falls apart.

The left engine howls—a shriek of metal fatigue. A systems cascade rips through her HUD. Her stabilizers fail. Her ship doesn't spin—it lurches, violently, into a drift. Emberlyn punches at manual overrides. Nothing answers. Smoke floods the cockpit. The vent system kicks in too late. Flames licking at wire bundles, oxygen warnings flashing crimson.

She's still fighting. Still flying.

But she's already lost control.

A broken wing of the Ashwake slams into her from the void—silent, massive, forgotten. The impact shears her upper engine, hurling her ship into a spin. The canopy bucks. Her head whips sideways. Glass cracks. Blood smears.

And then—nothing.

The last thing she hears is the thrum of failing power, alarms fading like distant bells, and the cold crawl of darkness at the edge of her vision.

Her fighter drifts. No beacon. No signal. Just wreckage… and a body lost in the dark.

 

[Emberlyn Rekali]

EXEGOL
902 ABY

THE TIME THAT FORGOT HER
Somewhere beyond the wreckage, beyond the war, she drifted… and the galaxy moved on.​

Time doesn't pass out here. It bleeds.

Seconds stretch. Minutes fracture. Hours become something looser—slower—like oil drifting over glass. Emberlyn doesn't dream. She doesn't float in some peaceful, suspended state. She's just gone. Eyes closed. Mind fractured. Held in place by the dead grip of crash-stasis and the stubborn hum of half-functioning systems.

The fighter didn't die. Not fully. Not fast enough.

The left engine was gone. Life support? Failing by the second, then revived by flickering backups—a cruel rhythm of near-death and artificial breath. The cockpit cycled between cold and blistering heat, between silence and the distant screech of alarms that couldn't make it past fractured audio lines. Her pulse slowed. Stabilized. Slowed again.

Then settled.

A stasis field, weak and half-glitched, had activated just before full blackout. It wasn't meant to last. It wasn't designed to preserve a pilot for weeks—let alone months. But something in the fighter's cracked architecture held. Maybe the shield modulator looped wrong. Maybe her Force presence bled into the system and made it believe she was still in the fight.

Maybe the ship just refused to let her go.

Drifting in the dark between dead wreckage and Exegol's gravity shadow, Emberlyn Rekali became part of the debris. A faint heat signature. A winking power cell. An unconscious pilot tucked inside a wounded predator of a ship, blood dried to her cheek, body wrapped in belts and carbon-scored plating.

No rescue came.

No beacon sounded.

But she lived.

Her heart beat in silence. Her breath fogged the cracked interior once every few minutes. The Force didn't move through her so much as it circled—like a current caught on shattered rock.

And time?

It forgot her.

The stars shifted. The war moved on. Names were remembered. Others were lost.

And Emberlyn Rekali just kept drifting—half-dead, half-alive, all fury waiting to be reignited by the smallest spark.

Kem Starfall

 

[Kem Starfall]

"Can't believe we're here Londor." A young man nervously fiddled with his blaster pistol standing alongside the captain. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

The Duros stood behind the pilots gazing at the derelict ship aimlessly floating in the sea of rocks and portals. The cockpit smaller than what the freighter size suggest all of a sudden felt larger. A small smile spread across his blue thin lips. "We've been navigating through this space graveyard for 2 weeks now Amis." Landor said. "And we found nothing, but old starships already plundered by spacers. This place was supposed be a smorgasbord of exotic items like Jedi and Sith Lightsabers! Force artifacts that can drive a person mad. But our crew has come up empty!"

Landor took a large risk placing his crew of the Guardian into the ruins of Exegol. He had no choice, his scavenging business is on the verge of bankruptcy. His family along with all the other families of the crew are depending on this incursion. If this fails, then not only Landor's business which he held for 30 years would go bankrupt, but their families would starve. "This is the first anomaly that we found," Landor said. "It has to count for something! Get the tractor beam ready!"

The pilots aimed their tractor beam towards the floating starfighter. Landor took a deep breath as much as he wanted to cash out, he needed to consult the "expert" first. The said expert had been busy getting drunk and flirting with all the female crew during Guardians journey. "Get Kem in the hangar now." Landor commanded. "We'll need to see what he thinks."

Emberlyn Rekali

 

[Emberlyn Rekali]

There was no time.

There was no sky.

There was only the hum.

Deep and low, not mechanical but biological—an echo behind her eyes, or maybe within them. It pulsed sometimes. A ripple through stillness. And then nothing.

Her body didn't move. Not even in breath.

Encased.

Preserved.

Not dead.

The crash-stasis field had done its job—barely. What had once been a sleek XJ-83 starfighter was now a scorched husk, its hull warped from the pressure of debris fields and failing seals. A stabilizer fin had sheared off months ago—maybe YEARS. The canopy was fractured but unbreached. The emergency beacon, dead. But inside…

She remained.

Wrapped in a coiled harness. Limbs suspended. Muscles long past cramping into numbness. A slow exhale, preserved across hundreds of hours. No awareness. Just drifting.

Until…

The hum changed.

The cockpit shook. A low, drawn-out vibration through the bulkhead. Somewhere in the blackness, something had touched the ship. A tug—not violent, but felt through the stasis cradle like a ripple through ice.

Tractor beam.

Faint proximity alarms stuttered back to life on backup power, blinking amber and dim. Life support had long since dropped to minimal retention mode—only enough to keep her breathing once every twenty seconds.

Her eyes twitched.

Just once.

It wasn't waking, not yet. It was memory—like pressure building behind glass. A flicker of heat in her spine, then gone. A jolt as the ship lurched again—this time pulled toward something stable. Real.

Light touched the canopy. Not stars—hangar lights.

The force of gravity settled into her blood. Artificial, but present.

For the first time in a long time, something inside Emberlyn Rekali moved.

Not her body.

Just a thought.

A word.

Unspoken. Unformed.

But alive.

And the drift—finally—began to end.

Kem Starfall