Captain Ash
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: Because Jerek Zenduu pointed out this art looks like Tilda Swinton
- Image Credit: Character Concept by Jens Claessens
- Permissions: N/A
- Links: Wardens of the Sky, "Dawson's Christian" Bando Gora Reavers, The Scourge, Kathol Rift, Netherworld, Otherspace, Tingel Arm, Echani, Arkanian, Zygerrian
- Canon: N/A
- Media Name: The Legend of the First Warden
- Format: Oral, mostly, a few holodiscs, a handful of ancient scattered books
- Distribution: Rare
- Length: Short
- Description: An ancient legend among spacers, passed down from generation to generation and preserved a few times by scholars of folklore and spacer mythology.
- Author: Unknown
- Publisher: Presumably, the Wardens of the Sky
- Reception: This is the kind of story you only hear long after the final call at the spaceport cantina, when everyone's drunk, but it's a wistful, sacred drunk as the night falls over the city and the bartender is too tired to kick people out, and only if there's a Warden, or someone who claims to have known a Warden. A ghost story for spacers, half-sacred.
A few versions have been written down by scholars of the more obscure fields of folklore and legends, but these are all ancient and contradictory. Nobody knows the true story if there is such a thing. Most time, it's told orally by someone who has had a few too many drinks, always embellished, and always different, except for a few key points.
CONTENT INFORMATION
I was out in the Rift, beyond Kathol, hauling cargo and passengers to some small colony, when I had a fuel leak. Not a big deal, usually, unless you're way out in the black. Powered everything down except emergency power to get it patched up. It's why I didn't see them until they were near in boarding range. The fething Scourge. I thought they were legends, mind you. But no, ramshackle, half-broken ships with no reactor containment at all, and hulls carved with Force-only-knows-what sort of gibberish. No time to power up the shields or weapons. I ushered my passengers into the bridge, sealed the door, and prepared to sell my life dearly. I didn't want to get ate by void-mad cannibals, but I heard they turned prisoners into Scourges themselves somehow, and that was a worse fate.
They'd docked at the clamp and were cutting through the hatch, right? And there I was with an old blaster pistol and a knife. I left the scattergun in the bridge with the others. The door burst open and I started firing till I melted the pistol's barrel and they still kept coming, not even noticing the blaster burns on them.
But then I saw her- the Ancient Warden. The First Warden, whoever she be. I thought it was a derelict, at first, lost in the Rift. A ship, pale and of a style I can't recognize, and I know every manufacruter's design to ever sail the Rim. No energy signals, no lights, and I could see the stars through a number of holes blown through the hull. But then the laser cannons opened up and shredded through the Scourge vessels hanging around. And then the ship vanished, and a pale ghostly woman came through the hatch. She carried no guns, no blades. Just a silent, relentless whirl of fists and feet. Maybe she was Echani. Or maybe Arkanian, I don't know, but I'm certain she was the First Warden, the Ancient One of the Black, bleached by thousands of years of hyperspace and supernova radiation. She cut through the Scourge like a lightsaber through battledroids, and my blaster couldn't even stop them. It felt like an eternity, but must have been just seconds, the Scourge were down, and the hatch venting them out into space. I caught a last glimpse of a ghostly face raising a bottle in salute before she too, and her ship, vanished into hyperspace, or Otherspace, or Netherspace, or something. But I've heard other people with similar experiences. Sometimes, doesn't matter where in the galaxy, when somebody decides to sell their life dearly to protect others, they get a stroke of good fortune, and this ghostly Warden appears to save them before disappearing again.
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Eons ago, there was a great Hyperspace War that raged across the stars between the earliest Republic and the earliest Sith Empire. Jedi and Sith fought and died and old institutions crumbled, but out of the chaos arose a legend amongst the spacers trying to make their living- the Wardens of the Sky. Not the mad conquerors of the Sith or the remote warrior monks of the Jedi, but spacers, just like them, capable of the same magic of the Force, living amongst them, serving as their protectors. Nobody knew who they were or who started the order, but over time, legends began to trickle from cantina to cantina. A convoy of refugees trapped between a supernova and a Sith raiding fleet and a light freighter dropping out of hyperspeed and launching a suicidal attack run against the warships, hitting them faster and harder than any of the witnesses could see, with only a single message to the convoy, Run.
They did, but not before seeing the freighter shatter three Sith warships and have its hull shredded in return before they all vanished into the spreading burn of the supernova. They thought that was the last of the heroic spacer, but soon other stories appeared, across time and space, covering centuries until the legend was a close-guarded story amongst the spacers. Bando gora reavers. The Scourge. Imperials. Zygerrian slavers. The stories morphed and changed over time, until recent times, it seems like the Ancient Warden is the busiest Warden in the galaxy, bouncing around from the Kathol Rift to the Tingel Arm on what must be a daily basis. Some use that as evidence of the legend's fictitiousness, but others point out a spacer never stays in one spot for long.
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