Solo // Kylo Ren

.one.

I heard them coming.

The stormtroopers.
The faceless.
The harbingers of death.

Three of the First Order Transporters landed on the nameless planet in rapid succession, their disembarkation ramps lowering to reveal two squads of stormtroopers, while a fourth vessel — dark and winged, like a bat out of hell — gradually made its way to the surface of the planet we'd recently called home.

We were refugees. Victims of the war between the First Order and the Resistance, we'd lost our homes, our lives, our very souls in the madness, and — like watching shadows in the dark — we had no idea that the hope to which we desperately clung had already abandoned us to our fates.

The sound of blaster fire hit my ears, and I ducked as an explosion rattled the frame of the ramshackle house where I'd lived for the past few weeks. My home on Hosnian Prime was destroyed by an attack on the First Order, and I'd watched as the light of my homeland burned brightly in the sky.

I was away on Corellia visiting my uncle and his family when it happened. Myself and some three billion inhabitants of the planet looked to the sky as it turned crimson in the light of the weapon streaking through the galaxy until it erupted. In an instant, my world was turned to ash. My parents gone. My sister as well. My friends, my future, my past.

All destroyed.

In the aftermath, I found myself staring at the spot in the Corellian sky where Hosnian Prime previously occupied. Both planets on the Corellian Trade Spine, travel between the neighboring systems was frequent and flourishing. Luxury items were imported from Hosnian Prime where alcohol, starships, and agricultural items were sent back from Corellia, allowing both planets to prosper in their proximity.

The Hosnian Cataclysm, as they were calling it, changed all of that.

Word of the First Order's growing might spread throughout the galaxy as terror replaced the tentative peace that had formed under the New Republic. Many turned to the Resistance, uncertain under the looming threat of imminent destruction, while others reverted to that with which they were most comfortable. Corellia had long been inhabited by pirates and smugglers, and it was with these that I found myself now.

Frightened after the destruction of Hosnian Prime, my uncle herded his burgeoning family onto a CR90 corvette bound for an unknown planet in the southwest reaches of the Outer Rim. Along with some six hundred passengers, we purchased passage on the Numa and prayed to escape the reaches of the First Order before it was too late.

Some on the ship were members of the Rebellion seeking safe passage to Mon Gazza, a planet in the Mid Rim, from which point they could travel back to their base. Others were diplomats who survived the Hosnian Cataclysm, much like myself, by being off-world and sought to protect themselves from further destruction. Many, like my uncle, were simply afraid.

The galaxy had seen enough war, enough bloodshed, he would tell me at night, almost every night. Mark my words, the attack on Hosnian Prime was only the beginning.

He simply wanted the opportunity to raise his children in a semblance of peace, and he would not risk getting entangled in another costly conflict. We had no way of knowing all of our efforts would be for nothing.

"Stand down," a mechanical voice ripped through the air, amplified unnaturally through the white helmet masking its owner. "We're searching for Rebel spies, and those who hinder our investigation will be brought up on charges of conspiracy against the First Order and executed."

I could hear my uncle whispering to his wife and two daughters, no doubt urging them to remain quiet and calm despite the chaos erupting around us. He'd shoved me under a table in the back of the small building, shrouded in darkness, and I could feel my spine press against the ridges of the corrugated metal.