The Kinrath at the Centre

Posted on Wed Sep 9th, 2026 @ 5:32pm by Darth Serus

2,287 words; about a 11 minute read

Chapter: Chapter IX: The First Verse
Location: CEC Industrial Complex, Coronet, Corellia
Timeline: Day Nineteen

The crowds had been growing since dawn, and from the highest floors of the Corellian Engineering Corporation complex they possessed a peculiar sort of beauty. Distance improved most things. From here, the individual banners could scarcely be read and faces disappeared entirely, reducing thousands of agitated citizens to colour, movement and competing currents of anger flowing between the towers, transport platforms and broad industrial arteries of Coronet. The glass removed the noise, leaving only the spectacle of raised fists, shifting security cordons and rival masses pressing gradually towards one another across plazas designed by architects who had plainly never imagined that citizens might one day use them to express hatred.

Nothing disturbed the executive suite. Its climate remained precise, the air carrying only the faint scents of polished timber, expensive fabric and the fragrance Orwole Sal-Varrin had applied to his throat that morning. Somewhere behind him, water moved almost silently through a narrow architectural feature set into one wall, whilst the dark material of his suit lay perfectly across his shoulders without so much as a crease to trouble it. Below, Corellia appeared increasingly inclined to tear at itself, and Orwole watched with the mild fascination of a man observing an experiment whose conclusion he had anticipated long before anyone else accepted that it had begun.

Nations were remarkably delicate things, he mused. People spoke of them as though they were mountains, invoking Republics, Alliances, constitutions, traditions and ancient institutions with the solemnity normally reserved for natural laws. In reality, most were little more than frightened populations agreeing that the same abstractions mattered. Increase the cost of living, kill the correct official, publish the correct document, humiliate the correct government, or allow fear to circulate a little faster than reassurance, and structures that had appeared permanent for generations became suddenly negotiable.

The Bastion Document revelations had frightened them, but the Cracking of Bothawui had frightened them more. Now, Coalition and Centrality supporters - and even a few claiming some love of the Outer Rim Alliance - gathered beneath his windows to scream at one another over which faction might best preserve a political order already decomposing around them, each side apparently convinced that history would submit to sufficient volume. Orwole found that almost charming.

He turned away from the window and crossed the generous space of his office, passing furnishings selected with the sort of care lesser men mistook for vanity. There was no vulgar display of wealth here because only people uncertain of possessing it felt any need to advertise. The materials were exceptional, the art authentic and the arrangement deliberate. Even the view itself had influenced his acquisition of the suite many years earlier, when others had called the appointment ambitious and some had called it premature. None did now, of course.

A series of reports waited upon the surface of his desk, and the first of them irritated him before he had finished reading the opening paragraph. Another forty-three personnel had arrived overnight. Not employees, mind. 'Personnel'. The distinction had become increasingly necessary as losses elsewhere forced survivors, equipment, records and artefacts into his Corellian operation.

The destruction of so many peripheral facilities and 'enclaves' had created a problem of accumulation. Sentients who had previously performed useful functions in obscure installations across the Republic and wider galaxy were now being directed towards Corellia with very little regard for whether they possessed the social qualities required to exist comfortably inside one of the galaxy's most prestigious industrial institutions. Many wore coarse fabrics and some carried scars with pride. Others had even mutilated themselves according to enthusiastic interpretations of Axion's teachings, which Orwole regarded as spiritually sincere and aesthetically unfortunate. A group from one of the lost enclaves had attempted to conduct evening observances in a maintenance concourse two nights earlier and had lit incense inside a CEC ventilation system. Orwole had personally ordered the practice stopped. Faith required discipline. One could worship without making an industrial complex smell like the dwelling of a provincial mystic.

His finger moved across the report as he considered the available accommodation. Additional areas of the lower service complex had already been cleared. The displaced adherents would be issued temporary corporate clothing where necessary and provided with credentials appropriate to whatever fiction placed them inside the building. Those capable of passing as engineers would become engineers, and those capable of passing as security personnel would join the contracted forces. Those incapable of passing as anything respectable would remain below, where their usefulness might continue without offending the appearance of the organisation that now sheltered them.

There was no cruelty in that. A machine worked because each component occupied the position to which it was best suited, and Orwole had long ago concluded that civilisation operated according to much the same principle - as did faith.

The inconvenience nevertheless contained opportunity, and that was what lesser men rarely understood about disruption. They experienced crisis and saw only damage, whereas Orwole saw redistribution. Destroyed enclaves meant surviving resources required somewhere to go. Lost commanders meant authority required somebody else to exercise it and broken financial chains required new custodians, whilst networks abandoned by dead men did not simply disappear immediately. Tolmin Voq, the mad Devaronian of the Cult he has frequently worked with had demonstrated that point particularly well, although not intentionally.

The thought brought a warmer expression to Orwole's face. Voq had accumulated a collection of contacts within GalactaWerks that far exceeded his ability to exploit them properly. He had possessed routes, favours, acquaintances and access, but lacked the patience and imagination required to turn relationships into systems, so much more fixated was he on conflict and his own sense of humour. Then Bomoor Thort had killed him. There had been mourning in certain quarters, and Orwole had sent the expected words, but privately he had begun making calls before the consequences of Voq's death were fully understood by anyone else with even a shred of his own awareness within the Cult.

It had been one of the more profitable deaths of recent years, ultimately. Contacts became agreements, agreements became freight, freight became access and access became leverage. The people of GalactaWerks were particularly interesting because so many imagined themselves difficult to manipulate. Their corporation had cultivated an aura of inevitability, as though immense size somehow granted immunity from ordinary weakness, but corporations remained collections of ambitious beings no matter how many worlds appeared upon their balance sheets. In some respects, Orwole preferred them to governments. Corporations were simply nations honest enough to admit that everything had a price.

He understood CEC better still. A movement of his fingers summoned a transparent schematic above the desk, unfolding the industrial complex layer by layer. Ship construction, commercial freight, executive administration, private security, storage and fabrication appeared first, followed by those systems that never troubled public plans. The sight pleased him because it demonstrated a principle he had understood instinctively for years. One did not hide a great operation by constructing a secret fortress beneath a mountain. That was the instinct of romantics and men who wanted eventually to be found. One hid it inside normality.

An authorised cargo container required no secret tunnel. A payment routed through legitimate subsidiaries required no masked courier, and a vessel constructed under a genuine procurement code did not need to evade inspection when the inspection itself belonged to you. The Republic possessed endless procedures intended to prevent conspiracy because the Republic remained convinced that procedures existed independently from the people administering them. Orwole had always found that belief wonderfully useful.

The Cult's strength had never rested solely upon temples, blades or revelation, whatever some of its more theatrical adherents preferred to imagine - or even the Dark Master himself, but such was his divine right. Those were simply the portions lesser minds understood because they were visible. Axion's will could travel just as efficiently through accounts, contracts, manifests, insurance, maintenance schedules, docking priorities and corporate permissions. Orwole's particular talent lay in ensuring that the divine purpose moved through the mundane world without the mundane world recognising what it carried.

His gaze travelled through the schematic and settled upon the growing number of markers denoting newly occupied sections. The losses were undeniable, and Orwole possessed too much respect for reality to pretend otherwise. Operations that had endured for years, decades even, had disappeared within months. Individuals whose names had once appeared reliably within internal communications now survived only within casualty summaries or missing-person annexe - his small effort to catalogue and understand the wider Cult himself, in a way that would be innocuous to most others. The crew of the Red Raptor had become particularly troublesome, whilst these so-called Jedi Templars, in their own cruder fashion, had managed to inflict damage of their own.

The structure had bent. Portions of it had broken. Yet, the surviving equipment, knowledge, personnel, artefacts and money were coming here. Every blow delivered elsewhere made Corellia more important, and every destroyed enclave placed another strand within his hands. The web contracted whilst the kinrath at its centre acquired greater reach.

Orwole dismissed the schematic and allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. There were adherents who would have regarded such thoughts as prideful, but they misunderstood pride because they had never possessed sufficient reason for it in themselves. Pride without achievement was vulgarity, but justified by superiority was merely accuracy.

He had been given beauty, intelligence, wealth, a good family name and opportunity, and had possessed enough discipline to improve upon all five. The Force had come later, or perhaps his understanding of it had, though he regarded the distinction as largely academic. He had always known that some men were born to move within the world whilst others were capable of moving the world itself. Axion had merely provided the theology capable of explaining why.

Beyond the glass, one of the demonstrations surged suddenly against a security barrier. Bodies compressed together, banners lurched above the crowd and a line of officers shifted to compensate. Orwole imagined the panic that must have existed somewhere inside that mass: someone losing their footing, another struggling for breath, the primitive discovery that a person surrounded by ten thousand ideological comrades could still die because nobody nearby possessed enough room to move aside.

Human beings and similar species adored crowds until crowds reminded them that they were animals.

Axion would end all of that - although not in the petty manner imagined by politicians discussing public order. Coalition, Centrality, companies, alliances, and all the other temporary arrangements of the galaxy would eventually become curious footnotes within histories that would themselves cease to matter and lose chronological cohesion. Axion-who-would-be-God would correct the defect beneath them: the sequence of accident, weakness, decay and replacement which lesser minds mistook for natural order. Apotheosis would not merely place Axion above the galaxy. It would restore history its purpose by fixing both what had been and what would come after, correcting all of existence to its right shape beneath and within the Dark Master.

Orwole believed that completely. His wealth did not compete with that faith, nor did his ambition contradict it. His enjoyment of fine clothing, beautiful rooms, social admiration and the envy of lesser men represented no spiritual weakness. Axion did not require beggars, and God had little use for failure.

A soft tone sounded from the desk and drew his attention away from the city. He accepted the communication without moving from where he stood.

"Security has requested authorisation to close the western employee entrance, sir," a woman's voice informed him. "The demonstrations have moved inside the outer exclusion boundary. Approximately three hundred shift personnel are still approaching from that direction."

Orwole considered the western approach through the glass, where a thread of workers had become entangled with the edge of a Centrality gathering. "Redirect them through Freight Seven."

There was a brief hesitation before the reply came. "Freight Seven is currently receiving the displaced consignment from the Sarapin group."

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Of course it was.

"Move the Sarapin personnel downstairs and reopen the route."

"To which level, sir?"

"Any level from which they cannot be seen by the employees."

Another pause followed, shorter this time. "Understood."

The connection ended and Orwole adjusted one cuff with quiet precision. This was what revelation looked like when translated into reality. Not chanting, visions or primitive displays of devotion, but administration. Someone had to ensure that the once-and-future God of history possessed sufficient fuel, weapons, ships, money and discretion to reach apotheosis in the first place, and Orwole had never considered such responsibilities beneath him.

He returned to the window and regarded Coronet once more. Somewhere among the crowds, journalists would be discussing the possibility of war. Politicians would be issuing statements, markets adjusting, security commanders shortening leave and families considering whether it might be prudent to leave the city, or even the planet. All of them were responding to history as though history were something as mundane as weather, as something that descended upon ordinary people without intention.

His reflection hovered faintly within the glass: dark hair perfectly arranged, sideburns exact, suit immaculate, the handsome and familiar face Corellia knew from industrial launches, charitable dinners, private receptions and financial publications. It was a face invited into rooms from which most beings would be turned away before reaching the lift, and Orwole regarded it with the distant satisfaction of a man examining another well-maintained asset.

Behind the reflection, Coronet simmered beneath the pressure of approaching war. For the moment, the city still believed men such as Orwole existed to preserve order.

In a sense, they were correct.

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