Editing Draelor Nah`utal (section)

=== Imperial High Command — A Seat Well Earned ===
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| colspan="2" width="100%" style="background-color: #4a0e0e; color: #f0d8d8;" |Draelor delivers Ubrikkian into Imperial hands, [[Year 21]]
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By the close of [[Year 19]], Draelor Nah`utal had spent the better part of a decade proving himself useful to the machinery of Empire — first as a soldier, then as an intelligence officer, then as an administrator who understood that real power in the Imperial system was rarely won on a battlefield. It was won in the rooms where the battlefield's needs were funded, staffed, and made possible. Then-Grand Vizier [[Jai Meridan]] recognized as much when he named Draelor [[Minister of the Interior]] late that year, an appointment that carried with it a seat on the [[Select Committee]] of the [[Commission for the Preservation of the New Order]] — the pinnacle of [[COMPNOR]]'s civilian government, and no small company to be counted among. Draelor walked into it a Kiffar from the southern hemisphere of a world most of his colleagues could not have located on a star chart, and within it he did not merely hold his seat — he made himself indispensable.

His signature achievement was, on its surface, unglamorous. As [[Imperial Treasurer]], Draelor took the Empire's monthly financial reporting process — sprawling, redundant, choked by the accumulated habits of a hundred different offices — and streamlined it into something that functioned. No campaigns were won by it, no headlines followed it, but the credits moved where they needed to move, and the officers who depended on that machinery working noticed. It would prove, in time, the longest shadow he cast over the Interior.

Recognition came early in [[Year 21]]. Then-Emperor [[Seele]] conferred upon him the [[Order of the Imperial Seal]], citing resolute fidelity and sacrifice over the course of an exceptional career — language rarely spent lightly, and rarer still for a man not yet forty standard years old. Draelor accepted it with the same composed economy he brought to everything else, and within days he was gone from Coruscant on an assignment few in the Select Committee were permitted to know existed.

[[Imperial Intelligence]] had spent years cultivating a sleeper agent inside the highest levels of the [[New Republic]]'s government — a patient, quiet asset finally ready to bear fruit. [[OPERATION CORE]] called for a coordinated hostile seizure that reached into the New Republic's government itself and swept up its subsidiary factions in the same stroke. Draelor's part in that larger operation was the takeover of [[Ubrikkian Industries]], one piece of a much wider collapse — and for one hundred days he was not a Minister of the Empire but the President of a captured Republic manufacturing concern, wearing a name and a title that belonged to someone unsuspecting hours prior. When the operation concluded and the seizure held, he stepped back into his Imperial uniform and returned to the Ministry of the Interior as though he had never left it — though the [[Operational Success Award]] that followed made clear that no one who mattered had forgotten where he had actually been, or how much larger the operation was than his own part in it.

The Treasury work continued in the background of all of it, patient and unglamorous, and early in [[Year 22]] then-Grand Vizier Jai Meridan formally recognized it with the [[COMPNOR Medal of Progress]] — the same efficiencies, still paying dividends, now bearing his name in the official record.

It was, by any reasonable measure, the record of a man positioned for the Empire's very highest offices. In the middle of Year 22, Draelor tested that position directly, putting himself forward for consideration as both [[Grand Moff]] and [[Grand Vizier]]. Neither seat was offered to him. There was no scandal in it, no falling-out recorded anywhere in the archive — only the quiet arithmetic of an Empire with more capable men than chairs to seat them in. On Year 22, Day 121, Draelor Nah`utal resigned his commission and stepped down from every office he held.

He did not leave angry, and he did not leave the Empire behind him. Whatever came next — and something would, eventually, come next — he never stopped calling it home.