Editing Draelor Nah`utal (section)

== Imperial Service — Structure Regained ==

=== Empress Teta — A Reason to Return ===
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| colspan="2" width="100%" style="background-color: #4a0e0e; color: #f0d8d8;" |Draelor hears a quiet word from an old friend, [[Year 26]]
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For nearly three years, [[Darth Chaakat]] answered to no one but [[Elaine von Veritrax]] and the quiet arithmetic of whatever mission sat in front of him. But the [[Saarai Enclave]] had never stopped being his, not truly, and its head — [[Darin Byrch]], known within the Order as [[Darth Emersus]] — had watched from a distance as one of his own drifted further from the structure that gave the Order its shape. Emersus said nothing of it for a long while. Men who did Chaakat's kind of work were not easily summoned back by a superior's impatience, and Emersus understood that better than most.

The conversation, when it finally came, wasn't staged as an intervention. Draelor had returned briefly to [[Empress Teta]] — one stop among many in a life spent moving between systems that rarely appeared on the same itinerary twice — and Emersus found him there, unhurried, in no apparent rush to raise the subject at all. What passed between them was not a command. It was closer to an old friend taking stock of another, and finding the answer wanting. Emersus spoke plainly about the state of the Empire — the gaps left by capable men who'd chosen to work in shadow rather than in structure, the cost of talent spent invisibly instead of institutionally. He did not ask Draelor to abandon the work he'd been doing. He asked him to consider what more he could do with a title attached to his name again.

Draelor did not answer him that day. It wasn't the kind of question that deserved a quick response, and he had spent enough years now weighing consequence before action to know better than to give Emersus one. He carried the conversation with him for months afterward, turning it over the way he'd once turned over Yoav Isaija's descriptions of Imperial warships, or the sight of the Black Forest Massacre's aftermath — not urgent, but persistent, the kind of thought that eventually settles a matter simply by refusing to leave.

Late in [[Year 25]], on Day 337, it settled. Draelor Nah`utal returned to active service in the [[Imperial Military]], assigned as a [[Line Officer]] to the [[Amber Taskforce]] — a modest posting, by the standard of what he'd once held, and by the standard of what Emersus surely knew he was capable of. He did not seem to mind the modesty of it. Whatever he had spent three years doing under Von Veritrax's direction, off the books and unremarked upon, he stepped back into structured service without complaint, willing to rebuild a record from wherever the Empire chose to place him.

He did not stay a Line Officer for long. On [[Year 26]], Day 54, Draelor Nah`utal was appointed [[Grand Moff]] of the [[Emerald Region]] — a title he has held ever since, and the first true command of his second career within the Empire's formal ranks. Whether Emersus ever learned just how quickly his quiet conversation on Empress Teta had borne fruit, the record does not say. But the timing left little room for coincidence, and fewer people who knew Draelor well would have called it one.