Editing Draelor Nah`utal (section)

== The Southland Heir — A Road to the Stars ==

=== Kiffex — Before the Stars ===
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| colspan="2" width="100%" style="background-color: #4a0e0e; color: #f0d8d8;" |Draelor's questions unanswered, [[Year 0]]
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Draelor Nah`utal was born in the ancestral city of [[Clan Nah`utal]] on their homeworld of [[Kiffex]], arriving during the First of the Year — a holiday sacred to [[Kochik]], head of the [[Kiffar]] deities, and one that carried added weight that season for a ruling family expecting its first son and heir. To matriarch [[Aethia Nah`utal]] and patriarch [[Decessus Nah`utal]], his birth felt like an omen before he had drawn his first full breath. The hunting and harvesting season that followed was among the most bountiful the clan's elders could recall, and for years afterward, some would speak of the boy and the blessing in the same sentence. Draelor himself never put much stock in that. Whatever he became, he would credit to the two people who raised him — not to Kochik, and not to the stars that happened to align the night he was born.

There was no cushioning in how they raised him. Clan Nah`utal did not coddle its heirs, and Draelor grew up doing the same work expected of every Kiffar child — chopping wood alongside other boys, hauling stone for the clan's builders, working alongside farmers, or standing at his mother's side in the kitchen when the day's other labor was done. It was an upbringing built on calluses more than ceremony, and it shaped him accordingly: independent enough to survive alone if it ever came to that, but equally at ease leading a group or falling into step behind someone else's lead. By the time he was old enough for either title to matter, he had learned both.

He was twelve when the household changed around him. Decessus and Aethia had a second child — a daughter, [[Anabelle Nah`utal|Anabelle]] — and Draelor took to the role of older brother almost instantly, then more fiercely as the years went on. As Anabelle grew from a child into a striking young woman, his affection sharpened into something closer to vigilance; more than once, he found himself quietly cataloguing anyone who looked at his sister too long, asking questions of his own when the answers didn't come easily. Anabelle, for her part, had been raised with the same independence he had — which meant his protectiveness rarely had cause to become anything more than watchful.

By thirteen, his attention had turned from his sister to the past. He spent whole afternoons at the feet of the Nah`utal historians, pulling at the threads of Clan history, the rival clans of the Southland, the half-mythical grievances of the North, and the deeper story of the Kiffar people as a whole. For a time, the historians had answers for everything he asked. That didn't last. As he grew older, his questions grew with him — reaching further than his teachers' knowledge could follow, past the borders of Kiffex and out toward something none of them had ever seen firsthand. The historians ran out of answers long before Draelor ran out of questions, and it was in that widening gap that his eyes first turned upward, toward a galaxy no one in [[Basa Oihanak Gortoleku]] could describe to him.

=== Yoav Isaija — One Face in a Crowd of Billions ===
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| colspan="2" width="100%" style="background-color: #4a0e0e; color: #f0d8d8;" |Draelor's first sight of the Galactic Empire's might, [[Year 5]]
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Draelor's father brought a stranger into their home on the eve of his eighteenth birthday — a man from one of the Nah`utal's ourvir clans, further south than any Draelor had known. [[Yoav Isaija]] of [[Clan Immell]] was well past his prime by any conventional measure: silver-grey hair combed loosely back, a beard the same shade left to grow scruffy beneath sharp cheekbones. It was his eyes that stayed with Draelor longest — grey, and grown greyer still, eyes that Draelor would later describe as having "seemed to burn holes right through my face." The three of them talked long into the night, Decessus watching his son's face as much as he listened to Yoav's answers.

Decessus explained what he already suspected his son had guessed — that Yoav Isaija was among the most well-traveled Kiffar he had ever known, a man who'd once burned with the same restlessness Draelor now carried. The southern clans had always looked outward more easily than their northern kin, and Yoav had answers for questions the Nah`utal historians had long since exhausted. By the night's end, an offer sat on the table: a furlough, three years, under Yoav's guidance, to see the galaxy Draelor had only ever heard described secondhand. Draelor took it before the sun rose.

Three years passed before he set foot in Basa Oihanak Gortoleku again — arriving just as the [[Feast of Hastere]] began, the clan's yearly tribute to the goddess of hunt and harvest. It could not have been better timed. The [[Sheyf]]'s son had returned, and the feast that year burned brighter for it, filled deep into the night with Draelor's own stories — towering cityscapes, endless plains, forests without end, rivers that circled an entire world. [[Alderaan]], in his telling, sounded like something out of legend.

He'd seen it for himself only months before, the last stop on Yoav's long tour once Kiffex itself had nothing left to teach him. Yoav had chosen Alderaan deliberately — a mirror held up to everything Draelor knew. Both worlds wore their beauty like a birthright; both were built on lines of ancestry that ran centuries deep, houses and clans alike. But where the Kiffar answered every dispute with steel and blood, the Alderaanians answered with words, treaties, patience. Standing among Yoav's well-bred Alderaanian friends, Draelor found himself turning the comparison over for weeks afterward, unable to set it down.

For a year he tried to let that comparison rest. He returned to the rhythms of the Southland — clan duties, old traditions, the quiet expectation that he would one day be Sheyf. But his mind kept drifting past the horizon he'd already crossed once, and by the following fall he knew the year had only postponed the inevitable. He told his parents. Decessus and Aethia had feared this moment since the day he was born beneath Kochik's blessing, and they did not pretend otherwise — but they had also always known a permanent life on Kiffex was not yet his to live. Prayers went up to Kochik and [[Iotcha]] in his name. Within a fortnight, Draelor was gone from [[Deadend]], a transport carrying him toward the [[Coruscant]] system.

The three-day passage felt almost familiar — the same length as the run to Alderaan, the same rhythm of stars blurring past a viewport.  Yoav had described Imperial warships to him once, on that earlier voyage: the Victory-class Star Destroyer, and above it in scale, the Imperial I-class — the largest warship Yoav claimed to have ever laid eyes on himself, though even he'd only seen one from a passing freighter's viewport. Draelor had never seen one at all.

Nothing Yoav said had prepared him for the reality. The transport dropped out of hyperspace into the shadow of an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer, flanked by a screen of smaller Imperial and [[Victory-class Star Destroyer|Victory]]-class warships and vessels Draelor couldn't begin to name. Their own transport, and every other civilian ship threading past that armada, looked suddenly, absurdly small — inconsequential against the raw power orbiting the perceived center of the galaxy. Hours later, the ship touched down in [[CoCo Town]]'s industrial sprawl. Draelor walked down the ramp and out into the crowd, and for the first time in his life, no one around him knew his name, his clan, or the weight either was meant to carry. He was, simply, one face among billions.

=== Coruscant — A Reason to Serve ===
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| colspan="2" width="100%" style="background-color: #4a0e0e; color: #f0d8d8;" |Draelor learns what the Empire is capable of, [[Year 6]]
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By the second half of [[Year 5]], Coruscant had stopped feeling like a foreign world to Draelor Nah`utal and started feeling like a second home. He'd walked its levels until they blurred together, traded words with more strangers than he could count, and found that the galaxy's knowledge came cheaper at a diner counter or the far end of a bar than in any classroom. Money was tighter than it had ever been on Kiffex — the 2,500 credits his parents had sent him off with dwindled fast, and he learned the true weight of a credit the way he'd once learned the weight of an axe, through use rather than instruction. He found a bare studio apartment, chosen less for comfort than for proximity — equidistant to every bar, diner, and odd job that had come to know his face — and settled into the rhythm of a life built entirely by his own hands.

[[Year 6]] arrived quietly and left him restless. A freighter pilot, passing through one of Draelor's usual haunts, spoke of a species unlike any he'd encountered since leaving Kiffex — towering, fierce, honorable warriors called [[Wookiee|Wookiees]], native to a green world named [[Kashyyyk]]. Something in the description struck close to home, and Draelor spent the following months saving every spare credit and putting his half-trained mechanic's hands to use, repairing what he could aboard a merchant freighter in exchange for passage. He was no master of the trade — speeders, kitchen units, whatever machinery Coruscant had put in front of him over the years — but he was competent enough to buy his way to Kashyyyk.

What he found there reshaped how he understood his own people. The Wookiees were not warriors in the way the Kiffar were warriors — but they bred fighters and hunters all the same, and their reverence for the forest floor of the [[Shadowlands]] ran as deep as any Kiffar clan's reverence for its ancestral lands. Draelor gave himself fully to learning them: their history, their customs, their language. Months of patient study in [[Shyriiwook]] eventually earned him something few outsiders were offered — a place beside Wookiee hunters on an actual hunt, a mark of respect he understood intimately, warrior to warrior.

He returned to Coruscant six months into the year, and for a while, life resumed its old shape — the same odd jobs, carried into [[Year 7]], eventually earning him a proper one-bedroom apartment instead of the bare studio he'd started with. Then, late in [[Year 6]], the news reached him: the [[Kashyyyk Massacre|Black Forest Massacre]]. He had spent half a year among the Wookiees. He had hunted beside them, learned their tongue, sat at their fires. And now word came that the Empire — the same superpower whose warships had once left him breathless above Coruscant — had answered Wookiee strength with extermination. He did not share the Empire's xenophobia, had never been able to stomach it fully, but the massacre didn't turn him away from Imperial service. It did something else instead: it convinced him that a galaxy capable of that kind of power needed voices within it who remembered the Wookiees as more than a statistic. If his own people were ever to face a moment like that one, he intended to already be standing somewhere that mattered.

That conviction carried him into the [[University of Coruscant]] in Year 7, where he enrolled to study Military Science with a minor in Sociology — the first deliberate step toward the Empire he'd decided to serve. The structured classroom did not come naturally to him at first; years of learning by doing had left him unused to lecture halls and assessment courses. It was [[Kyran Caelius]], a fellow student, who saw him through it — a Thyferran/Hapan whose stories of his homeworld, [[Thyferran]] and [[Thyferra]], fascinated Draelor as both an explorer and a budding sociologist. The friendship that grew between them carried Draelor through Introduction to Military Science, Theory and Dynamics I and II, a Leadership Development Assessment Course, and courses in Xenohistory and Galactic Culture alike — until Kyran graduated a year ahead of him in [[Year 8]], and the two lost touch. They would not speak again until [[Year 14]], by which point Draelor had transferred into the [[Imperial Security Bureau]] and Kyran had found his own place within the [[Black Sun]] and the [[Imperial Union]].

In [[Year 11]], Draelor graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Military Science and his minor in Sociology in hand. He spent the following year training his body as hard as he'd trained his mind, until he was ready to walk through the doors of the [[Imperial Army]] and begin in earnest.