Editing Draelor Nah`utal (section)

=== 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.