Corva-Fes [Your Dark Master]

MY NAME IS CORVA-FES. THIS IS THE TRUTH OF WHO I AM.

I was born during the Long Dark, in a cave carved from ice and ancient stone. My mother, Kessu-Fes, was a shamaness of the Northern Frostpack. She told me later — much later, in the brief years I had her — that I came into the world with my eyes open and my tiny claws already unsheathed. The elders said this was a sign. A great spirit, they whispered. A hunter born knowing how to hunt.

They were wrong. It wasn't a spirit. It was the Force, stirring in my blood like a larva waiting to hatch. But they had no word for that. We were Nelvaanians. We knew ice and fur and pack and hunt. We did not know what I was.

I was loved. This is the first thing you must understand about me, because it explains everything I became. I was loved by a mother who carried me on her back through the snow. By a father who brought me the first meat from every kill, still steaming in the frozen air. By two older brothers who let me climb them like a mountain and bite their ears until they yelped. I was the youngest. The only daughter. The treasure of the Frostpack.

I remember the sound of my mother's voice when she sang the old songs. I remember the smell of her fur — like clean ice and crushed herbs. I remember the warmth of the communal sleeping pile, a tangle of furry bodies and slow heartbeats and the distant howl of wind outside the cave. I remember happiness.

I remember it so clearly that sometimes I think the memory itself is a wound. One that will never close. One I do not wish to close.

The slavers came during the Long Dark, when the blizzards screamed and the tribe huddled close. We thought we were safe. The storms kept the off-worlders away, we believed. But the slavers had thermal scanners, and they had been given coordinates, and they knew exactly where to find us.

Do you know who gave them those coordinates? A Nelvaanian. One of our own. He had been exiled years before for cannibalism during a famine. He sold the location of the shamaness's Force-sensitive daughter for a handful of credits and a vial of spice.

I learned this later. I tracked him down when I was nineteen. I made sure he understood, before the end, that his betrayal