Ivak Nkik knelt on the floor, in front of a large metal box. The rusted iron was a sharp contrast to the modern Imperial decor of the room, looking as out of place as a Rancor in the Emperor's palace. Reverently, he opened the box and peered in with tear dulled eyes as the painful memories overwhelmed him. Hands trembling, he pulled out a piece of rusted metal- armor plating that had once covered his home.

The scrap still fit perfectly within the lines of his scar, and the palm of his hand still burned with the memory.

(Shards of red-hot metal rained apon him, as he stared down at the carnage below. At his feet fell a section of torn and twisted armor. He picked it up, not caring that it still glowed. It burned his hand, but he didn't notice. It would hurt later, though... )

He remembered that day as if it was yesterday.

I pray for their souls.

(The swap meet had just ended. Ivak Nkik had made out well, he'd traded all the droids salvaged last season for water, cloth, and supplies to last until the next swap meet, and for an escape pod they'd picked up just the day before, he'd gotten a speeder- dilapidated to be sure, but incredibly fast! He'd been shouting triumphantly as he flew over dune after dune, sending womp rats scurrying and once even startling a wild bantha, excited to get home, but when he topped the crest of the last dune, he'd seen the sandcrawler on fire, the panicked Jawas being mown down by blaster fire as they tried to escape. He saw his sister running with her baby, then a stormtrooper ripped the child from her arms and dashed its head on the side of the 'crawler. Another trooper shot her in the head. His uncle, the clan head, was held between two troopers, pleading to an officer, screaming something about droids and Owen Lars. The officer turned away from him, and the troopers both shot him at once. His smoking body fell to the sand. A fleeing female ran towards the sand dune where Ivak was hiding, almost making it over the top, but not five feet from him she was impaled by a green blaster bolt and fell dead at his feet. More Jawas ran from the sandcrawler and were slaughtered in seconds, their blood falling in black drops on the sand. Finally, the troopers halted the massacre. A few of the Jawas had escaped, but Ivak knew they would not last long alone in the desert.)

I mourn for the dead.

Carefully, Ivak Nkik, formerly of the Clan Itanna, unpacked the metal box. A power cell from an imperial blaster, almost worn out, a bundle of wires torn from a melted droid, an oddly shaped crystal made when blaster fire melted sand, a broken section of Bantha tusk that his mother had scratched a beautiful sand-grass pattern into, his uncle's prized spanner, half melted but still serviceable- these were the things he'd managed to salvage from the smoking wreckage of the sandcrawler. They would serve him well. Spreading the various pieces out on the cold metal table, he looked at the relics he had of his family. Poetic justice, that these relics would become the instrument of his revenge. He opened the text Vader had given him, The Book of Anger, and flipped it to the pages the Dark Lord had marked, the pages that gave instructions for building a lightsaber. The pages were written in the spidery hand of Emperor Palpatine, Vader's master. Palpatine would not have taken an alien for an apprentice, it was him that ordered the subjugation of all non-human races. Palpatine's soldiers had murdered the Itanna clan. But Vader was somehow different.Vader saw him as a Jedi apprentice, rather than a four-foot tall, jabbering alien. Or maybe Vader saw him as a four-foot tall,jabbering Jedi apprentice. It didn't matter how Vader saw him. What mattered was the opportunity. Ivak Nkik would become a Jedi. He would become powerful, and then he would kill the Emperor.

I weep for my enemies, for I will have revenge.