This will be long, so strap in — here's **Chapter One in complete expanded detail*
# đź“– *The Sovereign Saga*
**Book I: The Ashes of Empire**
### Chapter One: The Scavenger
---
The desert did not forgive.
Under twin suns hung low and merciless above the horizon, Jakku stretched out in golden waves of sand hard as glass and bitter as ash. The wind screamed ceaselessly across its dunes — a dry, hollow voice carrying the same refrain sung for centuries: nothing lasts here. Starships crashed. Armies fought. Faiths planted banners and vanished like footprints washed clean by storm. The desert endured, while everything else rotted into bone.
For Rey Alara Korran, the desert was both prison and crucible. She knew its cruelty better than most, yet it had made her sharp, cautious, quick enough to survive. Every morning, scavengers rose before dawn to scour the husks of long-dead battles, carrying their findings to Niima Outpost in hopes of bare scraps of food. Rey was among them, though she hunted further and deeper, driven by something she could not explain.
Today, she left the other scavengers trailing behind at the Outer Wastes, ignoring their shouts. Their trade was profit. Hers was restless hunger.
She slid down a dune in a spray of sand, breathing dust as the day's wreck loomed larger before her: a starcruiser carcass, half-buried, cracked open like a beast's ribcage. Its hull stretched skyward, metal bones jagged against the horizon. Scrap worth weeks of food. Others feared it, claiming phantoms drifted inside, scavengers swallowed whole never to emerge. Rey knew why — she had felt it, too, in the marrow of her bones.
The place thrummed with strange energy.
Dry wind tugged at her wrappings as she approached the broken maw of the wreck. Metal groaned faintly, shifting against itself as though whispering. Her own reflection blinked back in the ship's fractured viewport: a thin, sunburnt girl, goggles perched on her forehead, lips cracked with thirst. Her staff knocked against the side of the hull as she steadied herself.
She stepped through.
Inside, shadows swallowed her. Shafts of sunlight stabbed through holes overhead, cutting dust motes into galaxies of their own. The air still carried old oil, tang of burning circuits half a century gone. Where scavengers had stripped wiring and steel, Rey sought what others left behind. Symbols. Carvings. Ghosts.
She ran her hand along the wall. Here, faint paint still clung in streaks. Not Republic military green. Not Imperial grey. Older. Stranger. Faded circles and strokes, etched deep into the durasteel long before this ship crashed. They were writing — not Basic, not anything she knew. A language of spirals and fire marks, worn near smooth but still alive beneath her fingers.
She had traced them a dozen times, searching for meaning. She should ignore them, take what salvage she could find. But she couldn't. Every time she came here, her chest grew tight as if the walls breathed with her.
And always — the shard.
It lay where she'd found it months ago, still wedged in the ribwork of the corridor by some miracle scavengers had overlooked. A crystal, small enough to fit in her palm, cracked through the center. To passerby eyes: worth nothing. To Rey: alive.
She touched it.
Instantly her pulse leapt. The shard hummed — not with sound, but through her teeth and bones, slipping beneath her skin until her very blood felt alien. Cold in the furnace of Jakku. Her breath snagged, chest seizing in fear and awe together. Her eyes slammed shut.
Visions came.
Not dreams. Not fantasies. Visions.
First fire — cities wreathed in flame, towers splitting like glass. The roar of ships falling in swarms from the skies. Screams tearing across a million voices.
Then — a figure. A man. Brown hair falling wild, eyes dark and steady, not cruel but terrifying in their conviction. His hands spread over the galaxy like a sovereign blessing a kneeling world. At his back, banners of gold and black rippled. His voice was thunder and balm both: *Peace,* it promised. *Order.* And every star bent to his decree.
But from the edges of fire there came crimson. Not banners. Not ships. A red flare like blood igniting across stars one by one. Circles carved into planets. Sigils standing taller than spires, burning. The man did not bow. His golden banners clashed with crimson light.
And between both, she saw emptiness. She saw herself, blade of light rising in her hand — and she did not understand.
Rey ripped back to herself with a cry, stumbling against bulkhead. Dust stung her eyes, the shard clattering into her gloved palm. The visions still throbbed hot in her skull, leaving her breathless.
Sweat trickled down her back. Her skin prickled though shadows offered no air. Outside, scavengers' faint shouts carried across dunes. Unkaring laughter.
She gripped the crystal harder.
The desert taught her to laugh at ghosts. To bury questions with hunger. But ghosts laughed back when she touched this fragment. And hunger… hunger had nothing to say about the man whose shadow bent the galaxy.
Rey jammed the shard into her satchel, forcing her breath steady. Her throat rasped. She pretended calm as she stalked out of the starship belly like a thief escaping her own guilt. Clamoring shouts from other scavengers broke above the dunes. Market talk. Sand prices. A fight over water-sealed canisters.
Nobody felt what she had felt. To the rest it was just wreckage.
Her chest pounded still.
Past Niima Outpost, in the distance, dozens of derelict ships burned bright under suns, skeletons of wars generations old. Scavengers picked them clean every season but they never seemed to empty. Junk remaining within junk — bones of machines piled higher than living men. The world was nothing but scars.
Rey turned her face to horizon. Sand bit her lips. She expected to feel hopelessness. But strange enough, it was not hopelessness. It was a weight. A summons.
The shard pressed against her side as she shifted, all but glowing.
She had no words for what it was, but she knew this: today was different.
The suns leaned merciless as she trekked across the dunes. The trek back to Niima Outpost was three hours in the day's heat, harsher with each minute. Rey trudged through sand with the shard's weight knocking against her hip, mind running faster than her steps.
Her breath thickened as towers of junk sprouted from the horizon: Niima Outpost, a ramshackle settlement huddled around the only working trade depot for fifty kilometers. From afar it looked like a starship graveyard belched up into a shantytown — piles of ripped hulls, scav yards built on scav yards, rag tents pinned onto durasteel bones. A faint shimmer of smoke carried the stench of oil, sweat, and desperation.
The crowd swallowed her as she entered. Dust-brown figures hustled carts with screaming parts, cages of half-alive droids, shrieking scav vermin meant for stew. Shopkeepers yelled prices nobody could afford. Children darted between legs with tins of water dirtier than the ground.
Rey ignored the noise. She ducked into the quartermaster's stall and slammed a satchel of wires, tubing, and stripped panels onto the counter. The quartermaster, Unkar Plutt, loomed from his chair like a bloated slug in greasy robes. He picked through her finds with disdain, counting too few.
"This worth quarter‑portion," Plutt growled.
Rey clenched her jaw. "That's half a day's salvage."
"Quarter‑portion." His eyes flicked to her satchel, too sharp for their usual laziness. "What else you hiding, girl?"
She froze, clutching the strap. "Nothing."
Plutt snorted. "Nothing never rattles like crystal."
Her heart pounded. In her pouch, the shard thrummed faint heat. She forced her breath still. *Not here. Not for him to know.*
"Quarter‑portion," Plutt repeated, slamming a sealed packet of dry powder onto the counter. "Or leave with nothing."
Rey snatched it before he could change his mind. Others stared hungrily at the trade as she elbowed back into the crowd.
---
Her hut leaned crooked near the edge of the outpost, patched hides stretched across poles. She ducked inside quickly, away from scavenger eyes. The heat baked everything stale; her bowl of powder sat like dust on rusted tins. She poured water — barely enough to soften it into paste. Quietly, she ate.
Alone.
The outpost clattered with laughter and shouts outside, but her hut echoed only with desert wind soughing through gaps in the tarp. She glanced more than once to her satchel. At last, she pulled the shard out, setting it gently on the crate beside her.
Even in faint dusk it glowed. Blue and cracked through the center, its fractured heart shining as if light wanted out but could not break free.
Her tired eyes drank it in.
When she touched it again, the vision did not slam into her with violence. Instead, it came creeping, quiet as breath.
She stood under a night sky not Jakku's. Stars bled crimson. Sigils burned on worlds like scars.
A man's face again, that same poised prince she did not know, but his voice softer, more human, laced with grief: *"I will save them, even if I enslave them."* His words rang with mercy and damnation both.
Then the voice of another — female, cold and hunger-thin: *"The Dark alone endures. The rest are heresies."*
Rey spun in her vision and saw nothing but emptiness where the voice bled.
Her eyes tore open. Sweat coated her face.
Night deepened outside; the suns gone, air sharp as knives. Scavenger tents simmered with late fires, quarrels, drunken shouting. To all of them, she was nobody — another orphan scraping portions. But the shard throbbed beside her, reminding her she had touched something more immense than the Outpost's tiny lives.
She wanted to throw it away. To bury it in sand and pretend. But something whispered louder than hunger that had guided her all her years: *You cannot unsee fire.*
Excellent! I'll now **finish Chapter One** of *The Sovereign Saga* properly, and bring it to that 2.2k‑word mark with a strong, cinematic close. This final section will end Rey's first chapter arc with a haunting vision of Ben Solo's rise, giving the story its mythic hook.
---
# đź“– *The Sovereign Saga*
**Book I: The Ashes of Empire**
**Chapter One: The Scavenger** *(Final Section)*
---
Night on Jakku was colder than death.
Twin suns gone, the desert reversed itself in silence: the cruel heat surrendered to icy winds that whipped at the tarps of huts until they shivered like leaves. Rey sat cross‑legged outside hers, clutching herself against the chill. She rarely dared the open sky at night, but something in her chest refused the cramped darkness of her shelter.
Above her: stars. Countless, endless, bright enough to mock her. She had traced those constellations since childhood, imagining old ships threading between them and wondering where her parents had gone. The desert whispered lies about family returning; she still half‑believed them. But tonight she did not dream of family.
Tonight she dreamed of war.
The shard of crystal rested on her knee. Even broken, it drank the starlight and shimmered with whispers. She let her thumb graze its crack like one would an old wound, and the Force — though she had no word for it — pulled across her skin. Drowsy eyes sank, and the stars folded into something else.
---
She saw a chamber.
A Senate hall larger than mountains, its ceiling drowned in banners of gold. At its center: a young man. Brown hair brushed his forehead, a smile easy as breath. His clothes carried the white of Jedi tradition and the blue of Republic nobility. He was not cruel. He was charismatic. Senators leaned forward to catch his every word.
Behind him, Jedi stood in confusion, some bright‑eyed, some scowling. Some even knelt.
And the man's voice. Steady, certain. Beautiful.
*"The Jedi promise peace but offer only delay. The Senate preaches freedom but delivers paralysis. I will give you both. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Today. Order begins now."*
The chamber thundered in applause.
Rey's pulse hammered as the man's eyes swept the crowd — and for an instant, they found her. Warm, steady eyes that looked like kindness… until she felt the enormity behind them. Not kindness. Conviction.
He raised his hand. A saber ignited at his side — not blue, not green, but black shot through with veins of crimson. The Senators roared louder, some kneeling at once. Jedi wavered.
And Rey, frozen in the back of the vision, understood: this was not mercy. This was sovereignty. The galaxy bent to him not through chains of iron, but through trust, through faith warped into obedience. And that was worse.
The stars burned crimson behind him. She turned her head within the vision and saw worlds marked like scars, circles of red carved into oceans and fields. Shadows marched beneath them, eyes bright with fanatic hunger.
Two powers clashed across her soul: the Sovereign's banners of gold, and the Crimson sigils of blood.
And in the middle, alone, Rey Alara Korran held a green blade she had never touched.
---
She gasped awake, nearly toppling into sand. The shard trembled in her hand, but only with the cold now, faint as a dying ember. Overhead the true stars glittered, indifferent.
Rey pressed both hands to her face to stop her trembling. She was no senator. No Jedi. No heir of any kind. Just a scavenger girl who slept in rags on a forgotten world.
Yet the crystal hummed again, quiet, persistent, like a heartbeat only she could feel. Each pulse whispered a truth the desert had always denied:
*She would not be nobody forever.*
Rey pulled her knees tighter to her chest, staring at the horizon until dawn, waiting for suns to rise and the desert to become cruel again.