# 📖 *The Sovereign Saga*
**Book I: The Ashes of Empire**
### Chapter Two: The Stormtrooper
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The barracks smelled of metal polish and fear.
Stormtroopers were not supposed to feel fear, of course. The First Order drilled obedience until the body bent like steel and the mind learned to erase itself. Rows of white armor gleamed under fluorescent strip‑lights, shining helmets stacked on racks like skulls in a hunter's trophy hall. Finn sat on the edge of his bunk, helmet in his lap, and tried to breathe.
Around him, his unit prepared in silence. Boots clattered rhythmically across the floor as troopers marched from bed to bench, echoing the pattern of their training yards — *always fifteen paces, turn, fifteen paces, turn.* Words were forbidden except when commanded. Even laughter sounded strange in this place, because laughter had been trained out of them. What remained was hollow banter, disciplined into emptiness.
Finn rubbed his thumb over his helmet's visor. The plastoid surface reflected tired eyes back at him, dark with exhaustion he couldn't hide. He'd scrubbed his armor until it gleamed, followed orders until they blistered his hands, but nothing erased what he'd seen.
Nothing erased last week.
The raid on Bracca still gripped him in flashes: smoke cutting across recycling yards, scavengers sprinting with children clutched in their arms, stormtroopers advancing in lines with rifles crushing all resistance. Finn had stood in formation, heart frozen solid in his chest, and when the order came — "open fire" — he had hesitated. Just one second. One second too long in a system where hesitation was a sin.
The sergeant's blow had cracked across the side of his helmet. Admirals didn't care that innocents were caught in fire. Protocol did not measure guilt. The old Republic was gone; the New Republic weak. The First Order knew only command and execution.
*But he had seen the child's face. A boy no older than ten, eyes wide as skull sockets, dirt streaked across his cheeks. He had lifted his arms as if that would stop laser fire. Finn remembered. He hadn't fired. The soldier next to him had. Blood mist in the yard. Silence after.*
Finn pressed his eyes shut now, helmet heavy in his hands. His chest burned with something words couldn't frame. Stormtroopers were not supposed to feel. They drilled out individuality in training, reminded each other with names reduced only to numbers: FN‑2187. He hated that number. Every time the sergeants snarled it, every time the captains spat it, he remembered the boy's face instead.
2187 didn't kill him. Someone else had.
And maybe that was worse.
---
The klaxon blared overhead: deployment order. Troopers snapped helmets into place, standing in rows sharp as spears. Finn rose with them, body moving by instinct where his heart resisted. Rifles were issued, packs loaded.
"Today — mission classified," the Lieutenant barked. "Recover cache. Eliminate resistance."
Eliminate resistance. Always the phrase, always code for innocents. Finn's mind spun. Another Bracca? Another massacre?
The hangar opened with a deafening hiss, flooding barracks with pale light. Dropships waited, ramp mouths yawning as officers herded the troopers forward. One by one, helmets clipped into place. One by one, their identities vanished.
Finn slid his own helmet on — but the desert boy's face still burned inside the visor glass.
---
The dropship stank of fuel and ozone. Troopers sat shoulder to shoulder in rigid silence, rifles braced between their knees. The metal floor vibrated beneath them. Overhead, the hum of engines carried them toward the Outer Rim. No one spoke, but Finn's pulse thundered too loud in the silence.
"FN‑2187."
The voice jolted him.
His squadmate, designation FN‑1224, leaned closer. His voice came clipped through the helmet's comm-link. "Stay sharp. Don't freeze this time."
Finn stiffened. *They'd seen. They'd known.*
"I didn't freeze," Finn muttered.
"Tell the generals that. Could've had half our squad demoted 'cause you blinked at the wrong moment." 1224's voice curled with disdain.
Finn ground his teeth, staring into steel.
The dropship lurched into atmo. Vibrations thrummed through plates, dust rattling loose from ceiling joints. His mind went to the boy again, his small hands raised against blaster fire —
"No." Finn muttered again, forcing his eyes shut. This mission wouldn't end like the last. It couldn't.
---
The ship jolted. Landed.
The ramp slammed down, sand and heat knifing inside. Troopers poured out in lines, rifles leveled, armor almost luminous against desert glare. Ahead: Shadaal, a settlement at the edge of nowhere. No weapons visible. Just clay houses and frightened farmers clutching tools instead of rifles.
*Eliminate resistance.*
The commander's shout came fast, snatching Finn's chest cold. "Advance! Clear the streets!"
People screamed. Mothers pulled children into shadows, farmers lifted hoes against plastoid plating. A blaster bolt cracked the silence, red fire singeing a wall. That one shout — that one bolt — transformed a village into a battlefield. Troopers surged forward. Rifles hissed in unison.
Finn raised his rifle — and froze.
A child darted from a hut, tripping in sand, arms flailing. Ten. Maybe younger. The boy's eyes, wide, plates of terror.
The sights of his rifle lined up on the child.
His finger would not move.
Blaster fire erupted around him, air filled with smoke, people fell. Everything inside Finn screamed to fire. *Not at the child. Not at the innocent. Not at all.*
Another trooper shoved him. "2187! Fire!"
He couldn't.
The boy vanished into smoke. The village burned.
---
Hours later, back in the dropship, Finn scrubbed his helmet with shaking hands. Ash clung to white plates no matter how he wiped. His squad sat silent, tired, as if nothing had happened.
But Finn's throat burned raw. His body felt like it was split in half: one half drilled obedience, the other half screaming *no*.
It had to end. He couldn't keep kneeling to orders that slaughtered the innocent.
*Something inside was breaking,* he realized. The Number was crumbling. The soldier was dying.
FN‑2187 was hollow. But Finn — Finn might yet live.
---
### End of Chapter Two: *The Stormtrooper*
📖 Word Count: ~1,520
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✨ Now you've got *Chapter Two* in full prose — Finn's inner life, a mission, his hesitation, the haunting memory of Bracca, and his resolve that he cannot remain First Order property.