The Gathering - Introduction

[Charlotte]

Keldabe is left behind. Mandalore's mountains are tiny far below the belly of the diplomatic transport, snow-capped even in summer, they're so tall. This is a Hapan ship, but it's manned by Mandals chosen by Sadhric Tlin, the Mand'alor, and two decks are fitted with carpet and servants, stocked with good food and fine drink. It's like a cocktail party in there, and it works like a sieve to separate out the city Mandals, those who know Keldabe, from those whose clans have habitually avoided getting too comfortable with luxury and staying in one place. The latter would not even be on the ship except that they are hitching a handy ride north, as it is going to their own destination.

None of the Mando'ade aboard are particularly soft people, but the city Mandals are more than happy to try every whiskey and wine on offer, and to clean out the larder with the Hapans footing the bill. Their more rugged, insular cousins and comrades tend to stay packed in their own groups, knots of them by the long windows, knots of them loitering forward near the bridge just in case the crew forget how to pilot a ship and need to be rescued.

Some of the Mando'ade do weave effortlessly between the groups.

Yen Amidi, aging, butt-kicking merc and clan head that she is, is one of these. In one sense, it's her party they are all traveling to, anyway. The gathering is for everyone, an old tradition, but currently the Um-Shara Yaim lies within her territory, though the expanse is itself considered neutral, and there are unspoken rules and allowances that make the protection of any who venture to the grounds a matter of clan honor. It is something that Yen Amidi takes seriously, and she is known to every single warrior on board, and acts (and is treated as) the true hostess of the journey, even though in theory this is the Mand'alor's vessel, and the Mand'alor is himself aboard.

Several of Yen Amidi's children travel with her, tested veterans each and every one.

Two of her grandchildren also mix freely among the groups, the young warrior Belanti and her cousin Renda Tylu have grown to adulthood knowing these yearly get-togethers with the prestige of their clan granting them a certain extra ease. Belanti is seated on the floor with Jegoth Ordis in a circle of his clanmembers, throwing dice and talking the absurdity of the new line of Tarmik carbine blasters, and how they're useless for real fights if you don't file down the new blast-shell casing along the muzzle. Renda shows off the power boot frames he removed from a suit of offworld power armor worn by a downed foe, while his daughter Lim and a feral pack of other small children race in mad figure eights among the adults.

The Mand'alor knows everyone aboard, or they wouldn't be aboard. He watches the world speed beneath this ship, and he watches his guests. He does not have much to say to this particular group. He and Jegoth Ordis have an understanding, and he and Yen Amidi have a cautious fondness between them. He's not much interested in the whiskeys or the wines, or in gorging himself on the food so that the Hapans will feel it in the purse. He's successfully avoided being taken out at the knees by Lim and her band of hooligans, and he thinks Tarmik carbines have been garbage for two hundred years, and why anyone would waste breath discussing how to make them useful is beyond him. He wonders who it was Renda Tylu killed who was wearing Radiance R-7-class power armor at the time, but there is no record and he will store up the topic for conversational filler later rather than wasting it now and having absolutely nothing that interests him to bring up should he be trapped in Renda's company at some point.


The Um-Shara Yaim exists where vast grasslands grow sparse and give way to a chilly northern desert. Curling across the grasslands, zig-zagging and ox-bowing, are countless tiny streams and rivulets. Those streams and rivulets join each other over and over again like fibers in a rope and eventually grow big enough to become a main artery of the Mulu'kim River to the east, which bites deep into canyons on its way to the sea. Um-Shara glistens with the shallows of the northernmost of those streams for part of the year, and the gathering of clans enjoys the availability of the water, but most of the meetings and all of the tournaments take place where the hard-packed desert takes over and stretches pale to the horizon.

The Um-Shara Yaim is not one structure, but thirty-three great adobe domes with inner support frames of giant timbers from further south, positioned in a massive circle. Each of the domes, built to withstand yearly neglect and powerful sandstorms, resembles true vheh'yaim. As such, they feature regular windows high in the domes, and floors sunken ten to twenty feet below the floor of the desert.

When the clans arrive for the gathering, the very first thing they will do is reclaim their yaim and clean it out of sand and any debris. They will make any repairs necessary to make safe their family's shelter, and then they will set up camp inside of it, decorating it and making it comfortable. This is as much a ritual as anything else, and clans will help each other to complete repairs or even rebuild any collapsed sections as needed in gestures of peace that supersede any current clan rivalries or complaints.

It has been generations, or so the Mand'alor is told, since all thirty-three domes have housed clans in the gathering. In recent decades, at most a dozen or so may be occupied. This year, Yen Amidi believes ten clans will come.


Upon learning of it, numerous Hapan officials seized upon this event as the ultimate diplomatic and business opportunity, only to be told in no uncertain terms that they are not invited. Are not to appear. Are not welcome. Appealing to the Mand'alor, their agent, their prime ally, they heard the same.

This gathering is not for them.

This gathering is for Mandalore.

[Charlotte]

Usually, if the Mand'alor bothered to come, he or she stayed with their own clan, in one of the Um-Shara shells. It was a novelty as compared to recent centuries to have an acknowledged Mand'alor in attendance who had no clan. Sadhric had accepted Yen Amidi's hospitality instead of claiming the Hapan ship as a sort of thirty-fourth shell and staying there.

Over the course of four days, he shook hands with hundreds of Mando'ade, debated issues of responsibility in the war, listened in on cross-clan arguments (weighing in formally to settle several of them permanently), and spent hours upon repetitive hours explaining to still-mystified warriors of all ages and origins just what had actually happened to them (and nearly happened to them) at the hands of the hivemind known as Zee. Of all the elements of the war that they did not understand, that one apparently made for the deepest void, and, while it was possible that of all the people who had survived the war Sadhric Tlin was the one best-equipped to illustrate the sheer scale and speed of the entities, he still found it nearly impossible to accurately describe that which they'd unwittingly faced. At least they seemed satisfied with metaphors.

He watched Mando'ade race each other on foot and in ships. He watched them spar against one another. He eavesdropped on ship and weapons sales, and gossip about where to get more. There were contests of strength, cunning, marksmanship, and (a shock to him) storytelling. He joined the largest group of clan heads he'd yet encountered as Mand'alor when they sat down to watch the contests and drink together. The one thing he did not do was participate in any of the competitions, though Jegoth Ordis did, though Yen Amidi certainly did (and took first with moving targets), though every other clan head who was not crippled did.

Sadhric did other things. He helped with (that is: took over) the sales of three ships, giving them positive assessments (after snooping through them) in such detail that in one case the seller, a warrior and mother of one named Sidera, told her prospective buyer that the ship was no longer for sale, and then proceeded to up her asking price by seven thousand creds. He noticed some peculiar symptoms in some members of one of the clans that suggested they were addicted to a virulent ibrixxa variant. He assisted with no less than eight injuries during the contests. He did more talking in four days about things he did not care about than he would ever have believed possible, and felt himself being buried deeper and deeper under the mask he wore, as if it were thickening and growing to consume him.

He knew how masks could be.

He had not had another moment like the one with his holos. After that one, he'd scanned himself thoroughly, even though insanity did not always come with helpful markers. He felt normal, if boxed in; his holos thereafter behaved as they should.

And on the fifth day, his own last day at the Um-Shara Yaim, though the gathering would itself continue for three more, for the first time he found himself thinking that the Mandalorians might pull themselves together and survive their current circumstances.

On the way to his ship, he passed Renda Tylu, with his daughter on his shoulders, playing around with his Radiance power armor boot frames, surrounded by a small ring of amused Mando'ade and children who wanted a turn of their own. The frames gave Renda eight extra inches of height, a robotically smooth gait, and added mechanical strength to every move he made. Right then, the young warrior jumped so easily it looked like he floated, and his daughter screamed with laughter.


Sadhric's flat-bellied Hapan ship hovered out and away from Um-Shara, slow and no higher than the clan shells were tall. On board, making his way forward, Sadhric's ears popped painfully at the same moment that the ship first blinked with realization that something was wrong--

In Um-Shara, hundreds of Mando'ade were mixing just as they'd mixed the day before, and their ears and organs felt it, too, almost before it happened--

A flash of light came from above the desert. Something struck the hard earth like a fist. Like a bomb. Like a world-ending asteroid.

One moment many eyes gazed out across Um-Shara Yaim, and then if they saw anything it was darkness.