Mandalore was in rebellion against the Empire, a point of pride if one were to look through their storied history. Wars waged for expansion through the stars, against the Jedi and the Republic throughout the centuries, which led Mandalore to becoming the desert the boy grew up with. When there was no one else to fight, after conquests turned into stalemates, their homeworld sieged, a tenuous peace with the Jedi and the Galactic Republic forced, and their warlike nature remained unslaked, conflict turned inward. Internal factions divided; some sided with the newly formed Empire while others refused to be bound under their yoke. The conflict on Mandalore mirrored the greater conflict across the Galaxy.
This wasn't a fight for a child; but it was a conflict countless children bore witness to.
The sound of Laser Cannon fire woke a young Wulfram from a dead sleep. Permacrete buildings fractured; the rumble and crash as the highrise pitched chilled the child down his spine. Eyes watered as he stared, in disbelief, out the transpasteel windows at the wreckage of the city. TIE Bombers, a ship he had only seen on screens, screamed through the air. Their bombs rattled the tower beneath his feet and he scrambled.
"Wolsha!" His mother shouted from the den, sending the boy on course for her.
His siblings surrounded her, Ganymede, Orri, Silas. The windows creaked, fractured, and gave way, the intense heat of the burning city below flowed into the apartment. Screams rose through the streets, crying, futility. They poured into the stairwell to escape the blasts, the shrapnel, the rancor of those who fell in the streets as the Imperial Forces marked them for death. The following hours were filled with dread. Hidden in the stairwell of their highrise as the bombings passed. The screech of Ion Engines became low hums as the bombers began making fewer and fewer sweeping runs, instead they switched to targeted sweeps on fortified buildings. The screams turned to silence, the occasional wail in the distance after another bombing run. Then something more sinister came.
The Hunt.
KX-Series Droids swept the city. The lasercannons slowed, their booming fire revealing the higher pitch of personal weapons fire. KX Droids opening fire on those who survived. The Armistead family saw them, they burst in through the lower level of the stairwell and opened fire on another family who had huddled together on a lower floor. Blaster fire reported back from the family and another who had prepared to fight Imperial soldiers after the bombing run. Nobody expected droid executioners.
"Wolsha, Meda, into the hallway." Their mother whispered, as she placed her hands on the elder twins' shoulders and pushed them in the direction of the nearest floor's doorway.
Terrified for their lives, and staring down the KX droids engaged with their neighbors below, the children pushed onward, unaware of the danger ahead. The resistance their building put up to the droids brought a familiar screech overhead. The building rent, collapsing from the upper floors as the bomber delivered the payload against the midseam of the structure. Implosive force as the building collapsed drove the air to the center of the structure, trying to find any place to escape as the building crushed in on itself. Windows burst out, shattered from their frames by the catastrophic forces. Wulfram turned to see his mother and siblings disappear in the cloud of debris in the stairwell, before the force threw Ganymede and himself out of the broken window and into the roiling flames of a speeder in the streets below, scorching Wulfram's back and arm.
Ganymede, however, was not as lucky. She fell into the middle of the street, into the stone debris, her hair strewn about her as she lay quiet, unmoving. Peeling himself, screaming, from the durasteel frame of the speeder, the young boy endured and crawled to his sister, where he whimpered through the night as he heard the repeater fire move closer and hoped it would take him too. When the morning came and the city was in ruins, he cried, as he heard detonations in the distance, knowing others were suffering a fate like his.
The neighbors that had fought the KX droids to a standstill limped out of the ruins of the highrise and spotted him and his sister alone in the streets. The following days were a blur to the orphan, but rage and the bitter taste of blood remained on his lips. His ears pounded with stress and the high ring of tinnitus never left him since that night.