As we face the disappearance of so many of our fellow inmates, I take this opportunity to mark the loss (well, the absence) of one man in particular. His accomplishments were unparalleled - in the field, at least, of treason - and his persistence was the stuff of legend, for people, at any rate, who enjoy legends about spiteful self-obsession. He was proof for an entire generation after his passing that one man could, if only he set his mind to it, spread his capricious brand of destruction posthumously throughout the galaxy. To my knowledge no entity has ever bestowed awards for the most deleterious influence spurred on by the pettiest incitements, but I say without reservation that Galen Erso would have been a most worthy honoree, leastways for that definition of
honor, a word with which he was admittedly unfamiliar. It is with great sorrow that I reflect on how I will never again see him stranded in a muddy, humid, buggy waste; nor forced to do idiotic tricks for infernal spectators; nor murdered in a miserable ruined hotel; nor subjected to a death lottery; and so on, and so forth. My only consolation, bittersweet though it may be, is that I know this: in at least one universe, he lies well and fully decomposed beneath the crushing weight of a great deal of duracrete rubble bearing the Imperial insignia.
And so, somehow, I will carry on.