While the industries of Eremos and the rare ores of Oros have made the House of Ghazzawi one of the most prosperous in the Khilij Empire, their wealth is built upon a foundation of sand. Oros possesses its own water and food resources, sustaining its 17 billion inhabitants, but it produces little surplus to export to the home planet.
Eremos remains a thirsty world. For its survival, it relies entirely on the House of Mallick, a rival power that controls several agricultural worlds producing 30% of the Empire's food. Most vital to the Ghazzawis is the planet Nirr.
Nirr is a behemoth, 245,003 km in diameter, entirely engulfed by a global, drinkable ocean. There is not a single inch of dry land on its surface. This geography makes Nirr one of the most difficult worlds to conquer in the known universe. Its environment is a constant nightmare of tsunamis reaching heights of 35,000 feet and cyclones screaming at 500 km/h. Beneath the waves, it is home to leviathans exceeding 3,000 feet in length. Yet, this world is the only reason Eremos survives; the Mallick family constructed a massive portal system that shunts water directly into a network of canals stretching across the Eremos desert. This flow provides not just water, but the aquatic protein that feeds 48 billion people.
For this service, the House of Mallick extracts a staggering tribute every thirty days. They hold the power to turn the taps off at any moment, a leverage that eventually became unbearable. Suleman Ghazzawi, Khalid’s father, made the bold, desperate decision to seize Nirr for his house.
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The strategy for planetary conquest relies on seizing the teleportation rim in the exosphere, which is governed by a control base on the planet’s surface. Suleman’s plan was tactically perfect, and he nearly secured the base. However, the planet itself proved to be a more formidable foe than the Mallick guards. In the heat of the assault, a sea creature 2,309 feet long surged from the depths and swallowed Suleman’s command ship whole.
Suleman’s death threw the House of Ghazzawi into a defensive spiral. His eldest son and Khalid’s elder brother, Bilal Ghazzawi, took the throne. In retaliation for the attempted invasion, the Mallicks severed the water supply to Eremos. For three years, Bilal struggled to keep his people alive, forced to buy water from friendly empires at ruinous prices.
The struggle came to a violent end in Elysium, the imperial capital. Following a meeting with the Sultan, Bilal retreated to his local palace to rest. While he slept, an assassin slipped through the shadows and drove a Reaper’s blade into his neck. He died instantly, leaving behind a wife he adored and a newborn son he would never hold. Broken by the weight of her grief, his wife followed him to the grave shortly after, leaving their child an orphan.
The funeral Lee witnessed upon his arrival—the vast crowd, the mourning world, and the body on the stone slab—was the final farewell for Zayna Ghazzawi, the sister-in-law of Khalid.
