Disclaimer: I do not own the Mandalorian or any of the other associated characters featured in the eponymous TV series. I have no affiliation with the studio that created these characters except by virtue of being an obsessed fan.

The armored warrior she had seen in her mind was here.

She could sense it—and he wasn't alone.

Lyrian crouched behind a smelly container that was over five times her size, listening with her eyes closed as the Cerean merchant whose ship she was currently on slapped at the button to lower the main ramp. She counted, one, two, three, four, five, and then she stood up, tucking her satchel close to her side. After two more seconds, the entryway began to close again, and Lyrian darted out of her hiding place, down the ramp, and into—

Snow.

Ice.

Lots of it.

She sucked in a breath. Though it took mere seconds for her body to begin acclimating to the sudden cold, it felt like a lifetime before she began to breathe again and the tightness in her chest faded.

The Cerean had already disappeared into the grey chaos of snow and shadow ahead of her, so she wasn't concerned about finding him lurking about as she scanned the landscape. The air was elusive and incredibly dry despite the crystalline precipitation that flurried down from above, and already she could feel her skin assuming the tauter, almost brittle texture that told her of its low oxygen content. Couple that with the rocky outcrop that was the ship's resting place and the jagged path that loped irregularly down in front of her, and Lyrian could safely infer that she was on a mountain somewhere.

She frowned and drew her tunic closer about her—not because she was cold but because she had never been on a mountain before.

This was new, and she didn't like it.

"The way forward is the only way," the small girl muttered to herself.

She began her descent down the path, noting the relative smoothness of the stone under her feet and the ease with which she could traverse the snowy terrain. The ability to conquer the ice and snow was in her blood, and she felt that now as she never had before.

Six minutes later—she counted—and she was entering a village.

It wasn't anything impressive. Squat, geometric buildings carved of stone and laced with gleaming metal jutted out of tarry streets, splashed like oil stains across the white-capped mountain peaks that surrounded them. From her higher vantage point, Lyrian could see that the entire path she had walked and the village itself were situated along a narrow, flat strip of mountainous plateau. She couldn't tell how far up she was or what the ground-surface of this planet looked like, given her height and the spires of rock that ridged the area. But she could tell just by initial observation that this place couldn't have been very old, and it couldn't be oft-visited—likely for a good reason.

She squared her shoulders and started forward again, letting a wave of smoky air—tinted with the vague overtones of a mechanical shop—envelope her as she stepped into the village proper. She stuck purposefully to the middle of the wide street, walking between the cubic buildings and peeking with no small amount of interest into the doors that were open as she passed.

And, indeed, most of them were open, spilling enticing pools of flickering light and rumbling voices onto the main pathway. She heard snatches of Minnisial and Sy-Bistri more than any other language, which meant this was hub for just the kind of people she had been expecting to find: merchants, mercenaries, and smugglers. The Cerean's kind of people.

She pulled her hood over her head and swerved away from a strip of darkness creeping from between two shuttered buildings. She needed to tread lightly and stick to her plan. As such, the first thing she needed to do was find the warrior, which was likely going to be difficult considering she knew nothing more than his general appearance and the fact that he was traveling with a companion.

Fortunately for her, however, it proved to be remarkably easy.

Lyrian had almost reached the end of the drab plateau, where three larger buildings hunched menacingly against a sheer face of black rock, when she felt a familiar pressure behind her eyes—a narrowing of her focus. She turned slowly around, and there he was, wreathed in a mist of snow.

The armored one.

He was just coming out of a cantina she had passed not thirty seconds before, cloak whipping out behind him in the bitter wind, T-visor helmet as cold and impersonal as the predawn atmosphere of the village he stood in. He turned towards her, and for a moment she thought—irrationally—that he might know she was looking for him. But the thought passed just as quickly as it had come, and the warrior turned away, heading back the way she had just come.

Her heart thudded sharply against her ribs even as her mind snapped back to the plan. Somehow she knew he would be staying long enough for her to gather the supplies she needed, just as she had known intrinsically that he would be here the moment the Cerean's ship had entered orbit. But that didn't mean she couldn't lose him in this unfamiliar territory.

Hurriedly, she strode to her left until she was mostly concealed in the shadows cast by a dark residential building. She watched as the warrior trudged laboriously through the snow, walking peculiarly to one side. She cocked her head, unsure if this had to do with his particular species, simple difficulty in navigation, or some kind of paranoia.

When he had gotten farther enough away from her and seemed destined to duck into a larger building not far from the hill from which she had just come, she slipped from building to building. She would stay close to him, but not so close that he would know she was dogging him.

Her next order of business was the acquisition of supplies she would need for her embarkment with the warrior: sustenance, extra clothing, and finances.

For the next hour, Lyrian stayed close to the warrior.

She remained roughly one building behind him and stole throughout cantinas, shops, and sleeping quarters—so small and dark in her cloak that she was a virtual ghost. She found that more than being a place to refuel, drink, and brawl before continuing on one's way, this village and perhaps the entire planet was practically a rest stop for the galaxy. People came and went however they pleased, sleeping a few hours in cheap, grimy cots or pods until they felt they had stayed long enough.

She saw a good sampling of the Unknown Regions' many species, and despite the village's eerie, deserted appearance, the inside of nearly every building was full of traders and criminals who mostly talked amongst their own kind and mingled minimally with those of other standings. And, more importantly for her purposes, she found that the darkness and the muffled din of the planet's institutions were more than accommodating to hide her as she flitted from patron to patron, pilfering what she could when she could.

Tiny satchels of credits or flan weren't hard to come by in the cantinas, intoxicated as the customers generally were. Food was trickier to snag, but Lyrian quickly became adept at sneaking into smelly cantina kitchens and swiping whatever happened to be closest to her before a tender or servant grumbled back to retrieve an order. Clothing, too, proved to be easy to acquire. She simply tip-toed into any one of the numerous sleeping houses, weaved between beds and pods until she found the shoddy cabinets reserved for securing personal possessions, and then broke into them with an efficiency cultivated by experience.

She carried all of her stolen goods in a pack she had also pilfered from one of the sleeping houses. Her only hope was that the warrior would leave before her victims had a chance to fully realize what they were missing.

The warrior had spent the last fifteen minutes in the same cantina, and, mostly prepared for the journey ahead, Lyrian decided to risk entering the same establishment. If she hung near the corners, she would be able to observe him and form a better idea of how she wanted to officially approach him.

She ventured into the cantina purposefully, keeping her head down and scanning the room before she took a weathered seat tucked against the wall nearest the entrance.

This place was slightly different from the rest. It was more brightly lit and less occupied, and the bartender, of a species she didn't recognize, tinkered with mechanical scraps and metal in between fulfilling orders or barking at rowdy customers. The warrior also sat against a wall, arms crossed, no food or drink before him. She wondered why he was here if he wasn't going to eat or drink, but guessed it was better not to dwell on that.

He seemed like a mercenary or, more likely, a bounty hunter. And that meant he probably had more enemies than friends. But, then again, she had already reasoned through this in her head, and, in light of her vision of him before, she knew that the benefits of him being in her plan had to outweigh the risks. Even if by a margin.

A few minutes passed, Lyrian slowly warming up and beginning to feel the effects of her many waking hours, before a new patron entered the cantina. It was a female humanoid creature with ridges in her forehead and armor that looked suspiciously similar to that of Imperial soldiers. But that wasn't what attracted Lyrian's attention and made her sit up, adrenaline snaking through her veins.

There, on the soldier's hip, was a sleek black blaster.

Not just any blaster, either—it was a Chiss-made blaster. A blaster made by Lyrian's own people, and the youngling, though shorter on years than most of her kind, knew that the only way this non-Chiss creature could have acquired such a weapons was by murder or theft. Both of those things were unacceptable to her people without retribution, and Lyrian knew her place. The warrior was forgotten as her mind began to formulate a course of action.

She let a few minutes pass, painfully conscious that the warrior might choose to leave at any moment, and then she stood. The woman's back was turned to her, and the bartender was engaged in some activity at the back of the bar. Most of the tables scattered around the room were empty, but the few that were occupied seemed to be catering to the types of individuals who would hardly bat an eye at the theft of a blaster—from an Imperial or Imperial sympathizer, no less.

She soft-footed her way to the woman and had already decided on the exact angle she was going to extract the blaster from the holster, the way she would have to curve her fingers to minimize sensation on the woman's part, and the rough speed she was going to have to move to make it out of the cantina in time.

Unfortunately, her calculations could not take into account the unpredictable movements of the woman herself—always a danger in theft. Lyrian had escaped from close calls several times already tonight, but this one was different.

As soon as the blaster left the holster, the woman shifted, and her peripheral vision snagged on Lyrian.

"Eh!"

Lyrian gasped and dodged the first clumsy grab of the woman's hand. With speed fueled by adrenaline and practice, she sprinted out of the cantina and was already several steps into the snow before her victim reached the door. She swore as her feet sunk into the snow.

"Frilt! Terran! It's the thief!" the woman shouted in choppy Sy-Bistri.

Lyrian cursed softly in Cheunh—her own language—and risked a glance over her shoulder. Another Imperially-garbed alien had emerged from an alleyway near the woman, and he could move faster than his companion. He also had a blaster, which was definitely aimed at her.

Lyrian adoped a zig-zagging running pattern and did a quick scan of her options. Heading to the shipyard or to the end of the plateau was obviously out of the question. Trying to lose herself in a building would be foolish and unlikely, given the small size and cramped quarters. Her only choice seemed to be duck between the buildings, into the narrow alleyways, and hope that her speed, persistence, and exceptional eyesight could guide her through enough twists and turns so that she could either make it back to the ship or disappear into some niche her pursuers wouldn't think to look in.

She committed to a turn and made it into the first alleyway that seemed promising. The path between the buildings was slushy with half-melted snow and studded with metal and trash, but Lyrian was right in assuming that her eyesight would assist her in navigation.

She zoomed through the first alleyway and shot past the end of the building—only to find herself faced with a blank rock wall. Behind the buildings of this village was nothing more than a gap separating the structures from the rockface of the mountain that housed them. And, now, a reptilian alien she assumed was either Frilt or Terran.

She skidded to a stop and pointed the Chiss blaster at him—to which he responded by grinning and aiming his own blaster at her.

"No more space left, kid," he hissed.

Lyrian threw back her hood so he could see her features, and she was pleased to see a dim registration of shock on his face.

"This belongs to my people," she said loudly, her voice husky from disuse.

The presumed mercenary's surprise faded into resolve, and he took an aggressive step forward. Her fingers tightened around the mechanism that would fire the blaster, but she hesitated. She had never killed before, and though these individuals were technically the ones who had instigated this skirmish by virtue of taking the Chiss blaster, to fire now would seem uncomfortably close to a senseless killing.

She was going to have to run.

Without giving it another thought, she haphazardly dropped the end of the blaster and let loose a shot, which she hoped would give her aggressor enough of a pause so she could make it back into the alleyway. As she had intended, the blast hit the snow a few feet in front of the reptile-alien. She spun away from him and was about to breathe a sigh of relief when she felt it—a searing pain across her shoulder.

She cried out and nearly lost her footing, but she managed to stay on her feet enough to stumble temporarily out of harm's way, hidden behind the wall of a building making up one-half of the alleyway. She gritted her teeth and tried crashing into the back door of a mechanical shop, but found it locked.

Things were getting farther and farther out of hand.

She sprinted back to the mouth of the alleyway, but only got three-quarters of the way there before things came to a head. Behind her, she could hear the huffing of the reptile creature. Ahead of her stood the form of the woman she had originally snatched the weapon from.

She stopped, resisting the urge to reach her blaster hand up to touch her throbbing shoulder.

The woman smiled, wreathed heavily in shadows but light-skinned enough that Lyrian could make out her basic facial features.

"Well, now. A Chiss, aren't you? No wonder you got around so fast."

She jerked her head in some kind of gesture to her companion behind Lyrian, then focused her gaze back on the girl. She walked towards her, still wary as she saw the Chiss raise her blaster awkwardly and attempt to train it on her.

"We don't want to kill you," the woman said, raising her non-blaster hand in conciliation. "But we do have need of you. I know someone who could—employ you, if you're willing. Just hand the blaster back.."

Lyrian clenched her fist, and the pain in her shoulder seemed to flare with her anger. She cleared away the haze encroaching upon her vision and glared at the soldier in front of her. Her chin lifted.

"The Chiss will not sell themselves out as mercenaries," she said in Sy-Bistri, spitting the word for 'mercenary' out as a despicable thing.

There was a lull as her attacker considered this, and then she shrugged. In that moment, three things happened: one, Lyrian became acutely aware of the fact that the woman's companion was behind her, poised to either kill or stun her. Two, Lyrian's finger had tightened of its own accord on the trigger, just a millisecond before her attackers had launched their next offensive; she might have ended up killing the soldier despite her earlier reservations. Three, he was going to be here.

The armored warrior was going to save her—she knew this with the same inexplicable certainty as before, when she had known he was going to be here.

And then time was fluid again.

The soldier-woman grunted in pain as she, like Lyrian before her, was clipped by blaster fire. Her companion crashed the butt of his weapon on Lyrian's head, and the girl went down, stunned, though not entirely unconscious. And the warrior—he materialized behind the woman and swung the forked end of some rifle contraption into the back of her knees, crumpling her instantaneously.

Lyrian fell onto her stomach in the snow, cold seeping into her tunic, chilling her for the first time since she had stepped off the ship. She fought to keep her eyes open as the pain from her head-wound and her burning, aching shoulder radiated throughout her body. She had to stay conscious so the warrior didn't leave. She had to stay conscious so she could make it to Csilla. So she could carry out her plan and find out why the warrior currently fighting on her behalf had appeared to her—twice now.

The reptilian creature who had hit Lyrian had stepped over her fallen form at some point, and now he took a knee and fired his weapon at the new arrival. The armored warrior jerked to the right mechanically, whipped his rifle up, and fired his own blast, so quickly that his attacker didn't even have time to flinch before it hit him full in the chest and he fell backwards into the snow, twitching. The smell of sizzling flesh filled Lyrian's nose.

Meanwhile, the woman seized the opportunity and launched her own counter-attack. She had twisted herself into a crouch after falling, and now she lunged at the warrior's back with the agility of a lethal hunter, knife in hand.

Her blow was true, and she sliced at one of the few vulnerable parts of the warrior's armor—at the joint just behind his knee, where no plate covered him. Lyrian dimly heard the creature inside grunt, faltering at the pain, but then he had swung his rifle towards the woman's face.

She was expecting it this time, though, and she had already jumped back, now out of range of the warrior's weapon and glaring at him.

"And what stake do you have in this quarrel, Mandalorian?" she growled.

Lyrian's breath caught. Of course! She should have recognized the warrior for what he was at first glance. She released a mock groan—though the pain had indeed intensified and her body ached with the cold and shock of her injuries—and shifted just enough that she could get a fuller view of the Mandalorian. She had learned very briefly of his kind during her education a few years ago, and now she berated herself for not remembering it.

The Mandalorians were a rare group to encounter—perhaps even more so than her own species.

Though Lyrian didn't have a very long time to muse on this revelation because the woman's other companion had just appeared behind the Mandalorian. Lyrian almost shouted out a warning, but the Mandalorian apparently sensed the newcomer because he whirled around and shot some kind of cable out of his wrist, which attached to the brutish man's weapon and ripped it from his hands. The Mandalorian wrenched the cable, and it swung around, hurtling the heavy blaster in the direction of the woman's head.

She managed to dodge it, and then both she and the other man launched a joint attack, with the Mandalorian sandwiched between them. Lyrian watched in fascination as the Mandalorian, instead of dropping to the ground or attempting to ward off either of the attackers with one of his fancy gadgets, twisted swiftly around so that his back faced the wall instead of the man.

He was protecting his back, but Lyrian wasn't sure why—he had to have armor there, protection under his thin cloak.

Nonetheless, that was what he did, and now the male attacker had an arm slung awkwardly around one side of the Mandalorian's neck, pulling him to the right as the woman shot her leg out and landed a vicious blow to his chestplate. The Mandalorian reeled backwards, threatening to crash into the wall, but he managed to conjure enough force to pitch himself sideways instead—still protecting his back—and land heavily on the man holding his neck.

There was a crunch, a cry of pain, and a shower of fine snow as the two careened to the ground, and then the Mandalorian was on his feet again. In a single lithe movement, he had procured two blasters, one in each hand, and fired a round from each into both of his attackers. The whole thing happened in under five seconds.

Lyrian closed her eyes as the first flash gleamed upon his silvery armor, and then there was silence—no sounds of struggle, no more blaster fire, not even the sound of the Mandalorian's breathing. That is, there wasn't any sound until she heard a muffled, high-pitched gurgle coming from the warrior's direction. It was not a sound she had been expecting him to make.

She cracked her eyes open.

The Mandalorian stood not six feet away, blasters restored to their rightful places, rifle strapped once more to his back. And now he was trying to look over his shoulder at his cloak, as if the noise were coming from there instead of him. She frowned, and he seemed to murmur something, but with one ear pressed uncomfortably into the freezing snow, she couldn't be sure. Lyrian eased her face back into a neutral expression and refocused her thoughts on something more beneficial.

Here he was.

The warrior.

He had saved her life and she was wounded, but that didn't mean he was going to help her—especially since she was a proven thief and he had been injured himself, however minorly. She needed a way to get him to stay, and she needed one fast because he didn't seem particularly keen on sticking around.

She let out another groan and rustled in the snow, pretending to rouse herself from unconsciousness. She cracked her eyes open and saw that he had moved silently forward and was now standing over her, still, quiet, resolute.

Slowly, making sure to emphasize her trembling and to turn her injured shoulder towards him for inspection, she raised her head and blinked at him.

"P—please," she whispered, pleased at how weak her voice was. "I'm hurt."

The Mandalorian didn't speak, didn't move. The visor stared down at her impassively.

She made a show of letting a violent tremor run through her body, and then she coughed. She let her eyelids droop in apparent exhaustion, but 'managed' to pull herself into a sitting position in the snow. She huddled there, swayed a little bit.

But the Mandalorian turned away and began to leave.

Her mind raced, and she closed her eyes, felt the pressure behind her eyes again. He couldn't leave. He couldn't and and—

His companion.

She reached out desperately into her memories and into the ever-present pressure that led to her visions, focused on the tightness inside her chest and belly. She tried to find his companion in her head.

And immediately, it came to her. As if it had been waiting for her to discover this entire time.

"I know about the Child's gifts!"

That made him stop. Abruptly, too. Lyrian waited just until the Mandalorian turned around to face her, and then she made a great show of rolling her eyes back into her head, trembling once more, and collapsing sideways into the snow.

Approximately three seconds later, she heard the crunch of the snow as the Mandalorian came even closer, close enough that she could have touched his boots if she had wished to. He paused with his shadow cold over her fallen form, and now she could hear him breathing. She wondered for the first time what he looked like under the helmet—if he was humanoid or something different entirely—and then she heard him speak, softly, as if to himself.

"You were looking for us."

There was a rustle, a gentle creak as the material under his armor creaked, and Lyrian tried to become deadweight as his hands slipped under her shoulders and knees. He lifted her up easily, if not somewhat awkwardly. She tried not to flinch away from how cold his armor was against her skin and how much it stung when it touched her injury, and then he was striding forward.

Lyrian sprinted through all the ways this could go wrong and right in her head, made a mental note that she could not forget Pav, that they were going to have to get her out of the Cerean's ship before it was too late—

And she tried not to, she really did, but by the time he stepped out of the alleyway and had turned towards the hill upon which her stowaway ship was parked, she was smiling against his armor.

If any creature in the village had chanced to investigate the sounds of blaster fire they had heard outside, they would have seen that curious sight: a sleek Mandalorian cradling a faintly grinning child in his arms. And if they had, by some miraculous chance, managed to learn any more about this mysterious guardian (or else, criminal), they would have known that he was really carrying two children—the other one strapped into a carrier on his back, concealed by his long cloak, guarded zealously even in combat.

And if the bystander was a sane creature, it would shudder to think of what it might unleash should it ever dare to cross that trio.

The foundling of a Mandalorian was not to be trifled with.

A/N: Hey! And thank you for coming! Just some quick notes: one, I have big plans and high hopes for this story, buutt it might take a bit to post each chapter. I have a Beta reader AND my other multi-chapter story to manage, so expect a chapter here every other week, tentatively.

Secondly, I would LOVE to hear what you guys think about this and what you think could be improved and etc. etc. Please leave a review, please enjoy, and please have an EXCELLENT day because we need more of those in this life. ;D