Ironstone

Ironstone was a type of hard rock that could be found on the Outer Rim Territories planet Elphrona, in a region between two groups of hills. When a group of Nihil marauders was transporting kidnapped members of the Blythe family through the region in 232 BBY, one of them was thrown out of the repulsorcart housing the Blythes, with Erika Blythe assuming the Nihil had split her skull open against ironstone on the ground. Later, Jedi Master Porter Engle, who had been pursuing the group of Nihil, threw his lightsaber against a Nihil who had taken up a sniper position in one of the hills, with the weapon slicing through both the raider and the ironstone outcropping behind which he had taken cover.

Description

A type of hard rock, ironstone could be found on the planet Elphrona in the Outer Rim Territories. In one area on the planet, jagged ironstone slopes formed a more narrow canyon between two groups of iron and magnetite hills.^[1]

History

A Nihil operation on Elphrona (pictured) took place in a region that featured ironstone.

In 232 BBY,^[2] a group of the Nihil marauders was transporting kidnapped members of the Blythe family along a dirt track in the region of Elphrona between the two hill groups toward the former's starships. When Ottoh Blythe gave a command to the family's steelees—which the Nihil had taken from their homestead in order to transport both themselves and the captives—to suddenly stop galloping, the Nihil were thrown forward, including the Trandoshan woman who was guarding the Blythes in a steelee-drawn repulsorcart. Erika Blythe then heard a thick, hard sound that was similar to both a snap and a thud, which she believed had accompanied the woman's skull splitting open against ironstone on the ground.^[1]

Later during the Nihil's flight toward their ships, two of them, Egga and Rel, took up sniper positions on the hills forming the canyon sides in order to shoot at the group of Jedi pursuing them. One of the two Nihil shot the steelee on which^[1] Jedi Master^[3] Porter Engle had been riding, and one of the snipers then also opened fire at Engle's back. The Jedi deflected the shots aimed at him and leaped high into the air, in the process noticing the Nihil who had targeted him. Engle threw his lightsaber, and the Nihil took cover behind an ironstone outcropping. The lightsaber, however, cut through both the rock and the Nihil, killing him.^[1]

Behind the scenes

Ironstone appeared in the 2021 novel Light of the Jedi, written by Charles Soule as part of the Star Wars: The High Republic multimedia project's^[1] Phase I.^[4] In the real world, ironstone is a type of sedimentary rock in which the proportion of iron exceeds fifteen percent.^[5]