and Leia lead a group to destroy the cloning facility on Wayland, killing C'baoth and destroying the cloning cylinders. Just as Thrawn and Pellaeon learn that the Noghri aided in the attack on Wayland, Thrawn's Noghri bodyguard, Rukh, kills the Grand Admiral—whose last words are, "But ... it was so artistically done." The tide of battle at Bilbringi turns, and with the hope of victory dashed by Thrawn's death, Pellaeon orders the Imperial forces to retreat. Development The idea for a post-film trilogy was conceived by Lou Aronica, an editor at Bantam Books who proposed a series as "ambitious as the films were". Lucas was initially skeptical of the proposal, but acquiesced; Bantam Spectra then brought Timothy Zahn on board to write the trilogy. Zahn was given freedom to develop the direction the story should go in, with minimal pushback from Lucasfilm. Before starting work on the books, Zahn was only given two rules: the series had to take place three to five years after Return of the Jedi, and no characters killed in the films could return. Changes which were requested by Lucasfilm included changing an evil clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi to the new character of Joruus C'baoth, and the renaming of Rukh's species from Sith to Noghri. In order to provide him with existing worldbuilding material, Lucasfilm supplied Zahn with supplementary content from the tabletop RPG Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. When conceiving of the antagonist for the series, Zahn desired a villain who was less brutal than Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine. Instead, Zahn sought inspiration from military commanders throughout history and envisaged an adversary who could outsmart the protagonists. In creating the character of Thrawn, Timothy Zahn said: I think it’s because he was so different from any other villain we’d seen in Star Wars to that time. Most Imperials seemed to follow the “hit it with a rock” school of thought regarding opposition. Thrawn, in contrast, used strategy and careful planning and usually managed to be two or three steps ahead of the New Republic. Readers like their villains to be a challenge to the heroes because that forces the heroes to bring their best game to the field. The more clever the opponent, and the more difficult the fight, the more satisfying the victory. The original, working title for Heir to the Empire was "Wild Card", which was rejected by Lucasfilm as they believed