Destruction thrives on chaos. Chaos thrives on disorder. Disorder is the child of weak governments that others of power allow themselves to be subverted to. The Galactic Empire is dead. The First Order is done for, but we will survive and form what we were always meant to be. A galaxy of peace. Without the Sith. Without the Jedi.
—Rayla Sloane, about the faults of the Galactic Empire and the First Order and her intent to create a government better than both.
Rayla Sloane was a Human female who served as one of the leading commanders of the First Order Navy, where she was a Grand Admiral like her mother, Rae Sloane, before her. She was the childhood friend of Armitage Hux and in the aftermath of the Battle of Exegol, Rayla was instrumental in ensuring the survival of a major remnant of the First Order she led after the deaths of the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious and Allegiant General Enric Pryde marked the collapse of their leadership, the destruction of the Sith Eternal and the subsequent galaxy-wide loss of power that the Order faced, assuming the position of influence that would once have been held by the Supreme Leader without assuming the vacant office. The spitting image of her mother, Rae Sloane, Rayla was born a year after the battle that saw the Imperial Military beaten on the planet Jakku, but the identity of her father was a source of rumored debate among survivors of the Starfleet that had retreated beyond the galactic frontier. The popular theory — especially among those of her Imperial remnant that had directly served within the Galactic Empire before its collapse — was that Rayla was the illegitimate daughter of a secret romance between Rae Sloane and the late Gallius Rax, although in actuality, Sloane had given birth to her child alone and without a partner. Rayla, however, later used the debate regarding her supposed sire to accelerate her position with the ranks of the developing First Order, rising past the Imperial veterans inside the faction that her mother had led in colonizing the Unknown Regions as one of the first of the New Guard, a position gained from her talents and leadership skills.
Because of their ages, Rayla would grow close to Armitage Hux during their childhood, despite the animosity felt by their separate parents, although they drifted apart as Hux descended further into coldness and ruthlessness, cumulating in the Hosnian Prime cataclysm, where Sloane saw her friend wipe out hundreds of innocent lives. Much like Rae Sloane, Rayla was loyal to the First Order out of a desire to bring order, justice and law to what she considered to be a chaotic galaxy, rather than a hunger for personal power, and while Sloane chose to stand with the eventual Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, who respected her talent for leadership and thus included her among the Supreme Council, then with the Final Order and resurrected Sith Lord Darth Sidious, who's Imperial regime her mother had previously served, she did so with a certain reluctance. Rayla was present with the First Order at their final battle against the Resistance military on the dark world of Exegol, where she saw the Sith fleet crushed, but Rayla escaped to a secret shipyard of Imperial design established by her mother, from which she founded a remnant of the First Order composed of numerous individuals that shared her simple desire for control for the sake of order, not power. Embracing her legacy as the daughter of the founding leader of the First Order Grand Admiral Rae Sloane and the rumored offspring of Gallius Rax, Rayla swiftly assumed power over the majority of the First Order's remaining military, recreating her mother's Shadow Council, who she used to reconnect her organization's splinter factions and reintroduce a semblance of order to them while simultaneously assuming power as the central ruler of the remnants. However, much like her immediate predecessor, Enric Pryde, Sloane did not assume the same mantra of Supreme Leader that her other predecessors had held. Believing she could form the Empire her mother had failed to build, specifically one that was untouched by Sith or Jedi, which she believed to be the destructive flaw in both the Empire and the First Order, just as they were in the Old and New Republics, Rayla led her remnant, composed of a large fleet, in an exodus to the far reaches of Wild Space to begin again.