Star Wars: Life During Wartime

Redemption, part 5

The first jolt woke Raena from a dreamless sleep.  All around her, the planet ground its teeth.  The floor danced beneath her, bouncing her around unmercifully.  Frantic to find some purchase, she scrabbled at the smooth stone, invisible as always in the darkness.  Her fingernails snapped off.  The small sounds vanished in the horrific rumbling, which she felt as well as heard.  Every hair on her body twitched in atavistic panic.

Earthquake, Raena realized futilely.  The Sith world's surface strained to pull itself apart, to spill out its molten core like blood.

Something crashed in the darkness.  Raena staggered to her feet.  She refused to cower in the dark, awaiting death.  She'd cringed for too long already.  Raising her hands above her head, she tried to summon the ceiling down.  Come and crush me, she prayed.  Put me out of my misery.  Set me free.

With a bump that knocked her feet out from under her, the temblor stopped.  Raena hit her head on the stone floor, hard enough to see a white flash.  For all the notice the planet had taken of her prayer, it might have simply rolled over in its sleep.  She wondered if she could focus her anger inward enough to tear herself apart.

Later.  Now, she lay in the darkness where she had fallen, aching, catching her breath.  She didn't feel like crying.  All the tears had already been wrung out of her parched eyes.

When the man materialized before her, Raena assumed she dreamt him.  In the eternal darkness, the chasm between waking and dream could be crossed in a step. Though he stood before her in full color, his form was as insubstantial as a hologram. She could have reached right through him.

Raena raised a hand to shield her eyes from the blue-gray light that shimmered around him.  The illumination was bright enough to reveal blood on her fingertips from her broken nails.  Her hand itself was skeletal from starvation, the bones standing out like knobbed steel cables.  Another nightmare, she thought.

"Do you recognize me, Raena?"

She squinted at him, an aging man with graying hair and large melancholy blue eyes.  He stood very straight and tall for such a sad human. Beneath his brown robes, he had an athlete's body, just past its prime.  Warm compassion radiated from him, as disturbing for her as Thallian's lust or the Emperor's evil or Vader's rage had been.

"I've never seen you before in my life," Raena assured him.  She felt herself speaking, heard her rusty voice disappear into the darkness.  This was no dream.  At last she had some company, even if it was a ghost.  "Have you come to evict me from my grave?"

"No. This tomb is yours alone, Raena Zacari."

"What do you want?"

"What does anyone want? To make things right."

What did she want? All she wanted now was out. But before? For so long, she'd wanted to find her father, the powerful man who would protect her, claim her, the one who'd make everything right for her.  She'd wanted so intensely to be loved.  She'd worked so hard to be worthy.  She'd sacrificed her soul on the desperate altar of ambition, wooing a man who never acknowledged any sacrifice at all.  The only thing her sacrifices won her was Thallian's devotion.  He'd wanted to sculpt her into his idea of the perfect woman, the perfect killing machine. That had never been who she was.

The ghost knelt at Raena's side.  "I want to apologize to you, Raena. I never considered your feelings, only how you could be used. You were useful in obtaining information from prisoners. You distracted Thallian's ambition. I exploited that."

Raena shrank away from the spirit, searching his face for any familiar feature, any clue how he could know these things about her.  The gentleness of his voice convinced her that he was a complete stranger.  "Who are you?"