Between Your Star and Mine

A gloved hand rose to take in the sweep of light and energy arrayed before them. "Look at it, Lieutenant. So much beauty among so much turmoil. In a way, we are but an infinitely smaller reflection of the same conflict. ..."

—The Force Awakens novelisation, first edition.

. . .

Those who say the eternal sandboxes that are deserts do not grow cold have never trekked through Jakku's rising sand dunes in the heart of the night. They have never felt the sandy winds crash onto their backs with a sweeping chill against the afternoon's perspiration, or the billions of cold granules filling their boots with each sinking step that prickled their soles until they were an ungainly shade of bruised blue.

One particularly unfortunate little girl had, though, all too well.

With all of the strength the toughest scavenger had leftover from a hard day's sweat, the small one stomped through the sea of sand underneath the all-encompassing night sky. Her hands gripped tightly onto the thin straps that kept the large and barely contained pile of junk on her back, secured only with a worn out sheet of cloth and her will to eat and live.

A new flare of stinging wind greeted her bare arms and seeped through the thin bandages of cloth wrapped all around her torso and the raw silk blouse she wore.

"Cold...cold...cold!" her teeth chattered.

She had to stop soon, she knew, or else she'd freeze in her tracks. An image of herself as a statue- legs positioned as if they were to take another wide step, face stilled with eternal emotions of disparity and hopelessness, and eventually of the sand that would shift over and bury the corpse that would never scavenge another rusted shield generator or complain about the cruel Mother Sun again- took form in the child's mind.

And so she stopped her voyage to nowhere. Her eyes squinted to try and find something, somewhere, that would show her mercy, and that would give her a new excuse to keep existing in this desolate system.

As if an answer to her unverbalized fantasies, she did find something: a light. It was far off, lining the very edges of the horizon, but it was there—that was all that mattered. She adjusted her huge load and persisted.

The brightness was growing closer and closer. As it did, she could make out its finer details. It wasn't just any light, but a fire! A sweet fire. A beautiful fire. A warm fire. Oh, she could feel the heat send tiny kisses to her hard skin now, feel the glow melt the coldness of the air surrounding her...

"Stop right there!" the heat bit at her.

She stopped.

"Who do you think you are? Edging near my fire? Hmph!"

"I—I just wanted someplace to rest for the night. Maybe just even an hour."

A pause. The agonizing detachment from warmth continued.

"Come closer," the fire beckoned through gritted teeth.

The girl stepped closer to it, now only three or four meters away from its embrace. It was not alone, though. The inferno was accompanied by the frail and gnarled head of a human- an old woman.

Her face was horrible, sagging with bags of sun-singed skin, and lined with eternal age. She sat crossed legged, slouching on the other side of the fire as she stared at the child for what seemed like a full minute or two, a cruel judgement being passed in her worn out mind.

"Hmph."

Was that a yes for the young one to live for the night? Another cruel, cold "no"? The child's mouth was opening to beg and she could not stop it.