A Girl, A Boy and the Stars - A FinnRey story

Into the Dark

How close would this one get?

Rey leaned forward a little to watch another spray of red explode from the largest of the glowing craters, far below the shuttle. Tendrils of lava stretched and broke into globes as it reached up, as if projected by the Dark Side itself, grasping for the hated Skywalker until gravity overcame it and the molten rock retreated to fall to the blackened landscape as a hard, burning rain.

That one hadn't quite made it, but maybe if she lowered the Beltane a little more? She could watch this all day.

Stood on the edge of the loading bay, the landscape beneath her was mesmerizing. Pitch black rock, bent and twisted into smoothly flowing shapes of rivers of lava past, studded with pools of bright red, laced with scarlet veins. To her right, white clouds of ash billowed, angry and dense, obscuring her objective: the temple, and the artifact within.

And somewhere within it, the Darksiders. She could feel them waiting and assumed they could feel her watching. How many they were it was hard to say, because of their proximity to the Temple: a Dark presence, a stain on the Force so intense it could be felt from orbit. Whatever had happened there, whatever evil it contained, had cast a shadow that had all but extinguished light and life from this world.

Rey took a breath and stilled her mind. Showtime.

"To point one," she commanded the craft, and it slid away from the craters, to a position over the ash cloud.

"Lower field."

The wind rushed into the bay and whipped around her, flooding the space with a sulphuric odor and a biting chill. It ruffled the new tunic and pants that she'd had the craft fabricate that morning. They were a little more formal than her standard workwear, a sandy gold edged in white that seemed more appropriate to a warrior of the light than the usual dark grey.

She crossed her arms over her body and stepped off the edge, to plummet downwards, the fall momentarily overwhelming her senses before she could stabilize and connect with the Force again, using it to ensure she stayed upright and not tumble. She closed her eyes and couldn't suppress a smile. The Force Descent was one of the first core skills she had mastered. Idiosyncratic to every Jedi, most used air currents to assist them, like birds, gliding and soaring, but there was no subtlety in her approach, just power and nerve.

The shuttle was left far behind now. It would ascend to orbit and wait, shielded and concealed; no sense in exposing it to whatever dangers lurked below. The ash cloud looked like solid rock as it rushed towards her. Would she feel the impact? She'd not considered that, but had considered the mess the clinging dust would make, and had planned ahead; she wasn't going to show up to the party smothered in grey gunge. Reputations. She constructed a Force Barrier around herself, as she had done against the vacuum earlier, the world silent for a few moments before she emerged into clear air and her attention switched to slowing and stopping her fall, to touch down gracefully onto the flat black plain.

From here, the ash clouds were low and oppressive, casting shadows of perfect dark on the dim landscape, some ghostly wisps broken free to skim the ground. The glow of lava pools and rivers illuminated distant clouds, bathing the scene in a soft red light. Rey stood upon a surface of obsidian perfection, a vast expanse of flat black volcanic glass that reflected the clouds above and clicked against her boots as she started to walk in the direction of the temple. She couldn't see it yet, but could sense where it lay, waiting.

A stray shaft of sunlight pierced the billowing clouds to fall upon the plain in front of her, illuminating what lay within, and her steps faltered and slowed. Rubble, pieces of buildings, machinery. And people. Crowds of them, flocks of them suspended in the hard, black ocean beneath her feet, ghostly and still, some looking to the sky in terror, some clinging to loved ones, their final moments preserved in perfection for all time. An entire civilization extinguished and frozen in a single monstrous, desperate act by a failing empire of evil, a world that had laughed and loved and lived reduced to a beautiful, obscene graveyard by the Dark Side.