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

Alone in the Dark

Rey felt lost, even though she knew exactly where she was going. She walked through a labyrinth that would have been impossible to navigate but for the string she followed; the call of the artifact, luring her onwards and deeper. As she descended into the planet, doubts and fears nagged at her with growing insistence; why was she wandering further and further from home and safety, as if searching in vain for an answer to a question she struggled to form. And had she gone too far to find her way back?

It was difficult to know how long she'd been walking, but it must have been more than an hour, through vast empty spaces utterly devoid of any sign of life, smooth planes of dark volcanic rock meeting at sharply cut corners, full of random seeming slopes, turnings and offshoots. Rey employed the saber as a lantern, but the Temple was also dimly lit by regularly spaced points of cold white light, sometimes in the walls, sometimes the ceilings or floors.

Some spaces were so wide and low that she had to stoop, some so slender and tall that they brushed both of her shoulders as she gazed upwards to where the walls of the shaft disappeared into the gloom above. But mostly the dimensions were immense in all directions, the scale of its corridors and rooms absurd, dwarfing her, reducing a girl to an insect, weak and vulnerable.

She remembered tales of Monoliths, gigantic creatures spawned by the Dark Side, mutated by Sith alchemy: a use of the Force so feared and forbidden that it was almost taboo among Jedi. Perhaps these corridors were created to accommodate them. She felt a chill as she imagined one of the Sithspawn waiting in silence around the next dark corner, ready to crush her; there would be no escape, nowhere to run.

Or perhaps the intention of this place was to intimidate, to impress upon the visitor their insignificance in comparison to the Force that bound the universe?

Or perhaps they were the result of randomness. Didn't Sith believe that chaos was a gateway to strength? Something like that. Strength. This place was in itself a show of the raw strength they worshipped; an enormous power wielded to create a space thousands of times larger than it needed to be.

Or perhaps she shouldn't spend too much time wondering about the workings of the Sith mind.

The spaces were empty, as far as she could see. Huge flat planes of featureless stone that towered above her, like a monument to the most brutal minimalism. Rey found herself at a T-junction. The Force called her leftwards, but on turning to check the path to the right, she could discern that it contained not the usual blank, smooth walls, but something else, made vague by distance and shadow.

An instinct that she should have heeded urged her not to stray, to stay on the path, but curiosity moved her feet in the direction of one of the walls, advancing cautiously, holding the saber aloft to cast its golden light. She was barely 20-30 paces from it now, but it still wasn't clear what it was. She needed to be closer. She had to see. She edged nearer, warily squinting into the shadows. Nearer still.

How long Rey studied it before she understood what she was looking at, was difficult to say. Too long. It was difficult to grasp, the reality too foul for her mind to accept without putting up a struggle. Or maybe she'd known the instant she saw it, but had kept looking, kept examining it in closer detail, hoping that her eyes had deceived her and that it wasn't really what it appeared to be. Those couldn't be people. Surely. Because, why? Why would they be? What purpose could it serve? And what had been done to them?

The saber cast its glow on a small portion of a vast tableau of humans and machines. Her gaze traced the curves of bones and sinews as they merged with the dull metal of instruments shaped to echo their organic contours. Blood vessels branching into tubes that fed pistons and cylinders. Joints of bone fused with hinges and bearings. Skin wrapping both the skull it had grown around and the cables screwed into it. Bodies arranged, broken and twisted to align with unyielding mechanisms engineered to generate, distill and transmit suffering. The faces. They had not died peacefully here. How long had they screamed? Had they understood what was happening to them? How long before they had been allowed to die?