Aldor's Eye - Part I

Chapter VII - The Power

Stunned and unable to process any of it just yet, Din stood staring at the dead ray for a good half hour. Everything he knew about the physical world now lay in shambles. It should not have been possible for him to penetrate the ray's hide with his vibroblade, but there it was, still sunk to the hilt in the ray's head. After his mind battled with this for a while, he finally went back to the carcass to pull the blade out. He had to take both hands to it and struggled to pull it out until he cast his mind back up to the suns to ask for a boost. As soon as he asked it of them, the blade came out easily with one upward jerk of one hand. For another ten minutes, he sat on the ray's shoulder and studied the blade, then the wound he'd just pulled it from. The ray's blood was slimy and smelled like phosphorus and salt. It was a strange, luminescent shade of pale pink. He'd never seen anything like it. He wondered how many uses Aldor had found for it.

The thought of her brought him back from bewilderment. He remembered this was his tribute to her, and finally stood from the ray's shoulder and walked back toward the glen. When he got there, he put his armor back on and called R5 to bring the sledge to the beach where he'd left the ray. He had time, so he sat down by the stream, and passively watched the small silvery fish that swam upstream in sparse schools through the shimmering water, half in a trance while the ground trembled beneath him.

After a while, Din grew restless enough to walk back to the beach. But all he could do was sit and stare a bit longer at the ray, trying to replay the brief battle in his mind and failing. He had no memory of it. It was like he'd been blinded. Or overtaken. Possessed by the elements. That much he remembered. Images of the suns and the gas giant. The springs underground and the sea. All serving him through awakened instinct.

Don't use it. Forget it's there. The voice again, drifting from a deep chasm in his memory, prodding at his brain. Din knew he should be anxious, but he couldn't rouse himself to it anymore. The voice had been reduced to a whispered curiosity that Din noted, but didn't heed. Whatever he was meant to forget, he'd already used it. There was no holstering it now.

Within a couple hours, R5 arrived with the sledge, beeping and whirring and asking Din how he would get the ray onto the hovering platform. "For an astromech, you don't use your logic engine very much," Din grunted. "Just disengage the repulsorlifts and we'll drag or push it on. We can extend the panels if it's too big." R5 bristled at Din's jab, but did as he asked, and after a good fifteen minutes of pushing and hefting, they had the ray on the sledge, headed back toward the settlement.

As he walked away from the sea, Din began to come back to himself, and remembered where he was and where he was going. Pale crimson lips and nose bumps. Companionship and peace. Nothing sounded better right now than to spend an evening at the table with his son and the woman he loved, swapping thoughts and tending to little tasks. He heaved a sigh that pushed through his lungs from the very ground under his feet, and finally made himself admit that this was exactly what he wanted. What he'd always wanted. He just never let himself ask those questions until now. When he asked them and cycled through all the possible responses, he couldn't come up with a single good reason to leave the Eye. The things that meant the most to him were right here with him.

A rumble from the core of the Eye took issue with this conclusion. It didn't think he'd proven himself just yet. If he meant to stay even one more night the Eye would demand another toll. Din looked up at the gas giant, larger in the sky than he'd ever seen it, looming over him in judgment. But Din wasn't concerned. He knew his worth. And he knew the lengths he would go to for his family.

Bring it on.

It was Din's only thought when he sensed malice from above. Not the gas giant, but the foul, greedy vultures that always unnerved him. They'd caught a whiff of the ray's corpse, and wanted a piece of it. They looked spitefully down on him with their menacing white eyes when he raised his head to get the measure of them. "Fuck," he grunted flatly when one enormous, ghostly bird swooped lower in the sky, circling overhead in calculated loops, cawing and screaming in turns.