Survivor: A Star Wars Story

Chapter I

Seven Years Later...

REINA TAUTASKI

The dark haired girl paused as she snipped another flower. Looking up, the evening sky awash with orange and pink was slowly dissolving into a twilight of soft stars. The crimson sun sunk low beneath the horizon and two of the three moons of Zygerria were steadily climbing into the sky. The scene would have been almost peaceful if not for the hell of a world it belonged to.

She stood up amongst the palace gardens, rich and plentiful of blooming flowers and sweet fragrances. Her plain but tattered cream dress swished around her knees and bare feet were swollen, battered and scarred from years of treading on the coarse gravel underfoot. Her hair was entwined into traditional braids that were now falling out with flyaways sticking out everywhere, and large, dark eyes spoke of mistrust and hesitation. To any onlooker, at first, she may look like a peasant from the streets. The reality was much worse.

She was a slave.

The only reason that she was generally clean was so she was not unappealing to the queen's eye, but upon closer inspection, the edges of the dress were frayed and coming apart, splitting and threads sticking out. Smudges and stains were visible, writhing the folds. An assortment of brown bruises covered her arms and a white scar was barely visible in the back of her neck, descending underneath the coarse material of the dress. And yet the sad truth was that Reina was in fact, ironically privileged. Each morning, she would wake up in the servant quarters to a measly bowl of suspicious looking gloop and a glass of water, and then would live off that for the rest of the day. Sometimes the next two days. Her servant clothes clung to her willowy frame: thin and brittle. Her ribs stuck out from beneath her skin and her face was pale and sallow from malnutrition and dehydration. There had been multiple times that she had started to hallucinate from lack of water. If she was any normal person, she would have broken a long time ago. She would have relented under the cruel grip of the Zygerrian slave empire, but she was no ordinary person.

When she'd first been captured by the pirates, she'd still practised the ways of the Jedi and the Force feverishly. Everyday, she'd meditated, clearing her mind and staying in touch with the Code. It didn't mean that it worked, but she tried her hardest to stay selfless and calm. But when she'd got to Zygerria, she was forced to be selfish. She had to take things for herself, to survive. She would never forgive herself for what she did to others to get to where she was now, and even when she looked at herself, she sometimes wondered what it was all for. When cutting flower clippings or attending to the gardens, she picked up metal rods used for helping plants stand upright and envisioned it as the lightsaber she had lost so long ago. Imaginary training bolts fired at her as she blocked, slashed and spun. But it wasn't enough. She strayed further and further from her past and the Jedi Code.

She had initially stretched and did small strength building exercises, but as time went on, motivation faded until she only did it once in a blue moon, and even when she did, she was playing a dangerous game. If the guards ever saw her rehearsing such things, she'd be whipped for treason against her masters. Still, when she did practice the same rituals that she had done in the Temple, a small part of her tugged at her heartstrings. The part aching to go home.

The young girl was conflicted. When she'd first been sold into the slave trade, her plan had been simple. Escape and get back to the Temple. But as time went on, she heard whispers of what the war was doing. New slaves that came in would say the Republic was corrupted and that the Jedi were no longer peace keepers. Then the war came, and the Jedi became generals.  Collateral damage from the Republic became commonplace and planets were seized and put under intense security for the sake of scoring territory. It seemed that Reina's youth in the Temple had a rose coloured tint on it. The Jedi Order were very specific in who they let in the Temple and the Order. Would they really let Reina return? After all she could have been "corrupted" in her time as a slave. In a way, she supposed that was true. As a slave, her innocence had been ripped away and she'd been forced to grow up quicker. And more importantly, did she want to go back?