Sanctuary of the Wanderer

Chapter 1

It was a room untouched by light - not the light of sunrise, nor even that of the moon, only a single fluorescent ray would ever illuminate the emptiness surrounding Poe Dameron. His head throbbed with pain, as though there was something striving to escape, yet the walls of his skull would not allow it. When he had first opened his eyes, he could see nothing at all. Not a movement, nor even a silhouette, was discernible through the oppressive darkness. Yet he was patient, for time seemed without beginning or end in the abominable place to which he had been condemned, and his eyes began to adjust. A silhouette was there indeed for him to behold, something human-like, something more dead than alive. Perhaps no more than a puppet, a heap of fabric.

He watched it for some time with a child's fear of the dark, it did not move, yet with his keen gaze, growing sharper and sharper, he could see that it breathed. The black coat heaved with its breathing, its back was to Dameron, and he watched - his state trance-like, he himself too horrified to make a sound, so much as a motion which his body could not compel by its own resilient will.

In the stillness that neither threatened nor comforted, the man began to question, his faculties soothed by the continued passing of time. What was it that he feared? How long had he been there? Poe stretched out a hand and tried to prop himself up from the cold metallic floor, raising himself slowly, his gaze not leaving the only other form within the chamber. At this sign of motion, something in the room became aware of his presence and a light turned on, flickering with a pale blue hue as that of a screen. The pilot bit at his lower lip, his eyes darting to and fro between the thing in the corner and the luminescence above.

They had done something to him, some change, some drug - he knew not what, he only felt that something was deeply wrong with him. That they had taken his very soul from him, that no one could save him, lost as he was in a prison of monsters. Mad thoughts weaved and danced in his head while he fought against them one by one, trying to reclaim what was left of himself from the poison that was within him. Every inch of his skin felt hypersensitive, every sound reached his ear amplified, every vision appeared grotesque and embodied with meaning.

He wished to scream yet was afraid to make such a sound of boldness, whether in rebellion or submission - afraid that they would come in - dark silhouettes, obedient to some force unknown to man, an unimaginable thing existing only in the mind. A thing of faith and anxiety. For a moment he turned his eyes solely to the bulb, as though it were a great eternal eye, distracting him from the maddening fit that was overcoming him. He needed something to focus on.

Yet from the corner other eyes were turned upon him, equally distraught and searching through vague thoughts of a different construction - unfamiliar to the man's nature, suppressed for decades into recesses of catalogued memories, carefully wrapped in vengeful ambition.

His belief was that precise order had been hideously distorted, satirized by a wicked mind that forced him to stay in emptiness and confinement. Yet it felt like more than ordinary punishment, commonplace cruelty - it gave an ethereal hue to all that he saw and sensed, as though he were in a dream. His hands longed to search for his dagger, the comfort of knowing that if he was not strong enough to endure, he need not beg. Such memorabilia he carried with him always, a token from the days of old when he was weak and pitiful for all to see, when he had nothing to coat his shame. His emotions were read upon his face. Yet the latter he still could not fully learn to tame; the way his lips, his eyes, his hands would speak what he would have kept silent - telling all of his secrets like idle gossips.

The moment when their eyes met, all disappeared but the sharp feeling of revulsion, instantaneous and instinctual, an enemy recognized among strange things and strange worlds, in a surreal place full of archetypal evil.

General Hux raised himself cautiously, his arms shaking, wrapping his coat around his body like the feeble protection of wings for a bird struck to the ground. He felt that is frame was a thing emaciated with hunger, with weakness. He imagined ribs protruding and slender hands grasping, all his doubts and inhibitions magnified. Yet glimpses of the ordinary flitted also through his mind, disappearing as quickly as they came - for such things had no place in the metallic world which they then inhabited. To search for the blade, to strike down his enemy, these things he could not will himself to do, for then a more frightening enemy would remain. To be left alone in a place so imbued with emptiness made him shiver; he could imagine it well and would do all that he could to thwart it.

The two men were frozen in place by the shock of awareness, revulsion giving way to fear, fear to curiosity, and then, almost imperceptibly, to a sort of compassion as that of living beings stranded on an island. They were together and their fate was entangled, lest by some greater misfortune the sole witness of their existence would be taken away.