Afterglow | The Clone Wars

Looming Gates

Narrator: "Desperate times on Mandalore! Having won neutrality for the Mandalorian system, Duchess Satine now finds herself an outsider with little aid to her people. Supplies are impossible to come by, except on the black market. As a result, the Duchess faces a world consumed by greed. Hoping to alleviate some of the tensions rising on the capital city of Sundari, Satine has called upon her friend Padmé Amidala to make a diplomatic visit"

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The dream came in pieces—violent, fractured, strobing behind her eyes like lightning behind glass. Sweat clung to her skin. Her body, frozen, panicked. Unable to move as the ghosts of the dark passed looked at her beside.

She was thrashing. Screaming. All inside of her head. Something unseen had touched her, twisted her. Violated her. She couldn't see it, only feel the echo of it in her bones.

Hands, pale ones, came down over her shoulders, her arms, her face. Gentle but wrong. Soft but hollow. Their touch was too late. Meaningless.

"I care for you," someone said. A voice without a face, soaked in honey, empty as the void.

She clawed at them, spit them out of her ears, shoved them away. She wanted them off her.

Emerald eyes.

Blue eyes.

A mother's voice, or something like it. Blood on a white collar. Blood splattered on white sheets. Blood splattered before a throne, seeping into the floor as if it were water to soil.

The floor vanished. She dropped, through the bed, through the earth. Then fire. And screaming again. It was hers, this time. She lashed out, struck something. Wood? Stone? Flesh?

The dream recoiled, but it never left. It pulsed behind her ribs like a second and third heartbeat. The Zillo Beast, caged and betrayed, raged in her blood. And it wasn't just the beast anymore.

It was her.

Her body threw itself forward and she shot up in bed. Slim blankets fell from her body, her sweat-drenched skin catching the ever-twinkling lights that perpetuated outside her window. She felt her chest through her under bra, the heartbeat inside pulsing through the skin. Any faster and it might have popped out.

She pressed her palms to her eyes, willing herself to climb down from his high. It was just a dream, nothing more, nothing less. The Zillo Beast was long gone, as was her past.

The rest of the night passed slow. She didn't go back to sleep. Her time became occupied with sifting through her comm links, reflecting on which one belonged to which clone, and ruminating on memories. She tried Mars's comm again, as if he'd resurface from the dead and respond. As if he'd come back with another dry remark, while whipping another rookie into shape.