this is a disclaimer.
AN: OK. Quotation-salad, including lines from: Tolkien, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Gaiman, Donne, Tennyson, Stevenson, Christina Rossetti and tiny whispers of Frost and Burns. Ienpu should rightly be Ienpw, a spelling of the Egyptian name of the jackal-headed God the Greeks called Anubis.
twas but a dream of thee
No lost Jedi ruins here; no abandoned base or wreckage of a ship. Instead rubble raised in heaps tree-trunk stumps with brambles trailing, dells of darkness in uneven ground –
pits pits pits Luke thinks, snatch of a quotation words not his own and there's a scratch against his boot as something catches on the leather, tears, falls away.
Mara, behind him beside him with him always, a steady-burning candle-flame in the Darkness.
This place is Dagobah albeit drier. This place is Bespin, and a throne room long-destroyed.
"No Jedi ever came here," Mara says.
"Unless to face a Sith," Luke says.
North to south the ravine runs, a trench scraped out of the ground by the spade of some giant-child the way Anakin once made trenches in sand pits in Coruscanti parks. dark and deep – but never lovely, echoes again, as if Luke's own thoughts cannot do justice to this place. (To her.)
"The locals wouldn't know one from the other," Mara says.
Luke breathes rancid rotten air: no, not rotten. The rotting here is long over. Dust alone remains.
"We've lost so much," he says, and doesn't know if he means Luke and Mara, or Luke the representative of the Jedi Order, or Luke, speaking for the galaxy as a whole.
shadows of the past: the world is changed...
Something moves in darkness buried deep gaunt white on all fours it creeps down the cliff: drawn to what? The light of their sabres? The sound of their voices?
The heat of their bodies the smell of their blood.
Lang-legged red-eyed. Mara sees it too; draws a fierce breath.
There's another.
And yet more.
They creep crawl gather, red blood where the brambles scratch them and their eyes gleam in the dim: above their heads the sky is blue but no sunlight reaches the floor of this gulch, this trench out of Hell, enough to make a Tatooine farmboy homesick for Beggar's Canyon and the long empty corridors of the Jundland Wastes where death lurks in the cliff-shadows and the slavers pitch their hidden camps in caves to wait for unwary travellers.
Luke begins to back away.
Mara's fingers clench tight around her sabre cannot give up will not run away but she is no fool and her boots click on stone when she follows.
"There's a story I heard in the inn last night," she says. "After you'd gone to comm Leia."
Luke swings his lightsabre just to hear the hum of it slicing through the air. They are not far from the mouth of the ravine. There is nothing behind them: only in front.
The first creature he noticed raises its head – oddly flat muzzle gleam of teeth – seems to sniff, weaving this way and that fixates on them again.
Moving ever forwards.
"Do tell."
"That the gates of Hell itself are lost in these hills somewhere," she says. "That the hounds of Ienpu, Lord of the Dead, roam the cliffs and canyons, hunting down anyone foolish enough to come close to the entrance of their Master's domain, to drag them through the Gates and before their Master's throne like a cat will bring a dead mouse to its owner."
Luke snorts: inelegant break-the-spell. "And we still came out here?"
"We're adrenaline junkies," Mara says and shoots the creature in the lead: it crumples, and another embeds its teeth into it.
Luke sinks into the Force and watches as the threads of light take his sabre fling it forwards shears through the body of a second creature flick of his fingers against another thread and it turns to strike another down Mara laughs watching the strange duel: three dead now to her blaster and the others, finally, flee:
Mara and Luke turn and run chasing each other across bramblestrewn rocks round the dead stumps of trees burst out of the canyon's mouth and don't stop there the road goes ever on and on/nor i half turn to go yet turning/faster than fairies faster than witches/and catch a falling star...
every dead thing: i am re-begot/of absence darkness death/things which are not.
Luke runs with the wind in his hair and his footsteps pounding on the dry earth and Mara keeps pace with him easily never stumbling nor does he and they turn a bend in the trail and the sun falls across them.
dragons have one soft spot somewhere always/we save our lives in such unlikely ways.
Later, in the inn, the innkeeper unbends enough to tell them tales of children lost in those hills, of hikers with mysterious wounds, of a whisper in the night beyond the firelight and a fear that creeps beneath the bedroom doors.
Luke and Mara shiver, and smile at each other, and tell him to go up into those hills, and to take fire.
Later, in their room, there is fire of a different kind entirely: about him cast her shadowy hair/and arms like silver glimmering/your gown going off such beauteous state reveals:
forswear it sight! for i ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
"And when we get home," Mara says sleepy-sated-content, "will we strip our sleeve, and show our scars?"
Teasing.
Luke chuckles. "I never have words for you," he says. If only all confession were as easy as this: "Not my own, at any rate."
Mara never judges; not in this.
She twists just so, props herself up. Hand on his chest, legs entwined from such a steadfast spell his lady's eyes...
"It's all right," she says. "I never knew you'd read half of those things."
"Hyperspace jumps," he says.
Purse of lips casual calculating. "Oh, really?" And then: "All that poetry. I may have to marry you after all."
Rush of joy: and yet, still, even now, not just a stranger's words but a tease to top it off: "Out flew the web and floated wide/the mirror crack'd from side to side/the doom has come upon me cried –"
A kiss, for silence, and Mara too unable to find her own words for fears still-lingering Luke reads them in her mind as she saw into his: though the night was made for loving and the day returns too soon...
But:
awake! arise! my love, and fearless be/or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self/which is the god of my idolatry.
Very shortly, words are pointless: unwanted unneeded. They touch and kiss and move together (but truth to tell: hardly silent), and when the sunlight comes and brings the rest of the galaxy with it, their promises are – long since – made.