The Hatchling
Act 1
It started with a pathetic life-form of native Tatooinian extraction.
If he had been in his right mind, this fact alone should have been sufficient deterrent to send him hastening in the opposite direction without so much as a backward glance; but he had long since renounced his last feeble claims upon mental balance, admitting to himself that sanity and he, in the truest and fullest sense, had long since parted ways. And recently society at large – or what passed for it here, in this despicable hive of scum and villainy- had come round to his point of view on the matter, habitually appending the title "Crazy" or sometimes "Crazy Old" to his chosen pseudonym. He only hoped that he lived up to the accusation in a manner befitting his high and all but invalidated calling. He had no doubt at all that they were right in their prejudiced and dismissal of his character.
After all, only a crazy man would attempt to rescue a stranded krayt dragon hatchling.
"Am I crazy?" he asked the first diurnal wind, the gentle susurration before dawn, that subtle breeze that held only as much heat as a living breath, one carried by some nameless grace over the planet's fire-rimmed horizon to the equally nameless pilgrim trudging his way homeward with a baby krayt dragon tucked in the wide sleeve of his fraying robe. "…Or have I always been crazy?"
The wind seemed to chuckle, a hot wafting of mirth that cavorted about the tattered hem of his cloak and tickled the back of his neck, where roughly shorn hair already curled damp with perspiration. "You have always been crazy," the ever moving currents seemed to tell him. "At least, from a certain point of view. But I think you are beginning, at last, to grow into it."
"But…. is it civilized?" he wondered aloud.
The wind swept his hood back and ruffled his hair. "Here you are dressed in rags and ill-shaven, carrying a half-dead beast back to your primitive hovel, and you can still ask such a question?" Tiny dust devils swirled mischievously in his wake, obliterating what little footprints he left in the shifting sands. "Do not fear – you lend madness a peculiar elegance."
He grunted his sardonic amusement and wearily sloughed onward.
The wind wrung moisture from his eyes and then wiped it from his cheeks. He tightened his protective grip on the beautiful baby lizard and doggedly marched back to the shelter of his lonely abode.
He really wasn't of a sentimental temperament.
Or, if he had been born with such a sweet disposition, it had been rigorously trained out of him before memory had fully dawned over his bright inner horizon. It was not, he assured himself, the irrational ebb and tide of emotion that had called him to the hatchling's side. It was the mandate of something deeper: compassion, or perhaps even familial connection. A thought worthy of a lunatic, true; but when he had first heard the abandoned infant's cries, its bone-deep keening, the wavering unearthly ululation of its species, he had recognized at once the familiar refrain that echoed through the plenum with his every breath. He would know anywhere the pure inaudible tones of heartbroken defiance ringing in the anguished Force – here they but took on bodily form.
The piteous creature and he were surely soul-mates.
He had changed course, taking a dangerous detour into Tusken territory, to find the source of the wailing. His original intent that morning had been to intercept the Jawa sandcrawler slinking along the far ridge of the Dune Sea. It was prudent to keep abreast of the latest gossip and to monitor the current trading value of tech goods. The diminutive desert scavenger merchants were the best, if not the most reliable, source of both sorts of information. But it would seem that destiny had other plans for him that day. The orphaned hatchling had called to him, and he had responded.
It had lain amidst the shattered shells and corpses of its broodmates, the mangled body of its mother sprawling lifeless a short distance from the nest, grisly evidence of a rogue male on a killing spree. Such murderous rampages were not unknown among the creatures, but this massacre's sole survivor called to the pitiless stars with such shocked and disbelieving pain that even his war-hardened rescuer was moved.
The thing had tried to bite him when he reached for it, but a judicious application of the Force soothed its tempestuous mind into a semblance of calm, allowing him to fold the half-starved body into a corner of his cloak. They had set off for the refuge of home together, two solitary remnants of separate Purges, traipsing across the unforgiving desert.
It was utter madness, but it felt right.
He named the creature Oki.
The name had no significance – it was bereft of mnemonic weight, as light and insubstantial as his own assumed identity, a thing without anchor in the deeps of time, unhaunted by any specter of association or solemn heritage. It was just a tag, a hollowed and weathered syllable like "Ben." Perhaps this is why he chose it. Those who floated like dead leaves on the dwindling seas of tradition should not be burdened with names that bore meaning.
They needed to be buoyant lest they drown in despair.
Oki did not care one way or another about his name. Certainly he never came when he was called, or deign otherwise to acknowledge the existence or importance of his savior as anything more than tolerated companion. He cared only for blue milk and the occasional insect or smaller reptile foolish enough to wander close to his searching tongue and jaws. The former commodity was supplied in abundance by the Tusken spirit-wives, who made a daily sojourn up to the cave to leave peace offerings for the Wizard of the Black Hills. They left the milk skins in certain sacred clefts of rock near the mage's dwelling. Moving prey, by contrast, was provided in abundance by the planet's harsh generosity, nature's perennial hospitable sacrifice of the weak to the strong. Oki was a natural born killer. He often left a stray wing or leg lying about as evidence of his conquest.
At first, the dragon was confined to his crate, but soon enough the thing had run of the house. The two of them would spend their days cloistered within the cool sanctuary of their exile, while the twin suns rose and patrolled the skies like a pair of baleful eyes, a hellish master and his eternally damned apprentice seeking to burn out the last traces of tenacious rebellion.
Ben was tolerated, and tolerant. But he drew the line when the beast tried to share his ascetic cot at night. Affection he might feel for his growing serpent…. but he had sworn never again to nurture one in his bosom.
And so the day passed, while one grew ever larger and the other grew slowly older.