Chapter 1

The Witch of Jakku


They say she is a witch. They say the goddess of the burning sands birthed her, and all the demons of the desert live beneath her gold-flecked skin. They burn their dead on piled-stone pyres, to keep her from scavenging the bodies for her tinctures. They burn her scraggly grove of date palms once, her storehouse tarred with bitumen twice. They burn her, and her mother the desert burns them. A vicious cycle, the people of Jakku call it.

Her name is Rey. As in ray of sun. It may seem pleasant enough anywhere else, but it is an ugly name in the desert, a harsh cruel name for a harsh cruel witch. It is like naming a child Pain, or Death, or Fear. Burning Heat. Hateful Thing. Rey.

The villagers are wrong to think she wishes to scavenge their dead though, and they're likely wrong about her mother too. Rey doesn't know whose daughter she is, but she doubts any connection to the goddess of burning sands. After all, Rey knows no filial privilege—her feet burn and her lips crack and her thirst is constant, same as all of Jakku. The only demons she knows to sleep in her bones are loneliness and fear and anger and emptiness. Hardly ones befitting a girl named for the fierceness of the sun.

Same as all of Jakku, she also avoids her namesake, working mornings and evenings in her storehouse, when the desert is finally cool enough to withstand her magic fires. She spends her days sleeping fitfully, one ear always trained to listen for the shifting of footsteps above the howling desert winds. Her storehouse is full of myrrh and pickled olives and crushed barley—no hearts or teeth or nails. Not that the villagers listen long enough for her to tell them so.

Loneliness is probably Rey's most vicious demon, the one whose claws she thinks she may really and truly feel dragging against her skin. Hunger may carve out her belly until her bones jut like the rocky spine of the Carbon Ridge in the distance, but there are always figs to eat and milk to drink. There is nothing to take for loneliness, no tonic or brew to swallow. She knows, she's tried.


The sky is dark as a bruise, the air thick with ozone instead of dust for once. Rey sits patiently in the open doorway of her sleeping hut, a deep clay jug balanced between her knobby knees. She watches as the storm breaks over the Carbon Ridge, the sky that spreads over its peaks running dark as wine. She chants a prayer that the rains hold out until the clouds reach Jakku.

They don't.


They call her a witch, and a dangerous one, but Rey considers herself mediocre. She can summon only a handful of useful things out of the sand—barley, fire, a healing wind, and once, a staff that glows like coals at night—and a whole slew of unwanted things—thorns, scorpions, bones that whisper to each other, a thick smoke that will refuse to dissipate.

There is no spell she knows to summon those things she truly wants, those things she suspects one day she will fall down dead for want of if she never gets them, same as food or water. Family. Friends. Belonging. Love.

She has tried calming salves to sooth the anxiety of the villagers she manages to corner, clay masks that are charmed to disguise her. Nothing works. Nothing is permanent enough. She despairs each time she chisels a mark into the wall above her bed, a line for every failed attempt. The marks look down on her like the night sky as she sleeps, the enormity of her shortcomings pressing down on her.

There is one spell Rey will not give up on though, no matter how heavily it weighs on her every night to carve the mark of the day's failure above her head.

She will summon a water god, and bind him to this place, so Jakku can finally have the rain it needs to flourish. She will put the demons beneath her skin to good use. She will set herself on fire if she must. She will chase the belonging she craves across these burning sands, if she has to.


A full cycle of the moon has finished, and Rey sits again at her open door, the same empty jug clasped between her legs as she watches another storm release itself just outside her reach. The sweetness of the rain on the wind is a taunt and nothing more as Rey watches the clouds drizzle until they are empty. When the sun is shining all around her again, quickly burning off the petrichor and any hint of dampness, she clambers angrily to her feet. The clay pot shatters against the mudbrick exterior of the hut, the pieces instantly sinking into the sand.

Rey begins to pack.

She leaves most of the collection in her storehouse behind, taking only the things she will miss if the men burn down her hut a third time in her absence. A bit of frankincense she was able to trade for with Maz Kenata's caravan, before the villagers managed to poison most of the merchants against her. A bronze knife with arabesques carved in the handle, given to her by Maz herself as a parting gift last her caravan had passed through. Her glowing staff; though she summoned it from the sands herself, she has never been able to create its like.

There is no one to tell, to bid farewell, when she leaves on the three day's journey for the Carbon Ridge.


The heady wine color of the jagged peaks fades to an ordinary brown just a few shades darker than the golden sands as Rey gets closer—a trick of the horizon, no doubt. Her footsteps have become easier, stronger, taking her farther than she could have ever imagined; desert rat that she is, she's never had the privilege of crossing ground that's packed hard beneath her legs. Her footfalls feel strangely solid, her teeth ringing in her head with the impact of each step, and she grins, feeling surer of herself than she ever has.

The land that lies against the base of the Carbon Ridge is etched with wadis, their patterns as complex and spreading as the arabesques on Rey's knife. She walks straight down the belly of one, a spell for wind tucked under her tongue and another for earth pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The wadis are known for their flash floods this time of year, and she will need breath in her lungs and a steady patch of ground if she is going to survive against one of those brutal, whipping currents.

Rey is watchful of flooding, but she can't help but notice how dry the wadi seems around its edges, how there is scarcely any green in it to cut the neverending tumble of brown and gray stones that stretches below her feet. She can feel the earth spell thrumming in her hand, its power strong with no water beneath the ground to interfere.

Rey keeps to the path, hums a prayer for the land as she goes.


The wadi leads Rey right to the sea. She could cry at the sight of so much water before her, and takes off running toward its edge without a second thought.

She stops just short of the water's warm, lapping reach. Her feet are stinging as they slap against the pristine, crystalline white shore, stinging with so much pain she must stop. Rey lowers herself to the ground, flinches at the sharpness that meets her hands. This beautiful white beach is not soft and loose, like her desert, but coarse and hard as the mountains between which it is nestled. She lifts one foot to examine, and watches as drops of her blood slowly drip down onto the white dust below, blooming like strange vibrant flowers. While the cuts bleed, Rey finds they are not deep. And yet they suffer from a sting that rivals that of venom, the pain burning hot and high until it sends tears into Rey's eyes. She can taste the salt as they run over her cheeks to catch in her cracked lips. Her lips sting too.

Dread of this place has started to gather cold and heavy in Rey's chest. She lowers her fingers to scrabble in the pale dust, then brings them to her lips and tastes them. It's salt dusting her hands. Salt in her wounds.

It's all somehow salt, she learns, once she chants the ingredients in her satchel into a salve for her feet and continues onward. The shore, the sea. The rocks are crusted with it, the barren wadi is no doubt laced with it. Everything about this place resonates wrong with Rey's bones. To her, to everyone else in Jakku, water is life. To be confronted with this sea of… of death, it shakes Rey to her core.

She begins to wonder whether she hunts a god, or a monster.


Despite the deep-seated feeling of wrongness this place has about it, Rey persists. She takes a day to build herself a sleeping hut stacked out of rocks, searches for a charm that will spin her new bowls from the dark mud that rims the shoreline. It takes her a few tries—she isn't used to working with wet material. When the bowls are done, she fills them with everything she can find that gives off even a whisper of magic about it. She takes endless, endless bowls of water and mud and dried salt. When she finds the barren shoreline lacking, she scales the cliffs that hem in the sea, where she gathers strange stones and thin weeds and even a few round bird eggs. She takes her own blood from when she slips on the wet rocks at the shoreline and cuts herself on the sharp formations of dried salt before it. She takes rainwater she finds in creases within the cliffs, for both magic and drinking. The rest of the wine she has traveled with must go to the god of this strange place, when she is ready to offer to it.

The moon has completed a quarter cycle before Rey decides she may as well begin courting this god, if it is even still alive. It takes her three days to select good stones of power, two more to stack them into a small temple lined with cairns and seal it all with mud. She decorates the dried mud floor with thick crystals of salt, in patterns meant to look like the swirling, criss-crossing wadis. She makes many, many more bowls, fills them with salt and sea and rainwater. After some deliberation, she adds a few bowls of the fire she so expertly conjures as well. Fire and water may be opposing elements, but a sea would not be threatened by her meager flames. Surely a god would take the reminder of its might as flattery?

She sleeps in her hut, across the beach from the temple, and watches her flames flicker in the gaps between the cairns at night while she counts down the many subtle shapes of the moon. She is waiting for a moon-less sky and a low tide, so she might have some chance of defending herself against what she hunts, should things go badly.


When the night comes, she bathes naked in the sea below the stars and the darkened moon, lets her golden feet cake with mud and salt as she walks to the temple. She leaves her dark hair unbound and wavy with dried salt spray, her body free of the loose, flowing garments that belong to the desert and its burning sands.

Rey sings as she makes her offerings, her voice low and thick with the sea air as she gathers her bowls. She feeds the god's ego first, pouring a brackish mixture of rain and sea water out over a handful of rocks and a jumping fire. Rey jerks at the hot steam that rises up to fill the temple with a sharp hiss as the flames try to resist their demise.

She feeds its belly next, mixes the last of her wine into a second bowl of the brackish concoction, stirs it with her fingers and watches as the clear water quickly darkens.

Last of all, she feeds that fearful godly appetite, that dark insistence all divines seem to share for pain and sacrifice, that inhuman craving not for meat or fat, but bone and blood. Into this third bowl of waters, Rey allows her own blood to drip, from a wound across her arm inflicted by Maz's bronze knife.

She may as well give it a taste for her flesh now, if she is going to bind this thing to her, Rey thinks.

She is hardly faint-hearted, but she feels her head begin to spin at the smell of wine and blood and brine that thickens the wet warm air inside the temple. Her pulse starts pounding in her ears, and Rey swears the mud in the walls begins to weep, but she sings until she feels her eyes flutter shut.


She awakens to sunset on the cliffs overlooking the sea: her favorite time of day in this foreboding place that feels alive yet dead (her desert is the opposite: bleak looking, but oh what things pulse beneath the surface).

Rey is startled to find she is not alone here.

A man sits near the cliff's edge, huddled in on himself, arms crossed around his knees as his eyes track the sun's steady descent. Despite his crouched posture, Rey can tell he is long limbed and powerfully built, yet with an apparent air of grace to his sinews.

He doesn't seem to see her standing alongside him, as he looks straight on. He's beautiful, Rey realizes with a sick throb of her heart. His skin is nearly as pale white as the shore, his thick wavy hair as richly dark as the sea's mud. His eyes are a complicated sort of brown, muddy, yet with something clear and bright to them that reminds Rey of the horizon he watches now, his chin balanced on his arms.

Rey lets out a shaky breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and his face—somehow sharp, yet also soft—snaps to her. His plush lips are rosy with the sunset and parted in surprise as he looks at her for the first time, and Rey's heart flutters in her chest as she absurdly decides that she'd love to kiss this absolute stranger.

In an instant, his soft, open expression hardens into a scowl, and the sunset blots out behind a sudden rumbling swirl of thunderclouds. His pale skin takes on a cold, dead sheen that nearly mirrors the white-blue lightning that rips and tears across the sky.

Rey swallows hard, but there are no spells stashed beneath her tongue to help her now. In fact, her magic feels strangely dead in this place. She can't feel anything but him, she realizes with a jolt.

He has risen to his feet—she was right, he's as tall as a godling—and his hands are strangely cold as they grip her naked shoulders. The wind is shrieking around them now, and when he speaks the words he grits them through his pale, clenched jaw. Yet somehow, his low-pitched voice finds Rey's ears.

"Leave. Me. Alone."

And with no further preamble, he tosses her over the edge of the cliff, into the wind-raged sea.


Notes:

I wrote this for the daily prompts I'm trying to write on tumblr (this prompt being Mythology Monday). I was supposed to write no more than 3,000 words over the course of an hour or two, just as an exercise to flex my rusty writing muscles. I ended up spending my entire day writing an 8,000 word behemoth, so I guess I'm starting a multi-chapter *sighs eternally*

I shouldn't be surprised I got so into this prompt though I guess. I'm currently working on an original novel, and the plot of this fanfic is going to skirt rather close to an early draft I once had planned for my own book. This is loosely inspired by the Middle East/Mesopotamian mythology. People aren't generally super familiar with this stuff, so I won't get super detail heavy, but I guess know that those inspirations are there?

Anyway, I'm hoping to be quick in updating this one, since this first chapter is only a fraction of what I currently have written, but I'm trash, so we shall see!