The Hatchling
Act 2
One night, at the very beginning of winter, there was dew - the faintest suggestion of providential mercy dusted upon the sands, bedecking the wind-worn rocks with ten thousand glittering orbs, one for every system in the fallen Republic. The vaporator hummed away happily in its sheltered nook, proclaiming that its stored moisture levels were only 'moderate.' But Ben could not bring himself to sacrifice the heavenly beneficence to such quotidian purposes; the unexpected gift was a portent sent to rekindle the guttering luminance of spirit, not to nourish gross matter.
Oki suffered from no such metaphysical scrupulosity. He lapped at the swiftly evaporating gems with his forked turquoise tongue, greedily devouring the ephemeral tracery of hope.
And the twin suns rose, glaring upon the spectacle with lowered brows. Oki allowed his companion to stroke the soft fringe behind his scaled head, flushing a delicate shade of mauve with pleasure. There was a strange comfort in the gesture, one more akin to warm childhood security than the aching promise of distant hope bestowed by the skies.
The last dwindling remnants of dew seemed to wink at him. "What are you talking about? You never once even tried to smuggle home a pet."
It was true; he had been an obedient child, an exemplary student. But he still would have liked a pet, even if he never dared ask for one, even if he accepted without question that such trifling attachments were forbidden.
The dew melted away beneath the suns' double vendetta. "You weren't that exemplary."
He snorted, stroking his pathetic life form's scaled hide. Well. That was nice.
The last droplets disappeared, but their soundless voice lingered on. "I did not say it was necessarily a bad thing."
Oki and he watched the suns rise until the heat grew intolerable and they retreated by mutual agreement into the rough-hewn solace of their shared hermitage.
He knew that he had truly left the high and narrow road of sanity to meander instead down the broad avenues of madness when he began negotiating with the thing.
"Very well. You may occupy this entire room so long as you do not touch the contents of this crate.. or that table."
Oki agreed to the terms of the treaty.
"Off my bed, you impertinent usurper… oh, all right, blast it, I'll give you extra milk."
Oki accepted the conditions of parley.
"Don't look at me – it's always been this cold at night. And you are supposed to be genetically adapted to climactic extremes. Ow!.. Yes, well, that's my half of the mattress, you greedy barve."
Oki grudgingly settled for two-thirds of the allotted space.
But there was no negotiating out of the grim ultimatum posed by the new Imperial bounty postings in Anchorhead. A propaganda holo-cast disseminated by the Imperial Public Security Commission compared the few Jedi traitors suspected to have survived the initial Purge to krayt hatchlings: seemingly innocuous creatures which, if left to grow, would swell again to monstrous proportions. Better to crush the serpent's head before it reached destructive maturity, the Imperial officer's clipped nasal voice declared. It was a matter of protecting the newly restored peace.
"What do you think of that, my friend?"
Oki chomped a stray drassil-lizard and blinked apathetically. He was nearly too large to lay coiled comfortably in the narrow bounds of the hermit's living space.
"I'm going to have to Knight you and cut you loose one of these days. Before you get stuck in here," he informed the placidly snoozing dragon.
The nights approaching the annual solstice were bitter. They shared the one insufficient palette, precocious monster and prematurely old man, a metaphor and its meaning lying nestled close together, a quiet insult to the absolute peace of tyranny.
They delayed the planned Knighting well into the next season. At night, veiled from the malicious suns' scrutiny, Oki hunted in the wastes outside the hermitage, while Ben meditated, each one prowling deep in the vast and uncharted domains of his special heritage, obedient to the indelible prompting of his nature. By day they kept quiet company, respective majesties furled beneath a humble sandstone roof.
The occasional itinerant visitor to the cave – the Sand Women who left offerings of milk, an intrepid Jawa peddler, a lost homesteader in need of shelter – saw only the magician and his awful familiar.
The days grew yet hotter as spring wore on. Soon Ben was forced to make an excursion into town to find a new power cell for his arthritic old vaporator. And in town, gossip buzzed like flies about a pile of eopie droppings. Taxes had again been raised, despite the Empire's initial promise to levy extra income from only the most affluent systems, the decadent former supporters of Republican opulence. A bar fight in neighboring Mos Ertu had left seven dead and the business for sale at a cheap price. Speculation ran rampant as to the identity of its next purchaser. There had been another thwarted assassination attempt against the local Hutt crimelord, and a resulting spate of executions at the Great Pit or Karkoon. A company of Trandoshanbig game hunters had arrived at the spaceport last week, in search of sport out over the Dune Sea way.
He didn't like the sound of that. And so Oki remained a household pet for a little while longer, though his sides would barely fit through the doorframe and his dragon's heart chafed against the confinement.
And the weary days dragged on past the equinox and into the next drought season.
There was a meteor storm at summer's onset, a cataclysmic rainfall of white flame. Tatooine's cluster of barren moons looked on in terror as the sky fell about their ears. Some of the shooting stars made landfall, sending up spouts of fire and sand where they ploughed into the virginal desert past the Wastes, the desolate regions where only sarlaac and krayt roamed.
On that night, he sat and watched the stars fall from their thrones, the unmaking of his cosmos, and shed no tears. It was but a drab mummery, a dull pageant mimed by tired players. This brief apocalypse paled in comparison to its original, and so its awful splendor held no sway over his imagination. When he grew bored of the tawdry spectacle, he went indoors, only to find that Oki had a long last disappeared.
The krayt youngling had at last run to the wilderness of its origins, lured by the pomp and glory of the storm, driven by some deep collective impulse of his kind. Krays were said to seek out their mates in the chaotic melee of electrical storms, and to make love upon the burning sands. Ben could not say whether this eclectic snippet of natural history were true or even humanly verifiable – but he was certain that his dragon had finally left home.
Sighing, he made bitter tea from native yerba leaves – a green and biting brew so different from the aromatic silpa and fragrant hatha blossoms – and poured the last of the blue milk into it, sweetening the pang of loss with something good in the present moment.
Attachment was still forbidden, even if the ageless codices in which this prohibition had been inscribed were now themselves fluttering ash. He drank the tea slowly, savoring its harsh flavor as best he could, and fancied he could hear the faint roaring of his krayt echoing upon the far hills while heaven crumbled to ruin from on high.
In the end, he set aside the empty bowl and retired to sleep.
After all, the night's coolness was of short duration and he was already well acquainted with loss.