In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes

On what wings dare he aspire

What the hand dare seize the fire

-Tyger, Tyger

AN: This chapter occurs two years after the previous ones

Slicer turned onto his back and yawned, eyelids beginning to flutter. He sat up, stretching his arms over his head, coming to full wakefulness slowly…and yelping with indignation as he saw his fellow Riyus already tucking into breakfast.

He sprang out of bed and hurried over, pulling a gray tee-shirt on as he moved. He wrestled briefly with a young Kash'ti for a seat around the slab of spaceship hull that was the Riyus' main table, before shoving him to the side for enough free space to sit. He grabbed a hunk of bread and started chewing.

The Kash'ti to his side jabbed him in the ribs, before grinning and continuing his own breakfast. A'bian also fed his pet, an offworlder lizard now seated on his furry shoulder.

For some reason, though A'bian was one of his best friends among the Riyus, Slicer didn't like the lizard. Being around it made his head feel…fuzzy.

Daich, who had finished his own breakfast earlier, was busy sharpening one of his brace of throwing knives. Slicer hurried to join him, gulping down the remnants of his breakfast and swiping a mouthful of bantha's milk from A'bian's mug (prompting an enraged cry). "Hi, Daich!" he chirped.

Daich looked up and chuckled. "Hey, kid," he said.

"What we gonna do today, Daich?"

"Nothing," Daich answered, picking up his whetstone again.

"Oh, cool…what?"

"We gotta lay low for a while, kid," Daich told him. "Let the heat die down a bit. That last heist we pulled has got the Imps pretty steamed."

Slicer smirked. "Serves them right for leaving that warehouse so unguarded. They shouldn't put so much faith in security droids."

"They were actually pretty well-constructed, weren' they though?" Daich mused. "All them sensors and that armor…whoo! And they weren't exactly light on the firepower side neither."

"Fat lot of help it did them, once we pirated the command stream…"

Daich turned a sharp glance on his de facto younger brother. If there was one thing he wanted Slicer to learn from him, it was never to underestimate an opponent. "Look here, Slice; them Imps ain't stupid. Okay," he conceded, "lots of 'em are, that's why they got stuck here on Tatooine. But they have got some sharp people in command. Those droids were a good idea. It's just that…" here Daich's vaguely stern expression melted into a look of pride, "they don't know that we got ourselves someone able to hack into the encrypted files, get the blueprint for the droids, break the command-stream coding and figure out how to build a gizmo to pirate it. As I recall, it took us three weeks to get it all set up. You want to waste all that work by getting caught while they're still steaming about the heist?"

Slicer snorted his opinion of that ever happening.

"I know, I know, but still…better to give it a little time. Anyway, good as that last haul was, we don't need to do anything for a while. We're pretty set. Look, Slice…why don't you spend the day at the Track?"

Slicer's blue eyes lit up. "Hey, yeah!" He hurried off. Daich chuckled again as he watched Slicer round up the other Riyus of his age. The three of them hung out whenever one or the other wasn't needed. And they always spent free time together. He didn't expect to see them for the rest of the day.

***

Slicer was pulling on his piecemeal safety gear, as were the others – A'bian, his pet lizard as usual on his shoulder, and Rea Tarres, a human girl with pale brown hair, gone all streaky with sun-bleached bands of dark blond, and dark gray eyes. Just as he yanked on his helmet, a streamlined piece of racing gear he had salvaged from the wreckage of a crashed podracer, a shadow fell over him. He looked up and almost squeaked with fear.

Lianni stood above him, arms crossed, a stern expression on her pretty face.

Lianni was, at seventeen years old, the oldest member of the Riyus. She was Daich's older sister, by blood, and the gang's older sister, by practicality. She shared her younger brother's brown-gold eyes and dark brown – almost black – hair, and his sharp, symmetrical features – shared them to such a decree they looked nearly twins.

Lianni was the most law-abiding of the Riyus – in fact, she steadfastly refused to take part in any of the jobs. She instead functioned as, basically, the medic, cook and older sister of the Riyus, patching up wounds, fixing meals, and scolding the Riyus whenever they went on something that seemed too dangerous. And of course, she focused her efforts on Daich and Slicer.

'It's alright for Daich,' Slicer thought bitterly, 'he can just laugh and do it anyway, he's leader! But me…'

"Luke Skywalker," Lianni said, using Slicer's full name, the only one who did so, "You're going to the Track again, aren't you?"

Slicer, wincing at her use of his real name, turned to face the tall girl with what he hoped was an endearing grin. "Lianni, look…"

"Come on, sis, let the kid have some fun." Lianni spun around to see her brother behind her, watching the proceedings lazily. "Slice won't get into trouble – he's gone there and come back with his life before, hasn' he? The kid deserves a break."

Lianni fumed, but knew that if Daich had it in his head to help Luke go, there really wasn't that much that would stop the boy. She turned back to Luke, and felt herself softening at the hopeful smile he presented her with. She moved off with a loud huff, muttering under her breath about preparing the medkit for when the young ones returned. Daich winked at the three, motioning with his hand towards the exit of the Riyus' hideout.

They flashed him a smile of thanks before grabbing their glideboards and running out.

***

Glideboards started out as a rather expensive toy for rich kids old enough to want to fly but too young for their parents to buy them ships. The hovering, thruster-equipped boards zipped children around at a rather mild twenty km/h. They were a common sight on Coreworlds such as Coruscant and Alderaan, but rather rare out here on the Rim.

Slicer seized upon the idea at once, after reading about it in a holomag, and immediately began to build his own. There were differences, of course. He fashioned his deck out of transparisteel from a landspeeder's windshield, making it a little wider and longer than usual to accommodate the thruster he salvaged from a downed one-man Verpine Starrunner. The repulsor fields were taken from the same. Using an 'engine' designed for a much larger craft ensured that Slicer could move much faster on his glideboard than the original designers ever intended. He then built three more glideboards for the use of the entire gang, using the junk from other ships, although the first glideboard (which he kept for his own use) had the best material.

The three twelve-year-olds (actually, A'bian was twenty-six but that was the equivalent of an adolescent in Kash'ti terms) sped through the Mos Eisley streets with the same ease that they did on foot. In fact, they were inclined to show off a little, taking jumps and grinds whenever possible for them to do so.

Rea gave a whoop as she used her momentum to grind her board up the side of a wagon, launching off the edge of its rails with a spectacular backflip. She landed smoothly, with scarcely a bobble, and grinned smugly at Slicer as she raced alongside him. Slicer resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at her.

Rea seemed to feel it her great purpose in life to equal and surpass Slicer in any way possible. It wasn't jealousy, exactly…it was more a determination to keep his head from being too big. Funnily enough, the only time she left him alone was when he was working on his machines. Although she did make sure to insult him more than normal whenever he gained accolades from the rest of the gang for his work.

Yes, no chance of getting a swelled head with Rea around. Slicer sighed and, just to blow off steam, jumped straight into the air, kicking his board to make it roll over in the air once before landing sure-footedly back on the deck.

Rea gave an audible sniff at the kickflip.

A'bian gave his tail a flick, the Kash'ti equivalent of an amused snort. The young alien always found his more hot-headed human friends' spats an interesting spectacle.

Finally, they arrived at the Track.

The three youths swerved into a stop, throwing up great sweeps of sand as they curved. The Track was a huge, abandoned amphitheatre that had once been used by the Hutts to run pod-races. When the pod-racing first migrated to Mos Espa, and then later died out completely, the Track was abandoned. Because it was a few miles out from the outskirts of the city, and because it had once been owned by the Hutts, no one ever went there.

Except Slicer, Rea and A'bian, of course.

For a while they amused themselves by playing in the huge audience stands, yelling to each other to watch the tricks they pulled, jumping from row to row, grinding along the railings while avoiding falling into the arena below. Rea and Slicer ran a race through three circuits of the stands. Rea won.

She then went up to Slicer and began yelling at him for throwing the race. He fervently denied the charge. In the end, they turned to A'bian to decide.

A'bian stroked his lizard as he said: "It's almost noon. Let's go back home and have some lunch."

When they came back from Mos Eisley, when the twin suns were a little lower in the sky, they didn't waste time doing tricks and fooling around. It was time to Tag the Wall.

The Wall in question was the large, smooth stone wall just above the 'royal' box of the Track. With spray cans of paint, the three of them had been marking the wall with their own designs and ideas. Tagging it as their own.

Two narrow ledges, more a decoration than an access route, wound their way across the Wall. To get to them, they had to perform a huge jump across the gap from the royal box and the rest of the seats, using ramps they had constructed for that very purpose. The jump was almost fifteen feet; the first attempts had been nerve-wracking, but now, with their repeated jumps, it was nothing more than routine.

They landed on the lower ledge with little fanfare, jumping off the boards as soon as they hit the ledge. Slicer propped his board against the wall, engaging static locks he had installed on the deck to make sure it wouldn't move; the others followed suit. He ran sure-footedly along the ledge and crouched down next to a small hole in the wall, like a tiny cupboard, covered by tacked-on dabanna weave. He moved the weather-proof cloth away with his hand, reached in and withdrew the spray cans they had left in there. He began to pass the cans to A'bian and Rea's waiting hands.

The cans were small, barely half the size of Slicer's palm, but they held in them enough compressed paint to cover a stretch of wall twelve meters high and ten feet wide. The built-in stasis pods kept the paint from drying out.

A'bian and Rea immediately moved to the center of the wall, resuming work on the giant mural they had planned. Slicer had a project of his own in mind. He moved to one end of the wall, so far that his feet were right next to where the ledge ended. He set down the paint-cans he had grabbed from the hole in the wall on the ledge. Slicer was the worst of the three at drawing and painting; but he accepted and asked no help with this.

'This' was a drawing of a dragon.

But not a krayt dragon, like what was seen in the wilds of Tatooine; this dragon had a huge wedge-shaped head, almost like a horse's (Slicer had seen a picture of a horse in a holobook once) except that horses didn't have horns extending from the back of the head, and huge fangs, and eyes that were a gleaming slit-pupiled gold. The head was attached to a long, sinuous neck that continued down to a great chest, deep and muscular, that was nothing more than in proportion with the rest of the torso. Four legs ending in huge gleaming claws supported the dragon's powerful body. A long tail, spike-ended and thick, was coiled around the dragon's hind legs. Half-extended from the creature's shoulder blades were a pair of vast, majestic wings. The dragon contrasted sharply with the hammer-headed, stubby-necked, tail-less build of the squat krayt dragons; this was a sleek creature, built for the wind and sky as the krayt were built to hunker to the land.

Slicer had used only dark colors to paint the dragon, dark blue and violet and black, all deep shades – shades of the night. Except for the eyes, and the fangs – he used gold and white for that. They were slashes of brightness against the dark bulk of the dragon. He had been especially careful in painting the wings – they were the defining characteristic of the dragon. He spraypainted a long line of black down the right wing, sketching a curve to emphasize the wing's fold. When he was done, he took a step back, surveying his handiwork.

The dragon's golden eyes glared down at him. The great draconic body was drawn in profile, belly low to the ground, ready to spring to the sky – or for prey. The long neck was curved so that one confronted the dragon face-to-face.

Just like in his dream.

***

Rea looked up from painting a girl on a glideboard to watch Slicer step back from his work. He tilted his head up, assessing what he had done. He seemed oddly intense, in the same way he got whenever he had the innards of a machine spread out on his worktable or the innards of a computer system on his screen, running a hand through blond hair bleached nearly white by the suns.

The movement brought Rea's mind back to a night a few days ago, when she had ribbed Slicer about his scruffy hair. To her shock, he had taken it seriously and gone to Lianni, asking for a haircut.

The girl had been delighted; her mania about keeping the Riyus as respectable-looking as possible included a hatred of long hair. 'Made them look like thugs' was her reason. When Daich once made the mistake of pointing out that, technically, they were half-way to being thugs, she had gone into a towering rage. Daich never mentioned it again, and he still had to subsist on gruel for two weeks until she began cooking him meals again.

So, of course, she had been more than happy to give her 'little brother' the haircut he requested. She'd razored the hair on the sides and back very short, but hardly touched the front, doing only a little trimming on the bangs. When it was done, Lianni clapped her hands, thrilled by her handiwork.

Slicer had gone up to her and asked, a challenging note in his voice, if he and his newly-trimmed hair now met her standards. She could not find a reply for a minute, but finally rallied with some sarcastic one-liner; she couldn't remember it now. Slicer had smirked.

The trimming had given him a hairstyle which, while neater, had a tendency to fall into his face. True enough, a wave of silver-blond hair flopped into his eyes; Slicer shoved it back with an impatient hand, keeping his eyes fixed on his design on the Wall.

Rea followed his line of sight, stepping back herself in order to better observe the dragon. Slicer had always been the one with the least amount of artistic talent among the three of them; nevertheless, Rea had to admire the work he had produced. The lines were clean, flowing, the colors well-picked. Rea had never seen a creature like the one Slicer had painted on the walls; still, the way he had drawn the musculature and limbs of the creature seemed right. He had even done the shading properly, something that usually gave him a great deal of problems.

Yes, Rea decided while studying the dragon, he had done it well.

"Hey, Slice," she called to her friend, making his head snap to the side. "That's a right dalis (Tatooine slang for well-done) piece of graffiti. You done? Want to help me and A'bian with the mural?" she asked, gesturing towards the mural with one spray can.

Slicer shook his head. "Sorry, Rea, ain't quite done yet. Just one last little detail to do…"

He squeezed past them, grabbing his glideboard from where it leaned against the Wall. Rea noticed him sticking a can of silver spraypaint into one of his cargo pockets. Slicer gave her a jaunty wave, called, "Wish me luck!" and used the board to jump to the other row of seats.

"What's he doing?" Rea asked, frowning in puzzlement. She turned, ignoring the mural, to watch the other twelve-year-old skate away. A'bian turned as well, though he kept using his nearly prehensile tail to fill in the area he was currently painting.

"Who knows what Slicer's ever going to do?" he asked.

***

Slicer stopped the board a good fifteen yards away from the end of the row of seats, away from the ramp. The ramp facing the dragon he had drawn from his dreams. He re-checked his safety gear, tightening straps, adjusting positions. He knew he should be nervous about what he was about to do, but he was not.

He knew he could do it.

He removed the can of silver spraypaint from his pocket, shaking the can vigorously. He lightly pressed the top of the can, sending a tiny spritz of paint into the air, to clear the nozzle.

He set one foot to the ground and pushed off. The board shot forward like a blaster bolt. He carefully moved one foot to the edge of the board, depressing a switch there. The board's thrusters flared with a blue-white light, engaged fully for the first time. The board went forward even faster. Slicer crouched down slightly as his momentum built.

"Time to fly," he whispered.

The board reached the ramp, going very fast now. It cleared the edge, and suddenly he was soaring.

***

Excerpt from a conversation with Mical di'Tagel, Commander of Imperial TIE Fighter Squadron Omega Flight

"What makes a good fighter pilot? Oh, loads and loads of things – good eyes, steady nerves, courage, intelligence, a fair bit of insanity…too many to name, actually. Some can be learnt and developed by anyone, some are just born into, some are a mix of both. Hmm, though…I'll tell you a characteristic I've noticed in all truly great pilots.

They know trajectories, flight paths, you know – all those physics and geometry. That is not to say they're mathematical geniuses, that they can do calculations really fast or anything. If that were the case, then any of those yahoos at the Maw Installation could hop into a TIE and get a medal. Naw…it's more that they don't NEED to do any calculations. They take one look at a ship's flight path and can put their craft into a line of ascent that will take will take them to an intercept point precisely when they want; they can predict where a ship will crash-land by a glimpse of its descent; they judge distances and estimate how and where a ship will move.

Have you ever seen a holomovie where the hotshot-pilot-character stands the craft on its side to slip through a tight squeeze, or hugs the shadow of some cruiser? Yeah, a good pilot can do that, but you ever think how much brainwork is involved in putting your ship through its paces like that?How far to the right, what angle to approach at, where to squeeze through – teachers have been using the routine decisions of pilots as examples of advanced mathematics problems for ages. If it was all calculation, then pilots would need to be permanently hooked up to a computer. Nope…a good pilot does it all without thinking."

***

"What's the idiot doing?" Rea hissed, fear and shock having reduced her voice to nothing more than a whisper. "He's hit that ramp too fast…he's going to overshoot the ledge!"

A'bian watched his friend go soaring into the air, his black eyes narrowing as he tracked Slicer's flight. "I don't think he was aiming for the ledge…"

***

Slicer's attention had snapped down into a single, laser-bright point. It always got like that when he was flying, or working on machines…or, sometimes, when he was fighting.

He flew high, the deck of the board side-by-side with the surface of the wall – so close, sparks flew from the contact. He pressed the top of the can, and a thin silver stream flowed, to mark the wall. Here was where the tail began to curve down; Slicer pressed his foot into the front of the deck, making the board dip, following the curve of the tail exactly. It began to curve up again, into the body – he slid his foot back, into the tail of the board. The nose went up; the thrusters flared again, adjusting to this new demand to defy gravity.

He pressed harder on the tail; the board's nose rose again, like he'd done a wheelie in mid-air, as he traced the line of the dragon's neck. He came to the top of the neck, and ended the whole session…by kicking out at the wall, sending the board violently to the side.

He let go of the can of spraypaint. It fell alongside him, a shining spot of silver as the suns hit its metal skin. The nose of the board pointed down, putting the board on a slope so steep that the board was nearly vertical as it headed for the ground. Slicer let loose a whoop of sheer excitement. With one hand, he held the tail of the board, maneuvering it to spin into an Indy 720. He landed on the sandy surface of the track with a muffled whump, sending up sand exactly as if he'd made a big splash on the surface of one of those…what was the word – oh yeah, lakes…he'd read about in holobooks.

He grinned, feeling pleased with himself, as he waved cheerily to Rea and A'bian, who were gaping at him open-mouthed. He turned, to look at the dragon – with a new silver ridge running down its spine, to the very end of its tail. The ridge he had just sprayed on.

Now the dragon was complete. He had Tagged the Wall. In his mind, he named the dragon – for it had assumed a personality, a spirit, to him as he painted it. It was a creature built and born for the sky, so he gave it his own name. Skywalker.

***

AN: Whoo, this is the longest Break chapter yet. So, we've seen how Luke (now Slicer) spends his days. Not much development of the plot here, just a glimspe of how he lives – however, certain parts of this day foreshadow Luke's future…and they may not be the parts you think. If you think you've found the hint, review and tell me! I'll post the next part when a person reviews and gets it! ^_^

Oh yeah, the dragon Luke was painting – I've had a specific dragon-picture in mind. It was of this absolutely gorgeous book-cover, of the fantasy book 'Cormyr: The Novel'. I found a copy of the image on the web; if you want to look at it, check this URL…

Hope you enjoyed, and please review! Please, please, please review.