It was hot, it was alway hot. Dust, desert, sunlight. Even at night when the sun dipped behind the edge of the glittering city, it was still hot. Tall, metropolitan city of clay, brick and fabric. It was a world built on trade; once a stop along an old empire trade route between the old worlds and the new and it had built its wealth on that currency. When water was mined out of the rock, then the true wealth came. Flowed out of the rock straight into the hands of all who resided on a planet served by a faith that valued both trade but equitable sharing of wealth. All boats rose on the tide of water money and the desert world became one of terraformed life and its capital city built on trade grew into an empire of colour, culture and riches.
New Mecca, named after a holy city of the old empire. A holy city whose faith had followed with the seekers for new worlds, seeking life new for their kin and the kin to descend from them. Settling on this desert planet. Prophesied milk and honey, replaced by water and then later uranium. As promised lands went, it was almost miraculous that a planet of such fortune was discovered. Almost a quarter of a millennium and the planet continued to rise in good fortunes it would seem.
How the hell she had ended up here still baffled her.
Well, she knew the chronology of her situation but still, a kid from the ruins of a dying world that most were abandoning with fevered glee, now lived in the capital of one with life that seemed to pour out even from its creaks and crevasses.
She wondered what would have happened if she had been given the choice though. The choice to go with him. So little in her life had ever been truly up to her, truly her choice. The only decision she could recall making in her short life had been to run. Run off that world, out of those ruins, out of the dark onto that ship. And as things had turned out, it wasn't the worst decision, given she now had shoes, couldn't remember the last time she missed a meal and didn't need to keep a blade underneath her pillow just in case.
Not that she forgot. She still kept steel with her, just in case. Old habits die hard. And when young, habits forged in fear tended to be hard to shift. And she still hoped, though a smaller hope now, 6 years on. 6 years since he had left. Hope was an annoyance, made her feel foolish. Foolish to hold onto a belief where she had no proof it would ever come to be and foolish to indulge in being foolish. The spiral of thoughts, spiralling a whirl of dark and black until she sat up, shook her head. She was no longer a little girl staring into the sky looking for her hero to return.
Instead she was an adult, well just but New Meccan law, an adult who was late again to dinner. Something that Abu took almost as seriously as her blaspheming. She kicked her legs out of her cross legged position on the edge of the rooftop she liked to perch on and watch the sunset over the city.
The irony of finding pleasure in watching a sunset was not lost on her, given one sunset had generated a lifetime of nightmares that she still struggled with. Though no longer crying out and waking others, she still woke with a start. Eyes wide, staring out into the dark, a right hand twitching to reach out to someone who wasn't there, who hadn't been there for 6 years.
And now she was back at the start of the spiral. A frustrated exhale and she stretched out her crossed arms reaching to the sky.
6 years. She really needed to find a new hobby beyond wondering and imagining about him. A gift. Abu had called her imagination a gift. She still gifted stories to the younger children. Though with age had recognised that certain elements of her stories could be, should be kept to herself and that not all stories were to be gifted, to be shared. The stories were varied but almost always consisted of a warrior who undertook trials and tribulations, using the weapons of the dark for the goodness of those who resided in the light. Another frustrated sigh. Frack. It didn't take a mind shrinker to realise where the focus of her imagination resided.
The sun was just fulfilling her final stretch across the hemisphere above her world. Back to the house. Back to the reality she found herself. Hardly a struggle and maybe, if her imagination could pull her from envisioned merc battles, by the side of the great hero Riddick, him smirking down at her 13 year old self, she might have more contentment in this life the holy man had built for her.
But if she had a choice. She still knew how she would choose. Even after 6 years if he appeared she would run after him, follow him into the dark, to the violence that envitabled followed him. She knew the madness of that statement. That she would throw off the cape of safety, warmth and comfort that Abu had cloaked her with, to lose herself down a spiral of chaos, cold and blackness that centered around him.
She could shrink her own thoughts and desires but ultimately she knew the reason why. He was where she felt alive. Nothing else really quite described it. He was to her life. He saved hers, kept it and gave it back to her. And she knew without a second thought, without need for breath she would give it back to him.
Unwise, but the truth.
The sun had dipped down and the twilight had risen and cloaked the sky, leaving the distant comet trailing with its splintered ice tail in the far corner to the south. She cast her eyes over it for a few moments. She knew it was foolish and she should move forward and spend less time looking to the past or her imagined myths. 6 years of subconsciously moulding a version of a man she had known for less time than that into a totem of heroics. He was a killer, she had seen it. She saw what he had done on the merc ship, seen how he had pulled apart those men, the flesh covered monsters. But he had never harmed her, never been like the monsters that haunted her childhood, the men she had hidden from when she was even younger, the men she had heard her friends sob over, their nightmares in waking moments. The ones she had to run from. The adult in her, the woman that she was now knew he couldn't be this idealised version that she kept hidden in that small place in her chest, but stil, that is where he was, where she had kept him hidden. Her hero, her myth. Man he may be, but she imagined him something greater.
She stood, and dropped quietly without a hint of noise to the ground below and began the walk home. Pondering what was to come next for her.
Futures and possibilities had been a common theme amongst the scholar meetings hosted at the Imam's home. She had enjoyed the evenings when Abu would invite thinkers and leaders of his city to his home for food and discussions. To begin with it was the sweetness of the foods that Lajun had provided that had tempted her from her room. Dripping honey cakes that she enjoyed sucking the remains off her fingers and licking the forgotten beads on her face but as the lessons by Iman, and then by her schooling begun to lay in her mind she would sit on the landing, legs between the wooden slats of the stairs and listen to the men and women share their words. Discussions on politics, the nature of governments and their relations with their people, the mechanics of flight and novel techniques with cryo resulting in further exploration between the skies. She could now look back on those early evenings and see how fortunate she was to sit amongst these intellects. How these possibilities had moulded her into a woman who could, in theory, have any future she could so wish to pursue. She would laugh sometimes at the ridiculousness of her situation. A runaway now the foster daughter of the leader of one of the richest worlds in the known universe. It was like the old gods had rescued her from the depths of darkness and brought her to live a life of light and happiness.
In those moments when her laughter would settle and the joyful hysteria would calm he was there. Standing in the back of her mind, just slightly in front of the abyss of the black. Whenever she was unsure of what she should be doing in anything, he stood there. Silent. In the back of her mind. Her ghost. Sometimes he carried a blade, a wicked curved blade, sometimes there were two one in each hand. Was there blood? Threat but not threatening. Not to her. Not her ghost..not her imaginations, her musings.
Another frustrated exhale. She was in full self indulgent mood tonight. All this indulgence in considering Riddick did little for Abu's hopes to move her life towards something more "healthy," which she considered now had evolved to mean a relationship. Initially, as a child "healthy" had meant friendship and with age she noted that this now came with a different inference. An inference she did not seek out nor did she wish to indulge. She was distracted. Distracted by dreams of her dark warrior.
It wasn't a total denial. She knew Abu was right. One foot in her imagination and one foot in this reality hardly was sustainable. Once upon a time her imagination had been an escape. An escape from the dark whispers, the world around her, the reaching hands and then when she was on that doomed ship it was a way to pass the time. She thought cryo was meant to put both mind and body asleep and whilst she couldn't move, she was most certain she was awake, until she heard the pops and then all hell breaking loose, the never ending sense of falling, after which she was sure she blacked out, for she awoke to being cut out of her what could have easily been her tomb. To another desert world. To him.
Abu was right, it was time to pull herself out of the past and her imaginations. If he was going to come back he would have. He would have returned anytime in the last 6 years ago. After all, what was he waiting for, for her to come of age. She scoffed a laugh at that. Another indulgence. Imaginations of him coming back when she was 16, then 17 and then turning 18 - she had held a bated breath that birthday thinking just maybe he would come back, come back for her, and then when he didn't that hope had turned cold and she didn't indulge that imagination any further. All things die and maybe it was time to let childhood truly end and the imaginations with it.
She looked up at her adopted home and made a decision. One more indulgence and then no more. One more dream of Riddick and then she would pull all those fragments and put them in a box, place them on the hidden hearth's offerings and offer them to the old god that Lajun would occasionally pray to when her faith failed to provide a practical solution. Tonight she would fall asleep dreaming of pulling Riddick back out of whatever frozen world she imagined he had disappeared into and then in the morning she would think of him no more.