Chapter One
Dan was lying again beneath the stars, entertaining some kind of romantic idea that floated about in his mind. Beneath the night sky, silently lying on a hillside inspiration came to him like spring to flowers. Often times he would lie here, reveling in the wonderful feeling of lying in the dark in secret, concocting fantastic stories in his mind that excited him more than anything else in his dreary, normal life. He hated it.
Despite the wonderful adventures he would imagine, and how they made his heart beat faster and a smile explode off his face, he couldn't stand the sensation. Every other night he would come here and imagine, but it only made his longing to live in such worlds worse. It was like a perverted paraplegic man staring at the most beautiful, voluptuous woman he had ever seen. It ultimately just made his longing worse, and the harsh reality that such things would never come true made him almost suicidal.
But despite the agony that always followed, he could not deny himself the joy of creating such scenarios in his mind, or reading about them in a book, or playing them in a game, or watching them in a movie. No matter how much he tried to resist, he always found himself flipping another page, watching another cut-scene, pushing in another DVD, or laying still beneath the stars in this very same field. Just like tonight.
He had so deeply wished for escape from reality - to break the laws of the natural world – ever since he was a kid. He had sat on the river-stone path near his house, sitting in the meditative state he had read about, and tried to move the tiny stones with his mind. He had, as many teenagers of his generation, waited eagerly for his acceptance letter to Hogwarts and was just a little more crushed than the other children when it eventually didn't come, convincing himself it was lost in the mail, that America's wizarding school didn't accept students till much later, or some other excuse. In elementary school he had desperately searched for a poke-mon hiding in his back yard. But as he grew older and older, a bitter sadness stained his soul as he began to accept that nothing extraordinary was ever going to happen.
He closed his eyes, weaving his fingers through the grass as he stretched out his arms and legs. He grasped the clumps in his hands like a lover would their partner's hair during flights of passion, and let go with a sigh. He loved nature, and found that when he took a hike along the familiar paths of Kennesaw Mountain or snuck out to lay in the fields it restored his soul somewhat. Nature, like the literature classes he loved so much, was much like Dan's church.
He sometimes imagined how wonderful it would have been to be a Native American. Before the whites came of course, he wasn't stupid. How fantastic it would be to run along the same mountain paths, living a simple life uncomplicated by cell phones and cars and technology? No, it wouldn't be a picnic hunting your own food and avoiding other aggressive tribes, but the thought of running through the forests, unscarred by streets or buildings, caused every ounce of stress to leave his body. In those times, fantasy was still possible. Myth was alive around them, because the world itself was unknown. Now all the dark secrets of the world were exposed by monotonously buzzing fluorescent lights.
He stared longingly at the sky, deeply desiring to escape this rock and travel across the universe to some other unknown place. He wanted to visit all the planet that hung in the sky, to walk along the starlit path above him. He wanted to run through virgin fields and virgin forests, to forge his own path through unexplored wilderness. Though surprisingly he didn't believe in god, he would find himself guiltily begging that some power would intervene and send him something extraordinary.
Something flickered amongst the stars. It was like a star had emerged from behind the moon, drifting across the night sky, steadily growing. It suddenly broke into two parts, one zooming ahead of the other. He suddenly realized he could hear it falling, like the sound of all the planes that came in and out of the nearby airforce base, blazing thunder across the sky. The star seemed to be on fire, and as it neared closer he realized it wasn't a star at all.
He thought he had lost it. He wondered if all that longing to escape reality had only driven him insane, making his imagination come to life in vivid hallucinations. It was a ship. A space ship.
It tried to even out and soften the landing, but it was badly damaged and zoomed off into the distance, crashing into some nearby woods with less noise than he would have thought. He thought he could hear a tree snapping in the distance.
Then suddenly he remembered the second half, and looked up just as the second ship - harder to see because it was black – came barreling towards him. He began to run, realizing that it was going to crash near him, but he had taken too much time. It slammed into the ground nearby. Bits of the metal hull and broken glass exploded out at him as he raised his arms in front of him in defense, the materials cutting deep into his soft arms but not causing any serious damage. As he lowered his arms, which by now were beginning to bleed more than he had ever bled anywhere else, he realized the pilot had been ejected from the cockpit by the crash and was lying several feet from the crashed ship.
Forgetting for the moment the impossibility of the situation he ran forward, all the while thinking it was impossible for anyone to have survived that kind of crash. Strangely enough though the man's body didn't seem mangled, though like his ship his dark clothing made it difficult to really make out his figure in the darkness. He ran up to the motionless figure, shouting "are you alright?!"
He crouched down, pressing his fingers clumsily on the man's neck to try and find a pulse. Somehow he was alive. He noticed the skin on the man's face was strangely cracked with black lines running along it like veins. He didn't think it was the result of the fire, and in fact couldn't see any real damage the man had sustained other than a few cuts from flying through the windshield. He took off his shirt and began ripping it up to use it as a substitute for bandages, placing his hands on the man's worst cuts to stem the bleeding. Between the both of them things got so messy he couldn't tell whose blood was whose. "I hope you don't have HIV," he said to himself, giving him another shake to wake him up.
The man wasn't responding, and he was about to leave to call the police before noticing a strange cylindrical piece of equipment laying only a few feet next to the motionless pilot. Is that a lightsaber? It suddenly darted towards him, and he leapt away as it flew past him to the now standing pilot, who ignited it so the glowing red-orange blade was inches from his throat. There was a moment's pause where Dan's heart pumped faster than it ever had before, when without warning the Dark Jedi scoffed, turned off his saber, and force pushed him down to the ground. His head hit a rock, and the pain caused him to lose focus and snap his eyes shut. As he opened them again, the ship had lifted back into the air, hovered for a moment above him like some dark angel, and shot off into the night.