The first condition of the first day- Navigation by Way of Stars and a Small Hope- A fire- Inner Dialogue and Commentary- Deterred Traveling
When she woke it was his face that she saw and for that brief moment where she held the blaster in her hand and could feel the warmed and edged contours of it molding into her palm with the fingers traced along the barrel and the forefinger against the capacitor and the thumb stroking the safety, she accounted his face and in a memory from a distant world where she and her brother had huddled together in the ruins as a pyre born of flesh and metal rose up in hellish display as the yuuzhan vong did dance about the pit and its shrill screams, naked save for the blood smeared along their bodies like oil and paint, spouting out tribal chants on battle and death with the etchings of their shadow features engraved large against the buildings did that visage yet coincide.
The ebony eyes and the lipless and nose less gaze smeared with a canine tooth grin and scars lined about underneath the blue sac lids in the forms of mazes were seen and in her instinct she pulled up the blaster and fired a single shot into the mass of his thigh and he cupped the smoking crater in his leg and howled through pursed teeth as she rose up, holding one hand to the bandage, and stepped to him and placed the blaster to his head.
What the kriff did you do me? Poison me? Huh? When he did not answer, she belted him across the cheek with the butt and it thudded against the bone and a small token of spittle and blood was thrown out of his mouth and his face was turned from her and she could not make out his expression. Answer me.
Her voice trembled and all the moisture had leapt from it and the faint beginnings of a shiver wove up her spine as along those corridors came a shrill gust shaved by the angular geometries and debris into some form of damned screams.
I would do no such thing, he said and touched his blood and marveled at in the fashion of a dumb, his voice roughened as if by gravel. Such a cowardly action.
Like hell I believe that.
I could have let you bleed or cut out your heart, he said. But I did not. You still yet stand, your wounds bound and stitched. There is no quarrel between us.
I'll decide that, she said and leaned against the wall and used it as a crux. And when she looked over the vong once more, she attributed to him what crimes his people had done unto her family and her acquaintances and her own flesh and the lands which they all had dwelt upon and burnt but she had no strength to it though she did wish for it. Could she kill hi- it. This thing. In one such flicking of a finger. She sworn she had such a capacity some days ago.
Then I should take part as well.
I've got the gun.
Yes. You do, and he rose up and before she could register the patter of his feet he was to her and holding her blaster in his hands once more and threw it away into the corridor. With its passing went her courage and she was weak-kneed and faint. But that is not such a constant. He grabbed her by the shoulders and took her to the mattress and sat her on it. Now we can discuss these things as befitting us.
Don't touch me. Don't.
If that is a precondition, then I will give you one as well. He took her jaw and squeezed it and said, do not shoot me again, and released it. He limped out to the hallway and picked up the gun as she stared wide-eyed and set it on the mattress and leaned against the wall and stared at her. Puss began to leak out of his leg and ran down the length of it and the blackened broken skin stared at her with the pink muscle exposed and the odor wafted. He seemed to have forgotten it and spat out some blood on the floor.
What are you going to do? She said and huddled herself closer with the blaster in her grip. It was cold to her and gave no comfort with the stock pressed to her ribs.
These are the other rules you shall abide by. Do not leave the ship this night or the next. Sustain yourself. Keep warm. Otherwise, do as you will.
And if I don't?
Then you will die, he said. That is fact.
You're going to kill me. Or sacrifice me, or whatever you vong do, she said in a near hysteria.
Then believe you me; that the yuuzhan vong have been dead these many years and are far gone. And as of their bloodlust, it was long ago sated.
She shook her head, Liar, liar.
There is nothing I can do for you then. You may take my word or you may not. Until then, I will be outside, and he left clutching his leg.
Calming herself, she waited for a minute from his departure before rising up and going through the ship like an awakened comatose, hand steadied by the walls and bulkheads and trailing bits of wire and choking on the small wisps of smoke present and the goose bumps trailing along her spine from the cold. Now when she came upon the dead, she checked them over with a critical eye, taking notes of their wound placements and the state of them and when she found none to bear witness of the vong's crimes she paused and thought and its current lasted her all the night as she wrapped herself in some sheets and shivered in the bed like she had as a child.
There was no light to herald morning, only snow turning grey between ground and covered sky and when she rose she went through the bodies, coveting what values and trinkets could be found in their homunculi, carrying forth her the blaster in one hand, index finger resting below the trigger, and a thin flashlight between her teeth. She pecked through only those passengers who bore the image of still life and whose wounds were limited by comparison, and shut their eyes with her passing. Fingers highlighted their pockets; came away with spare few credits and the odd knickknack. Some foreign coins, scraps of paper embroidered with poetry, a locket with a half washed out holo. She spun the picture in the air and placed it back in the pocket.
She keyed in vague treatises of existentialism and nihilism in the scattered touch displays but the monitors lay dim, unknowledgeable and possessing no samaratin inclination and in her frustration she saddled up against the wall and beat it with the base of her hand. To which he was witness. At those times she saw him do such, she gestured away with the blaster and he adhered to such biddings and waited outside on the manifold.
The lined stitches ached for her.
Some of the panels were scattered about, revealing the multicolored wiring and she traced it through the ship like some medicinal cartographer appraising the complexities of the form but not the soul and she came upon a burned and degraded area where the would be beacon uttered off a dimming and slowing red light to which it died as a thin ember. Hardly crimson. She squatted near it and pressed against its skin and came away with blackened palms and cursed with an unbefitting tongue filled with a broader base of diction and slang than appropriate. She cleaned them against her slacks; her head hung in her hands. What to do. Possibly nothing.
The name of the world she inhabited came to her.
She rose up, stuck to her mind longitude and latitude of that memorial hidden in the tundra, and went outside and the cold buried through her layers like a lance and she gasped. As he watched, she looked up. Light was still dim on the horizon; enough parted clouds to measure the stars. Certain ones were out whose names returned to her and she took their measure and calculated vectors and angles and came away looking at the world's edge with her estimation.
She returned to the ship and gathered what she would. Food, water, a lumilamp, a slim vibroknife, some oil from a banister poured into a bottle, the locket stored in her locker. Blaster tucked into her waistband. Canteen filled. She found a knapsack and sequestered her supplies within it. Clothed herself in the heaviest raiment and layers. Pulled the ensemble together. Went outside once more.
Looked at the horizon and tightened the straps, the buckles and breathed in the dry air through the sheet of cotton with icicles already formed by the wetness of her lips.
Where do you intend to go? This is not some place where you can wander at your leisure, your whim, he said and swept his hand out. Do you not see this world as it is? Barren. Fruitless. A pause and quieter, Godless.
It isn't any concern of yours what I do.
It is.
Wrong there scarface. Bout as far off from right as you can get.
Should you do this, yours will not be the only death. But the child's as well. Do not be foolish, await your rescue.
I know what I'm doing, she said and turned to look at him, so shut it. And one other thing, she patted the blaster, don't follow me or this time I'll take off your head.
Then she marched out under that sky, all stalwart and alone, the mountains of which she went to slumbering in a white haze, the wind whipping about her legs in a growing fury and the warrior himself incanting and motionless and fallen down on the ground with her passing.
He piled the bodies in the hold and doused them with what oil she had not commandeered and prayed before striking out sparks with twin sheets of metal. For their lives, for their journey to God. He asked his dead lords for such. The volcanic embers rode into the oil and danced along its length, consuming the bodies, rendering them as they once were. To their basic elements. The lithe red flames overlaying the low running blue in seasonal plumage.
He went out and kneeled outside the ship and watched the fire rise up. As pinpoints of light from which the darkness could be held off. To grasp and to hold and to be the sign and portent for things in their becoming. In their beginnings. To serve as a beacon and a memorial for those yet unborn.
Held his face in the snow; would not sunder so much those flames with his eyes. Brother, is she the witness? Could she be? Forgive me, for I have not heard the word these many years and am still yet a fool. Even unto this end.
Ask her of their fate and the doubts will be stripped to nothing. That the children of gods are long dead and brooked no passage beyond purgatory. As their sins remanded. There can be no question of this. What did that oracle foretell? That she should be taken for a sign and be this exile's release. This can not be.
Be silent. Be silent.
But follow her still, in that unlikely case.
In the midst of her trek, a pale whisper grew out of the land and the currents of curved wind strung along the ground like a river's eddy and which flowed snake-like and coiled through the turf rose up swiftly and in a great fury and in such a time that there was no preparation and she covered up her face against that mass. So she went blindly, forearm on forehead, the snow accumulating against her clothes and forming a blanket of white moss, forcing each step after next after next.
Starting down a small incline, she stumbled and fell into a large drift and in the time it took to free herself, a numb feeling began to work itself through her nose and her fingers and her feet, but it was unrecognizable to her and she went on heedlessly. The hour following, the creeping slumber ran up her legs and down her back and seeped through her pores like an anthrax and bit by bit, all aspects of her body gradually slid into the world's dominion. Breathing became labored, consciousness dimmed, along with the slower beating of her heart.
With that she fell amidst a sudden flurry and when the storm came and encompassed her fallen body, she saw things in between the swirls of ice. Daggers of frozen water. Teeth of a dead monster; burning fire in the sculptures of snowflakes thrown from the headwind. Texts stacked together. Ink and leather bound together in matrimony. Knowledge yet undimmed, the universe held captive by trimmed fingernails and uncalloused fingertips. Poems. Epics. Ballads. Tomes. Stories of all magnitude and virtue crushed into the embers of her breath.
Her father, her brother both faded away in the distance.
And finally the sound of a melody, old in nature and slow in tempo which she once knew but had forgotten in the years of her wandering; followed by the swift loss of reality into black.