The Fall of the Infinite Empire

Chapter 20

Gran-Nock bounced off the wall where the Sith had thrown him. Once or twice a day for many days in a row, some Sith came to beat him. Sometimes there was more than one of them. None of them were Adas, whom he had not seen in some time. They were smaller, younger, and significantly weaker. Had his hands and feet still been part of him Gran-Nock was sure he could have killed any of them with ease, whereas at his best he could not have killed Adas. But, just as Adas had said in their first conversation, he was unconsciously dependent on using his hands to employ the Gift in battle. And so even if he had tried to fight back, he was sure he could not have made any difference to what was happening. They would beat him, throw him around the small cavern in which they had placed him, leave some bruises, and perhaps break a few bones. These were inconsequential. Like all Rakatan soldiers he had been trained to enter the healing trance. In it wounds healed more quickly. Not as quickly or completely as they did with kolto of course, and of course no healing trance could heal all the maladies which kolto could. But he had no kolto. Conceivably the Sith could have some, since they had raided several Rakatan outposts, but of course it was unlikely they would give him any.

The hours between beatings had so far been enough to heal the minor injuries they had given him. The worst part had been how they left him, often with the bones in what remained of his arms and legs broken, and just as often face down on the cavern floor, the stone blocking his ability to breathe through his nose. He either had to accept the pain of using his not yet healed arms and legs to roll over, or wait for hours, breathing through his mouth and feeling the entire time like he was going to suffocate. It had been after the last beating, and the last time he had endured the agony of pushing on the stumps of his broken arms and legs and roll himself back over, that it occurred to him that his situation provided a good opportunity to check whether his strength in using the Gift purely mentally was both sufficient to move his own body, and also whether the Sith could tell that he was using it. He would try to move his body using only the Gift.

But he would have to wait for these Sith to finish his beating. This was difficult, and not just because of the pain. Gran-Nock had been practicing using the Gift for weeks, and he had noticed some improvement. He had been working with half chewed bits of food, but still, there had been progress, progress he didn't want the Sith to know about. He could not risk using the Gift in front of them, which meant he could not resist the beating with it. He worried that if he raised his arms to block an incoming kick he would, unconsciously, push back against the Sith somewhat with the power of the Gift. Would they notice? It certainly would not be strong enough to stop their blows from landing, but the risk was still too great to let it happen. And so Gran-Nock had decided he had to control his rage. Rage was the path to strength, as every Rakatan knew. Before battle Rakatan warriors would feed their rage, would stoke the fires until they burned hot. It was the way to tap into your greatest strength.

But he could not allow himself to tap into that strength, and so he had to cut himself off from his rage. As a veteran of many battles he had some practice in this. While the anger and hatred were useful in battle they could also cloud one's judgment, make it harder to understand what was going on around you. That meant that one had to develop the ability to push the rage down, to make the anger responsive to one's will. Gran-Nock had tried this, but to no avail. When battles of his past had called for such internal action, there had been pressing need of it. A command from a superior, a change in fortune that needed responding to. There had been fear. Fear of punishment. Fear of dying from whatever new development confronted you.

But there was no fear now. Death was the point of all his efforts, after all, and it was the one harm his captors denied him. And without death to fear, what was left? Pain? He was already experiencing it. Gran-Nock could not summon the fear he needed to push away the anger. He had puzzled on this for a time before figuring it out. It had come to him in a flash of inspiration. There was a time when his life had not been characterized by the balancing off against each other of fear and anger. The days of his childhood on Lehon when the Gift had been not a weapon but a joy. Food at the family table, games with his siblings, adventures with his friends. It had all stopped when he had reached the age to begin his education of course. He had been selected for one of the military academies and that had been that. It had been a long time since he had thought of such times. The teachers at the academies had encouraged everyone to put childish things out of their minds. But he needed those childish things now. He needed the memory of his parents' faces, the sound of his sister's laugh, the feeling of Lehon's soft golden sun on his skin. He tried to remember them, and when he did so the rage and the fear left him. At least until the next kick. Then they would flare up again, and Gran-Nock would have to summon forth the memories all over again. He imagined it as though he were on a raft out at sea, and every punch or kick was as a wave knocking him off, but his memory could calm the seas between the waves, to give him seconds to rest, to prepare, to absorb the next wave without falling off. And with his memories he would ride out the storm.

And the longer the beating went the more real the ocean he was imagining became. He was withdrawing into his own mind, creating a fantasy, but the fantasy made it all easier. He could still see what was happening to him, but it was as though his eyes were a window in the sky above him. The world they revealed a strange image floating far away. The sounds grew muffled and distant as well, and last of all the pains grew less sharp and less forceful. And Gran-Nock floated on an ever more peaceful sea.

Eventually the beating stopped and the Sith left, and still Gran-Nock drifted on the open water. He knew he needed to leave, needed to be fully present in his body so he could concentrate on the task at hand. He knew this but drifted all the same. He had not felt this kind of peace in so long he couldn't really remember when it was. It felt familiar, this feeling without worry, anger, or fear, but he could not place it in a memory. Even those childhood memories were not really memories of peace. They were memories of excitement. This was different. It was like he was remembering something so old that there was no memory for it, just the knowledge that once there had been something else. How odd, he thought to himself, to find this again halfway across the galaxy, mutilated and imprisoned. Thinking about the reality of his situation finally sent his mind back to reality.

He opened his eyes, and it was only in opening them that he realized they had been closed, to the familiar sight of the stone cave floor. He listened for the sounds of Sith walking down the passageway to his cell and heard nothing. Now was the time. He needed to focus. He needed to recall the anger he had just been pushing away. Anger to focus him and his power on the task at hand. He had to call forth his hatred. It would cut the channel through which his strength would flow. He thought of the pain the Sith had caused him. He thought of the mutilated body they had left him with. He thought of Adas' smirk and constant condescension. He thought of all these things, and to no avail. It was as though he were still holding it all at one remove. The memory of the pain was dulled and muted, just as the pain had been during the beating. The Sith Lord's arrogance wasn't an insult, his missing hands and feet weren't indignities, they were all just facts.

He tried to shake himself out of this mood. He had pushed things too far during today's beating, that was all. Too much ocean and raft and childhood memories. He needed to clear his mind of such things. He thought of his days at the academy, participating in the drills and the sparring matches. But whereas before such thoughts had filled him with pride at his victories over his fellow students, now he found himself wondering, 'were they as lonely as I was?' He tried to think of the battles he had seen. He had fought against slaves across the empire, participated in an assault on a Kwa outpost on a distant world of ice, and even been part of the last charge against a trapped Celestial. Glories all, especially the last one. He had used those memories to build his aggression in the past, but now he could not stop his mind from turning to the faces of the comrades lost on those days. There had been thousands of dead Rakatans that day fighting the Celestial. Half of even the final assault force had been cut down. He thought of their faces, their broken bodies, and how pointless it all seemed now. The thing had been running away, making for the galaxy's edge. To go where? Who knows? Away from the Infinite Empire. And rather than let it run away and hide, many thousands of warriors had been sacrificed.

The rage would not come. He was not angry. At most he was sad.

"There is no time for this!" he whispered savagely. To himself he supposed. The only anger he could feel was at himself, for his own failure. He imagined what his father would say, what his instructors would say, what his commanding officers over the course of his career would say, if they could know that he lay here, in the hands of the enemy, and was unable to summon forth any anger at or hatred for them. And then he remembered that they were all likely dead. His father was certainly dead. He had been a warrior as well and years after Gran-Nock's own military career began his father had been killed on campaign. His instructors had no doubt all cycled out of the academy and back into regular service, and that meant most of them were dead. And his entire fleet group was gone, as he had seen himself.

It just all seemed so pointless. He was going to die alone on this planet, one way or another. There was no one who would be ashamed of him, no one who would be proud. There was nothing to be achieved, and nothing to be lost. There was just the next day's suffering. He lay there for a long time, sinking into feelings of despair and hopelessness until it felt like he would drown in them. And the thought of drowning brought his mind back to the sea, and to the raft. And he found that it did not take much work to go back there, to float on the despair and the pain instead of sinking in it, instead of being forced under. And in his mind he drifted until after a while he decided that whatever else was going to happen, he would like to be sitting up instead of laying on his face, and he would like to achieve that without pushing on broken bones for leverage. He did not know if he could do it. Certainly he had never done anything like it before, using his Gift to move something that large without the subconscious aid of movement. And so he imagined his body moving as he wished it to. He noticed first how odd it was that despite the fact that he was imagining his body lifting slightly from the floor and rolling slowly onto his back, that he hadn't replaced the mental image of the sea and the raft and his body on that. It was as though the version of him on the raft, a version that was whole and un-maimed was imagining the broken body in the cave. As though what drifted on the unending ocean was the real him, untouched by the beasts who had taken him.

And when Gran-Nock opened his eyes, his real eyes, he was on his back looking up at the ceiling of the cave. He did not cry out, not only because that might draw the attention of anyone guarding him and he wanted to see whether they would notice what he had done on their own, but also because he did not feel any thrill of victory. He felt relieved that he could breathe easier. There was slightly less pain in his broken bones while on his back than laying on his front, which made him happy. But that was all he felt. It was all he wanted to feel for the moment. He wanted to preserve the peace in his mind. It was better than the despair. So he set about entering the healing trance, because whatever else happened the night would be better without the pain. And as his breathing slowed, he drifted on a blue sea beneath a golden sun.