Cinderborne: a Star Wars Story

Chapter 48

Holo's heart vanished; fell into a great slavering abyss yawning cold between his ribs. Gazing down upon that terrible scene, that fiend of steel and storm standing dauntless amid the seething tide. 

Tempest-heart she loomed before all he loved. The gate in her heart knew no bound, hungered without falter, flounder or fail. Something cold spread through him at the sight; slid slick through the chasm behind his breastbone, joined the foul dark that roamed unleashed within. There would be no salvation this day.

Or so his bleak mind thought. But for the first time in all his life, for the first time since Tin's birth, for the first time since they had come upon this drear place, Fate looked down upon them - and smiled.

***

All the world shook; rocked by a tremor like none it had ever before known. It shifted, shuddered, convulsed. Unraveled.

Swift, a sable seam snaked through the charred sands, opened wide its jagged maw. Exhaled a single, thunderous breath; a roar like all the voices of every soul ever sheared, every life ever sliced short. Like every father who had ever screamed, every mother who had ever keened, every child who cried out at the cruelty of the world.

Dust the air itself became; a mire raking its way across the oval plane, broiling up at its tattered edge, smashing its silt-surf over the AT-ATs where they like sleeping tortoises lay. Holo fell back, driven from the precipice as much by shock as the tidal swell slamming its tawny, glass-quilled mass down before him.

Through its rusty haze nothing at all could he see; not shade of Death's angel, not sliver of his comrades pale and white. Only the filthy storm, and the dark shape of a great churning chasm buried deep, deep within.

"What?" Blithe, bland, bumbling, his voice stumbled to his call. "What in all the galaxy is going on?"

Sixes merely shook his head, rocking where he stood as the hill shuddered, remembering the spasm of mere moments prior.

"I cannot begin to guess."

***

"Lorral?" Los'Crena scrambled back, bow tumbling forgotten from his quaking hands. "What is this?!"

She grinned, madness a bog-light burning in her eyes. "A sign!"

"Of what?!" He felt the other hunters scatter, their footsteps whispering in the storm-scream.

Then the earth thrashed again, and Los'Crena did not linger long enough to guess.

***

The Resistance had spread its vile seed upon a world once pure. They stood now, arrayed as a tumor of a hundred bristling cells; curving slowly around their champion. Watching mirthful, as Death loomed above their dread foes.

Through storm and sand, through stone and silt Gahalas glimpsed their legion souls: crimson blades cracked and jutting; pieces of pewter catching the rays of a dying day. He raised a hand, even as the world parted around him, even as the threads of earth unspooled.

He felt their heartbeat pulse against his fingertips; a hundred drums beating just out of synchrony, a chorus just slightly offset. Their song would never reach its end.

His fist closed, and as one, their percussive peals fell silent.

The world ruptured. Four and ten thousand cracks smashed through the scorched sand, broke it apart like a leviathan plate hurled from great height. At its core, a hurricane rose.

Seven points of burning light speared the swirling sands; drove their bristling, nettle-strands through the murk; cast their foul amber glow upon the mottled face behind. Rugged, seven sockets crouched beneath cowls of black bone; rippling and rumpled like cloth drawn across his angular face.