Chapter Text
The twins were not quite halfway to their zenith when the lookout first spotted the pair approaching Bildor’s Canyon. The terrain was bathed in a light that was still young and soft. He watched their progress with idle curiosity. They were the most interesting thing he had seen for years; no one seemed to come this way anymore.
A decade or so earlier there had been a sudden, and to the Tuskens at least, unexplained, large-scale exodus of settlers, leaving behind a much smaller population which seemed disinclined to continue what, for a while, had been a relentless push into the Tusken’s territory. Since that time the tribes, what few remained, were given a wide berth and led a mostly untroubled existence; raising families, Banthas and hunting the Krayt dragons whose numbers had begun to climb again. The settlers had a word for it that Tuskens spat at; they would, in their ignorance, call it ‘peaceful’. Tuskens knew better. Life was not peaceful; you came into the world fighting and would fight until the bitter end, however, and whenever that might be.
These two didn’t look much like any settlers he had seen before. The fact they were walking immediately set them apart; settlers preferring to travel around in their damnable speeders. Machinery in general remained an anathema to the Tuskens. Over a half century earlier his own tribe had made a grudging exception for the vaporator which had become the heart of their settlement, a symbol of the Tusken practice of taking whatever they wanted; whether it was supplies from settlers or precious moisture from the capricious clouds.
At a distance, with their limbs tightly swathed in fabric and their heads covered to provide protection against the harsh sunlight, a younger Tusken might have understandably mistaken the walkers for members of another clan. They might have indeed passed as Tusken had their face wrappings, or lack thereof, not given them away.
They were a few paces short of the mouth of the canyon which led to interior of the Wastes where the tribe’s encampment was situated, when the shorter of the two stumbled slightly, halted and sat down to adjust their footwear. For a moment he considered raising the alarm or simply picking them off before they could intrude any further, but something stayed his hand.