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Prince Ben Organa laid back amongst his pillows, and breathed in deep the sweet-scented smoke of the white-night blossoms, so tenaciously alive that their petals remained faintly luminescent, even as they smouldered in the shallow rough-hewn dish nearby the bed.
The only remaining relics he had yet found of his own life, his own long-fallen kingdom, were the scent of those flowers, and the shining mantle that his beloved Rey had woven for him of her own hair, spun and transmuted into thread of invulnerable, everlasting gold. He clutched it close, and tried to imagine that he was holding all of her again, rather than just this remnant of her aura (albeit remarkable as it was), tried not to care that it made him feel like a child cowering under a favourite blanket. As he had each night since he had awakened in this new, but disconcertingly familiar body, in this new and horrifyingly unfamiliar time.
In their age—his and Rey’s--thousands of years past, when the God of Light was still seated on the throne of the universe, the notion that men could be born into the world again after their death was considered a heresy—the half-baked philosophy of the priests of some distant realm that he couldn’t even remember the name of. (There were so many things he couldn’t remember the name of. That no one in this age remembered the name of. Even for the cruelest tyrants of his first lifetime, he couldn’t help but mourn a little).
But perhaps there had been something to it after all. He hadn’t yet fully adjusted to the heaviness this body’s muscle, the thickly calloused hands, the map of scars seared into his face and torso--some old and faded to white, others still welts of angry red. A harsher, harder body, forged by the crushing pressure of the coarse red sands and jagged crystal peaks of a harsher, harder world than Prince Ben had ever known. But their natural features were remarkably alike--his towering height, the dark curling hair, the plush lips, so unusual on a man, his blasted ears...He might have thought Kylo a far-flung descendant of a sibling or cousin, except that he had none.
And now, the encounter with that red-haired warrior woman–-Tava Ren--had stirred something buried within him. A shadowy tendril of unease that had crept up from the pit of his stomach and lingered ominously around his heart.
Was a memory of this body, this...Kylo Ren—this unknown vessel into which the witches had dragged his soul out of its age-long imprisonment in the deepest chasm of Ixigul–trying to assert itself? Had she and Kylo been known to one another, before the knights had set out on the hunt that sealed their leader’s doom?
(They did, after all, share a name. Or was it a title, perhaps?) The coven had deemed it unnecessary to impart to him the history of the man who’s flesh he now lived in.
Such a villainous heathen-–one who worshipped not the memory of the old God of Light, nor the dear departed Goddesses, nor even any of the multitude of the unworthy sons of God who had been contesting the divine throne since the sky was shattered, but instead walked the obscure path of the Shadow--was hardly worthy of his concern, Sister Melinda said. The man had been extraordinarily powerful in body and spirit, and that was the sum total of his value to the grand pattern of fate. To serve as the vessel for the divine prince’s resurrection was the only chance that Kylo Ren’s tainted soul might be redeemed in the eyes of the Goddesses, Sister Kleo declared.
It was clear that the witches spoke the truth, that this world was dying–the cool, pallid, shrunken sun, barely vibrant enough to sustain crops, and the shattered fragments of the moon scattered across the sky at night, barely strong enough to pull the tides, were undeniable proof of that—and what other choice did he have now, but to believe their word that his living presence was required, to restore fate to its correct course and fulfill the prophecy of the Goddess’ ascension, which had been thwarted by the cruelty and hubris of the priesthood so long ago?
The idea that this coven--comprised of people of all races and genders, some from distant lands that were now called by names unrecognisable to him, brought and bound together in their rage and grief for the future that was stolen from them--might have repeated that same ancient sin they aimed to correct, might have killed a man and celebrated it, might have deprived someone of a son, a brother, a husband or lover--all so that he, a man killed thousands of years ago (prophesied saviour of the world or not), might live again, filled him with unease.
But knowing that Rey was still...alive, in a way, and waiting to be reunited with him...That complicated matters.
But the sense of foreboding faded soon enough, drowned out by the irresistible scent of Sister Julia’s floral soporific—that blessed drug that never failed to bring her back to him, if only in dreams--and he finally slipped into sleep. But for the first time since his return, he dreamed not of one woman, but of two.
There was Rey, stiller and paler than the face of the Ash Tree Goddess in her aspect of the tender of the dead, frozen in a millennia-long sleep in the darkness under a faraway mountain, a carpet of those same white-night blossoms trailing down from the catafalque which held her enchanted coffin of ice, the flowers needing no sustenance of light or soil, but only the nourishment of her indomitable spirit.
And there also was Tava Ren, her six heavily armoured companions barely visible in the gloom, shifting awkwardly as though they were set to flee any moment, as she hurled the full force of her fury against the walls enclosing Rey. Transparent as the finest glass but unbreakable as adamantium, the ice refused to offer up the slightest splinter as she struck her blazing blade against it again and again, howling like the tainted dark winds that coursed through the vast and hungry red desert of the east, as even her formidable muscular force—unlike anything else Ben had seen or felt in this time of decay—failed to break through the enchanted seal that preserved the cherished form within, any more than she had been able to strike a blow against Ben, shielded as he was by Rey’s mantle of gold.
He had to find...that mountain…