Safety, Once (Lia)

[Yasha Cadera]

Fixed in the comfortable bosom of the Sumatiyara, a pale young woman with auburn hair and bright hazel eyes lit sticks of incense from a candle flame, which trembled as the woman trembled. Her embroidered chersilk shawl drifted off her shoulder and she pushed a lit stick of incense into a hand crafted ceramic bowl of coloured sand, its outer shell a sheen of turquoise and pale blue like Naboo's oceans in the spring sun. Once the incense stick is fixed in the sand, she pulls the shawl back around her thin shoulders and huddles within it. Underneath the shawl, a simple red slip settles from shoulder to ankle, its lace straps an organic splay across deathly pale skin. She lights three more incense sticks and places them in the sand bowl, their fragrant offering floating and curling into the air around the statues.

I'm both the woman and the maker of the bowl. Every statue and ornament in this small side-room on board has been crafted from my hands. There are statues of my Naboo Goddesses in bronze and marble, there's a bronze Shiraya with her crested moon fan, the moon plaited in silver and engraved with talisman scripts. Beside her rests the Goddess of Safety smiling down from a contented face and hooded hair, her marble garment sweeping downward to pool at her flower-covered feet. The Goddess of Safety statue took me months of meticulous work, I'd completed it in honour of [member="Jared Ovmar"], my missing lover. I prayed with each stroke and lathe and carve that the Goddess would wrap her cloak of sunlight around his shoulders and bring him home.

Oh how she did. . . how she wrapped him in her protection and how she seemed to have little left for me, her happy petitioner. I kneel with a tight pained groan on an elaborate rug on the floor, put the shawl over my hair, my eyes locked with the Goddess of Safety as my hands come to my knees, sliding to the floor I prostrate myself. "Oh Goddess of Safety and Consolation, be with your daugh. . Goddess of Safety and Consolation be with your daughter. . . "

My forehead connects mutely to the carpet and the wellspring flows. Tears jerk from my eyes as my shoulders shudder and shake, my ribcage burns and I cry out in a strangled sob as the shivering breaths falling in and out of my once ruined lungs seethes into the fragranced air.

I'd held it in on Lipsec. I'd held it in while in the Bacta tank and I'd held it while [member="Lucien Cordel"] looked me in the eye and gave his sympathy and consolation. Jared was sequestered in the Meditation Chamber and I feel [member="Marselia Urstalis"] in her confusion and awe as she walks through my ship. Bucket stands in the corner of my chapel, its head whirring from side to side as I, Andra Sivas, daughter of the Goddesses of Naboo sob for the loss of my child.

So far from Naboo, can the Goddesses hear me? Am I clinging to the vestiges of a foreign religion, when I should be clinging to the Force only? My hands grip the carpet. "Goddess of Safety and Consolation be with your daughter and take my child to the pristine lands, where no harm nor danger can marr, nor disease destroy. Take his spirit to the true Light, whence all good flows. Oh Goddess o-" I choke on the words, stifled by another sob and stay prostrate on my knees, forehead to the floor as my hands come up to rest on my head as I feel Lia coming closer and closer still.

 

[Marselia Urstalis]

It had been no more than two or three days, she thought, but time seemed to blur. Everything a blur. So much blur. All she did was sleep. Trying to eat was a futile endeavour - she didn't have the appetite, and what little she managed seemed to sit in her stomach, uneasy, and there was little to be done, little she cared to even try to do to, to do more to keep it down. It mostly did, but it felt like it wouldn't stay. So all she did was sleep, the energy her body was not getting, it was not being replenished nearly as much as it needed, so the preservation of sleep.

All she did was sleep, or give the illusion of it. Images burned into the backs of her eyelids made her keep her eyes open until she was too tired to fight it and the images seemed to no longer be seen through the exhaustion. The quality of the sleep she got was mild at best, for if the images did not manage to keep her awake, they would scrape through her mind in her dreams. The two other living beings in this ship were like dead men walking, but for the grace of the Force and bacta. They were here, but so little did she see them, so little did they see her, that it was like a ship of ghosts, and she wandered its gangways bleary-eyed and wary that all she would end up seeing when she looked on either [member="Anders Sivas"] or [member="Jared Ovmar"] was... was...

...she stopped, one hand going to her mouth, the other smacking against the nearest bulkhead for stability. Her eyes stung like tears would come, except there were no tears to be had - they had all been spent, or her eyes were too tired to try. She heaved dry sobs for a minute or two, and when the sound of her grief quieted, she couldn't tell at first that her ears were hearing the sobs of someone else, the words of a mouth that was not hers. In truth, she had hardly spoken since they had left Lipsec behind. Eventually Lia found some focus, enough to recognize the voice, and that it was right around the corner. And the realization of what intersection of this vessel that it was. Carefully, she crept around the corner, to see this sanctuary that had not held her interest, and the woman who was a shaking ball on the floor of it.

Andra... she thought, not knowing what to think or say. Her hand curled at her mouth, her teeth finding soft purchase on her knuckles.

 

[Yasha Cadera]

My cries die strangled in the wool of the carpet as harsh stabs at vocal cords slit up and down with a knife. I pour my grief at the feet of the Goddess I'd been promised to once, when my childhood on Naboo was ending and my father bundled me up in his arms a final time before the great lingering goodbye. Lifting my forehead from the ground, I beat my chest with balled fists and prayed. "Take this! Goddess of Safety, i was promised to your cognizance and your bastion do not leave me fallow, dear divinity take this. . . take this that I may yet follow your glory and love. Take this and take my son. Ta--"

Andra. The mental fabric was scorched and raw, [member="Marselia Urstalis"] hadn't fared well in her first high pressure situation. Quite the opposite the girl froze, but I loved her for it. How odd in this continuum to have a girl who felt and shivered and feared and fell to shock, instead of gleefully peeling back the skin of the beast to bite into its hideous ichors?

I shudder. My hands are still clenched on my chest and I unfurl my fingers to pull down the shawl from the locks of auburn hair which pool round my face and down my shoulders. "Lia." My voice is husk-soft and layered with the weary agony of my poured out grief. Rubbing my face with a corner of the shawl, I beckon my Padawan inside the Chapel and motion for her to come and sit down. "Come in, Lia. The Goddesses are far from vindictive. Quite the opposite."

And like a faucet's burden I turn the taps of my own emotions abruptly off, cloaked from Jared and Lia for a gaping hole where seconds before the thick of them had stifled the air and made weeping angels of women. "You're not okay, but you will be. Take a stick of incense, light it and stick it in the sand. Deep breaths while you do it, make the act an exercise in putting all of you into something. Come on, you can do it. After all, you saved my life. Jared's too and for that I am infinitely pleased."

My mind curls around to my lover, I send Jared the image of my gratitude at his life continued. In the meditation chamber I know he'll understand.