Sorel Crieff
Ready are you? What know you of ready?
The Teedos called the storm something unpronounceable. In the native tongue it was called X'us'R'iia. It had a name because the Teedos believed there was only the one storm, the same one that returned again and again. It was the breath of the god R'iia, the Teedos said.
R'iia was hardly a benevolent god, and thus the storm was blamed for a great many things. It was the source of the famine that had plagued so much of Jakku for centuries. It was the reason the water had gone away. It was why their luggabeasts turned unruly. It was responsible for the many interlopers who plagued their lands. It was, significantly, what had brought the great shards of metal filled with many, many soft beings crashing to the sands so long before. The ship graveyards were a monument to R'iia's anger, the Teedos said. They were a warning, one that the interlopers in Niima consistently failed to heed, much to the Teedos' annoyance. Most of the Teedos were harmless, scavengers in their own way. There were orthodox Teedos, though, zealots who were known to attack both their brethren and the salvagers, claiming what they did was a blasphemy to R'iia. R'iia would punish them all for their sins. The X'us'R'iia would punish them all.
Sorel was a Jedi and therefore didn't believe a word of it.
She'd been high on the superstructure of one of the old battle cruisers half-buried in the sands, hoping to find some sort of memento. She looked out and saw the storm forming on the horizon. She knew instinctively that it would be a big one. It was time to go.
She'd been free-climbing the wreck, and it was-perhaps paradoxically - always quicker going up than it was going down. Going down, you had to worry about gravity in a whole different way, and hurrying was a good plan to get yourself hurt. She knew that from experience. She took it fast, anyway - almost too fast-then risked jumping the last three meters to the ground. The sand could be soft if you were close enough, but she wasn't. From that height, it was like landing on metal. The shock of impact jarred her ankles and ran a sharp pain up her calves and into her knees.
It would be a race to her ship. She would run as fast as she could across the desert, the rising wind chasing her.
The storm was almost upon her as she reached the exit of the ship. She started running and it had almost caught her by the time she reached twenty metres. It came in surges, strong enough to buffet her from behind, even at this distance. Sand was swirling when she slid to a stop and changed direction — back to the cruiser.
She made it just in time. The sound of the storm was growing deafening, the wind a near-constant shriek, mixed with the rasping, cruel noise of sand scraping the hull of the ship. Thunder exploded above her, making her flinch, and she squinted skyward in time to see the last of the sunlight being eaten away by the swirling dust clouds. Dry lightning arced and lit the sky as if daylight had returned at once, just for a second. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the lightning flash. Her skin stung with biting sand, the wind trying to take her by the feet and lift her where she stood, and she had to fight her way further inside the hull using handholds. She barely managed to wrench a door open enough to stumble inside, and then, just as quickly, slammed it shut again.
For a moment, she stood in the darkness, catching her breath, listening to R'iia's rage outside. The noise was diminished but still sunk through the armoured hull. She reached into a pocket, fumbled for a second, then found one of her glow rods. The light flickered weakly at first, then stabilised into a warmer glow.
Sorel sighed, took off her boots, and emptied sand from them. She shook off her clothes. She shook out her hair. When she was finished, there was a substantial pile of Jakku's desert at her feet, and she felt easily ten kilos lighter. And she wondered if anyone else had been caught in the storm where they shouldn’t be.
[member="Josiah Saedrin"]