#this was inspired by emperor's wrath of the tyrant cover

[pequodyaoi]

uhhhhhh red hare and lü bu

[the-blue-fairie]

Skyclad

Inspired by @nudistrachelberry

Overwhelmed by her situation after finding Luke, Rey seeks peace through meditation and introspection.

On Jakku, the elements were her enemy and so Rey armored herself against them.

She learned from a young age how the sun could sear the flesh, how the winds could tear it, how the sands could sting.

She saw scavengers with backs of mottled purple, their skin stripped away as though by a tyrant’s bloody scourge.

Yet, the tyrant was not some overlord. It was the planet itself. Stories of the emperor, his rise and fall, of the Republic’s spires, of any masters from on high were fairy tales.

Not even Unkar Plutt was as fearsome as Jakku. Unkar Plutt was a creature of meat and bone. You knew what was within his power, you didn’t want to cross him or incur his anger, but he was not the heat of the day. He was not the ice of the night. He was not the shifting sands that could suck you down and leave you half-buried like the hulks you sought to scavenge.

The wrath of Unkar Plutt was terrible, but Rey felt more terror the first time she saw a sandstorm swallow an encampment whole.

She was tiny then. She did not see much. An old woman shielded her eyes. Still, she remembered flashes. The sand like a great wave, towering to heaven, on the horizon. The sounds of fumbling, scrambling. No screams. She did not remember screams. The sand engulfed everything too fast for screams, it must have. She remembered the sting of sand tumbling from the cowl the old woman wrapped around her. Remembered the feeling of keeping her eyes clenched shut, lest the grains of sand burrow in their corners…

Unkar Plutt did not like to be argued with, but it was possible to argue with him. Even if the consequences were brutal, it was possible.

You could not argue with Jakku.

Jakku had no mind to reason with, no beating heart to move. It simply was, in all its sightless, lifeless barbarity.

That was what Rey taught herself. And so, she fitted herself to fight against an implacable enemy.

She bound her body tightly with wrappings to keep out the sun and sand. She swathed herself like an already mummified husk. One tear in the wrappings and Rey knew the result. Her eyes took in the livid scars and blotches on other scavengers’ skin, the bleeding welts and blisters. She saw the way Jakku ate you to the bone if you let it.

Rey would not let it.

She shrouded herself, hooded herself, gloved herself.

Her goggles, she fashioned from an old stormtrooper helmet.

These garments were her weapons against the elements, weapons as formidable as her quarterstaff.

On Jakku, she could never conceive of nature as anything but hostile.

Leaving that planet opened her eyes.

The stars sprawled before her, celestial marvels.

The lush green of Takodana flooded her view. It was almost beyond her imagining, a world you did not need to arm yourself against.

It was there Rey heard the call first, felt the vision wheeling around her – but she resisted then. She threw down Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber and fled. She had built walls around herself on Jakku. She had bound herself tight so that she might let nothing in.

Strength had always come from masks, from shields, from armor of cloth that always kept the world at bay.

Yet, another form of strength presented itself to her, a Force beyond her comprehension. It sought to break down her defenses, to flow through her, but it was not like the forces with which she had so long waged war.

It was cool and placid as the surface of a lake, soothing as the shade of green trees.

When she opened her heart to it for the first time, she felt that.

The snow was cold, the earth shattering around her when Rey drew Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber to her hands.

Yet, when she shut her eyes and felt, she felt as she never had before.

“The belonging you seek is not behind you… It is ahead…” Maz Kanata had said.

The past clung to her like her clothing. She cocooned herself in the past for the same reason she wrapped gauze around her face in the desert. For protection. Memories wound around her like cloth over her body, like the wrappings over her mouth, her head. Memories of a small child gazing up at the blue, screaming, “Come back!” Memories as coarse and rough as the feeling of the mask against her face when she scavenged through the broken monstrosities on Jakku. Like the mask, the memories were uncomfortable. But like the mask, they shielded her.  

You already know the truth… Whomever you’re waiting for on Jakku, they’re never coming back…

The memories gave her a reason to stay.

Hope for her family…

They would come back for her…

She had to wait…

Years of waiting…

Like the mask, the memories shielded her from what she dared not face.

Or did they suffocate her?

All those years…

(Barely able to breathe…)

Waiting…

(The heat of her breath against the cloth of a mask…)

Immobile…

(The mask protects you from the sand, but there is so much more than the sand…)

Unable to rise from the dust…

(What good is protection if…)

Never coming back…

(…it protects you from all that you can be?)

Breathe. Just breathe. Reach out with your feelings. What do you see?

Now she was here, on this island, the birthplace of the Jedi Order. Its trees were as green as the trees she had seen on Takodana. Its rocks were as old as any. The rocks and trees were far older than the ruins scattered amongst them. The Jedi must have known this when they built their first temple. Nevertheless, it was the temple that made the air there seem heavy with history, the ruins that entangled with the green and became one with it, the ruins that the Caretakers sought to guard for they carried a sense of sacredness.

She felt the Force within her, burning and persistent, like the flow of lava over a volcano’s black slopes.

Yet, she could not partake in the sacredness. Though something stirred inside her, she could do little more than give it name. Skywalker refused to teach her more. She had come so far only to be met at the end by the stubbornness of an old man.

Now she was alone in darkness, in the midst of a storm. Somewhere, Skywalker was holed up in his hovel. She did not know where. She had stormed away in frustration and, looking back, she realized she had lost sight of the flicker of fire at his window.

She almost wanted to scream.

The island was screaming around her already. The rain roared as it pelted her ceaselessly. The sea bellowed as its grey waves crashed upon the rocks. The wind shrieked in her ears and kept on shrieking. Porgs squawked from their nests. From elsewhere, the cries of other beasts of the isle rang in chorus.

She trampled through the grass, over rocks. Where was she going?

Was she wandering blind?

No, not blind, but…

Exhausted.

(She had seen so much.)

She pushed on through the rain.

(Seen families wither and die on Jakku.)

Upward, she felt herself moving upward.

(Seen Han Solo’s body tumbling, lifeless, into the abyss. Lifeless. Bereft of all that made him who he was…)

Her clothes hung heavy about her, soaked by the deluge.

(Seen Finn struck down.)

Heavy like her gear on Jakku. Weighing her down.

(We will see each other again. I promise.)

Heavy like memories. Heavy like responsibility. Heavy like disappointment. Like the shock of seeing a hero fallen from grace.

(Luke Skywalker. She had grown up hearing stories of his adventures.)

All this… weight…

(Her family, gone. Han Solo, gone. Luke Skywalker…)

She found herself tearing off the sopping rags clinging to her.

Tearing them off as she staggered upward, a great cliff rising before her.

Casting them behind her, casting them to the ground.

It felt surreal at first, standing nude on the edge of a cliff.  She was used to having some covering, some protection.

But this was not Jakku.

And, even on Jakku, some forms of protection merely shadowed her eyes, stifled her, kept her in place…

Nude, she stood upon the brink, gazing down at the whirling waves bristling with foam. The waves cascaded upon the rock of the cliffside below her, the rock that seemed indomitable but that let itself be worn away as it had always been worn away, as it always would be worn away…

Here was a place to scream, to cry out to the heavens.

But Rey did not scream.

Rey shut her eyes.

Water droplets splashed upon her body by the hundreds, but unencumbered by her garb, Rey did not feel a weight. She felt as smooth as sheer stone… as though she, like the rock face beneath her, might dissolve away…

Yet, this dissolution was not an annihilation.

Rey thought of something Luke had told her: “And this is the lesson. That Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies, is vanity. Can you feel that?”  

He had spoken in bitterness, to discourage another generation of Jedi, but there was something beautiful that she now felt in his words, whether he realized that beauty or not – something that shone like rays of sunlight through the cracks in the walls of a darkened temple. She did not need Luke’s teaching simply to partake in the sacredness. She did not need the training to feel the exultation of the Light. The training was meant to hone one’s skills, to shape the unmolded clay… but there were so many ways to shape unmolded clay, each more wondrous and unique than the last.

What did it mean to be a Jedi? Did it mean the dogma, the rules and regulations, the strictures? No. It meant accepting the embrace of the Light.

The way of the Jedi could grow and change, change like the island rock reshaped by the waves. The dogma could be chipped away and washed out to sea. The structures set in place eons ago by those long dead could be worn down to the finest powder. As long as the Light remained, the Jedi remained.

The rock of the island had been reshaped for millennia. Worn down. Swept away. Built up. New rock took its place alongside the old. Caverns collapsed inward or were sculpted by the water. The coastline was always transforming and yet always was itself. The island did not die with change. It did not fall into disorder. Change was its natural order. It could be so with the Jedi, for it was vanity to think a change in the structure of a thing could dilute the essence of the Light. The Light was ever-guiding…

At the same time, the Light was ever-changing – like the island, like nature itself. She felt the Force within her, the Force that before had burbled in her chest like magma deep beneath the earth, that had burned like the spout of lava. It had cooled, but not congealed like lava into rock. No, it flowed through her still. Now its flow was like the river, rich with new-melted snow. The Force was like one of the raindrops sliding down her back. In the sky, it took one form. It was a droplet. But the instant it struck her shoulder it took a new form, gliding down her body in a shimmer of silver whilst remaining itself. Other raindrops took other forms, some clinging to her skin and slipping, some splintering like distant stars and glistening in their multiplicity. They were individual. They were a multitude. The Force, like them, was ever-shifting and transformative. It could not be circumscribed.

Trying to bind the Force to dogma was a fool’s errand. Even the temple on this island, the hallowed ruin, seemed a monument to hubris behind Rey’s closed eyes. It held wisdom, yes, but Rey felt a greater wisdom in the wind that beat down its walls, in the ooze that trickled into its cracks, in the moss that flourished on its broken remnants…

Through the darkness of her eyelids, Rey felt a flash of light. Sightless, she saw the pale lightning fork across the sky more clearly than with her eyes open. Then she heard the roll of thunder from afar, but there was no trembling in her heart. These things were like the sandstorms of Jakku, mighty and unyielding, but in meditation she understood they all had their place within the Force. Even the sandstorms of Jakku. The sandstorms swallowed up souls, but they were not evil. They were not the Darkness. Shadows grew in hearts and minds. Beings who sought to oppress the galaxy, they were evil. The First Order was evil. But the sands… were the sands. The Light shone over them the same way it did bodies rotting in the earth. Death and decay, in themselves, were not cruel. They were part of the great cycle…

(All things fall away, but nothing falls away.)

The island no longer screamed at her. Its myriad voices flowed together and yet it was not as if they all became one voice. Each voice retained its individuality, its uniqueness. From the howl of the wind to the reverberating thunder, from the groans of the thalla sirens on the rocks to the rumble of the serpents in the sea, from the cries of the birds to the weeping of the rain – no voice drowned out another. And yet they all came together in unity, in a haunting and harmonious song…

From her place on the edge of the precipice, Rey kept her eyes closed and listened.

***

When she awoke, the storm had passed.

The dawn was painting the clouds with rosy fingers. The suns had not yet crested the waves on the horizon. Still, their dim glow spread art across the firmament, art that met Rey’s eyes as they fluttered open.

She rose, taking in the pastel warmth surrounding her. The sea shone a pale crimson, its foam the softest pink. Rich plumes of red billowed above the surface of the waters. Turning her head, she saw her clothes strewn behind her like debris that had been tossed ashore.

She might have gathered up her garments, but she did not.

Instead, she kept on walking.

The suns rose higher, bathing the world in orange and gold. Their rays felt gentle on her skin.

There was a tranquility in being nude. Nude, she could feel things better. She felt the way the warmth of the suns mingled with the cool morning air. It felt pleasant. She felt the blades of grass bending beneath her feet. She felt the drizzle of water that dripped from arches of stone as she wandered under them. Stretching out her arm, she felt cold stone against her palm, felt its texture. There were so many small things, sensations, that she missed while wearing clothes. There were so many things too that she took for granted. She had felt the warmth of the suns every day since landing here, but now their warmth felt different as she let it wash all over her body. More special somehow. Transcendent. She felt blessed to have such lights in the sky. It was like she was coming to understand the world anew.

She found a green place in the valley and sat down. The grass tickled her buttocks. A few porgs waddled by. She smiled at them. They cooed in return. Some Caretakers passed her and wagged disapproving fingers at her, but she paid them no mind. The smile that spread across her face upon seeing the porgs spread into her heart. She fixed her gaze ahead, where the mountains glistened in a halo of gold.

She knew that in time she would have to pick up her clothes like clumps of brown seaweed and put them on again. But here and now, she focused on the serenity of things.

The Force was all around her.