Uncharted

[Caira Ayryn]

Chapter One: Wall of Sand, A Fated Arrival

Perhaps the remnants of the Copper Eye had seen her coming. Then again, perhaps not. She remembered what it had felt like and all that she had seen. Glimpses in the darkness, a shadow immediately upon her. Touching the empty depth was the heavy lethargy of paralysis that had settled in her bones with a single prick on her neck. It was something she had never before experienced, a forlorn sickening sensation of her own inescapable fate.

Arms strained. No movement resulted no matter how much effort she put into motivating her muscles. Meanwhile Caira tried to sort it all out. The Prime hadn’t physically seen her captors but from their footsteps there were about six of them, she could sense their individual physiques through the vibrations in the ground but it was difficult to juggle with the overwhelming deluge she combatted before she succumbed to the inescapable shadow of her subconscious.

Suffocation, fear, trepidation broke out underneath the black cotton bag that served as a blinding layer over her face. Assumption was the only thing she had to go off and even she didn’t know enough about her abductors to suspect precisely who it was that had wanted to exile her from Coruscant and banish her to the outlying verses. They probably had assumed she was a Camelot spy.

Though they had left her attire intact, her weapons intact, if they really had wanted to hurt her, they would have. Why had they done this?

The female wiggled out of the poorly wrapped bag that encased her head, ruffling-up her braided hair, her eyes quickly adapted to the instant suffusion of light that seared into her pale skin.

”A.. Desert?”

Her pale eyes glazed over the edges of dune that rose and fell like paraded mountains and in the distance seemed to ebb away from her like soft waves. The Prime took it in all at once - the heat, the light, the empty sound of wind on the drifting sand. She quickly rose to a stand but found her senses muddled as she collapsed into a broken kneel. The paralysis was still in effect. If only slightly. She heaved in a breath of arid desert air and let the determination fill her.

Straining herself and coughing in some sand, Caira’s eyes fixed on the rolling pursuit of a tidal wave that rose hundreds of feet in the air, casting the sun away in the shadows of the rainless storm. It was a steaming, rolling wall of sand bulldozing its way through, entrenching the placid terrain and eradicating the baby blue sky of its cloudless serenity.

The tsunami of niveous sand approached in the form of a colossal wall, ready to steamroll Caira into the dust below her feet. The tornado engulfed her and tore at her fastened stance upon the not-so-stable ground. The Prime acted quickly, using the bag they had put over her head and ripping it into a finely fashioned balaclava. Then, she placed her iconic sunglasses in the opening she had made. Small coarse pieces of sand scratched at the lenses, but her eyes were protected by the layer of shade which served as impenetrable goggles. There wasn’t much to see trapped inside the whirling cloud, specks of sand perpetuated at a strong force and bore themselves down at any stagnant moving part of her body. Painful scratches of wind tore through her new and rather thick attire like fragmented glass, leaving only her gauntlet arm, her balaclava and her socks untouched -yet completely covered in a thick coating of sand - as the woman found herself at the core of the noxious sandstorm.

What are the odds that the second I arrive, a great sandstorm appeared to make my day even better? The monk's spiteful thoughts reflected the creasing grimace beneath her covered visage.

Casting with the wind and somehow gravity remained grounding her, was her hefty cloak. She used it as a brace against the wind and sunk lower to the ground in an attempt to make some headway and brave the storm, because there was no where to burrow beneath. She would be smothered alive had she remained in the open. So the “sailing” girl didn’t have much time, she couldn’t let the sand collect else she would lose her bearings. In her jumbled, paralysis filled haze, she recalled the sun, it hung tilted in the sky if only for a moment East of where she faced. The approximate direction of the current of wind fluctuating within the condensed whirls of sand - and the very gale that had swept this storm in - might just lead her in the right direction. After all, it had carried a consistent sweep of sand from a steady direction. There was no other option, she would go against the storm because it was the only way for her to maintain a straight direction to anywhere.

Her steps became the endless monotony of her own pace. The strands of grueling sand and wind bore down as she continued to fight -one small step at a time- as the suffocating blizzard swallowed her whole. She consequently cut her cloak off, as at this point it was a disadvantage, and off was her last train of righteousness.

The gales cast granules everywhere, within her pockets, sheaths, and cavities of her hood. It nearly became too much for the young sorceress as she continued further, willpower now superseded the strength she had summoned. On the bright side, it had blown away the ghastly arid heat that had settled on the mounds of crumby sand.

This was an uphill battle, the direction she traveled could bring her to nowhere. It could kill her, had the girl no faith. And when she arrived into whatever danger was waiting, her sore muscles would be so heavy with fatigue that no matter the obstacle, it could easily kill her.

It was a battle of the mind. Within it, she created thoughts of serenity, despite her current doubt of insanity, which sometimes brought more burden than motivation as she could be trapped in this sandstorm until death. Gasping, heaving, and steading breaths suffered and smothered her beneath the brazen bag. Time hung over her shoulders with a dauntingly infinite weight, haunting her most recent memories, and effecting every sense that gradually awakened from its dormant slumber.

“This is... One way to wake a girl up.. And yet whoever did this, didn’t kill me. I guess it’s because they can’t. Primes can’t die.” she told herself, “But, they could have put me in the Underverse if they really wanted me gone..." She voiced out loud so she would not have to hear the endless white noise roar in her ears. Before shouting, "Why am I here?” at the wall of sand and the constraints of her tortured screams were muffled by the sound of sand that shrieked her own cries back at her as the wind tore into her bones.

The Prime traveled in the hourglass, as time continued to thieve away every one of her breaths.

The braid she had wrapped whipped her shoulders in the wind; when her feet would idle too long, small piles of sand would accumulate on the tops of her boots in hefty mounds. Caira was glad she hadn’t maintained her position and attempted to wait it out, with this weather, there would be a mountain of sand to mark her somberly nameless tombstone.

“The storm came from my left. I know I must be heading towards something.” her voice howled against the chaos. To affirm her sense of direction there were littered glimpses of color that Caira had caught of a fluttering tapestry. Footsteps and fatigue were the only tools she had for measuring how far she had come; if someone had attempted to calculate the time she spent battling that storm, and her arrival to the Town With No Name, they would find that it took about five hours for Caira to finally stumble into the eye of the storm.

The chill of dusk settled with the dimming of the storm but with its fading turmoil, she saw a dense mound of darker color on the horizon. “Civilization!” she said weakly and fumbled quickly towards it, tripping over into her dense enervated feet and collapsing into a face full of sand. She ripped off the balaclava and crawled toward the shadows of buildings, still grasping the hems of her cloak she gritted her teeth to match the edge of the still grueling storm.

The sand beneath her toes started to shift and she nearly tumbled to the ground again, indicating the incline that she would have to face and continued to climb the collection of fresh dough that seemed to take a minute for every crawled 'step' she took to pack down the sinking granules beneath her.

The raging fury of wind had declined, while small fragments of sand still battered and pinched at her cheeks, as well as the other parts of her that showed naked windblown skin. With the brief idle of motion, immediately the immense weight of her lethargy clouded in her silver eyes, her body shuddered yet she had slowed her pace to that of a snail. Don’t stop, you aren’t there yet. Cai attempted to motivate herself and could have reached out her sleeved arm to motion that her goal was within her grasp. When her elbow thundered over a piece of metal that had been covered by the piles of sand, it was finely shaped into a sleek board, had an immense amount of sand upon it, yet it had amplified a slight vibration to its core.

Can it be? The wanderer immediately recognized her hover board, which her captors must have sent askew from her, set off in any miscellaneous direction, so she could not use it to free herself of the trudging, grueling heat of the desert. Torturous intent indeed.

The board's mechanisms had died out here, just before the town and on its outskirts. It wasn’t much use to her now, but she had it in her possession, and with it, she would have one final push as she strapped the board on her back and crawled onward, fingertips clawing into the last stretch of her life.

Caira saw the first bit of moonlight show in the shape of Omni’s crescent smile, but she was surprised after some careful observation to find that she was in the middle of the storm. Much like a hurricane, there was a large calm in the shape of a circle that seemed to surround the town, but the eye of eased winds were passing quickly as another wall of sand threatened to consume the town whole.

She tried not to think of the odds that she had actually found the board once set askew, whether it was chance or logic that her captors had used to send it off in a free direction, or if it was intentional that they sent it toward the town. Whatever group of uglies that had ‘exiled’ her, probably thought what she had just that: It wouldn’t be much use to her on the outskirts of town. Somehow had she stumbled upon it, and the grateful Prime held a prideful smile on her grimacing, wincing face. She held her prize triumphantly, like a turtle with a shell on its back and crawled through a covering and underneath tarp into shelter

At the spree of coincidence, defied, and Caira had found it, the Town With No Name.

...

Meanwhile, in the safety of a dugout on the edge of the boarded up town, some tarps hung to entrench the storm and brace the wind and sand, as piles of it pooled beneath due to the rapid air currents. Within, was a young guard about the age of thirteen, his front tooth was missing and he spoke to his partner who at least quadrupled his own age, “Say, how long you think this storm 'ill keep?”

“Oh, she’ll stay at it for at least another hour,” an old man’s voice wavered with wisdom, “But I’ll tell ya this, I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it before, ever since I fled the Empire in Coruscan'.”

“Really?” the kid chirped in a childish tone of shock and awe as he simply couldn’t contain his endless curiosity.

“O’ course. Usually they blow over within an hour and are much milder,” the older man rose to his feet. “Yes, something’s a’ comin’.” he spoke with a scowl as his fingers played with some fine linens.

“Like what?” the boy looked around with big brown eyes that brimmed with energy and hope as he took a quick peek outside at the rippling winds of sand.

“No, no lad! I meant metaphorically.” the geezer shooed him away from the filtered dust that entered their marquee.

“Huh? How’s that?” the boy tilted his head and turned back toward the guard.

“It means something isn’t actually coming, hell, no one would be stupid enough to be out in this storm. A metaphor. It means that in the future, perhaps the storm’s an omen of some sort- ” he cut off from his momentary analysis and explication when the excited boy jumped up ecstatically and interrupted his thought.

“I think you’re right! Somethin’ IS coming!” the lad’s eyes only grew wider.

“Ah yes, now, as I was sayin' the metaphor-” the guard nodded with his eyes closed, glad finally the lad had given him the attention his stories demanded and assumed his thoughtful expression as his eyebrows creased his sand-worn face.

“No, look here!” the boy pointed to a dense figure through the parted rugs of the makeshift tent, through the wall of sand and wind, enduring the fastest and most ruthless gales the dunes had been not known for many years.

The older man had to check his eyes as he scrubbed them free with his knuckles. He didn’t want a false alarm caused by the sand left in them from this nap earlier that day. The approaching figure certainly wasn’t raiders, but a single girl donned in black.

“Is that whose comin’?” the boy asked, the definition and explanation of a metaphor going over his innocent head.

The older man sighed with a smile, giving up hope for little Murad, “Yes.. I suppose it is.”

...

“When we saw you out there, we couldn’t believe it!” the man explained to the sand-covered woman whose clothes had amply deteriorated from the harsh wind.

The young boy protested, “I could! I could! We were jus’ talking about ya!”

Caira’s eyes fluttered in an attempt to stay open, she had collapsed in their dugout, grateful for the shelter it provided from the wind of the storm and borrowed a canteen of water. Her fingers had fumbled for it eagerly and she felt the coarse grains of sand underneath her fingernails and it caused her to wrinkle her nose in drowning distress. Yet, her curiosity was piqued when the boy mentioned her, “Hm? About me?” she inquired, suddenly suspicious as water dribbled down her chin and neck. After having her fill, she used the rest of it over her face, washing like a cool waterfall over her dust-coated skin. She shook off some of the droplets of water that had accumulated on her chin as the boy in strange garments continued.

“Yup, yer’ the metaphor.”

The old man put his palm to his forehead, all was lost. “What he means to say, is that we weren’t expecting any visitors, especially coming through this raging storm. We haven’t had one like this... Why.. since I was a young boy about Murad’s age here.” the geezer said with a sigh as he pat the boy’s back. Murad gleamed with invincible youth. The old man seemed slightly envious that youth was wasted on the young but didn’t have the heart to tell him of the idiom ‘curiosity killed the cat’ and as friendly as this desperate stranger was, she could still be dangerous to the town.

“So tell me of this place.” her tone echoed lowly, they were easy enough to talk to in her half fatigued state, though she could barely keep her eyes open enough to listen but her bones had settled and it felt as though her muscles were already settling into hibernation. Caira’s silver enervated eyes traced the friable walls, wondering if they were worthy of something so fleeting as safety. She didn’t mind the unsound integrity of the place -which was just a couple of simple tarps- as long as the ceiling didn’t cave-in due to the infinite wind and heavy pressure of heaping sand.

“I’m sorry to ask,” the old man whom seemed to age by the minute said, “But you didn’t know of this place before you ventured out into the dunes in this storm? It is unwise to, though perhaps you got caught in it, I just ain’t sure how you found yer’ way here completely blind.” his voice was accusatory, and he boldly stated his suspicions seeking answers or a confession from Caira, expecting her villainy to be admitted with a boast of triumphant pride.

“I really belled the cat out there didn’t I? But to explain, I knew nothing of this place when I was taken and deserted here without a choice, didn’t see my captors. Apparently I had enemies I didn’t know existed, though I only just arrived in the Omniverse a few months ago. They were capable of abducting me and putting me in the deser-” she stopped, suddenly her eyes narrowed.

“What is it, there somethin’ in yer eye?” the naive young boy said trying to figure her out.

Caira shook her head and continued, she supposed fatigued worked like a truth serum, as she didn’t have enough energy to be defensive or put up a good enough lie to make her seem like a more powerful Prime with limitless capabilities. “...Trapped me in the desert and conveniently enough, at the moment I awoke, this unnatural storm of sand swept me off my feet and I trudged a while before I got to this place. But I believe there is something to it after all.”

Faintly her eyes glimmered with a tired determination.

“What are ye' gonna do?” the old man asked, his eyes soon grew as eager as the youth’s as he was caught up in the mysticism of her story.

Though, maybe it was her lassitude talking, “I’ll give them exactly what they want. I’ll face the treacherous terrain!”

“What? No- its much too dangerous out there, even for a Prime.” the old man explained the bandits of the mountains and the creatures and cretins that dwelled in the great sea of the sand.

“And what of the horrors of the night?” Murad even looked concerned, knowing and recalling the scratching against the walls of his home as he slept by those creatures who had dwelled in the dark for far too long. Along with the horrible stories and rumors he would hear as people would almost never return after nightfall.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it was possible.” Caira’s eyelids slowly began to wink with sleep, “I’ll rest up and leave soon. If you’d find me a place with a bed I’d appreciate it.”

“Much obliged, little lady.” said the elder.

“Oh, and if you have a village doctor, I should wish to see him...Uh, Immediately...” she had barely finished her words before the triumphant posture of the girl crumpled into one of fatigue, unsupported under the weight of her nodding head.