The Desert Caravan Meme

[cornichaun]

The Desert Caravan Meme



The sky is unimaginably large. Infinity as a pale, blinding blue, never a cloud. Your eyes always sting from the sand and from the bright, painful light.

This is the desert. It is the desert that lives in poetry: the shifting, formless sea of white and gold and red, in slow, sinking dune-waves. This is the desert of scorched cliffs and ancient stone; it is the desert of vast, eternal wind, bringing the bite of grit to bare skin. Sun’s heat untempered by mercy and parched land flickering with false hope of oasis.

This is the desert of legend: the desert that hides prophets tucked in endless emptiness, where djinnis whisper on the winds and magic wells from the sands themselves. This is the land that can trap you and drain you, of memory, of past, of weakness; the land that secrets treasure away in caves and holds salvation in hidden water. This is the land that bakes you and cures you, lets the soft clay of your soul shape into something new.

The desert is a place forever between, broken with paths, sliced and scarred for the sake of trade. But the desert is a place itself, too, home for the nomads, the caravanserai, the dotted strips of live eked out of the dry. Home to the snakes and the birds and the twisted, thorny scrub, the camels and the horses.

It will seduce you with the rapture of quiet, the beauty of an emptiness that is never truly empty. But it will deceive you, too: a mountain days away that seems close enough to touch; a camp close enough to hear, but hidden in a fold of the dunes. If you lose your way, you could die of thirst an arms length from salvation. Dunes shift; paths bend. If you do not know the desert, it will kill you.

Who are you?
A traveler, trusting in the grace of a guide to bring your caravan safe to the other side;
A guide, walking by stars and distant hills through the land you know by heart;
One belonging to a caravanserai, an enclave of the desert, by precious water, gleaning a living from the harsh land and the travelers passing through;
A bandit, preying on the slow, plodding merchants;
A nomad, with the desert in your blood, watching the intruders pass through;
A hermit, solitary and empty, grown accustomed to the silence;
Or a creature of magic: a djinni, a sorcerer, a witch, a prophet?

What has happened?
An ordinary, exhausting day of travel, your mouth dry as dust?
Have you lost your way, straying, along and baking in the sun —
A raid by bandits, to take money, goods — people?
War, over territory? Over water?
Strangers arriving in the caravanserai?
Happening upon a celebration, of life, water, harvest?
A rainstorm, for the first time in years? A sandstorm, deadly, and far more common?
Or something else?

Comments

[sensitively]

That grin — and the subsequent flush that followed it, and remained stubbornly on his cheeks — was far more intriguing than it should have been. Rey found herself mirroring his smile and then watching him intently, unable to look away as he cleaned his plate in an effort to catch sight again of the reddening of his pale cheeks.

She watched then as he wrote out a message to her; he winced as he did, most likely because of his stiff fingers, and she felt a momentary surge of compassion. Whomever had scarred him so badly had done quite a thorough job of it, on the one hand at least.

His message gave her pause before she nodded. Scavenging through old Imperial star destroyers wasn't for everyone. Rey slung a pack over her shoulder, giving him a last nod as he made ready to leave. "I can take you to the southern gate of the outpost on my speeder if you like, before I head off to start my work for the day. I'm going out that way, anyway."

[prevailsthelight]

Ben nodded and stood. He tucked his slate into his pack then swung it onto his back, securing the straps around his body and then re-wrapping his headwrap. He once again became a quiet and anonymous ghost of a man - all traces of his identity were gone, he was reduced to the pack and the clothing, and not a scrap of skin or hair was visible, even his eyes shrouded with a veil of fabric like cheesecloth. He followed Rey out to her speeder and clambered up behind her. Again, he wrapped his arms around her waist and clung, eyes squeezed shut against the sickening sight of so much land speeding by.

[sensitively]

The way he gripped her while on her speeder, his arms curled tightly around her midsection, made Rey shift in a manner that was both uncomfortable and strangely pleasant. She realized that while it was fast it wasn't the preferred method of transportation for everyone, and that Ben definitely didn't like it by the way he clung to her as though his life depended upon it.

Still, despite the fact that she'd been unused to physical closeness for so very long prior to meeting him, she found the way he held onto her — trusting, as it was, that she'd keep him upright and not let him pitch forward or backward on the high-speed craft — somewhat endearing. She found she was somewhat disappointed when they'd arrived.

She dropped him off at the southern entrance to the outpost, nodding to him as he clambered off of the speeder. "I'll be back for you in several hours, before dusk, certainly." And then with a wave from him she was off.

The day's work was spent on the carcass of the Executor, the Dreadnought that was said to have been the flagship of Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith. Rey had scavenged it a few times before and was already familiar enough with it to know what to focus in on, what to hunt for inside the behemoth starship. She made quick work of the innards of control panels and switchboards, yanking and wrenching parts out of place to put into her knapsack and take back to Plutt.

By the time the sun began to sink in the sky she was already back at Niima washing her wares, her hands swathed in arm-high rubber gloves as she scrubbed the metal parts with a caustic solution meant to rid it of rust and dirt, so focused on hurrying through her work so that she could meet up with her friend once more that she paid little attention to her immediate surroundings.