Deepwater Reflections

[Toska]

"Strong this planet is with the Force."
"It is one of the purest places in the galaxy."

―Yoda and the spirit of Qui-Gon Jinn​

The dancer danced to such music as any cared to play. Alcyone, alight in the mist, sweat rolling from pores saturated with humidity, trudged through the swamps. Her knees were thick in the muck, her feet bare but for the most anachronistic of leathers. Movement came in slow bouts, sucking through stale sediment and broken by gasps for breath that slipped into the laughter of the bog. Her eyes were closed, hands outstretched, reaching... always reaching for something, something further and beyond.

Immersed within the lattice of stagnation of a planet that forgot to breathe, she pressed. Always onward, towards an illusive goal that held her by the throat. That seized its hollow and stole her senses. Sight, taste, smell. Bereft of all but the most nascent of talents; she felt her way through the twilit bog. Let her feet guide her over peat and gnawed at logs. Stumbled through a haze that coerced her into depravity.

Roots curled out to kiss the surface of flat ponds, jutting out of banks stained in ichor. They trembled at her passing. Quivered for that fresh, jittering nucleus which bequeathed upon them the gift of hunger. Their trunks were gnarled, twisted with crooked limbs stumbling through the barest gaps in the fog, through a glass canopy that knew no escape. Knew no mercy. For Dagobah, no sweeter recourse came but that of decay; life rotted in its wake, purified in its final hour. Carressed by rafflesias that hung from webs of wines and thorns, that dripped with noxious sap and reeked of flesh.

The passage of time promised irreverence against its brow.

Distant howls that cackled as the pealing of thunder on tin awoke what activity stirred beneath the bog. It buzzed and churned on waters which encircled themselves, stale to the very pits of anthracitic coal that bubbled up from the wakes of sulfuric geysers. Smoke blended within the fog, belched out by pockets that lit up the peat, that burned colorless and bleak and threatened to siphon off the very air for any who dared breathe.

It was stifling. Thick. Beckoning only silence, only the chiding thrum of a heart to gull the weary into rest, into a sweeter embrace. Isolation, disappointment, the telltale hints of lost souls clawed their way along the howls. As with the Force, they became one with the world. Enmeshed in a biome that fed upon itself, that devoured all who came into contact with it.

Alcyone basked in it. Relished the longing kiss of want that suffused the surface. The quiet lull of desperation as life settled into rote. She anchored herself to it, to the scratches that split her cheeks and palms and knuckles, to the bruises lining her knees and thighs and toes. Calloused by it, centered to that discontinuous sense of self, the tattered remnants of her patchwork clothes swayed with her. Trappings of necessity, protection, of society that bore no power over these swamps.

At the edge of a pond so still that its waters mirrored death itself, she knelt. Disturbed the surface with a single finger, clawed her way into its depths. Scattered ions and particles of motion into the stagnant mirror. Shattered its still, its safety that slumbered as none other might. She opened her eyes, cast her gaze deep into its putrid waters.

 

[Jake]

The blind eye of the sun raked Dagobah with its gaze once, twice...

The intervals between breaths stretched until they outpaced the days themselves, crushing hunger and thirst and sleep into quiet voices that she could leave far behind as she embarked upon her journey into the spirit. The complete disassociation of body and mind was an achievement unto itself, cleaving into two something that had been whole, like the prying apart of twin helices. Holding herself in perfect scrutiny, she disappeared into a meditation that took her farther within herself than she had ever gone before. She walked a path down the amniotic corridor of life-memory, a uterine odyssey to plunge into the seas of neuronic time, to bare witness to the darkness that determined her soul. Listening to the whispers of the spine, she knew now how she had misled herself to contemplate the world from the vantage point of a single, brief lifetime. There was much to hear in the voices that emerged from the junction between thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, the zone of transit between the Nautolan past as gilled fish and airbreathing amphibians. Each soul carried the full heritage of the entire biological kingdom, each bloodstream a tributary of its almighty river. Evolution offered greater insight than she had ever imagined.

For many days Tsurumah lingered beneath the water, insensate to the creeping bog pythons that encircled her in dim reptilian curiosity, unaware of the gnarltree roots that brushed her face when probing to see if she could offer the great swamp any sustenance. In that time she became one with the Force as she had never been before, and when at last she awoke her eyes took in many flashing cataracts of detail from the farflung corners of the living world above her -- the wind combing its fingers through the branches of Yarum seed bushes, the leaves of Lahdia plants closed around their flowers, the dragonsnakes coiled in repose in secret groves that flourished with life far older than humanity... A girl who knelt at the edge of the pool where Tsurumah watched, far below.

Yes. It was time to abandon the trance and the thousandfold thought that had swallowed her.

Returning to herself, she shrugged off strands of water hyacinth that clung to her body. Wetland plants choked the surface of the pond so that precious little light trickled down to the starved depths. Fish flitted around her through the murky black, their scaled bodies the vermiculate maps of the world in its becoming. Before Alcyone's eyes, light suffused the mirror-like surface of the pond as Tsurumah called upon the Force to exhume her from the underwater grave where she meditated upon the underworld of the unconscious. As if the unsuspecting wanderer had awakened the sleeping god of the swamp, a pillar of water rose monolithically into the air before dropping, and all was as it had been, the pond a quiet interlude to the absolute chaos of thronging life that was Dagobah.

But the planet had ejected something from the cradle of its womb: Tsurumah, covered in slime and algae, utterly naked save for the gold filigree around her head-tentacles. The Nautolan warrior Sith towered over Alcyone; her nudity and the complete inhumanity of her stare lent to the savagery that ripped at the air around her. Though the calm of meditation had sutured Tsurumah's broken soul, it could not mend her completely.

TELL ME, she said in a voice that was the voice of all Dagobah.

WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU TO THIS DROWNED WORLD...?

@Toska
@Dread