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The dream always starts the same way, with Benthic lying on a patch of fungal moss, watching amber clouds race across the stark orange sky. The sun is high, its white disk hazy through the thick atmosphere. Spreading his mouth open, Benthic can taste the spring air, laden with spores and the musk of petrichor. It's hot, even with the frequent showers, and he only wears a loincloth.
Despite the peacefulness, there's a building a sense of unease. It bites and itches. It sloshes inside him, a formless malaise, a shadow without name or reason that threatens to spill over.
Benthic sinks deeper into the soft back of Yarsham, the float-jelly he calls home, wishing he could stay there forever—be a log rather than a Tognath. He'd let the fungi curl spindly tendrils around his fingers and toes, dig between his chitinous plates and the soft, pale flesh of his belly and thighs. They would consume him, digest him, feed him to the giant that birthed him. But peaceful Yarsham has no need for him. It's well fed. The soil on its back is loamy and rich. It sustains two whole clans, and has done so for more than six generations.
Yarsham is home, and Benthic won't fully sink into it until the day he dies and is fed to its beds of white moulds.
So what's the hurry? What's this feeling?
A golden kite-jelly soars overhead. This should be a common day. An everyday. Benthic would crystallise it if he could—with himself inside it. Yet even in dreams time must move forward, and Draia appears at his side, shaking her head in disapproval.
'Your belly is white, little grub. Cold as stone.'
'Elder sisters were created by the gods to fret and drive their siblings to madness,' Benthic replies tartly.
'Mad or not, you'll still catch a cold.'
'I don't share this specific talent of yours.'
'Prediction?'
'Cold-catching.'
Draia clicks her mouthparts, exasperated. Her bodysuit crinkles as she folds herself into a cross-legged position next to him. 'I knew you were a bad egg from the start,' she says. 'I should have stepped on you when pa wasn't brooding.'
Benthic laughs. Only his sister could joke about something so crass with such a light and pleasant tone.
'You wouldn't know what to do with Edrio without me.'
'We still have parents, you know.'
'We do?' Benthic asks, confused.
He sits up, looks around. Yarsham extends around them, but they're near the edge of its left side, and Benthic can look down to the plains below. There's smoke—as always in mining territory—but it's black and thick, oily columns twisting in the air. Fires. Wood fires. Nursery trees burning.
And parents? Benthic doesn't even recall the scent of them.
The unease hardens into cold anxiety. He turns to Draia to tell her, to warn her that something terrible is coming. But she chitters happily, large hands looming over him as she pets his head. Was she ever so tall?
'Why should I worry?' she asks him. 'I have you and Edrio to protect me.'
'No, no, you don't understand—'
She grabs his shoulders, squeezes painfully. 'You'll protect me, and ma, pa and ja. You can put all that sniping to good use.'
'No, Draia, listen!'
The sky grows light behind her, and she shakes him, shakes his shoulder. Benthic knows what's coming, and she won't listen, won't stop shaking him.
'Benthic—'
He tries to push her off him, to free himself so he can run. He has to find Edrio. Has to steer Yarsham away from this green sun rising in the North...
'Benthic!'
The sudden darkness is almost as disturbing as the knowledge of what's cresting over the horizon of Yar Togna. But Benthic isn't on Yar Togna. Not now, not for years. Not ever again. He's in a cave on Segra Milo, being shaken awake by...
He fumbles with the switch of his cybernetics, recovering his sight. He toggles on the night vision and finds Saw Gerrera looming over him, hand like a vice over his shoulder. Benthic lets out a helpless, indignant chitter, throwing his hands up to show he's awake.
'P-problem?' he asks, pushing himself up and reaching for his rifle.
'Not yet,' Saw replies, cocking his head sideways, one of his many enigmatic grins revealing a flash of white teeth in the darkness.
So Benthic was the problem. He must have been noisy. Usually Edrio wakes him up, but his eggmate has been away on a mission for several days now.
As if reading his mind, Saw jerks his chin in the direction of the empty bunk and says, 'Don't worry. Your brother is safe.'
'I'm not worried,' Benthic replies, glad for once that the voice box of his rebreather mask flattens tone, hiding just how defensive he would have sounded otherwise.
Saw laughs. A derisive, breathy chortle. 'Come,' he says, turning around and leaving for the front of the caves.
Benthic takes a moment to collect himself and shake off the last dregs of the nightmare still clinging to his frazzled mind. Everyone else is sleeping, it seems. A small blessing. Then he fine-tunes his cybernetics. The lack of pheromones makes human speech particularly difficult to parse, and Saw is on another level entirely. Offending him now wouldn't do. It never would, really, but Benthic has rarely been this self-conscious around him before.
Saw is sitting outside. He taps the crate next to his in a silent order and hands Benthic his flask without comment. Fire bourbon, Benthic knows before he even accepts it. He can taste the stuff on the air through his mask. Saw likes it potent.
He sits down and takes a swig through his mask's straw. The night is dark and starless, and the warmth blooming in his gut is welcome. Teed is pacing on the ridge, so it must be around four in the morning. With Segra Milo days lasting thirty hours, there's still plenty of darkness ahead of them—and then plenty of sunlit hours to start preparing for the Spellhaus raid, if Saw makes up his mind.
'I did receive a transmission from your brother,' the man says, breaking the silence.
Benthic hesitates, unsure if this is a leader sharing intel or a friend trying to be reassuring. 'Good news?' he asks, because two can play the cryptic game.
Saw gives him a sideways glance. 'There is a garrison, in the East. Less protected. Edrio thinks half our forces would flatten it now. With the attack as a distraction...'
'So we're going?'
Saw chuckles. 'I called Luthen.'
Benthic remains studiously silent. He'd been standing sentry when Luthen had last come and gone, but he's second in command and word always gets back to him. Given Saw's temper, Benthic is actually impressed he can speak the man's name without spitting on the ground.
'You will sleep better,' Saw says in the quiet, 'after we destroy that imperial station.'
Benthic sighs, a static noise through his voice box. He hands the bourbon back to Saw. 'The nightmares never go away.'
'Mine don't either,' Saw says, smiling—always smiling. 'But I welcome them. They fuel me. Remind me of my origins.'
'Your origins?' Benthic asks, curious.
'I dream of Onderon.' Saw's eyes are locked to the horizon, his back stiff and knuckles tight over the flask. 'I dream of droids patrolling my street, and my sister, Steela, falling to her death. Sometimes I'm the one falling. Sometimes I do things differently, and she lives. We die a thousand different deaths.'
A rush of emotion overcomes Benthic, tightening the plates across his back in a shiver. Ever since he joined the Partisans, he's been measuring himself to their leader. Saw Gerrera, a legend of the wars, an unshakable visionary sacrificing his life for the cause. Benthic has been around, but he's never seen or heard of a rebellion leader more worthy of his followers—of Benthic's own devotion. Saw has been an example to him... And all those years, they shared the same sort of night terrors? Woke in the morning with their dead sister's voice ringing in their ears?
'I— My—'
Saw turns to look at him, and Benthic freezes on the spot. What was he going to say? I also lost my sister. We're the same, you and I. What is he thinking? Saw can't possibly want to know—
'What do you dream of, Benthic? What horrors did I wake you from?'
Benthic stares back, silently weighting the pros and cons of rebooting his auditory cybernetics, just to be sure.
'It must be terrible,' Saw continues, 'I know what happened to Yar Togna. So much worse than Onderon.'
'It's not a competition,' Benthic says weakly.
Saw waves the argument away. 'We all lost too much. But we haven't lost the same things.'
And the Tognath have lost more than most. Saw knows it, anyone who cares to look up the history of Yar Togna knows it. It's not exactly hard to get to the Imperial era and read between the lines. The large, searing lines of orbital bombing and cultural genocide. Nursery trees burning, strip mining. World killing.
It's not what Saw is asking about. He knows Benthic's story—every Partisan's story. It's always the same, anyway. Dead families, dead worlds, dead dreams... Whole futures, amputated by the Empire's mindless maw. Futures ground under foot, histories erased. There's nothing special about Benthic and Edrio—besides, perhaps, how high they've risen in Saw's trust.
No, he wants to know what haunts him.
'It's always the same dream,' Benthic says, looking down at his scarred knuckles. He feels an itch at the sight of the worn chitin. He'll moult soon. Not for the first time, he wishes he could shed more than just old skin. 'It always starts and ends the same way. I'm lying down in a field between crops, and it feels terrible.'
'To be back home?'
'No. It's like... Like the very sky is with eggs, a sac ready to burst and some horror crawl out of it. But we're floating peacefully. Everything is in its right place. It should be a normal day. Then my older sister is next to me, worried I'll catch a cold even though it's so hot.'
Silence. Benthic doesn't dare look up.
'We always talk,' he continues. 'When I tell her something is wrong—because everything is on fire around us by that point and the bombardments are lighting up the sky—she thinks I'll protect her. She says I will protect everyone.'
The gods invented elder sisters to torment their younger siblings. It's a testament to how great Draia was, that she torments them still.
Saw passes the bourbon again and Benthic accepts it gratefully. He takes a swig and explains how Saw's shaking had translated into his sister's grip on him. Another swig, and he describes how the dream would have unfolded if he hadn't woken him, with an energy beam piercing Yarsham, the enormous float-jelly's crash-landing in its death throes. The smoke. The trekking. The dream-logic where they trade with talking animals and the poisoned water that makes grass grow out of their shoulders.
The crowd is too real though, plucked right out of Benthic's memories. A dark, pressing body made of a thousand living parts, undulating and sweeping them off their feet, chest plates grinding and creaking, painful, so painful.
'That's where we lost our sister,' he concludes. 'Well, in the dream and in real life.' A final swig of the bourbon, trading warmth for hope. 'So maybe she's alive, who knows? We didn't bury her.' Yarsham had been dead and rotting. Even if there'd been a body, they wouldn't have had anywhere to bury her. There's a cruel practicality to Draia's hands slipping from theirs, swallowed by the mob. 'Meanwhile, your sister—'
Saw's hand clamps on Benthic's wrist, warm and grounding. 'It's not a competition,' he says in a husky whisper.
Benthic lets out a sharp trill. 'We've all lost too much.'
Saw nods. 'And every loss is unique.'
He's smiling again, but it's kind this time. An invitation. Benthic wishes he could return it. He warbles a full laugh instead.
'What dreamless nights we'll have,' he says, 'when we've burnt the Empire down to ashes.'