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❝to suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.❞
― FRANK HERBERT, Children of Dune
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𝐓ipoca 𝐂ity, 𝐊amino
𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 her eyes first fell upon the turbulent oceans of Kamino, Rowan felt a wicked sort of fondness for its crude storms, ash-mottled pigments, and desperately sloping waves. The former Jedi Knight appreciated that the planet itself seemed to know it did not have a right to be beautiful.
Thunder boomed with violent, injurious resonance, as if the heartbeat in her own chest was held between the misted palms of the sky. Destructive desires bled through the corners of Rowan's mind; she wanted to raise her arms, to steal her way from her shaking spacecraft and stand upon it's hull in the pouring rain, screaming at the clouds to take her for their souls were the same, distant ancestors of condensed sorrow and roguish flame extinguished. Yet she stayed silent, basking in misery that encompassed an entire world, imagining that the atmosphere sobbed for her alone, each echo of rain like the tick of a carved ivory clock in her time-marrowed bones.
But the chaos of an overarching abyss does not always reflect the wild within.
Inside Tipoca City's domed facilities, stark white walls burned at the raw vulnerability of her retinas, like velvet lily petals and swan feathers sharpened by the menace of glass as they repressed any possible means of catharsis. Even as her gaze darted from one place to another without stopping for a moment, searching for the relief of shadow within corners the light could not touch, discomfort new and old churned within the woman's ribcage. Clones of all ages passed through the halls, some like rabbits with their innocent, eager frames and skin like silk, others battle-hardened soldiers with ghosts dragging in their wake. They seemed strangely unaware of her presence despite the fact that each identical face jolted a deep path of regret within her conscience - the same features had echoed upon the ones she once believed were brothers.
Their glassy-eyed disconnection wasn't quite a loss to Rowan's cause, however, for uniformed marches seemed to drown out her presence like thundering chariot wheels. She usually relied on vivid self-assurance to make an undeniable home where she did not belong, but even as her emotions lay visibly shattered, strewn across her face like shards of broken porcelain, she'd met resistance from nothing except the rain.
