Of Love and War Book 5: The Tragedy of Hope

Chapter 1: Heat Wave

The heat that radiated off the lava covering the world of Mustafar was already enough to make the temperatures unbearably hot. Yet it shouldn't have made the air so sweltering as to heat up the metal of the shielded facility to the point it burned skin—lightly, thankfully. Nothing scarring had occurred, not yet, anyway. Something was wrong if the temperature had spiked to the degree of burning, as even the air caused skin to dry and lips to crack.

The heat was the first sensation that returned to her. This unbearable heat that seared her skin and made her eyes sting as what little sweat she had beaded over her eyelids and managed to slip beneath loosely-closed lids.

The next was the pain. There were the small things: cuts from glass, bruises from impacts, the burn of the heat that was getting steadily worse, a pounding headache that made it difficult to focus. Then there were the larger things: the burns and cuts from a lightsaber, the small layer that had been sheered from her shoulder, and her entire body seemed to throb and hum with pain.

She twitched, ears picking up the sound of blaring alarms, a sound that grew steadily in strength as she returned to consciousness. She wanted to move, to figure out what that sound was and to escape the heat boiling her skin, but she was in so much pain...

She managed to open her eyes first. She squeezed them shut again a few times as the little sweat she'd generated burned her eyes before the blurry red, orange, and grey world around her slowly came into focus—for the most part. Her vision still swam enough to make her feel unbalanced, and it seemed like the floor was tilted.

No...no, it really was tilted! As she managed to lift her head marginally from the ground, it was to discover that there was lava slowly devouring the room that had once been part of a shielded facility. As she came to the jarring realization that the room she was in—she couldn't say it was the whole building because she'd only just regained consciousness—was sliding into the lava of Mustafar, she registered a metallic rolling sound that seemed vaguely familiar. One arm swung jerkily out on instinct, and something cylindrical stopped rolling across the floor as it came into contact with her hand.

Move.

She tried to push onto her arms, but her limbs didn't want to cooperate, even as she saw the lava creeping closer. Anything she started to put weight on trembled and buckled, everything tilted and swam as her mind sluggishly tried to make sense of what was going on.

Move!

Her fingers curled around the cylindrical object she'd stopped from rolling across the floor as she tried again to push herself up, much slower this time. She wavered unsteadily even though she was hardly lifting herself off the floor, her stomach lurching violently and causing a raspy retch as her stomach tried to expel contents that weren't there. Again, she found herself on the burning floor, unable to gather enough sense of herself and her surroundings to even raise herself marginally off the floor.

She dimly realized that she was lying on another cylindrical object that was pressing uncomfortably into her abdomen, but her mind was more focused on the connection she'd just made.

Growing up on Tatooine, one of the first planetary survival lessons that had been engrained into her were heat related illnesses. As a result, she recognized heatstroke even in her disoriented state.

I can't get up...I don't have the strength, the ability, I can't...

Yet she could feel the burning of the lava getting close. The facility was sinking, and she had to get up and move.

Still, she couldn't even get her arms to cooperate. It was hopeless. She couldn't get herself to move to safety, no matter how hard she tried.

Please! You have to stand...I ask nothing more of you beyond that other than that you live.