The night chills him.

The dark seems to breathe in and out of his skin – a soundless, unsound osmosis wherein his already detached perception of the world and himself in it bleeds silently into the night. The night chills him. Skywalker does not mind. This long, endless night (at first he paid no attention to it, but as the long hours in the Threshold crawled into days he began to realize that something was amiss) is a reflection of him. As if he would have his insides turned out. As if he were made out of a mass of long shadows and silence, a canopy of leaves that only allow for the finest beams of moonlight to reach the murky forest floor. He slips in and out of the pale glow of the moon and it silvers his black skin, bleach on his emotions, leaving his heartbeats colored in the same sickly pallor as death.

It chills him. It suits him.

Black-skinned, bright-eyed Skywalker walks. Out of the threshold and it’s stale, idle gloom – and there is purpose to his long strides – into a world rendered not entirely unknown by the rumors that has passed him. He has been idle for days, waiting. There will be no more of that, he thinks and somewhere above his head a cloud reveals itself and its grey outline only by passing in front of the moon. For a moment he melts into shadow, the dark gains weight and curls itself about him. He heads south.

Time passes and he walks silently across the lands that have been inaccessible to him up until now. His stride is in the length of a wanderer and he is eager (albeit his unmoving face and its unwillingness to bear testimony to any sentiment) and he pushes on, unmindful of the strangers he passes, their strange markings and appendages irrelevant to him. Moody, roman-nosed Skywalker could appear more inviting, more accessible, had it not been for his infatuation with starless skies and empty darkness. Had it not been for his uncommunicative manners; had it not been for the lack of warmth in his eyes. Should he not be so ruthless in his judgments.

Aware of his faults, Skywalker accepts them and justifies them with a single, uncompromising thought: these things that he lack leaves room for something else.

Relentless ambition.

And it is this antipoetic drive that carries him across Helovia on un-stridden paths, through a dark that he is not familiar with. The marsh, someone had told him, you’ll find them in the marsh. He walks and does not know for how long. It doesn’t matter. At first he does not notice it, but soon he finds himself encompassed by a heavy, old scent: stale water, he instantly thinks and notices how the trees have changed, akin to withered bones, picked nearly clean by slathering jaws, vines of green flesh left to rot here and there. The ground underfoot gives way to unsure, treacherous wetness that reeks of rotting wood – enough to slow him down, to stop. Skywalker is old enough to know the uncertainty and untrustworthy nature of marshlands and deems it unwise to go any further. This must be it; he concludes and stares through the gloom, searching for movement. There is a strange stillness here and he deems it unwise to call into it. Instead he stands, at the mouth of the marshlands, unmoving, uncertain.

Unsettled?

S K Y W A L K E R.