The suns were slowly falling. Though the air didn't cool, not yet, but the shadows were lengthening, and the wind was picking up, whispering over the dunes like an old voice repeating a warning too faint to understand.
Uncaring of this, Luke marched ahead of the droids, bare-chested, caked in sweat and sand. His skin had bronzed further under the twin suns, his silver hair now damp and clinging to his forehead.
He should've been exhausted, but something burned inside him that wouldn't let him fall or die here.
> "Come on, it's this way," he muttered. "We should be close to the canyon now. And there should be water pockets under the cliffs, and Shelter."
R2 beeped a response, curiously.
C-3PO trailed behind, muttering.
> "Oh, splendid. Another rocky graveyard. I'm sure this one will be far more scenic than the last, oh! I nearly tripped on sand again! Oh heavens I was not build for this, just why couldn't we have landed on a nice planet with road's and actual civilisation."
Luke just rolled his eyes and ignored them, instead he scanned the horizon, and the way the sand was shifting, and Listening to the rhythm beneath the surface.
The desert it indeed moved, and had a rhythm if one just listened closely enough. It was like breath, like movement, a heartbeat.
And right now, It had stopped?
Fir a moment he froze.
R2 also realised it, and screeched in warning. And then the sand in front of him rose with a boom that sent sand flying.
The sand exploded high up into the air and from the ground a massive beast burst. It came from beneath the dunes, a Greater Sand Maw, twenty meters long, ancient and plated in sandstone-choked armor. Its mouth opened in four directions, ringed with jagged bone-teeth and a spiral tongue pulsing like a living drill.
It shrieked with a sound that was raw and thunderous, and the droids screamed. But Luke merely moved. No, he sprinted forward, toward it.
Instantly the maw lunged, teeth gnashing towards him in response.
Luke rolled under its shadow, hooked off the side of a boulder, and vaulted upward onto its hide. His bare feet skidded on the armor plating. The beast whipped its head, trying to dislodge him.
He slammed his palm into the back of its neck, and instantly flesh gave way and bone cracked.
The monster thrashed violently, but Luke held fast, one hand gripping the edge of a scale, the other now glowing with instinct.
The voice of the blind master was now echoing in his mind.
> "Find the breath. Break it."
And for a second Luke closed his eyes, exhaled, and then struck twelve times in two seconds.
The blows were like lightning, two fingers driving into each point just beneath the armored carapace, like opening a pressure valve from the inside out.
The beast screeched again, but this time it didn't sound angry, it sounded afraid as it died, and within it some of its insides burst apart.
It was like a tall tower of flesh as it fell to the ground, it's weight cracking small stones beneath it, and then it merely twitched a few times. But Luke felt it, it in fact wasn't dead, just paralyzed.
Then he dropped from its back, landing in a crouch, his fists coated in gore. He stood, chest heaving.
> "Well, I guess that was our welcome home party then, hahaha." He said, looking at R2.
In response R2 let out a whistle of astonishment.
C-3PO, still hiding behind a half-buried sandy boulder, peeked out.
> "You… you punched it. To death. Like a barbarian."
Luke smiled at this and said. "No, I just destroyed its insides, and soon it will be dead, not yet."
Then Luke waited for a moment. He slowly caught his breath again, and watched as the sand maw stopped twitching, and then it just lay still.
Its cavernous mouth hung open, steam was rising from the wet folds inside as nerve clusters fired their last. One eye, a milky, membraned orb the size of a shield, quivered before collapsing into itself with a soft squelch.
Luke wiped his arm across his face, smearing blood with sweat. His breathing was now steady, but now came the part that mattered.
He dropped to one knee beside the corpse, fingers brushing the thick, scaled hide, It was a colour of rusted sandstone, scarred from decades of battles beneath the dunes.
Then his hand moved like a craftsman's. He wasn't just looking anymore, now he was reading it's muscle strands, finding tendon joints, estimating the core where fat and fluid still remained insulated from the heat.
> "Meat first," he murmured. "Then marrow. Then the hide."
A mantra. Spoken low. A lesson drilled into him by Owen. And the droids. And the dozens of nights in the under-caverns of the homestead where meals were earned with knives, not credits.
He drew the vibroknife from his belt with a whispering shnnkt. Though he would have really wished now that he had brought the Vibroblade with him and not left it onto the ship. Well there was no use complaining about it now.
The blade hummed, barely audible, vibrating at a frequency fine enough to slice through bone if angled right.
Then he pressed the edge against a seam just beneath the fourth row of exposed plating, twisted gently, then drove it in with a practiced, measured force.
Quickly flesh split and steam hissed.
The smell of the beast hit the air: hot blood, acidic oils, and the faint sweetness of preserved muscle, like meat slow-cooked in a furnace for a thousand years.
R2 beeped softly behind him, almost hesitant.
Luke didn't look up.
He slid his hand inside the incision and peeled back layers, revealing the shimmering inner tissue that was purple-red, marbled with gold fat that was already beginning to gel under the cooling wind.
> "Fuel," he said. "Water. Tools."
He cut, sliced, flensed.
The meat was dense but fresh. Not bloated. He separated the top layer into clean slabs and wrapped them in hide from the beast's own flank, binding them with copperwire tendon, folding them tightly into a makeshift ration pack.
Next, he turned his attention to the lower thoracic cavity.
His blade moved faster now, his hands slick with blood. He carved downward, reached in, and punctured the inner gland sac, catching the fluid in a drained canteen.
The liquid shimmered like amber, faintly glowing. A rare hydration stabilizer used by creatures like this to self-regulate in deep hibernation. Enough to keep him alive for a day. Maybe two.
He bit the cork shut and clipped it to his belt.
Finally, he knelt at the beast's mouth.
Two of its fangs, sickle-shaped, black at the tip, still jutted from its upper jaw. He planted a knee on the mandible, gripped the base of one fang with both hands, and wrenched.
It cracked loose with a snap and a jet of fluid.
He did it again for the second.
Both daggers were nearly a foot long. Sharp. Curved. Hard enough to punch through most armor if thrown hard enough.
He slid them into the loops at his back, where his old vibroaxes once rested.
For the final touch—he sliced a section of coiled tendon, braided it tight, and looped it into a rope. Flexible, but strong. Could double as a whip if he needed it to.
He stood at last, covered in blood, muscles glistening under the low light.
Behind him, 3PO turned his head just enough to mumble.
> "Must we really take such things? It's so, grotesque."
Luke didn't flinch.
> "It's fuel."
He pulled the hide-pack tight over his shoulder and said.
> "Everything out here has a price."
After that he only glanced back once at the corpse, and then turned.
> "Let's move."