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Cobb Vanth stood alone in the middle of the Dune Sea, watching the clouds roil and billow in the sky above him.Clouds. The kind he had heard stories about, but had never seen… had never dreamed he would see. These were not the wispy feathers that sometimes appeared at dawn or dusk, not the puffs of vapor in the low atmosphere that seemed no more substantial than a whiff of exhaled breath on a frigid night, not the distant rising columns of dust that preceded a sand squall. These were real clouds, storm clouds… and somehow he knew the rain was coming.Offworlders sometimes spun tales of great deluges, of floods and of oceans that stretched as far as the horizon. It was a staggering thought… how much water it must take to fill a valley or a crater, or a vast desert like the one that surrounded him. Still, he had heard people say that the canyons of Tatooine had been carved by rivers, that this very basin was once a sea… that the Jundland Wastes where Freetown now stood was at one point in ancient times lush and green… covered with grass and grazing land and farms that grew crops for eating.He'd often tried to picture what it must have looked like, but never with much luck. It was hard to even imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by green. Sometimes he wondered what sound leaves made when they shook in the wind. And what did grass feel like? Was it soft? Sharp? Did it have a scent?When he was young, a Devaronian diplomat's daughter had gathered him and a small group of other slave children together, then had regaled them with tales about her own planet — and forever after he had remembered her mentioning that she could smell the rain before it came. He had never believed her, really… and now, even with the rain coming, he couldn't smell anything. Maybe she was lying, he thought, to try to impress these desert-dwelling kids; or maybe the rain on Devaron was different.Cobb rotated his sore shoulder, then looked behind him at the leagues of sand to the east… flat, calm, showing no stirring from the wind that was blowing the storm in from the west. He looked back around and that very wind blew harsh against his face. He squinted into the distance, and there saw a dust rising, a haze growing. Something touched his cheek and he reached up, brushing his cracked fingertips over the moisture there. He thought for a moment his eyes had been watering from the sudden gust, but another drop landed on his cheek, then one on his brow. Then more drops came, and more wind cooled his now-wet face, and he closed his eyes as a memory rose.As a child, he had once witnessed a water storage container spring a leak. He had never seen so much water, had never imagined having it touch his skin; so in a moment that he knew would draw punishment from his master, he had reached out to touch the drizzle. He remembered still how it felt, he remembered the taste when he had cupped his hands and brought the captured water to his lips. No small sip, as he had usually been restricted to… this was pure and primal, and after that first deep drink, he had stepped fully under the leak and looked up, opening his mouth and letting it fill with the falling water. It had beat against the skin on his face, soaked his hair, weighed down his clothing; the sand beneath him had turned to mud, and he had splashed in it with a joy and wonder that he would never again be able to recapture… then he had been dragged away from it, punished as he knew he would be while the adults did all they could to save the escaping water in buckets and barrels and seal the breach in the tank.A flash played behind his closed lids, then he heard a great crack and a rumble that shook his very bones. Opening his eyes, he saw more flashes — immense shocks of electricity, striking up from the ground and hitting the clouds; coming down again from the sky and sending out massive explosions. Lightning and thunder… but so much more alive than the dry lightning that would sometimes accompany the sand storms that he was used to.He could no longer see the sand or the distant dunes in front of him. All was a static, the horizon hidden behind rushing gray, while above him the churning clouds spread out infinitely. The drops beat harsh against his skin, like stones that dissolved into nothing and fell away after contact. His face, his hair, his clothes… everything all about him was wet, soaked, dripping. His parched lips parted and the purest water he had ever tasted slipped past them and onto his tongue.His feet were mired in sludge, the rising water now above his ankles. The ache in his shoulder grew, and again he glanced back. Behind him, the rain was not falling, the sky was clear and pale. The twin suns still shone down there, casting no shadow on the sand that sat untouched and unmoved, as if in a painting. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and looked forward at the storm once more. Squinting past the water in his eyes, he thought he could see the distant dunes that the rain had been hiding from him. The rain was slowing, perhaps. What would happen then, he wondered. He had heard that sometimes after a storm great arches of color would stretch across the sky. He hoped he would see that, hoped that something like that could even happen on Tatooine. That time when he was a child, when he had been watching the adults try to stop the leaking container… he thought he had seen prisms of light in the falling water, like sunlight through a crystal. Did that really happen all across the sky?A smile faintly pulled on the corner of his lips at the thought, but the smile failed as quickly as it had come.The dunes, he thought, were coming closer — illuminated by the lightning and looking for all the world like a wave of sand being pushed aside by a krayt dragon's passage. No, not a wave of sand… a wave of water. A massive wave, taller than the dunes, taller than the mountains of the Mospic High Range.Cold crept up from the base of his spine and into the nape of his neck. He thought for a moment of running, but even if he could draw his feet from the mud where they were stuck, where could he even go? How fast would he have to run to escape the oncoming wall? Would his speeder even be fast enough? His speeder?Where was his speeder? He didn't see it anywhere around him. He didn't even remember riding it out here, but how else could he have gotten so far into the Dune Sea? He couldn't even remember why he had come here… he just remembered being here. Not that it mattered. Soon the wave would hit him, wash him away.He wondered grimly if it would hurt. Water seemed so gentle, but the way it was now stinging his face, he thought that it was only soft when it was slow and in small amounts. This wave… this was neither… and a bleak, humorless chuckle rose in his throat when he thought that if the wave did not crush him, then he might well be the first person to drown on Tatooine in countless millennia.The wave came closer, but still it looked to him like a dune… like no more than sand, driven by the wind. The sparks of lighting still flashed and the thunder still sounded. The noise all about him now was inescapable, omnipresent, ubiquitous… the rushing wind, pounding rain, snaps of what may well have been blaster fire in his ears. He closed his eyes and waited…And waited.The wave didn't hit him, it didn't hurt. No great wall of water slammed into him. It enveloped him slowly, warm water rising from his ankles to his knees, from his waist to his chest, then he took a deep breath as his head went under.He was floating then — or what he assumed floating felt like. His body was light below him, his limbs slow as they passed through the water. He couldn't swim… who knew he would ever have to? He didn't even try. What good would it do to flail now and fight it? He would sink, drown… but still he held his breath. How long would he be able to do that?His arms and legs jerked in the weightlessness. Was he being pushed along by the current? He couldn't tell. It felt like he was lying still, suspended in nothing. It was strangely comforting, soothing… despite what he knew would happen when he took a breath.The air in his lungs burned, his throat ached, his shoulder throbbed. The sounds in his ears were hollow but loud — a rushing, a thumping, imagined voices in the cracking of the thunder… He couldn't hold his breath any more. He breathed in, wondering all the while what it would feel like to have water fill his lungs.But it didn't…He took another breath, then another.
…Air…
And still he floated, felt his hairs bush against his brow with the current… but the sound of rain and thunder faded into mechanical beeps and whirring, footsteps, the thrumming of his own heart in his ears…In a flash of memory, he felt a searing in his arm, his body hitting the ground… he smelled the burning of his own flesh… he heard a cold and harsh voice warning the people of Freetown not to interfere with… with what?The sour taste of bacta forced itself into the corner of his mouth, moved over his tongue and down his throat.He tried to open his eyes… tried and tried, until his lids fluttered and lifted just enough…Just enough to see a wavering above him, a red-tiled ceiling barely visible through the liquid where his broken body rested. A figure stepped into view… a man he had never seen before looked down at him, began speaking words that were almost inaudible past the myriad of sounds that now enveloped him…A deep and wizened voice, a stranger's voice welcoming him back… …Back from where? From the water? From the flood?No… no, he was still in the water… it was surrounding him, cradling him, comforting him…He closed his eyes once more, and again the sea took him under.