Warlock
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Warlock |
| Author(s): | Mac (ausmac) |
| Date(s): | February 2005 |
| Length: | 16,400 words |
| Genre(s): | slash fanfiction |
| Fandom(s): | Star Wars: The Phantom Menace |
| Relationship(s): | Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan |
| External Links: | Warlock at Archive of Our Own http://ausmac.slashcity.org/warlock.htm (defunct link, The Alternative) |
Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Warlock is a Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan story by Mac.
Summary: Originally published in "Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience" - an AR where Obi-Wan is an Inquisitor for a Jedi Order that uses torture and threat to control the galaxy, and Qui-Gon is a renegade...a Warlock.[1]
Recs and Reviews
This story gripped me from the start and wouldn't let go of me. It's dark, very dark, and shows where good people can be led to when doctrined from early childhood. But it's also a story of hope and redemption. And the triomph of sheer willpower and fait.I utterly adore this one.
Excerpt:
He sensed the arrival of the one he had foreseen, just as he had sensed the sunrise a little time before, though he could not see it. One of the first things they had done after taking him was to blind him.
They had strapped him tightly, legs and arms spread fully apart, and it was so long ago that the pain and the hours blended into one agonised stretch. Reinforced bands at his wrists and ankles held him in place. He could move slightly, hardly more than a wriggle, enough to remind him how entirely restrained he was.
They had taken everything from him, his clothing, his sight, even his power – or so they thought. Dulled with drugs, numbed by them, he had begun to lose track of time. No-one spoke to him, but he wasn’t alone. The future was with him, the hope that he held through the Force and within his heart and mind. It gave him strength.
That, and his faith.
Remember your purpose. When what is done is done, remember it. Like a little prayer sent into the void, he whispered the call of his faith. Believe.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been there, but he thought two days, perhaps three.
The thirst had been terrible. His mouth was dry, his throat painful and tight and no amount of licking generated any more saliva in his mouth or over his cracked and bitten lips. He faced it, acknowledged it and recognised it. Without water he would eventually die. He suspected it was not what they intended for him. I am thirsty, I crave water. I have no control over that. I put it behind me.
He was hungry. They had not fed him, not a scrap, and his stomach ached with emptiness even as the weakness began to creep through his centre. The hunger ripped through him, until he controlled it. I am hungry, I have no food. There is nothing I can do about that. I put it behind me.
Suspended as he was, he could neither rest nor ease the strain on his body. The ache in his arms and shoulders, that had started as a twinge, had grown to a burning, and thence to agony, and finally to the numbness of locked muscles and frozen joints. I hurt, the pain is there every moment. I control it, put it away from myself, acknowledge but do not let it subsume me.
When they had blinded him, he thought he had found his greatest horror. The pain of it had been terrible, the fear equally so, as they held his head in place and touched their tools to his brain. Then the darkness, total, all-encompassing. So helpless, so alone.
I am blind. It is a terrible thing, it made me feel like a child again, afraid of the dark. Yet the Light is still there, inside me, and the strength of all the Believers who have gone before me lights my way. I cannot change this thing now. I must accept it and be one with it. I put it behind me.
Then there was the fear. Fear was the beast that ate the heart, that made one less of a man. Bad enough when you didn’t know what lay ahead. He knew, he remembered, he had felt the pain, the blinding agony of torn flesh and screaming nerves. He had been there, and touched it in others, and consumed it in himself.
He faced the fear and recognised it for all its daunting shades, and put it behind him.
When the door opened and his fate entered, he was balanced and at peace.[2]
References
- ^ The Alternative. TPM Fiction Index, Wayback: 27 September 2008. (Accessed 03 January 2015)
- ^ seremela2 in crack_van. Warlock by Mac (NC17), 11 November 2009. (Accessed 03 January 2016)