Darkness.
Then pain.
Not the pain of a heart failing or lungs gasping for air — that was done. This was something different. Something deeper. A weightless panic. Heat, noise, chaos… then light.
John Carradine opened his eyes.
But they weren't his eyes. The colors were off. The world too bright, yet too hazy, like looking through water. Sounds hit him in waves — metallic echoes, shouting in guttural, alien tones, and the distant hum of machinery.
He tried to scream, but what came out was a snarl. High-pitched, wild, not human. He tried to move, but his limbs flailed with awkward resistance, stubby and unfamiliar. His skin — no, not skin — was covered in thick fur. Coarse, warm, and matted with something slick. He wasn't wearing anything. He was being held.
And the one holding him wasn't human.
Towering above him was a creature with sharp fangs, deep-set black eyes, and fur like a wild animal. It spoke — or roared — in a language he couldn't understand. Yet something inside him did. Not in words, but in meaning: "It's a strong one. Born screaming."
A woman — no, a Wookiee — passed him to another. The smell of fuel, sweat, and despair filled the air.
That's when he noticed it — the walls weren't made of wood or stone. They were metal, caged, reinforced. He was in a mine, deep within the bowels of some cold, unfeeling world. Slaves bustled in chains. The air was thick with dust. Outside the barred opening, faint glimpses of stars blinked in a purple sky.
Kessel.
He didn't know how he knew the name, but it rang in his mind like a curse.
The overseer, once feared across the cotton fields of Alabama, had been reborn — screaming and clawing — into the body of a slave on the most brutal mining planet in the galaxy.
A Wookiee.
A species known for their strength, their pride, and their chains.
In his past life, he cracked whips over the backs of men who couldn't fight back. Now he was born into a world where the whip never rested — and it was meant for him.
And so, his second life began.
With no language, no name, no freedom — just the haunting irony of fate, and the quiet, growling promise that the past would not be buried so easily.