Master Masbau’s words stick in your mind throughout the next day. And the day after that.

As much as you want to get to work, you realize that his words have merit. Whatever it is that causes you to hesitate so when you get near the ship is clearly dangerous. On one hand, you’d very much like to just leave it alone and forget about it. On the other hand, you really don’t like the idea of leaving something so disconcerting inside your very soul. This thing, whatever it is, is an obstacle towards accomplishing your goals of removing your droid-phobia and exploring the ship. But, right now, you’re not really sure how exactly you can deal with it.

It’s dangerous. Truly dangerous. You can feel it. If you awaken it to your presence, who knows what will happen? Do you have the strength to fight it off? Would you be able to escape it? What would happen if it, Emperor forbid, escaped the ship and began rampaging about inside your soul? This cannot happen. You must not let it. And so, you plan.

You will be careful. That much is sure. You must find a way around it while accomplishing both objectives. As Master Masbau said, you should tackle the issue of the droid-phobia first, then go exploring. First dealing with something that you can pinpoint, and then going after the ambiguous goal of exploring a multi-kilometer long ship is just common sense. Therefore, you will do your best to enter the ship close to your target, while also avoiding the… enemy.

This calls for some reconnaissance. And so, this evening’s meditation session finds you inside an isolated meditation chamber. You’ve sent a message to Master Masbau, telling him to come find you here if he doesn’t hear from you within the next two hours. Just in case.

You certainly hope nothing like what happened after the warp-dream happens again, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure you have a safety net.

With you, you’ve also brought your usual knife and napkins. If you need to use Force Stanch for whatever reason, then you will be prepared.

You go into your usual routine of calming yourself before meditation. Once ready, you shut your normal eyes, then open your warp one.

Something is odd. Your sight… It’s different. It’s somehow…

Clearer.

It is as if you’ve just been given some sort of corrective lens. And also not. Your new vision is at once clearer, sharper, and deeper. It’s as if you were given some sort of prescriptive-telescopic-jeweler’s loupe, allowing you to see just so much more!

Is this what you felt back then, on the night you gazed at the stars?

You haven’t used your warp-eye in a while. After so long of keeping it closed, you’re still not in the habit of using it outside of certain meditation sessions. So, you suppose it’s not so surprising that you didn’t realize what had happened until now.

Now, what happens when you turn it inwards?

Well, now. It’s even better! Your gaze pierces deeper into the warp-stuff forming the matrix to the composite of your true-self. The shroud of vision-impairing fog simply appears to be less opaque than before. And, as you marvel at your new view, you look deeper into your true-self, dipping down deeper into your inner-self as an experiment.

And you see even more.

The colors are richer, yet just as indescribable as before. Glimmers of light and currents of warp far off across the plane of your inner-self are revealed. Upwards is the ever rising layers of your true-self, mesmerizing in its gilded beauty with eddies of both warp and Force swirling in between.

Wispy pillars of light flow outwards and upwards and all around. Warp-energy shines brighter than before, almost blinding with thought and vitality. Your deeply held memories sway to-and-fro in with the movement of your emotions, showering you with discarded bits of warp-stuff and conceptualized dreams.

And through it all is the ever present Force, flowing amongst and osculating the winds of warp as they slide past. It twists through you, and around you, and all through the world at large. It dims and glows with each beat of your heart, bending and unbending with every breath.

Looking past yourself, you look out into the beyond. And what you see dazzles you. You don’t just see the floor of the austere meditation chamber.

No. Your warp-eye sees far, far more.

Your eye follows the trail of the Force as it streams past you, out into the welling of life beyond the room. It flows in great sheets across the hall, the Temple, the planet-wide city! It blankets the world, wrapping everyone and everything in its energy.

And far beneath your feet is yet more to see. The core of the planet gives off a dizzying amount of energy, swirling in great looping swirls throughout the world. Circulating. Forever returning back to the beginning, then sweeping out once more.

And past the planet itself is the void itself. Pure nothingness. Empty of all.

Harmonizing.

Faintly, you can see — no, feel — the movement of matter and energy in the great expanse beyond, also looping in a fascinating celestial dance. The sun, the planets, the moons, and every celestial body spiral about, revolving about an ever-changing barycenter. And beyond even that is the universe at large! Stars! Systems! Galaxies! All playing a great entropic game, of which you have the distinct honor to experience first-hand.

It is beauty incarnate. But, the more you look, the more dizzying it all gets. There’s just so much to see. So much both within you and without that your thoughts are seized up with the overload of information.

Too much! And yet, not enough! You can feel it — the possibility of even more refinement in perception. Perhaps with time and training you can become better at handling all this information. For now, you’ll have to make do.

But it is ever so difficult. You’ve glimpsed but an infinitesimal fraction of the galactic truth, and you cannot help but yearn for more. Yet, you know you cannot handle it. And so, you restrain yourself. You concentrate, falling back to the mental exercises taught to every Youngling by their minder.

With a sigh, you close your warp-eye for but a moment, then open it again, aimed squarely at the ship within you.

You see it, a massive statement emblazoned just past the prow of the ship. A name, at last.

= THE GOLDEN DOCTRINE =

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

While it’s nice to not have to refer to it merely as “the ship” anymore, this isn’t exactly your goal. And so you look around, searching for the thread you traced to this ship before.

There. You see it coming in from the memory flying high in the upper reaches of your memories, linked inseparably to this ship, The Doctrine. It leads straight to the hull, rooted to an enormous rent in the plates of armor. The thread is tangled and tainted, swelling to a bloated size to seal the hole. But, that makes no difference to your warp-attuned eye. The thread shines through the gilded armor. You trace the glowing thread as it spiders out behind the hole, twisting through corridors and tunneling deep into the bulkheads. It branches out, but from your vantage point, you can see its bulk movement through the belly of the ship. And as you continue to trace this web of warp, you see it consolidating once again. The strands reunite the farther and farther they go. And finally, you see it: a sickly glow, deep within its bowels. This is where your droid-phobia originates.

And now, to find an entrance.

You stay far from the ship, keeping your point of view well out of reach of that disturbing aura. You circle it, pinpointing possible entrances while keeping an eye out for whatever it is you are so afraid of.

And then you see it. It. A faint blue-ish glow. It pulses softly, almost as if it were breathing. And as you observe it from afar, you feel… revulsion.

This thing should not be here. IT MUST NOT BE HERE.

But, you’re still unsure if you can do anything about it. Whatever it is, you can feel it now. You can feel how exactly it matches the aura you’ve been avoiding. This thing is undoubtedly the source.

And what’s worse is that it is uncomfortably close to your target. Far too close.

From the proximity of one to the other, the two sources of your despair might be in the very same room, or at the very least in rooms adjacent. You are going to need to be quiet. And careful. Carefully quiet?

Whatever.

Your entrance probably isn’t as important as you originally thought, now that you’ve identified both threats. As long as it isn’t too close, then you’ll be fine. And so, you begin your approach.

You choose another hole in the ship — A hole in the hull. Heh. — on the same deck as your target, roughly a hundred meters away. You make sure to enter on the side opposite to the thing so you can avoid having to sneak past it on your way to your true target.

As you move, you contemplate a thought that’s been tumbling about in your mind for the past day. Though this is deep within your own soul, you are somehow not omniscient, which strikes you as rather odd. Why is it that you cannot simply reach in and pluck out what does not belong? Evict the grotesque squatter and flick away the droid-phobia and be done with it all.

Somehow, it doesn’t work like that. But why?

In order to enter the ship, you manifest a representation of your own body, stepping in lightly and orienting yourself as if gravity existed in this inner world. How are you able to do such a thing — generating a notional body for yourself, yet are limited by an imagined source of gravity? And now, you must enter this fortress of a ship and sneak around like a rat in the hopes of avoiding some sort of inner demon.

Confusing. Tremendously so.

But, you do what you must do. And so you slip into the hole and pad down the passageway toward your goal. As you do so, you maintain a constant vigilance. Debris lines the path and you must be careful to avoid tripping over any, all the while keeping an “eye” out for unseen threats.

And threats do indeed abound. The thread of warp-stuff you’d tracked all the way here, now split into hundreds of individual strands, is clearly tainted. Within the ship, it gives off a sensation as if it were a mix of the droid-phobia and the terrifying thing making this ship its home. As you’d seen from outside, it lines the hallways of the ship, almost like… tripwires. As you move, you’re forced to step over or duck under these threads, fearful of what would happen if you were to break one.

You proceed with utmost caution, scanning each doorway or passage with your warp-eye, looking for the tell-tale glow of a thread. Oftentimes, you follow a thread for it leads you toward your goal. But sometimes, a way is so thoroughly blocked, either by a physical barrier or a tangle of uniting threads that you must backtrack and find a way around.

Around and around you go, making your way through the labyrinthian complex of the ship. Faintly, you can feel sweat beading on your forehead as the stress builds, but finally, after what seems like hours, you’ve made it.

There, in the heart of the ship, is a cavernous room, within which are towering pillars made out of skulls. At first, you are horrified. There must be thousands of human skulls assembled within this room. Who would do such a thing? And why?

Was it the thing you are so afraid of? The grotesque horror dozing not twenty meters away?

Or perhaps… Are you not the pilot of this ship, as told within the dream? Did you condone this dreadful act? Did you, perhaps, do this yourself?

You do not know. You do not want to know.

But it gets worse. As you look closer, you see that these skulls do not stare emptily throughout the room. No. These craniums are not vacant. Each one is filled with arcane machinery, the purpose of which is not immediately clear. And each skull is linked to its neighbors, forming a network of tubes and bones.

Is this the source of your fear? Perhaps, you must put each one to rest. The thought fills you with despair for there are just so many!

But, the threads of warp-stuff do not lead to the individual pillars. No, they lead elsewhere. Toward the center of the aft-side of the room. There, an enormous skull, carved from marble hangs up high, around which is the semblance of a giant mechanical gear. Below is a small mountain of more machinery. Across it is a haphazard series of vents and interfaces, tubes and cables connected wherever possible. The harnesses are strewn across the steel floor, leading to each individual pillar of skulls. Whatever is flowing, whether it be energy, information, or unknown fluids, must pass through this disturbing altar.

In front of this thing is a console, obviously made for human use. And it shines. It positively radiates with malign light. The threads snake their way across the room, trailing down from the ceiling or lie slack on the floor. Each one ends here. This man-made interface is your target.

On the other end of the room is the horror you’d been trying to avoid.

It is truly indescribable, for it continuously changes before your very eye. It is… like that monster in your dream.

The daemon.

The ‘a’ is inserted into the word as you think it. It springs out of the rear of your mind, and somehow the mere thought echoes through the room.

You freeze in place, ready to bolt for you’re sure that the creature will wake up to that abstract racket. But, fortunately, it continues to lie still long after the silent noise dies down.

The thing sleeps. Despite its unending shape-shifting, it fails to move from its place. And so you breathe, letting out the breath you’d been subconsciously holding. You creep forward from your entrance on the side of the room, still watching out for wayward threads. Step by step, you near the console. And as you get closer, the feeling of fear grows ever larger.

The console is active. Glowing green symbols cycle across the screen. As you examine them, you get the strange feeling of familiarity. It’s not a language you’ve studied or seen in your lessons before. And yet, as you look at it for longer, you begin to glean just a bit of understanding. Enough for you to understand that a great deal of text is describing errors and statuses. There’s quite a few things clearly wrong with the ship judging by the number of [ERROR]s and [UNKNOWN]s and [OFFLINE]s you can see.

And flashing in the center of the screen are the following words.

PRIMARY POWER - OFFLINE

EMERGENCY POWER - LOW

RECOVERABLE FAULTS DETECTED

PERFORM SYSTEM RESTART?

YES / NO