This morning is filled with both dread and excitement. You look around at your friends, seeing the same emotions within each one, but also seeing them deal with it in different ways. Tera is uncharacteristically solemn in demeanor, but below the surface is a roiling storm of apprehension. Nyine and Yolan are the opposite, chatting to each other and trying to keep everyone else’s spirits up while keeping that nervous geist away. The others are a mix.

And you? Well, there’s no reason for you to be nervous too, right? After all, you’re not participating in this round of Trials. But even so, you too feel a discomfort in your gut and the onset of a headache. Part of it is because you are worried for your friends. You have no doubt that they will pass, but at the same time, you’re still scared of what could be. Another part of it is the feeling that you too will still be judged. You were dreaming of and preparing for this moment for so long, and now that it has come for your friends, a small part of you still thinks that it is also time for you too!

But, that is not to be the case, and that is yet another reason for your pain. You want to join them. You want it to be now, not in the unknown future! There is still no word from the Council on when you too can take the Trials, not even with the trust Masters Corr, Lasah, and Nu have placed in you! What will it take for the Council as a whole to trust you too?

You hold back a sigh. You don’t want to burden your friends with your own frustrations. This isn’t the time. The eight of you sit in the common area, just waiting. You are there to cheer them on, not to make them feel worse.

Soon, someone will come to fetch your friends. Soon, they will show that all their training has paid off.

When will it be your turn?

You hold your aching head as the cacophony of your friends’ nervous thoughts and feelings continue to assault your mind. This is the other reason for your pain. Each one of them is practically screaming out in their own minds, trying to come to terms with the biggest event in their lives. You’ve been unable to sleep peacefully for the last few days thanks to all the mental noise they make! And, they’ve all been thinking the same repeated thoughts, worrying about what they will face, how they can prove themselves, what could happen if they fail, etcetera etcetera. Even though your telepathy still isn’t good enough to let you properly hear others’ thoughts, the fact that they just keep repeating themselves means you have had plenty of time to interpret their true thoughts.

Ugh… When this is over, hopefully you’ll have some peace and quiet. In the meantime, you stand up and go around the room patting your friends on their backs and trying to cheer them up or distract them with some conversation. However, even with the smalltalk, those recurring thoughts continue to bounce about in the backs of their brains, creating an incessant clamor that makes you want to just go back to your room and lie down.

Finally, the door opens and an unfamiliar pair of Knights walk in. They go about fetching each of your friends, checking their names against a list. When they come to you, they stare quizzically at your masked face and ask for your name as well. You’re tempted to pretend to be one of your friends for a moment, but honesty prevails and you tell them it is not yet your turn. As your friends line up to leave, you wish them all the best of luck, and then they’re gone.

You’re alone.

There’s nothing to do now but hope for the best. They must succeed. They had better! As much as you don’t want to have to take your Trials by yourself, it would be far worse dealing with a friend who needs to take the Trials again after a failure. Maybe that’s a bit of a selfish thought, but it’s true!

For now, you’ll head to your lessons. There’s plenty to do now that you have three different Masters to learn from.

≡][≡ ⬦⬦⬦ ≡][≡

The Force writhes beneath your skin, weaving its way through your veins and spreading into the flesh and spirit beyond. It’s not quite the same as the Cleanse Master Nu has begun teaching you, but it’s still impressive to see. The effect is far more localized, but it’s probably also more effective against infectious vectors of the mundane kind. While Cleanse purges the mind and body of outside influence, Purification — as a healing technique — is geared toward clearing away disease.

“Good job, Xena!” Master Corr cries, happiness at your success just as evident in her words as her true-self. “You’ve certainly got the hang of it now. I’ve got just the thing for this moment!”

You glance at her, then start shuffling away as quickly as you can as she rummages around in one of the pouches on her belt. As you’d expected, little slips of something fall out as she does so, prompting soft cursing from her as she bends down to pick them up. You can’t exactly see what the things are — your Force Sight continues to improve, but you’re not quite at that level yet — but you can easily make some guesses.

And so, by the time Master Corr finds what she’s looking for, you’ve ducked around the corner and snuck your way into an empty room. You hide behind a medical bed, cover your mouth with your hand to prevent any undignified giggling that could give you away, and wait.

“Ah, there it is! Here you go— wha? Xena? Where’d you go?”

You watch her through the wall with your Force Sight, concentrating hard to keep your focus on her. Your Sight is nowhere near as good as Master Lasah’s, but it’s certainly getting there. You’re unable to make out minute details, such as images on little stickers, and you’re still unable to manage the total input of Force Sight. The information overload from being able to see everything, everywhere, all at once is far too much for you, but the tips and tricks Master Lasah gave you over the last week have at last allowed you to focus enough to “see” more than just the outer contours of objects in a narrow field of view. Now, you can make out Master Corr’s body and clothes, as well as the furniture around her at the same time!

“Oh Xena! Where, oh where did you go?” she calls, amusement spreading through her. She begins checking through the room you’d just been in, searching behind and under the bed, then through all the cabinets you’d be able to reach. When she finds nothing, she begins looking in the more ridiculous places: in the cabinets that you definitely can’t reach with your short stature, inside the garbage bin, and even under the chair she’d been sitting in. Finally, when she picks your mask off the table and peers underneath it, you can’t hold it anymore and burst into laughter.

At that, even from a room away, she hears you and beelines it over. She bursts into the room, a wide smile on her bulbous face — your Force Sight finally letting you see expressions! — and performs a magnificent dive onto the bed. You shriek in delight as she bounces ungainly, thwarting her own lunge toward you. You jump up and start moving as she collects herself, but with a push of the Force, she telekinetically slams the door shut just before you make it there.

“I have you now!” she announces, faux menace darkening her tone.

You continue laughing as you yank on the door handle, but she continues to hold the door shut with the Force. You pull with all your might, but with your naturally pitiful strength, combined with your weakened arms, there’s no way you’ll be able to put up a good fight. And so, you finally concede. She’s got you and now you must suffer the consequences.

And the consequences? A sticker of your choice, of course. And not just any old sticker…

Master Corr guides your hand along, tracing the shapes on the available stickers before letting you choose one. Each one depicts an abstract shape, representing the tenets of the Jedi Order. The shapes are strange, for how could it be possible to visualize the concepts of peace, knowledge, serenity, and harmony? There are plenty of ways to come up with a symbol — a tangential representation of the concept — but these stickers do not follow such a cheap method. Somehow, the lines your finger follows resonate with the core of the concept themselves. Each line, spiraling or straight, jagged or smooth, fits together with the next and the ones after that, coming together to form the concept itself.

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Or, at least, that’s what you feel. You sense nothing other than the texture of the sticker. Nothing glows in the Force, nor in the warp. And yet, each stroke of ink burns itself into your mind, showing you the shape even without the use of your eye. It’s a mundane sticker, but the shapes themselves somehow make it so much more.

For some reason, Master Corr isn’t letting you actually take a look at the stickers with your third eye. While you do have your mask off, the headband stays on to prevent you from “cheating.” In your meetings with her, she insists on having you take your mask off with the pretense being that she wants to check up on your eyes. However, that’s pretty clearly not the case as she still wants the mask to stay off even when you’re just practicing Purification or doing your therapy exercises. She probably just wants to see your face and your expressions, judging from the surge of happiness within her whenever she sees you smile.

And you’re smiling quite a bit right now. You actually like these stickers. You’re not sure if you’ll like them as much once you actually see them, but for now, they’re an amazing novelty to admire. You’d like to meet whoever created them and you say as much to Master Corr.

“Great! I knew these were worth the effort!” she says, beaming at you — almost literally. The surface of her true-self shines so much with her sunburst happiness that you almost go blind! Again! What she said, however, surprises you and you actually blink with all three eyes.

“You made these?”

“No,” she says, crushing the praise on the tip of your tongue, “but I knew I had these ones somewhere in my collection. I’d lost track of them so I spent a few days searching. I’m glad you like them!”

“So, who was the artist?”

“I have no idea!” she declares happily. “I like to think the Force delivered them to me in my time of need.”

Uh…

Sure. You’ll just not comment on that bout of lunacy.

Instead, you just nod along while thinking about which to choose and where to put it. You could put it on your mask, or maybe on your lightsaber! For now, you’ll think about it a bit more before making a decision.

Now that you’ve learned Purification, you would think that you have more time to do other things, but Master Corr instead increases the time you’ll need to spend exercising. It is, perhaps, fair. You do need to build up your strength back to where it was. Even now, it’s difficult to carry things for long. Even during mealtimes, you have to quickly find a seat once you’ve filled up your tray for fear of dropping it all. You definitely need to work on that.

Even if you did have that time back, what would you do with it anyway? It’s not like you can go bother Master Nu or Master Lasah for more lessons. They’ve got plenty to do themselves! Master Nu, as the Chief Librarian, is always in demand. As for Master Lasah, you’re not really sure what she does with most of her time, but she does tend to disappear for long periods of time to do something off of Temple grounds. They’re just as busy as you, if not more!

You do ask if she can now teach you Force Healing, but she tells you to wait until you’ve finished with your therapy. Healing won’t help you with what you need to do, and she wants you to get back into shape as soon as possible. And so, you commit yourself to the physical therapy she has prepared. You’re going to need to be in the best shape possible once it’s your turn to take the Trials.

≡][≡ ⬦⬦⬦ ≡][≡

One thing you’ve noticed, after wearing the mask for a while, is that people tend to look at the eye at its center. You hadn’t intended it to do so, but as the golden centerpiece of the design it is rather eye-catching.

Heh.

It does help to keep people focused on your face though, even without your facial expressions for others to look at. That’s a strange thing, isn’t it?

People spend so much time looking at others’ faces, searching for emotions, deeper meanings, and social cues. You, on the other hand, have always been able to tell at a glance how someone is feeling and what they desire. Your witchsight has forever been a handy tool for you.

Is it a crutch, though? Back during the Gathering, your mirror-self had called it such. Would you be able to decipher others’ emotions without it? Well, after you were blinded, you obviously couldn’t. Now that your Force Sight has been getting better — enough so that you can actually study others’ expressions with it — can you do it?

Probably not. Your mirror-self is likely right. You’ve lived your whole life without having to muddle your way through ambiguity. You’ve always been able to tell how others’ feel, even nonhumans. You don’t have the practice, but is that truly a bad thing? Is it even possible to lose your witchsight? It isn’t as if you have witch-eyes to put out! Even if you lost your warp-eye, you’d still be able to use your witchsight. After all, even with your warp-eye closed, your witchsight always continues to function.

You flip your mask about in your hands, staring at the eye with your own. Your headband lies on the bed beside you, leaving your warp-eye free to scar anyone who passes. Fortunately, your friends are all still completing their Trials so no one should be at risk. No one besides your mask that is!

You lock that central eye with yours in a battle of the ages, staring unblinking for whole minutes! But, alas, a speck of dust stings your eye and you must look away, blinking moisture back into the star-filled orb. The mask wins this time, but you’ll surely prevail the next!

It really is a strange twist of fate, though. You, unable to see others’ faces, unable to interpret expressions as well as you probably thought in the past, now hide your own face away behind a guardsman’s mask. It’s just to protect others from having to see your eyes, though.

You keep telling yourself that, but it rings hollow every time.

What are you hiding from?

You fumble the mask, dropping it to the floor with a clatter. It lands face down, eye hidden, and all you see is the blank, featureless inside of the facade you wear. Even though you wear this every day now, you see it from this side just as rarely as from the other.

Your eyes…

No longer yours.

Changed and monstrous.

You liked your old eyes more, just as shiny but nowhere near as fearsome. They would provide a soft glow on your pillow whenever you opened your eyes on those nights when you couldn’t sleep. Your friends weren’t scared of you back then. You were just the odd one — the one with the extra bits — not this wounded abomination!

You lean down and pick the mask up and put it back on, then flop back on your bed, rolling to your side to avoid crushing your tail. You pull your legs up toward your chest, tail tucked in between, and make a small ball out of your body.

You close all your eyes, trying to shut the world away for just a moment, but it doesn’t work. There’s just too much going on around you and your ever-active senses simply never let you have any peace. Force-sense and Force-Sight, witchsight and telepathy; each one a gift. Each one a curse.

You wouldn’t give any of them up.

Each one grows stronger by the day, either passively or through active learning. One day you’ll be able to see as Master Lasah does, with the same fidelity without being overwhelmed. One day, you’ll hopefully be able to hear others’ thoughts or send your own out to be heard, preferably without any accidents along the way.

One day…

You open your warp-eye, Gaze lighting up the darkened room. The sun has gone down as you’ve lazed about, waiting for your friends to return. Still, they are not yet back, so what else is there to do but watch the void?

You shove yourself upright and cross your legs into a meditative position. However, you don’t look inwards, but outwards instead. You’ve looked out into the void many times already, ever since your mistake — it’s almost become a habit by now to do a bit of star-gazing every night! And so, since you have nothing better to do, this will serve as a bit of harmless entertainment to occupy your time while you wait.

Oh, right. Where’d your headband go?

You look around, but don’t see it on the bed where you’d last put it. Leaning forward, you spot it fallen on the ground so you pull it up and into your hand with the Force, then put it on. You’ll still be able to watch the void just as well with it on without the distraction of having to see the actual room around you. Not only that, but any of your friends who happen to walk into the room won’t immediately start vomiting on the floor! You mentally pat yourself on the back for being so thoughtful.

Now then, where were you?

Ah, right. Just getting started.

You sit up straight and look up, eye open,

And see.