Bleh. Meditation is boring. You’ll just do something more interesting, such as try to figure out what actually happened to you! The warpfire changed you. It’s now time to figure out what exactly it did.

You’ll start with your eyes. You lost your nice and shiny blue ones and gained shinier but less nice blue ones. Not much of a fair trade, to be honest. Then again, you did also get to keep your life, and you can now hear other peoples’ thoughts, so maybe you came out of that net positive?

Nah. Having to deal with constant mental noise isn’t exactly a good thing. That’s part of why you have no hope of actually meditating properly. At least, that’s what you tell yourself.

You’re lucky only your eyes were lost in the end there. You got to keep a pair of functioning arms and your face is unscarred. It certainly would have been far worse if your face had also caught fire. That would have really hurt! Not to mention, how would it have been treated? You had to keep your arms in bacta for over a month. Would you have had to do that with your face?

You shudder at the thought and hunch down in your seat. If your face were changed the same way your arms were, your mask would certainly be a lifesaver.

Anyways, where were you? Ah, right. Your eyes. When you’d seen them for the first time, you could have sworn you could hear them screaming — at you or at each other, you’re uncertain. However, since then, you’ve not felt that again. The two orbs of burning blue blaze merrily away, pulsing as they rotate within their sockets. It’s incredibly unnerving to see, for they look so out of place in your face that even you feel discomfort when staring at them in a mirror. Furthermore, these things don’t just look like miniature stars, they feel like ones too!

They’re hot. They actually burn inside your head, but somehow you feel no heat, nor any pain. Perhaps any nerves even remotely close to the things have already been seared away, or perhaps you have some sort of resistance? You cannot tell without closer examination.

What you can tell from just a glance, however, is that your eyes are made of warpfire. These things are made of the same stuff as what incinerated your old eyes, and yet they do not change things in the same way. Any way you look at them, whether it be with your witchsight or with your warp-eye, it’s immediately clear that these things are blazing sources of warp — and that fact is terrifying.

You’ve already spent so long trying to clear the warp-taint from within yourself, and yet you have two little flames, just spewing warp out into the world, inside your head! You’ve just avoided thinking too hard about it until now, but since you’ve finally decided to actually try to figure these things out, it’s time to get it done and out of the way. Do these things taint you? And what happens to the traces of warp that escape from your open eyes?

Sitting up straight, you do your best to push away the thoughts swarming at the edge of your mind, focusing solely on the task at hand. Warp-eye open, you turn it down and look inside.

…

The eyes are… not eyes. That much is obvious. They’re pure warp. Not malevolent, but not benevolent either. They just are. The warpfire that resides in your head is just a concept made reality — a concept of change within yourself. They’re… a trophy. A reminder of what you did right, and how you succeeded against the odds. But, they’re also a scar. You failed at many a critical point and you paid dearly for it.

The “eyes” are benign — not doing you any harm, nor doing anything untoward to the fabric of the Materium. The warp they leak simply dissipates shortly after leaving your eyes, fading away into nothingness and returning to the Empyrean.

The only thing that concerns you now is the heat. Why exactly are the insides of your eye sockets unburned? This calls for… experimentation.

This is probably a bad idea, but what else can you do? You stand up and exit the meditation chamber. A few minutes later, you return, having fetched a sheet of paper. You sit down once again, taking some time to rip up the paper into thin strips. Hopefully this doesn’t go wrong.

Eh, you know what you’re doing this time. You at least have an idea of what will happen.

You slowly push the tip of a strip of paper into your eye, tilting your head downwards. After a second, when the paper is a centimeter inside, you can smell it smoldering. Quickly, you yank it out and examine it with your warp-eye, blinking bits of ash away. The paper is quite clearly burned, now falling apart at the brush of your fingers. However, you see something unexpected. Or rather, you don’t see something you’d expected to see there.

There’s a rather distinct lack of warp-taint, either in the paper or in the ashes on the floor. This is definitely warpfire, but it produced no change within the paper other than combustion. So, is it truly safe? Is it benign? There’s another test you can perform: self-experimentation. What would happen if you were to touch your “eyes?”

Alright, maybe this one is a bit more dangerous than the last test. Instead, you’ll have to try something else — a compromise between safety and the spirit of experimentation. You stand up again and go to find two more things: a glass of water and a pair of nail trimmers. You take a sip of the water, then save the rest for when things go wrong. Hopefully plain ol’ water can put out warpfire. You snip off a nail with the trimmers, the click echoing within the small meditation chamber. This’ll do.

Actually, you might as well do the rest of your nails anyway while you’re at it. A couple minutes later, you have a pile of clippings ready for testing. You gingerly pick one up, pinched between your thumb and index finger, and raise it to your face. Opening your eyes once again, you slowly push the nail inside.

Nothing. No smoke and no fire.

You push it further in, your fingers now brushing the edges of your eyelid, and still nothing. You pull it out and examine the nail. It does look a little bit singed, but it’s nowhere close to what happened to the paper. Is it because the material is different, or is it something else?

Time for the final test. You lift your hand up to your face, finger positioned in front of your right eye. Bracing yourself, you start pushing it in, then chicken out at the last moment and pull it away. This doesn’t feel right.

But, why?

You think about it for a few minutes. What could possibly keep you from sticking your finger in your eye? Well, there’s an obvious answer: instinct. No creature is going to purposely poke its own eye out if it can help it. Shoving your finger a centimeter or more into your own eye socket could be triggering your brain to metaphorically scream out “No no no!” That would make a lot of sense.

What else could be the answer? Maybe the warp? Maybe the Force? You see nothing with your warp-eye, though. No warp-taint. No strings of corruption attaching the eyes to anything else. You see nothing with your Force Sight, nor sense anything either. Nothing at all.

Perhaps it is simply just an instinct, telling you not to stab your own eye out with a finger. You steel yourself, positioning your finger in front of your eye again. This time, you push forward faster, quickly moving your finger in, to the depth your nail had been. The instant you feel it in place, you yank it back out and hold it in front of your working eye.

Nothing. No singe marks. No change, or at least no more change than what’s already happened to the digit. The finger doesn’t even feel hot, but you put it into the glass anyway to check. Seeing no steam coming out of the cup, you feel safe to try again.

This time, you hold your finger in for longer, and again, once you pull it out, you see nothing untoward. It’s completely fine. Your eyes, for some reason, cannot burn you, but will easily burn anything else. The conclusion is a relief to you, but you’re still wary of the things. You’ve still not solved the mystery of why they felt almost… alive.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

How could they scream and wail? They’re just warpfire, right?

You look again, straining to see something, anything, within the bright balls of warpflame. You stare for minutes on end, and yet, nothing. You feel you are missing something, but nothing appears from the depths of the fire. Nothing leaps out to tell you the answer. Maybe that’s a good thing…

≡][≡ ⬦⬦⬦ ≡][≡

Over the next couple weeks, you continue to “meditate,” searching your warpfire eyes to glean more detail about them. You spend hours gazing at them, looking for the slightest hint of anything more, but find nothing.

The only thing you learned from this exercise is that this is even more boring than actually meditating. Just looking at your own eyes with another eye is definitely weird, and also clearly a waste of time. Maybe you’ll get back to meditating this coming week. Considering it’s a viable skill to be tested on during the Trials, you might want to stop with the slacking.

Between meditation sessions, you, of course, had your normal lessons, physical therapy with Master Corr, and training with Masters Lasah and Nu. Though you had an amazing breakthrough in Battle Meditation, with that little stunt with Cho’an, you are unable to replicate it reliably. You do your best to concentrate on that feeling — that you’re one and the same as your friend — but nothing happens, not even when you take up Cho’an’s offer to train with you again. It’s incredibly frustrating, but there’s nothing to be done other than to keep trying.

Your Force Sight training, on the other hand, is progressing nicely. You’re almost there, you can feel it! Or rather, you can see it.

You look around the medical ward, picking out the sterilized and organized tools both on the counters and within the cabinets around. At the same time, you idly note the movement of patients in the next room over and the puttering of the assistant droid who helped you out all those times before, now working to make another Initiate comfortable in his powerchair. The information overload is no longer as bad as it was before, but you’re still unable to resolve all the data with both clarity and speed. Often, you must trade one for the other lest all you resolve is a headache.

The Force flows around you, picking out things of interest, drawing lines of invisible light toward what you should see. A chair, a knife. Your headband and mask on the countertop to your left. Bloodied sutures in a deft hand and a Youngling sleeping. Suddenly, the majority of lines converge on something approaching in the distance. Master Corr.

As she approaches, you think a bit more about what you see. These lines are not Force. This is not what Master Lasah sees at all. When you explained this to her, she became confused, not having ever noticed such “helpers” before. Whatever this is, it’s new. It’s unique to you.

You shut your warp-eye as Master Corr enters the room and the lines disappear.

“Good morning, Xenaaaaaa!” she yells, startling the patients in the neighboring rooms. You watch as one of them punches the arm of her chair in frustration, a datapad now laying on the floor and out of reach.

“It’s after noon.”

“Meh, who cares? Anyways, it’s time for one more checkup.”

She dances around the room, spinning and swaying to a tune she hums under her breath. You hear a quartet of snazzy strings and the rhythmic honk of a horn, blowing sharply under the breath of an enthusiastic musician. As she writes on a datapad, she shakes her hips to the beat and you watch as a couple stickers slip out of the pouch at her waist, falling to the floor.

“Master Co—”

“Done! Alrighty, let’s get a look at you.” she says, spinning around and snapping her fingers in one last crescendo. Master Corr has you run through a set of simple exercises, the same as you have done every day for the past month. She nods her head as she examines you, watching you closely and probing out with the Force as you move. You feel slight twinges in your muscles, not due faults in recovery, but as a result of her venturous checks into your health. Finally, she has you sit in her favorite spinny chair while she checks the state of your arms and warpfire eyes.

No change, other than a lack of pain.

“Perfect!” she declares. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me before we conclude?”

“Um, yes. I tried looking into what my new ‘eyes’ actually are.”

“Oh?” She gives you a quizzical look, curiosity blooming in her soul. “And what did you find?”

“Well, I was wondering why they don’t burn my eye sockets, but burn anything else. I did some tests. I, uh, lit some paper on fire with my eyes—”

Master Corr interrupts you, jumping up and asking, “What? How?”

“I… pushed it into my eyes. It didn’t hurt or anything! It just burned a little bit and I took it out immediately after.” As she settles down, you sigh internally with relief and continue, rushing through your explanation so she has no chances to interrupt before you finish. “I then tried burning parts of me, starting with my nails. I clipped some off and held one inside my eye and nothing happened. So, I put my finger in my eye, and still nothing happened. Whatever these are, they don’t burn me at all. Not even dead parts of me.”

“So… why?”

“That, I don’t know. It’s warpfire, the same as what burned me — changed me — in the first place. But, it doesn’t do anything except act like normal fire now, other than not burn me that is. It’s weird.”

“Yes, it is.”

Master Corr paces across the room and back, thinking. You listen to her thoughts coil around themselves, tangling and untangling with the chime of bells. Garbled nonsense falls out, trailing at her feet as she walks across the Materium plane, and the phrases you’re able to catch are unintelligible without context.

Finally, she stops, having come to a conclusion.

“Maybe it just is.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe it just is.”

“I still don’t understand.”

She walks over to you and puts both hands on your shoulders, webbed fingers wrapping around the bone. She bends down, looking you in the unseeing eyes, looking for the nothingness within.

“Not everything can be explained, Xena. Not everything needs explaining to exist.”

“That’s… I don’t really believe that.”

“But, what is the warp then? What does everything you have told me about it lead you to conclude?”

“The warp is concept, conceptualized.”

“Yes, but does it have rhyme or reason?”

“Well, no. It’s… I don’t know. It’s the warp.”

“Yes! Exactly!” she says, laughing excitedly and slapping you on the shoulders. You stare at her, wondering if she’s gone insane, having been exposed to you and your warp-eye for so long. Fortunately, she sobers up, her thoughts and feelings turned serious. She bends down again and hugs you, pulling you close.

“Master Corr?”

“... I don’t know what to tell you, Xena. I can’t explain it for you, and I don’t know what I can do for you other than give you the tools I am expert with. I can’t even guide you, not knowing what this is. I don’t know what plagues you. I don’t know what I can do to help you make sense of it all. But - but just know that I’m here for you, okay?”

You smile as best you can, and hug her back.

“Okay. Okay.”

After another minute, she releases you and steps away. She turns back to her datapad and marks a few more things, muttering under her breath.

“Check… check… yes… and sign.”

As she finishes up, you twirl around in the chair, savoring the feeling of the dizzying spin. The world whirls around you, but you perceive everything and everyone as staying where they are — where they should be — relative to you on this populous planet, orbiting a star, and spinning around in a wide, wide Galaxy.

A wondrous universe, one step away from madness.

Your spin slows as you stretch your arms out, conserving momentum and bleeding energy away in the friction of the squealing bearing below you. Master Corr stands in front of you, hands on her hips and looking at you with a proud smile. She holds her hand out and as you come about again, your cheek gently slaps into it. She draws her hand away, a sticker now plastered upon your face.

You pout at her, but can’t quite manage the puppy dog eyes given your lack of viable instruments, so she just smiles and halts your spin with her foot.

“Xena, you’re all good to go now! No more bacta, no more physical therapy. But, hopefully not ‘no more Corr’ though!”

You smile back as you peel the sticker off, transferring it to the front of your tunic.

“I’ll visit if you teach me Force Healing!”

“Ha! Shrewd little one, aren’t ya? Alright, I did promise you. We can begin next week. Same time as our regular meetings. Meet me in my office, though.”

You cheer, get up off the chair to give her another hug, then put on your mask and headband. Finally! You’re finally done with this!

You depart with a wave and a “see you later!” and as you make your way out of the Halls of Healing, you hum to the tune bouncing within your mind.