“Xenaaaa!” Tera cries as she rushes across the room. “You’re awake!”

You brace yourself for impact, but fortunately she has the sense to not tackle you in your bed, but you do have quite a fright when she halts her charge by slamming into the side of your bed.

“Ach! Careful!”

She hops up and down with unrepentant energy, the bed shaking with each bounce. Relief wafts off of her at the sight of you. Similarly, your other clanmates — all six of them! — seem to relax slightly as they walk through the door and see you awake. Doran, Nyine, Mick, Cho’an, Yolan, and even the excessively shy Kar are also here to see you. You’re afraid Tera is about to try climbing onto the bed, but the arrival of your more mature friends slows her down. Nyine, knowing exactly what Tera’s like, holds onto her hand to prevent that sort of foolishness.

“Hi everyone. It’s good to see you. Uh, wait. Sorry. I mean, thanks for coming to see me!”

They’re all quiet for a moment, a sudden melancholy spreading through the room at your words.

“Are - are you really blind now?” Tera asks, worry flaring up again throughout all of your friends.

“Nah. I’m fine. I can still see.”

“What? Really?”

“I can still see with my third-eye, so I’m only two-thirds blind!”

Tera growls under her breath. “Xena! Don’t joke about that! You got my hopes up!”

“Sorry…”

You watch as that brief flash of hope fades from your friends’ emotions, the excited chatter of their minds diminishing too. Perhaps that was a bit mean of you.

“Well, I’m guessing you’d like to know what happened.”

“Of course!”

Hmm. How do you proceed? You don’t really want to tell them everything. After all, there’s no reason to scare them when they can do nothing about it. But, it is nice to have their support, so you’ll at least give them the basics.

“The short of it is, I was messing around with some stuff and it backfired. I wasn’t careful in what I was doing and I guess I caused some weird reactions. I don’t fully know what or why any of it happened, so please don’t ask. The results of my mistakes were rather… painful. Obviously, there’s my eyes—”

You open them, and give your friends a good look. A few of them gasp in surprise, but surprisingly little fear.

“— and there’s also my arms. They got pretty badly burned, but then they also got, um, changed. They’re weird now.”

“What do you mean?” Nyine asks, pushing her way forward.

“How do I explain? Um. This one—” you say, shrugging your shoulder, “—looks more like a prosthetic than a real arm. The other one… the veins glow. They actually give off light.”

As Nyine takes a second to process that, Doran calls over her head, “Can we see?”

“Later, once the bacta tanks are off. I’ll show you then.”

“What is the ‘stuff’ you were messing with? The thing that caused all this?” Nyine cuts back in. The others clearly have the same question, each one of their minds and emotions shifting toward curiosity in the same fashion.

Ahh! What do you say? You don’t want to lie to them! Maybe a bit of truth will satisfy them?

“I - I can apparently do some weird things. Maybe it’s got something to do with my species. I don’t know. I think I have some sort of telepathy now. I can hear vague impressions of your thoughts. It’s not much better than my empathetic sense. Part of how I got it involved blowing up my eyes and messing up my arms, I guess.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“That sounds like a poor trade.”

“Hey, I still have my other eye and my arms aren’t gone. But, yeah. It’s still terrible.”

Yolan hums in thought, his mind whirring at your revelations. “How is any of that possible, though? I’ve never heard of anything like it before.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. I was doing some meditation, and then this happened.”

“Hrm. Is there anything we can do? Maybe we could look into this for you?”

“I guess that wouldn’t hurt. Sure!”

“We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

“Thanks, Yolan. Thanks to all of you.”

“You’re welcome. By the way, when will you be out of here? The healers won’t tell us anything.”

“Maybe in a couple months. Maybe three. Or maybe less. I don’t know either.”

“Are you going to be able to take the Trials, then?”

“Oh, right.”

The disappointment, tinged by anger, wells up within you. It’s irritating. Even if it’s your reward for failure, that doesn’t make it any less annoying. However, this isn’t really anything you can deal with now, so you brush it away.

“No, I won’t. I’ll need to wait until I’m healed and approved by the Council. They don't trust me not to get myself hurt again, I think.”

“What?!” your friends cry out simultaneously. A round of disbelieving comments stirs through the group and you nod along to their complaints of the unfairness of the situation. Tera is, of course, the most vocal of the lot and you have to eventually shush her before she ends up bothering patients in the nearby rooms.

“Look, there’s nothing I can do about it, which is what really gets me. But, that just means I have to keep going as usual. I’ll focus on recovering first, then I’ll train so hard they’ll absolutely have to let me pass. Anyway, I’ve still got a few years before I’m too old. I’ll have more chances, so don’t worry about me.”

“Hrrgh. Fine.” Tera growls out, still enraged in your stead. “You’d better get better soon, though! It’s weird not having you around.”

“I know. I’ll do my best. Thanks for coming, everyone.”

“We’ll see you again tomorrow, Xena. Get some rest.”

“See you then. Or not. You know what I mean.”

Tera gives a small and sad laugh, and then files out with the rest of them, leaving the room oddly quiet in their absence.

Hmm. Now what?

≡][≡ ⬦⬦⬦ ≡][≡

The Bloodlust is still there, throbbing away in its repulsive malice. It’s almost gone. So, so close! Since you’ve got nothing better to do, you’ve decided to go ahead and finish it off now, once and for all. This time, however, you won’t have the benefits of Force Stanch to aid you. You’ll have to do this the hard way.

You scratch and strike and pry at it with your mind, doing your best to remove the last of its waning taint. The roots have, unfortunately, been growing unhindered for over a month now and you waste most of an hour on removing these first. The core of the thing is still just as disgusting as always, but the wrappings of good memories still hold it at bay. You work at it as well, tearing away chunks and leaving them to disintegrate in the whirlpools of ambient Force swirling about within you. It’s mind-numbing work, but there’s little else to do so you welcome the chance to be productive.

Another goes by as you worry away at the core. It’s a nauseating blend of anger and blood, anathema to the ideology of the Jedi Order. You flinch in disgust every time a part comes away in your metaphysical hands, but press on knowing you’re getting closer to finishing with each blow. You dig into it, ripping through the shell and into its very heart, still pulsing away in ecstatic rage. And yet, the work is still not done. You must rid yourself of every part of the Bloodlust, or at least chew it up until its scattered remains are neutralized in the light of the Force.

Minute after minute, hour after hour, you sit and meditate, focused entirely on killing off your malignant passenger. But finally, after so many months, you scrape away the last of the taint and cast it into nothingness. You’re free! Free at last!

And so warp-damned tired…

But, something else catches your eye before you back out.

A memory.

A darkened memory, twisted with war and brutality, but also redeemed in the virtues of strength and honor.

An eye. The eye of a warp-storm, far far away… Watching. Waiting. And yet, distracted. It does not see you now, merely keeping you under subconscious observation. Wrinkles in the warp-stuff around the memory leak — a red haze bathing you from within. And where the haze filters into the surrounding warp-stuff, the beginnings of warp-taint boil into being.

This…

Is this the source of the warp-taint? The true source of what’s refilling you whenever you try to purify yourself?

The memory of what you saw in your warp-dream.