A/N: Couldn't update yesterday.
I pushed past the ship's ramp, the desert air hitting me like a furnace blast. Arachnae scuttled behind me, her metal legs clicking against the metal ramp before sinking slightly into the sand.
The cargo transport we'd rented was nothing fancy—just a big boxy thing that Nari had procured through channels I didn't ask about. The Scythe was too conspicuous for refugee transport, what with being an Inquisitor ship and all.
The makeshift camp stretched out before us. Some refugees were huddled around small fires, their faces illuminated in flickering orange light. Others were curled up in sleeping bags or blankets, trying to find rest in the unforgiving desert night.
Obi-Wan sat cross-legged near one of the larger fires, eyes closed. Classic meditation pose. I could practically hear the "wise Jedi master" soundtrack playing in my head. Nari was crouched beside him, talking animatedly with a Zabrak woman who was gesturing wildly with her four horns.
I walked past them, making sure my footsteps were heavy enough to announce my presence without being obnoxious.
"Going for a walk," I said to Nari as I passed. "Feeling a bit cramped after being cooped up for so long."
Nari nodded, his attention still focused on the Zabrak woman. "Don't go too far. The desert isn't exactly forgiving at night."
"No shit. I'll stay within shouting distance."
Arachnae followed as I trudged away from the camp, the sand shifting under my boots with every step. The droid was in her default "curious about everything" mode, her optical sensors swiveling to take in every rock, shrub, and shadow.
Once we were a good distance from the camp, I tried to activate Hyper Perception. Just a small bubble around me to start with.
Pain lanced through my skull immediately, like someone had shoved a ice pick behind my eyes. Nausea churned in my stomach.
"Okay, note to self," I muttered, rubbing my temples. "That's still a no-go."
We kept walking until I found a decent-sized sand dune with a large rock at its base. Perfect backrest.
"Arachnae," I said, settling against the rock. "Pull up the recordings from when I fainted. Eight times speed."
The droid projected a small holoscreen in front of me. I watched as the scene played out—me collapsing, Obi-Wan rushing to my side, the frantic attempts to restart my heart, the moment where everything went still, and then the sudden return of life.
Nothing was different from what Obi-Wan had told me. No hidden details, no mysterious figures lurking in the shadows, no sudden revelations.
But the weird feeling in my mind persisted. It was like trying to remember a dream after waking up—the more I focused on it, the more it slipped away, leaving just a hollow echo behind.
I knew whatever it was had been important. I just couldn't grasp it.
"Alright, screw it," I said, waving away the holoscreen. "Let's focus on the current disaster."
My Force powers had increased significantly—I'd accidentally crushed a metal canteen earlier, which wasn't exactly normal for me. But the control was completely shot. It was like my power had been upgraded from a garden hose to a fire hose, but someone had removed the nozzle.
So what the fuck had happened?
All my problems had stemmed from what I'd come to call the "faulty Ezra star" in my head. My soul, basically. It was like a broken transformer that distorted any Force energy trying to pass through it.
The simplest way to get answers would be to go inside my mind and look directly at it. But every time I even tried to start up Hyper Perception, the nausea and pressure shut me down immediately.
If Obi-Wan was right, meditation should help. But wasn't it comical that my meditation method relied on Hyper Perception to observe the Force flow around and inside me? I'd tried to learn how others did it—people who presumably didn't have this weird sensory ability—but my senses just didn't register whatever "normal" Force sensing was.
I settled into a cross-legged position, my back against the rock.
"Arachnae, keep watch," I told the droid. "Let me know if anything with more than two legs and less than five heads approaches."
She chirped in acknowledgment.
I closed my eyes. Well then, Hyper Perception was all I had. If it hurt, I'd just have to acclimate my body to it.
I closed my eyes and reached for Hyper Perception again, starting with the tiniest bubble I could manage.
The pressure came instantly, same as before. A spike behind the eyes, nausea crawling up my throat, the whole migraine starter pack. I gritted my teeth and leaned into it.
Pain is just sensation, I told myself in my best fake-Buddha voice. Suffering is attachment to the material body. The flesh is weak but the spirit is willing and all that enlightened crap. I can sit here for ten thousand years if I have to. Om mani padme hum, motherfucker.
The pressure doubled. Tripled. My brain felt like it was being squeezed in a vice made of angry bees.
Okay, new plan. Pain is real, suffering is real, and right now both of them are winning. But I'm not tapping out. Not again.
I pushed harder.
And then everything just… blanked.
One second I was fighting the headache, the next my mind went white and quiet like someone yanked the power cord. Vision tunneled, legs turned to wet noodles, and I felt myself tipping sideways.
Oh hell naw.
I ain't fainting three goddamn times in one day. That's not character development, that's lazy writing. Even fanfic authors would get flamed for that shit.
I forced Hyper Perception to shut down hard, like slamming a breaker switch. My eyes snapped open and I caught myself with both palms in the sand before I ate a faceful of Tatooine.
"Fuck," I wheezed, rubbing my temples. "Buddha can suck my un-enlightened ass."
Arachnae tilted her chassis, all eight eyes blinking in what I swear was concern mixed with judgment.
Piing?
"Don't you start." I sat up, spitting grit. "I almost went night-night again. Third time today. That's not a streak, that's a medical emergency."
She scuttled closer, sensors flickering over me like she was running diagnostics.
Pi-pi-piing.
"Yeah, I know. Brains aren't supposed to do that." I dragged a hand down my face. "But I don't have months to sit in a cave and realign my chakras or whatever Obi-Wan wants. Vasha's on Scarif. Timeline's already half-broken. I need my powers working yesterday, not after a ten-episode training arc nobody asked for."
I stared at the droid.
She stared back.
Then I grinned the kind of grin that has gotten me banned from three different spaceports.
"New plan. Every time I start blacking out, you zap me awake. Full voltage. Right in the neck. Don't be gentle."
Arachnae froze. All eight legs locked up like someone hit pause. Her optical sensors went from normal to maximum brightness, the droid equivalent of bug eyes.
Pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-piing!
"Translation: 'You have lost your goddamn mind.'"
She bobbed her chassis up and down so hard I thought she'd shake a leg off. Definitely a no.
"Look, I'm not asking you to tase me for fun. This is science. Controlled exposure therapy. Like when you touch a hot stove as a kid and learn real fast not to do it again, except I need to do it again, on purpose, until my brain stops being a little bitch about it."
Piing! Piiiiing!
"Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds insane. That's why it's going to work. Insa-I mean innovative people get shit done. Jedi sit in caves for decades. Sith throw lightning at their own apprentices. I'm just crowdsourcing the lightning to my emotional support spider."
She backed up two steps. Actual retreat.
I patted the sand beside me.
"Come on, girl. I trust you. You've got perfect aim and you hate seeing me drool unconscious more than I do. We do this a few dozen times, I build tolerance, problem solved. Easy."
Arachnae's legs curled in like she was trying to disappear into her own chassis. If she could vote, the ballot would read: stupidly mad, with an extra side of mad.
I gave her the biggest, saddest tooka eyes I could manage through the helmet visor.
"Please? For Me?"
A long, suffering chirp.
Then, very slowly, one of her legs extended and the little shock prod on her underbelly flicked out with a tiny spark.
Piing.
"That's my girl." I rolled my neck. "Alright. Round one. Don't hold back."
I closed my eyes and reached for Hyper Perception again.
Of course the whole 'make you uncomfortable package' came alongside it but I pushed through it, feeling my awareness start to expand outward—
And then my brain decided to take an unscheduled nap.
ZZZAP.
"FUCK!"
My eyes snapped open as electricity arced through my neck. Every muscle in my body seized for a glorious half-second before releasing. I found myself face-first in the sand again, twitching.
Piing!
"Good girl," I wheezed, pushing myself back up. "That's exactly what I asked for. Hate it. Love it. Let's go again."
Round two. Same result. The moment I pushed past the threshold, consciousness tried to slip away like a greased eel. Arachnae hit me with another jolt before I could fully black out.
Round three. Round four. Round five.
By round eight, she'd stopped being hesitant about it. In fact, I was pretty sure she was starting to enjoy herself. The zap on round nine caught me right behind the ear.
"OW! That's a new spot!"
Pi-pi-piing!
"What do you mean 'variety keeps things interesting'? This isn't a cooking show!"
Round twelve, she got me in the armpit. Round fifteen, the base of my spine. Round eighteen, somewhere I'd rather not discuss.
"Laugh it up, you little menace," I grumbled, spitting sand for the umpteenth time. "See if I upgrade your chassis with a cup holder."
Pi-pi-piing!
The chirp sounded distinctly smug.
But somewhere around round twenty-something, something shifted. My brain, apparently tired of being electrocuted every few minutes, started to cooperate. The blackout feeling still came, but now there was a split second of warning, a moment where I could feel the shutdown approaching and brace against it.
By round thirty, I could hold on for two whole seconds before the surge hit.
By round forty, I could feel the edge and pull back before tumbling over it.
And finally, after what felt like an eternity of sand-eating and involuntary muscle spasms, I managed to hold a stable bubble of Hyper Perception around myself.
But something was wrong.
In the past, expanding my awareness had been almost freeing. Like dissolving into the world around me, becoming one with every grain of sand and whisper of wind. The only friction came when something living entered my field, their presence creating resistance against my expanded consciousness.
This was different.
Despite the empty desert around me, everything felt constricted. Tight. Like trying to see through fog while wrapped in invisible gauze. My awareness pushed outward and met resistance everywhere, as if the air itself had thickened into something dense and clinging. It was like forcing my way through an overgrown hedge, branches and thorns catching at every tendril of perception I sent out.
"What the hell," I muttered.
The sensation wasn't painful, just uncomfortable. Wrong. Like wearing a shirt two sizes too small, but for my soul.
Piing?
"Something's different," I told Arachnae. "The outside feels... crowded. And there's nothing out here but sand and rocks."
She tilted her chassis, sensors sweeping the area around us. Her confused chirp confirmed what I already knew: physically, we were alone.
Whatever was causing this resistance, it wasn't visible.
"Okay," I said, wiping sweat from my brow despite the cooling night air. "Phase one complete. Now for the fun part."
I took a deep breath and turned my senses inward.
--
I floated in the void of my mind, staring at what should have been familiar territory.
The Alex star was exactly as I'd seen it last time. A massive, stable white star, bright and whole, rotating with the kind of cosmic certainty that made me feel like at least one part of me had its shit together.
But the Ezra soul?
"What in the Kentucky fried fuck?"
The last time I'd looked, it had been a fractured, bleeding mess. A blue star that was more like shattered glass held together by hope and spite, with pieces constantly diffusing outward like smoke from a dying fire. Each time I'd checked on it, it had been more and more dispersed, slowly dissolving into the void.
But now?
It was vaguely spherical.
The blue star was still there, still cracked and broken, but something was holding it together. Semi-solid, goo-like black substance was spread all over the surface, like someone had taken cosmic duct tape and slathered it across every fracture. The substance pulsed faintly, almost alive, binding the fragments in place.
"Okay, that's new. That's very fucking new."
I tried to move closer, my formless consciousness drifting through the mental void. As I approached, I noticed something else that made my theoretical stomach churn.
The void itself felt different. That constrictive sensation I'd felt earlier with Hyper Perception was here too, but amplified tenfold. The black goo wasn't just on the star—it was spreading through the space around it, threading through the void like ink dropped in water. Thin strands of it drifted everywhere, creating an invisible web that pressed against my awareness from all sides.
So that's what those invisible brambles were. The black shit had been leaking into my perception this whole time.
What even is it? Some bastard sun of Venom who infested my fucking mind?
Near the blue star, floating in the space around it, were the innards. The leaked soul fragments, or whatever the hell they were. Wisps of blue energy that had bled out from the cracks over the years, drifting aimlessly like debris from a shipwreck.
Except they weren't drifting anymore.
Branches were coming out of the black-covered star. Tendrils of that same semi-solid black substance, reaching out like roots or veins, spreading across the floating fragments. They wrapped around the wisps, pulling them closer, drawing them back toward the star.
It looked like ...assimilation.
Like the black stuff was actively reclaiming the lost pieces, dragging them back into the whole and integrating them into the structure. The branches grew steadily outward in every direction, methodical and relentless, claiming more and more of the void.
I didn't have a body in this space, but if I did, I'd be hyperventilating. This wasn't normal. This wasn't how souls worked. At least, I was pretty sure this wasn't how mine worked. I wasn't exactly an expert on metaphysical biology, but black goo holding together a fractured soul while tentacle branches assimilated floating debris definitely felt like something that should come with a warning label.
The tendrils continued their work, methodically pulling in fragment after fragment. Each time one touched the surface of the star, it seemed to melt into the black goo, disappearing beneath the surface. The star pulsed faintly with each integration, and for some reason I could feel the very ambience pulse alongside it.
And what was even scary was that the branches didn't stop. They kept growing, extending further and further into the void, spreading in every direction like roots searching for water.
Then I saw something else. One of them reached the White Star.
The moment it made contact, everything seemed to go still for a moment, and then the endless void shuddered.
The branch ignited instantly, black substance bursting into flames that were somehow both bright and dark at the same time. The fire raced back along the tendril toward the blue star, and the entire structure convulsed violently.
And then it screamed.
I didn't have ears in this place, but it didn't matter. The sound bypassed every sensory filter I had and slammed directly into my consciousness. It was like someone had taken a thousand voices, each one shrieking in agony and rage, and blasted them at maximum volume from every direction simultaneously.
My awareness shuddered, stunned by the sheer force of it.
The branches erupted outward in a frenzy, no longer methodical but violent and chaotic. They lashed in every direction, tearing through the void, reaching for everything and nothing. Several shot toward me, or where my consciousness was floating, and I felt a spike of primal terror despite not having a body to feel it with.
The screaming intensified, a mind-piercing howl that threatened to shred whatever passed for my thoughts in this place.
I tried to pull back, to retreat from my mindscape, but the sound had me locked in place. My awareness was frozen, trapped in the middle of the maelstrom as burning branches thrashed around me.
One of them got close enough that I could see the texture of the black substance, the way it writhed and pulsed with something that wasn't quite alive but definitely wasn't dead.
Fuck this. Fuck all of this.
I yanked myself out of the mindscape with every ounce of mental strength I had, tearing my consciousness free like ripping off a bandaid made of razorblades.
Reality snapped back into focus.
I was lying at the bottom of a crater.
Sand walls rose around me in a perfect bowl shape, maybe three meters across. The rock I'd been sitting against was gone, probably launched somewhere into the dunes. Arachnae was clinging to the crater's edge above me, her legs dug deep into the sand, optical sensors flickering wildly.
And standing at the rim, silhouetted against the stars, was Obi-Wan Kenobi.
His cloak billowed slightly in the night breeze. Even in the darkness, I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand hovered near his belt where his lightsaber would be.
I blinked sand out of my eyes and croaked out the first thing that came to mind.
"Well. Hello there."
Obi-Wan didn't laugh. Didn't even crack a smile.
"Ezra." His voice was calm, but there was an edge underneath it that I recognized from our training sessions. The tone he used right before explaining exactly how many ways I'd screwed up. "What happened here?"
I pushed myself up onto my elbows, wincing as my ribs reminded me they were still very much not healed. "Would you believe me if I said I was doing some light meditation?"
"The disturbance I felt was not light." He descended into the crater with careful steps, sand sliding under his boots. "It was larger than the one on the ship. And that one was already... concerning."
Shit. He'd felt that too.
"Yeah, about that." I sat up fully, brushing sand off my arms. My mind was racing through everything I'd just seen. The black goo. The assimilation. The branches reaching for the white star. The screaming.
None of it matched anything from my meta-knowledge. Not Legends, not Canon, not any of the weird expanded universe shit I'd consumed in my past life. Black parasitic substance holding together a broken soul and then throwing a tantrum when it touched the healthy one wasn't exactly a documented Force phenomenon.
I ran through the options. Tell him everything? Tell him nothing? Somewhere in between? Each path branched into a dozen consequences, and I didn't have enough information to predict any of them. If this was some kind of Dark Side corruption, best to reveal it now than later as god knows what it would do if left unattended. Even if not, even if it was something else entirely, keeping him in the dark could bite me in the ass later.
I couldn't figure this out alone. And if there was one person in the galaxy who might have seen weird Force shit in his decades as a Jedi, it was the guy standing in front of me.
I let out a long breath.
"Okay, so." I rubbed the back of my neck, wincing at the residual tingle from Arachnae's earlier shock therapy. "I was meditating. Looking inside my mind with all those stars in the mind."
Obi-Wan's brow furrowed. "Soul stars. Looking inside your mind." He said each phrase like he was tasting something unfamiliar. "Ezra, what exactly are you talking about?"
Oh yeah, I'd never actually explained the twin star situation to him. It was not the best option, as my all problems originated from there itself, but I had held back on telling him the situation in depth Maybe because I feared him suspecting the whole transmigration thing...But now was not the moment for me to care for his suspicions, there were a hell low of weird things in this galaxy anyways.
"It's going to sound insane," I said. "But you're going to want to sit down for this one."
__
A/N: We are down in rankings so would really appreciate some powerstones btw!