Cen had expected the worst, like rancors, fire, explosions, pain, torture, more grenades, and all around the most evil techniques possible to imbue his spirit with the powers of the dark side. What he did not expect was hypothermia. He knew little of the procedures of meditation, to train upon pain and powered to shield or expel, and now, at the moment of its heightened requirement, he felt unhinged frustration press against his ribs, thrust into his gullet, and swell in bulbous form, threatening to burst forth in fiery vocalizations of his anger. The pain of the hoarfrost was unlike anything he had felt, the burning of hot metal, flame, beatings, and blaster bolts only sunk into the shadow of winter, whose bite acted as a torturous, paralytic poison, blanketing his body first in numbness only to pierce his nerves with smoldering hot hooks, tugging forth a greater response to the suffering. It would be mere moments until he would succumb to frostbite and hours until death.
The sun was gently sinking beyond the pale horizon, nipped with black outcrops of stony mountains beneath their jackets of ice and snow. He had said it himself, the cold which was fatal during the day would only serve certain death come nightfall, and if he was to survive even to the point of darkness he would either need to steal the ship or meditate, as per the master's orders. As fighting the freezing cold with his emotion was a more realistic venture than besting the Gen'Dai, Cen sighed in defeated and fought to freeze his poise in a stern matter against the violent shivers.
The incandescent sun of Hoth was still slowly sinking, casting jagged shadows of the mountain's span upon the pair. Karr Dalmos had outright refused to teach Cen the techniques of meditation, largely in part to the "No Force" policy of his training. But, upon Cen's young adulthood inclination to peep, he was granted the opportunity to study Karr in the midst of their practice.
Cen struggled to memorize their stance of his first mentor's composure, seen only years and years ago, but recalled the motion in which the hands were locked. It was an odd movement, in which rather than interlocking the fingers, weaved across the webs of their counterparts, they simply lay over top of each other. His right hand firmly clasped the back of the other, fingers against the knuckles, and lay beneath, both outstretched in a lax sense of calm, firmly held against his abdomen with ginger care. He remembered to close his eyes and to straighten his spine, a movement which only served to bring bites of pain to the small of his back, which had grown stiff in the chilly air.
He winced, suddenly more aware of the small interactions of the world across his body; there was a numbness that swallowed his feet; a sharp, needling pain across the glass wounds that dug into his arm; the way the cold dark washed over his body, prickling it with goosebumps and patches of frost; and there was that distinct sense, that cord of vibration that sunk deep into his gut. It was as if his hands, in midst of their meditative stance, had subconsciously grasped a twine that stretched deep across the plains of ice into the unknown and had become aware of the gentle strumming one man played in the distance. It was disturbing, disconcerting and a wave of unease swept over him, pulling him away from the focus of pain.
His eyes squinted shut further, a dull ache erupting as the pressure for darkness laid harsher upon the muscles of his eyes, straining them. Then came the wisp, a lone white trail of smoke against the dark backdrop of his eyelids, so prominent and corporeal that Cen felt as if he had squinted his eyelids to the point of peeling his vision away from existence, to stare eternally into the black so vividly his sight pierced through the curtains or reality into a universe beyond his own. Then the tendril of paleness snaked beyond his sight, spreading out through the heavens of his vision in a fog, and light cast down beyond it. Clouds. It was reflected by the floor of his prophetic vision, which was cast in glass and crystal, and in the lightened distance, cloudy yet pierced by spears of sunlight, he saw the Monolith once again.
Cen, conjured into a state of hypnosis by whatever unholy force compelled him to bear witness to the Monolith, had found himself in this trance, inadvertently shielding himself in the Force, but not through the pain his master had wished. There was a warning nurtured in the picturesque infection of the vast pillar of midnight, one so drawing, a vortex of consciousness, it compelled his body to instinctive protection through the Force, but as Cen's brief expansion into the Ways of Pain impaled his feeble trust with spikes of fright, he fled from the vision, the warning, entirely, and exploded into a gasping state of consciousness. He was scared of what the vision heralded, if it was neither Force nor divine, but a simple harbinger of Hell, of punishment, the field of Purgatory made manifest in nightmares to haunt him with the presence of doubt, of regret. He collapsed to his shaking knees, hyperventilating to imbibe his parched lungs with the desperately missed air. "I... I can't... How am I supposed to call upon this pain?"
[member="Kezeroth the Beholder"]
