Private Veil of the Mind [Je'gan]

[Mother Askani]

​

Darkness pressed in around her, thick and suffocating, save for the cold, cerulean glow of the Holocron of Je'gan Olra'en. It pulsed in her hands like a living thing, its angular facets humming with knowledge long buried beneath layers of time and secrecy. The air in the chamber was still—too still, as if the very Force held its breath in anticipation.

She lowered herself, folding into a cross-legged position as she closed in on the floor, her wrapped fingers brushing the Holocron's surface, its weight far heavier than its physical form suggested. The nameless one who had lent it to her had done so with neither warning nor reassurance, only a knowing glance that spoke volumes. This was no mere relic of Jedi or Sith wisdom. This was the archive of knowledge and power few could wield.

Even now she felt the length of her scar; there was a deep pulsating under the flesh -- the Nameless creatures of legend had left their mark, and with it took or suppressed her abilities somehow. She had been the first of any to survive that she could find in any records anywhere. However, her cerebral prowess remained.

As she reached out with her mind, the Holocron responded in kind, a whisper threading through her consciousness like a blade slipping between ribs. Mastery? The voice of Je'gan Olra'en was neither welcoming nor dismissive—merely expectant, as though he had been waiting for her all along, as though he could read her mind.

A flicker of movement danced at the edge of her vision. The chamber had no windows, no flickering torches, yet shadows slithered across the stone walls, forming outlines where none should be; or so she thought...

It was illusion, but illusion so finely woven it blurred the line between deception and reality.

She exhaled, steadying herself. She was no novice to such trickery. Her own mind had carved its place in the void of the Force, bending thought and will with ease. And yet, before Je'gan Olra'en, the finest mentalist in recorded history, she was but his second, a traveler at the threshold of something far deeper.

The Holocron's glow dimmed, then flared with sudden intensity. Show me what you know, the voice beckoned, laced with something ancient, something watching.

She closed her eyes, and the world around her unraveled.

-----

"What have I sacrificed? Everything..."
​

 

[Mother Askani]

​

The Holocron's glow pulsed erratically, casting long, jittering shadows along the chamber walls. Mother Askani sat cross-legged before it, her fingers hovering over its cold, angular surface. The voice of Je'gan Olra'en coiled through her mind like a slow-moving serpent—calm, composed, yet carrying an unmistakable edge.

"The White Current," he mused, his tone somewhere between amusement and disdain, "is a philosophy of cowards."

Askani's brow furrowed. "Cowards?"

"They don't fight, don't manipulate, don't even assert themselves. They dissolve. Vanish. It's the difference between a soldier and a ghost. Between someone who moves the game pieces and someone who just fades into the board."

The chamber wavered—not a trick of the light, but of perception itself. For a fraction of a second, the stone walls seemed to melt into rolling mist. Askani tensed, her mind instinctively reinforcing its defenses, but the illusion didn't break. It wrapped around her, insidious and seamless.

"You want to learn this?" Je'gan's voice pressed into her thoughts like a thumb against an open wound. "Then stop trying to master it. You can't grip water in your fist—only let it run through your fingers."

Askani exhaled sharply, rolling her shoulders back. "Stop trying to master it?"

"The point is knowing when to let the tide take you." A pause. "Or when to drown someone else in it."

The mist thickened. Not an illusion. Not a dream. A presence—alive, shifting, formless yet aware. It wasn't just wrapping around her. It was pulling her in.

"You think your mind is a fortress." Je'gan's voice was closer now, as if he were standing beside her. "That's your first mistake. Fortresses can be starved out. Walls can be scaled. Doors can be broken."

A rush of pressure crushed against her thoughts—something vast, something unstoppable. Instinct screamed at her to resist, to push back, to fight. But even as she braced herself, Je'gan's voice came again, low and amused.

"The harder you struggle, the faster you sink."

Askani's breath hitched. The walls of her mind—walls she had spent years fortifying—were no longer solid. They were sand against the tide, eroding, crumbling, pulling her deeper into something she couldn't define.

"Now," Je'gan said, his tone shifting into something cooler, more precise. "Try again."

The world around her was gone. The Force did not flow through her—it was her. And in that endless, shapeless current, she felt it—something lurking beneath the surface. Watching. Waiting.

This was no mere lesson.

This was a test.

-----

"What have I sacrificed? Everything..."
​

 

[Mother Askani]

​

Darkness.

Not the comforting embrace of shadow, nor the absence of light, but something deeper. Vast. Infinite. A void in which thought itself unraveled, where time ceased to exist.

Askani floated in it, or perhaps was it--no body, no boundaries, only awareness stretching outward into nothingness. A flicker of instinct told her to claw her way back, to anchor herself, but there was nothing to grip. No walls, no ground, no center. Just the current pulling her ever deeper.

And then--Je'gan's voice. Smooth, casual, but sharp as a blade at her throat.

"Better."

She felt him move through the void, though she could not see him. Could not see anything. Only the shifting, endless tide of the Force pressing in on all sides.

"You've stopped fighting. Good. That's the first step. But floating isn't swimming, and drifting isn't control."

A pulse of something--cold, precise--slashed through the formless expanse. The nothingness around her shifted, suddenly alive with motion.

Askani barely had a moment to process before she felt it--something stirring beneath her, beneath the Current itself. A presence, vast and unknowable, brushing against the edges of her awareness. It was neither light nor dark, neither malicious nor kind. It simply was.

And it was watching.

Her pulse spiked. "What is that?"

"A question you should've asked before diving in."

The presence stirred again, closer this time. A pressure, vast and crushing, yet indifferent. Askani felt her own thoughts waver--her very self thinning, as if the Current was absorbing her, or worse, forgetting her.

Panic flared, brief but undeniable; it took her back to the time she first experienced her breach.

"Ah," Je'gan murmured, and she could hear the smirk in his voice. "You feel it now, don't you? That's the real secret of the White Current. It doesn't just hide you--it erases you. The Fallanassi call it surrender. I call it obliteration. Stay in too long, and there won't be a 'you' left to come back."

Askani gritted her teeth, focusing, trying to center herself--but there was no center. No form. No Askani. The weight of that truth pressed in, smothering, and for a single, horrifying moment, she understood exactly what he meant.

She was vanishing.

"Lesson two," Je'gan continued, merciless. "Now that you know how to sink, let's see if you can learn how to swim."

And then, without warning--he pushed.

A force, not physical but mental, slammed into her. Askani was ripped from the stillness, sent spiraling through the Current, deeper into the void where the presence lurked.

She did not scream. There was no air. No sound. Only motion and the crushing weight of something vast unfolding before her.

And then--

A glimpse.

Not sight. Not in the way one saw with eyes. But an impression, a flicker of knowledge too great for her mind to hold.

And what she saw nearly shattered her.

-----

"What have I sacrificed? Everything..."
​

 

[Mother Askani]

​

The glimpse burned into her mind like an afterimage on scorched retinas--brief, incomprehensible, and wrong.

It was not a vision in the way she had known them before. It was not the Force whispering in vague premonitions or showing her fractured glimpses of things to come. No, this was something else. Something ancient. Something that did not speak but simply was.

The presence in the Current--it had seen her too.

A weight pressed against her thoughts, vast and impossible to measure, not with malice but with a curiosity that was somehow worse. She was not supposed to be here. She had touched something old, something that had existed long before she ever reached into this art, and it had turned its attention upon her.

Her first instinct was to pull away, to claw her way back to the surface of herself, but the Current did not allow for such things. She was the Current now. She could not escape because there was nowhere to run--she was already inside it.

And it knew.

"This," Je'gan's voice returned, distant but sharp, "is the part where you either learn or you drown."

Askani struggled to center herself, but there was no center. No solid ground, no axis around which her thoughts could orbit. Every technique she had mastered--barriers, mental fortifications, anchoring herself to her identity--meant nothing here.

Because here, she was not real.

She had become formless, adrift in a consciousness far greater than her own. The Current was pulling her under, folding her into itself, and soon, she would be nothing but a ripple in an ocean that did not remember.

The presence stirred again, and her thoughts warped.

Time became a meaningless concept.

For a flicker of a moment, she was not Askani, not a Jedi, not even a person. She was a memory, a dream, a thought half-formed and drifting through an endless tide of others just like her. She could feel the weight of it pressing in--lives lived and lost, voices speaking in tongues too vast for her mind to contain. They whispered to her, pulling, pulling, pulling--

Sink.

"No."

The word was small, barely more than a spark in the abyss, but it was hers.

She clung to it, that single point of defiance, that tiny, fragile thing. It was nothing compared to the vastness of the Current. A drop against an ocean. A whisper against the storm.

But it was hers.

And that was the difference.

She focused, not on resisting, not on fighting, but on being. She was Askani. She had a name, a mind, a will. She had been a Jedi once, a warrior, a seeker. She had learned the arts of the mind, had wielded illusions and bent perception. She was not the Current. She was herself.

The void did not resist her--it simply did not care. But it shifted. The Current was still there, flowing through her, but no longer consuming her. She had not overpowered it. She had simply chosen not to drown.

And with that realization, she felt herself rise.

The nothingness peeled away, the weight lifted, and--

The chamber returned in a rush.

Askani gasped as her mind snapped back into her body, lungs dragging in air as though she had truly been drowning. Sweat slicked her skin. The Holocron still pulsed before her, its glow steady, indifferent to the eternity she had just glimpsed.

And Je'gan--his presence still lingered in her mind, dry and sharp as ever.

"Not bad," he mused. "You didn't die. That's more than I can say for most."

She let out a slow, shaking breath, rubbing her temples. "What was that?"

"Perspective." A pause. "The Fallanassi surrender to the Current. You learned how to let it pass through you. That's the difference between being a whisper in the tide and being the one who decides where the tide flows."

Askani swallowed, steadying her hands. She was exhausted, drained in a way that had nothing to do with physicality. But beneath that, beneath the fatigue and the lingering unease of what had just happened--she understood.

This was only the beginning.

-----

"What have I sacrificed? Everything..."
​

 

[Mother Askani]

​

The holocron's glow had dimmed, its pulsing light fading into a low, steady hum. The energy of the chamber had shifted--no longer an open current of possibility, but settling back into familiarity. She exhaled slowly, grounding herself in the moment.

But his presence in her mind had not fully withdrawn, though it had lessened, it lingered.

"That's enough for now." His tone was firm, but there was something else beneath it--calculation, perhaps. As though he were measuring her still. "You'll need time to process. Don't get arrogant and try to dive in again without preparation. That way lies madness, and I do mean that literally."

She smirked despite her exhaustion. "I'll keep that mind."

She flexed her fingers, still feeling the phantom sensation of the Current pulling at her, trying to make sense of it all. Je'gan had taught her the shape of it, the method of holding onto herself while existing within something else, something greater--but she had the feeling that she had only scratched the surface. And she'd be lying to herself if she had not wondered about what was possible; she found herself wondering about what's possible often in this stage of life, expanding on her learning.

Her mind drifted, the weight of the lesson still pressing against her thoughts, but something else had begun to take root. A question, an unease.

She hesitated for only a moment before speaking. "Tell me something," she said, watching the flickering blue haze of his holocron-bound form. "You were a mentalist. The mental arts were your specialty. But you also understood fear. The kind that goes deeper than the mind. I mean you'd have to. The kind that infects something... more."

She glanced up at him, snatching his gaze, and though he was nothing more than a projection, the weight of his stare was still unsettling.

"Have you ever heard of the Nameless? Or the Blight?"

A beat. Something subtle shifted in Je'gan's expression.

"The Shrii-ka-rai." The name rolled off his tongue with a cold familiarity, as though it had been buried deep in his memory, a ghost of something long past but never forgotten. "Eaters of the Force."

Askani nodded. "They say they strip the connection entirely. That the closer you get, the worse it becomes. That even the strongest Force users--"

"Hallucinate. Break. Die."

The bluntness of it matched her stilled expression.

Je'gan leaned back, arms folding, the brim of his wide hat casting shadows over his sharp features. "I never faced one myself, but I knew of them. I knew of what they left behind. Husks where Jedi or the like used to be. Empty. As if they had never been in the Force at all."

Askani looked. "That's exactly it."

"And yet there exists something that devours it."

It was simple. So matter-of-fact.

She continued. "Mhm. And the Blight?"

Je'gan's lips pressed into a thin line. "That one's murkier. It's not just about the Force. It consumes everything--not just life, but existence itself. It spreads. Unmaking. Turning all it touches into something... less. Least that's what the texts say. Hasn't been seen in thousands of years."

There was a weight in his voice, something colder than before.

"But tell me, Askani," he said slowly, "why are you asking about them?"

She hesitated. The truth was -- "Because I've come face to face with these creatures, I survived, but I've been left with a scar." Her calcified scar, the cause of her breach in the Force.

The whispers of these things had been growing louder lately--hidden in the edges of old records, spoken in the quietest of circles. The Force had not warned her, not in any obvious way, but she had learned long ago to trust her instincts.

And right now, something deep within her was telling her that he had knowledge that would matter.

"The dangers of the past only remain dormant for so long. I know there's a way to counter these things, and undo their damage..." she said. "There's something lost to time, and I plan on finding it."

Je'gan studied her for a long moment. Then, with a small, humorless smirk, he said, "Then you'd best start preparing yourself. Because if you go digging into this? Sooner or later, something is going to look back."

The holocron flickered, and his presence faded.

She sat there in the dim glow of the chamber, her pulse slow, steady, but unmistakably uneasy.

-----

"What have I sacrificed? Everything..."
​