SW Gray Tales 34.2: Premonitions II

Fortunately, the rest of the night had no surprises. After my heart stopped trying to beat its way out of my chest, I actually fell asleep pretty easily, wrapped around Vasha like a human-shaped security blanket.

The next morning, I tried to convince myself it was just a bad dream. A glitch in the matrix. Same thing happened that first night Vasha brought me home, all those years ago. Just a ghost of a memory, probably. It’s not like Vader was about to pop out of a closet to reenact the cellar trauma in stunning 4K reality, right?

Fuck. Why am I planting flags?

Whatever. I decided to shove the creepy night vibes into a mental box labeled "Deal With It Later, Maybe" and went back to the only problem I could actually solve: my janky Force powers. Specifically, why the concentrated pulse I sent out for telekinesis kept fizzling like a wet firecracker.

The best way to solve a problem is to trace it to its roots. In this case, the root was the point of concentration itself. The command center.

My head.

I’d kind of been avoiding a deep dive in that area. My brain is, to put it mildly, complicated. Even now, after two years of Hyper-Perception expanding my sensory processing power by some ridiculous factor, scanning a high-end nav-computer could still leave me feeling a bit dizzy. My own brain? That’s like comparing a datapad to a planetary network. The sheer structural complexity was off the charts.

And for whatever reason, spiritual or physical, the brain seemed to be the main CPU for Force-sensitives too. It was the nexus. The convergence point.

I mean, think about it. If I lost an arm, I’d lose the Living Force in that specific part, but I could still use the Force just fine. But if I lost my head? Game over. Which, duh, wasn’t exactly a revolutionary discovery. No head, no life. Force ghosts and all that weird shit aside, of course.

So yeah. The signal was getting scrambled somewhere in the most complex, most vital, and most sensitive part of my entire body.

No pressure.

I took a deep breath, centered myself, and initiated the scan, pointing the full, unfiltered firehose of my Hyper-Perception right at my own skull.

The surface-level reading was... interesting. The Living Force was denser up here, more concentrated. Like my brain was the capital city of my internal Force-ecosystem, humming with more energy than anywhere else. Made sense.

But I needed to go deeper. Past the general glow-up and into the nitty-gritty, the neural pathways where the signal was getting garbled. I pushed the perception inward, trying to map the flow, to find the exact point of failure.

And I hit a wall.

Not a physical one. It was a barrier in the Force. A hard stop. A "404 Page Not Found" error page planted square in the middle of my own consciousness. My senses, which could normally feel every dust mote in the room, just... stopped. Blank.

What the hell?

I pushed again. Harder. The barrier held, a smooth, featureless void in my perception.

Okay. No. Not acceptable. This was my head. My house. And there was a locked door I didn't put there.

So I did what any reasonable, self-respecting Force-user with OP sensory powers would do.

I rammed the gate.

I gathered all the focus I had, aimed my Hyper-Perception at that single point of resistance, and hit it with everything I had.

The barrier shattered.

And my brain went supernova.

An explosion of pure sensation detonated behind my eyes. It was like that first time in the cellar, that overwhelming feeling of becoming the universe, but a thousand times more intense and focused entirely inward. It wasn't about feeling the world around me anymore.

My Hyper-Perception just... turned off. Snapped silent.

It wasn't needed.

Because I wasn't feeling anymore.

I was seeing.

An eye had opened in my mind.

The world dissolved into an endless, silent, black space. I was there, but not there. A disembodied point of view. A floating camera in the void.

And I wasn't alone.

No, there were two things in the darkness with me.

Two ginormous, terrifyingly beautiful things.

They looked like the pictures of the sun I remembered from my past life.

Stars.

Two of them, burning in the void of my own mind. They were so close they seemed to be merging, their coronas overlapping in a swirl of silent energy. But they weren't the same.

One was massive. Dominant. It burned with a fierce, stable, white-hot light, so dense and contained it looked almost solid. A perfect sphere of unwavering power.

The other was smaller. And it was blue. But it wasn't stable. It was… dispersed. A chaotic blob of semi-solid, semi-gaseous energy. It pulsed weakly, its edges frayed and leaking light into the void like it was bleeding.

Like someone had poked a hole in a star. And then kept poking it till it became this.

My brain, which I'd previously considered a high-maintenance meat-computer with occasional genius DLC, was apparently hosting a binary star system.

What in the God-Emperor-on-the-Golden-Throne-ass-heresy was this?

Like yeah, people always say you’ve got two wolves inside you—one racist, one sexist—but since when did the wolves evolve into cosmic nuclear furnaces?!

I mean, if this was some kind of Force-astrology thing, nobody warned me. No wise old mentor ever said, “Ah yes, young padawan, eventually you’ll unlock the hidden celestial engine in your brain that runs on existential dread and questionable life choices.”

My disembodied consciousness floated there, staring. My first instinct was to poke one. My second, more rational instinct, was to not do that. But curiosity, as it always does, won out.

I drifted closer to the big, stable, white one first. It radiated a kind of serene, absolute confidence. It was just... there. Unmoving. Unshakeable. As I got nearer, the sheer scale of it was mind-boggling. It didn't feel hot, not in a physical sense, but the presence of it was overwhelming.

Then, without any warning, it pulled.

A sudden, irresistible gravitational force yanked me forward. My non-existent stomach dropped.

Oh, fuck. Don't tell me this is it. Don't tell me the inglorious end of the great me is getting sucked into a metaphysical sun inside my own damn head.

The white light consumed me.

I braced for annihilation, but it never came.

Instead, I opened my non-existent eyes to a world of pure, brilliant white. It wasn't a void; it was a space. And all around me, floating like ghostly windows, were screens. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

And they were all playing memories.

My memories. From my first life.

There was my sister, laughing as she tried to put a stupid party hat on one of our cats. The cat, unimpressed, batted it away. There were my parents, younger, smiling at me from across a dinner table on my birthday. I saw my old room, cluttered with books and half-finished projects. My first car. The view from my favorite hiking spot.

Things I once had. Things I could never hold again.

I saw moments I'd almost forgotten. The specific way the sunlight hit the floor in my childhood home. The taste of a coffee from a cafe I used to frequent. Small, insignificant moments that were, in their own way, everything.

My logic centers were screaming that this was impossible, but my... heart? Soul? Whatever non-physical equivalent I had right now, it ached.

Fuck it. Even without a body, I felt my nose sting. Felt my eyes welling up with tears that couldn't fall. It was all there. A perfect, pristine archive of a life that was gone.

I don't know how long I stayed there, just watching. Floating through the ghost-reel of my past. It could have been seconds or centuries.

Eventually, after an eternity of bittersweet nostalgia, I managed to get a handle on myself. I willed myself to move, drifting toward the edge of the brilliant white space. I pushed against the boundary, and just like that, I was back in the void.

I was floating right beside the white star again. But this time, there was no pull. It just hung there, placid and bright, as if to say, "Yeah, that's me. All of it."

I had to pull myself together. Saying goodbye to a life you've already lost once is a special kind of hell, but what else could I do? That was then. This is now. It is what it is.

The white star, it had to be me. Alex. My original self, my soul, my ego, whatever you want to call it. A complete, solid archive of who I was. And it was big. Stable. No wonder I still felt more like myself than the kid whose body I was borrowing.

And if that was me... then the other one, the fractured blue star, had to be Ezra. It was so much smaller, so dispersed and weak-looking in comparison.

But why?

Giving the white star a wide berth—I wasn't ready for another round of emotional waterboarding—I looped around and drifted toward the blue one. Its light was faint, and as I passed through the hazy, leaking edges of its energy, I could hear faint whispers. Fragments of sound. A child's laugh, a woman's hum, a man's gruff but kind voice.

I steeled myself and dove in.

Inside, it was just as chaotic as it looked from the outside. Memories flickered like faulty holos, disjointed and incomplete. It was all the stuff I'd gotten flash-downloaded into my brain when I first arrived: hiding in the cellar, the shock of his parents being taken, snippets of life on the streets. Seven years of survival, all chopped up and broken.

There wasn't much emotional feedback here. It felt... distant. Like watching a movie about someone else's life, which, I guess, it was.

Strangely, just like in my own star, there were no memories of the last few years with Vasha. None of me. It was like this place was a snapshot, frozen in time from the moment I arrived.

Exploring didn't give me any answers as to why it was so fractured. Did my arrival do this? Did my own, much larger "star" just sort of... break his?

Still, it answered one thing. I felt more like Alex because, apparently, I was more Alex. Ezra's consciousness, his sense of self, had been ground down into this sad, broken little thing, while mine was still whole. A mountain of selfhood next to a pile of cosmic dust.

I sifted through the memories of parents I didn't feel much for—because that's mostly what was left of him, that core trauma. I'd buried that part of Ezra years ago. Sure, I felt an obligation to save Mira and Ephraim, but it was more like... settling a debt. Paying rent for the body. A karmic transaction.

Disinterested, I decided to leave. I snapped my focus back, pulling myself out of the mental void, out of the binary star system of my own mind.

The transition was jarring. From the silent, dark expanse to the sudden, sharp reality of the bedroom.

And a face.

A familiar, blue-skinned, lekku-framed face, inches from mine.

Vasha was leaning over me, her expression a mixture of tenderness and deep concern. Her hand was hovering just above my cheek, as if she'd been about to touch me but wasn't sure if she should.

"Ezra?" she whispered, her voice soft. "You were crying."

Uh oh.

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A/N; for some reason, patreon had turned the allow comment on post option off by default. I only saw it now. If you guys have any comments, regarding those chapter, you can go and comment now, I love reading them. Also gives me new ideas