Unspeakably tired
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from Russia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Kuwait
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Estonia
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Russia
Unspeakably tired
back at it again
El misterioso Darth Plagueis: su debut en Star Wars y el futuro incierto tras la cancelación de The Acolyte
En la mitología de Star Wars, pocos personajes han generado tanta fascinación como Darth Plagueis, el poderoso Señor Sith que obsesionó a Palpatine y cuya historia solo se insinuó en el cine. Durante años, los fans especularon sobre su aspecto y sus planes, alimentados por la novela Leyendas de James Luceno. Sin embargo, el canon oficial lo mantuvo en las sombras… hasta hace poco. Un cameo…
seems like a renaissance painting of a greek myth
That one art trend/ study but made it Osha!!🥰
The Acolyte: The Fifth Gate (Fanfiction)
The system doesn't care that he wasn't ready.
Three years from now, a tribunal will ask Kael Vaeran to explain a power the Jedi Order has no name for, and Master Vernestra Rwoh, the one who caught him lying with his own body during a sparring exhibition and chose silence over a report, will be the one who votes to let him keep it. Long before that room, he is a sixteen-year-old initiate counting his own breath past minute thirty-two, waiting on a chamber-feeling that arrives without a name, only a five-armed pinwheel he sketches wrong dozens of times in the dark. What he carries surfaces in a green kyber crystal found alone in an unmappe…
📖 Read FREE — no paywall, new chapters daily → unwrittenrealm.com
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📖 Chapter 1: Chapter 1 : Wake Beneath a Foreign Ceiling
Kael sat on the edge of the bunk with it in both hands, turning it. The cell was stone — pale stone, West Spire pale, the kind that held cold through the night and only began warming around the second bell of the morning watch. The corridor outside was quiet except for the low cycling hum of the Temple's air-exchange. He'd been sitting here long enough that his heels had gone numb against the floor.
Two girls. Fire behind them, not in front — the fire was everywhere, in fact, walls and sky and the ground tilting wrong — and they were running toward something that kept moving. He'd been watching from outside the frame, like a man behind glass, unable to call out.
The dream dissolved the way dreams do: faster when you try to hold them.
He set the flimsi on the bunk.
The cell was seven steps long. He knew that because he'd walked it twice before remembering where he was. One narrow window, high-set, letting in the pre-dawn grey of Coruscant. A pressed-wool blanket folded at the foot of the mattress. A standard-issue washbasin in the corner, the tap handle worn smooth where a thousand other hands had turned it. One shelf. One hook behind the door. His training robe hanging there, grey-brown, slightly large across the shoulders in that way issued clothing was always large across the shoulders.
Sixteen, he thought, and it landed flat, the way facts did when the mind refused to make them feel real.
He stood, crossed to the basin, and ran cold water over both wrists.
That worked. That had always worked. He didn't ask why.
The pre-dawn greyness outside the window was shifting. Not warming — Coruscant's lower spires didn't warm, not truly — but changing quality, the way compressed city-light changed when the upper lanes started their transit cycle. He had maybe twenty minutes before the first bell. He used eight of them to wash properly, to press his robe flat with both palms, to knot his belt correctly — one wrap, check the hang, one wrap more.
He knew how to knot the belt. His hands knew.
That was the thing that kept landing wrong. His hands knew. They moved to the washbasin tap and turned it the right direction on the first try. They folded the wool blanket back into its standard Temple rectangle without him deciding to. They'd woken him from the dream by pulling the cover flat before his mind was even present.
This body had been here. This body knew the cell.
He did not know the cell.
The corridor outside shifted — footsteps, measured. Not hurried. The particular rhythm of someone who had walked this corridor for a very long time.
He turned toward the door.
The footsteps slowed.
Not stopped — slowed, that particular deceleration that meant something had registered. The door was cracked, standard overnight protocol, and through the gap came one slant of corridor light, warm bronze, the kind thrown by the passage-sconces that ran the West Spire's tertiary levels at night-cycle setting.
He held still.
The pause lasted perhaps one breath. He didn't count it. Then the footsteps resumed their measured pace, growing quieter, turning the far corner.
Nothing more.
He stood with one hand on the washbasin and his pulse ticking in his throat and tried to name what he'd felt in that pause. It was pressure, but not the physical kind — not the sense of being observed through glass, not the prickling along the back of the neck that surveillance produced. This was anterior. Pre-sensation. The feeling of a room before you opened the door.
He had no frame for it.
He filed it the same way he'd been filing everything: strange. present. unknown source. move forward.
The first bell rang.
The corridor came alive — doors, footsteps, the low voices of other Padawans orienting themselves toward the morning. He moved to the door and opened it fully, stepped into the passage with his shoulders back and his face arranged at neutral, the way his hands had arranged the blanket: without deciding to, from memory he didn't own.
"Vaeran." A voice to his left, warm and familiar in a way that landed slightly out of register, the way all the familiar things here landed. A dark-haired boy, Kael's height, pulling his own robe closed at the collar, half-asleep and clearly trying not to show it. "Thought you'd already be at the hall."
Rell. The name surfaced without prompting. Human, eighteen, three months ahead in the cohort. They shared this corridor. He had more than that — he had the texture of the word, the sense of a specific kind of easy rapport that took time to build.
He didn't know how they'd built it.
"Was reviewing my notes," Kael said.
Rell raised an eyebrow, didn't question it, fell into step beside him. "Tessari's doing the walk-and-correct this session, not the seated form. She's in a mood." He rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. "Bera already claims she's going to get selected for demonstration."
"She might."
"She might," Rell agreed, in a tone that meant she won't, but she'll make it unpleasant for everyone trying to prevent it.
The meditation hall was two levels up, accessible by the West Spire's internal stairway. Kael let Rell set the pace. The stone stairs were worn in the center by something like centuries of foot traffic, and the rail was the smooth dark alloy of Phase 1 Temple metalwork — older than the Republic's current form, older than most things Coruscant still actively used. His hand found the rail automatically.
Observe. Follow. Don't fill silence with noise.
He had seven minutes before the session began and he didn't know the session's structure. He knew the form names. He knew what a meditation block looked like from the outside. He knew, in a way that his hands but not his mind had verified, that he'd sat in that hall before.
The question was whether he could sit there again without the gap showing.
He thought about the dream. The two girls. The fire behind them that was also the sky.
Later, he decided, and meant it.
The stairway opened into the hall's antechamber, and the smell changed — incense trace, cold stone, the particular scrubbed-clean quality of a room that had hosted focused attention for so long it had started accumulating it in the walls. The bell was still echoing somewhere above. His cohort filed in through the far arch, seven of them, shedding the residue of sleep.
Back in his cell, on the bunk, the flimsi was still blank.
He waited until the bell-echo faded. Then he moved with the cohort through the arch, kept his pace ordinary, found his rush mat — his hands knew which one — and settled.
He had one problem to solve. He was going to solve it in the time he had.
Forty minutes, he thought. Figure out the forty minutes. Everything else can wait.
After the session, back in the cell during the short window between meditation and kata preparation, Kael sat on his bunk and uncapped the stylus.
He thought for a moment. Not long.
At the top of the flimsi, he wrote: four sessions, twenty minutes each, starting today.
He capped the stylus. Looked at the line. The flimsi was small, the kind issued for personal notation — thin, light, meant to be carried in a robe pocket. It could hold more than one line.
He thought about the pause in the corridor. The pre-sensation. The pressure that had lasted exactly one breath and then moved on.
He didn't write that part down. Not yet. He didn't have the vocabulary for it.
He folded the flimsi in half and pressed it flat under his palm.
Outside, the second bell rang for kata prep.
He put the flimsi in his robe pocket, smoothed the front of his robe with both hands, and stood.
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📖 Chapter 2: Chapter 2 : Breath Counts Toward Nothing
Master Tessari moved like a woman who had corrected spines for thirty years and stopped being patient about it sometime around year fifteen.
She came down the line of seven rush mats with her hands clasped behind her, pausing at each Padawan for long enough to assess, sometimes touching a shoulder, sometimes pressing two fingers between shoulder blades to communicate you are collapsing forward and I will not say it twice. The hall was warm with the combined body-heat of the cohort and the morning sun coming in through the high lateral windows at a shallow angle, cutting white bands across the floor-stone.
Kael sat at the fourth mat from the left.
His spine was correct — his body had made sure of that before his mind arrived. He'd dropped to the mat and the posture had assembled itself: cross-legged, lumbar engaged, shoulders rolled back and down, jaw soft. Easy. The trouble was everything above the neck.
Earth-mind had nothing to do with forty minutes of stillness.
It started running catalogs. Forms one through five, the names, the posture breakdowns. Tessari — a Master, cohort-rotating instructor, reputation for selecting one Padawan per session for demonstration. Bera — to his left, two mats over, her spine was a degree too rigid, overcompensating. Rell — to his right, one mat, his eyes closed and his breathing already settling into something that looked real.
Tessari's sandals whispered past Rell.
Past Kael.
Her hand did not touch his shoulder.
He held still.
Behind him, he heard her pause at someone further down the line — a pressure correction, the flat two-finger between the shoulder blades — and continued.
She moved past me, he noted. Not relief. Something more tactical than that. She'd read him as lower-rank. Not a subject of interest. Good. He needed to be not a subject of interest for quite some time.
The hall settled into its session rhythm. The sound of the air-exchange above dimmed as the hour deepened. Tessari completed her walk-and-correct and took her position at the front, facing away from the cohort, which was either traditional or her personal preference — he didn't know, and asking would cost him more than it was worth.
Twenty minutes remaining, by his count.
His mind went through everything it had accumulated in the past two hours. The kata prep schedule. The West Spire's stairway plan. The refectory's location relative to his cell. He was not yet sure which eating schedule applied to his tier. He would observe at the first meal interval and follow the cohort without asking.
Don't ask what a late-Initiate would know.
The problem was that he kept manufacturing new questions faster than he could table them. The second bell's timing. The correct angle for the meditation bow at session close. Whether the cohort rotated mats or kept assigned positions.
Fifteen minutes.
He caught himself on the inhale.
He'd been counting his breath for approximately — he checked — four minutes. Not intentionally. His attention had simply slipped into it when the catalog ran dry: the way one counted window-bars in a waiting room, or footfalls on pavement, or the seconds between a flash and a sound. The body counting to give the mind somewhere to land.
At minute twelve he'd started losing count and restarting from one.
At minute fifteen he'd stopped restarting.
He was on forty-seven, or possibly forty-eight.
Something changed in his chest. Not dramatic — not the opening of a lock or the flooding of warmth that he might have imagined. Smaller. The specific quality of a cramped muscle releasing, the one between his shoulder blades that he hadn't known was tight until it wasn't anymore. A single breath that went deeper than the last twelve.
The feeling lasted three or four more breaths and then leveled into something that was simply: quieter.
He stayed with it.
At the front of the hall, Tessari had not moved.
The session closed without demonstration. Tessari dismissed the cohort with the standard gesture, and Bera's face cycled through three expressions in quick succession — anticipation, recalculation, and the particular stillness of a person deciding not to be visibly disappointed. Rell rolled his mat with the efficiency of someone who'd done it two hundred times and was thinking about breakfast.
Kael rolled his own mat. The motion was automatic.
"Told you," Rell said quietly, not to anyone in particular.
In the corridor outside, Kael fell into step with the cohort while they sorted themselves toward the meal interval. He had four minutes before he'd need to navigate the refectory, which gave him enough time to pull the flimsi from his pocket and add a line while walking.
He wrote: minute thirty-two — chest opened.
He looked at it.
That wasn't quite right. It hadn't opened. It had released something it had been holding, which was not the same as opening. But he didn't have a better word, and the flimsi was for records, not poetry.
He pocketed it again.
Rell was saying something about the kata block schedule and whether sub-master Vala ran two circuits or three on Sevenday prep mornings. Kael listened with the front of his attention and kept the back of it on the flimsi in his pocket.
Four sessions, twenty minutes each, he'd written this morning. He'd completed one — the cohort session — but it had been forty minutes, not twenty, and he hadn't been aiming at it deliberately. It had found him.
He thought about that.
What did it mean that the result had arrived through counting something as basic as breath? He had no framework for the Force. He had a child's framework — action sequences, glowing swords, the mythology of a franchise he had consumed from the outside. He had understood it as: special people with special aptitude, trained from childhood, reaching inward.
He'd never reached inward in his life.
But the chest opened.
That was the data point. That was what he had. He would run it four more times today — alone, seated, counting — and see whether the mechanism held outside the hall.
If it did, he'd keep the method.
If it didn't, he'd find another.
The refectory appeared at the corridor's end, warm with the smell of grain-mash and pressed fruit. Seven Padawans funneled through the archway ahead of him, and Kael followed, watching which tables were cohort-assigned and which were open, storing the information the same way he'd stored the stair-rail's texture and the bell's timing.
One variable at a time.
There was still the question of the pause in the corridor that morning. Still the question of the pressure that had lasted one breath and moved on.
He'd work out the meditation mechanism first.
Everything else could wait.