Disclaimer: Any recognizable names belong to George Lucas. I have no
special permission to write this story and am not making any money from it.
Author's Note: Sorry this chapter is sort of late. I had lots of final tests and projects. Also, this chapter is a bit slow, but I think still enjoyable.
Chapter 6
Many Jedi returned to the world of their training in times of trial or trouble, and Qui Gon was no different. He booked a public transport to Talgonia, where there was a small proxeum he could keep vigil in alone until the demon left him.
The proxeum was called House of the Bell, and it perched like a rookery on one of a cluster of fanglike mountains that rose up from the desert. Generations ago, Talgonia has suffered a horrific civil war. Ecological weapons had killed millions of sentients, and most of the planet's other life. Almost all the wildlife that was on Talgonia now had been teraformed back into it with help from the Ho'Din govronment, and these deserts weren't the most desolate sectors of the planet. The armys had blasted some areas down to bare rock and left them so poisoned, irradiated, and geologicaly unstable that no one could make anything live there. The people of Talgonia, the Finvairra, were now among the galxcies most fervent pacifists.
The desert was a flood of golden burning sand. The wind that blew off it had the heat and fiery smell of the air around a raku kiln, but the etched and cracked towers of stone where tall enough to catch the rain that evaporated before reaching the dunes. They were cooler, moister, hung with vegetation: thick stands of bantha pines, flag leaved cable-like rania plants, fur ferns, and bander vines twining around the trees and zal cane. Sometimes, at dawn or twilight, the peaks were even cloaked in a haze of mist. The Finvairra called these oasises green islands.
House of the Bell was log framed with stone floors and pillars, set back under the deep green fronds of tall trees. It was small, and very old. At the time it was home to four Masters and their Learners, who were all working on distant planets at the time, and a Knight caretaker, named Boid Chal, who had agreed to let Qui Gon live alone at House of the Bell for a few weeks.
When Qui Gon hiked into the clearing where the proxeum stood, Boid was perched on the ridgepole of the main hall, like a living version of the sentinel carvings on either end of it. He called out to Qui Gon in his own musical language, a greeting that sounded like a single high note of a flute echoing around the dome of the sky, and glided down on wide, membranous wings to meet him. Boid was one of the Finvairra. He was bat- like, about human sized, with a vulpine head and a long fur-plumed tail. His legs where small and tucked under his body, but his arms where long, muscular, and supported voluminous skin wings that folded neatly at his sides when he was on the ground. Boid was covered in a coat of fog gray fur, and his eyes where as green and flashing as Ryloth serpent stones. Black feathers, iron charms, and strings of small bells were tied into the crest of fur running over his head down to his shoulders.
"Peace, Master," Boid said, dipping his head gracefully.
"Peace, my friend." Qui Gon folded his hands in front of him and bowed.
"House of the Bell will be empty as long as you need to be here." Boid paused for a moment, holding Qui Gon in his piercing foxish gaze. "You are entering a time of great danger."
"Yes."
Boid seemed to consider behind his quick eyes. "This was one of the first things rebuilt after the war. There is a spirit of tough hope hear. That might help you. Listen to the voice of the silence, Master Jinn," Boid said, speaking basic. It was a Finvairra saying, meaning roughly the same thing as, 'May the Force be with you.'
He lifted his wings and spread them wide, the membranes glowing pink with the sun shining through them, and leaped from the terrace off into empty space. He fell for a few seconds and then the towering desert updrafts caught and blasted him upward, high above the mountaintop. Qui Gon watched the other Jedi glide away on a river of air. Boid's shape faded into a black point in the razor blue, aseptically dry sky, and then it was gone, too far off for even Qui Gon's keen vision.
He stood on the terrace for a long time, absorbing the shaded curves and shadows of the dunes, the arid horizon in front of him, the still, green, mossy forest behind him, and the crystal clear, crystal hard, half orb of sky above him.
The voice of the silence.
Yes, he could hear that here.
* * * * *
It was one past midnight, and a lamp burned in the main chamber of the House of the Bell, casting a warm glow. Qui Gon had not slept since he had come to this place a week ago, but he was alert and exhaustion did not touch him. He had spent most of his time in intense meditation, preparing himself to counteract the vergence. Now was a deeply important time for him, he had to make himself as pure, as peaceful, as deeply bound to the light side as possible. In the past week he had sunk down to the very pit of his heart, making peace with old pain, mending or reconciling his weaknesses. The silence of the empty proxeum had revealed itself to be something complex, beautiful, vast and intimate at the same time. He felt the light side resonance that generations upon generations of Jedi, living, teaching, and learning here had cast and left behind like fossils, but mostly he was profoundly alone, shedding much of himself and much of his past like a snake skin.
Qui G opened his eyes from the latest period of meditation and got to his feet, unclipped his lightsaber from his belt, and began to practice a kata. Right now the most important thing was for him to be as spiritually healthy as possible, but there would soon come a time when physical strength would also be needed. His body felt unbelievably light as he stood. This was mostly a result of his heightened spiritual state, but also reflected concrete reality. He had eaten little since beginning his vigil at House of the Bell, and though the energy he drew from the Force decreased is need for food, he had lost weight.
He started slow, meditative, as carefully as if he had never held a saber before. Qui Gon measured grace betrayed his skill, though. Somehow you could see his quickness hidden in near stillness. It was eerie, the slow sequence of spin, sidestep, attack, and block more unearthly than the blinding, inhuman speed he was also capable of.
Then faster. Qui Gon opened a door inside himself, allowing the Force to add speed to his control. Eyes closed, he listened to the oscillating hiss of his saber as the phosphorescent green blade swung and sheared the air. This was what made him the best of them with a saber, the unteachable ability to flow like the wild wind and yet be solid, to give back what his opponent, even an imaginary one, gave, nine fold. Calm center, hurricane's eye. His movements melted together. He felt himself rise above the limitations of gravity and his own body, those boundaries only a foundation from which he could go anywhere. It was like dissolving into a pool of water. He dissolved into movement. He became the kata. Quick as an adder, agile as a cat, silent as a ghost. As Qui Gon fought a hypothetical battle alone in the night, his shadow swirled and jumped like flame on the hall's carved wood wall.
* * * * *
The next night Qui Gon gathered spiny tana fruit from the proxeum's vegetable garden and made tea for his evening meal. Water boiled in a clay pot over cherry-red embers, silver steam rising from it. He sat by the hearth stripping the husks off the fruit, focused on the simple task but also keenly self-aware. He could not feel the demon that he had caged in his psyche, but he did not question his sureness that he had not destroyed it yet. When he had invited it into himself it had lost most of its power. He had chained it, and there was little in his heart that it could use against him. What Yoda had told Obi Wan was very apt. Places with an aura of the dark side were dark mirrors, only returning the darkness you gave them. This thing was almost the same. Almost. Over time it had become something different, and it would eventually find a way to attack him. When it did he would have to be ready, or more likely, become so quickly. It would probably happen with no warning, but Qui Gon did not see that as a disadvantage. He often found that too much time to plan exactly could be his undoing.
He took a beautiful, moss-colored jar down from the shelf and shook a handful of shredded, dried leaves into the bubbling, steaming water. As the tea brewed, the water turned clear blood red. He couldn't feel the demon, but he could feel himself changing. Because he had no other task but centering himself in the Force, and because failing to do so would mean he would probably die horribly and in darkness, he was becoming more vibrantly interwoven with the light. A Jedi that stopped learning might as well stop being a Jedi, and Qui Gon was careful never to let his mind get stiff, but his relationship with the Force had not been in flux like this since his apprenticeship. He was finding greater harmony with the Force and being opened like a bud. Rituals of exorcism tended to stir up things you never expected. The changes were hard to articulate logically right now, but that might be for the best, too. Letting himself be distracted by such things would be dangerous now. He would deal with the now half formed epiphanies in their own time.
By the time he had finished thinking he had a basketful of fruit stripped, and then poured the hot shimmering tea into a rough clay bowl. He ate and drank slowly, the simple meal taking him over an hour to finish.
Then later, after another meditation and kata session, Qui Gon picked up a lamp, a glass tube containing a culture of bioluminescent algae. The anchient Jedi had built the proxeum over a natural spring, and he headed for the place where it still flowed. He was barefoot so his footsteps were silent but the lantern's light seemed to echo down the narrow hallways.
The flagstone floor had been laid right up to the edge of the pool where the spring water collected. A stream flowed from it, through a channel in the floor, to the outside where it wound its way through the forest and eventually poured down the bare rock face of the mountain. Qui Gon wasn't thinking of much of anything, just following the actions that came naturally.
He sat down by the edge of the spring, cupped his hands, dipped them into the water and drank. The water tasted soft like rain but had a mineral sharpness to it. For a minuet he only stared into the water with his arms resting in his thighs. The movement of light on the waters surface almost lulled him into a trance.
Qui Gon stood and began to undo the clasp of his belt, pulling off his long and voluminous robes. He unwound his sash from around his waist, and undid the tabards that crossed over his shoulders, slowly looping the cloth into a loose coil with unconscious care, and then dropped it to the floor. He shrugged off the baggy outer tunic, pulled the snug, long sleeved shirt under it off over his head and stripped to his skin. Jedi were strong as gundarks but rarely very heavily built. Despite his big bones Qui Gon had always been raw and wiry. The lines and angles of bone and muscle showed starkly, as if everything unnecessary had already been used up. His skin was the same way, somehow worn, even where it was pale and soft. Between Force healing and bacta he was scarless although it looked like he should be scared, and all he had been through still showed on his body. He crouched on the edge for a moment and then slipped into the still water.
The water cradled him as he lay on his back in it, his long hair fanned out around his head. The pool was wide enough for him to float spread eagle and deep enough that he could not stand with his head above water. Weightless in the cool water with his eyes half closed, Qui Gon felt almost disembodied, the way he had during the kata, the same sensation of dissolving. The water held him up, tingled over his skin, and he felt the power in it, the life force even in the nonliving. The overflowing cycle of life swirled before his mind's eye in the simple touch of water. He could feel the lineage, the power the water had picked up, one day part of the vast salty blue green oceans, another conducting life in the leaves of a plant, another atomized and floating in white clouds, another falling back down to earth to nourish the land, to make the old trees grow, and now in a cold spring bubbling up from deep in the rocks.
After an immeasurable time of perfect motionlessness, Qui Gon exhaled, held his breath and let himself sink down to the bottom. He knelt, knees digging into the soft sand that lined the spring, and began to meditate. Dim light filtered down from the surface like sunlight through an autumn forest's canopy. It glittered and rippled across pebbles and the jagged chunks of rock embedded in the walls of the pool. The water's cool weight lay on him heavily, yet it was always flowing, always moving. This was an old, old Jedi exercise, one that all students practiced in one form or another. Physical challenge as the path to mental control, psychic power, and spiritual freedom.
Patiently he held his breath, for a minuet, ten, twenty, feeling his body slow down as if in hibernation, conserving oxygen. Drawing inspiration from the cool, gentle currents flowing over his body, Qui Gon let his mind go fluid as he had been taught to do when he was under mental attack, or when he wished to conceal his thoughts and feelings. As he did, he thought he felt a faint flicker of darkness, the demon just barely showing itself. It must have done so because he had disturbed it. He was encouraged, but put it out of his mind. He felt no need to concentrate too fully on his goal. He simply reached out for the Force that, like the water, flowed all around him. After a while he became so involved in what he was doing that he forgot where he was and took a deep breath.
He was so relaxed and inhaled the water so quickly that he never even choked as it poured down his throat and filled his lungs in seconds. Panic was almost an alien concept to Qui Gon, he felt only shock, and even that didn't last long. It was soon replaced by awe. There was no pain, no crushing suffocation; it felt strange, but . . . he could breathe. He didn't know if he was absorbing oxygen from the water like a fish, or if he no longer needed to breathe, and he didn't care. He threw back his head and laughed, first in wonder, then at the strange sound of his own laughter transmitted only through water.
After several hours Qui Gon kicked his way to the surface and climbed out of the water. Outside the arched window over the pool, the sky was deep indigo, covered in stars like tiny pieces of shattered glass. Getting ready to return to the main hall, he gathered up his cloths, and draped his robe over his dripping shoulders. He felt purified, blessed, alive. It seemed impossible that he had done the psychic equivalent of swallowing poison and hoping his blood turned to anti-venom.
Once again Qui Gon settled himself on the stones of the main hall, preparing for another night's vigil. Dry now, except for his long hair, he dropped into the kneeling position he would be comfortable in for hours. As he closed his eyes to meditate, if he had been a cat he would have purred. The light of the lamp in front of him shown through his closed eyelids, dyed brilliant red orange by his pulse.
Suddenly his slate blue eyes opened wide. In the lamp light Qui Gon's pupils dilated, expanding as if against darkness.
Author's Note: Sorry this chapter is sort of late. I had lots of final tests and projects. Also, this chapter is a bit slow, but I think still enjoyable.
Chapter 6
Many Jedi returned to the world of their training in times of trial or trouble, and Qui Gon was no different. He booked a public transport to Talgonia, where there was a small proxeum he could keep vigil in alone until the demon left him.
The proxeum was called House of the Bell, and it perched like a rookery on one of a cluster of fanglike mountains that rose up from the desert. Generations ago, Talgonia has suffered a horrific civil war. Ecological weapons had killed millions of sentients, and most of the planet's other life. Almost all the wildlife that was on Talgonia now had been teraformed back into it with help from the Ho'Din govronment, and these deserts weren't the most desolate sectors of the planet. The armys had blasted some areas down to bare rock and left them so poisoned, irradiated, and geologicaly unstable that no one could make anything live there. The people of Talgonia, the Finvairra, were now among the galxcies most fervent pacifists.
The desert was a flood of golden burning sand. The wind that blew off it had the heat and fiery smell of the air around a raku kiln, but the etched and cracked towers of stone where tall enough to catch the rain that evaporated before reaching the dunes. They were cooler, moister, hung with vegetation: thick stands of bantha pines, flag leaved cable-like rania plants, fur ferns, and bander vines twining around the trees and zal cane. Sometimes, at dawn or twilight, the peaks were even cloaked in a haze of mist. The Finvairra called these oasises green islands.
House of the Bell was log framed with stone floors and pillars, set back under the deep green fronds of tall trees. It was small, and very old. At the time it was home to four Masters and their Learners, who were all working on distant planets at the time, and a Knight caretaker, named Boid Chal, who had agreed to let Qui Gon live alone at House of the Bell for a few weeks.
When Qui Gon hiked into the clearing where the proxeum stood, Boid was perched on the ridgepole of the main hall, like a living version of the sentinel carvings on either end of it. He called out to Qui Gon in his own musical language, a greeting that sounded like a single high note of a flute echoing around the dome of the sky, and glided down on wide, membranous wings to meet him. Boid was one of the Finvairra. He was bat- like, about human sized, with a vulpine head and a long fur-plumed tail. His legs where small and tucked under his body, but his arms where long, muscular, and supported voluminous skin wings that folded neatly at his sides when he was on the ground. Boid was covered in a coat of fog gray fur, and his eyes where as green and flashing as Ryloth serpent stones. Black feathers, iron charms, and strings of small bells were tied into the crest of fur running over his head down to his shoulders.
"Peace, Master," Boid said, dipping his head gracefully.
"Peace, my friend." Qui Gon folded his hands in front of him and bowed.
"House of the Bell will be empty as long as you need to be here." Boid paused for a moment, holding Qui Gon in his piercing foxish gaze. "You are entering a time of great danger."
"Yes."
Boid seemed to consider behind his quick eyes. "This was one of the first things rebuilt after the war. There is a spirit of tough hope hear. That might help you. Listen to the voice of the silence, Master Jinn," Boid said, speaking basic. It was a Finvairra saying, meaning roughly the same thing as, 'May the Force be with you.'
He lifted his wings and spread them wide, the membranes glowing pink with the sun shining through them, and leaped from the terrace off into empty space. He fell for a few seconds and then the towering desert updrafts caught and blasted him upward, high above the mountaintop. Qui Gon watched the other Jedi glide away on a river of air. Boid's shape faded into a black point in the razor blue, aseptically dry sky, and then it was gone, too far off for even Qui Gon's keen vision.
He stood on the terrace for a long time, absorbing the shaded curves and shadows of the dunes, the arid horizon in front of him, the still, green, mossy forest behind him, and the crystal clear, crystal hard, half orb of sky above him.
The voice of the silence.
Yes, he could hear that here.
* * * * *
It was one past midnight, and a lamp burned in the main chamber of the House of the Bell, casting a warm glow. Qui Gon had not slept since he had come to this place a week ago, but he was alert and exhaustion did not touch him. He had spent most of his time in intense meditation, preparing himself to counteract the vergence. Now was a deeply important time for him, he had to make himself as pure, as peaceful, as deeply bound to the light side as possible. In the past week he had sunk down to the very pit of his heart, making peace with old pain, mending or reconciling his weaknesses. The silence of the empty proxeum had revealed itself to be something complex, beautiful, vast and intimate at the same time. He felt the light side resonance that generations upon generations of Jedi, living, teaching, and learning here had cast and left behind like fossils, but mostly he was profoundly alone, shedding much of himself and much of his past like a snake skin.
Qui G opened his eyes from the latest period of meditation and got to his feet, unclipped his lightsaber from his belt, and began to practice a kata. Right now the most important thing was for him to be as spiritually healthy as possible, but there would soon come a time when physical strength would also be needed. His body felt unbelievably light as he stood. This was mostly a result of his heightened spiritual state, but also reflected concrete reality. He had eaten little since beginning his vigil at House of the Bell, and though the energy he drew from the Force decreased is need for food, he had lost weight.
He started slow, meditative, as carefully as if he had never held a saber before. Qui Gon measured grace betrayed his skill, though. Somehow you could see his quickness hidden in near stillness. It was eerie, the slow sequence of spin, sidestep, attack, and block more unearthly than the blinding, inhuman speed he was also capable of.
Then faster. Qui Gon opened a door inside himself, allowing the Force to add speed to his control. Eyes closed, he listened to the oscillating hiss of his saber as the phosphorescent green blade swung and sheared the air. This was what made him the best of them with a saber, the unteachable ability to flow like the wild wind and yet be solid, to give back what his opponent, even an imaginary one, gave, nine fold. Calm center, hurricane's eye. His movements melted together. He felt himself rise above the limitations of gravity and his own body, those boundaries only a foundation from which he could go anywhere. It was like dissolving into a pool of water. He dissolved into movement. He became the kata. Quick as an adder, agile as a cat, silent as a ghost. As Qui Gon fought a hypothetical battle alone in the night, his shadow swirled and jumped like flame on the hall's carved wood wall.
* * * * *
The next night Qui Gon gathered spiny tana fruit from the proxeum's vegetable garden and made tea for his evening meal. Water boiled in a clay pot over cherry-red embers, silver steam rising from it. He sat by the hearth stripping the husks off the fruit, focused on the simple task but also keenly self-aware. He could not feel the demon that he had caged in his psyche, but he did not question his sureness that he had not destroyed it yet. When he had invited it into himself it had lost most of its power. He had chained it, and there was little in his heart that it could use against him. What Yoda had told Obi Wan was very apt. Places with an aura of the dark side were dark mirrors, only returning the darkness you gave them. This thing was almost the same. Almost. Over time it had become something different, and it would eventually find a way to attack him. When it did he would have to be ready, or more likely, become so quickly. It would probably happen with no warning, but Qui Gon did not see that as a disadvantage. He often found that too much time to plan exactly could be his undoing.
He took a beautiful, moss-colored jar down from the shelf and shook a handful of shredded, dried leaves into the bubbling, steaming water. As the tea brewed, the water turned clear blood red. He couldn't feel the demon, but he could feel himself changing. Because he had no other task but centering himself in the Force, and because failing to do so would mean he would probably die horribly and in darkness, he was becoming more vibrantly interwoven with the light. A Jedi that stopped learning might as well stop being a Jedi, and Qui Gon was careful never to let his mind get stiff, but his relationship with the Force had not been in flux like this since his apprenticeship. He was finding greater harmony with the Force and being opened like a bud. Rituals of exorcism tended to stir up things you never expected. The changes were hard to articulate logically right now, but that might be for the best, too. Letting himself be distracted by such things would be dangerous now. He would deal with the now half formed epiphanies in their own time.
By the time he had finished thinking he had a basketful of fruit stripped, and then poured the hot shimmering tea into a rough clay bowl. He ate and drank slowly, the simple meal taking him over an hour to finish.
Then later, after another meditation and kata session, Qui Gon picked up a lamp, a glass tube containing a culture of bioluminescent algae. The anchient Jedi had built the proxeum over a natural spring, and he headed for the place where it still flowed. He was barefoot so his footsteps were silent but the lantern's light seemed to echo down the narrow hallways.
The flagstone floor had been laid right up to the edge of the pool where the spring water collected. A stream flowed from it, through a channel in the floor, to the outside where it wound its way through the forest and eventually poured down the bare rock face of the mountain. Qui Gon wasn't thinking of much of anything, just following the actions that came naturally.
He sat down by the edge of the spring, cupped his hands, dipped them into the water and drank. The water tasted soft like rain but had a mineral sharpness to it. For a minuet he only stared into the water with his arms resting in his thighs. The movement of light on the waters surface almost lulled him into a trance.
Qui Gon stood and began to undo the clasp of his belt, pulling off his long and voluminous robes. He unwound his sash from around his waist, and undid the tabards that crossed over his shoulders, slowly looping the cloth into a loose coil with unconscious care, and then dropped it to the floor. He shrugged off the baggy outer tunic, pulled the snug, long sleeved shirt under it off over his head and stripped to his skin. Jedi were strong as gundarks but rarely very heavily built. Despite his big bones Qui Gon had always been raw and wiry. The lines and angles of bone and muscle showed starkly, as if everything unnecessary had already been used up. His skin was the same way, somehow worn, even where it was pale and soft. Between Force healing and bacta he was scarless although it looked like he should be scared, and all he had been through still showed on his body. He crouched on the edge for a moment and then slipped into the still water.
The water cradled him as he lay on his back in it, his long hair fanned out around his head. The pool was wide enough for him to float spread eagle and deep enough that he could not stand with his head above water. Weightless in the cool water with his eyes half closed, Qui Gon felt almost disembodied, the way he had during the kata, the same sensation of dissolving. The water held him up, tingled over his skin, and he felt the power in it, the life force even in the nonliving. The overflowing cycle of life swirled before his mind's eye in the simple touch of water. He could feel the lineage, the power the water had picked up, one day part of the vast salty blue green oceans, another conducting life in the leaves of a plant, another atomized and floating in white clouds, another falling back down to earth to nourish the land, to make the old trees grow, and now in a cold spring bubbling up from deep in the rocks.
After an immeasurable time of perfect motionlessness, Qui Gon exhaled, held his breath and let himself sink down to the bottom. He knelt, knees digging into the soft sand that lined the spring, and began to meditate. Dim light filtered down from the surface like sunlight through an autumn forest's canopy. It glittered and rippled across pebbles and the jagged chunks of rock embedded in the walls of the pool. The water's cool weight lay on him heavily, yet it was always flowing, always moving. This was an old, old Jedi exercise, one that all students practiced in one form or another. Physical challenge as the path to mental control, psychic power, and spiritual freedom.
Patiently he held his breath, for a minuet, ten, twenty, feeling his body slow down as if in hibernation, conserving oxygen. Drawing inspiration from the cool, gentle currents flowing over his body, Qui Gon let his mind go fluid as he had been taught to do when he was under mental attack, or when he wished to conceal his thoughts and feelings. As he did, he thought he felt a faint flicker of darkness, the demon just barely showing itself. It must have done so because he had disturbed it. He was encouraged, but put it out of his mind. He felt no need to concentrate too fully on his goal. He simply reached out for the Force that, like the water, flowed all around him. After a while he became so involved in what he was doing that he forgot where he was and took a deep breath.
He was so relaxed and inhaled the water so quickly that he never even choked as it poured down his throat and filled his lungs in seconds. Panic was almost an alien concept to Qui Gon, he felt only shock, and even that didn't last long. It was soon replaced by awe. There was no pain, no crushing suffocation; it felt strange, but . . . he could breathe. He didn't know if he was absorbing oxygen from the water like a fish, or if he no longer needed to breathe, and he didn't care. He threw back his head and laughed, first in wonder, then at the strange sound of his own laughter transmitted only through water.
After several hours Qui Gon kicked his way to the surface and climbed out of the water. Outside the arched window over the pool, the sky was deep indigo, covered in stars like tiny pieces of shattered glass. Getting ready to return to the main hall, he gathered up his cloths, and draped his robe over his dripping shoulders. He felt purified, blessed, alive. It seemed impossible that he had done the psychic equivalent of swallowing poison and hoping his blood turned to anti-venom.
Once again Qui Gon settled himself on the stones of the main hall, preparing for another night's vigil. Dry now, except for his long hair, he dropped into the kneeling position he would be comfortable in for hours. As he closed his eyes to meditate, if he had been a cat he would have purred. The light of the lamp in front of him shown through his closed eyelids, dyed brilliant red orange by his pulse.
Suddenly his slate blue eyes opened wide. In the lamp light Qui Gon's pupils dilated, expanding as if against darkness.