who's crying now ━ [NINAZU]

[ninazu]

BURN
BRIGHT

In the underground’s total darkness, Ninazu could drown in the absolute nothing. There had been a day she meditated in the deep quiet, and even she had no idea how long she’d been gone. She’d disappeared for hours in the freedom from expectations, society, and the haggard faces looking expectantly to her for something. How she hated shouldering other’s burdens.

“Right,” she answered, as though she hadn’t considered slipping into the darkness here and now. A single flame sparked on the crown of her head, a minuscule spark compared to her usual mane. Fire was greedy; it would eat all their air, if she allowed it.

She followed, assisting with moving of the earth. Boulders shifted out of their way. Dirt fell from above and rose from below, the natural order disrupted. Ninazu breathed with her magic, allowing the power to flow and guide her. It was almost meditative, working in time with Stryker, and she almost hated when they came to their destination.

She popped out of the opening. A hair before Stryker. A touch less careful than her match. The lone flame sprouted into a beast on her back, rolling down her neck and crackling down her spine. The tip of her tail ignited into flame.

Silently she walked, watching Stryker down the doberman in her peripheral vision. A few more paces—the serval was further outside. Her target continued to ramble about the improbability of lightning striking a treehouse, but Ninazu wasn’t paying attention to his breathing. She listened and watched, true, but for a different cue.

The serval turned, saw the doberman, and inhaled.

Ninazu sparked the air, a puff of fire created and breathed in. One choked splutter, that’s all she heard from the serval, before his lungs smoldered into unusable sacks of meat.

He burned from the inside out. Ninazu glanced at Stryker, confirming his success, and then watched him die.

But that was the fun part, wasn’t it? She grabbed the body and pulled it behind a pile of rocks. Ninazu hated the idea of their beautiful plan getting ruined by an insomniac happening to notice the dead guard at the entrance of the Crystal Caves. After all… they cut this mission a little close to the Typhoon’s main sleeping quarters, didn’t they? The thought put a grin on her face.

“Naturally,” she answered, turning back to Stryker.

She walked into the twisting cave, the flames on her body providing ample light, so she took the lead. The bodies at the entrance didn’t bother her—things like that never did—but something about this sat with her differently. Heavy and light, the sensation tugged at her body like the ghost of a daydream’s epiphany.

“This time… we’re doing this. Not for the mayhem. But, truly, for the condemned. It’s odd, isn’t it?” Ninazu mumbled. She hated talking like this; revealing feelings made her feel more vulnerable than anything else in the world. But, she supposed, he might already have figured this out. Stryker usually had greater emotional intelligence than she did. And his motivations skewed less towards selfish violence than hers.

She pocketed the comparisons between them, however, when she came to a row of supplies packed against the wall. With a flick of her fire-tipped tail, she ignited the torches in this larger cave, and her grin widened. “The pirates do love their jewelry,” she chuckled, pushing open a chest. The gold within gleamed in the flickering torchlight, and she pawed a heap into her satchel.

© MADI