you're the life of the party // creating yule tree

[ninazu]

BURN
BRIGHT

Ninazu stepped through the crowd of wanderers collected in their central camp. Stryker’s aggressive campaign left no wanderer untouched; nearly everyone she passed proudly carried bandages, wounds, scars. They blinked away sleep from their eyes, finished polishing their weapons, and watched the guru. She knew their thoughts, their guesses, as she surely as if she stood among them. Another raid announcement? A captive to torture? Yet one more demonstration of their might?

“It has come to my attention that there are no trees tall enough for our yearly Yule Celebration.” Ninazu spoke the words quietly, but heads looked up from the resting wanderers.

The wanderers murmured amongst themselves. Several licked their lips and glanced at the spot where previous Yule Trees stood, one after the other, for decades since the group’s formation long before Stryker and Ninazu’s arrival. But the spot held nothing now, not even char or debris, only an empty spot where vegetation had once flourished. As successful as their war was, they couldn’t restore the land with bloodshed.

Ninazu placed her paw on the ground, clawing the depleted soil. Greenery refused to grow in the Condemned’s camp since the meteor, but she sensed nutrients and life recovering. The lioness’s golden eyes narrowed; she breathed in, smelling the muggy soil, and focused on the soil between her toes. The land fought her, bellowed its exhaustion in her ear, but she braced herself. After her previous experiment yielded nothing but overgrown carnivorous plants, she anticipated the mental struggle and knew how little she could get away with asking.

The soil before her trembled. The ground shifted, rising up in a bump and then parting around a sprout. The plant shot up to the sky and thickened, forming a palm tree. When it stopped growing, it stood over ten feet high—commendable, but nothing compared to the glorious palm trees on the island before the meteor. Ninazu touched its bark with a sigh, biting her tongue, and shook her head.

“This is the best I can do. But next year—no, next month—we will have a new home, one filled with real trees.” She grit her teeth and licked her fangs. “We are so close. It will be done.”

Ninazu shook her head, took her paw off the tree, and turned to the crowd with a lopsided smirk. “But let’s forget about all that dreadful business for a moment. I believe tradition calls for decorations. Who has an offering prepared for the Yule Tree?”

© MADI