Arrrrgh, that was a way longer break than I'd wanted. T_T Dang, how am I gonna finish this . . .
dragonsatdawn: Shintaro, yep! And at one point they most likely did, yeah.
Yes, Lilly's death will be in this story! And . . . not at the end, if you can believe that. :P Definitely not when Cole was a baby! I'd guess about 14 years old, although she was intermittently sick during pretty much all of his life.
Thanks for the review!
ForeverFictional: Oh dear. What does the other half of the family think of that? XD
JustRandom: The Ninjago musical team does a great job.
You know, I'd just meant it to sorta be a sign that Misako didn't have a good answer for Lilly, but now that you mention it I wish I'd thought of that. XD
Or could they? . . . Maybe the mind-creature is just convenient for Lilly to blame.
Can't take the credit there, I'm pretty sure Murtessa actually did say "Mriefbringer" at one point in the show. XD
Ah, nah, not Griefbringer. It's just a nasty forest critter, that's all. Like the Devourer, just popped out of the undergrowth one day and went chomp. Ninjago forests are no picnic. :P
Yep, I knew what you meant! I thinnnnnk a pendant is just any little individual thingy that you put on a chain or string to make a necklace, while a locket is specifically a type of pendant that opens up so you can store pictures or tiny keepsakes inside.
Yeah, her "default" impulse is to not hurt anyone when she can tell they aren't trying to hurt her; she just has little problem dealing out injury or death if she does sense hostility. Like most people who interact heavily with weapons, really.
Answer to both of those is no, I'm afraid! Not gonna see him again, and unfortunately he was just a traitorous rat. :/
Lilly hurled herself to the ground and shielded her head. She could feel the wave of searing heat passing above her. Once it abated, instinctively she rolled aside and pressed herself between the floor and the wall, where the dragon was less likely to trample her.
Griefbringer came exploding into view, preceded by flame, rabid foam, and flashing claws. Screaming, the monstrous beast reared back, flaring its leathery wings till they beat against the walls of the tunnel.
Lying where she was, Lilly didn't breathe. To some degree the dragon was as she'd imagined it. Massive, scaly, bristling with spikes, claws, fangs. A single gleaming horn on its forehead, like a twisted joke on a little girl's unicorns. Its eyes glowed with hunger, rage.
But with her warrior-trained eyes, Lilly noticed more. First off, most relevant, the beast had located her and was zeroing in for the kill. Gasping, Lilly snatched control of the tunnel ceiling and yanked, bringing giant slabs of stone crashing down upon the dragon's head. Over the rumbling she heard its furious scream, but she didn't wait around for its inevitable recovery. She flipped to her feet and ran. In this constricted space she was dead meat, she had to find a larger area, somewhere she could maneuver, preferably somewhere with tactical hiding spots.
Even as she revved into battle mode, even as she sounded the earth around her for advantages, she felt overwhelmingly sick. She had expected the dragon to be terrifying, majestic, a legendary opponent. But in her brief glimpse of the beast, she had seen skin stretched tight over starving bone.
She found a large natural cave. Stumbling down among the stalagmites, she threw herself behind a column of stone and waited, blades drawn.
Griefbringer came wallowing into the cave, trailing ash. Its head lifted and its nostrils flared; slowly it swept the cave for the scent of its new prey.
Lilly got a good long look. Her hands shook around her blades. The dragon was scarred, emaciated. Its starkly-ribbed belly dragged the floor. Old wounds crisscrossed every other inch of its hide, coalescing into a shining scaleless patch all along its back, deeply grooved—whip marks. Everywhere else it was gored, slashed, the tip of its tail and pieces of its wings lopped off. A thick metal collar dug into the flesh of its neck, trailing two severed lengths of chain.
Now she knew why it was savage. It had been tortured out of its mind.
Who could have done this? For a second Lilly's rage flared up against the Munce and Geckles, but just as quickly she realized it couldn't have been them. She had noticed their weapons as she was escorted here—the Munce carried only blunt instruments, the Geckles none at all. They couldn't have caused these scars. But who in this realm could be so cruel to a creature as noble as a dragon?
Didn't matter, in the end. One way or another, now the beast was crazed and it was after her. Lilly swallowed bile. All her will to fight had left her; she had expected to fight something powerful and evil, a righteous battle. She recoiled at the thought of harming this pitiful, tortured creature, one final cruelty in a life already much too cruel.
Griefbringer, however, wasn't about to give her a choice. It had caught her scent now. Screaming, it lunged towards her, jaws open wide. Lilly yanked a wall of stone up from the floor, but the beast bashed its head straight through, spraying shards of rock every which way. As the dragon stumbled, dazed, Lilly threw herself to another defense point.
She and Griefbringer thrashed their way around the cave, rearranging and smashing rock formations every few feet. The mind-creature was screaming bloody murder all this time, which really didn't help Lilly's case. She was simultaneously trying to defend herself and to think up a way to subdue the dragon somehow, calm it down and make it understand she would rather not hurt it.
For just a second her concentration slipped. The next thing she knew Griefbringer was looming above her, flames already sparking in its throat. Seized with panic, Lilly brought up her blades and slashed, slicing open the roof of the dragon's mouth. It screamed and fell back, blood spurting from between its teeth, and Lilly sheathed her blades and full-out ran. She could hear Griefbringer still screaming behind her, and feel a torrent of flame at her heels. She smelled the blood burning.
That was it, then. No more hope of winning the dragon over; she had cut it like someone in the past had cut it. She was its mortal enemy for life now.
"Kill it, already! Kill the thing!" screeched the mind-creature, and Lilly, for once, knew that she would have to listen.
It was grueling. When she had read about knights battling dragons for days, she had visualized non-stop clashing and chaos, slashing swords and screaming beasts and general high-adrenaline drama. Just for a longer time.
It wasn't like that in reality. In reality the battle lurched on and off, over and over. They would clash and separate, driving each other in and out of hiding. There were moments of extreme terror interspersed between long, agonizing stretches of waiting in fear but unable to do anything.
Lilly had no sense of time. Later they told her it really had been days.
One time Griefbringer really committed to pursuing her. It plowed through endless tunnels, driving her in front of it. There were no nooks or side passages to hide in, and no time to create one herself. For a second she thought it was all through. She could feel the dragon's teeth snapping right at her heels.
Finally, with a sob of relief, she realized the passageway was narrowing. Soon it became just wide enough for her, not wide enough for Griefbringer. The dragon hurled itself against the narrowing gap, howling, its claws scraping and gauging at the stone.
Gasping for air, Lilly stumbled far enough away to be safe from any fire-breathing and collapsed forward onto her elbows. She let her forehead rest against the unforgiving stone. For a few moments she only shook with exhaustion and listened to Griefbringer's howls.
After a moment she tentatively sounded her surroundings. She was in a large space, and there were other passages leading into it. Once Griefbringer grew tired of scraping at this entrance, it would go to find another. She couldn't stay long. But in the meantime, she became aware of a very strangely-shaped pillar in front of her . . .
Still breathing hard, she lifted her head. For a second she forgot everything she'd just been through; she wasn't sure if it was from awe or horror. Before her rose a gigantic statue, hewn so roughly that you could barely believe it wasn't natural. A pair of horns jutted up between a pair of demonic wings, outstretched as if to shelter something at the statue's feet. A rough stairway led up to the base of the statue, ending right where Lilly was lying. She must have narrowly missed banging her head against the first step. As her eyes tracked up the stairway, she thought she glimpsed something tiny and green . . .
Griefbringer's screaming snapped her back to reality. Licking her parched lips, she glanced over her shoulder, then up at the statue again. The thing gave her the creeps, but at the same time she felt a strange attraction. She wanted to go up and see whatever that tiny green thing was, touch it.
"Yes, yes!" The mind-creature seemed to have had quite the mood swing. "Go touch it, Lilly. Take it."
Well, that was a point against this idea. And yet . . .
Swallowing, Lilly clambered to her feet. One hand on her blade, she started slowly up the staircase. With each step she felt both more urgency to take the next one, and yet more fear of what she would find.
At the top of the staircase she froze, her heart thudding. On a rough pedestal of stone stood a gigantic green skull. Not a human skull, she thought. Perhaps the skull of the most monstrously disfigured human. Or of a Skulkin. But . . . green. And faintly glowing.
She could feel the evil washing out from it like heat from a fire.
"Yes, yes, YES." The mind-creature sounded like it was in ecstasy. "Touch it, Lilly. Take it. Ohhhh, it's so beautiful. Take it!"
Lilly tried to remember why this was a bad idea. Her mind seemed to be fuzzy, distant. She couldn't put thoughts together. Even while she was trying, her hands drifted up and grasped the skull.
If she'd ever touched a high-voltage wire, she'd have recognized the feeling. Eyes flared wide in pain, she stared as her hands began to turn a lustrous black; her wrists; her forearms. Blood roared in her ears. She could feel herself shaking all over, as two different brands of evil assaulted her at once, twirled a frenzied dance around each other, clawed and groped at each other, struggling to merge. The mind-creature in particular was having an orgasmic time, from the sound of it. She couldn't hear anything besides its joyous howling, and she was suddenly so afraid, so repulsed, but so helpless—she heard screaming, but she didn't know if it was Griefbringer's, the creature's, her own—
—And then in the midst of it all she thought she heard the high, thin scream of a child. Something inside her surged, the world seemed to flash, and a second later she was on her hands and knees and the only screaming remaining was definitely her own.
For a moment she sank to her elbows again, desperately struggling not to vomit. She was still trembling violently. Through blurry eyes she saw that her hands had returned to normal. She could still feel lingering traces of the evil that had coursed from the skull when she touched it, an evil perhaps even greater than the one she carried with her.
"You FOOL!" Apparently her own passenger took plenty of issue with being interrupted. "Take it back! Seize it!"
Panting, Lilly looked up at the glowing skull, still leering from its pedestal. A surge of the same evil sensation washed over her again, and she scrabbled frantically to her feet and stumbled away. She had to run. Get far away from this thing before the mind-creature induced her to touch it again.
The mind-creature howled unholy curses at her every step of the way. She was still dazed, nauseated, and terrified; she lurched as fast as she could down one of the passages out of the room. She had to get away. Far far away from that evil thing.
After a moment she became aware of her running footsteps. Then she became aware of glowing eyes up ahead of her; a guttural reptilian snarl. Griefbringer, once again.
She slid to a halt, temporarily shoving the skull to the back of her mind. For now, back to the business of staying alive.
The brawl wore on for hours more. Lilly attacked, defended, hid. Griefbringer stalked its prey. More and more patches of the Dungeons of Shintaro became spattered with dragon blood.
Lilly was exhausted. Nothing mattered anymore. She could barely stand, barely walk. She could no longer run.
Griefbringer rose up behind her. A gurgling roar, thick with blood, and the dragon's jaws snapped closed around her shoulder.
Lilly's head jerked back. She tried to scream, but it hurt too much even for that. The teeth had punctured her armor, crunching through the metal and steadily bearing down, seeking flesh. She could feel rivulets of blood already soaking into her clothes underneath.
Faint with pain, she yanked out her blade with her free hand and lashed out. She felt edge meet scale, and Griefbringer shuddered, its teeth vibrating in her shoulder. Choking on a scream again, Lilly drew back the blade and struck again, and again. She gored at hide, sliced off the tongue, gauged out an eye. Still Griefbringer struggled to hold on. Through a slick of blood its remaining eye glowed madly, watching her. Hot with hatred.
And Lilly hated it too. With everything in her she hated this animal. That was all that was left.
Finally she broke past Griefbringer's limit. Shaking with pain, the dragon yanked back. At first it took her with it, slamming her against walls like a ragdoll, but with a final stab she convinced it to drop her. It hesitated to approach this source of pain again; Lilly, delirious with adrenaline, managed to run.
She had no clue where she was going anymore, and she could no longer keep track, either by sight or by earth sense. All she knew was that eventually she came up against an ornate, massive door. She was too far gone to question why a door was all the way down here; she fell against it, heaving for breath and trying to keep her legs underneath her.
Griefbringer screamed behind her. She no longer knew where to go; she shut her eyes and waited for death to come.
Only, the doors suddenly gave way. She stumbled, caught herself heavily on her hands, and heard the massive wooden weight slam shut behind her. Before she could even process that, there was a slam and rattling as Griefbringer hurled itself against the doors in her wake. She cringed, expecting them to open again.
But they didn't. There was a continuous barrage of thumping, crashing, screaming, scraping, clawing, but the doors didn't give way. Even the sounds of fire breathing didn't bring the tiniest flicker of heat or flame. Finally the assault slowed, and she heard the monstrous beast sliding to rest on the other side of the doors, growling to itself. It was waiting for her to come back out.
Exhausted, Lilly laid her head on her arms and slept, as quickly and as unrefreshingly as passing out.
Some unspecified time later she awoke. Her shoulder was throbbing, but considering that she was still alive she must have stopped actively bleeding. For a moment she was disoriented and sluggish; then she ventured to push back onto her knees and dazedly look around. She was in a round room, definitely man-made. Wall sconces, mysteriously lit, guttered between ancient paintings. Still worn-out and half-asleep as she was, it took her quite a while to register the subjects of the murals. Slowly she put the pieces together: they were all Masters of Earth.
Swallowing, she sat back and looked around in weary awe. She was in the Heart of the Mountain. A temple built especially for her lineage, her element.
Her eyes drifted to rest on the faces of her ancestors. For a moment she thought she felt the stirrings of a connection, like a sense of belonging. For just a second, she forgot to be ashamed of her element.
Then her gaze landed on an achingly familiar face, and a chill stabbed through her. Her father. His painting was here as well.
Turning away in disgust, Lilly sat back against the doors separating her from Griefbringer. This temple meant nothing. It didn't discriminate between the heroes and the traitors, it only payed homage to a power they happened to share. Who knew how many of these other noble-looking painted figures had also used their powers for evil? Maybe they all had.
A low growl and scratching sound reminded her that Griefbringer was still right outside, tracking her motions. Groaning, she let her head sink back against the doors.
"Get up, Lilly." The mind-creature somehow managed to sound tired itself. "You need to get us out of here."
Lilly ignored it. For a moment she stared vacantly at the opposite wall, licking uselessly at her lips. A feeling of intense hopelessness washed over her. This was what it had come to? After all these years chasing redemption, she was going to die down here, a slow death of thirst in the temple of her own element, under the pitiless gazes of her ancestors. A crazed beast lying in wait for her just a few feet away, one last thing she'd managed to hurt. It would take that honor from Lou.
Swallowing thickly, she reached for the locket and plucked it off, gazing at the photographs inside. She was too far gone to remember why she'd ever been so hung up on getting to love him again. It seemed so stupid right now.
"Get up Lilly." The creature was starting to sound uneasy. "Get going."
Shut up, thought Lilly tiredly. You're the reason I'm down here in the first place.
Her thoughts drifted to the Spinjitzu Burst. For a while there she'd been so hopeful, so determined to save herself. Save her husband, save her baby. Poor child. It didn't deserve to die with her down here . . . In trying to protect her baby she'd doomed it.
After a second her eyes snapped open. The Spinjitzu Burst. That was an elemental move. She was in the literal birthplace of her element right now.
She scrambled to her feet, heart pounding. How had it not occurred to her?! This temple was what she had come to find in the first place. Maybe if she could master the Burst, she'd be able to defeat Griefbringer?
She started across the room, intending to get a closer look at the murals and inscriptions, hoping something would carry a clue. As she crossed the carved design in the temple's floor, it suddenly burst into light beneath her, outlining the edges of the images with a soft purple glow. Gasping, she dropped to one knee to get a closer look. The light was neither hot nor cold, and somehow didn't seem to come from any specific source. Somehow she had never thought of purple being Earth's color, but she realized it felt right.
As she traced the glowing lines, she felt energy surge up her arm, sending her heart hammering. It was a completely different energy from the skull she had picked up in that one cave; this felt like a nurturing power, natural and gentle. Swallowing, Lilly pressed both her palms against the floor, welcoming the connection.
The temple seemed to hum around her as the light grew brighter. She sensed the stone around her in exquisite detail—her own feet pressing atop it, the chisel marks in the temple statues, every individual scale on Griefbringer's belly. The feeling spread further and further, like water blooming across paper. For a dizzy second she thought she could feel the entire mountain, every tunnel, every pebble, every drip of water. Then the feeling seemed to invert and she could feel herself, the power of Earth flowing through her, the whoosh of blood in the tiniest capillaries, every single cell. She felt a second tiny heartbeat within her and realized with a jolt that her baby was destined to carry her power too.
For a second she held perfectly still, taking in the feeling. After a second she closed her eyes and let her element consume her. It was a sweet release; her mind shut down under a flood of purple. Only distantly, as if watching somebody else, she realized she was glowing purple herself.
In her head she could hear the mind-creature screaming, one long continuous note of agony. Flashes of black, purple, and turquoise splattered across her vision, swirling. She could feel the struggle against the inside of her skull.
Meanwhile the real world was hazy, and later she would only see memories of it in snatches when she dreamed. For the best, perhaps. The next time she was fully aware of her surroundings, she realized she was outside the Temple of Earth again, and Griefbringer was lying in four pieces around her. Blood still gushed from its severed neck.
Panting, Lilly looked down at her hands, still glowing purple around the hilts of her swords. The smooth black and white blades were crusted with thick red. Swallowing, Lilly looked over the dead dragon lying before her. She sifted through her mind, searching for the creature's voice, and heard nothing. Her thoughts seemed to echo.
That was it, then. She was free. Her knees buckled, and once again she passed out.
A/N: With thanks to the friend who suggested the backstory for Griefbringer. Ninjago was all like, "dragons are beautiful and noble beings, how dare you hunt them to survive," then four seasons later it was like, "eh, dragons are super evil, it's cool when knights chop off their heads!" Naw, naw, Ninjago. Gotta explain that one somehow.