AUTHOR'S NOTE:

As always, I am thrilled that this story has readers, followers, favers, and commenters, the latest being AveXCninja11, StoryMaker7, TitaniumMasterOfAquaLightning, INFJwriter, lovesgod12, and Kai Lover911! Thank you!

In this chapter, something good finally happens...

Chapter 9 - The End of a Search, The Beginning of a ?

Sam was plunged into total darkness.

She couldn't see anything, but she could tell she was traveling, feet first, down the steeply sloped wall of a tunnel at a fast rate of speed, which increased with each passing second. She clenched her teeth and desperately wished for the motion to stop.

After a minute, she felt the sensation of slowing down. Her body felt like it was positioned less vertically and more horizontally.

Suddenly she hit a bump, similar to a mogul on a ski slope, and the action caused her to tumble around as she traversed the remainder of the tunnel. The back of her fire jacket flipped over her head and entangled her arms.

Sam exited the tunnel and landed on her side with a "Mmph!" The back of her fire jacket remained draped over her head, arms still tangled. A loud clang sounded a second later.

As she struggled to get her bearings, she heard her name being called by familiar voices.

She felt herself being pulled to a sitting position and as someone adjusted her fire jacket, removing it from covering her face, she discovered that Cole and Jay were kneeling on either side of her and Lloyd was crouching down in front of her. Over Lloyd's shoulder, Sam could see Zane a few feet away, focusing his eyes downward and concentrating on something she couldn't see due to Lloyd's position blocking her sightline.

"Guys! You're OK!" she bubbled, ecstatic at seeing them.

Holding her head while she waited for her slight dizziness to disappear, Sam quickly surveyed their surroundings. They were imprisoned in a musty-smelling jail cell with a stone floor and stone walls. The hole in the wall from which she had exited the tunnel and entered the enclosure had now mysteriously been sealed with metal bars.

That loud clang probably happened when the hole got sealed, she realized.

"Are you OK, Sam?" Cole asked her.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she replied, now feeling well enough to remove her hand from her head. "How's everyone here?"

"Most of us, fine. One of us, not so fine," Lloyd responded, moving aside to allow her a view of what Zane was focusing on: a red-clad figure lying on the ground.

"Kai!" Sam gasped at the sight of her fiance. He was being tended to by Zane, who had folded up Kai's fire jacket into a makeshift pillow for his head and was now kneeling on one side of him, treating the patient with various items from the first aid knapsack.

From her sitting position, Sam quickly crawled over to the other side of Kai. He was awake, but weak.

"Oh, Kai, you're alive!" she whispered, joyful tears welling up in her eyes as she gingerly stroked his cheek, which was smattered with streaks of dried blood.

He gave her a feeble smile. "Well, I can't die before the wedding. If I did, all that time spent addressing invitations would be wasted," he joked with a croak in his voice.

"Oh, stop," she lightly protested, smiling through her happy tears and reveling in being by his side once again. "What happened to you?" she asked, stroking his tousled spiky brown hair. She noticed that the sleeves of his ninja uniform were practically torn into strips.

Kai began to explain to her and to the group. "One minute there was a wall of flames coming at me while I was setting backburn fires, and the next minute the ground opened up and I was sucked down a tunnel and landed in here. So that made me kind of grumpy by the time our hostess appeared with a couple of her minions."

"Her minions looked sort of like tumbleweeds," he continued, "so I reached through the bars of the cell and kinda burned them up with some well aimed fireballs."

As the others chuckled, imagining the scene, Kai grinned that adorable lopsided grin. Sam hoped this was a sign that he was starting to feel better.

"She didn't care for my lack of appreciation for her hospitality, so after she put a spell on this whole cave area to neutralize my fire, she conjured up some temporary shackles on my wrists and sent more minions in here to teach me a lesson with their tree branches."

Sam and the others reacted in horror. That would certainly cause the ring crystal to glow, she thought.

Zane paused the application of a medicine and sat back on his heels. "And, Kai, you were beaten to the point where I am finding bits of bark embedded in your skin."

The others cringed at learning the severity of the wounds.

Jay, after having heard that the fire witch had cast a power-neutralizing spell, had begun testing his own powers. He spoke up. "Uh oh, it looks like all our powers might be neutralized in this cave area. I can't shoot electricity."

While the rest of ninja brothers set about testing their powers, eventually proving Jay to be correct, Sam told Kai about the dream she had last night, and what Sensei had said about the glowing stone in the wedding ring and the evil witch of fire.

"That's definitely Fiora who took us down here, then," Kai affirmed. "When I saw her, she appeared in the main area out there in the form of black smoke which reached up to the ceiling."

Sam looked through the wall of bars at the cave area beyond. Torches lined the stone walls of the rather large space, providing illumination. The 30-feet-high domed ceiling area above, however, was dark. On the ground directly below the domed area, the floor was elaborately decorated with shiny tiles arranged in a circle.

"We got taken down here the same way you did, Kai - wall of fire, then tunnel," Lloyd informed him. "Hey, Sam, was there another wall of fire that got you after the one that got us?"

"Uh, no," Sam said slowly. "I ran to Three Boulders and climbed onto the top of them and..." Her face began to turn crimson.

The others noticed her flushed face. "What's the matter?" Lloyd asked.

"I-I screamed to Fiora a lie, that I was pregnant with Kai's baby!" she stammered, embarrassed to reveal - in front of her fiance - the lie she had told.

This time it was Kai's turn to blush deeply as his teammates erupted in loud, hearty laughter.

"Just for the record, guys, we're abstaining till the wedding night, so a baby's not even possible!" he quickly assured them as they continued laughing.

"A baby's not possible...yet," Kai grinned at Sam with a twinkle in his eyes.

She smiled back at him, the color of her cheeks almost matching the red hue of his uniform.

The sudden clang of a loud bell interrupted them. The four newly arrived ninja jumped to their feet and assumed defensive postures at the bars of the jail cell, ready to protect themselves, their incapacitated brother, and his fiancee from whatever danger the bell signified.

As the group watched through the jail bars, a metal door to the side of the large room opened, and in marched a procession of...walking tumbleweed soldiers. Each one was carrying a tree branch, just like a soldier would carry a rifle in a parade. They lined up in rows and stood at attention.

The last tumbleweed in the procession announced, "All hail Mistress Fiora!"

The prisoners watched as one more tumbleweed soldier walked through the door, carrying an ornate golden bowl containing something burning, for the flames flickered above the bowl's rim.

But what was more impressive was the cloud of black smoke floating above the bowl. The bottom of the cloud was attached to the bowl like a tornado funnel cloud snaking to the ground. Once the cloud had entered the room, it expanded in size, its top stretching up to the dark domed area.

The tumbleweed soldier set the ornate golden bowl in the center of the circle of shiny tiles, and that's when two orange eyes appeared in the cloud, along with an orange triple flame symbol where the forehead would be.

Fiora had arrived.