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A silent, snow-covered mountain.
Scarred by fire and magic, nothing has grown there for one hundred and seventy-two years. Animals avoid the place by instinct, and people have long since moved away. There are stories of what happened, whispered into the night over fires and across the backs of yaks, to grandchildren, to friends, to travelers. The legend changes from family to family, from one community to the next, but one thing remains the same: A great, ravenous beast with a mouth wide enough to swallow a man whole.
A team of strangers, of researchers, find this place and marvel at its grim spirit, at the deathly quiet. Someone tries to warn them away, but they are only invigorated by these tales of flames and monsters. They search tirelessly for some clue, for more pieces of the story, and finally, they find one. A statue, seemingly carved from basalt, marked with a strange crest and guarded by a tiny stone creature nesting in its depths. The researchers are ecstatic, and take it away with them to an unknown fate. Once again, the mountain is lifeless.
Then, something miraculous happens.
A force with the gentleness of a breeze and the purpose of a hurricane engulfs the mountain. Pure, creative energy heals the wounds time could not, rebuilding a massive temple from dust and ashes. Years of erosion of the surrounding rock are undone, and magma moves lazily beneath the mountains once more. Soup boils in pots over roaring fires. A spring of clear, cold water bubbles up through a sun-warmed fountain. People, finally, stand and draw breath, and tiny beings made of magic zip freely through the air. The last thing any one of them remembers is being consumed by a monster borne of hunger and rage, and now they are alive, one hundred and seventy-two years later, as if they had done nothing more strenuous than take a nap.
Soon, the animals return. Birdsong can be heard the following sunrise, heralding herds of enormous hooved mammals and solitary, elegant cats. The curse has been lifted.
Still, a lonely staff waits for an owner.
An ancient guardian waits for his pupil.
Small kwami wait for their friends.
The monks of the temple fear the worst for their youngest guardian and his miracle box. There is no body to offer to the vultures of the mountain, so some still have hope, but days, weeks, months slip by with no sign of the boy or the missing miraculous. Once in a while, a swarm of otherworldly ladybugs will sweep across the sky to unknown destinations, but these sightings are rare and now hardly acknowledged.
The guardian is the only one left who believes in his pupil. He waits for years, turning older and grayer as he watches the last path he had sent the boy along as their temple burned. The other monks had long since carried the abandoned staff to the mountain’s peak in a sort of a burial, but none of them dared to object to the guardian’s waiting, even as they thought it high time for him to pick a new guardian to train.
He knows there’s truth in that, but the seeing the ladybugs fill him with hope. No one knows what exactly happened the night he’d lost Fu, or why he never returned, but hope that he might still come home drew the guardian to his nightly vigil.
Until then, he waits.