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Fire flickered in the back of his mind. Fire, along with the sound of sharp teeth snapping, of dozens of clawed legs skittering across hard stone floor. The smell of a dank, dusty cave, cut through sharply with the distinct scent of rotting flesh.
The presence of the monster loomed behind him, ever-lurking despite the fire that was supposed to have burned it to ash, the wall of flames meant to hold it back.
It was only a matter of time before it finally pushed through and finished its goal. To blindly follow the instincts that drove it. To consume.
This place was full of powerful, fulfilling prey. Powerful, yet easy.
Sleeping, unaware morsels who would soon follow their destiny, to follow in Kai's footsteps and become a part of the beast. It would be so simple.
With a hiss, it slipped through the flames. Like it was nothing.
The monster maneuvered its way through the tight halls of the monastery, silent despite its size.
A head of long black hair sleeping in a bed of blue sheets.
She hardly stood a chance before she was taken.
Kai jolted awake.
And was met by big eyes only inches from his face.
“Whuh- Wyldfyre!!” Kai jolted away from her, his many legs still somehow doing nothing to prevent him from tumbling backwards out of his bed. Of course, he could barely fit on the thing anyways, his long body always draped over the mattress at best even when he slept curled up tight. So when he fell, the rest of his body followed in a cascade of segments and limbs.
“Oops. Did I scare you?” Her face peaked over the edge of his bed to look down at him.
“Why are you in my room!? Not to mention staring at me while I sleep?”
“I wasn’t staring. I obviously just got in here and happened to be looking at your face when you woke up! Complete coincidence!”
Wyldfyre, as usual, was a terrible liar.
Kai groaned and pulled himself onto his feet, struggling to coordinate the long body that he was still getting used to even after all of this time. It didn’t help that his head was pounding and all of his limbs felt like lead. He felt even worse rested now than he did before going to bed. Those damn nightmares were getting worse… especially as the monastery filled up with more and more people.
“What do you need, Wyldfyre?” He questioned.
“Why do you keep your door locked?”
“Um, because I like to have privacy? Do you not know what that means?”
“So much you need a stupid big lock on your door?” She pointed to his door, now ajar, and at the lock in question… which was now nothing more than a melted, mangled mess, accompanied by the charred wood of his poor bedroom door. Great.
“Yes, because apparently small children are vying to break into my room! Now go! Shoo!”
Kai shooed her away with his claws, but she didn’t budge, just sat cross-legged on his bed with her smug smile. She tilted her head at him. “That lock probably won’t stop you if you go on a horrible person-eating rampage, you know. Come on, it took me like no work to break in.”
“Pff, I’m not going to go on a person-eating rampage, thank you very much.” Kai tried to ignore the images in the back of his mind, of people tied tight in spun silk, familiar faces twisted in dread, in the shadow of something monstrous looming over them. “I don’t know what kind of bug you think I am, but I am not the person-eating kind.”
He tried to nudge Wyldfyre off his bed with the dull sides of his claws, but she still sat stubbornly, shoving away the limbs.
“Come on, everything from the Realm of Monsters is person-eating! Everything was always trying to kill you in those journals I read!”
“Not everything, and I’m not from the Realm of Monsters!” He shoved her more forcefully this time, finally knocking her off the bed. She landed on the ground hard, but didn’t seem terribly bothered as she bounced back onto her feet. “Now can you leave so I can sleep?”
“Ugh, Lloyd told me to wake you up for training. Or whatever.”
“Lloyd and I have very different ideas of what time it’s okay to wake up,” Kai muttered, awkwardly curling back up on his bed now that Wyldfyre was displaced from it. That of course didn’t deter her, and she hopped back onto his bed anyways to sit next to him.
“Yeah, because you obviously haven’t been having enough sleep.” She stretched her legs out like she owned the place, and leaned back against his side. She didn’t seem at all concerned by the long spindly legs on either side of her.
“And what makes you say that?” Kai asked.
“Duh, your ugly miserable face.”
Kai huffed out a laugh. “Says you.”
“Please, I’m the awesomest, most attractive person on the team. You’re the least. It’s pretty simple. But you’ve been more ugly than usual.” She stretched out further, leaning heavily into him and somehow managing to push his heavy body to the side, making more room for herself on the bed. “And now you’re locking yourself in your room. Suspicious, if you ask me.”
Kai huffed. Wyldfyre was far too keen, and absolutely relentless. It was a horrible combination that made her a complete plague to deal with. Great against their enemies, not great for him who got the brunt of it daily. She had already dug through his journals, and now she was prodding him about this.
“Or, you’re looking too far into things, and I’m just trying to get my uninterrupted beauty sleep.” He glared at her. “Key word try.”
“Well, you need it, I’ll give you that.” She flipped over onto her stomach to stare at him with her big eyes, resting her chin on her hands. There was a spark of mischief in there that he did not like. “But I dunno, I heard you talking in your sleep and it sounded a lot like a people-eating bug nightmare to me.”
Kai pulled back. He was… talking in his sleep?
“Sounds to me like you were watching me sleep, then,” he said.
“Pff, no, you’re just loud,” she waved him away dismissively. “You’re avoiding the question!”
“I don’t think you asked a question.”
“Come onn, you can’t hide anything from me and you know it.” She flipped over onto her back again, sprawling out starfish style and somehow taking even more space on his bed. Wyldfyre was incapable of staying in one spot, always with too much energy to spare. He sighed and pulled himself off the bed, this time willingly, and she happily settled into the now-unoccupied spot. Like some sort of small annoying dog.
“Fine,” Kai admitted with a huff. He had been through this already. He knew there was no other way of getting her off his back. “Yes, fine, I'm scared about that. But you don't need to know any more details.”
“Why not?”
“You already know more than you were supposed to!”
“Yeah, ‘cause I'm awesome.”
“No, ‘cause you're annoying and nosy.” She glared at him in response, but before she could attempt to retaliate with fire or anything of the sort, he shoved her off his bed again with a sweep of his claws. “Now leave me alone and go tell Lloyd I’ll be there in a bit. Before I eat you for real.” He snapped his teeth at her halfheartedly, and she just laughed in his face.
“Fine, fine, but you know you don’t stand a chance against me,” she said. She gave him a wide grin, big and toothy and full of smug confidence both earned and unearned. “You don’t need to worry. If you ever go on a person-eating rampage, I’ll stop you right away with my awesome fire. You won’t even have a chance to call it a ‘rampage’ because you’d be dead before you even got there! That is if I don’t fix you by being my cool self first.”
Kai laughed a bit. He didn’t bring up that the monster had defeated a fire master before him easily, or that there were countless people who had lost to it, now nothing more than ash left behind in that cave. He didn’t mention his fear that in his process of taking it over, the damn thing might now be fireproof even if he loses his grasp on it.
She would probably still figure out a way to stop it. She was strong like that. Smart like that.
“Thanks, Wyldfyre,” he said. “Now for the last time. Get out of my room.”
She rolled her eyes, but relented and left, leaving him alone again.
He laughed to himself before going to gather up his stuff. Maybe another session of Lloyd’s hellish early morning training would be enough for him to pull himself together.
He stared at the remains of his poor door, and the lock on the ground. Yeah, he didn’t know what he was thinking. Obviously that wasn’t going to work. A pathetic little lock like that couldn’t stop any of the ninja in the monastery… What hope did it possibly have against the monster?
It would be fine. His friends clearly weren’t helpless. They had Wyldfyre, after all.