Chapter Text
Lloyd is 25 and he’s dying. He lost. He lost to himself, he lost to his own worst enemy. Everything hurts, and he can feel the life trickle out of him.
Lloyd Montgomery Garmadon, the green ninja, elemental master of Life, current master of the monastery of spinjitzu, is dying, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
He has to at least save the forest, so he calls upon his powers one last time, sending every bit of energy he has left into the ground. It’s working, but it’s also killing him faster.
I’m sorry, he wants to say. For leaving the other ninja behind. For failing the whispering woods. For not being stronger.
He feels the life leave his body, his breathing getting shallower. Every breath is harder than the last one.
Lloyd Garmadon is no stranger to dying. He has died before, though not permanently. The first time he died he had… a really strange dream he can barely remember anymore, back during the oni invasion. The second time he died has only been weeks ago, and that time he did not have any dreams. It was just… dark. Peaceful.
Will he finally know peace? Will he find himself in the spectral lands, meet that departed ninja Arin mentioned, and then… possibly move on? Or will he… will he return to the mysterious field from his dream?
He doesn’t know. But he hopes that he’ll at least find peace. He hopes that, whoever gets the element of life next, won’t fail. He hopes that his sacrifice at least saved the whispering woods. He hopes that his friends will somehow find out what happened to him, and that they won’t grieve him too much.
Lloyd is 25 and has always known that the life of a ninja can be short. Ninja don’t last forever. Ninja tend to get hurt or die young. He and his team have been lucky so far, with no one dying permanently in 15 years of being ninja, but it looks like that luck has run out.
Lloyd is 25 when his eyes close for the last time, when his heart beats one last time, when he takes one last shuddering breath before he goes still. There’s nothing after that, just peace, for a moment. But destiny has never been kind to him, and so he is not allowed to rest.
Lloyd Garmadon is 8 when he opens his eyes again, confused on where he is, why he is alive and why he is in the body of a child again.