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Nya could totally do it.
This is what she had been training for this past month. This is her chance to rescue her brother. This is her chance to prove herself just like the others in the team.
Cole, Jay and Zane had all managed to retrieve their golden weapons and prevent them from landing into the wrong hands and now it was her turn.
Grab the sword, free Kai and then book it out. She was not foolish enough to believe that she alone could take the Dark Lord on.
Speaking of which, he was there. His huge shadow towering over both her and Kai, who was hanging from a single, steel chain wrapped around his torso and arms.
If Jay were here he'd joke about this being the climax of a movie, the final fight in which the hero saves the damsel in distress and defeats the villain.
To be fair it really did feel like it.
Taking a deep breath even though it burned when the air entered her lungs, Nya prepared to leap over the stones towards the Sword of Fire. She was glad that she left her gi and mask outside the temple, since even in just her maroon shirt and loose bottoms of her ninja suit the heat felt unbearable.
Nya briefly wondered if they felt so out of place too when they freed their golden weapons.
These thoughts were put away. She didn't have time to ponder, she needed to retrieve the sword and save Kai. Everything else could follow later.
Sensei Wu believed in her. He took her in after Kai was taken and taught her how to fight. Even after she had been stubborn and short tempered during her training, Wu never gave up on her. He saw the spark in her, the talent that she supposedly inherited from her father and decided she was worth teaching. She couldn't disappoint him now.
Not Sensei Wu and not the other ninja, who showed her life could be more than manning the register at forge and barely scraping by. Cole who taught her how to be a team player and that it wasn't just her against the world, but that there were people who had her back. Jay who despite their rocky start always managed to make her laugh and appreciate the smaller things in life. And Zane who showed her through his own unique point of view on life to live more in the moment and stop dreading things she couldn't change.
They were counting on her just like Kai was.
Nya leaped from her position into Spinjitzu, jumping from one rock to another all while dodging the molten lava beneath her feet. With a final flip, she reached the weapon with no problems. Garmadon didn't even try to stop her, but she was too elated to care.
The palm of her hand wrapped itself around the hilt of the golden weapon. Her weight shifted and she pulled the sword free from. With more grace than she would have been able to achieve weeks prior Nya landed on her feet. Using Spinjitzu one more time, she cut her older brother free and made sure they both landed safe on the ground.
While Nya had been able to dampen her fall with her hands, Kai flung straight down, a miscalculation on her part.
Kai weighed significantly less since the kidnapping. He visibly looked lighter too. In his current state, his hollow cheeks didn't look much different from the high cheekbones both their parents possessed, but on them it didn't look so sickly.
But at least it wasn't anything else like a lost limb or some kind of nasty infection. Kai could deal with malnutrition, it wasn't something the two of them weren't familiar with and with the help of Sensei Wu, Nya was sure he'd make a fast recovery.
For a moment everything seemed alright.
She had the final golden weapon. Kai was free and out of immediate danger. All that needed to be done was finding the quickest way out and regrouping with the other ninja, and then everything would be alright again.
Not even Garmadon's imposing shadow could shake her.
But then, just as she was about to help Kai detangle himself, an ominous glow caught her attention. She looked down and noticed it was coming from the Sword of Fire.
Nya didn't even get the chance to truly examine the weapon from up close and find out the source of the sudden glow before it took over her whole field of view.
At first all she could see was a hot orange then less than second later a vibrant yellow and finally it settled on burning, bright white which hurt to look at for more than a few seconds.
Everything exploded into a world of pain.
Nya was pretty sure she fell hard to her knees, but it was hard to tell when she couldn't see and couldn't feel anything but an agonising, burning pain spreading all over her body. It was hard to focus on anything but the pain.
At one point Nya could have sworn she felt pressure build up underneath her skin before it popped like air bubbles on the surface of boiling water.
She instinctively tried to scream, but her whole body felt like it was on fire. No matter how hard she tried she couldn't get enough air into her lungs.
From experience Nya came to learn that usually something only hurts for a short while before the pain fades to a dull ache persisting until the injury is fully healed, but what she was feeling right now seemed to never end. With each second the pain only got worse. Bad enough for her to start wanting to cry, but even that task seemed too gruelling to her.
Just as she thought her agony would go on forever, the pain stopped, just as sudden as it came. At first just her fingers and soon both of arms stopped hurting. Her face and upper torso, however, still burned excruciatingly.
It felt like an eternity, but when she finally came to herself, all she could see was the blurry stone ceiling. It seemed darker than before, but for that she blamed the blinding white light. Her eyes just needed a while to adjust and she'd see normally again.
The question as to why she was even looking at the ceiling of all things didn't even cross her mind.
The next thing she noticed were pitiful whimpers and a smell from something foul like a rotten egg. The stench was one she was all too familiar with. One that filled their forge more often than she was comfortable with.
Burnt hair never smelled good.
Now that she thought about it, did Kai start doing his stupid hair spikes to decrease hair on fire accidents?
Shit, Kai!
She had completely forgotten him for a second. The mystery of the light could wait. She needed to make sure her brother was okay and not the one who got burnt. While she was blacking out — or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a white out — her brother was laying on the ground, tied up with no way to stop himself if he happened to roll off the stone platform they landed on.
Nya tried to sit up, but a hand on her shoulder pushed her down. She groaned against the pressure, but didn't try to fight, it hurt too much to.
It was a human hand not the skeletal one of a Skulkin and if it were Lord Garmadon, whether he counted as a human or not was debatable, he certainly wouldn't have been as gentle. It had to be Kai.
Speaking felt like a chore. Her mouth was drier than the Sea of Sand dessert. Nya coughed for what felt like a minute straight just to be able to whisper her older brother's name.
His spiky hair popped into view followed by his face. He looked relieved, but at the same time scared. More scared than ever before.
"Nya! Thank the First Master. Don't panic. I need you to stay calm. Everything is going to be okay," he rushed out to explain.
What?
"I'll take care of this, okay? Just keep calm and you'll be fine. You'll be more than, you'll—" his voice cracked as a sob escaped his lips. It was the first time in a long while that she had seen shed tears for at least a long while since he had done it in front of her. Usually he'd leave the room making up some half-assed excuse to cry when no one was watching, but their home wasn't that big and walls not that thick to grant the siblings that kind of privacy.
Kai squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to get his breathing under control. What was happening? If anything it seemed like Kai needed to calm down and not her.
"Nya… I- I will fix this."
"What? Kai there is no time for this," she croaked out, tears gathered in her eyes as she tried to suppress a wince. "We can't let Garmadon have the sword."
"Forget that damned sword! Your life is worth more than a piece of metal."
"The fate of Ninjago is at play." And most importantly his own safety.
Garmadon would not grant them mercy. As long as she was the elemental master of fire she had the ability to stand in his way. What if next time Garmadon decides kidnapping her brother won't be enough?
Like always when it came to something remotely dangerous, Kai firmly put a stop. "No, Nya, you're not thinking clearly right now. The smoke got to your head."
"I am fine," she insisted. It was just a little— a lot of pain, but she could pull through. She had to pull through. Everyone was counting on her.
When Cole came face to face with a dragon, his biggest fear, he still continued. He didn't abandon them to return to an easy life without undead warriors and beings they had believed to be nothing more than fairytales before it all, he stayed. Zane, with no memories of a previous life or anyone to fall back to, cared and put his life on the line for them. Jay got shocked by lightning while they sailed through the floating ruins and he still didn't stay down, he pulled through and secured the Nunjucks of Lightning. And Sensei Wu, a near immortal being, brought them all together and gave them a home when they needed it the most.
From the stories Wu told them, it was hard to believe Garmadon would hurt his brother even with the Great Devourer's poison in his veins. He could have ignored it all, but he didn't. All to give the people of Ninjago a chance.
Nya refused to let all their hard work go to waste.
Not even when each time she shifted it felt like she was trying to swim in a pool full of needles, not even when every inhale burned her lungs and made her chest constrict uncomfortably.
She made a move to get up, but Kai was quick to push her down. His voice had the same tone of vulnerability as before when he said, "Don't. Please don't hurt yourself more than this."
"I already told you I feel fine,"Nya repeated, but it didn't hold much weight considering she barely managed to sound the words out.
"Nya, please. For once just listen to me."
Despite Kai's protest Nya propped herself up and looked down at her body.
Her maroon shirt looked bad, but her skin, or at least the parts of it she could currently see, looked worse.
The skin on her hands was covered in blisters with a fair share of them already popped, oozing some kind of liquid. It looked lighter in colour, almost as if a layer of white candle wax was coating her hands. Some parts were blackened.
And her fingers they were—
"…My brother knows better than to just free the weapons by himself, he lets the Skulkin do the dirty work for a reason. Your predecessors and I had to ensure the golden weapons could never fall in the wrong hands and so we've hidden them somewhere secure, resting places only the elemental masters of the corresponding element could tread. If anyone else tried to free the weapons from their tombs, severe consequences would befall them…"
Oh.
Oh.
"I was on the ground trying to get the chains off me when suddenly the space behind me lit up. I was confused, but then I remembered you were and when I turned flames were coming out of the sword and…" Kai was explaining, but she wasn't paying attention to any of it.
The whimpering, the rotten smell, it all came from her.
It was her punishment for freeing the Sword of Fire. Her punishment for being unworthy. Sensei Wu was wrong.She wasn't the elemental master of fire, she never had been.
There wasn't anything special about her.
Kai's hands hovered over her shoulders, suddenly afraid to touch her. He begged her to look at him and she did. Even now she couldn't bear to hurt him. "I knocked it off your hands as fast as I could, I swear! But— but I wasn't fast enough."
Her eyes landed on the sword. It lay on the ground just a few meters away from the two siblings, no longer glowing. It didn't look like something that could do all this, but when Nya squinted her eyes the proof of the last couple of minutes were there.
On the hilt of the sword, on the exact same spot she wrapped her hands around it, were little dark marks. It was skin. Skin which melted off her hand and stuck to the sword as it was ripped away from her hands.
Suddenly, the celebratory dinner Zane spent hours on, crawled its way up her throat. Nya tried her best to keep it down, she didn't want Zane's hard work to go to waste, she didn't want to be weak right now out of all times, but it was futile. Her stomach's content ended up on the hot volcano ground anyway.
Undigested pieces, which included a lot of chewed up carrots, swam in the acidic, brown bile.
The sight of it didn't help against the nausea and Nya found herself gagging and throwing up until she was just dry heaving.
Kai was hovering over her form trying to shield her from the world, but too scared to touch her in case it would completely destroy her.
Reluctantly she forced her gaze back down to her hands and despite her stomach being completely empty, the urge to throw up returned immediately when she saw the missing space where her fingertips should have been.
The fingers of her right hand, the one she wrapped around the hilt of the sword, had it the worst. Instead of charred meat there was just blackened bone. Her pinky finger was completely burned away and her thumb didn't look much better. Never in her life did Nya think she'd be able to see her own skeleton. Part of her was curious about how it would feel to touch it, but the other, much bigger part was too scared to find out.
The skin up her arms looked leathery, unreal and it reminded her of tried meat. The farther up she looked the less severe the burns were.
Nya wanted to lift her hands to check out her face. If the pain was anything to go by, then even her head wasn't left unharmed. But she stopped before she could even begin.
She had long since lost the feeling in her hands and most parts of her forearms and while it was nice not to feel what she saw, she knew that not feeling anything wasn't a good sign.
Gently lifting her shoulders, Nya tried to get a feel. The first contact was painful and almost immediately Nya could tell something was wrong. Her face felt strangely malleable. She dropped her shoulder immediately, her breathing speeding up as her mind finally caught on how severe her situation was or maybe her body needed a couple of minutes until all the adrenaline left her system.
Her hands were completely useless. In just a few seconds her whole life has flipped upside down.
Every time she sees her reflection Nya would be forced to remember failures.
Kai was going to work himself to the ground to take care of, because now she was even more of a burden.
Cole, Jay and Zane will go back to being three. Sensei Wu would blame himself for mistaking her for the next elemental of fire, but really it's her fault. If the past weeks had shown her anything it was that she wasn't made for this. The amount of times she failed the training course was ridiculous. That should have been her first sign and if it weren't for her teammates she wouldn't have made it far enough to reach Kai.
Maybe her father knew that she would grow up to become a disappointment. Maybe he and mom left, because they somehow knew even back then that she wasn't worthy of inheriting the element of fire.
Kai was now touching her again, gripping her shoulders as he said something she couldn't hear. Her shoulders’ nerve endings weren't burned like they were on her hands. Nya would have flinched away from the pain if she didn't feel something on her face slipping downwards.
Was that sweat dripping down her face or skin? Judging by the look Kai was giving her, she knew she wasn't going to like the answer to that question.
Everything after that was somewhat of a blur.
Kai helping her up, trying to herd her out of the volcano, Garmadon retrieving the Sword of Fire, Nya refusing to leave without the it even though she couldn’t land a single hit on his shadow form in her current state — not that she believed she could have stood a better chance against Garmadon if she had been at the top of her game seeing as he was a literal shadow — and finally Sensei arriving.
Sensei Wu fighting off his own brother on his own.
And then disappearing like every adult she has ever known, but this was different. He wasn't dissolving into thin air for reasons unbeknownst to her and he wasn't abandoning them in front of the steps of their old crumbling home, because he found out raising two orphaned kids wasn't as easy as he thought it would be.
Sensei was forced to leave him, because of her and her stupid overconfidence.
Nya knew she stood no chance. If she followed him she'd be more of hindrance than help, but all the rationality flew out the window the moment she saw her mentor plummeting deeper into the volcano.
The guilt etched into his face was enough to make her tear up again.
With the agility she didn't know she possessed, Nya jumped up, ready to follow him.
And she would have made it if Kai hadn't been faster and wrapped his arms around her waist, forcing her to stay. She struggled and begged him to let her go, but he refused.
Fat droplets rolled down her face, stinging her still sensitive skin and she stayed in Kai's arms until no more tears were left. She cried until her body caught up with today's events and what little strength she had left finally ran out.
By the time the guardian of the golden sword appeared, an impossibly tall dragon with red scales like the leaves on a cold autumn day, her consciousness long faded with no assurance on if she'd ever wake up again.