❝ tell me once again,

i could have been anyone, anyone else,

before you made the choice for me,

my feet knew the path,

we walked in the dark, in the dark

i never gave a single thought to where it might lead ❞

the moon will sing, the crane wives

lloyd

His eyes were still closed.

A tiny part of him, a delusional part of him, hoped that if he kept them shut, kept the image of the last time he'd ever see his friends burned into the back of his eyelids, everything would be okay.

"Brad. Brad!"

He could see Zane, Cole, Jay, and Kai rendered perfectly as they were moments before he'd stepped through. Zane's flat expression judging the reckless journey Lloyd was about to go on. Cole, half stoic, half ready to throw Lloyd out of the way and leap into the portal himself. Jay, hopping from foot to foot with uncapped energy. And the back of Kai's head. Because he'd refused to listen to him. Refused to acknowledge that what Lloyd had said might actually be true.

"Brad!"

Someone jerked his blanket off him. Lloyd instinctively curled in on himself, searching for the oh-so-lovely warmth of the threadbare blanket he clutched every night. Sunlight shot into his eyes without warning. The monastery sucked in the morning.

"Not now." Lloyd groaned, burying his head into his pillow. Pillow was a bit extreme for it, actually. It was more like an inflamed piece of cardboard with paisley patterning.

Someone jabbed their fingers in between his eyebrow and his eyeball socket, nearly popping his eyes out of his skull.

"Ow! Arin, what was that?" Lloyd rubbed his eyes and begrudgingly made his way out of bed. He didn't know the kid had a capacity for violence in him.

"I didn't want to do it, I swear! You weren't waking up and last time you said to take drastic measures if you didn't get up on time so I did this thing my friend Wyld used to do to me when I woke up late before people started walking all over us so I—"

Lloyd waved a hand at Arin and yawned. "Don't worry about. I'm awake now, aren't I?"

In the next room, he quickly washed and changed into his monastery robes. Inspecting himself in the mirror, he noticed how long his hair had grown, nearly touching his shoulders. The monks here didn't cut their hair - either because there wasn't a single blade in the place or because they liked the aesthetic. Lloyd wasn't quite sure which but it was getting to the point where he might have to tie it up. He tried to picture himself with a Ninjagen monk's haircut.

How did you even try to cut out that bit at the top? Frowning, he stared at his reflection in the mirror. He tilted his head this way and that, wondering if a mohawk would suit him better. But the monks wouldn't appreciate that, and Lloyd wasn't trying to get on their bad side. Sighing, he left the mirror alone and adjusted his robes, the maroon and gold pleats out of place, as per usual. They wouldn't stay flat despite hours of ironing with hot rocks, much to his frustration. He tried to keep the groan quiet, but Arin had unnaturally good hearing - or naturally, depending on which perspective you were taking.

"Brad?" Arin called, "Are you okay?"

"All good." Lloyd replied, failing to keep the wince off his face at the word Brad.

"Are you sure?"

Lloyd mentally cursed the range of abilities the native sori of the gods' realm could have. If Arin caught him swearing there would be a lot of wide-eyed blasphemy. Was this how Astra had felt on her swearing ban? He didn't even like to swear that much - and the thought came across so petulantly he stood there for a second, between the bathroom and the dormitory, wondering how the most pressing concern of his life was whether or not he could swear in front of a child, and not the fact that he was quite literally stuck in the gods' realm with no way of getting home.

And also, no way of finding Wu. Currently.

"Brad." Arin said, sounding significantly more stressed than usual. "We're going to be late to first meal."

Stepping out into the now deserted dormitory, cold stone underfoot, Lloyd gave Arin a weak smile that seemed to tide him over. The constant swirl of objects that floated around Arin loosened, a stray rock and a sock dropping to the ground. Arin quickly swept them under his bed with a sheepish look and bounded over to Lloyd. They exited the apprentice dormitory side by side, as was their usual routine, and emerged on the wooden bridge connected to the dining hall. He cast a wary look down below, and was met with the early morning smoke that always swelled later in the day. He had yet to venture out of the monastery grounds since the incredible sprawling mass of wooden and stone buildings mysteriously constructed over a cloudy mountain range had kept him more than occupied.

The air up here was always chilly, enough so that when he puffed out his cheeks, little clouds of cold air rose up to join the clouds above. Arin especially loved to do this, even when it was slightly inconvenient situations, like when they were bringing large gourds of poultices the apothecary monks wanted across the bridges and the sudden urge to blow overcame him. His fellow apprentice, though years (not that he was sure how many exactly as he hadn't asked the sori, it seemed like a sensitive topic) younger than Lloyd, often displayed behaviour that was quite antithetical to the principles that the monks preached. Arin liked to chatter on about the tiny aspects of his life before his pilgrimage, though that never included his parents, proclaimed quite loudly his preference for mulberry pie, spoke of mythical wars that Lloyd actually knew of because they happened in Ninjago, and failed to reflect on his day without his mind wandering away somewhere.

He guessed it was partly because Arin was at heart, a kid. But the not-quite monk part of him knew that Arin didn't actually want to be here, despite embarking on a pilgrimage to the monastery on his own. Arin was here because he had nowhere else to go. And even though he hadn't told Lloyd that, he supposed on some level Arin must have suspected the same about him. Little flecks of snow picked up in Ari's constant vortex of floating objects, disappearing as soon as they entered the dining hall. Arin spun around, a dog chasing its tail, to make sure he wasn't trailing anything in by accident lest they be ordered to re-enter again. It had happened on multiple occassions, and as growing and ever-hungry sori and not-quite-pretending-to-be-sori, it hadn't gone over well for their stomachs.

As they passed the senior monks they made the customary bows to their elders, acknowledging them with the solemn disposition required. Lloyd approached Jaronus, the first monk Lloyd had met. Jaronus greeted Lloyd and Arin with a deep nod, as was the norm for the apprentices training there. The floating sori passed him his bowl of gruel and ignored Lloyd's tentative smile. He kept his groans internal and sat down at the low tables in the dining hall, Arin beside him. When he'd first staggered out of the portal, bleeding and bruised with his green armoured suit falling apart, he'd smacked face-first into the monk.

Jaronus had barely noticed Lloyd until he started throwing up next to the well he had been collecting water from. His stomach swirled, queasy at the memory of his journey through the realm portal. The gruel looked even less appetising than normal with that memory, which was quite a feat.Lloyd was pretty sure he'd blacked out through the jump, and though it couldn't have taken more than a few seconds, the spinning, tumbling sensation that had jumbled up his innards had felt like days lost in cosmic sauce. Sometimes his dreams consisted purely of that moment playing on loop.

The monk, wordlessly, had led Lloyd up the mountain to the dining room and given him a bowl of food that he now ate three times a day, seven days a week. Jaronus hadn't introduced himself for a solid week until Lloyd had climbed out of his post-portal spiral to communicate verbally. They'd not communicated much despite him seeing Jaronus for his gruel every day, even though Lloyd had tried to establish some sort of connection with his rescuer like he had with Arin. The kid seemed to be an anomaly. Jaronus, like the other sori sprites, didn't really see Lloyd. They saw him for what he told them: a faraway, humanoid sprite who was looking for refuge.

Not the grandson of the god they worshipped.

Not a human from the realm of Ninjago on a mission to kill his uncle.

Lloyd spooned his gruel in and chomped slowly, eyes trained on the mural behind the high monks' table. He'd examined every inch of it every time he ate here, and found nothing new. No hints to suggest how his uncle had turned out this maniacal way, no hint as to how to find him. Just the image of his grandfather wearing the same hat Wu had worn every day of school, his back turned to the painter as his robes billowed out in invisible wind. His grandfather stood upon a bed of clouds, seemingly floating in the sky. Rays of golden sunshine burst forth from the horizon he hid, swirls of glittering, now faded, paint surrounding him.

Here, they called him The First Spinjitzu Master. The same words were etched in scratchy font underneath the mural. Lloyd had yet to learn what Spinjitzu actually was, since the word was only ever muttered in respect to his grandfather. And he wasn't really sure how far he could prod with questions until the monks started returning their own. He glanced at Arin for a second, wondering, with a selfish pang, if he could get him to ask the senior monks his questions. He felt bad enough every time the word Brad came out of his mouth. But in some awful twist, it was easier to focus on lying to everyone here instead of thinking about home.

Lloyd finished his meal and padded over to the sinks to wash his bowl. Next to him, the other apprentices were doing the same, all silent in thought. The monks hadn't taken a vow of silence - in fact, Lloyd regularly attended their lectures on the benefits of peace and stability - they simply didn't see the point in talking about useless subjects. What they considered useless, he found strange. Even during the war, he would have laughed and hysterically piled onto his friend's stupid fart jokes, but here, the sound of laughter was absent.

The lightness he'd craved during the war was hushed here because the monks enforced the light themselves, and they had a very different idea of what it meant. It wasn't exactly stifling. It was just easy. Easy to swallow, easy to keep his head down and pretend his research was going to save him. His time in the monastery library should have been successful. If you wanted to know more about the patron god of the monastery, it was a hop, skip, and jump kind of conclusion to read the books in said god's monastery, right?

Lloyd had never had a penchant for most of his school subjects but he'd taken a liking to the myths and legends his mother told him, so it wasn't particularly excruciating to be locked up in the library reading about and surrounded by those myths and legends. He'd hoped for some mention of his uncle, and after hundreds of books and scrolls, he'd become delusional enough to expect a footnote with Wu's exact weakness buried in some old moth-eaten tome.

He hadn't found a weakness.

He'd found nothing.

But Wu would hate that, wouldn't he? Hate the fact that his father had talked up his place with the gods and no one even knew he existed? His sister could probably twist this into some barbed insult she always managed to fling at their enemies in battle, but Lloyd sat on his first-week discovery with a frown that had carried onto his second and third (maybe?) week at the monastery. It wasn't anything concrete he could use to physically harm Wu. Where else was he going to find information about his uncle? The obstacle was frustrating enough in itself, especially when the library seemed never-ending.

There was always that what-if that teased him. What if he stopped one scroll short away from the solution to everyone's problems? He'd never be able to forgive himself if Wu ascended to full godhood with Lloyd at fault. He'd crossed the bridge to the library and sat himself down in his usual spot all while musing over this disastrous and unfortunately repetitive train of thought. It assaulted him when he woke up, when he ate, when he researched, and it haunted his dreams with a special kind of evil he was quite honestly sure he didn't deserve.

Rubbing his temples, he picked out the book from the top of his pile and continued reading from where he'd marked off. The urge to tell someone about all this was practically splitting his head in two from the effort. It didn't come from any blabbermouthy intentions, just the feeling of being squashed in with this horrible dooming knowledge and an answer that had to exist. If he could discuss it, the delusional part of him hoped Wu's weakness would simply materialise itself.

It was crazy, full stop. Who could he talk to? The monks, despite their dislike for unnecessary talk of violence and darkness and the outside world, were nice and didn't ask why Lloyd spent half the day buried in the monastery library, or why he seemed to stare at everything with unabashed awe he really was trying to hide. If he told them, they'd either think he was crazy or boot him out or call whatever the equivalent of the authorities were.

Poino, the text read, believed that balance, as sure as the balance within him of light and dark, should be bestowed to those who live below. For that reason, we strive to—

"Ugh." Lloyd groaned, slamming the book shut. It was like every other author in this library only had good things to say about his grandfather. That was reassuring, at least, if he ever came face to face with him, but extremely not helpful when it came to defeating his son. The librarian on duty shot him a glare worthy of Nya without her Oreos. He flipped through his collection of books and picked a scroll at random, the texture of the paper coarse and thick, unlike the smooth paper he was used to reading.

The realm of the gods, otherwise known as the realm of Oni and Dragon, nomenclature owed to its rulers, is not the only realm. While we sori of the realm are unable to see what goes below, we hear the whispers. There is no state of peace, a chasm between light and dark. There is violence and there is death in abundance. We are lucky enough to live in a state of calm, for those here do not misuse the dark, but instead respect and maintain it to protect our realm. I have no worry, no fear of an attack. My fellow monks do not even consider the possibility of brutality. They have all but banned the word itself. Poino's mission, since his creation, has been to ensure this can spread. His time in the realm of 'Ninjago' proves this.

However, I find it difficult to believe that he is the same upon his return. He has formed more than a desire to deliver peace to that land, he has formed connections to mortals there. But I cannot say this to anyone.

I speak of treason to our beliefs.

I speak of treason to the rules of the gods.

I speak of treason to the fault of my best friend.

Lloyd set down the paper, his mind churning. This wasn't exactly any help for him, but it did point some fingers at his grandfather. The mysterious writer had to have been a monk to be included in the library, yet it was strange that the contents hadn't alerted the monks. A frown overcame his face again. The scroll had ended abruptly, and upon searching his basket, he didn't find anything else connecting it. Taking the opportunity as a break, he wandered the shelves of the monastery library to let his mind rest. The monks had built the insides of the library as a massive spiral, which broke into smaller and smaller swirls of books that reached up to the domed ceiling of the building. There were more than enough books to keep him here for years. Many of the monks hadn't even emerged from their sections of interest.

It was Zane's dream, basically, if he could incorporate a digital filing system.

For a painful moment, Lloyd let himself wonder what it would have been like if his friends had made it through with him. They'd probably be a lot further ahead with the whole killing Wu thing, which only made it worse to imagine. The library was as cold as the rest of the monastery, but the lingering chill that always followed him around wasn't just from the weather. He was so fucking lonely here, and the feeling was building up in his chest with nothing to stop it. Something was stinging at his eyes. Raising his head, he swept his hand across his eyes, drying the tears quickly. He hadn't noticed the skylight in the roof before. Calling it a skylight was a bitch of a stretch, just a window with something blocking the light from coming in. A few rays snuck through, highlighting the sheen of a wooden railing high up. Lloyd wound back through the spiral of spirals, trying to locate the bannister. That meant there was a second floor to the library, one he'd never seen before, one he'd never been told about.

"Where..." Lloyd mused to himself, craning his neck up and walking at the same time. He bumped into a shelf, only managing to catch the falling books thanks to his trained reflexes. Ninja reflexes! Jay's voice chimed in his head. Maybe he was going crazy and imagining his friends was a side effect. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the railing again, and the curving balcony that accompanied it. But no way to get up. Searching the small store room proved useful. With a Kai-ish aha! of victory, he emerged with a rickety ladder that he leaned against the stone wall.

With a shrug to no one in particular (perhaps the loopy voices of his friends lingering in his head), Lloyd clambered up the ladder which was a lot harder than one would have thought in a monk's robe. Then he had to make a calculated (not so calculated) leap at the bannister, which almost resulted in him splattering on the library floor. He emerged on the dusty balcony with a couple of ribs that were definitely bruised after he'd hit the side and folded awkwardly. It ran around the circumference of the building, close enough that if he did a lot of precarious balancing and wobbling he could probably touch the skylight. Better not, he told himself. At least his voice of reason was semi-working.

Lloyd picked up his feet carefully as he surveyed the secret floor. He didn't want to alert any of the monks to his exploration, which probably went against peace and all that. There were a few abandoned tables up here, all covered in a thick layer of dust. The one closest to Lloyd held an empty pot, the ink all gone, and a quill, the tip stained with use. There was a cutting off the edge of a scroll as well, which he picked up and rubbed between his fingers. It felt exactly like the paper of the mysterious monk writer. Maybe this was their secret writing place. He paced along further, noticing a few glass cabinets in the shadows of the dome's curve. Crouching, he inspected the first one.

A metal cylinder - a telescope, actually - rested on the first shelf, with etchings he'd never seen in Ninjago or the gods' realm carved into its side. Below it, a small chart of stars, a constellation that didn't exist to him. The other cabinets contained similar items, most familiar enough for him to recognise them but not entirely of his world. Then there were the other objects, contraptions he couldn't make sense of at all. Finally, after poking around all the stuff on the hidden floor, he returned to the first desk, yanking the drawer open. A single scroll lay there, tied off with a green ribbon. Lloyd picked it up and untied the ribbon, pocketing it. The scroll unfurled, and before him lay a story.

A figure stood, proud and tall, beams of light emanating from him. Swirls of power, coloured red, white, black, and blue burst forth from his chest, spiralling away into the edges of the page. Between this chaotic mess, a rift of light erupted from the figure's body, pushing away the shadows that had been shaded into the page. When he looked closer, he saw the shadows pulling at the figure, wrapping themselves around him. Beneath the figure's uniform, his skin was inexplicably glowing gold. What kind of paint could have done this? When he tilted the scroll just so, he could see the metallic outline of two dark purple eyes glinting in the shadows. What was this? Lloyd traced the one-panel story lightly, the questions fading away.

He'd seen this before.

Not exactly as it had been depicted here, and not in a single image. He'd seen fragments of this prophecy, sequestered away from him.

This was his prophecy.

No, Astra's voice said.

Lloyd folded the scroll into a tiny square and shoved it into his robes. He swung back down the ladder and put it away just as the pitter-patter of Arin's excited footsteps entered the library, sprinting through the swirls of bookcases, shouting Brad, Brad! despite the many monks shushing him violently. They wouldn't like him saying that. He caught Arin by the shoulders just before the kid shot past him and smacked into a wall. He'd done that way too many times as a kid and it hurt. Arin skidded to a halted, one leg flailing up into a kick. He landed in a rather excruciating split position that Lloyd didn't envy as he hauled him back up to his feet.

"Hey. What's going on?"

"There's a new apprentice! Well, not really. She just showed up out of nowhere and she's asking for some guy I don't know." Arin bounced from foot to foot with a grin. On his way in, his special sori ability had picked up a whirlwind of loose papers that were dancing around him. "And she's acting kind of weird, too. Come on!"

Lloyd didn't really have a choice but to cling to Arin's tiny hand and speed along to the main courtyard of the monastery mountains. It was the only mountain to have stairs carved up into the side - the only way to get into the monastery, a path he'd only taken once himself. A large congregation of monks were already clustered in the courtyard, which took a lot of squeezing and wriggling to get through. Lloyd popped through a couple rows behind the front and was tall enough to see over the heads of the other monks. The newcomer was clad in a thick cloak the monastery gave all novices to ward off the chilly air. Lloyd pitied them - it took a while to get used to the weather up here, and he'd been sick the first week here with a runny nose that turned his entire face pink.

"Who's the new guy looking for, again?"

"Someone called Lord." Arin frowned, tapping his chin in a comically wizened look. The newcomer started shrugging off his cloak despite the monk guiding him protesting. "No, Lincoln. Something silly."

The newcomer's cloak fell off.

Arin continued jabbering on. "No, it was La-loyd! Lloyd? What a funny name, huh?"

Lloyd's heart sort of exploded in on itself all at once.

The first time he'd heard his real name in weeks, coming from a face from his world, standing here in the gods' realm, smiling innocently at the old monk next to her.

Harumi.