The air of Natlan did not announce itself politely. It arrived as an accusation — a dry, hot gust laced with the metallic tang of molten rock and an undertone of scent that could be at once floral and ferrous. Jin felt it press at the back of his throat as if the landscape were trying to argue with him: claim me, measure me, know me. He walked in the wake of Kachina, small shadow caught by a larger procession of color and sound, and despite himself the world around him pushed at the edges of his composure.
Kachina strode with the nervous energy of someone perpetually on the cusp of apologizing for being alive. Her feet were steady on the volcanic soil; her hands found the nearest piece of carved wood or metal as though habit demanded tactile proof of the world's solidity. She had waved at statues, bowed to gatekeepers, smiled at the slow-footed Saurians and cursed, under her breath, a game of self-consciousness whenever someone praised her. To an outsider, she might have seemed an awkward blur of smiles and sudden, quick glances at the sky; to Jin she was a living compass of earnestness, and the way she flinched when a gust whipped ash into her hair made him think of an animal that had learned to trust people even while its ears remained alert.
They came upon the statue first — a monolith of hammered bronze and obsidian, the god of flame and war carved in a pose that was equal parts birthing and judgment. Kachina stopped, eyes widening with a reverence Jin had seen before: the halting, hesitant worship of those who had been allowed to keep a dream. She jabbed a finger toward the pedestal as if to pin the idea into place.
"Look," she said, voice bright as struck flint. "It's The god of fire and war, The lines — see how they curl, like the memory of an afterburn. They say she holds the flame of victory and the mercy of the hearth both. Isn't she grand?"
Jin glanced at the statue. To him, the bronze face held no secrets. The wind combed across it, and flakes of ash collected in the creases. The words Kachina offered slid across him like birds: audible, light, not quite sticking. He listened as one listens to rain against a window when sleep is near — present, acknowledged in passing, not truly felt. Still, he said nothing dismissive. There is art in indifference that spares insult; he allowed the worship to play its small role.
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They threaded into the center of the town, where people clustered around braziers and stalls. Vendors sold dried fruits that steamed with a strange, warm perfume; smiths hammered at anvil-beds where sparks leapt like small, domesticated stars. The soil here glowed in places — not with fire itself but with copper and mica veins that scattered the light like embers. Steam rose from fissures that served as communal baths, and from those baths came the murmur of conversation in languages layered with laughter.
Despite the bustle, Kachina persisted at Jin's side as if each new sight were a personal triumph: a smile to the stallkeeper that made the merchant's hard face soften, an embarrassed bow to a cluster of children who shouted in a dialect she loved and floundered in equal measure. She fumbled at her words and smoothed them with a gentle shove of her palm on her skirt. Her voice was always a little too loud for private things, and too small for the city's heart.
"You know," she said, sidling closer to Jin, "my grandmother used to come here. She said the red lilies that grow in the heat smell like the first honey of summer and the last coin of a dream. I thought she was being silly. But—" She inhaled, eyes imploring. "They do smell that way. Don't they? You can smell the sea in them, or maybe the ash. Sometimes I can't tell."
Jin looked down at a shallow bloom that clung, improbably, to a fissure's lip: a red spider-lily, each petal lacquered with minute crystals of volcanic glass. When he leaned in, the smell did not read as either sea or ash alone, but as a memory that refused to be cataloged. There was something in it that pricked the back of his tongue, like a promise half-received.
(Note: The red lily is the symbol of Jin after obtaining the Dark element.)
They moved on. The Saurian — a tall, placid creature with a long neck and scaled hide the color of burnished lemon — had been waiting near a ring of steam vents. It was larger than any domesticated beast Jin had seen outside Natlan's deeper wilds; it wore painted bands around its neck, and its eyes held an old, slow patience. Kachina stepped forward and conversed with it in the fluid, clipped greetings of a language Jin did not know. The Saurian released a low, metallic song — less vocalization than throat-hum — and lowered its tail to the ground as invitation. It was the sort of gesture that could have been a courtesy or a ritual of transport; either way, Kachina hopped up with the practiced movement of someone who'd mounted such a creature before.
"You're brave," she told Jin, as she patted the Saurian's tail with the fingers of a friend. "Not many carry quiet behind them like that. Quiet is an art. And you — you must be very patient to follow me so obediently."
Jin made no declaration of patience. He remembered when silence had been his ally — a sharp, useful thing that cut distractions into neat pieces. Now it sat inside him like armor. He climbed onto the Saurian's tail and felt the animal shift its weight, then the world tilted and they were moving.
The route carved through a landscape Natlan had built like an argument. Trees here were not trees as Jin had learned to name them. They were black-barked columns twisted into shapes like living braziers, leaves edged with tiny serrations that shimmered against the heat. The earth beneath their feet was a mosaic of obsidian shards and pumice, an old wound healed and left to form strange, permanent scar-tissue. Rivers — one a ribbon of red that caught the light like poured wine — ran alongside banks where mineral deposits had built filigree castles in miniature. The red river's steam hissed as it met pocketed air; the smell of iron was thick enough that Jin's mouth tasted faintly metallic.
Kachina's breath quickened; she leaned forward as though proximity to the land itself supplied courage. "When Mavuika walked the Pilgrimage," she murmured, watching the distant cliffs where basalt columns stood like stern sentinels, "they say the rocks sang to her. A small, honest song. It's silly, perhaps, to believe in songs beneath feet, but sometimes a place will talk if you know it's lonely."
"That's not silly," Jin said, because the lie of it — to soothe — felt easier than the truth. The land did speak, not with voice but with the persistence of its features. To call that song loneliness was to give it human texture; he did not mind the anthropomorphism. Kachina seemed to need it.
They dismounted at the arena edge: the Flame Sacred Square — a wide-open theater carved from layered stone, its central brazier huge enough to host a small caravan. Banners stitched with geometric fire-flames and tribal sigils fluttered in a constant, low wind that carried sparks along like insects at dusk. People gathered in tiers, speaking in the cadence of tribes: a sound both communal and careful. At the center of the square, a dozen performers in ceremonial armor moved in a ritual that was as much spectacle as devotion, their arms painting arcs of controlled flame that rose and were swallowed like obedient beasts.
Kachina's eyes shone with unshed tears. She turned to Jin, and for a moment vulnerability softened every line of her face. "I always get nervous in crowds," she confessed, voice thin but steady. "My hands go clammy and I forget the right rhythm to breathe. But when I watch them—" She gestured towards the performers, whose songs of percussion hammered the arena like a distant heart. "—it feels like the beat aligns in my chest if I stay still enough to hear it."
She watched for a long while, then began to clap. It was a clumsy, wholehearted sound that started small then grew as others took up the motion. The performers bowed in unison and one — a woman whose hair was braided with small beads of volcanic glass — recognized Kachina from the Pilgrimage. They exchanged a few words; Kachina's expression flitted through colors of shame and pride, as though she were aware of the scale of what she had accomplished and yet still surprised she had survived it.
"You did well," Jin said, and meant only that watching her made him less inclined to dismiss small human triumphs.
"Did I?" Kachina's voice trembled on the question. She leaned against the low wall and folded her arms as if to hold herself together. "I thought I would trip. Or melt. Or that I'd be swallowed by my own mistakes. I won't lie — I still think I'll be swallowed sometimes. But then Mualani smiled at me in her way, and I remembered to breathe."
Kachina's idolization of Mualani was delicate, threaded with a shred of fear. She was brave, but not without scars. Her near-death memories had become bronzed talismans she polished nightly; they steadied her resolve even as they left a tremor beneath it. She fronted confidence like armor that was too big, slipping around the edges, yet she would never refuse someone who asked for help.
They traced the boundary of the square and found themselves at a vendor's stall that sold small, handcrafted trinkets carved from lava glass and bone. The vendor — a woman with a scar that cut through one eyebrow like a careful comma — offered them a sample of something: a folded paper containing spiced sugar which when eaten left a warm, electric spark on the tongue. Kachina accepted and giggled as if the spark were private.
"Try this," she urged Jin. "It tastes like first-fires and the laugh of a friend."
Jin took it, and the sugar dissolved in his mouth like a tiny, urgent sun. For a flicker, heat ran across his nerves; the world seemed to sharpen.
They walked farther still, pushing past the square into narrower lanes where the architecture grew more experimental. Houses leaned toward the volcanic heart of the island like people bowing to a benefactor; balconies were latticed in patterns meant to divert ash and catch the light. Blackened copper gutters sang when the wind threaded through them. A child's kite, wound with lengths of ribbon, caught a pocket of thermal updraft and tore forward like an errant comet.
Kachina's voice dropped to a private cadence. "When I was small, I thought being strong meant never showing fear. I was wrong. Strength is messy. It is crying and then scouring the tears away with your own hands. It is being afraid and choosing to move anyway. Mavuika — she taught me that warmth is not the same as safety. Warmth is an invitation; safety must be built."
She paused near a doorway engraved with ceremonial runes and touched the marks as if they were old friends. Her fingers trembled against the stone grooves; the gesture was both superstition and blessing. Jin watched the small movements that made up her — the way she tucked stray hair behind her ear, the micro-smile that arrived like a shy animal when no one was looking — and felt a sudden, unaccountable impulse to be less indifferent. The world had ways of asking people to be better simply by placing people such as Kachina into it.
A shout broke from beyond the next alley: a ripple of panic that mercilessly cut the day's easy pace. Voices layered: surprise, alarm, a brittle edge that came with the narrators of misfortune. People began to run in a funnel, and at their center a shadowed rip in the air grew like something being unzipped.
Kachina's hand found Jin's — quick, urgent — and she dwarfed before him as if bracing to step into a current. Her expression hardened into a mask of concentration that made her younger face look older in the flash of it. "The Abyss," she said softly, her voice a blade. "Don't look away."
A stranger's scream frittered the distance between them. From the rip spilled motionless figures like dolls being readied for animation; their forms were familiar enough to be troubling: silhouettes of townsfolk, of children, of a local singer — things the mind recognizes and refuses to release. The square rippled with the unsteady realization that whatever drew these shapes forward wanted to make the living into its mirror.
Without thinking, Kachina leaped. She vaulted the low wall with a grace that belied the fumbling kindness Jin had watched all day; once she was airborne she became small and feral, the concentrated will of someone who loved imperfectly but with the heat of devotion. She shouted a name — local, intimate — and charged into the pocket of air. Jin followed because he had to, not out of heroism but to keep the world from feeling like it could take people as easily as it had given them.
Inside the rip, the air was cold, a false chill. It wrapped around them like a throat. The figures were frozen again, as though caught mid-breath, but they were wrong. Their edges frayed like paper gone wet; their eyes, when they opened, were hollowed and wet with a light that belonged to the deep. Kachina moved among them with blunt compassion, placing her hand on shoulders like a balm. Each touch pushed a small surge of light into the being, and the being shivered, as if remembering how to be.
"You can leave," Kachina muttered, as if speaking to a child who clings to a nightmare. "Go home. Hear the pots sing. Feel the warmth you were never taught to keep."
Her words were a prayer that bent around a certainty: she did not know if it would hold. She did not know if the Abyss would eat what she offered. But she kept speaking nonetheless, because the steadiness of voice is sometimes the only tool a person possesses.
The rip fought back with a keening that tugged at Jin's bones. It wanted to unravel them into flat shadows. Jin felt something inside him — a weight and an absence — that wanted to answer with equal mimicry. He resisted by remembering small things: the scent of Kachina's hair when she laughed, the silent way his boots had left prints in the volcanic sand, the geometry of a statue he had observed without sentiment. He turned the memory into ballast.
Kachina's fingers glowed; the light was granular and muffled like captured sunlight filtered through cloth. She worked with a child's stubbornness and an elder's incantatory cadence. As she touched the figures, the hollow light filled and warm blood seemed to remember how to hold itself. Bodies slumped. Lungs relearned to take the right shape of air. A cry came from the crowd outside — not of fear now but of recognition — and one by one, people who had been stolen from their lives stepped free, hugging themselves as if they had been returned from some long absence.
When the last figure blinked, when the rip shuttered and failed to swallow anything more, Kachina stood trembling like a newly struck bell. She laughed then — a small, absurd sound that braided relief and terror. She looked at Jin, and the rawness in her expression balanced on an edge between triumph and collapse.
"You were brave," she told him simply. Her voice was coated in soot, in sweat, in the honest raggedness of someone who had looked at danger and said, momentarily, "This is mine."
"We both were," Jin corrected, though he knew by the tilt of his shoulders which of them had given more and which had held back. He did not look for praise; Kachina needed none, but she craved to know she had not been alone.
The crowd gathered in small knots to exchange versions of the same story. Garlands of gratitude were woven in their wake — small, practical things: someone handed Kachina a towel; an elder pressed a coin into her palm and shocked himself at his own courage. The heat of the square returned like a pet that had wandered; people resumed their station in the city's machinery, but the mood had shifted into something tenderer. Kachina sat on the low wall and accepted the towel as if it were an emblem. Her hands shook so gently that Jin could see the tremor in the fabric.
"You were ready," Jin said. It felt necessary to utter this, to make public what she had always privately feared wasn't true.
Kachina blinked, then smiled — that uneven, unpracticed way she had of assembling happiness. "I practiced," she said. "All those times I thought I'd fall, I practiced falling into something else. I practiced the breath. I practiced the shape of a hand when someone needs it. It never stops, you know? Strength isn't a thing you gain and keep in a chest like treasure. You have to keep carrying it. But—" Her voice softened, riddled with the kind of humility that made courage look human. "—when people answer you back, it makes carrying it lighter."
Dusk came not as an event but as a slow resettling of heat into a purple palette that made shadows long and stately. Lanterns were lit along the walkways; their light was not white but tempered like the inside of a clay bowl. Kachina stood, stretching her arms like a cat. The Saurian nudged at her with a nose warm as bread.
"Would you like to see the Speaker's Chamber?" she asked, voice suddenly businesslike, the old nervousness tempered by the day's small victories. "It's carved out of basalt that remembers the sea. They say the arches were cooled with salt baths, and the echoes taste like old stories."
Jin nodded. They walked together toward the Chamber, passing under a tunnel whose ceiling had been painted with constellations of bright, black glass. The gallery hummed with lives resumed: a small troupe of musicians warmed their instruments, and a woman mended a torn banner with thread that reflected the last light, as if time itself were being stitched into place.
As they approached the Speaker's Chamber, Kachina paused at the threshold and touched the stone as if to read a line of Braille. Her fingers came away dusty, and her eyes glittered with private resolve.
"Tonight," she said quietly, "I will try to speak. Not a performance, but a real thing. I will tell them about what I saw, and I will not make it prettier than it was. I won't hide my hands when they ask. I… I want to be honest about fear. About the way it sits in your throat. And maybe if I am honest, someone will hear and say, 'I know that fear too,' and together we can make it smaller. Does that sound foolish?"
Jin considered the theatre of her earnestness, the way she constructed her courage like a fragile monument: honest, imperfect, dangerously sincere. "It does not," he said. "It sounds necessary."
Kachina's laugh that time was softer, threaded with incredulous gratitude. She tugged at the strap of her pack and, for a heartbeat, the child in her — vulnerable, hopeful — blinked like an animal waking.
They entered the chamber as the crowd was settling. The Speaker's dais had been carved to catch sound like a cup catches rain; when Kachina climbed the steps and stood beneath the arch, her voice carried without strain. She began haltingly, flinching at the eyes that measured her, correcting herself when words slipped. But as the minutes passed, something peculiar happened: the more she said, the steadier she became.
She spoke of the Pilgrimage and of small betrayals — to herself and the world — of nights when she had wondered if she would be one of those people who watched life from the edge. She did not dress her truths in the sheen of heroic myth. She said, plainly, that she had been frightened more times than she could count and that each time she had chosen to move forward because someone else had put a hand out.
"And I have been selfish," she added, a faint, painful color in her cheeks. "I have wanted to be strong alone. But strength… that was never the point. The point is the warmth we make that will keep someone else from freezing."
The chamber listened. When she finished, the applause that followed was not empty. People stood and spoke to one another about their own fears. A woman near the back confessed she had not left her home for months. A fisher's son admitted he had been ashamed to tell his parents he wanted to learn to weave metal. The conversation unrolled in a way that was not ordained by any leader but by the human inclination toward repair.
Outside, the night spread across Natlan like a warmed cloak. Jin and Kachina walked beneath lantern light, past houses whose occupants hummed the lullabies of industry. The Saurian's slow silhouette passed them in the distance, a steady presence against the city's breath.
Kachina fell into step beside Jin, contentment settling into her shoulders as if she had shed a layer of armor. "Thank you," she said simply. "For being patient with me today. For listening, even when you seemed bored."
"Boredom is a useful pretense," Jin replied. It was easier to halve a compliment with a joke. She did not need flattery. She needed recognition — the honest kind.
She tilted her head as if weighing his words. "I like that you say true things," she admitted. "Sometimes I worry that people only say pleasant things because they are polite, and then the world becomes a soft, unhelpful illusion. I prefer true things. Even if they are heavy."
"True things are easier to move with," Jin said. The air between them smelled of turned soil and lantern oil, a domestic blend that felt like a promise of continued mornings.
They walked until the city narrowed and the roads led toward the island's inner sanctums. The distant rumble of vents reminded them of the land's heartbeat, and Kachina, eventually, fell quiet. Her exhaustion was the thin, luminous sort earned by honest exertion. Jin watched her and felt the day compress into a simple ledger of small, meaningful events: a statue, a ride, an intervention, a speech. Each had been ordinary and each had been a small crucible.
When they stopped at the edge of a cliff that overlooked the red river, Kachina climbed onto a low boulder and sat with her knees to her chest like a child. The river below moved with a patient, molten grace; steam wrote faint calligraphy into the air.
"Do you ever get tired of being the person who must act?" she asked, in a voice that was private and raw.
Jin considered the question. He had been practicing indifference as a craft, a shield against the needless tug of other people's frailty. Yet for the first time in a long while he did not want to maintain that artifice. He wanted instead to speak plainly, to give back as she had.
"Yes," he said. "But sometimes the cost of not acting is more than I want to pay."
Kachina's face folded into something like relief. She reached out and, on impulse, laid her hand against his forearm — a light, confident press that said without words: I know you are here. It was permission and gratitude braided together.
They watched the river together, two figures on a cliff, as the city murmured behind them. The fire of Natlan glowed and faded in the distance — not diminished but kept in steady measure. Kachina turned her face to the horizon as if seeking a future that might be kinder, stronger, and more honest than the present had been. For the first time that day, Jin believed that whatever storms might come, there were hands ready to meet them.
The night closed like a vow: not a promise of ease, but of company. In Natlan, heat was not only an element; it was a pact — a communal answer to the cold of the world beyond. Jin felt that pact thrum beneath his skin. He had come to observe, but he left holding on to something: the belief that people could remake themselves slowly, that small acts of courage could be stitched together into safety, and that the honest admission of fear could become, paradoxically, a kind of strength.
Kachina hummed a tune as they descended, a short, imperfect melody that had been created from fragments of everything she had seen that day: the sound of a Saurian's breath, the scrape of a smith's hammer, a child's laugh. She did not sing to be heard, only to despatch a particular kind of gratitude into the evening.
Jin matched the rhythm with a step and, without thinking too much about the future — or about making anything grand of the moment — he allowed the smallness of it to be enough. The city of Natlan folded into night around them, and the two of them, improbable, stubborn, human, kept moving.
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Heat: Thank you very much for reading.
Note: Jin spent a full year isolated from humans. His sarcastic, laughter-filled, and playful nature won't return because he doesn't know how to interact with people he doesn't know and has no connection with. This is normal for anyone, let alone someone from another world who spent nearly a year and a half there. This means Jin is now 18 years old.