Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

This Is War

A desert cottontail tilted its head and turned it around. The creature was used to being exceptionally wary, yet the certain shade of boldness in the approaching figure made it refrain from digging under the sands and acting like it wasn't there. Usually, predators prowled and sneaked around. This man of two legs strut with confidence. He knew exactly where he wanted to go and was headed that way.

Somehow, the cottontail had a feeling that the approaching wraith of the sandy dunes wouldn't do harm to it. The reason was simple–the little rodent was too meek and insignificant and the man's interests laid elsewhere entirely. The petite furball and all of his oversized ears wouldn't even give him enough sustenance to pace over another dune. The man wore a thick poncho that fluttered in the pelting sandy blizzards of the deserts. Just like a phantom, this figure floated around the dunes, instead of competing against them, much like a skilled vessel picked the waves it wanted to ride instead of picking a fight with the torrential perils of the storm.

A red balaclava with simplistic green symbols and mosaics flapped about over the man's face. It was only when the enigmatic man approached the vermin and flicked his oversized, uber-wide-brimmed hat with a pointed upward crown, even the man's face was invisible to make out. Without the humanity in his eyes, it would have been impossible to tell this wandering specter from just a poncho being carried by the desert gale.

For whatever reason, despite it making absolutely no sense, the long-haired individual stared at the cottontail for what seemed like an awkward amount of time, even to the little critter. Where initially it jumped up and froze from being picked out as a notable detail in the boundless ocean of Wind Country sands, the stare had extended to where even the cottontail let out a meek cry. It was as if he hastened the desert's shadow to devour it if that was to be its fate. The little critter reared its teeth with frightened and wide eyes.

A series of low-pitched noises came out from underneath the strip of cloth cloaking the man's face. He was laughing. Not manically so. Something about the ordinary desert critter amused him mildly and after he was done admiring it, the figure walked on, drifting alongside the apron of the dune, seeking to walk around it while enjoying the moderate cover from the heatwave blasting in his face. He was happy to pay the cost of extra sand pelting him at all times for it if need be.

*****

The desert wanderer stopped for a moment to tip the brim of his hat and stare ahead. Directly in front of him laid a round stack of pointed wooden sticks. Wood wasn't very common in the desert. It usually grew around oases and the last time that the phantom had visited his home, there were no such protections around it. His home had been dug into a wall of sandstone and relied on it to protect it from the constant shower of sand. This was an early warning to anyone coming to this outer region of the desert with intentions to flip it over on its head–whoever was in charge was influential enough to control enough oases to ruin them and rip its trees out with their roots, reshaping them to ramparts that protected even irrelevant buffer shantytowns like this one.

Then again, a conqueror like Fennec would've had to flaunt his would-be power and influence to the Sheikhs and their spoiled hogs, lest they came to take a premature piece of what Fennec would bring to them all the same. In due time.

The long-haired man haunted the entryway of the desert town, floating across it like a ghost. The desert's specter turned his eye to the right, seeing a horrified expression of a handling head, still attached to a bloody stain of its guts after something massive had stepped on them. The wanderer looked to the left, as he passed right past the crushed bodies to see human scarecrows with bare and dry ribcages that were squeezed open and relieved of their precious and beating prize. The mangled remains hung with similar haunting expressions, overlooking the entrants to the town.