Birthright | Ninjago

𝐗𝐈𝐗. IN BETWEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE EVERYTHING went to shit, Avashiro, the son of the Overlord, was officially declared a missing person's case. He was described as having short black hair, dark eyes with a hint of purple, and he bled black instead of red. If anyone was to find him, they were to report the sighting to the Ninja—or, more specifically, Lloyd Garmadon. the Green Ninja, Master of Energy, Savior of Ninjago—if you didn't know his name, well, you might have been living under a rock for a few years now.

It was only an hour after he had disappeared within the blink of an eye, but since it was the Green Ninja asking, law enforcement very well couldn't say no to starting a case then and there.

In a place far away from the middle of the city, a scream echoed through a long-forgotten temple, followed by the sound of panting as the only inhabitant of the temple fought to convince himself that he was a real person. The panting dissolved into sniffles as he had his back pressed against a table, throat aching from the scream, shadows creeping around him. Pain shot up his arm as he slammed his elbow against the table.

A secret door popped open, revealing a tattered leather journal with the words The Writings of the First Spinjitzu Master standing out in gold lettering with a sprawled-out, handwritten font. Hiro turned the book over in his hands, brows furrowed as he looked at the yellowed pages. A dead man's journal—the creator of all of Ninjago, the light, his father's greatest enemy . . . and Hiro was holding his diary.

Fuck it.

Hiro needed answers, and he would get them from anywhere he could, starting with how he had seemingly traveled miles away from the Ninja in the blink of an eye. He had never done that before—or maybe he had without realizing it. Sometimes it felt like he ran too far in a short amount of time as if the shadows pulled him where he needed to go or wanted to be; sometimes the darkness responded to his emotions, creeping around him like a safety blanket, ready to take him away from all the danger in his life and deliver him somewhere quiet and safe.

People thought of the darkness as an enemy, but to Hiro, it was an ally. One day it might even become a friend.

At the very least, he would have something to distract him from the pain in his arm and side. He was pretty sure he had pulled the stitches from his stab wound with everything that he had done that day and was 80% sure his arm was at least going to be very sore, if not fractured. Zane wouldn't be too happy to hear about that, but Zane wasn't here right now. He was dead, gone in the blink of an eye, leaving behind powdered white snow and broken hearts, and a dozen promises that he wasn't able to keep.

Hiro couldn't focus on that.

He cracked open the book.

The first thing he noticed were the little drawings made at the edges of the parchment paper, hardly what one would call good art. It was more-so stick figures with frowny faces and sketched-out eyes that littered the page and made Hiro feel like he was being watched. The drawings were that of a child—perhaps Wu or Garmadon had gotten their hands on the journal before the First Spinjitzu Master had hidden it away in this temple. If he had to guess, Garmadon had made the eyes while Wu had made the stick figures.

The next thing he noticed was that the language written in the book was old, older than Hiro was, and yet he could read it easily. A perk of his body having originally been made for his father, Hiro supposed as he stared at the faded ink on the parchment. He ran his fingers over the letters, feeling the roughness of the paper against the tips of his fingers, before he began to read, keeping an ear open for any sound of someone coming to find him.