Chapter Text
For the first week in that cave, Morro was unaware that anything was amiss. He was accustomed to death. Usually, it was full of more suffering and one’s ears being bombarded with the unceasing cries of the damned. However, these elements of the Cursed Realm were now mysteriously absent.
He’d been through sensory deprivation torture from The Preeminent before. It wasn’t Her favorite flavor of suffering, but She did enjoy mixing it up every so often. So when Morro’s spirit faded away after the Day of the Departed, he simply sighed at his poor fortune and dissociated. Morro was very good at dissociating.
The second week, Morro gained a creeping suspicion that something wasn’t quite right. He could hear stray rocks tumbling somewhere far away. At some point, he came to notice a consistent trickling noise somewhere on his right. Every noise echoed in a way that set him on edge.
Morro jolted upright when he realized he could feel his surroundings as well. He’d been slouching on the ground, and now he wasn’t.
There were a select few senses that The Preeminent was completely inept at replicating. She was incompetent at simulating touch, and almost equally amateurish with her grasp on proprioception. Usually, all this meant was that She needed to be creative with her punishments. Now, he realized, it implied something completely unprecedented.
He wasn’t in the Cursed Realm.
He had a body that he could feel , and it didn’t feel right .
Morro blindly stumbled to his feet. He opened his eyes, but nothing changed. He stood there in the dark, furiously blinking and grinding his teeth, before thrusting his hands to his eyes. To his chagrin, it seemed he didn’t have eyes. Frantically, his hands scoured the rest of his body, taking note of three observations: He was wearing some ragged clothes, he had hair, and he didn’t have skin .
His hands trembled as they moved under the rags he was wearing and up into a vacant ribcage. Morro jerked his hands away. He felt nauseated, realized he didn’t even have a stomach, and immediately felt more nauseated than before.
This is fine , he thought as his entire body rattled violently, I’m possessing a corpse, I can just leave.
Morro forced the bones he possessed to steady, calmed himself with deep, imaginary breaths, and stepped out of the body.
Morro stepped forward, tripped, and clattered to the floor with his spirit still held firmly in place. He let out an abrasive snarl, stood up, and tried again. He thrashed and raged, trying desperately to eject himself from the body. His soul strained against the bones he was trapped in. He couldn’t be trapped. He wouldn’t allow himself to be trapped again . He let another scream tear through him as he forced his ghost out of its bony prison, unfamiliar pain wracking his non-existent nerves. He collapsed in a quivering heap on the ground. He was trapped.
No. He refused to be trapped again in some new horrible place. If he couldn’t leave this body, he was going to leave this place and drag this corpse along with him. He marched through the rocky, damp, black void around him and turned whenever he hit a wall. He didn’t care how long it took. He was going to keep walking until he found his way out of this cave, or until all the bones he inhabited were ground to dust from grinding against stone. At least this way, he was in control.
His sense of time could charitably be described as shaky. Morro had no idea how long he staggered around in the darkness, narrowly avoiding cliff ledges and echoing rapids that were deceptively hard to locate. He’d fallen into water exactly fifteen times so far. The depth was irrelevant, and he found himself jerking and thrashing and shrieking in a panic every time he dipped in. Once the fear passed, all he could feel was hot, simmering shame for being such a coward. The water wasn’t even hurting him. At least no one was around to watch him act so infuriatingly weak.
All shame and frustration were dashed from his mind when he glimpsed the smallest mote of light in the darkness ahead of him.
Morro scrambled towards the light, heaving through imagined lungs. When he finally stepped out of the cave and into the open air, he collapsed to the ground and began laughing hysterically. If he could cry, he would be, judging by the gasping hiccups that he emitted.
He could see the sky! He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a more beautiful sky. By all accounts, it was an average blue sky on a clear day, but Morro had already burned the sight into his memory.
When he finally began to calm down, creeping dread invaded his elation. He knew this place. It had changed drastically, being not but a craterous plateau, but the surrounding landscape was unmistakable. This was what remained of the Caves of Despair.
Slowly, Morro looked down at the body he was trapped in. He knew these decayed robes. He grasped at the hair that miraculously clung to his skull and stared back incredulously at the long black hair with one scandalously green lock running through it.
This wasn’t a corpse . This was his corpse .
Was this his life now? To be stuck as a ghost and now as a what? A Skulkin? Did he count as a Skulkin now? Was the universe hellbent on forcing him into one form of undeath after another? Being stuck in a mannequin for one night was manageable, but this was something else entirely. He shrieked to himself.
“Just let me DIE!”
His words echoed uselessly through the mountains.
What did the world expect him to do now? What else could it want from him? He’d been allowed to live again and he’d turned it down. The ninja deserved to live just as much as he deserved to be DEAD . That was how it was supposed to be, he’s made his peace with that, but apparently, someone in Cloud Kingdom hadn’t received the memo.
Morro screamed at the gods and chucked rocks down the mountain until sunset. He quivered and spewed curses at the universe for having the audacity to screw him over yet again .
The air remained eerily still.
Morro whipped his bony arms around in the fading sunlight. He wanted to destroy this place. He wanted to rip it apart with the most violent tornado he could muster. He channeled all of this fury and indignant rage into the air around him. The air didn’t budge.
He thrust his arm out with an aggressive kiai. The air idled lazily around him in response.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
He kicked at the air, shouted, and snapped his palms out in front of him, willing a gale to form.
The air yawned with languorous boredom.
He’d assumed this situation couldn’t possibly get any worse, but the universe just loved fucking with him, didn’t it? Morro was now acutely aware of how disconnected he felt from the air around him in a way he was entirely unfamiliar with. Being unable to tap into his powers felt akin to the pain of trying to move a phantom limb. The air around him was a crushing prison, and every movement the wind made against his accord sent a shudder up his spine.
Morro trembled on his knees, grasping at the ground and sobbing with humiliating abandon. He wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that, and he didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing had mattered for a long time.
Eventually, he rolled over and sprawled himself across the dirt, staring past the stars. Perhaps The Preeminent wasn’t so bad at replicating touch after all. This was probably just a new trick she’d developed just to torment him in particular. It would make more sense and he’d frankly prefer it that way.
So when he heard the approaching sound of beating wings, felt the ground shake as something large landed nearby and the red ninja stooped into his field of vision, he prayed The Preeminent had gotten very creative.