Pyojin of the high flames had thought he’d known power. Supreme wizard over the port city of Kelsas-mor, greatest of his kind and chair of the global association of spellcasters. He’d built his reputation on being untouchable- living alone in his tower so high above the feeble rooftops below, watching the movement of stars and deepening his knowledge of the arcane.
He admitted to himself as they alighted amidst the molten stone and shattered wreckage at the top of his tower, that he might have let his reputation get to his head. The little fox- innocently looking up at him after it just carved eerily precise swirls and eddies across the entire surface of the moon- played a small part in that realization… that there was something so powerful out there, to reshape the very heavens.
Nobody would have called him meek, but perhaps… humbled. That would be a word he’d describe himself as. Throwing a small cloaking illusion over himself with a twist of his ascendancy he followed the fox out into the chaotic streets, watching with no small amusement as gawking crowds pointed up to the still cooling moon. That was what a wizard should be- something whose works are seen and decried as impossible, whose steps herald apocalypse or salvation.
They slipped into the inn to the irate gaze of a woman he’d not seen in hundreds of years, her gaze far more focused and centered than it had been before. A faint aura of danger meshed seamlessly with her judging eyes as she stared down the suddenly guilty looking fox. “So. You were out tonight?” He might have forgotten not to gape as he heard Madwoman Kiyo speak a coherent sentence to a person that was actually in front of them. “Just… go to your room. I’ll be there in a second.” The fox sulked off, leaving Kiyo to turn her gaze to him. “Did you really think I wouldn’t notice some half-rate sorcerer sneaking in with her?”
“Half rate? I’m one of, if not the premier wizard in the entire world!”
“Perhaps this world…” there was something there, a hint of pain, pride, longing and vigilance. “Seriously, a cloaking spell that doesn't even hide your ascendancy? What’s the use of that?”
“If I don’t want people to see me, it’s very useful indeed.”
Kiyo scoffed, pulling out a stool and slumping down at the bar. “You do you. I was just wondering why you were following her. I sincerely hope it wasn’t for any… malicious intentions? Do know that you will never be able to harm her.”
Pyojin could believe that, after seeing the destruction she’d wrought on the surface of the moon. That could have been them. Carefully, he reached out a few simple diagnostic spells- one to the woman in front of her, and one to the fox waiting patiently, curled up in a room above them.
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Kiyo quirked an eye as she felt the prod, smirking softly when a stream of half-incomprehensible impossibilities echoed back the connection, infinites and missing values. A soulless body and a soul in a body- nonsensical. “I must compliment you- your scrying wards are are very advanced.”
Kiyo just laughed-
The second spell touched the fox and he screamed. Pain lanced through his being, a roaring inferno of agony clinging to his essence as his ascendancy burned. Fire. Fire. Fire! He knew- he felt but a hint of eternal depth and impossibility, of something far too large- too large for a fox’s pelt, too large for planets and galaxies, too large for the physical laws of the universe.
The truth of it pushed at his mind, smirking in Kiyo’s peculiar- soul, eyes- and-
He woke sobbing several hours later, tucked neatly into bed with the… fox… curled up beside him, a small but not insignificant portion of his ascendancy erased as if it’d never been.
Sobs turned to choking laughter. Apocalypse or salvation indeed.
……..
A name.
It was what, ultimately, the strange tendril of concept had been questing for when it touched upon her being and was burned in kind- the wizard’s construct, she realized when Kiyo dragged him unconscious up to the room and tucked him into bed. It had delved her nature, and in doing so had known the truest meaning of annihilation.
Erased as if it’d never been. Looking at the wizard’s agonized face as she curled up beside him, she wondered-
Slipping off into the closest thing to sleep, she touched on the infinity of fire, and the infinity of fire echoed her presence in kind. They were the same, one for all and all for one- infinite conflagration forever spreading out beyond the bubble that contained them.
She watched the patterns within existence, and the flow of reality without- the grand embrace of the vastness of all realities, existence- she could see the fire, feel it- an expanse of self that stretched across its entire breadth, impossible to describe in its immensity.
Fire. She was fire, but… she was more than fire, for once- for once she met herself in infinite interactions of possibility, holding, stepping around and through the reality that was her being until she was, beyond fire, beyond annihilation.
She was Kitsune.
………
Kiyo watched the sky smear as time shifted once again, everything around her changing in a flickering wash of futures. Cities and mountains, forest domains and shattered deserts, desolate wastelands- myriad colors, the weight of time pressing down around her as something changed far into the past.
Amongst it all, as real as the first time she’d seen her, the fox remained. Nothing changed it, and for nothing would it change, for it was. Kiyo found herself smiling as she dragged a hand down the fox’s luscious pelt, content for once- to have something with her that wouldn’t disappear in a mirage of dreams and memories.
It helped a bit that she was pretty cute, too.
As the world twisted and changed, she sat in silence with a fox of fire and touched on the breadth of reality.