Ash

"There's no need to take action against a junior, don't you think?"

A familiar old man lounged leisurely in a place only one man had ever stepped into over the last several hundred years.

The garden where the two sat was quite odd. In fact, one would be hard pressed to truly call it a garden at all.

What should have been a calming stream of water was actually a trench filled with lava. The green lotuses one would expect to find had become odd flower-rock structures that glistened mostly of obsidian. At the same time, the creatures which should have been beautiful were instead sinister scaled creatures of the snake and salamander variety.

Ancestor Ember tried his best to hide his ugly expression behind a veil of calmness. But, it didn't take a genius to realize that his fists were clenched beneath his long and wide robe sleeves.

"I see. Maybe I should have known." Ancestor Ember finally said.