>>5948054>>5948061>>5948070>>5948091>>5948092>>5948110>>5948116>>5948428>>5948675>>5949938>>5952500>>5953615>>5953923>>5955015The fire temple is exactly what you expect it to be: A large temple complex in the woods, walled off and surrounded by a small supporting village.
The caravan pulls up to a small travelers inn in the village portion, and you Hotaru grants you permission to immediately go check out the temple, remarking that you’ve earned some R&R after you spent last week’s ‘day off’ getting assaulted in the woods. Masami and Naoki have to help the Kumamoto clan unload their goods and get everything organized for transport.
Walking up to the fire temple, you pass through a torii gate, saying a quick prayer to the spirits of fire while you head directly to the water basin to purify your mouth and hands. It’s a quiet, sedate experience.
It’s rare that you find moments of genuine peace these days. Even when you’re safe in the Nakagawa Inn with your teammates, you can’t help but feel the burdensome, looming specter of the ninja experience hanging on your soul like a weight. Dealing with death, the nature of conflict, the prospect that one day you’ll wake up and it’ll be the last day for you or someone you love.
But you take a deep breath here in the shrine, the cool water in your hands, the chirp of birds, the intense greenery.
The shrine itself elicited a bit of reverence from you as well. Majestic structures adorned with carvings and vermillion paint, the temple complex unfolding in front of you like a sacred oasis, touched only by hands extended in respect to the divine, the architecture of the stone braziers humbling you with their testament to the craftsmanship of generations past.
Stone statues of personified kami watch you from the sides of the gravel pathways, watching over you in mute, unwavering vigilance as the smell of incense and flora is carried to your nostrils on a gentle, warm breeze.
Ninja were not religious people. You’ve often wondered why you’ve never heard of shinobi visiting shrines like your mother did, why places of peace like this were only frequented by civilians, why you yourself only seldomly came across the idea to come somewhere like this. Perhaps you already had an answer. Your trade was death and destruction, and maybe it took a special brand of noxious arrogance to assume that someone like you should even be allowed in a place like this.
The sensation of sacred reverence begins to fade as your hands dry of the purifying water. Reverence is replaced with antipathy and a growing sense of unease, as if one of the priests would leap out at you from a bush to remind you that you were a killer and that you should fuck off from this sacred place immediately, an uncouth savage who could only destroy and never create, a person who could not and should not inhabit this world.
