Part One
There was once a little ninja. She always wore black cloth as apparel. Her only visible features were her fear-striking dark eyes. She fought all types of evil. The ninja defeated unimaginable, sinister monsters with such ease, it couldn’t even be described as a battle. She destroyed highly trained assassins, samurai, and anyone else who had the nerve to challenge her in combat.
The ninja was feared as far as her tales could reach. Such tales consisted of everything from beheading a cruel dictator and freeing the land from his harsh tyranny, to adventuring to dangerous and far-away lands to rescue children from vicious monsters. The stories portray the ninja as a fearless, aggressive, and impenetrable force willing to quash anything intersecting her from upholding justice. While this is true, the ninja has difficulties of her own, in which her physical sharpness is fruitless. She locks such problems away in her mind, concealed from everyone else.
The ninja never spoke, for she was constantly fighting a battle in her mind. Even when surrounded by friends and loved ones, the ninja’s inner-conflicts were too obnoxious for her to focus on anything but. Inside her mind were thousands of voices, yelling at her. They told her she didn’t matter, no one would listen when she spoke, and she wasn’t doing well enough. When fighting those ruthless monsters, or while killing that savage ruler, the ninja couldn’t believe she was doing well. She instead thought of how faulty it was of her to even let the monsters abduct the child, or how lazy that she hadn’t taken down the dictator until then. No matter what she did, she couldn’t be good enough for herself.
After a day filled with battles, winning, and saving the world, the ninja would go home. She didn’t eat, she merely went to her bed and lay there. Then the voices commence their criticism. They say she did awfuly, they say she is shameful, they say she’s wasting her time, that no one likes her, she’s not doing anything, people are making up all this ‘saving the world’ stuff, that she doesn’t matter. The ninja listens to these voices, and even begins to agree with them. Every day her condition becomes graver. She starts to use her sharp weapons to puncture her skin. She slides them across her skin in large motions, implementing more force and strength than she does when battling assassins. The ninja feels immense pain, good. Her tears drop into the wounds and they start to sting, but she loves it. The pain satisfies her.
The ninja now cuts herself every night, then falls asleep with tears in her eyes. She perceives the pain throughout her sleep. The pain in her head from the voices and the pain the voices inspire. When she awakes in the morning, the ninja cannot remember the night prior. She only observes scars on her skin and dry blood on her blades.
At night the voices come to take over the ninja’s body. She battles them for as long as she can, but she still can not resist their hate fueled power. They have endless reinforcements, and she gets weaker by the second. Her eyes are first to fall. The voices let them run like rivers. Then the rest of the mind is overrun. The voices take control of the entire body. The Ninja becomes a separate person. A person ruled by her voices.
