Lu let one of the fire ferns lick through her thick hair of black smoke. Its tendrils drew in nutrients then receded into its tube-shell, which was attached to the rock walls rising over the magma pool. She plucked a lava guava from a silver-leafed, basalt-barked tree, and sucked on its glowing nectar. The fire sprites danced and skipped into her garden from the magma flow, as they were wont to do on a whim. Lu giggled as they skittered over her bare body of supple obsidian. They darted up into her hair and frazzled it mischievously.
Her eyes flared, violet as burning potassium salts, and with a nettled huff, she conjured a spray of flames from her hands, whisking away both the fire sprites and her hair of smoke, leaving herself a short-crop. The sprites chittered away back down the lava tube.
Lu was sad to see them go. She didn't get company very often at the top of her mountain, and sometimes it was bad company, like the grebbers who braved the climb up the mountain to break off the purple branches of the mountain's crystal trees. The shards of a crystal tree were very receptive to magical energies, and were coveted by wizards for enchantment.
Lu hated wizards. Even though she had never met one, she was affronted by the idea that they would seek to use her trees for their own selfish purposes without bothering to ask the tree for permission, or to listen to the song of her trees and truly appreciate them.
The grove of crystal trees was why she even existed. When the scintillating seed of the first tree rose up through the newly formed magma tube and took root in the fresh cracks of the cooling rock, her mother, Gaia, the earth goddess, gave birth to her out of a crystalline flower that grew from the onyx-dark wall. She awoke as the flower bloomed in fire, her first sensation being the gentle caress of flaming pedals.
She was born fully-formed, naive but immortal; a corporeal spirit, a conduit of magic and possessing of beauty befitting the daughter of a goddess. She had flesh, miraculous of substance and brimming with natural magic. Her bones were made of diamond, and her organs an alchemical orchestra of mineral biology and etheric energies. She even sweat out of pores in her skin, a fire-proof oil that gave a lustrous sheen to her body. She was what was known in the lore as an igniad, a cousin of both the dryad and the nymph.
She knew her mother wished for her to protect the crystal trees, otherwise mortals would surely greedily harvest every last one. Crystal forests took a very long time to grow, and only a mature forest could spawn seeds from the tap root that grew deep down through the mantle of the world to the magma sea.
She loved to listen to the quiet song of the trees as they sung to one another, a melody so fast and complex, it almost sounded to the inattentive ear like one long note. Sometimes, the trees would sing with her, and slowed their notes so they could harmonize with her.
She protected her grove fiercely. When the grebbers came, the trees would cry out to her, and she charged down the slope of the mountain, her bounding strides sowing steam as the snow melted in her wake. The mortals, usually human males, ran in fear of her fiery approach. She would conjure a fan of flames to frighten them and would singe their clothes if she got close enough.
One time, there was a knight who came to defeat the "demon" that resided at the top of the volcano. Luckily, he challenged her verbally instead of attacking her outright, and she found she could communicate with him empathically, like she could with the trees. He felt her anger, the anger that came from her assumption that he was there to break her crystal trees, to cause them pain.
He was mesmerized by her lithe form alight with fiery splendor. Her feelings influenced him. He decided that she was not a demon, for how could a demon feel compassion for trees that were, he realized, so beautiful? He talked to her, though he dared not come too close. After a while, Lu could speak as he did, his language coming naturally to her through her empathic link.
Although she had just met him, she took a liking to him, and began to appreciate the things about him that were beautiful, especially his youth and strength that would be gone all too fleetingly in his short lifespan. She wished he could have stayed longer, but her mountain was not hospitable to humans.
Nor was she.
Once word got out that there was an igniad residing on the mountain, she occasionally got visits from greedy and sinister mortals come to kill her, hoping to chisel her diamond bones from her cold corpse and become fabulously wealthy selling them. She had to kill them. They often tried to hurt her trees to draw her into a trap. Her vengeance was swift and overwhelming, leaving charred husks in blackened armor. Mortals would leave her alone for a while after each attempt on her life, but much to her frustration, she needed to refresh her reputation every once in a while.
Years passed, and she nurtured her grove and her garden, dancing with the sprites and singing with the trees. She would give herself completely to the joy of music, even when she felt lonely and sang sweet songs of sadness that resonated through the whole grove.
One day she was bathing in her magma pool, gently giving herself some affection as her fingers circled her nipples poking up into the hot, wavering air, her breasts like islands in the yellow-hot liquid. The lava was dense as stone, and within it her body was particularly buoyant.
Lu had just begun her bath, but wouldn't take long. Even though her body was steeped in the elemental magic of fire itself, the lava became uncomfortably hot if she lingered in it too long. Her body did not absorb the heat of the molten rock, but reflected it with her magical link to the essence of fire. She wore a crystal cup perfectly fitted for that most sensitive place between her legs, to protect it. She had asked the trees to grow it for her, enchanted to hold its place against her without any other means of being secured. Its gentle, constant pressure was comforting.
As well, the crystal cup helped absorb magical energy that flowed out of her womb once every dark moon. It was a painful shedding, and the trees lovingly made the cup to help ease the suffering of their protector. It flared elegantly just above her pubic mound, reminiscent of a flower. The entirety of the crystal always seeped a gentle, electric purple light, reacting with the energy of her body, but it flared blood red during the shedding. She was between cycles that day; the dark moon was not for a fortnight, and she knew a full moon would rise into the sky as soon as evening came.
She heard a change in the song of the crystal trees, a tune she had never heard them make before. They were announcing an arrival, though the song was devoid of fear. The trees always felt trepidation with visitors, but this time they were calm and joyful. She was overcome with curiosity.
She rose up, rivulets of liquid stone sheeting off the curves of her sculpted form. She bounded up out of the shelter of her crater and stood tall on an outcropping of obsidian. Gazing down over the canopy of her grove that hugged the top of the mountain, she saw a figure filtered through the fractal branches, moving between the crystal trunks.
Suddenly she brimmed with hope. Perhaps it was her friend, the knight who spoke to her so long ago. But the spark of hope in her dimmed, for surely the man had died of old age, if not from battle. She wondered who else would come alone to her snowy, wind-swept mountain, and not try to take branches from the trees at the edge of the grove? If the mortal had come to kill her, she thought, it was a fool to try alone. Then fear and anger flared in her heart at the thought that it could be a wizard.
The trees did not seem to think the stranger was a threat, however, and she trusted their intuition. She slid her hands over her body, smearing flames where she touched. She wrapped herself in a fitting dress of blood-red fire, which helped keep the cold wind off her bare skin.
She waited, listening to the whispering notes of the trees and watching the figure make his way up to the top of the forest, close to her crater near the peak. She could see he was a man by his dark brown beard under his hood. He wore no armor, only some leather and furs, and was not bundled against the frigid air like others she had seen. He carried only a waterskin from his hip and a straight staff in his hand.
He reached out and touched the oldest crystal tree, its faintly luminescent trunk supporting a kaleidoscope of branches. Her breath caught, for she feared he might harm the tree, but was taken aback when he seemed to commune with it, speaking to it. She had never seen anyone else talk to her trees. She was touched, and felt her heart warming for the stranger.
She skipped from crag to crag, then touched down in the snow, sinking down into it as it melted instantly at her touch, down to the rock, producing steam at her feet. She sauntered forward with her smoke hair billowing silently in the breeze. The man noticed her approach, but did not seem alarmed. He spat out something he had been chewing, leaned his staff against the crystal trunk, and bowed to her.
"Why have you come to my grove, human?" She asked. She tried to extend an empathic link to him, but could not, as if he was somehow protected against her charms, and she feared once more that he was a wizard.
