No Free Ride to Redemption
By Corvus no Genmu
"In the Beginning"
"How do you keep going when there's nothing left for you here?"
There has not nor will there ever truly be a shortage of demons in the world. Be they of man's own or of a power unknown, demons will forever roam in the shadows, striking when they see fit and leaving naught but ruins behind in their wake. In the written histories of the world, there have been many demons noted but only nine have lived on in history with their names whole and unforgotten, all born from a single powerful entity that could, at worst, be proclaimed as a god. They are called the Tailed Beasts, nine great beasts of power each stronger than the other by correspondence with the number of tails they possess. From the one-tailed Shukaku of the Desert Sands to the nine-tailed Kyuubi no Youko, each tailed beast has wrought great destruction upon whatever land they came across until, at last, the era of ninjas began in full and with it, the art of sealing.
"What do you desire most in this world, that which you would kill to possess?"
It took much time and great sacrifice but, eventually, all nine Beasts were sealed away into human hosts, poor babes born on the days of their final attacks upon mankind or merely serving as an alternate prison as the old proved useless in beneficial terms. These poor souls, hated by demons and feared by their fellow humans are called jinchuuriki, a word in the old tongue that translates to "the art of human sacrifice", a befitting term for them. They are poor souls, growing up as weapons by their own choice or through others'. Either way, no jinchuuriki would live beyond their late twenties. Such is the fate of jinchuuriki and the Tailed Beasts bound to them.
"Who do you fight for, when no one here cares for your life?"
However, as much as the jinchuuriki were feared and hated, as dangerous and powerful the Tailed Beasts were, they both were creations of humanity. The jinchuuriki were born of human sacrifice and the manmade arts of sealing while the Tailed Beasts themselves were creations born through different means but all sharing in their connection to humanity's darkness mixed with the earth's rage, minute as it is now to what it once was. Madness born of endless travel, fear born of approaching death, souls lost forever at sea… all human emotions and blackened hearts combining with formidable animals and elemental forces of nature, from them creating great and terrible beasts of power and rage.
"Why do you smile, when inside you are drowning in a sea of tears?"
Still…… there are stories whispered in the forbidden corners and lost alleyways, in dark labyrinths and forgotten libraries amidst tomes older than man's knowledge of jutsu that there were creatures far more dangerous, and far more powerful, than all of the Tailed Beasts. Monsters born purely of the earth and its vast variety of elements, born of a rage made by what man once was millennia past in a time long forgotten. Where, under man's power, forests fell into seas of ash and the oceans boiled as the greatest of storms gathered at their every whim. Their toys became the makers of their undoing and these would-be gods fell to the very creatures they created, led and united under a great and terrible beast of unimaginable power and already old even at the ancient human's beginning.
"Will you follow us, through heaven and hell, for those reasons?"
In the end, the Ancient Ones and their powerful technology vanished with their destroyers following them into near-forgotten obscurity. Only the descendants of those powerful people live on, only just touching the surface of what they once held and yet still having their senseless capacity to destroy each other. As for their ancestor's destroyers… No one knows of the full truth of their disappearance. There are whispers of the destroyers' power being too great and they themselves were killed by what made them so powerful in the first place. Others say that with their mother's vengeance satisfied, they were allowed free reign, the world, nay the entire universe, was theirs to explore and they were out there still and, eventually, they would return home. A precious few say nay to both theories; that the monsters were blessed, or cursed, with a better perception of the world then their demonic cousins. They saw the rises and falls of man and decided the better part of valor and so vanished, waiting in the shadows of the earth's forgotten history until the time was right for them to emerge once more.
"Yes."
To Be Continued...
On the next road…
Meeting Again