Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Naruto characters, Rio Toyohai is however, my own creation.
Chapter one
A glowing blaze burns through the Village hidden in Art, licking at rooftops with its blue-tipped tongues. Bodies litter the streets, the raging immolation of their village reflected in their glazed eyes. The screams have quietened, but the crackling of fire on wood is deafening. The girl's gasps can barely be heard as she pelts down street after street, constantly looking behind her and shying away from the bodies.
She comes to a sudden stop in front of a flaming house; eyes wide and fearful, as if she doesn't quite know how it appeared before her. The door is kicked in, lying on an angle. She covers her mouth with her grazed hands and hesitantly enters.
The smoke is getting thicker now, but she endures the inevitable choking as she cries out,
"Mother! Father! Cinari!"
Each word circles poison fingers around her windpipe. Eyes streaming, she falls to the ground and retches. She can no longer see the door, but the air is clearer by the ground. She feels her way along the floor, blinking rapidly to free her sight of the blur. Sucking in a sudden gust of smoke, she bursts into a coughing fit, lifting a hand to cover her mouth. Only, it's covered in a luke-warm fluid; gritty, and thicker than water.
Mind now hazy, the sound of the fire and groaning beams retract, replaced by an overwhelming ringing. Fire traces red veins up her arms, blemishing her collar and cheekbones as the honey tinted skin relents to the scorching heat. But she sees nothing. She feels nothing. Nothing but the slashed bodies of her parents before her, blood pooling under their lifeless frames.
The world tilts sideways. She can feel the erratic, frantic beating of her heart beneath her chest in all corners of her body, but she cannot locate individual limbs. As her mind closes in on itself, a pair of hands clasp around her, and pull her from the smoking house as its bones collapse with a final resonating crack, and settles amongst the blackening timber.
"Are you sure she's the one? We don't want to get back to the leaf and find we've got the wrong girl."
The Leaf? As in the Fire country? The girl thinks.
She is sure she has some other thing to be thinking about. The iron slab weighting her heart down in her chest is telling her it's important.
"See for yourself. That's the seal right there, exactly as described." Another voice says.
Where am I? Who are these people? I don't recognise their voices...
"Ok then." The first voice counters, seeming satisfied.
"Keep her out until we get back, we don't know what she's capable of."
"Yes Sir!" Comes the sharp affirmative.
A heavy, suffocating dark crushes her reviving consciousness, and she slips back into oblivion.