F̘ͮ̌͛̒̽̚r͉̙̝̰̣͑ö̼͉̠̞̽̕m̗͔͍̗̻̬̓̋͛ ͎̼̣͐̂t̲̠̭͇ͯ͗͆̂͛h̞ͣe̙̤̓͂͐̎́̓ ̴̘̰͚͑A̵̳͇̯̩̖ͭ̐̌̎͛ͩr͖̤͉̝͈͕c̵̙̜ͪ̆ͨ̎͑̓ͯh̤̦̞̋͒́̂̿ī̩̝͓̫͕ͣv̰͇̤̫̟̞̰e̍ͥͧͫ̑̓
̵̳͕̟̭͓͇ͫ̅Sͧͥͤ͛ͬ̏͏̯̲̮̘̥c͈̉r̝̀o̞͓̱̍ͨ́l̥̣̈͒́́̚͝ḷ̷͉̮̭͆̋ͭ̈́̒ͯ ̞̖̹͐ͤͧ͢1̪̪͙͓̍͆̾̍̐̓͜ͅ9̈̆̋̓̀9̶̝̥̼̹̼͓͊̌̇̚̚̚9͖͂̾ͤ;͚̳̟̙̔̔̐̏ ͓̖̮̬̪͈̫͑͐ͩ̄̓ͭ͒͜M̔ͩ̓̎̚͢e̫͙͔͈̱̥̫͐̐͞m͕͇͍̥̫͌ō̗̆̏r͓̘͕̐͆ͦ̀͜ỳ̊̉ͮ̕ ͖͈̪̏͗̌̇̈́U̷̳̙ͧͦ5̞͖̳͚̘̩͇ͯ̾̾
̨͈̠͚̱͉̯̯̿͋̅̔̽̓C̨͚̲̥͙̭͆̓a͉̗̻̽͒̽̃̎̔͆t̴͚̣̣̹̥͓̩͐̍̾̐ͪ͛e̩̟͇̮͉͇͖ͣ̾̽̄̆g̘͈̋͂̍̎͐͑ȍ̻̙̭̯͔̆͗́̚͜ṟ̟͊͊͛ẙ̭͇͈̖̲̬̄ͩͣͪ͒̔͡:̳̺̩͇͍̃̿͆ͣͅ ͢E̬̽ͪ̈̎̚͜Ŕ̯̬͕̳̘͊ͅŘ̸͕̻͔̪̈͑O̤̜̞̰̅ͤ͒͑ͅͅR̢͚̠͓̥̅

ah.

so this is where theyre all stored.

strange.


Why?

Why did he have to dream like this?

It was meant to be a refuge, a place that held time he could truly lay claim to. But it seemed a home for more than him alone. It was not a sanctuary of peace.

It was a world of ink.

An endless sky was not discernible from a ceaseless ground. He had no inkling, no clue of the time he had spent caught somewhere between sleek plains of black, always somehow glinting with reflected light twisted into strange and unknowable patterns through the darkness. And then there was him, standing or sitting or lying somewhere within the cavernous gloom, his senses of sight and time lost to him in equal measure.

A knowing of time was determined by night and day, by motion and movement. But there was no motion to see, no movement to glimpse and gaze upon fleetingly with his unseen eyes, nor was there a sun to watch rise and set. Dawn and dusk held no sway over this dark realm, nowhere to be found in the deepest pits of this seeming void.

Just as time was.

And with an understanding of what was lost to him in the nadirs of this strange darkness, he began to grasp a simple truth: time did not live here.

Without time, nothing could be seen, movement could not be made, light could not reach, and the wind could not blow. All he knew occupied space, and space was nothing without time. Finding a world lacking one distorted the other into something that sat beyond the scope of all recognition.

Realisation made unknown sounds echo in the dripping nothingness.

Looking out onto the abyss, eyes still unseen, the sound of turning paper filled the air and scrolls appeared from the deep murk.

That was why he called it a world of ink.

As a scroll fell before him far too neatly and unfurled of its own accord, stained white page strong on a canvas of pure black, he remembered that this had already happened, and he recalled the images shown to him, the countless scrolls that had appeared before him again and again.

It was never the same scroll twice.

It unfolded before his eyes with slow deliberation, rolling with no small manner of care across a surface of rippling darkness behind. Unrolled in entirety, an almost sequential filament of strange markings written in deep ink appeared on the paper. He did not understand what he saw.

Perhaps they were of a language no one knew, a foreign tongue forgotten on the forever turning pages of unwritten history. It could have been a title, a name, a number, or a directive. There were countless possibilities for the unknown words before and below, an infinite quantity until one was chosen.

He did not know why now, just as he had not known each time before, but he chose number. The runic inking faded from the scroll, and a picture emerged from the new slate of off-white.

Had he been afforded the time to pose his dark world a question, he would have asked why such a seemingly minor decision made progress a possibility in the void and the scroll. But he could not ask his question. There was no time for questions.

There was no time for him, no time for sight, no time for sound.

There was no time at all.

There was only the space, and there was only the scroll.

There was only the scroll, again and again and again.

And the scroll's image was familiar, always. Each image was similar, and each image was yet not the same as its predecessor.

But no matter how many times it vanished and reappeared before him, he could be nothing but impressed, shocked and awed at the sight on the scroll. He could be nothing but at a loss for words when he gazed upon eerily similar vistas, painted and portrayed with an incredible, impossible tenderness that left him gasping without lungs time and time and time again. It was all somehow communed through simple black ink.

What he saw was a sky filled to the brim with carefully swirling clouds in early morn marked by a flock of small birds, a dark and dirty ground skilfully mired in cold, unfeeling grass, and two utterly unique figures standing across a tract of callous ground from one another, staring or glaring with eyes, or watching and waiting through the aid of something else, with the otherworldly assistance of something at their backs about to erupt into something truly and strangely familiar.

Each time it came before him, he forgot what it was that stood behind them without truly standing. It was nothing legged, nothing armed and nothing bodied. What stood behind them and with them was something embodied. It was something each of them, no matter who they were in their moment of silent conflict, had come to personify. He did not what trials had been thrust upon them, but their suffering had transformed into something made flesh and blood and life written in ink.

But as he gazed closer, eyes hidden in the dark, it began to return to him.

He looked ever closer at the world scrawled on the ink-washed scroll.

The artistry was of superb detail, walking well beyond the boundaries of mere obsession with realism, and driving hands and eyes deep into the black, warped realms of the zealot. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the painting began to approach a surreal plateau, a safe haven of sorts resting between the lofty dream of an idealised sky, and the grimfaced beauty of reality's cold, bone-dry grass.

As he found his mind sitting on that same trodden tor, on the very same plateau the scroll's maker reached for, it made him forget that every detail – right down to the delicately splayed wings of the birds taking to the air at the coming of dawn's early light – was painted with the same simple ink.

And then the scene of two beings facing one another across a vast expanse of grassy plain began to move.

Immaculate detail gave way to impossible sight.

The clouds began to move, coiling swirls of grey-lined wind urging them away. Those same coils brushed at the back of the man stood on the left, making the light, leathery clothing he did not recognise ripple and waver in the gust sending clouds of dust from the west to the east over frosted grass. A mouth turned from impassive line to shaking snarl, teeth bared for the entire world to see.

On the right, on the ground and on the other man clad in thick cloth and ringed metal, lines of black light sparked and danced. Jagged lines and veins crawled and dragged in short instants, making headway up and down the body's entirety and a small part of the ground's totality. The air around him crackled and trembled.

The world around them did much the same as they threw their hands to each other.

Wind from nowhere and everywhere lashed out with fearsome force. Embracing arms of lightning reached for the sky with bright and blazing intent, smashing and spreading over strands and curls of wind in explosions of grey light and flares of black wind.

The to-and-fro, the back and forth of furious wind and ferocious lightning was directed and conducted by their hands, the motions of their bodies as they themselves moved like the elements around them. They danced and dodged, spun and leapt, all the while wielding wind and lightning like weapons, using them to fight and hurt and maim and kill with blades of wind and swords of lightning.

A tornado came tearing across the ground in mere moments, shattering earth and ripping up everything in its wake. A bolt the shape of a thunderous dragon came crashing down from the chaotic wreath of circling, swirling clouds that was the inky heavens above. They collided in an almighty display of force, a mere slice of divine calamity brimming with twisting gales and flashing electricity thrust into stormy skies, sending beams of light down on their destruction.

A battle, awe-inspiring in scale, raged from the scattering of morn's rays to the charcoal descent of eve's sun. For hours unrecalled, wind and lightning waged war against each other, as unrelenting as their wielders. Wind wailed and shrieked and howled. Lightning roared and streaked and cried.

In his place of soundless, sightless, timeless darkness, he could hear the tumultuous events of the scroll echoing around him. Somehow, he could hear every breath swallowed in haste, every crack and scream of lightning and wind rushing past to meet violence with violence in the core of the page, along with every word shouted between them in a harsh, guttural language he did not know.

The sounds and the sights lasted until dawn returned anew.

The two men he saw in the renewing grey of warming light were torn and leaking ink in places, cupping scorched and sliced wounds as they themselves began to crumple inwards, exhausted beyond all measure. At the end of everything, it seemed as if they wished to sink into the ground on their hands and knees, demanding the earth to open up and accept them into the fold of endless slumber below. But it would not heed their call.

These two beings were children of wind and lightning. While wind dared to whisper and lightning deigned to crackle at their backs, on their shoulders and in their souls, earth would deny them rest just as it had so many times before.

And so he remembered what it was that stood behind them without truly standing, what was with them as long as they lived and breathed: wind and lightning.

But how could he have possibly forgotten something so important?

Yet he did. At the end of every scroll, every time he saw such a similar scene in this black world of his drenched to the core so utterly in ink, the memory and the understanding vanished in entirety as he refused to believe a fundamental truth of each and every scroll: the absolute futility of it all.

No matter their identities, their genders, their lives, their trials and tribulations, their conflicts and disagreements, their victories and defeats, even their very species, they were all children of wind and lightning ordained to carry the weight of cyclical fate on their backs again and again and again.

These children of storms and hurricanes bore the terrible responsibility of their progenitors on their shoulders, struggling and heaving and shaking beneath a strain unlike any other. They would carry it until their lives came to an end, in their clashes spread over a lifetime or in any of the unexpected twists and turns life took for better or worse.

But, even in their ends, there was no real end. There was no true conclusion.

In the end, their struggles and their deeds amounted to equal fistfuls of nothing. The cycle would continue long after they departed the world of the living. The forces of wind and lightning would never rest. They would fight again and again and again, until the end of time or the end of the world – whatever came first.

This time, and only this time, he acknowledged this truth he despised.

With the sound of rustling paper and the turning of pages, the scroll in the darkness before him rolled shut.

And then, for a few moments, the visions of ink inscribed by ancient hands on older scrolls did not come again. The watcher was given a moment. He was given time in a timeless world to think.

Wind and Lightning...

Had these two forces existed in rivalry, subsisted in singular spheres of acidic contention since the dawn of time? Was there ever a moment when they themselves had paused to think, just as he did now in the short space between painted dreams?

Were Wind and Lightning – theses two brothers of a kind he could scarcely understand – doomed by mere virtue of fate to war and rail against each other until the world around them collapsed under the strain of their undeniable power?

If this was true, then what of the others? Were Water and Fire forever shackled to eternal conflict, just as Wind and Lightning were chained until the bitter end? Did Earth live beyond this infernal cycle of opposition, or was it merely free to hate all its brethren for defiling its rising and falling body, daring to shred and drown and strike and scorch the lands forged from its molten soul?

The scrolls in the dark rustled and turned, and his sightless eyes were reaffixed to seas of flowing ink.

He had seen each scroll before. One by one, their shaped streams of ink trickled away before his eyes, the same events in black playing out again and again and again in front of him on a countless number of pages.

Now, they all came together at once.

An innumerable, immeasurable display of painted memory stretched out like an infinite castle's walls before him, reaching from one endless side of the ink abyss to the other in a river of moving page and parchment.

Something within the body he could not see clicked into place. Something deep and dark and primal became known and light and conscious, rising to the surface of the mind he was barely aware of amid the ocean of unfurled scrolls filling his unseen vision with impossible displays of power and force, raging wind and furious lightning.

Somehow, deep in his heart, he knew it would be different this time.

Somewhere, deep in his heart, he knew this cycle would not remain standing for unending perpetuity.

Someway, deep in his heart, he knew that there was something in this world that had not been there always, something that could help him put an end to what would not.

Eternity was coming to a close because of...

He knew the word. He could hear it floating along the surface of his mind, ever present and shouting its name to him from a distant shore across the greying waters with all its might. But it was so far away, being dragged through the ashen sand and into the obsidian jungle by chains of ink, by a world that refused the change, a nature that denied evolution as it sat atop its volcanic throne looking out over a darkening archipelago stranded amid black seas. And then it was captured, imprisoned beneath jagged mountains and spewing geysers of fire.

But it did not matter. It continued to shout out its lungs below the ground, to rattle its chains fastened to the heart of the world itself and strike at the black bars that kept it from brightening the dimming skies with every solitary iota of strength it could muster. The world wanted it gone, but it could not kill it. This was a beast that refused to be slain, as adamant that it would not die as the world was. After a thousand years of trying and failing, nature could hold it prisoner no longer.

The cage shook violently and shattered into nothingness deep below the ground. The captive within flowed from its shackles, permeating the earth and everything that lived on it.

It was all for the sake of eternity's end that the prisoner was free.

He remembered the word.

A clap of thunder in the dark made his bones shake. A starburst of brilliant blue flashing and streaking and crying in the endless sky of black above made him smile as he quaked. A rush of familiar wind in the deep made his trembling heart soar.

Time had returned to his world of ceaseless ink.

The black skies ruptured; the canvas of pure black began to split at the seams; the endless fortress of scrolls cracked and crumbled and disappeared in the explosions of blue that rocked the void to its empty core. The all-consuming darkness retreated in on itself at the coming of dawn.

In the growing glow, space linked astral hands with time once more. The distortion of everything he knew into something he could not was undone; frayed reality spiralled back into patterns that made sense again.

And it was all because of that one word, that one thing that let them break the chains of infinity.

It was all because of the one word he remembered: chakra.

The crumbling world that once more made sense fell apart beneath the coming of morn, and Naruto himself fell into the transient space between dreams and the waking world.


The passage he walked through the dark held voices. None were truly discernible. He could hear the voices, the tones, the kinds of people that spoke with them, but he could not hear their words.

He walked that dark passageway in a strange haze, treading the halfway line between dream and reality. The images he thought were floating in the murk could not possibly be real. The voices he heard had to be much the same. It was all a haze he stumbled through as he made his way down a path paved with nothing, not even dirt.

There was nothing real here and there, nothing of substance. It was just the halfway line after all. And then he crossed the halfway line's halfway line. A flicker of white appeared in the distance, and reality was but a few lumbering steps away.

The voices kept muttering, murmuring, whispering, shouting and talking. Conversation floated on rising and falling waves in the odd darkness, much how he imagined oceans did on a daily basis.

He saw those floating in the gloom as well. There were images of flowing water and frothing whitewash, vistas of glistening seas stained with blood, rage thrashing in hearts just as the waves did on the shore as ghostly crimson arms tore someone to pieces in front of a young boy...

How strange.

He saw a mountain, too. There was stone that flew into the sky, accompanied by marching legions of slow, heavy flames, and there was burning pain that filled the body of someone below it all. It was less clear than the ocean.

How strange.

He saw something like a sprawling town of white near the sea, but split apart by immense disaster of some kind. There was great sadness in the ruin, city and soul both. Again, it was less clear than its predecessor.

How strange.

Throughout, voices rose and fell, passing his ears by without so much as a thought given to them by him. But, almost at the end of it all, a mere step from the flickering white, he stopped when one of the murky murmurs suddenly became clear.

"I have watched over the world for some time. I knew they would wake once more. But I did not expect this. I did not expect the wind to choose you..."

There was a name. But it escaped him as dreams became the fleeting things he knew them to be once more.

Black became white. And then white became midnight blue.


There was a great difference between waking and being waked.

The former was to follow the paths laid out by the circadian rhythms of the body, to arrange life around them as so many did, and to expect to open eyes to the sight of morning. The latter was to throw cyclical nature out the window, to trust in an alarm or the hands of a human or the paws of an animal to stir the sleeper from their rest. That trust brought with it an element of uncertainty to sleep.

An alarm could malfunction, causing one to wake early or not at all. Emergencies or fears or many other human things could drive one to be waked by matters of urgency in the middle of the night. An animal's movement could jostle a bed in just the wrong way, startling the occupant to a sudden state of alarmed alertness.

There were many ways to wake up. Perhaps it was a number equal to the many things one could be woken by. Alongside them both sat the many different times to be woken at. But when all was said and done, it came down to choice, preference and habit.

The habit of Uzumaki Naruto when he first woke was not a usual one. His was to keep his eyes firmly closed and his ears wide open. In his mind, sound reigned supreme in the morning. It was a wondrous thing, yet it was a sad thing most often neglected for the sake of the sun. But there was only so much variance in light, only so much song the sun could sing. In the end, each morning melody played out the same beneath the sun. It rose at the dawn, only to set at the dusk, always tinted the same kinds of colours.

The sounds and the songs of wider nature were not so limited. Each morning, each evening, each day and each night was different. Different sounds, different songs, different birds, different insects all came together in a new way, a new disorganised, disjointed cacophony each and every day.

It was a wonderful thing to hear in the morning, so he kept his eyes closed when he woke up to soak in as much as he could. Far before his eyes woke to the world, his ears were up and moving.

That was the only reason his eyes didn't snap open when came to in the middle of a frenzied storm of sense.

Sound exploded in his ears with every slam of his heartbeat against his chest like booms tearing the sound barrier apart, every drip and drop of the leaky faucets down the hallway outside the door like thundering drums pounding at his head, every piercing blare ringing out from the machine nearby like a cold chisel chipping away at screaming stone, every single painfully shrill chirp of the crickets in the garden below the scarcely open window coming at him like the echoing cries of damned souls crawling out of whatever hell resided so far beneath the bed he felt frozen in.

The bed with sheets like rolling hills of sandpaper threading his skin into bloody ribbons, freezing teeth of too-cold air chewing at his face, claws of week-old sleep dragging in the cracks and crags of his eyelids, the vacant jostling of something metal lying sharp and jagged in his arm – it all stabbed into his body and his brain as he barely found the strength to even stir in the centre of all that ear-splitting cognizance.

His stomach churned and churned, bile rising and gurgling low at the back of his throat when the nauseating scent of thick, gooey sap dripping from the tiny cleft in an old bird's beak as it fed from a tree at such an ungodly hour, the gut-wrenching smell scarcely worse than the booming echoes of the drops of sap splattering on the bark again and again and again.

There was no thought, no time for anything other than pure terror as sound, touch and smell surged to the forefront of everything until it overwhelmed everything itself and sent him spiralling down into an agonising awareness that threatened to tear him apart.

It was all pouring in through his ears, his nose, his mouth; it filled his mind, his veins, his lungs. He was drowning in an ocean of liquid sound, choking under a glacier of frozen touch, burning away beneath magma-falls of molten smell.

He felt every single thing around him, living and breathing. He was so painfully, terrifyingly aware as they merely existed, because that mere existence – composed so thoroughly of their sounds and songs, the nature he held so dear to his heart – was splitting his skull in two.

There was no more room for anything inside. Yet it all of it still wanted in when he was full. It kept falling down on him, splashing and storming forward in a deluge of neural overload, swelling his head and mind, his body and soul until he was one more drop away from his entire being bursting under the pressure.

Anymore, and he would come apart.

Anymore, and sense would kill him.

To dream in the dark, stripped of time and lucid awareness for so long, only to wake up to screaming, ear-bleeding, mind-crushing reality – it was quite a way to go.

In all that time, he barely stirred, barely twitched his tortured fingers. His eyelids scarcely moved as darkness held his sight captive. His nose didn't twitch as scent assaulted it with every noxious, putrid weapon it had in its midnight arsenal. His ears were frozen stiff as monstrously amplified sounds of the ordinary kind ricocheted in the bony confines of his skull, almost ready to fracture from the sheer strain.

In all that time, his one wish, lying languished at the bottom of that fearfully vast mountain of agony and sense, was to hear the wind one more time before he was crushed into powder and dust by noise and pain and an awareness that stretched his mind to the breaking point with nothing but the truth of what was around him.

The truth of everything around him was... was... swept away by the wind.

Like a switch had been flipped on the anguish rolling through him, burning and freezing and drowning and bleeding, a rush of air flowed through him. And just like that, his mind was free. The pain was gone.

He could breathe.

For the first time in what felt like a meagre fraction of eternity, one day in a span of time that would live to see oceans dry and mountains crumble and build again and again, he could actually breathe.

And it was glorious.

But that frenzied tempest of sense and awareness wasn't gone. It had simply moved, trembling clouds of ferocious black still hovering near and circling above. Now, he rested on an uncomfortable bed at the eye of the storm, and bathed in the cleansing winds that washed his smouldering veins free of fire.

Kaze's presence continued to fall on him gently, a living breeze slipping through the scarce crack between sill and window. Peace came on the wind, and the rampant tension plaguing every scant centimetre of him left with it. He was tense no more.

For a moment long awaited, Naruto was left to breathe beneath the slightly irritating interruptions of some beeping device near his bedside, and the pointed twitching of something metal in his right arm. He ignored them both, turning his attention to the gentle flow of air through that narrow, narrow gap below the... window.

It took him a few seconds, mind processing rather slowly, to realise that the window wasn't actually open. It was shut. There was a thick, locked latch that held it tight, metal bars curled tightly around the window within the confines of a wooden disguise.

Yet he could still feel the window trickling through the internal structure, a tiny breeze swiftly traversing even smaller honeycomb tunnels of timber and steel before it rushed into the room, fresh particles smashing headlong into their damp and dusty brothers, excited wordless greetings filling the space between them.

It was that microscopic gust that carried so much with it. It carried so much sound and smell and touch and nature. It was that minuscule zephyr that had delivered unto him a furious cataclysm of impossible sensory detail that overwhelmed him without the mere possibility of struggle.

And it found him so easily through a path he thought removed to the wind. He did not know why.

He asked his question in the newfound silence of his mind: What's happening to me, Kaze?

Air coiled around him; images and sights came in the darkness of his eyes still shut firm, but not as they had before.

Never as they had before.

The backs of his eyelids were no longer black, but marked with... shape and line. It was shifting white and grey layered against an inconsistent background of swirling shadows. It was something he could make sense of, a picture he could build on.

It was the room around him, its dimensions and contents stripped of defining colour and texture beyond the flat and featureless, leaving him to look upon the purity of plain form and the clarity of blank outline. But it was more than recognisable, and he could see what was within it.

He could see the shape of the beeping machine next to him, linked to his left hand by a clamp that exhibited little pressure on his skin as it led a wire back to its home in the box-like form of the device. He could see the intricate proportions of the needle dug into the bloodstream of his right arm, affixed by flexible tubing to a bag full of liquid of some kind that allowed it into his body.

Without even moving his eyes, he was able to view all in the room around him with unparalleled ease, though the lines and the shapes shimmered and flickered before him. It was almost as if something rolled off them, distorting their composition in... waves.

Waves... soundwaves... echoes...

His eyes would have widened at his realisation had they been open. But now he knew what he was seeing inside his head. He was seeing sound, the echoes of the most indistinct vibration in the air as objects shivered on the smallest scale.

But that scale suddenly grew larger and larger until he heard a deep pulse of something run through the room, over his skin and into his own chest where he felt it resonate in time with a beating pulse of his own.

Heartbeats...

His heart beat in his chest. He could hear it, feel it with his hands, and ignore it as he pleased.

His focus in the skeletal image of the room he had built for himself snapped to the pulsating, quietly trembling outline of a human he had overlooked, so enraptured by lines and echoes and shapes and complete lack of colour in his little world of sound.

He could not ignore the heart he saw moving in their chest, nor could he ignore the steady, watchful pulse he heard beating against their breast.

With each resounding, pumping beat, echoes of a heart spread like heat over blank skin and clothes, sending a single wave of vibration just beyond the boundaries of their ghostly outline. He watched on, entranced in small part by the warming shivers reaching halfway across the room and fading gently.

His colourless gaze wandered up the human shape, traced bodily curves beneath thick, armoured clothing. Beneath a mask and a cloak, it was a woman. And she was watching him, the room, turning her head ever so slightly towards the window. More than that, tiny circles of noise spread from her face and from her eyes. He could see the waves when her sight shifted, just not to where it shifted.

Why was she here, in this unfamiliar room holding a bed, him, a beeping machine of some kind and a needle dripping liquid into his bloodstream?

Oh...

He was in a hospital, but the woman wasn't a nurse. Judging by the infinitesimally quiet sound of metal clinking against metal from pouches on her hips and a longer piece from her back, she was an armed kunoichi. She was an armed kunoichi standing in the room with him, watching, her arms held carefully and confidently by her sides. It was easy to both hear and see that she was a guard.

Ripples of sound along the wall that held the door to the room alerted him of... two more people outside, their hearts even and steady through the walls, just like the woman nearby. He could not see their outlines as easily as the first, but by height and build, they seemed to both be male. Going by their proximity to the door, he assumed they were guards as well.

Focus slipping inwards, his mind concentrated on other things.

This combination of hearing and sight was... strange, to put it briefly. It was more than strange, though he tried not to dwell on it in the current moment. He did not doubt that it was Kaze's doing, but it could wait. What he wanted to know, after the storm in his head had passed, was why he was in a hospital.

His memory was blurry and distant at best, shrouded in a thick layer of misty dreams and distorted visions. His mind was still recovering from a sensory beating of immense proportions. But there were people nearby.

Outside the door, walking the hallways, conversing amongst themselves in the break rooms down below, drinking tiredly from mugs, washing blood and grime from hands, checking through lists and making notes in files – there were people in the hospital, staff and patient alike he could hear through the walls and the floor. Someone had to know what had happened to bring him here.

If they didn't know, then there were the guards. There were the two outside the door and the two...

... And the two in the room with me.

He hadn't felt it, seen or heard it at first. He had been far too distracted, entranced and enthralled by a newborn facet of sense playing out before closed eyes. But there was someone else in the room with him, another heartbeat echoing off the walls in almost total silence. He could not identify its source, not within the normal dimensions of the room he found himself in.

And it irritated him. Somewhere deep down, he found a growing speck of annoyance with that someone he could hear but couldn't see. He searched the room, scoured it up and down across the space and the shape and the line, all the dimensions he could imagine that existed within this solitary room. But he found nothing.

The heart continued to beat, driving waves through the room from a direction he could not discern, from a point in space he could not seem to recognise with this newfound insight of his. He knew they were here. It was just a question of where...

And then he felt it, stronger than before.

The window...

His focus snapped to that far left, past the woman and her weapons, past the glass and lock that was not locked to the wind. Beyond it, in the darkness, someone waited, their heart daring to beat like a war drum, taunting him to find them. It was just a question of where...

The wall...

It was thicker there because it led to the outside, a wall that faced nature. Sound did not travel well through the material. But that did not mean it was denied passage entirely. Everything was porous, if only to the slightest degree. Air moved through the tiniest cracks, the smallest holes in a surface. The air carried sound, the beating pulses of hearts.

Heartbeats...

He felt it stronger still.

And he felt it there!

His eyes snapped open. Colour collided with form, tinted and tempered with midnight blue. It was strange to readjust to. But then he began moving.

He moved from the bed. He did not know why. The air moved with him. He did not know why. But before he had time to pose his questions to any who would listen, his left arm reached to the windowed wall of its own accord, his hand raised and fingers splayed wide.

The motion of his arm beckoned forth the wind. The wind came.

It was not the wind he knew.

The air rippled before his hand, building and squeezing and looping and coiling until it finally had enough and wanted release from the bonds of flesh that held it firmly to the earth. A tangled accumulation of white and grey wanted release from his palm. It wanted out. It wanted out. It wanted out.

Let go.

An unshapen mass of something came loose from his hand with a bitter shriek.

The world froze, and he heard sounds.

The crickets stopped chirping. The people below stopped moving. The metal of drawn weapons stopped clanking. The bird drinking sap from a tree at an ungodly hour took flight in fear.

Grey lines roared through the room, and fangs of ice chewed at the limb that dared it forward. Deep slashes swept up his arm in an instant spiral, one turning loop of red thrown out into the space by unseeable razors. Blood on the tempest's breeze spattered and streaked, just as the entire room was blasted into chaotic disarray with a tormented screech of freezing winds.

He hit the floor. Something sharp and pointed tore a chunk of flesh free from his right arm. Pain ravaged his body and pounded at his head. And then he saw the wall.

Past overturned machines slammed into the groaning floor, something had ripped the exterior wall apart, a jagged wound carved up and down through a veneer of splintered wood and a barrier of ruptured brick. The window had disappeared, the remnants of wall were leaning perilously out into the chilled night, and he was lying in front of an upturned bed, gazing at it all beneath the far-flung moonlight pouring in through a far-gone divide.

It was devastation, cold and simple.

And then it began to slip away.

There was furious movement, sandalled feet hurrying past the streams of midnight moon filtering through nothing but open air let in by an opened wall.

Animal masks and armoured hands descended upon him, tapping him in places and checking things around him. Then voices came, unheard at first but eventually crossing the sea of ringing that suddenly flooded his ears.

"Can you hear me?"

He did his best to nod to whoever spoke. But it was difficult when his arms kept leaking so much red onto the broken floor and into the sterile white of his hospital gown.

"Hey! Stay with me, kid!"

But the voice was getting quieter, even as it came in the form of shouts and heated breath against the cusp of his ear.

"Come on! Get someone in here now!"

And it was getting darker. It was already dark outside, now that he finally opened his eyes to a world of colour, but it was getting even darker. It was like his vision was... fading. So, too, was sound.

More shouts filled the air as running filled the halls. Panicked tones echoed off the remaining walls but fell on deafening ears while the world shifted away from him.

Sound went first. Sight went second. The heavy heartbeats he felt pulsing in the air around him went last.

It was dark again.

At least there were no scrolls this time.