From the Nexus
Scroll 62; Memory N513
Category: Archive/Forge/Depths/Nexus/Zenith
We are intertwined beings.
The simplest manner that the Five may sustain us is by sustaining souls. When the physical form perishes, the soul is made to linger, and conjoined with another. One great shard links each soul. There are five great shards, five Chosen.
We are beings made replete with memory.
And I, the sixty-second Chosen of Lightning, can remember everything, for I was there. Their memories are our memories. Their souls are our soul. Our soul is Lightning, and our place of memory is the Nexus.
It will remain as such for many cycles to come.
For the one who remembers this next, know that I am sorry for what I have done.
The forest had a hierarchy of sorts. A food chain, he believed it was called, was something that environments that harboured living things all possessed.
At the very bottom, was plant life – plants did not hunt, nor did more than a few specific examples kill other things as a source of food. Plants merely sat still, soaked sun, and did their best to proliferate. As sunlight was not particularly difficult to come by, plants were the most plentiful of all things in the forest.
Above the plants was what ate the plants – herbivores, being the appropriate term. They fed on the largest source of food available to them, whether it was leaves or roots or fruits or flowers or something that was potentially lethal to one species but surprisingly beneficial to another. Again, they did their best to proliferate, and with the second largest source of energy, their numbers were high, but less than plants.
Then there were the predators, the hunters, the carnivores, the meat-eaters. They were those that shed lifeblood beyond sap and pollen to live, feasting on the living and the breathing and the trembling with teeth and claws and traps and more. Their place at the peak, the last link of the chain, was a bloody one. Their source of food was third, so their numbers were fewer, and competition between species caused diminishing populations all around.
Violence for the sake of violence was needless. But violence for the sake of life was necessary. As he saw it, life, no matter its form, merely consumed itself, bottom to top. It wished to develop, so it had no choice but to swallow its own limbs and grow new ones in their places, with different appendages and different functions.
Renewal was a harsh thing.
Well, renewal was harsh unless one was sentient. Then that was just a whole other hurricane of confusing dynamics and strange logistical problems wrapped up with emotion, morals, ethics and a great many things he had no real knowledge of beyond words and guesses.
This strangeness applied very much to humans, but it also applied to a particular group of the forest's denizens. By virtue of not only strength and power, but cunning, cleverness, and the tricky advantage for some that was called chakra, they did not stand at the peak of the forest food chain.
They stood on another mountain altogether.
Though, it was hard at times to understand why.
"Can you please get off my face?" Naruto's words tumbled out of his mouth awkwardly, tongue halfway stuck between the little bit of space between his teeth and the monkey's butt a bare centimetre from his face.
Though he couldn't see the action, he heard and felt the tiny shifts of muscle and flesh in the hairy arms and legs locked tightly around the back of his skull as the little monkey that couldn't even reach his knees from the ground shook its head.
Naruto took in air through his nose, trying to ignore the potent scent of primate wafting into his nostrils with reckless abandon. "Please?"
Again, the little monkey shook its head.
"I'll scratch you behind the ears?"
He received one more shake of the head.
"I'll get you a... banana?"
He got a skull-splitting shriek into his ear this time.
"Okay, okay! You don't like bananas, I get it." Even though that somehow goes against every preconceived notion I've ever had about monkeys ever. "How about you just pick stuff out of my hair?"
He sighed in relief at the sudden lack of monkey butt in his face as he finally felt the little monkey nod his head and crawl up to sit in his hair and pick the edible bits and pieces out that stuck around when he didn't wash for the larger part of a month.
And then he heard the dry curling of Asuma's lips a metre or so away.
"Don't you say it, sensei."
Asuma's grin widened. "Naruto..."
"Don't you dare say it, sensei."
His wiseass smile turned almost predatory. "What's with all this –"
"Don't say it!"
"– monkeying around?"
Naruto's gaze swam slowly to the ground as he sighed. "You said it. Again."
Asuma sat down just beside him, the usual stink of smouldering cigarettes not far behind. "That's because I won. Again. And you know damn well that it's one of the two things I say after I win. Remember what the other is?"
"'Thanks for choosing Aerial Adventures with Sarutobi Asuma – kicking your ass sky-high, twenty-four years and counting'," Naruto recounted with a long overdue groan, burying his face in his palms and nearly tossing the little monkey on his head across the thick, tangled floor of woven wood and vines.
"Damn straight," Asuma half-laughed, half-coughed on the sudden rise of thick smoke from some metres away. "Guess they're getting the bonfire started early tonight."
"Yeah," Naruto nodded, careful not to send the monkey perched on his head – rather occupied with pulling dirt and insects loose of his matted mess of blond hair and spikes – bouncing over the platform of wood and vines and straight into the big fire at the centre of the village in the trees that was soon to be roaring high into the evening sky. That would not earn him many points with the locals.
And he rather liked the locals, save for the occasional monkey butt he got shoved in his face.
Spread across the platforms and huts carved from rough and knotted wood, the strangely wide-open meeting places of strangled branches and vines, and the ancient halls that filled the treetops with daily song and evening oration, there were a great number of them. He could count them if he so desired, just from the heartbeats he heard all around him through the vines, the leaves, the bark and the wood. Each was a pulse that became a wave that rode on the air, each a telltale signature of time and place, stress and age, truth and peace. Sitting still before the growing flames, feeling the whisper of whirls and eddies in the night breeze, hearing the hearts of hundreds, he found himself at the centre of a community he had come to know quite well.
With an upwards glance at the young chimp on his head, rifling through his hair for edible things fleeced from the forest floor, he entertained the notion that perhaps he knew it too well. If the smell of monkey butt was familiar by this point, he'd spent far too much time in the forest.
But too long a time or not, he knew this place now. He knew the home of the Sarutobi.
The Sarutobi were an old clan, and far before the idea of Konoha was ever conceived, they had come to live in this forest alongside its first inhabitants: the extended tribe of apes, monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas and all sorts of primates that went by the same name. When the Sarutobi clan had made the journey to Konoha, the Sarutobi tribe had stayed behind in their ancestral forest. With the sudden absence of the clan came a kind of uncoupling, a loosening of an intimate, almost symbiotic relationship between the clan and the tribe. The Sarutobi that had forever been one became two, and yet they remained linked.
A rite of passage for those of the Sarutobi clan was to venture to their ancient home and spend time, both living and surviving, with the tribe. The young men and women who journeyed forth learned of their roots among the roots, learned of their past written in their halls of history, and carried it with them into their future. It was a means of maintaining the still deep connection between clan and tribe, though it was of course far more symbolic in nature than the conventional permanency of the blood-written Sarutobi summoning contract.
Of course, despite how poetic and meaningful it all sounded, he learned most of this in extremely offhanded conversation with Asuma-sensei, spoken in chewed-up, smoggy words between mouthfuls of food and the occasional lungful of smoke. Naruto couldn't help but find it odd that he talked about the long and illustrious history of his clan just because it was something to talk about.
And then there were the long lulls like now, when Asuma-sensei said nothing, he said nothing, and they were perfectly comfortable watching the fire rise higher, seeing primates of all shapes and sizes drop and climb into view from above and below around the lowered pit of stone and clay in the centre of this arena-like space up in the trees, and feeling the little monkey on top of his head still rooting around at the roots of his hair for something else to eat. Other than the distracting scent of monkey butt still lurking unwanted in his nasal cavities, it wasn't all that bad.
But then he remembered what sort of gathering this was, what it was about to become, and despite its beginnings and preparations seemingly the same as all the other celebrations, festivals and trivialities held in his time in their midst, he forced his own thoughts away from such trivialities and focused on what was important: the coming funeral.
A great wooden container – quite like a bucket or a bath, but larger than both combined a few times over – was lowered over the fire by ropes and pulleys hidden in the branches. Water rushed out. Steam rose up with a hiss as loud as the crackling flames and the breaking of burning wood into splinters and embers. Water not consumed by the heat was left to flow outwards, into the floor made of the canopy, branches and brambles and boughs woven with vines and wood and age-old care and tradition.
The drenched, blackened logs were slowly removed as the gathered began to settle into stillness, and the pit of fire, their witness and host to celebration, was left empty. A gaping pit of decades-charred clay and dust that smelt strongly of the forest around was what remained.
It was then that, from deeper in the village, where the homes and houses of the tribe lay, drums sounded. He listened briefly with intensity, and then relaxed his senses. He knew where they were, what they carried, and what they brought.
Two in front and two at the rear of the procession wielded instruments of taut and worn animal skins, slamming at them with enormous palms and enormous practice. The resonance of their taps carried far and wide, an announcement and a message louder than any shout, call or siren.
The four at the heart hefted what he would have first described as a litter of woven wood, but it lacked a throne. It was the domain of one perhaps worthy of such nobility, yet it did not carry the trappings of such. It was simple, without ornament, but with great purpose.
Finally, between the first two ceremonial drummers and walking before the carriers, a leader walked tall.
Naruto, along with the rest of the gathered, waited as the drums grew louder and the silent marchers drew nearer.
They entered the meeting place from the largest entrance, an ornate gateway of carved scrollwork and hewn history. The bearers with a litter meant for more than royalty, the drummers with their slow tattoo of tribal melancholy, and their leader appeared from the gloom of a walkway of woven wood and vines as wide and thick as any road.
The meeting place – a vaguely hexagonal space suspended in the trees, sporting three tiers of flat seating, divided in the centre by the main road's exit and entrance and facing the fire pit at the centre – was a space meant for many things. It had held festivals, feasts, revelries, theatres, artworks, meetings and grand moments of entertainment – all things that bonded this community, already so very tightly knit, together.
On that same scale, drifting between celebration and sadness, funerals held a place in the order of things.
It was only natural, but not for the beasts in the plains, or the birds in the sky, or the fish in the sea. Their passing was held as a failure to the rest of their kind. Their duty was to grow, to feed, and to reproduce; they were to spread their kind as widely as they could. If they died, they were not strong enough.
But for a shinobi to fall only to the ticking hands of time? Then he had been strong enough.
Strong enough to outlive all his friends, Naruto reflected, right before he opened his eyes at the final beat of the drummers, the last thudding step of the bearers, and the almighty presence of the leader of all those gathered in silence.
Dark skin the tone of charcoal, flowing white fur that spoke of experienced years, the rippling muscled bearing that supported it all, and the hunted pelt of a legendary tiger worn over the white-trimmed mesh and the black cloth below – if he had been standing sentinel in the glowing light and long shadows of the once-roaring bonfire, the Monkey King Enma would have been a fearsome sight indeed. But, with the fire gone, and the flames left now to dwindle, crackling and sputtering before grave eyes, Naruto recalled it for a moment from memory, and compared it to the solemn, contemplative being before him.
He did not look so much a beastly warrior as he did a sober mourner, straight-faced and serious in the relative darkness. It was appropriate for what he knew was next.
Thick bundles of dry twigs and fallen branches were placed neatly in a crossing pattern in the pit. As the thick dust – a substance of wooden shavings and a strange sap he knew from unfortunate experience that ignited far too readily – was scattered by the last of those preparing the pit in the quiet, he knew fire would spread fast.
The litter was placed above the precisely laid fuel, and Naruto saw the body with his eyes, not his ears.
It was tradition, that when the litter was laid the body remained as it had in life.
The man had been old, his thinning hair white like snow, his chin grey like steel, his skin weathered like stone. His exterior had been hard, fierce; a fighter's physique to the end, but his eyes of mottled, rippled brown had betrayed a tired tenderness when Naruto had looked his way in his times in the village, when he had been told stories by a mind still intact, a man still lucid. But now, laid against the wood, those eyes were closed, his hair was damp, his chin was moist, and his skin glistened with the same kind of liquid bonded to the dust thrown like incense.
Naruto could not help the sadness that embraced him at the sight.
And then Enma began to inhale, a slow, powerful sound that filled the silence as easily as wind filled the world. But breath leapt from lung to lung like fire, a conflagration that swept over the mourners as they inhaled together in a vast wave of resounding echoes and primal heartbeats.
Naruto did the same, joined in the expanse of the exhaled breeze that came rushing forth, a part of all he felt and saw.
Across from him, Asuma-sensei rose silently and descended the steps to his place near the pit, his walk firm and his gaze resolute. Enma nodded once in his direction, and his teacher sat cross-legged opposite where Enma stood.
The first part of the ceremony had concluded. The second began when Enma clapped his hands together, fingers skyward, palms pressed. The sound called out, loud and long, fading quickly into the forest. Enma held firm, eyes shut, hands clasped in silent prayer and quiet recollection.
The action was repeated again and again through the meeting place. Claps rang out one by one, a slow, stilted applause as primates of incredible variance all bowed their heads in prayer. Naruto replicated the motion, clapping his hands and bowing his head.
But he did not know what to pray for. He hoped his respectful silence would suffice.
In the quiet, his mind wandered. It was what he did, what he had done since his life had begun. His senses stretched, his mind broadened, and he became open to the world, taking in, absorbing, recording, inscribing. Wind guided his thoughts like it had guided his first breaths, his first steps, his first words. In the force that had forged him, he found rest as those around him, in this forest founded on earth and fire, prayed.
He had wondered on the nature of the Sarutobi tribe, their association with fire and earth despite their home in deepest forest. It seemed strange and opposed at first, but when he had asked his questions, the answer came simply: home. The ancient forest that spread like a sea rested within the embracing expanse of an older volcano, a great earth-borne beast the size of a nation slumbering and dormant for untold millennia. The connection to fire and earth came from below.
There were places in the forest that smelt strongly of smoke, steam and sulphur, places where the ground beneath the uninterrupted centuries of deadfall and decay was still dry, arid and cracked, and where magma had once rumbled and flowed far below. The deadly denizens of the forest tended to avoid such locales, treading carefully in wide circles around it, where the heavy paw-prints of cats much larger than him made painstaking trails and efforts to evade the centuries-old scents of hellfire and brimstone.
He remembered those connections to earth, to flame, to forest, and it was of this the King of Monkeys spoke. It was there he received his answer.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It is here we begin, and it here we end. We rise up from the dusty ground, live among the trees, and burn bright as lights in the dark. But all flame must one day dwindle, and all must one day return to ash and dust. With the fire of a beloved soul fading to embers, we now return his dust and ashes to the forest from whence he came."
At the foot of the pit, Asuma made three hand seals and exhaled.
The funeral pyre erupted in flames.
Enma's eyes closed firm. "And, at the last, he returns to the soil on a fiery tide."
The silence of the gathered, the quiet that had swamped the gathering as Enma spoke, ensued, a calm gently disturbed by the sounds of crackling flesh and burning wood beginning their slow descent back to ash and dust. Naruto kept his eyes closed, but saw everything clearly in the wind of his mind's eye. He saw the first blossoms of smoke rise into the air, watched the trails snake away as the fire grew, and observed the steady decay of the remains within.
The fire chipped away at what was left, but without the forceful violence of a predator's teeth, rending meat from a corpse. The fire's heat softened flesh, and removed it piece by piece as the heat grew with every passing moment. Like water and waves on the shore, the tide of fire of which Enma told swept what remained of this mortal shell away like ashen sand, little flecks of black rising in the pillar of flame to swirl away as embers.
Naruto hummed almost inaudibly to himself and to Kaze when he heard the whisper of wind from the trees against his ear. He nodded slowly at the truth unknown to those around him yet suddenly known to him: he was reminded of water when he looked at fire because they were connected.
He had always known that, at a baser, instinctive level. It was a deep, primal assumption to him. While his world was wind, it was occupied by other things. He did not know them intimately, but he knew of them enough to see and hear what others could not. And he heard their connection.
The link between the turning tide and the fading flame.
They... had yet to come, yet to wake. But they would, he hoped.
And, perhaps without even knowing it, the Sarutobi prayed for the same thing.
Seeing the embers rise up and scatter on the wind, Naruto could see why they found hope in the flames.
The fire crackled in the cave. The smell of smoked skin and seared meat was strong. The boar was coming along nicely.
"Something satisfying about cooking what you caught yourself, isn't there, Sasuke?"
Sasuke grunted his affirmation. Kakashi was right.
Indeed, there was a kind of instinctual pride in seeing a hunted prize turning over an open flame, something deeply satisfying in the image that Sasuke was vaguely aware of between the growls of his stomach and the returning heat in his cold, cold hands.
Kakashi was right. Again. He hated it when Kakashi was right. He also hated when Kakashi was bound to profit off of his work.
It had taken him a very long time to find one. And then he had had to drag it through the snow, right back to a cave full of the smug, smiling eye of his sensei, and the dwindling scents of a cooked meal and a pack of hounds he had just missed. Either Kakashi was the most coincidence-prone man in existence, or his teacher was just an ass who enjoyed tormenting him to no end.
Of course, the fire had been roaring when he'd dragged the boar in. Then when he'd looked away for one second, the fire was dead, the ashes were scattered, and the remaining dry wood was drenched and already freezing.
He had his answer.
"I'll take that as a yes." Kakashi's closed eye curved into a crescent.
Sasuke grunted again. Kakashi was an ass, but he was an ass with a plan.
Lessons could be taught in many, many ways. The idea of the Academy, where learning was structured and curtailed to subjects and intertwined and coalesced in examinations, came to mind. It was slow, perhaps, but ultimately thorough. It was a foundation, but he needed more than a foundation and he needed it quickly.
He remembered the strangely cheery glint in Kakashi's eye when they had first arrived. "Easiest way to learn is when your life is on the line."
And then Kakashi began pelting him with kunai and shuriken and set a pack of dogs after him for the next six hours in a snowy wilderness he barely knew how to navigate. That was just the first day.
Survival training at the Academy was to spend a few days without comfort, looking for clean water, foraging for food, camping in the forest, rubbing sticks for a fire. They didn't simulate the conditions of hostile territory until the third year.
But that wouldn't compare in the slightest to being hunted like an animal in an icy wasteland.
The first days had been the hardest, hungry and cold, equipped but unused to heavier, clumsy clothing that made it difficult to do anything. But the strangest part was the solitude. His electrical sense alerted him to life – the spark everything carried deep inside – but he did not feel anything as he wandered the frozen forests and the snowy plains beyond Raikou's murmurs. It was empty, desolate.
And then, when the unending quiet was almost getting to him, Kakashi would remind him of the hunt with brandished steel and bared fangs. The pursuits were sporadic, unpredictable, and dangerous, more than enough to leave him bruised and bleeding. The fact they came unannounced, sometimes no more than a few minutes apart, didn't help the paranoia.
Between hunting for sparse food, drinking snowmelt, getting so little sleep, having his shelter burnt to cinders or drowned in frozen-over water or blocked by a barrier of earth he could not break, he was always on the move, always running, always hiding, always fighting. He was so tired but still in so much danger of broken bones and starvation, bleeding stilled only by the cold he felt clinging to him day after day.
That was the first month.
It had been... it had been...
Come to think of it, he didn't know. He'd stopped counting some time ago and never started again.
"Kakashi."
Across the dry dirt and the crackling flames, Kakashi didn't look up from his book, the orange thing he kept in one of the chest pockets of his jounin jacket. "Question, Sasuke?"
"How long have we been here?"
Kakashi turned a page. "A few months. Why the sudden interest?"
"Just remembering when I got here," Sasuke said. There was no reason in hiding the obvious things from Kakashi. As soon as his teacher caught wind of something obscured, he was like a dog with a bone. Or Bull after him. Or Pakkun leading the charge on his scent trail, with Bisuke, Shiba, Urushi, Akino, Uuhei and Guruko trailing behind him when they all tried to run him down on the plains. Of course, the only times in that first month he managed to keep properly ahead was in the trees, and that'd only been twice.
Sasuke shook his head. The memory of those first chases, when the blood was pumping and he hadn't wanted teeth in his ankles and through his pant leg, was still quite vivid.
"Those were the days," Kakashi said, a smug smile in his voice. "I mean, I can still remember when all you could do was run away. Oh, where did that little scamp go?"
"He froze to death in the first week," Sasuke snorted.
Kakashi chuckled. "True. At least this one knows how his chakra works."
"Hey," Sasuke grumbled, "I only tried a Katon jutsu out of reflex."
"And I'm sure that wonderfully stunned look on your face was reflex, too."
"Then why did you take out your damn Sharingan to memorise it if it was going to show up again?"
Kakashi gave a mock gasp, a hand over his masked mouth. "I take offence at that. I would never use it for such childish things."
"You showed me a photo-real sketch you made of it after you punched me into the snow."
Kakashi's exposed eye flipped into a smile. "I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Sure," Sasuke said, "just like you didn't know anything about Itachi."
He blinked.
What... what did I just say?
Kakashi's eye snapped open, and the book was gone. "Sasuke."
Suddenly his face felt tight, his muscles tense as he sat sharply upright, his eyes set uncomfortably firm in his skull.
What am I doing?
"We talked about this," Kakashi said slowly, carefully, like he was stepping through snow mined with explosive tags. He knew what that was like, the caution, the paranoia, and the danger. "I didn't know what was going to happen. None of us did. It was just –"
"Just what?"
He didn't know why he was swiftly on his feet, why he felt so on edge as he stared through the fire, why words kept coming.
"Just what, Kakashi? A tragedy? A disaster? A mistake?"
"Sasuke, it was –"
"An accident? Murder? A massacre? Genocide?"
"Sasuke, you need to –"
"NO!"
Thunder rang in his ears, and Kakashi covered his.
"You can't answer me, because what the hell do you know about it?"
Hands drifting down, Kakashi said nothing, did nothing as the fire crackled, as Sasuke stared through the embers with rage from nowhere, directed at the only other thing in the cave that wasn't a roasting corpse.
"What have you had taken from you?"
He knew, somewhere distant at the back of his head and far from his anger, that something had been taken from Kakashi, but the words still spilled from his mouth in a toxic rush.
"What's kept you awake night after night? What have you had replay in your head day after day whether you wanted to or not?"
He clenched his fists, sparks leaking from the gaps in his fingers like water, and his anger refused to subside as he spat words into the fire.
"What's given you nightmares for weeks on end? What's made you wake up covered in sweat and breathless, so scared that the blood you saw was still there? What made you realise when you see it in your dreams, in your every waking thought again and again that you can't do a damn thing to stop it?"
His fists uncurled, his muscles uncoiled, the sparks stopped flowing, and he was so tired. His breath was suddenly short and shallow and his last stupid, inane, noxious words came out in rasps.
"What made you realise... you weren't strong enough?"
And then he felt the anger go as quickly as it had come, replaced by an overwhelming desire to leave.
"I... I..."
He couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't think of anything to do, to justify, to defend, to try and make sense of any of this. So he did what the lessons of survival Kakashi had pounded into his thick skull told him to: retreat and reassess.
He grabbed hold of his chakra, slowed the world to a crawl, and ran.
The fire roared high; the crowd roared higher.
Drums were beating, primates were raging, and Naruto was somewhere in the middle of all the noise, slipping through the gaps in the thrashing mess of flying limbs and fur that surrounded him, trying to find something to eat between all the insanity of Sarutobi celebration. He'd been caught up in a festival for the passing of the seasons the first time he came to the village in the trees, but that had nothing on a festival for life.
Death was a time for reflection. That didn't mean it had to be solemn. They reflected with noise, with food, with fire, with music, with dancing, with all the things they loved in the world that the one who had passed had loved just as much.
It was tradition not to mention the name aloud on the first day, but the uproar in the village screamed to the highest heavens everything about the man save that one thing, a cry of love for the departed.
It really was a beautiful thing. He just wished it wasn't so damn loud.
Hands over his ears for the umpteenth time as a keening shriek from a particularly loud baboon cut the air, Naruto hopped from clear space to clear space, making headway in openings that existed only for a moment before destruction and rebirth took place a moment later. The flailing arms and legs of the crowd made passage difficult, but it was either that or jump from head to head to escape the crowd.
Naruto didn't like being impolite.
It took him a few good minutes, but Naruto finally made it to a table laden with fruits and meats and other things gathered from the forest. Food was abundant in the trees; a true bounty if one knew where to look. Luckily – or unluckily, perhaps – he had come to know the forest well, so he recognised some of what was on offer. Of course, a few of the more exotic things escaped him.
For instance, he really didn't understand how a fruit that naturally secreted poison to the touch was supposed to be eaten, or even if it was supposed to be eaten. That just seemed like plain idiocy to him.
But he ignored it, snagged a few things to fill his begrudging belly, and searched out a spot to sit for awhile. The meeting place was packed, but it truly was immense. High at the furthest row, he found some space and sat.
"Naruto, there you are."
And he somehow managed to find himself next to Asuma-sensei.
"Greetings, young one."
And he managed to find himself next to Enma, too. That was odd.
He looked over to the two of them, Asuma leaning with hands on knees, Enma straight-backed and tall, and smiled slightly. "Hello, Enma-sama, Asuma-sensei. This is quite a celebration. Are funerals always like this?"
Asuma looked ready to say something, but Enma's deep, powerful voice cut through.
"Similar, yes, but they are rarely so extensive. It is not often one of the clan passes in his sleep, so it is important that we mark this occasion in our minds. Few pass from this world with peace."
Slicing winds tore at the sky. Lightning clawed at the ground. The earth shook, and they knew no more as the heavens abandoned them.
"Yeah," Naruto said. From the ones his mistake some time ago cost, he knew that to be true.
A hand grasped his shoulder, and Asuma-sensei gave him a wistful smile. "It's alright, kid."
"My apologies, young one," Enma said, eyes closed and head inclined towards him. "I spoke without consideration."
He'd spoken with Enma before, when he had visited the village with Asuma-sensei after several weeks of surviving the forest, for rest and slightly more formal education than his teacher's love of ambushes and paranoia-inducing attacks that taught him how to go without sleep for days at a time and traverse the unpredictable environs of a largely vertical landscape without the use – or a need – of conventional chakra. He'd spoken somewhat of the event that had resulted in his arrival in Enma's lands, in the ensuing tragedy he had played no small part in. The Monkey King had shared his condolences.
"No need, Enma-sama," Naruto said with a bright grin. "I'm fine, but maybe you could answer a question for me."
"Oh?" One of Enma's immense eyebrows quirked upwards, and his gaze slid to Asuma. "And Saru's youngster was unable to help you?"
"Enma-sama," Asuma groaned. "I'm not twelve anymore."
Enma laughed. "Ha! You'll always be a youngster to me, my boy. I do have a century-and-a-half on you."
"Well, that just about answer my question," Naruto smiled. "I just wanted to know how old you are."
"Why the curiosity?" Asuma asked, after he'd finished grumbling.
Naruto looked up slightly, tilted his head as he considered the words he needed, drawing a few from the deeper recesses, along with some concepts from... somewhere. "Well, K – I mean, he was in his nineties when he passed, and he went in his sleep from natural causes. But he was a Sarutobi. If Enma-sama is already significantly older, it means he and the rest of the Sarutobi tribe are strong down to the biological level, probably because they evolved in such a harsh environment. Just because of that difference, it means the Sarutobi clan didn't come together with the tribe until sometime after that development. The timeline of your history I've seen is lengthy compared to the human lifespan, but it only begins just before the clan met with the tribe. Again, it indicates that the changes for the tribe took many more centuries than both have coexisted for."
Asuma stared at him.
"What?" he said, "I find this stuff interesting."
Asuma blinked a few times. "Well, no shit, but still. I didn't realise you knew anything about that sort of stuff. Or why you'd be interested in it. Or why you even know anything about that to begin with."
"We do have places of learning here, Asuma," Enma said, stroking his chin thoughtfully.
That was true. They had books, and he had spent time reading when he wasn't in Asuma-sensei's little slice of pre-existing hell, but that wasn't the main source of his knowledge.
"Yeah, I just didn't realise how much time I'd been giving you," Asuma chuckled. "If you had so much time to read, I probably could've kept you in the forest for a bit longer."
Naruto groaned. "I can always trust you to threaten me when I need it, sensei."
"I try, Naruto," Asuma grinned broadly.
Enma cleared his throat. "As interesting as your banter is, young ones, Naruto does raise a point I had not considered about the origins of our clan. You would do well to commend him on such extensive thought at such a tender age, Asuma. The thoughts of youth are long thoughts, but few so young are capable of finding clarity therein."
"Right," Asuma nodded slowly. "Good job, kid, on the, uh, thinking."
Naruto grinned at his sensei. "Thanks."
Conversations quickly resumed between the leader of the tribe and the heir to the clan, on matters concerning preparations for departures, on the state of the Sarutobi in Konoha, on the conditions of the forest as a whole, and he soon found himself lost in thought, pondering the complexities of his own condition.
His thoughts turned to the funeral, the pyre that Asuma-sensei had set alight, the send-off they gave their blessed elder.
He remembered the man, few and fleeting as those memories were. He was old, he was wise, he was kind, and he died of natural causes. His life had reached its natural end, and life left him in his sleep. He had departed from this mortal coil in peace.
It was a far rarer thing than he had first thought.
Of the moments that stood strong among this village bound strongly to the trees, the forest, the ancient roots that spread into basalt and igneous earth for seeming eternity, his stories of war stooped weak yet powerful, held fragile and tragic yet brutal and potent amid Naruto's gathered recollections. They were there simply because war had been there when nothing else was, and it dominated the younger years of the man's life.
The First, the Second, and the first months of the Third – he had seen much. While he had been able to describe grand battles, the continuous skirmishes clashes of hundreds in ruined fields of fire and blood, and the clashes between the titans of the shinobi world, duels between two with the power of armies that escalated into a conflict beyond the scope of mere words, the old man spoke of these without the reverent tone Naruto had heard from teachers and instructors in Konoha, the hushed quality of voices when they talked of these blooded deeds as magnificent, as awesome, hallowed things, and even the slight one-sided essence of the text in the books they read. The old man did not talk of war like he missed it. He sounded as if he was glad to be rid of it. And Naruto could understand that even a little, thanks to the old man's words on the nature of the battlefield.
At the asking of his question, his sudden smile was sad and knowing, yet wishing it was neither. "It's hell, kid. And hell never leaves you."
Those words stuck with him, and carried over to dreams... or perhaps something that was not.
In sleep, when he had slumbered in the village in the branches or on a bed of loose leaves with rest held so weakly by his tired hands, he had wandered his way back... there.
He did not quite have a name for it, not yet at least. At first, there had been so little within to name it for save ink. But he did not think that was enough to warrant a proper name. So, when he found himself in that dream of written, painted darkness once more, he had no real name for it. That was the case, until he reached out his hand and felt something beneath his fingers. He was no longer so detached from his body, his sense of self no longer so twisted and distorted. He was still him.
In the darkness, his eyes could make out vague things in the shadows, and his ears told him there was a space around him. There was sight and there was sound, but it was not quite what he knew. Time was still not what he knew, so space bent to its whims.
The space around him was a room with definable limits, no matter how massive in size it truly was. It was made of ancient stone. But it did not feel like stone, not in the way that mattered. To his touch, it was cold but not, hard but not. It resembled stone in all ways until he pushed, when he felt a give that stone did not have. It was as if the first layer was made of earth, and the rest was merely a falsehood, a convincing deception made for a sense of comfort.
And, after that first realisation, he woke up, shoved the dream to the back of his conscious mind, and blew the giant panther about to swallow his head away with a furious fist of wind.
In nights of dreams that followed, he learnt more about the space still shrouded in murky night, enough to give it a name, or a few he had yet to decide on.
The Study, the Library, the Archive, the Hall, the Nexus – all these were contenders for this place's name. A study for its namesake action, a library for its replete stores of knowledge, an archive for its sheer extent of record, a hall for its shape, and a nexus for the timeless connections that spanned untold millennia.
All these things were true. In this hall, there were the shapes of shelves, things made of wood that was not wood in the same way that the stone was not stone. They were countless in number. The scrolls resting upon them were even more numerous. Stories, tales and journeys were stored in them. Memories were stored in them.
He had wandered through the library aisles stacked to forever with recollection. He had unfurled scrolls, and began to read, began to look, began to watch. Some were language, some were image, and some were motion. All were stories, tales and journeys. All were memory.
He had learnt words, terms, concepts from these memories. It was where he learnt of biology and electricity and evolution and matter and the way wind functioned. It was where he learnt how to move properly with his altered chakra, where he learnt to breathe efficiently, and where he learnt to orient himself in the world. It was where he learnt to understand more.
But when the old man had told him stories of war, its horror and its torment, the next scroll he wrested from the shelves with ease was not one to read, not one to gaze at, not one to watch. Instead, it was one to live.
The breeze was sour, stale, rotten with the stink of air about to boil over with blood and shit, fire and gore. The craters were filled with bodies just the same, a bubbling soup of corpses sitting stagnant in the midday sun, harsh light knifing its way through the heavy smoke rolling above like sickly clouds. There were missing limbs, there was burning flesh, and there were bodies opened to the cruel blue sky from neck to navel in an ocean's scarlet tide. Innards were spilling over from the cauldrons of ravaged cavities, ribs not broken but splintered, to let intestines drop and stomachs churn. Those spires and towers of bone not felled by battle or cracked by conflict stood tall from their shattered cages, the jagged peaks of mountains of decaying carcasses already piling high. They remained silent and sentinel, white watchers in a red river.
Heartless blue and black above, rotting red far below, this was the aftermath. The smell, the sight, the stifling sound of silence – this was what was left.
He wondered how much worse it had been during.
But these were all his thoughts, the thoughts of Naruto. The eyes through which he saw were not his own, nor were the words that came through a different mouth, the feelings that were provoked in a different mind, and the connection he felt to the man he saw as his vision panned across the devastated landscape.
A feeling of brotherhood he didn't know stirred in an unknown breast and an unknown heart when he laid eyes on this person, a tall, lithe panther of a man stood tiredly, with long hair of sand and brown falling to his shoulders, and eyes that glowed with an inner light – the right a ghostly blue-white, the left a rich mixture of metallic gold and bronze.
The disproportionate joy that rushed through him at the sight of this man was tempered by the blood he kneeled in – the blood he knew they had both spilled without remorse, without even a hint of regret at the storm they had transformed into at the sight of those who knew, at the sight of those who needed to be erased, the last fleeting remnants of an entire era they had killed with their own hands.
The feeling of something truly wrong pulled at Naruto's thoughts. He should not have been there, witnessing this moment. He should not have even touched it.
But he was there.
The words that followed between them were short and sharp, not a conversation one would see between typical friends. It seemed harsh and forceful, lined with brutal undertones. Naruto could hear their words but he could not understand them. The language they spoke was different.
But he could feel them.
The feelings that shot between them were layered, complex, steeped in the riddles and mysteries of the lives they had led and the lives that had come before theirs. Yet their feelings were invisible things, transferred not through their words and their tones, their body language or even their eye contact. It was shared through the energy – huge, colossal and overwhelming – he could feel thrumming about them, an understanding of each other innate to their very existences.
But it was hard to track.
He missed things, things lost to the flow ever-present, existing even when they ceased making sound beyond breath. There was an entire discussion of a world's gilded history he had only caught the tail end of, when they both seethed silently, caught for a moment in a great rictus of anger and despair. The world around them raged with cutting winds marked with red, and the smoke-stained midday sky flashed with lightning from nowhere.
He only caught one definite, solid concept, something that stopped his thoughts, that made the living memory waver and dissolve into patchwork grey, that made something inside him scream with the wrongness of it all.
The Cleansing.
It shook him back into reality. Naruto blinked, fear forgotten. But then he looked, and felt something change.
Drawn back to the present, he could not tear his eyes from something suddenly so different.
In the centre of celebration of life and memory, an unceremonious ceremony of raucous festivity, the flames of the feast were no longer playful. They no longer danced; they no longer cast stretching arms of brilliant twilight into the branches, into the falling leaves; they no longer spread high in pride and power. He saw them differently now.
The noise of living things drained away, and the flames before him seemed to darken and grow.
The fire did not play or dance or cast or spread from its pit of shadowed clay. It crawled, it twisted, it reached, and it writhed from pits far deeper. These were pits of charred dirt, blackened flesh and simmering, smoking blood. Fire gathered in these places, coiling tight like blazing snakes in craters from long lost battlefields that sank back into the earth. But while the battlefields sank, the flames consumed.
Murky embers, hungry and wanting, licked at the leaves, flickering upwards like forked tongues tasting the air. Smoke grew thicker, denser, and darker as the flames became the same, a red shadow looming in the branches. And that red shadow exploded into growth, growing and growing until it could grow no more, until the leaves were ash and the mountainous trees were black bones. Fire roared into the night, drowning the noise of joyful remembrance in the raging thunder of all-consuming inferno.
Then the trees were gone, the people were gone, and the wasteland of war returned. The forest had said its final goodbyes, the tribe had vanished into history unrecalled, and the terrain of tortured plains unfolded for all left with eyes to see, a last terrible testament weaved in worldly tapestry.
The tapestry was wounded, and those gaping wounds bled.
"We killed the world once. I do not wish to do so again."
Naruto blinked once more. Everything... was still intact, in place, existing as it was.
The fire blazed with light, not with darkness. The forest stood tall with ancient pride, not as corpses. The people moved with celebration, not with starvation. Asuma and Enma still talked, saying something about leaving in the next few days, a journey on which his sensei would soon take him.
Naruto looked skyward, and he felt a change in the wind as Kaze whispered a new word.
Shard.