Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or Naruto. The only thing I own is the plot. Also, in this chapter, there are a couple trace lines from Green Field by the Brother Four and Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Beta: Michelle T.

Chapter 6: Caldera and Oasis

'I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys.

I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs.

I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.

I will set junipers in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together.'

-Isaiah 41:18,19 -


November rolled in through the gate of Sunagakure in long, billowing gusts of wind and would normally have brought with it, the dry coarse sand of the desert. But Kagome planted cedar and acacia in a half-moon shape just beyond the village gate. So when the winter wind flew to their gate, it left behind the sand and brought with it not the dry, dead scent of the desert but the crisp, effervescent aroma of fresh leaves, tree sap and newly sprung buds.

Unlike the short and soft-bark apple and orange trees that crowded the plateau at the back of the village, these were pure timber trees, with hard, full trunks, sturdy boughs, and thick, strong roots that dug deep into the earth where they burrowed and fostered life.

"We will plant the cedar and the acacia trees here," she said on that first day when they brought her on her request out the gate. It was among the first few complete sentences she could form and speak to a crowd of the Sand people. The words escaped from her soft but sure, buoyant on the excitement of creating something new, something good. The spot of earth where they stood was good too. Like the wasteland it was in, it was parched and cracked and held nothing but sand and rock and the scorching heat of a mid-day sun, but deep down below, in the cool well of the earth's bosom, Kagome felt a keen desire to be more. A tiny little thing, perhaps the imprint left over by something else that had passed this part of the land, but it was more than enough. She would draw out this wish and let it bloom.

From amidst a veritable grove made of bodyguards and escorts, she walked the curved crescent moon shape a good ninety yards from the village gate. Hung from her left hand was a basket full of the seeds they had given her. Small but hardy, and encased in smooth brown and yellow shells. With her other hand, she picked up each seed, held it in her hand as the heart of the seed called out to her, then let them fall to the earth where they unfurled, budded, rooted.

One by one, each step let fall a seed into the desiccated, dead earth and from there bore life.

It was slow and labored, hard work that took near a month to complete. The crescent moon itself stretched from one end of the wasteland beyond the village gate to the other. About the length of her old district quarter in Tokyo. Walking so slowly as to allow time for each seed, the march from one pointed end to the other took an entire week. But this first march only saw the cedar and the acacia grow from seeds to saplings. It would need more marches to see that the young sprigs growing into mature trees.

When 'Shadow of the Wind' Satoosa-san clasped her hand and asked her one day "Why so slow? You could have grown them all in one go." He said this in his own voice, in the language of the Sand people, not the voices of her memories. He hadn't needed to for a while now, not with simple queries of this kind. The clasping hands, she supposed it was out of pure habit.

"These are… old trees… long… long live. Not like apples and oranges… or vegetables and flowers. They need time. Need strength," Kagome answered in her halting Sand people language.

Looking at the saplings by her side, their thin, bony branches standing no taller than her waist, she added. "Baby trees grow. One day, they will become giants. Immortal giants. And then they will protect you."

At her words, the trees reached up, their branches rising up towards the skies like hands, their freshly sprouted green leaves, defiant and vibrant against the stark backdrop of the barren sandland. Already she could see their roots burrowing deep into the sand, into that well deep down beneath the earth that beckoned them to live, to thrive in the face of death.

In the back, somebody murmured breathlessly as they gazed upon the impossible scene of rows upon rows of young trees growing from the desertland.

"... a miracle…It is a miracle..."

Shadow of the Wind Satoosa-san simply stared at her, an unreadable, edged look on his face, his silence as indecipherable as ever, until suddenly, he said in a placid, almost… gentle voice. She might have believed it had she not known, from just a few months of having known the man, that there was little that was soft and gentle in the chief of the Sand village.

"You are tired," his hand moved to her temple to brush aside a stray lock of hair before grazing her cheek, now clammy with the sweat of her brows. "That is enough work for a day. Let us go home." And he led her by the hand away from the desert and its harsh sun. More than the silence and the neutral veneer, it was this voice that so ill-fit the warrior Satoosa-san that most concerned Kagome.


By the second month under Satoosa's tutelage, Kagome had graduated from speaking a smattering of words to speaking full—albeit of questionable grammatical structure—sentences at once. In the third month, they touched upon the alphabet, which, in its full depth, consisted of a brutal 50,000 characters. And that was not even all. That was only just one script, albeit the oldest and most extensive one, out of the several in use by the sand people and other human settlements of this world, or so said Satoosa-san before he promptly and resolutely assured her that eventually, she would be required to learn all of them and he would be her teacher to that very distant end.

Of course, it would take years to master all 50,000 of that first script alone, but by the fourth month, armed with the 46 most commonly used letters, they progressed to reading.

It started with a children's book. Not the handsome, glitter filled, high-quality print booklet Kagome used to see back home, all glossy pages and full with hand-drawn cutesy pictures and cut-out figurines, but a small, worn thing with a dull brown leather jacket. The book was slightly battered around the edges, as if it had been grasped and pulled and pushed by tiny little hands one too many times.

"Nursery rhymes," said Satoosa-san before she even thought to ask. "They are simple and the rhymes should make it easy for you to remember." That made sense. Once he had explained the lack of any conventional teaching materials to her. Before her, there was simply never any need to teach foreigners their tongue. All within this land spoke and wrote the same language. It stood to reason then that the only way Kagome was to learn the language would be the same as how all sand children do.

A nursery book that had seen uses. It looked completely out of place in the hard, callused hands of the warrior Satoosa-san… that was, until she touched it. There were memories sleeping deep in the leather cover and the wrinkled paper pages, in the smudges of crayon at its back. A sunshine day where the sun's rays but did not scotch. Smelling baby's breath in the tingling, bell-like laughter of a child. He kissed her hair where it smelled like warm honey and melted caramel. Little hands, little feet, little faces with big, big smiles. Small and soft and fragile and so so scary. All of a sudden it occurred to her that the easy familiarity with which Satoosa held the book could have come only from years of personal experience.

She withdrew at once, feeling helplessly mortified for something she now felt as easily as breathing.

"Your children's book," she stated, drawing upon the image of the little boys and girl and the smiling woman she had once seen in his memories. Satoosa disregarded her statement with ease, having done this a hundred times before in just a short few months of having acted as her sole teacher. Instead, he leveled a stern look at her before commanding.

"Focus."

Then he opened the first page and started to read. The first rhyme told a tale of a rabbit making mochi cakes on the moon in five simple verses. Satoosa had a surprisingly nice voice, a smooth inbetween of baritone and bass, warm and with a rhythm that drew in listeners, and he carried the tune of the rhyme with ease. He might not be a singer, but the verses, coming from his mouth, held a gentle cadence that was easy to listen to.

Then he stopped, asked her if she had gotten it and then told her it was her turn to read. This was how the lesson went for the night, reading children rhymes back and forth, learning the words and sentences the baby way. The book, which was not a thick one, ended with a lullaby, 'Song of the Cradle'.

It took Kagome three days to learn it from cover to cover, memorizing the words, learning the letters, reading page after page without stumbling for too long.

Then he came with the next book, a collection of children stories illustrated with color pictures, and the next, and by the burning fireplace of her room, he made her sit wrapped up in layers of furs and blankets to ward off the cold of the onset desert winter and read to her the stories of his homeland.

A month of lessons passed this way, then there came a book not quite for little toddlers. A children's history book, illustrated. It was titled 'The Oasis' and it told the story of how the Sand people's village came to be.

'The great empire collapsed 10 years after the last rain fell on the windswept plains and left its children wandering the paths in need and hunger…' the tale started. 'And for many years they wandered, a people once rich and powerful, now made poor and voiceless. Once there were green fields, kissed by the sun. Once there were valleys where rivers used to run. Once there was sweet land where honey came from the earth and milk from the flower fields, but their home now lay in the dust. Gone were the green fields, parched by the sun. Gone were the valleys where rivers used to run.'

Unlike the previous books, with this one, he was as riveted by the childish tale as she, a fact that told of his love for his country.

'The people despaired, believing their fate to be divine retribution for their years of wanton excess. Many ran away and died in the wasteland where their bones made a graveyard, their blood a swamp. But most kept on wandering, for they had nowhere else to go. They lingered for decades, roaming from settlement to settlement, trading petty goods to pass the days by, and wherever they went, they were never accepted, for the other peoples thought them cursed by the gods and were loath to take in the cursed ones. Even the Wind people believed themselves forsaken, until one day, the spirits of the wind came to a little boy and told him.

Follow the dancing aurora. Follow it until you find the heart of the desert.

What followed is a schism that marked the beginning. A third of the people splintered off and followed the boy. The rest stayed their path. For nine years they followed the aurora in the skies, walking the sandhills at night, until finally, they found it.

The oasis. The heart of the desert.

By the green tree lines they halted their camels and dismantled their caravans and by the water's edge they built their first home since a long, long time. Here they lived, sustained by the oasis, and here they fought in defense of their hard-earned home, until eventually, they became known as the people hidden by the sand, and the boy who led them to the oasis became known as the first Shadow of the Wind.'

The hand-drawn illustration at the end of the book was a double-paged spread. On one page, a dilapidated city in grayscale, the crumpled, gargantuan corpse of something once mighty. On the other page, a tiny village budding in a gloriously burning sun, stretching languidly from a sparkling blue lake.

Satoosa closed the book and handed it to her, and instead of asking her to read, he said.

"Go to sleep. We will depart early tomorrow." Before she could ask, he continued.

"I have something to show you."


The pond that lay before Kagome's eyes was small, its water still. There were dust on the bottom and in the murky depths, and occasionally a bubble from a rare stray fish that had—somehow—miraculously survived in the stagnant water. From the stone ledge, an old man and woman sat with fishing poles extending into the water, eyes closed as if asleep.

"Not very impressive, isn't it?" The old woman stirred from her death-like sleep, face wrinkling into a wicked smile.

"Ah!" Kagome shrieked, startled. "I.. ah… you… san…" She knew what to say in this kind of situation. Satoosa-san had taught her. But in the suddenness of the moment, the words fled her mind.

"Oohh, one thing at a time, little girl. Shall we start with names?" said the old woman. "Mine is Chiyo. What is yours?"

"I… I am Kagome, Kagome Higurashi."

"The desert spirit can speak after all!" Twittered the old man, his smile mirroring his female counterpart. "I was sure she was quiet like a little sand mouse." Then he inclined his head somewhere behind Kagome. "It seems we shall make a fine teacher out of you yet, Kazekage-kun. After all, if you can teach the voiceless spirit of the desert to speak the mortal tongue, teaching a bunch of little kids how to fling kunai should be easy no?"

Coming up from behind her, Satoosa gave a short bow at the pair. "Honored siblings."

"Spirit of the desert?" Kagome repeated the title with which the old man called her, eyes darting back and forth between Satoosa and the pair.

"It's what the people have you been calling you," replied Chiyo.

"Oh…" She turned to look at the pond, not knowing how to respond to that revelation, then something came to her and she turned to look at Satoosa. "Is this… the lake, the oasis… in the book?"

"Yes."

"Oh… it's…," she floundered for words "... small." And indeed the pond was small, tiny even. It would be more apt to call it a deep hole with some water in it than a pond, let alone a lake. If it wasn't for that story yesterday she would have thought this a particularly large well not unlike some others she had seen dotted about the village.

Chiyo cackled at her comment, as if she was greatly amused. Satoosa simply nodded as if he too agreed.

"Disappointed?" … well… yes… the story of the previous night had made the oasis into some miracle of nature, a grand thing teeming with life. This… this was… not even anywhere close to the exquisite vision painted in the last page of the book. She had been so taken with that story. It must have shown on her face because the next thing Satoosa said was, "It used to be much bigger."

"It used to encompass this entire village," said Chiyo. "But that time is long since gone. These young 'uns…" she nodded at Satoosa. "... never even got to see its majesty back then." The wrinkles on her face pinched and pulled as she grimaced from some unsavory thought. "Though I doubt Kazekage-kun brought you here simply to show you this old well, you are headed elsewhere I assume?"

Satoosa nodded.

"In that case, we shan't keep you," said the old man, making a shooing motion with his hand. "My name is Ebizo. Go along now, little desert spirit. Now that you can talk, come back anytime. We old people would like to know more about your world of spirits too."

As they made the long trek out the Southern village gate, Kagome gathered enough courage to place the question in her mind.

"How did it happen?" she said slowly, carefully, stringing the words together one by one. When she put a mind to it and when she wasn't startled by somebody else speaking too rapidly, she could speak well enough for a complete foreigner. "How did the oasis become... a well?"

He looked sideways at her without stopping, then reached out and took her hand. The flare of the seal draw on her palm was now a familiar little pin prick against her senses.

'Overpopulation' He replied through the voice of her high school teacher. It seemed this conversation would be well beyond her current hearing ability.

"Oh…"

They passed the gate and ventured into the basin of entisol proper, trailed only by a single guard and warrior maiden. The sun had yet to come up. The sand beneath the sole of her shoes was still cold. The wind howled. From the ground rose sharp cement ridges that looked blue in the dark but once the sun come up, she knew, would be a brilliant copper color that told of the vast amount of metal components underneath.

'That must sound petty to you but when this village was founded over a hundred years ago, it quickly became the safe haven for many. People from all corners of the desert poured through this gate in search of the water of life. That was good at first, because we needed more people to build our village and protect it, but very quickly our number grew beyond what a single oasis could support.'

"You must have had plans. I saw people who bend stone… and water."

'Indeed we did. The first Shadow of the Wind was a person who could manipulate water the way I could manipulate metal,' he lifted up a hand and a nebula of gold came from the flask at his hip to dance around his arm in demonstration. 'It was how he managed to find this single oasis in the deep desert. We did not have very many people like him but for a while, but we maintained the oasis in almost pristine condition...' He paused there for a second.

"Something happened?"

"Yes"

"What was it?"

"War."

They scaled the sharp ridge of a hill in silence, trailed by the guards and the maidens that now followed Kagome everywhere with the exception of the sacred well where they met the old siblings.

'We were invaded. Then we ourselves invaded others in retaliation. Wars are costly. We were forced to shift our production into wartime economy. Most of us back then were pure warriors so we had little understanding how this would impact the village in the long term. The resources with which we used to maintain the oasis were shifted into growing our war machines and our soldiers.'

"... You be.. beliv… thought… the oasis would last?" She needed a dictionary. Her entire vocabulary was still comprised of the simple words in children's books.

'We did," he paused. 'We were wrong. When we returned from wars, our beloved lake had shrunk. We scrambled to fix it, but though we could manipulate the streams and draw moisture from the air, truly creating water from nothing was beyond our abilities. The natural world has its laws. Just because we can shift things a little here and there does not mean we can go about breaking the laws of nature at will.'

He turned to look at her then. Except for you, the silence seemed to say. Then the path sloped down and then up, made a turn under a rincon and suddenly in front of them was a great stone wall that extended as far as the eye could see from both side.

"Kazekage-sama!" came a voice from high up above, then a string of words too quick for Kagome to catch. He gripped her arms tight just as the earth below them moved and rose up as if an elevator.

"Whoa…" She stumbled, held onto to him tight as they ascended the wall. A sand warrior received them on the ledge.

"Kazekage-sama, Miko-sama," he greeted, folding into a deep, respectful bow.

"Hello," waved Kagome at the guard who, now that she took a good look at him, couldn't be that much older than her. His eyes however, were wide and impossibly full with reverence and it was directed at her. "Um… hi?" She tried the wave again, harder this time, only for the guard to drop even lower and let loose a stream of words way too fast for her to even make heads or tails out of.

"Oh…uh…I… uh… please… please stand… out… in… up?" Phrasal verbs were difficult. Scratch that. Phrasal verbs were really really difficult. It completely bamboozled her that a single word could have so many different meanings depending on which adverbs followed in its wake. It didn't help that her mind was still misted over for having been roused from sleep far earlier than her usual time.

By the way the guard was peeking at her with an undisguised and plainly confused expression, she hadn't gotten her message across. Kagome turned pleading eyes towards her oft taciturn guardian who, with a short and succinct command, sent the sand guard scurrying off.

"You butchered our language," he commented dryly, turning to look her in the eye with one brow raised. Without waiting for her to piece together an apology, he pulled her to the other side of the wall, onto an outcrop overlooking the country.

"Wait," he commanded as he steered her towards the still dark but vast vista of the windswept plain. A minute went by, two. Then suddenly, a burst of sunlight appeared over the far horizon. It was as abrupt as it was glorious. The young sun drew a nimbus of gold and orange as dawn slowly rose on the desert.

"There," At his command, her gaze dropped curiously down along the vertical slope of the wall upon which they perched, until it rested upon a vast and empty space. The dust field opened up into a basin. The ground beneath was made up entirely of gravels, parched and cracked and dusted with the silvery white of salt buildup. There were calderas in the stones, gouges like the claws of some great beast carved some twenty, thirty feet deep into the earth. There were marks branching out from these bottomless chasm, arroyos that had long since dried up.

Writhing about and intertwining the arroyos were the bleached white roots of long dead trees, and dotted onto their branches were tiny patches of dirty green and brown moss.

All of this created a panorama that whispered softly but firmly that history had happened here, perhaps long ago… but still unfaded. And beneath this panorama was….

Kagome stilled, awed by the thing beneath.

… regret, sorrow that was bone-deep, longing that lasted a lifetime and more….

They lumbered beneath the ground, nebulous, wreathed in plumes of flickering light, like great whales swimming in the depths of the sea, unseen by all but her and her alone.

"What is that?" She asked breathlessly, for a moment overwhelmed by the memories deep within the earth. Was this, she thought to herself, how Kikyo had felt when she entered the cave where Onigumo once lay? Where the very soil beneath his body was soaked with desire and thoughts of her? Obsession so strong it became the heart of a demon.

No.

Onigumo was only one person, and he only had a cave in which he lay on a rotted mat. This, here, was infinitely greater than what she as Kikyo had felt in that tiny and comparably insignificant cave. Did a war happen here? On this very spot?

Kagome hadn't really expected an answer and so was surprised when she got one.

"Remnants of a dream," said Satoosa. That he replied in his own voice and his own language riveted her entire attention to what he would say next.

'We sought to push back the very desert.' Kaede's voice then, in her head, piecemeal words stitched together to form coherent sentences.

"You did not suc.. suc… win?"

There was an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

'It was all a very grand plan. We dug deep trenches, raised stone cliffs, yanked subterranean rivers aboveground. We planted trees and thought that we could mold the land into whatever we desired. We even had someone like you then, an ally called the first shadow of fire, who could bend wood to his will.'

He made a vague motion at the gargantuan dead tree roots down below. Her gaze followed the trajectory of his hand as she tried to imagine the colossal undertaking that must have been.

'The trees he planted were titans, but without the proper care they could not survive this harsh terrain. It took a fortune just to keep a single tree alive and we were never an especially rich people to begin with. We had plenty of this…'

Gold dust danced around his hand.

'But this thing… it is not worth a lot when you lack basic necessities such as crops… and the water you might drink reserved to sustain grand but ultimately doomed hyperions. Before long, our soil began to fail from our abuse of the underground rivers, and our resources with it.'

"What did you do?"

'What would you have done in our place?' he hedge, but there was no heat there. 'We needed more to feed our land, to feed our trees, so we turned to what we had always been best at.'

"War?"

He nodded, looking at some far away point in the vast and empty dust basin. 'If you have nothing, it is easy to justify taking things from others. Did your people teach you philosophy, priestess? When you were in training?' He looked back at her. 'Ours once said, when all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.'

"War… is never… never the right thing," she protested, frowning at her guardian whose expression was as inscrutable as ever. "It is… a circle… It is whirlpool with no end."

"Perhaps so," he said in reply, then fell silent.

"You wanted to show me something. Is it this?" She prodded and was rewarded with yet a tiny nod of his head.

"Why? What do you want me to ob… to see?"

He went quiet for maybe a minute, his eyes not on her but on the great marks in the ground far down below. He had the air of a man who was waiting for something to arrive but also knew that it would not.

"You look upon the corpse of our greatest dream, priestess" he said finally, using both voices, one from his mouth, the other from her memories. "... and our greatest failure. This is where the edge of our oasis used to be."

She stared at him, surprised, her mind working to marry the incongruous images of a lake of such size with the pitiable, dusty old well she had seen but half an hour ago.

"That's..."

"Unbelievable? I thought so too, once," Satoosa cut in. The undisguised bitterness in his voice shocked her into silence. "We are but thirsty children whose forefathers drank without thought. But now that you are here…" His gaze was fastened to her then, eyes heavy with intent.

"You want me… to make the trees grow here." He wanted her to transform the land itself, knew she could do it, and had good reasons to.

It made perfect sense really, when she thought about it, a logical next step to ensuring a steady food supply for a desert bound community. Desertification was a real problem in many countries of her previous home and previous timeline. She had learned from the geological books of her high-school classroom that fighting against something like that started with nurturing a vegetation line durable enough to withstand the harsh condition. In time and with the right conditions, the trees themselves will stabilize the soil and rebalance underground water sources. But the land around this village, Sunagakure she had learned the proper name, was as bad as it could get. If it was fertile once then it would have been a very long time ago. The proof of soil degradation and prolonged mismanagement of water resources, those cracks in the earth and the silvery white dust, were clear before her eyes.

Satoosa smiled at her then, a rare and slightly awkward quirk of his mouth, half forced and half genuine, as if the man himself was rusty when it came to expressing delight or happiness. He put a hand in his pocket, withdrew it. Then he took her hand and in her palm, carefully, gently, a little tentatively, he laid the gleaming black and brown seeds of the cedar and the acacia. When he spoke next, there was nothing but simple honesty in his words.

"I want you to know how important you have become to me, and to my people."


End Chapter 6


1. Kagome meets Gaara next chapter, first scene right in, for real. Pinky promise! I was gonna push in that next segment too but then more world building and (very subtle) characterization for Yondaddy Kazekage happened. You would think he's become a favorite of mine, but actually it's not. This extra (very subtle and very much open to interpretation) character building for him in this chapter is actually an extension of the building of Sunagakure's cultural identity. Remember Konoha has that dancing leaves and shadow of the fire and stuff? I wanted something for Suna as well. We know little about Suna as a culture, a country and a people with history from canon. In canon, Konoha is basically the center of the universe. It's the first ninja village. It's got both Hashirama and Madara and it's got Naruto and Sasuke, the reincarnations of Indra and Ashura and so on and so forth. Seems a little unfair you know. Plus I want to explore new ground, so I created a semi-mythical background and history for it.

2. The nursery rhymes featured in the earlier part of this chapter are real Japanese Warabe Uta. They are traditionally taught to little children as preparation for learning the alphabet.

3. The language of Narutoverse in here is based on an amalgamation of real Japanese scripts over various eras. It is a mixture of sogana, hiragana, katakana, gojuon and of course, kanji. There are more than 50 000 kanji in reality. Most of them are defunct though. Only about several thousands are used frequently nowadays. In here, Kazekage first taught Naruto something similar to Hiragana and will try to teach her the noble scripts such as sogana and kanji later on.

4. A couple readers have repeatedly asked me over several chapters this same question:

'I don't get why Kagome can't understand the Narutoverse language considering she speaks Japanese herself?'

So I'll explain it here. There are several reasons for this that pretty much boil down to 'a difference of universes and eras'

a/ First, nowhere in canon Naruto has it ever been explicitly stated that the language of Narutoverse is actually the same 'modern Japanese' that Kagome knows and use. Kishimoto stated that the world of Naruto is a fantasy version of Japan and various other Asian cultures. It is alluded in story that the language is Japanese yes, but it is never explicitly stated. What you see as Japanese script drawn in the manga is the 'language of communication', not necessarily the language used in-universe. If you're confused, think about it this way: the Lord of the Ring trilogy, do you think any of the characters in there speak modern English?

Nope, some of them speak Westron, some Quenya, some SIndarin, some Orcish. But what we see in the book is English and if translated, other languages. That is called 'the language of communication' or 'the language of presentation'. There's a difference between that and the actual language used by the characters of any fictional universes. The difference is not always clear and defined but it is there. You need only look at the seal scripts (which are not pure hiragana, katakana, or kanji) of Narutoverse to see a subtle hint that the actual in-universe language may be at least slightly different from modern Nihongo scripts.

b/ Two, a difference of eras. Even in the case that the in-universe language of Naruto is 'Japanese', it still is unlikely to be the same form of Japanese used in Inuyasha verse. A language is a fluid thing that changes and evolves through time. Take old English for example, from the 12th or 13th century (called Anglo-Saxon). If I give you a 12th century English script, are you sure you can read and understand it completely? Beowulf was written in Anglo-Saxon English. Modern readers, even if they are native speakers, have to read the translated version. And that's only a few century of time differences.

If you have to measure the difference in time era between modern day Inuyasha verse (from which Kagome hailed) and Naruto-verse (which in canon timeline is a hundred years away from their equivalent of real world Japanese Sengoku Jidai era with the warring of states and ninja clans), can you do it?

There you have it then, why Kagome and the people of Naruto-verse don't speak the exact same language.

I simply do it as a way to bolster the realism of the story. Because seriously a person coming from a completely different universe, from a completely different timeline and a world with completely different metaphysical rules (the humans of Inuyasha sure can't do the things Naruto ninjas can do) speaking the exact same language as the locals do is logical?!

Also, it's just cause I'm into crazy obscure world building detail like that. What can I do? I'm like a drug addict when it comes to obscure details.

Anyway, I hope that clarifies things up.

5. Apparently the Yondaime Kazekage has been given a canon name by Kishimoto in the 4th data book. His name is - drumsroll - Rasa. Should I change the name to the new, canonical one or keep the old, fanmade one do you think? Personally, I like the name Rasa. It has a Middle-Eastern bend to it that will definitely allows me to play around with the world building of the story. I have always wanted a more culturally diverse Narutoverse anyway.

6. The descriptions of the caldera part as well as Sunagakure geology is based on actual real world depiction of aridisols, desert soil that has been salinated or has a very high buildup of metal deposit due to mismanagement of water sources.

7. I can't wait until we get to Gaara. I have such plans for this lil' kid.

8. If I may, I would like to ask your personal interpretation of Kazekage as a character in this story and this chapter. I put in a lot of nuances in his interaction with Kagome and these are left deliberately open to interpretation. His thoughts and feelings for Kagome can only be described as… muddled and conflicted, at times bitter and fearful, at times in awe and covetous, at times indulgent, at times frustrated and helpless, at times resentful. The exact details are up to the individual readers though and I would really like to know my reader's interpretation of the character, see how each of you read the in-between-the-lines I left in there.

Cyber cookies if you do let me know!

Sythe