2
Dove caught in the snow
Like a fly on a still pond
Where has your home gone?
It was yet another frigid winter in the Land of Lighting. Regrettably, the weather was never quite at a comfortable temperature in that country; winters always carried the danger of frostbite and blizzards, while summers always brought heatstroke and blazing sun.
It was on one cold winter day, not so long before the seasons were due to change, that a woman wrapped up her young daughter in warm clothes and sent her out to get some exercise.
The girl, just six years old, waddled out into the blinding snow, promising her mother that she would not to fall in the river, and yes, she would remember to come home in time for snacks.
This girl's name was Inazuma Hachi. She was the daughter of two well-respected ninja in the Village Hidden in the Clouds, and come the beginning of the warm season, she would begin training to become a kunoichi herself. As she made her way down the icy, rocky, path to the frozen stream, each breath puffed out from behind her scarf and floated apart into the cold. She was uncomfortably warm, despite the chill, for her mother had dressed her in more than enough fabric to keep a baby chick warm, happy, and buried in a snow bank.
So when the girl passed out of sight from her house, she peeled her overcoat off clumsily and carried the bulky clothing in her arms, sighing with relief as she pulled the scarf down from her face with one mitten-wrapped hand.
She carefully made her way down the icy slope until she made it to the river, whose surface was frozen and covered in snow, save for a few fast-moving parts. Inazuma draped her coat on a prickly, frozen, bush and began wandering around, entertaining herself with the snow and ice.
After about fifteen minutes of mindless fun, she stumbled over a snow-covered stone and around another pale-brown, prickly bush.
And came to a halt.
There lay a boy. Or was it a man? He certainly looked large and scary in her eyes. He was wearing a black-and-red cloak and had red hair… red.
Inazuma remembered the time when her mother was showing her how to cut vegetables, and she'd accidentally cut herself with the knife. The blood oozed out of her finger and dripped against the cold white tiles of the kitchen.
That was the color red his hair was. Like blood on kitchen tiles.
She stared, wide-eyed and openly, for though she had seen plenty of people with white hair, black hair, yellow hair (and even had a friend who had pale orange hair), she'd never seen anyone with red hair.
Suddenly, his eyes snapped open, and she was disappointed by their color. Just brown. His just brown eyes rolled over and locked with her dark blue ones.
"A-are you okay? Who are you?" Her voice was high and a little frightened.
Suddenly, a steel cable slithered out from under his cloak and wrapped around her ankle like a snake trying to constrict its prey. The pointed tip tried to pierce the fabric of her pants, but its efforts were weak and her pants were made of tough black leather. The coil collapsed around her foot.
"See the purple on that rope?" He rasped. Her eyes jumped back up to his face. She nodded.
"It's poison. If you tell anyone I'm here, you'll die."
It was a lie, of course. A desperate lie, but she believed it wholeheartedly. She swallowed, eyes impossibly wide, and stumbled back, away from the man with blood red hair lying on the snow, the purple poison of his limp steel cable seeping into the white.
Inazuma scrambled back behind the shelter of the naked bush, gasping for breath as she crouched by the icy river. She was trembling like a deer caught in the crosshairs, but her eyes refused to water the way they usually did when she was afraid or hurt. It wasn't the red-haired man that drove the trembling, but the idea of saying something about him. Would she really die? Just like that? How? She was flooded by an inexplicable urge to race back to the village and tell everyone about everything, just to see what would happen. But then she would... die? Hugging her knees, she stared at the leather of her pants, and trembled with the forces of curiosity and fear at war inside her.
Death was a concept entirely foreign to her young mind.