Hello everyone.

If you enjoyed Indra for some reason, maybe you'll like Crimson Horizons.

I have posted the first chapter, and although uploads will be a bit slow in the beginning, because of obligations and another story to finish fully (a dozen chapters), I kinda had to get it out — and the word, too.

It's on my profile — and here are a few short extracts, in case.

The moon hung bright in the night sky, its ethereal glow casting a quiet hush over the world below.

It was a deceptive peace, for the same silver light that bathed the sleeping earth would soon witness a tide of blood.

The heavens, dressed in their celestial finery, seemed to hold their breath in anticipation of the night's dual promise: one of salvation, the other of sorrow.

Amidst the impending tumult, the moon presided with impartial grace, an eternal spectator to the pendulum of human fortunes, swaying between grandeur and tragedy.

SUMMER SNOW fell endlessly.

Hyūga Hanabi frowned as she glanced up at the night sky, her feet stepping over the powder smoothly, never leaving a trace.

The Snow Step, of course, was a necessity for any shinobi, times being as they were.

The wind was howling through the trees, and aside from its strident sound, it was yet another quiet night — and how she hated nights like these.

Neji, who she could see clearly in her Byakugan's range, didn't care for them either. Then again, there wasn't much he didn't seem to carry an unspoken dislike for, these days. He was younger than her by four years, five years younger than Hinata, but he talked like an old man already.

All three of them had spent most of their lives in times when the sky hadn't been so inky, when strange, chimeric creatures didn't roam with a hunger sharpened by the cold, when whimsical spirits didn't weave through the skeletal forests.

When a heavy, forlorn silence didn't blanket the land, with only whistling winds that carried the biting cold to disturb it.

This white, desolate expanse that hid both predator and prey was a world enshrouded in snow. Above this frostbitten landscape, fractured arches shimmered in the sky like broken mirrors, and they lit up the dark.

It was not a world for the weak: power, of course, was its main currency, and so it was that strong shinobi who reigned supreme.

They could scour the land, claim what resources remained, and enforce the brutal truth of this new era.

It was the sort of crucible that forged men, women of steel from the spirits of the fallen, a place where the weak were sifted from the earth like chaff in the wind.

It was on that night that Hanabi and Neji met the man with hair like a flame.

TWO DAYS after the nameless woman was buried near the Great Tree, Naruto had mostly forgotten about the event.

People died, that was the way of the world, or so his mother said. Several people he knew had died, already. Old Daichi, Fumiko and Souta.

And although he was sad that the old woman was gone, it didn't mean he particularly enjoyed standing in the sun in ceremonial gear for hours, waiting for the rites to be over. They didn't mean much, they didn't make her any less dead. But he supposed that these things were for the sake of the living, rather than for the dead.

Besides, he was Uzumaki before anything else. He could take it. And there were only so many of them on the Heavenly Island, so these things were important.

There had been more before, and there were more of them throughout the land, too. But those were Earthbound, Uzumaki who had renounced their right to live in the skies to dwell down on the Elemental Nations.

And then there were the elite clan members, too. Those who stood at the top, and had earned themselves the privilege of traveling between the floating island and the land.

Naruto's mother had been one of them, once. That was how she met his father, of course, but that was before her health made it difficult for her to perform at the rigorous standard of performance that was expected of them.

It took more than this to keep Uzumaki Kushina down, of course. If she couldn't fight on land, she would fight in the skies, and if she couldn't fight in the skies, she would find a way to fight in the seas.

Her spirit was indomitable, her hair billowed like flames and her voice could carry over waves.

But the difficult days were difficult for anyone, and even Uzumaki Kushina could sometimes let them get to her.

Naruto's father was an outsider, if this wasn't clear enough already. A man with hair that was called 'blond,' but was closer to bright yellow, really. It wasn't common at all in Uzushio — there was no one, in fact. In any case, Namikaze Minato — they never married, and even if they had, he would have had to take her name — was a figure that was seemingly carved out of legend.

His father was a tower of strength, and his smile, just like Naruto's mother's, was enough to light up a room: it was like the sun piercing through the clouds on a stormy day. His father was his personal hero — a man born to poor fishermen, whose very existence was an act of defiance against the ordinary. Proof that anyone could set out to do the impossible, and manage. And if anyone could have made his mother smile on these cloudy gray days, it would have been him.

That was how Naruto liked to remember him.

Growing up in Uzushio provided a happy childhood.

His mother would read him tales of old folklore that he was soon too old to fully believe in. Still, if nothing else, the stories of ancient gods in the forms of oil, foxes, and rabbits instilled in him a love for the texture of words. Tracing his finger over the inky lines and symbols when he was too young to understand them, Naruto developed an appreciation for calligraphy that would serve him well in the future.

His mother, cunning as one of these mythical foxes, was subtly teaching him all along — a fact Naruto only recognized much later. His father, the few times he did see him as a child, back when Uzumaki Kushina still had the sort of political pull to strong-arm the Uzukage into letting her leave with a child, when no one usually was allowed outside of the island…

Well, his father never seemed to be as devious.

But then again, it was hard to remain unbiased when he had seen one of them much more often than the other. And you could never truly know a person that only existed as a dream.

Naruto was about as curious as he was reckless: questions came out of him about as quickly as new, creative ways to endanger himself.

And when at nine years old he decided that he loved Uzushio but still wanted to see the outside world and his dad because the latter wasn't allowed in, his mother cautioned him not to make this sort of statement out loud next time, maybe.

See you around, maybe.