No Strings On Me

by NeonZangetsu

The gods love to play their little games, don't they? They're cruel. Arrogant. Mad puppeteers, leaving their pawns to twist and turn on strings. What a sick joke. But there are no strings on me, no sirree! A startled shinobi finds himself dragged to a new world against his will. Naturally, he rebels. Help the gods? Nah. Save the world? Nope. Got a kid to raise! Narutoxharem?

9. Five Words

A/N: Behold a massive chapter! Slifer and I worked hard on this~!

This chapter has a little bit of everything, for everyone.

Looking forward to reading your feedback!

With my fifteen year anniversary on this site finally here, I find myself reflecting on the little things in life. What was once a lazy pastime meant for me and a few friends really grew and evolved over time. There are days when I look back on the last fifteen years here and I wonder if anyone will remember me; if I made an impact, despite never making a single cent on any of these stories. Some days were happier than others, and some stories I enjoyed writing WAY too much; to the point where I'd stay up all night working on them.

And of course, there are times when I look ahead to the future days and wonder what will become of things when I'm, well... gone.

Of course, I try not to dwell on the latter overmuch; I'm still alive and still writing. In an ideal world, I'd like to keep doing so for as long as I can. But old age is catching up to me and these days, the world is filled with so much madness and death. Feels like everyone's lost their minds sometimes. Even before that, so many friends and fellow writers I once knew are gone, now. Will I still be here in twenty years? Ten? Five? Its a chilling thought. But for now, I'm still here, still writing.

So here we go. The fate of this story depends on you, the reader. Your feedback determines the fate of this tale, and many others.

Alright, I've kept you waiting long enough, methinks. Enough of this old man's rambling; you're here for a story.

Once more, I own nooooo references, quotes, memes or themes. Not a wit or a one. Nope.

They're simply tributes to legends far greater than I. Hope you're ready for some surprises~!

The chapter title will make sense by the end.

"Five words can hurt, or they can heal.

Which will it be, I wonder?

Which indeed?"

~?

Five Words

"Meep."

Were Ranni not a doll, her throat would have gone dry.

A doubly true statement, given that not only did her doll body lack the ability to produce bodily function, but what stood now in the courtyard of Raya Lucaria was a thought projection; a remote-controlled extension of her senses and spirit to interact with the world while her porcelain form was safely sequestered away at the topmost parapet in her rise. And yet, despite this, she was beset by degrees of phantom sensation she had long forgotten.

The sound of blood thundering in her ears. The feel of sweat beading down her back and even a shiver of cold all dredged up from memory. The instinctive urge of fight or flight. Why?

Because for the first time in centuries, she stared into her mother's eyes and felt like a little girl about to receive a verbal lashing.

The courtyard was just as it had been moments before when her presence had been revealed by Naruto; the blond young man stood behind her at a comfortable distance, looking between mother and daughter with an unsure expression, his usually boundless enthusiasm stymied by the fact that even he didn't know what to say. Across from them stood the veritable peanut gallery of three young children, a large red wolf, two men and Ranni's own Wolven Shadow.

Blaidd, still wearing his silk dress shirt in the cool summer night air, wore a layered expression upon his lupine maw, black lips pressed into a thin line and lone eye full of resignation. It was almost as if he was trying to tell her that he was sorry about this, but it had to happen. She nearly stomped a foot, such was her embarrassment.

Damn him! No, no, compose yourself, Ranni; you're an adult who can face your issues with grace befitting your station!

She would not demean herself before these children!

The shortest of the them, black of hair and blue of eye, lacking any visible footwear, surveyed the building altercation with keen eyes. And was she seeing things, or did Ranni spy a trace of wry amusement on the girl's cherubic face? Little rotter!

The tallest of the trio, who, now that she looked at her, bore a strong resemblance to Melania in her youth, looked unsure of what to do, seemingly sinking into the side of her father's wolf to avoid the awkward situation while the third of the group, a magenta-haired girl with a sealed eye pouted at her and crossed her arms over her little chest.

This was all to say Ranni was avoiding the real cause of her feelings.

Rennala, the Fullmoon Queen of Caria and her mother, stood before her, the light chill on the wind rustling the maroon evening gown she had clad herself in, her sparkling blue eyes boring deeply into Ranni's own astral orb. How she wished her other eye was unsealed in this moment. It would've made things so much easier.

Because she didn't know where to look!

"Mother," she forced the word out, her voice level-yet-bearing an awkward edge, desperately trying to right her frantically spinning mind.

A beat of silence passed between them, no visible sign that she had heard Ranni speak. In point of fact, the only visible sign that her mother was not a statue was the light flexing of her fingers, an unconscious reaction being viciously fought against with a stony visage. The Darkmoon Princess was hard-pressed to answer if that urge was to throw her arms around her in a hug or to throttle her.

"Ranni," Rennala finally spoke, a frosty edge clinging to her tone. Her eyes were full of a chaotic swirl of emotions, an ouroboros of passion and ennui ever biting its own tail to elucidate cohesive thought that was not one with hysteria. "You've come home, I see, though a skulker in the shadows I thought you not, Darkmoon epithet notwithstanding. It is a jot rude to not announce your arrival," she finished gracefully, crossing her arms under her chest, the tendons in her swan-like neck poised as her fingers continued to twitch. "Then again, it seems that what I conceived of your character was far off the mark. What an amusing oversight." she chuckled mirthlessly.

Ranni shifted uncomfortably; she didn't like that sound; it was so cold coming from one from whom she had only ever known warmth. Inclining her head till the brim of her hat obscured her face, Ranni apologised. "Forgive mine lack of decorum, Mother. I simply… wished to ascertain the company you keep."

"The company I keep? Interesting turn of phrase from one I haven't seen in centuries." Rennala's laconic response sent a stab of existential pain through Ranni's nonexistent heart, gladdened that her hat obscured her face from being seen.

While this was but an exchange of niceties, the truth of the matter was that the tension in the courtyard could be cut with a knife, and Ranni was slowly losing her battle between putting up a strong front and turning tail to run for the hills.

The wind rustled the grass beneath them as Ranni met her mother's gaze once again, curiosity prompting her to act. "My survival… does not seem to surprise you."

Rennala sharply exhaled from her nose, the ladylike equivalent of a snort of derision, turning half profile in the direction of her Shadow. "Blaidd's survival is quite telling, and even in silence, the guilt he radiates in my presence was enough to make me suspicious that my foolish daughter yet lived… in a manner of speaking," the last words were all but a hushed hiss through gritted teeth.

"M-Mother-

Rennala's finger twitching grew more sporadic. Ranni winced. She knew she must choose her words well here; her mother's ire was slow to rise, but when it did boil over, very little could stop it. While she wanted to speak with her mother, it would be impossible should the fury of the Fullmoon Queen drive her to her own long-held baggage rearing its head.

Stealing herself, Ranni's astral projection turned away from her mother and strode towards Blaidd with purpose. "It's clear that my presence, for tonight at least, is not welcome a jot, so I think I shall simply take Blaidd and be on my way-"

The younger Carian words were cut off as a sharpened glintstone spike buried itself between her and Blaidd, a foot of the sparkling crystal poking from the virgin earth. Looking over her shoulder, she beheld the familiar sight of her mother's catalyst held firmly in one hand, a trail of blue-white particles tracing through the air from its bejewelled tip.

"I think not," Rennala exclaimed, voice glacial. "Thou shall not flee! Not from me!"

"You cannot stop me, mother."

Naruto finally took a step forwards, adding his voice to the back and forth. "Alright, alright, how about we calm this all down. Rennala, I know I don't know everything about what's going on here, but at least-"

"Naruto, love." She cut him off, looking at the blonde for the first time and her stormy visage cracking, revealing a pained warmth that served to make Ranni's gut twist. "You have been good to me and brought light back into mine life after so long in darkness. But this once and only this once, I must ask thee to curb the tongue; this is something I need to do." her eyes shimmered with emotion, "Please… trust me."

He froze, unsure of what to say before finally nodding in ascent and moving to join the trio of children and give the mother and daughter some space.

In an ideal world, Ranni would have taken the opportunity for what it was, a breather to get her thoughts in order.

Sadly, something about her mother's words rankled inside her, and she spoke before she could stop herself.

"You wouldst find fault with me when you besmirch father by having affections for this…this vagabonded buffoon?!" She spat before her eye widened, two of her four hands flying to her mouth.

Rennala's pupils narrowed to slits, her narrow face splitting into a furious scowl. "How… how DARE you speak to me like that after everything that hath happened, hath the little culver's pure white wings become sooted in her time away!? That body may be a doll mockery of thy teacher, but surely thy soul still holds some measure of sense and politeness, or did you also give that up on the Night of Black Knives!?"

Ranni bristled while Blaidd gestured for everyone else to get to a safe distance, recognizing the signs that his ward's anger was on the rise. Radagon's Wolf picked up the trio of girls and bolted for the wall, followed closely by old Moongrum and Boggart, only Naruto and Blaidd remained close to their own partners.

"They say that seeing is believing, but I struggle to believe what mine eyes show me now." Her staff slammed down, drawing a flinch from Ranni. "Where is the daughter I brought into the world, whose brilliance and cunning were the world to me? What stands before me is a mirage of poorly thought-out plans and idiocy-lest you prove me wrong!"

Ranni's projection sighed in exasperation, masking the hurt she felt at her mother's words. "Enough of this; I shall speak with thee all another day when your temper is leveled. Farewell, Mother, seek me out at my Rise; Blaidd knows the way." Her peace thus said said, her form began to fade into motes of blue sorcery as she cancelled her Thought Projection, seeking to end the conversation now and deal with the repercussions later.

"Do not run away, Ranni!" Rennala called, steel in her words and fire in her eyes, "You shall not slip into the moonless night so easily again!" The Fullmoon Queen snapped her fingers, and the air became alight with complex patterns that formed into a magic circle that began to rapidly orbit her before encircling Ranni's vanishing thought projection.

'What!?' she thought, suddenly aware of a peculiar feeling taking hold of her senses as the rapidly spinning spellcraft circled her. Distant awareness spoke to her of a spectral hook taking hold of her 'navel' and yanking backwards hard; her vision briefly dimmed, pressure pushing in from all sides until akin to being forced through a tight tube before a lapsing in awareness, thoughts scattering to the wind before with a metaphorical 'thump' her senses returned.

All of them, including the dim awareness of the ground beneath her feet.

'An astral reconciliation mystery.' Where before her body had begun to turn translucent as her thought projection broke down into its constituent mana, now she was very much solid, her face set in a mix between an annoyed scowl, panic and incredulous curiosity. 'She barred my cancelling of the thought projection and used my bound thoughts as an anchor to drag my physical form from the Rise to here.' Ranni realised, unsure how Rennala had conjured such a complicated spell with seemingly no preparation...until her singular eye locked onto the tips of her mother's previously spasming fingers.

A subtle shimmer around the fingertips, perhaps half a millimetre across, far too small to notice but perfect for concealing the esoteric mudras one would need to cast such a sorcery non-verbally. 'Mother feigned her movements to prepare a trap in case I left prematurely.' she finally concluded, almost admiring the subtle diversion. Her mother had lost none of her brilliance.

Rennala narrowed her eyes on Ranni, pursing her lips, "Did'st thou think centuries of madness would rob me of the ability to see a thought projection? I began tracing back thy stream of consciousness the moment I laid eyes upon you." she trailed off, her face conflicted, sadness and anger at war with each other, marring her otherwise beautiful face. "Oh, little culver, what have you done to yourself…"

"Taken charge of my fate, mother," Ranni replied with cold fire; she would not apologize for her actions.

Naruto gulped from the sidelines, it was clear that things were on the precipice of falling off a cliff, but she could see wanted to respect Rennala's decision. "How's this going to work?" he asked eventually, earning himself the angry stares of two Carian royals.

"Hmph!/Hmph!" both huffed, looking away from him and then back to one another. Ranni spoke first, regarding Naruto with an unclear emotion. "It is clear that Mother will not let Blaidd and I leave in peace, and truly, this talk is long overdue. I believe, as the masses say, we are 'to have it out."

Naruto blinked owlishly, having never heard of such a turn of phrase; though if the audible gulps from Blaidd, Moongrum and Boggart were anything to go by, he could guess what it entailed.

A fight.

Rennala nodded stiffly before softening to address Naruto, her affection much more visible than Ranni's smorgasbord of emotion. "It means that my foolish daughter has returned to her place of learning and wishes to exchange words and satiate my BURNING questions. As the principal of this institution, I am inclined to say we take this outside."

"Agreed." Ranni nodded, her face firm while caustic anger and horrid self-hate melded in her heart. She deserved the rage, but she had to make her mother see just what had pushed her as far as she had gone. If that meant enduring a barrage of spellfire, then so be it.

The blond shook his head, doubtless trying his best to make sense of all of this with the fragmentary information he had. He too, seemed keenly aware that this was a poisonous wound that needed draining, and he always wanted to see people he cared for helped. He closed his eyes in thought as the pair continued their stare down, and asked slowly, "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Just keep our home and hearth safe, my star," Rennala said fondly, causing Ranni to positively fume. "Now… Little Ranni, thou knoweth the place."

And so it was that half an hour later, Ranni the Witch, Darkmoon Princess and Rennala of Caria, Fullmoon Queen stood across from one another atop one of Liurnia's namesake lakes, the academy a dominant feature on the horizon. The sky was dark and moonless, but both women could make each other out perfectly under the ample starlight. For all points of contention, Ranni knew she had nothing to fear from her mother, after all despite being a Sorcereress on par with a God and full of potent emotions, she doubted their exchange would escalate beyond a playfight to serve as a conduit for their words…

Right?

'And yet my Mother's disappointment burns harsher than any sorcery…' she thought, looking over to the distant walls of the Academy, just about making out the forms of an audience forming on the wall. Naruto's thicket of spiky gold hair was visible to the naked eye even at this distance. The porcelain-bodied witch watched Naruto form a cross-shaped hand seal and blinked when six identical clones of said Uzumaki popped into existence with puffs of smoke before bounding away from the original in different directions.

A most curious sorcery, if indeed it was one at all.

"What's that vagabond up to?" She wondered aloud.

"That 'vagabond', as you put it, has a name; I would ask that you use it." Rennala tapped the bladed tip of her catalyst to the water's surface, "He is… special to me."

Before Ranni had the time to respond to that reminder, a rush of sound drew her attention back to the academy.

"Sage Art: Six Gold Yang Formation!" Naruto intoned, his voice booming out over the lakes.

All at once, six thin pillars of gold light lanced into the air, streaking into the sky for nearly a thousand feet before slitting at their apex; all six shafts were linked as one perfect hexagon. Before Ranni's eye, she watched a tremendous golden hexagonal barrier take from around the academy, protecting it from any harm.

Her antipathy for the blond interloper aside, Ranni could not help but marvel at such a large barrier that had been erected so quickly and in a style of sorcery she did not recognize. In fact, it didn't feel like magic at all. "By the moon… what is he…"

"Of topics to discuss, Naruto's curiosity is something we can get to…" Rennala retorted frostily.

Ranni squared her two sets of shoulders, mana begging to gather at her fingertips. "And where would you desire we start?"

Rennala's staff tapped down once more and her form was enraptured by an aura of greenish-blue mana, a flame of magic that briefly obscured her appearance from Ranni.

When it cleared, she felt her nonexistent blood run cold.

In place of her burgundy evening dress, the statuesque Queen donned a tight-fitting though not restrictive, corset of navy blue leather outlined in red piping over a crimson halter-topped tunic. Rennala wore a pair of dark riding breeches tucked into low-heeled black riding boots bearing glintstone spurs. The entire ensemble was set off by a midnight blue hooded cloak that trailed just beneath the knee, its lining a sumptuous red. Her hair, once down in a braid, was now done up in a tightly bound bun that set off her pale skin and blue eyes.

This was an attire that Ranni knew well, for this was what her mother had worn long ago when first teaching her the macrocosm of arcane might and sorcery.

"Where else but the Night of the Black Knives?"

And so began the battle.

---

(.0.0.0.)

---

A rapidly assembled group of spectators had gathered on the high wall of the academy to observe the coming battle.

They were soon treated to a spectacle that, had the learning institution been its heyday, would have been a case study. A masterclass in high-level sorcery wielded by two masters, each at the pinnacle of their particular craft. The lake's mirror-like surface reflected a hailstorm of spellfire that volleyed dozens of projectiles at the two figures who skated upon the water as if it were a great ice rink.

Rennala, identifiable by her dark clothes, swept her catalyst through the air with a trail of glintstone fractals following its path, forming out into a complex magical circle that leveled a steady rain of projectiles in the direction of her doll-bodied daughter.

They varied in kind and purpose; some physical projectiles were made of Glintstone that took on an unrefined boulder appearance, while others were spikes and flails. Moreover, a phalanx of seven spectral blue-green swords revolved around Rennala's head in a steady locus, shooting forwards towards Ranni with blistering speed that rent the air as they passed.

Ranni readily reacted to the spellfire, her white dress set aflutter as her four arms swept about her to weave counter-sorceries, her magical circles a darker shade of blue than her mother's. Shimmering barriers formed of sparking ethereal dust took form as flashes in the air, intercepting the rain of solid projectiles that shattered against their glassy hearts with sharp cracks. The air was filled with the haunting song of combat, morose and magical like long-rusted evening bells being rung in opposition to one another after too long sitting mothballed.

Naruto let out a low whistle in appreciation of the spectacle, the sheathed length of his sword propped up on his lap, sage's senses telling him more about what was going on than he could simply see through the Golden Yang Barrier he had erected over the perimeter. He wasn't going to lie and say he understood sorcery, frankly in the sessions where he and Rennala studied his Great Runes, even when she had gone to great lengths to explain the arcane implications to sorcery and what the last Uzumaki could achieve with them, he'd found his eyes growing foggy and lost in the sound of her voice.

Or maybe it was just that he found Rennala's interested face so incredibly cute that he'd much rather pay attention to that...?

Though right now, his face remained marred by a concerned frown; because while he was more than willing to respect Rennala's decision here, he could feel the coil of negative emotions roiling within her. The most prominent was sour anger, a melancholic rage born of long carved wounds being agitated, its unique 'scent' telling him that the love that she felt for Ranni made it both better and worse.

Then there was twisted catharsis mixed with paradoxical longing, like the building desire one felt to rip a long fouled thorn from a septic wound; its caustic puss of grief making it all the more hazardous to remove without exciting more significant self-harm. And under all of it, an all too familiar feeling.

His mood must have been worn on his sleeve because the aged voice of old Moongrum broke the silence.

"Worry not, Ser Naruto," the chivalrous gentleman said comfortingly, "My Queen shall not truly harm Princess Ranni; she cares too much for her to do more than a slap on the wrist. And in the realm of demigods and magic, a grand display of magic can be appropriate for what we mortals would solve by boxing our ears."

"You sure?" he winced as another blast of spellfire flashed through the air. "I mean, I know this is a charged topic, but… this feels a bit much, doesn't it?" he questioned, looking over the other watchers. A vein jumping in his temple when he saw the reactions of the others. "Don't you think?!"

"A bit much?!" Boggart did his best to cower behind the battlements even with the Yang barrier in place, only the eye holes in the blackguard's iron mask poking above the lip of chiselled granite to watch the fire. "This is more than a bit much! This is bloody insane; my mother would have just hit me with a ladle, not summon the damn stars!" he exclaimed as two opposing spells collided with one another, detonating in an explosion that sent crescent slashes of differing blue magics in all directions including directly at the academy. "Bollocks!" he shouted, diving for cover. No one joined him on the floor as the crescents of energy impacted on the golden barrier and dissipated with barely a shudder to the gold chakra construct.

"What on earth is this barrier made of?" Little Sellen's voice rose in plaintive inquiry, distracting him yet further. "Its construction is not something I'm familiar with. Are you using those curious doppelganger instead of sigils or anchor points at the corners?" Her attention was clearly divided between the familial spat and fastidiously studying her 'father's' barrier ninjutsu. She held a small journal in her hands, with which she even now scribbled away with a quill as fast as her small hands could muster.

Naruto rubbed the back of his head in minor embarrassment, "Oh, this thing? It's my attempt to recreate something an old enemy once used, though he was waaay taller. I may not understand much sorcery, but I won't sit on my rear, not expanding my arsenal to keep you all safe."

A dusting of pink crossed Sellen and Milicent's cheeks while Melina puffed up her little chest in pride.

Blaidd nodded slowly, "Aye, friend, you've done what the Queen asked you to do and then some. And I appreciate not being on the receiving end of all that ruckus." Rennala launched a concentrated beam of magic at Ranni, to which the smaller woman glided away from, briefly turning invisible. "Though heed Moongrum's words, they shan't hurt one another physically… their feelings however, I pity that pride and providence ill coincide in such a venture."

"You're okay with this?"

Lupine eye narrowing, Bliadd gave Naruto a sideways look, "I most certainly am not; what guardian would be happy knowing their charge is about to face damage, emotional and intangible as it is?

Naruto quirked an eyebrow and replied quietly, "So why aren't you running into the middle of it to pull her out; she made it clear she wanted you to leave with her."

The hardness in Blaidd's eye faded, replaced again by that resigned look as their faces were all lit but a distant geyser of dark blue magic.

"..."

Naruto's ears perked up, hand tightening around the sheath of Kaimon involuntarily, "What was that?" he asked the wolf man.

Blaidd shifted in place, his muzzle pulling back in query, "I didn't say a thing." he said, causing a trill of discontent to run up Naruto's spine. He was sure he'd heard Blaidd whisper something. "But I suppose, in a way, this is something that could only ever be postponed, never avoided entirely. By hook or crook, Ranni's actions have left their wounds on Rennala's heart and mind; in doing so, hurting her mother also hurt Ranni. They need to air their grievances, and doing so with the battle is-"

"Cathartic," Sellen chortled with a smirk, earning her a light cuff around the head from Naruto. "Ow!" she glowered up at him. "What was that for?! I was just being honest!"

Naruto took a deep breath, reviewing this all, "I still think its a bit too much-"

"Have you truly never had a dispute that could only be resolved with words and violence as one?" Blaidd asked sincerely, crossing his arms over his chest.

Naruto opened his mouth to respond and found himself summarily was suddenly assaulted by a wave of memories from years past.

Smashing his forehead into Garra before dragging his broken body across a clearing to speak his mind to his brother Jinchuriki.

His first battle with Sasuke, sinking his fist into his father's stomach for the injustice of being made a weapon.

Slicing Obito along his side as they debated the worth of a dream.

The entire day that he and Sasuke beat one another half to death; all to prove once and for all whose ideology would stand.

His mouth snapped shut, telling Blaidd all he needed and then some

Kurama offered a low chortle. "He has you there...

"Not that foreign a concept then, eh friend." he chuckled lowly, "Though best keep an eye just in case, who knows what supreme sorceress will unintentionally do when their blood is up."

Naruto nodded, then felt his hackles rise, once again hearing a whisper on the wind that he could not place, his trio of girls still silent bar Sellen's scratching quill.

Shivering slightly before shaking his head, he let a silence fall between them as he continued to watch the battle, watching as Ranni unleashed a small tide of translucent wolves who bore a strong resemblance to the wolf perched to his left. The dogs thundered forwards, churning up the waters as they bonded, the flaming swords clamped in their maws, slashing towards his girlfriend in a squall of non-existent steel.

Rennala held her catalyst out before her before tapping her wrist against it, causing it to spin in front of her with a growing corona of royal blue light. When the pack was only a few metres away from her, she grabbed the spinning gem-tipped staff, and the blue light was instantaneously drawn into the phalanx of spectral swords above her before, at once, they let fly as greased lightning, surging into the pack. A dozen wolves were pierced at once, but many more continued to run at her, having been missed by the swords.

Suddenly, the swords embedded in the lake all radiated thick threads of that same royal blue magical light that struck out at the remaining walls. It crisscrossed between like a masterfully spun spiderweb, the sorcery strands seeking out each and every remaining wolf and tagging them in a fraction of a moment, arresting their momentum and undoing whatever sorcery had held them together. As the wolves faded away without so much as touching the Carian Queen, they let out a single haunting howl as one, a death knell for those that never truly lived and one that Radagon's red wolf answered with his own.

Radagon…

"Blaidd, can I ask you something?"

"You just did, but I'll do my best to answer if it's something I can," The half-wolf answered with a thin veneer of mirth at Naruto's annoyed expression. "What's on your mind, friend?"

"I've done my best to avoid touchy subjects when talking to Rennala, partly because she was in a bad place," said word echoed a startled yelp from Ranni as her mother's spell nearly caught her, But also because I had hoped she would tell me by herself eventually." he trailed off, providing pretense for his question, "but I'm tired of working with fragments of information because I don't want this," he gestured to the battle, "to happen again if I can help it. So I guess what I'm trying to ask is… what happened with Rennala and Ranni? What led to a reunion like this being tainted with anger and hate?"

It was a loaded question and one that Blaidd was clearly uneasy to answer. Even old Moongrum, usually composed, so unflappable, looked downright ashamed for some reason. Perhaps he, too, had wanted to tell him but not wanting to taint his and Rennala's relationship with cursed wisdom, for he who increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.

"That's… a complicated question with an answer you might not want to hear," Blaidd said with a sullen grimace, fixing Naruto with an affirmative look. "Are you sure you want to know?"

Naruto met the wolfman's one-eyed stare, feeling the depth in that loyal orb, and nodded once. "Ignorance is bliss, but when has that ever stopped me from sticking my nose into others' business?"

Bliadd let his shoulders slump before taking a deep breath, more for confidence than the length of the story he was about to tell.

Something told he him he wasn't going to like it.

He was right.

"Alright, then. Well, it began, as they say to children, a long time ago, in a land far from here…"

Naruto listened to Blaidd explain long and hard then about how long ago Queen Marika the Eternal, the Goddess chosen by the Greater Will to take the Elden Ring, had set out to bring the many desperate kingdoms, baronies, dukedoms and other fiefs into a single theocratic kingdom beneath the Golden Order. And at the head of her seemingly endless armies was the strongest warrior, the wisest general and the greatest tool at her disposal. Radagon, Queen Marika's brother-self. Under him, the soldiers of the Eternal were a great millstone, crushing flat the opposition of any who would rise to face her on the continent, from the lowest peasant to the Dragon Lords of old.

And yet, for all the war, all the bloody battles, the bending of reality itself at the behest of an actual divine figure, Radagon of the Golden Order made one mistake.

He led his armies into Liurnia and made war with its stewards. The sorcerers of the Carian lineage and their greatest monarch, Queen Rennala of the Full Moon, the greatest sorceress the Lands Between had ever known. When the armies of Caria and Lyendall had made war, for the first time in ages, the gilded footmen and penitent knights were stopped in their tracks by spellfire and glintstone. Rennala and her banners retook and paid back in blood a hundredfold for every inch of land that the capital's forces took.

For the first time since his sister-self, Radagon found himself stalemated by another, a witch who shone with the infinite mystery of the moon and fathomless shine of the stars.

They were a match; Radagon's divinely gifted miracles would trade with Rennala's masterful sorceries, his strength matched by her summons, for as much light as the Erdtree could muster, the moon would reflect it back with cool beauty and brutal ferocity. As the hammer of the Erdtree fell upon Liurnia, the glintstone dagger of the moon would rise to slip between the ribs of a stronger enemy. And yet, for all that anger, violence and talk of manifesting destiny, Radagon and Rennala had grown a respect for one another and, later, love.

And it was love to succeed where force had failed, an armistice and marriage bringing an end to an age of violence.

"It wasn't long before the pair had given birth to their first son, General Radahn, a demigod of terrifying power perhaps on par with Godfrey the Golden, and from that, the families grew closer," Blaidd explained, now with a wrapped audience. "Radagon would give Rennala two more children, Ranni and finally Rykard."

Naruto found his eyes trailing out to the battle raging between mother and daughter, watching the wondrous genius of magical warfare and beauty on the battlefield; Naruto found himself pensively smiling. 'Radagon… I might not know you, but I can understand. Heh.' A rueful smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. 'Seeing such wonder every day for years on end… I'd fall in love as well… just as I already have.'

There it was, a singular, sincere, internal declaration, one not even noticed by the one who had thought it but true. Full of fire that was small but would burn the very cosmos to its core to be known. Naruto Uzumaki had fallen for Rennala of the Full Moon… and he wished to learn all he could to make sure he could continue to see this wonderful creature hewn from rays of moonlight and bands of stellar brilliance smile genuinely again.

But Blaid wasn't finished.

"Things were good then, simple, without the mess of politics and prophecy. The Golden Lineage and Caria's demigods grew closer. Radahn grew to be a powerful sorcerer and General of armies, respected him as a bastion of strength, wisdom, power, loyalty and above all, kindness." the half-wolf huffed, "A rare commodity in leaders, especially those blessed to be strong."

"He sounds like a good man," Naruto said wistfully, feeling a note of shamed sadness from Blaidd.

"He was…" the wulven assented before shaking his head, "Rykard was also honoured, for his tact and proficiency at statecraft he was named the Praytor of Mount Gelmir…"

"And Ranni?"

Moongrum winced, the wolf mewled sadly, and an airburst rattled the barrier from a distant clash. Blaidd let out a chest-rumbling sigh; it was clear that recounting such ancient history was not pleasant for him. "Ranni… was named an Empyrean, the reason for which I was created."

Empyrean. He'd heard the word said before in passing but had never delved into its meaning, though this time, it was Sellen who had chosen to take up the mantle of explanation.

"An Empyrean," the raven-haired girl began, not looking up from her notebook as she shifted her weight between her feet, "Is a title given to those demigods born with the capability of ascending to True Godhood. Though to the Golden Order, it has a different additional meaning. Those selected by the fingers and thus the Greater Will to one day succeed and replace Marika as the Eternal deity of the lands between."

"...a future pre-planned… is no future at all…" came a whisper from all directions.

Naruto tensed, feeling disquieted. 'Kurama, did you hear that?'

"Hear what?" the mightiest Bijuu gruffly rebutted.

"Bah!" Melina exclaimed, raising her pudgy fists above her head in challenge, "If those fingers made mama unhappy, I'll just have to beat 'em up! Papa will hold 'em down while I kick 'em!"

Laughter broke through the grim pall, if only briefly.

"Aye, lass, that is something I'd love to see", Blaidd grunted in amusement before pushing on, "After that announcement, Queen Marika's approach to her family shifted, and in an attempt to keep a closer eye and hold on her progeny and potential successors, the Carian demigods were summoned to live in the capital." Blaidd looked up into the moonless sky and the fog of memory, "Everything started to fall apart when Marika banished Godfrey."

As Blaidd continued, no one noticed Sellen begin to slip away from the rest of the group and quickly retreat into the bowels of the academy.

All save for a certain rotted redhead who followed her pseudo-sister, intrigued as to what could draw her away.

---

(.0.0.0.)

---

"Wicked child!"

"I did what I had to do, Mother!" Ranni called, snapping her fingers to erect a barrier that took the brunt of one of Rennala's wide beams. "Thou must understand that I knoweth the path that would have been laid out before me, and I found it foul!" Her eye widened when she saw it to be a feint. Extending two of her other arms, she erected a pair of glintstone walls to either side of her to intercept metallic stakes that her mother had called up from the submerged lakebed. "I know-"

"Fool of a daughter! You know nothing!" Rennala leapt into the air and hung there, floating gracefully before manifesting a boulder-sized Moon that she sent careening down at Ranni. "Of what I felt, of how the Kingdom mourned and the world came undone, how my heart bled, how it still bleeds for the shattered state thou left the world in!"

Ranni realized the danger of the Moon and quickly acted, skating backwards along the water's surface while extending a hand; she fired a condensed stream of dark blue energy that met the celestial body as it fell, detonating it prematurely. The attack exploded in a tumultuous cacophony of sound, the condensed magical power boiling outwards like a pierced balloon. She was sent rushing backwards over the water, a terrific gale ruffling her hat as she was propelled back by a wall of air pressure and the concussive magic she had released. "

And what do you know, mother of mine?!" she righted herself with a snarl, pride smarting. "That day, I did what I must to escape my fate! I WILL NOT BE BOUND TO THAT THING! Nor shall I ever!"

All of a sudden, Ranni's intuition screamed at her to move; that danger swept upon her with silent wings. Faster than she could comprehend the warning did she act upon it, throwing up all four of her hands and arranging them in a diamond pattern, their segmented fingers forming the frame for a magical sigil from which emerged a dark blue seven-layered barrier.

Not a moment too soon, as Rennala came blitzing through the cloud of smoke leftover from the prior attack directly at Ranni, the bladed length of her catalyst extended in a thrust. Slamming into the hastily erected barrier with monstrous force, Ranni's eyes widened as the first four layers shattered on contact, the blade piercing the fifth layer before being stopped by the sixth.

Rennala glowered at her, eyes alight with caustic fury, teeth bared like some maddened dog. "Was that why you cast the world into chaos?! Your deeds...what befell your brothers...all that stemmed from your actions!" she exclaimed forcefully.

Anger prickled behind Ranni's eye, aimed at who she did not know yet, but it was the impetus to act. Her fingers moved at inhuman angles, articulation impossible for any not possessing a doll's mechanical hands, rearranging the barrier's formation.

"Do not judge me!" she roared, sending the edges of the barrier backwards to loop around Rennala and contain her in a bubble of power before blasting it away from her with a sudden stream of light. The orb containing her mother skipped backwards across the lake like a stone, smashing through the remains of a long submerged bridge before the Queen finally popped the prismatic prism with a torrent of magic.

"The Greater Will, the Elden Ring, a game of cosmic proportions where all are but pawns dancing to the strings of an Outer God that does not understand the world!" she slashed a hand through the air, trailing flesh azure fire in her wake. "I could not abide it, I did not abide it, I SHAN'T ABIDE IT!" she screamed as Rennala settled upon the water, launching a stream of short summoned daggers at her mother to prove the point. "NEVER!"

Rennala saw the attack and reoriented her catalyst, manifesting a massive greatsword from it and swinging it in a wide later arc, the flat of the blade sweeping her daughter's projectiles aside. She still glowered at Ranni, though a modicum of approval marked her face, marginally pleased that Ranni was finally backing her words up with action.

A wave of the catalyst and a trio of green-blue orbs swirled into being before vanishing and reappearing, dispersed in the air around the battlefield.

"And yet you chose a foolish, ignorant and inane path to do so!" Rennala bridled, her teeth grinding against one another. Each of the obs began to divide into smaller orbs linked by chains of blue lightning until the entire sky was alight with a spider's web of electrical discharges. "You, you DIED!" the Queen said, grief overflowing from her words.

Ranni flinched as if physically struck but dare not stay still for long, preoccupied with dodging the discharges of lightning that she danced between, some landing so close that they scorched her white dress. Lightning would be sent her way from whatever orbs were closest to her, but they had divided so many times that each time she evaded, she put herself in the path of another. "

My flesh was tainted," she spat back, "Its ties to that thing hewn into every sinew, a pre-planned fate written in blood! The only way I could escape it was to be rid of my Empyrean flesh."

"And was that thy only option? Why did thou not cometh to me?" Rennala wailed, swatting aside a curse of stillness that Ranni had planted at her feet. "I would never turn you away, never allow the Greater Will, the fingers or anyone else to condemn you to a fate you did not want."

Ranni looked down, unconsciously redirecting a bolt of lightning at her mother, "Because you weren't there, Mother. YOU WEREN'T THERE!"

"NOT BY MY WILL!" Rennala roared in response, absorbing the lightning bolt into the gemmed tip of her staff. "Do you think I sat idly by when I was banished from the capital!? That I did not care for my children when you were forced to live alongside a woman who tossed her own children into the sewers on the whim of a religion that I fought tooth and nail for YEARS…."

Ranni blinked phantom tears from her eye, no, control yourself, she had done the only option she could have to rid herself of her burden. Yet her mother's words had served to hook onto old memories, grievances from long ago.

"LIAR!" She bleated in anger, summoning a colossal globe of fire that she sent flying at Rennala, boiling the surface of the water as it passed. "Not once did you write to me nor reach out after Father became the Elden Lord!"

"Liar?!" The raven-haired queen's eyes widened in near hysteria, "I am the liar? How many layers of misinformation and fudged memories are thy wrapped in? Not a jot of truth in thy words; I never stopped sending you messages. I wrote to you every day, yet my messengers were barred from the capital." Rennala slammed her staff into the water, a ring of light expanding from her feet. As one, the globes of lighting fired, arcs of power shooting towards her only to turn and bind Ranni's flame mystery in chains of lightning, holding it still. "I am many things, Ranni, but a liar I am not! This is what I am!"

The energy of the binding slowly fed into the fireball, swelling it in size and changing it to a shade of cobalt as Rennala wrested control of it from Ranni.

"I am she who fell in love with a man who tossed her aside at the whim of a god. I am she who feels her insides boil and tear at the prospect that I am allowed to be happy after so many missteps. I am she who loves her children regardless of what they have become, and yet…and yet!" Rennala stood tall, tears streaming down her cheeks, "...I am broken, but never a liar."

Agony, pain, love, hate, desire.

All filled her face, and Ranni's own was a mirror as the Queen sent the colossus cobalt conflagration fly.

'I am not wrong…but neither is she.' Ranni realized, seizing hold of the lake. The waters rose up in a tidal wave to meet the firestorm in a rush of steam, but to her astonishment, the fire only seemed to grow stronger the more water she exhumed to douse it. The fire was so hot it was vaporizing the water before stripping the hydrogen, oxygen and magic to feed the fire.

Thinking fast as the fire bore down on her, Ranni summoned a dome of water around her before transmuting it to glintstone, the solid barrier weathering the tide of flame as it landed before detonating a tower of cobalt-coloured flame that could be seen for miles around.

Steam covered the lake's surface in a thick fog, obscuring both Ranni and Rennala from sight for nearly a minute.

But they were no longer the only ones on the lake's surface when it eventually abated.

"Come yee oathsworn knights of Caria, come yee fallen friends who opposed the Erdtree, rise as I give thee a moments joy in battle." Rennala intoned as the fog pulled away.

"Arise yee star-sworn, yee who hath followed the path of the Dark Moon who yet waits to see an age beyond this," Ranni answered, her voice thick with pain.

Arrayed on either side of the lake were hundreds of translucent figures, one side faint white while the other were somewhat solid. Memories given form. Behind Rennala stood her Oathsworn Dragon, before it a vanguard legion of one hundred knights of Caria, armed with swords, bows, spears and catalysts, their intangible armours marked with battle scars of a battle near a millennium old.

Facing them down was another retinue, hundreds of figures, be they man, beast or even cryptids, the likes of which had long since been thought dead. Those who had given their lives to Ranni the Witch since the shattering, memories of the dead who yet lived and the living long dead.

At some unsaid signal, the two forces advanced, footmen and men at arms swarming forwards under a suppressing lone of arrows and spellfire. They crashed headlong into warriors from the meanest beggar to sorcerers of great repute, geysers of spectral blood filling the air with shards of moonlight.

And amidst it all, mother and daughter met spell for a spell, yelling obscenities and niceties simultaneously. And for all her bluster and self-assuredness, Ranni could not keep herself from comprehension, nor the bitter bite of understanding that came with it. She had caused this; her actions had caused the world to fall to chaos, and her inaction had let her mother fall to madness when all she had ever wanted to do was help.

This.

It was.

All. Her. Fault.

---

(.0.0.0.)

---

Everything was shaking.

A shudder of masonry caused a light stream of dust to fall in front of Millicent, the greyish particulates appearing blue by the cobalt light of glintstone lamps hanging from sconces along the wall. It would seem that even with Naruto's barrier in place, the battle outside was fierce enough to be felt even this deep in the Academy. The little redhead's gold eyes did their best to adjust to the gloom, navigating the half-light more by sound than sight. It felt as if, at some point in the fog of her scattered memories, perhaps she had once been used to moving without sight.

Had she once been blind yet learned to see, or was it something else?

She continued her train of thought while ducking behind a marble pillar, peaking out to watch Sellen skulk through the halls as quickly and quietly as her little legs could carry her. She bit her lip when another tremor radiated up through her feet; perhaps she should go back to her father to watch over Rennala -Mother!- and make sure she was okay.

The newcomer's appearance had indeed been a strange development on an otherwise pleasant evening. The arrival of the long-talked-about yet never seen Ranni, Rennala's apparently dead daughter, to whom she was said to bear a strong resemblance.

"I can't see it," Millicent mumbled, taking a curl of her long red hair between her fingers.

"Can't see what?"

"EEEP!" the redhead squealed, nearly jumping out of her skin when the voice spoke from behind her. Wheeling around, she found herself face to face with Sellen's amused childish visage, her feathered black hair framing her face and eyes reflecting the glow of the lamps. "Don't sneak up on me!" she scolded indignantly, her cheeks dusted with embarrassment. "That's rude!"

"Oh?" the other girl smirked, "That is rich, given you were pursuing me, hoping not to be caught." she said pointedly, finding it amusing at the childish way that the redhead looked at her shoes. But as the little redhead muttered a series of silly excuses for why she had been spying on Sellen, the barefoot neophyte gained an enlightened expression as if an idea had just dawned on her. "Actually, I think it's best if you do come with me; there is something that you could help me with."

"Me? Hey!"

Sellen took Millicent's hand and all but dragged her further into the tunnels, ignoring the little girl's complaints and weak struggles. They continued through the labyrinthine bowels of the structure, dozens if not hundreds of passages that led deeper into the subterranean maze; it made Millicent's head spin as she was sure that some of this geometry was impossible, tunnels that seemed to double back and intercede on themselves yet impossible space dictated a new path entirely.

"Where are we going?"

"The Undercroft is hard to get to, but it will give us access to what we need," Sellen answered briskly before approaching a large oaken door barred closed with a giant magical circle. The little sorceress pulled her notebook from a little satchel on her side and quickly flipped through the pages, occasionally tapping specific glyphs and patterns on the magical circle. "Rennala and Father are occupied, giving us a chance to look into something that benefits all of us."

"Benefit?" Millicent queried, raising a red brow.

Sellen paused in her tapping and looked over her shoulder at Millicent, looking for the right words to say, her usual annoyance or self-satisfied smugness replaced with something that Millicent had never seen on her, though she struggled to find the right word to describe it.

"I find Rennala insufferable and the blonde betrothed of hers to be fascinating and aggravating all at once, and don't even get me started on Melina," Sellen explained all this slowly, looking down at her bare feet, "and yet they offer this home and knowledge to me and the rest of us without qualm. As such, the least I can do for my benefit and the rest of ours is at least take a peek ahead to see what might be coming."

Big words. She didn't understand them all. But she got the gist of it.

Jumping in place for extra height, the little sorceress slapped her palm into the centre of the sigil. A bell-like chime rang forth before the glypha began to unravel itself in spiralling patterns, the double doors slowly swinging open to reveal the Undercroft.

Millicent felt her breath hitch in her throat at what she now saw, for it was quite the wonder. The doorway opened into a cavernous room some fifty metres across with a tall vaulted ceiling that disappeared into the gloom and mist above them, though it was not the size that amazed her but the composition. The entire room was made from Glintstone from the perfectly level crystalline floor to the gigantic pillars that ringed the perfectly circular hall, each one chiselled from naturally occurring gem stalagmites into dodecahedral supports that glowed with their own internal light.

At the room's centre was a convex dias of transparent crystal measuring five metres across with a wide stem of white energy flowing through it, but her gold eyes were drawn by something atop the dias. A pyramidal plinth jutted up from the crystal to Milicent's eye level, and a large golden egg sat upon it.

'The Great Rune of the Unborn, ' Milicent realised before a dagger of pain lanced through her mind, the rot squirming within her as the fog of memory lifted for a moment, 'I am… supposed to… oh father, oh mother… the rot, the will!' but the thoughts faded into the darkness of her mind once again, leaving only an unpleasant headache in its wake.

She let out a mewl of discontent, shrinking in on herself as uncertainty roused the childish thresholds of experience that came with this body.

She did not know; she did not know. All that she knew was something she did not know!

"Shhhhh," a voice soothed, and a softness quashed the fire of rot in her brain, the gold-eyed girl subconsciously leaning towards the sound and finding a small cool hand brushing through her scarlet tresses. Opening her eyes, she realised that none other than Sellen was rubbing her head, once again bearing that expression that Milicent could not find the word for.

...thank you."

Wordlessly, she was led down the steps into the Undercroft and towards the Great Rune, the older acting girl leaving the rotted neophyte on the outskirts of the crystal dias before pulling out a stick of chalk and dropping to her haunches. She watched as her 'elder sister' slowly drew a series of intricate symbols upon the ground around the platform, each strangely simplistic yet drawn with such precision that there must have been great importance that required an infinitesimal margin for error.

"I don't understand." Millicent exclaimed, drawing an amused chuckle from the barefoot girl. "You came down here to just draw symbols in the dark...?"

"Sorcery is neither art nor science, but sometimes you must be precise to elucidate what you need." Sellen preened anew, briefly looking older than she was. "After my last brush with the Great Rune, Rennala hid it in a place most difficult to find; although I've spent the last few weeks trying to work out just where, and the battle gave me a chance to find it."

"Are you going to use it?"

Sellen stopped to gawk at her, "Are you mad? If I used it again in this state, I'd probably be reborn as an infant; I didn't even want to use it in the first place; it was an accident!"

Millicent felt her brows rise to her hairline, fixing Sellen with a disbelieving stare. Never let it be said the Sorceress Sellen had anything less than suicidal curiosity; even Millicent had worked that much out.

"Oh feh!" the feather-haired girl waved her off dismissively. "Speak not a word; in this case, I simply wish to use the Rune as a conduit for divination," she said before returning to her sigil carving. "Divination is an old sorcery, but one with strong ties to Raya Lucaria, events to be read in the passage of the celestial bodies through the heavens are usually something without a concrete set of details, obfuscated by a lack of medium to interpret it. But mayhap, what if the conduit by which you interpreted the stars was a facet of the universe itself?"

More big words. Milicent didn't understand these at all, or their meaning.

Instead she looked between Sellen and the Great Rune then back again, trying to understand what the barefoot little girl was trying to say. Comprehension finally dawned on her face, eyes widening at the prospect, "You… could see the future in clarity."

"Of a kind, it's more accurate to say you see a greater scope of what is going on right now and what might come of it… well, you could, not so much for me," Sellen said, whispering the last part. She tapped the crystal dias and drew Millicint's attention to the stem of energy that ran through it like a forking path. "This undercroft is built at the nexus of Liurnia's leylines. We will draw the energy of the land up into the Great Rune and use it as a prism to defuse the information of the cosmos and the land into a tangible form, then my divination matrix," she tapped her circle of astrological sigils she had drawn, "will transform that information into a visual medium that you will be able to perceive."

"Me?" the redhead questioned, shocked by her inclusion.

Sellen stood, brushing specs of dirt from the clothes, "Yes, you. When I originally came down here, I originally wished to confirm the location of the undercroft, but your presence presents an opportunity I can't overlook, my little apprentice," she cooed.

'Apprentice?' the redhead thought. She surprisingly liked how it sounded, another way of bringing this little family closer together, she shook her head and pointed at Sellen. "Why do I have to look? Why not you?"

Sellen frowned, crossing her arms over her chest and tapping her foot, the patter on the crystal floor sounding rather cute. "For all my skill and talent, there are some things that require a certain constitution to do, and while I may one day be able to change my form to a state where I can handle mysteries of this scale…" she gained a pained expression, "there is the potential that I would become an abomination from it. On the other hand, your body is much stronger than mine, and I think you have been touched by something similar before. So, Millicent, my would-be apprentice, my sister, will you help me look into infinity to see what lies ahead for this family?"

"..."

A heavy silence filled the room as Millicent mulled over the proposal, looking over all the information in her head, and Sellen patiently waited for an answer. On the one hand, she should say no, simply return to the surface and go tell her father about this; the worst that could come of that was Sellen getting a bump on the head from Naruto and Rennala's parental wrath.

On the other…

"Okay, but you have to promise me this," Millicent fixed Sellen with an intense stare, her gold eyes seeming to glow in their sockets, "whatever we learn can't hurt our family."

Sellen was about to make a sarcastic remark but was brought up short when her 'sister's' stare persisted with unnerving intensity. A bead of cold sweat running down her temple. Eventually, she gave nonverbal assent, and the redhead nodded in return.

Millicent readied herself as Sellen began to speak a hushed incantation, a swirl of magic emerging from between her parted palms that was slowly drawn into the crystal and down into the leylines. The stream of Sellen's magic into the earthen stream of power continued for half a minute with no apparent change.

Then it happened, an additional fork from the leyline began to detach from the nexus and slowly be drawn upwards through the convex dias and into the plinth where the Great Rune sat. It ascended slowly, flowing through the plinth in meandering arcs and swaying paths; it was an ethereal set of veins and capillaries that beat with the raw of the earth, a rush of sound permeating the Undercroft as it drew closer to the egg-shaped Rune.

At last, the magic of the leyline touched the Great Rune. The reaction was instantaneous. A globe of translucent golden light began to expand from the Rune, pushing out towards the two girls who stood on two opposite sides of the dias. Fire prickled at the back of Milicent's eyes, and the rot within her bucked against its chains, a wordless howl filling her ears, demanding she grab the Rune and make it hers. Unbidden, one hand rose, tiny fingers reaching out to touch the golden sphere.

"No, do not touch." Sellen barked, positively amusing in her squeaky childlike voice. "Merely look!" Flexing her fingers, she redirected her magic to the sigils on the floor that began to light up one by one in sequence; from each arose a band of light that rose to encircle the golden orb and contain it, halting its advance and letting its internal gold light grow thicker. "There, the totality is contained; now, simply wait for the divination to begin...!"

Across the blue corona of the containment field began to form a series of circling objects of varying shapes and sizes, each bearing its unique symbol, a total representation of the movement of the heavenly bodies rendered in three dimensions. Millicent found it hideously complicated, but she did as she had been asked, kept her eyes squarely locked on the center of the orb that grew denser.

Sellen began to intone an aria, her voice aflutter with excitement.

"In the beginning, all matter and energy was as one, a singular point in space and time. From that moment came all; from that time, the cosmos unravels into the present and from the present, we observe all that is and all that might be. These are the teachings of the stars, the moon that gently breathes the cosmos' light upon the stargazers who walk in the intersection between this day and the next."

Eyes narrowing, the child of rot noticed a change within the sphere, a darkness within its heart that bubbled up like ink through water, becoming a solid kernel of black matter in the heart of the globe. Light seemed to bend and refract around it, a singularity from which no event could be observed. But observe, she did, and no matter how hard Millicent tried to pull her eyes away from the object, she could not.

"Bwah!?" She gasped, a blaze of pain in her brain forcing her to take a step backwards. "What is… what is this?" she asked before being rocked by another fire of sensation, the rot squirming under her skin in response. Sweat beaded down her back, quickly rendering her dress sodden; panting desperately as she tried to comprehend just what exactly was occurring. It began as a whisper, an infrasound perceived yet not honestly heard, evolving into a burble of sound like a hundred thousand voices speaking at once. The sound thundered against her, threatening to swallow her up, even when she covered her ears. "It's too loud!"

"Focus, tune out the chaff!" Sellen instructed concern bleeding into her otherwise affirmative tone.

Taking deep breaths to steady herself, Millicent attempted to focus on the light-bending object at the heart of the divination orb, and with time the sound slowly bled away to nothing more than a rush of white noise. But no sooner had the last voice faded did images slowly begin to swirl to life in her mind's eye, raw concepts of information bombarding her mind.

"I… I… can see."

Sellen gasped, pulling her journal and quill to her hands while using her feet to keep the divination stable, "What do you see?"

"Everything… I can see everything." she breathed.

She could see Sellen standing across from her but also herself in third person, then it shifted to Naruto and the others on the academy wall, Blaidd hunched over the blond while Boggart sprinted in the direction of the kitchens, screaming about smelling salts. She could see her mother and Ranni locked in a pitched battle, screaming themselves horses, tears streaming down their faces. One ranged at the injustice of being left to madness when it could have been helped, while the other justified her actions despite still hating herself for driving her mother to such a state.

As her perception expanded, awareness of what was and what had been swept aside the fog of her memories. She could see it, the cathedral, the searing excoriation, kneeling to the Greater Will and promising as she had in exchange for escaping the rot. She remembered it all…

"Aahhgh!" she exclaimed, the vision changing, the images shifting to a series of things she could not explain.

"What do you see, Millicent? What do you see!?" Sellen pressed.

"I see… I see…" her lips quivered as a sob threatened go burst free. She bit down on it, "I see… a knight, their bow caught between glintstone and unalloyed gold…. I see an Omen deep beneath the earth, raining blood and affection unrequited… I see… a peg-legged hunter stalking the Altus Platau… oh my...

The images dissolved, reforming into an abstract image, the brace of a great tree mouldering in the wind. Five buds from within the tree's bark emerged, thick with veins and a familiar shade of scarlet. Slowly each one bloomed; their flowers dreadfully beautiful, belching plumes of rot into the air, filling the space with a horrid sound from her memories, a twisted song.

"One watches us from far away…" Said the smallest flower, thorned and weeping with rot.

"The eyes are familiar, the body is not, but so far away." Said the next.

"We know this gaze, the one who ran away, the traitor, the sister no longer." Spat the third.

"Patience sisters, we shall find the lost one and make her rot once more-" the penultimate flower bristled. "For by our putrid lustre combined, our rotting mother shall bloom yet again!"

At last, did the final flower, more significant than any of the others, begin to open at the foot of the tree, yet no staymans or stigmas filled the petals. Nay. Instead, hidden in the flower's heart was a woman adorned with a winged helm and prosthetic limbs.

Away! She had to look away; she could not let herself be perceived, away, away! She cast her mind far away from the rotted blooms, far from the past and present and into the distant future. Her eyes filled with a nebula of perfectly arrayed golden stars, and beyond them, she saw-

Millicent screamed.

It was an awful sound; high and reedy, it echoed off the walls and through the bowels of Raya Lucaria with a singular, unbroken note of abject horror at what she saw.

"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!"

"Millicent!" Sellen shouted in concern, quickly willing the spell to be cancelled, but alas, it had become self-sustaining. She ran her hands through her hair before coming to a simple, much more straightforward solution.

With a yell of exertion, the little girl sprinted towards the wailing redhead and tackled her to the ground, cradling her against her in a vain attempt to beat the horrid future away.

Then something peculiar happened, all at once, the light from the globe seemed to reverse itself, dispelling the black void and retreating into the Great Rune before being sucked right back into the leyline and away. Around them, the entire Undercroft shook terribly.

The shaking continued for half a minute before, finally, silence returned, only broken by the scared sobs of a little girl. Sellen did her best to comfort the little girl as she bawled; just what could she have seen?

"-ven", Sellen caught, leaning towards Millicent while rubbing soothing circles into her back. She began to slowly calm down as the adrenaline drained out of her, muttering the same five words over and over again before falling asleep.

"A helix reaching towards heaven…"

---

(...Twenty minutes earlier...)

---

As the swaths of conjured forces tore strips of spectral flesh from one another on the field of battle, Naruto felt the vein in his forehead throbbing dangerously close to the start of a migraine. "I know she means a lot to Rennala, but I'm not gonna sugar coat it. Ranni's plan was fucking stupid," he said plainly, causing Blaidd to physically cringe.

"Well… with the benefit of hindsight…" the wolfman tried to rationalize-

"Hindsight?" He scoffed. "Even with hindsight, it's a stupid plan, and this is coming from the font of all stupid plans. Take this from someone who has been flying by the seat of my pants for most of my life; the way Ranni handled the problem was not the right way, and even if Godwyn hadn't been offed, it still wouldn't have ended well."

"And how do you figure that, friend?" Blaidd questioned, flinching when Rennala's Oathsworn Dragon bounced off the barrier after being sent there by one of Ranni's more powerful spells. "No one could have predicted the shattering."

"Where do I start?" running his hands through his thicket of spiky hair, Naruto launched into his scathing deconstruction. "If everything had gone to plan, then just Ranni's physical body died to free her of the hold that the Greater Shitbag held over it, then you have the only non-golden Empyrean suddenly murdered by a group of women with strong ties to Marika. Stop me if that doesn't sound like a plan to instead secure your own lineage and kill competitors."

Blaidd mulled over the words but shook his head, "True, though Radagon and Marika are brother and sister selves, the same soul in two bodies."

"And who, outside of us, knows that?" Naruto replied with an expectant look.

Blaidd suddenly looked a little sheepish, but Moongrum was there to fill in for him. "Not many, and had only Princess Ranni perished, false as it was, a civil war between Caria and Lyendall would likely have begun anew, but far fiercer."

The prospect of grief-enraged Rennala joined by Radahn and Rykard leading a full-blown civil war against Marika and Radagon, was a prospect nearly as horrifying as the shattering had been.

"Exactly." Naruto shook his head, exasperation and worry in his heart as he watched Mother and daughter make battle with one another; he could feel her; he could feel both of them. Their anger, their pain, it was a fire that burned him, and still, he could not help but call this a tragedy. Accidents, mistakes and unforeseen consequences all had come together to make both parties suffer.

"Indeed, a tragic twist of fate."

There it was again!

Who the hell is speaking!?' Naruto internally bleated.

Kurama raised the mental equivalent of an eyebrow. "I didn't hear a damn thing. Shouldn't you be focusing on your girlfriend and soon-to-be stepdaughter rather than phantom voices? With me, you'd think you would be used to voices in your head by now…"

His surly observation hardly helped Naruto's mood.

At his wits end, expanded his senses but could find nothing particularly out of place save for the feeling of Sellen and Millicent under the academy, and they couldn't get up to too much trouble, could they?

Twitching fingers unconsciously closed around the hilt of Kaimon, still crossed over his lap.

Blaidd noticed the twitch and regarded the Odachi idly, seeking to change the subject. "Funny-looking blade you got there, friend. Not the first blade like it I've seen. A fair few Samurai wander the Lands Between, but I've never seen one with a blade that long or so… disquieting." he gestured to the flower-shaped hilt, referring to its uniquely unpleasant feeling.

"Oh, Kaimon?" he replied, lifting the bandage-covered sheath a little higher, "Yeah, Rennala gave it to me, it was helpful against Godrick and," he blushed, "she told me that it's an old Carian tradition between a man and a woman."

Blaidd looked at Naruto with a blank expression before he began to shake, a shudder rippling through his shoulders that was mirrored by Moongrum. Each began to slowly chuckle, then with time, it grew to be a laugh until both broke down into a peel of gut-busting laughter. Blaidd rocked back on his haunches while old Moongrum doubled over and held his sides.

Naruto and Melina stared at the two with deadpan expressions before Naruto lifted the extensive length of Kaimon's sheathed form and summarily bonked both on the head with it. "Knock it off!"

"Yeah! Don't make fun of Mama's gift to Papa!" Melina chipped in, glowering with all the heat of a watercress sandwich. Which is to say, adorable.

"Oof, sorry, friend, didn't mean to laugh so hard, but I think you lack some context." Blaidd chortled, calming his laughter, "When the Queen of Caria gives a sword to a man, it's not just a sign of courting. It's a symbol of engagement."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"...well, damn." Naruto said glibly, genuinely surprised.

Boggart snickered and pointed out at the raging battle, "Oh, you bastard, you've got that to look forward to on your wedding night! I hope you can regrow blasted-off limbs."

"Papa and Mama are getting married!?" Melina squealed, setting off another peel of laughs amongst the men and Wolf, but they turned solemn when another explosion from the battle rocked the barrier.

Naruto's ears perked up, the whispers on the wind getting stronger now; he looked around before feeling a familiar sensation of cold prickle up his arm from his hand. Looking down, her realised that the feeling was coming from Kaimon's handle, and the longer he looked at the sheathed sword, the stronger the whispers grew until he gently popped the first inch of the black blade from its sheath.

He looked down at the cool black sword, and the rest of the world seemed to fall away; sound bled into nothing but whispers, except it was not whispers, he realised; it was the running of a river. The Hamon lines began to move upon the metal, jostling and shifting like mist rising from water, drawing Naruto ever closer to the heart of the dark.

Blaidd straightened, his lone eye seeing Ranni and smiled bittersweetly. "A wedding sounds good after so long in darkness, and Ranni needs some light in her life, though I'm not sure how she'll take to having a stepfather." He looked back at Naruto, only for the blonde to remain gone silent, hunched over the partially drawn blade. "Friend?" Blaidd asked, jostling Naruto lightly, only for him to remain hunched. He pulled the young man up to look at his face, finding his eyes fogged and a stream of Saliva running from the corner of his mouth. "What's wrong?"

All gathered around and attempted to rouse the blonde, but nothing they could do would wake him from his fugue state. As Boggart ran off in the direction of the kitchens in search of some smelling salts, none noticed that Naruto's hand had never once left Kaimon, nor the dull black light it emitted.

---

(.0.0.0.)

---

Naruto did not know how he came to be in his current location, but he could say for sure that it wasn't where he had been.

A few keen factors clued him into this fact; the most guttural had been internal. One moment he had been looking at Kaimon, then he'd felt a sharp tug at the back of his consciousness that was akin to whenever Kurama had pulled him into speak prior to them becoming true partners, a forceful yank rather than a gentle nudge.

The second was the local itself.

Gone was the high wall of Raya Lucaria and his Six Gold Yang Barrier, replaced instead by a foggy plain surrounded by pitch darkness and the sound of running water.

In short, probably not on this plane.

Thankfully, he was a dab hand at such experiences at this point and knew that little would be gained by standing still. He swept the foggy local with his gaze before setting off at a sedate pace toward the running water's source. He did not have to walk long, passing through a bank of fog to arrive on the side of a fast-flowing river ringed on both sides by red and white spider lilies that nodded in a non-existent breeze. The sight caused him to shiver; there was something… wrong about this place, but not in the same way that Godrick's grafted had set him on edge. They had felt like something profoundly unnatural, a perversion of nature. On the other hand, this place felt like it was part of nature, yet a setting he was not supposed to be.

And yet he had been called here. Curious.

Cupping his mouth, he called out, "Hello. Anyone there?"

His voice echoed endlessly beyond the river's far shore into eternity..

"There's little need to shout, you could whisper, and I'd hear you." an aged voice spoke from Naruto's left, "Though you're correct to meet such a place with a raised voice. While those of your ilk should face it with reverence, a loud voice does liven up a dull end."

Naruto whirled around and spotted the one who had spoken, taking notice of a figure that sat not twenty feet from him. Slowly approaching, Naruto took in his appearance.

He was an elderly gentleman seated in saiza, his form thin with age but still decently muscled, a build that spoke of a person who had spent a long life fighting. He wore a pair of pale blue hakama and a matching tattered Haori. Perhaps most strikingly was the black and gold kabuto helmet perched atop his head, hiding his face from view.

As Naruto drew closer, the man, who was exceptionally tall even when seated, turned to greet him, revealing a drawn face, wizened by age and scarred by battle, a long scar having cost him an eye. He did not know this man; he had never met him before, he was sure of it, and yet he was inexplicably overcome with a sense of familiarity looking at him.

"Naruto Uzumaki," the man greeted simply before returning to his task, lifting a sword before his eyes to inspect it before continuing to slowly clean its black length.

"Kaimon?" Naruto blurted out, suddenly finding an identical sword in his own hand.

"Indeed," the old man mused, his wrinkled lips cracking into the ghost of a smile. "I believe that is still the name of the blade you carry, lest you choose a new one for it, though Kaimon is both fitting and elegant." He silently continued to clean his own version of Kaimon, fastidiously going over every inch of the blade for imperfections and cleaning them where they were found.

Naruto frowned before sitting beside the old man, remaining silent while he scrutinized every inch of him, from the tips of his straw sandals to the calluses on his fingertips.

"Something on your mind, Naruto Uzumaki?" the old man asked, rubbing down the Hamon of his Kaimon while Naruto's own sat in the grass.

"I don't know you…" Naruto began, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, "But for some reason, it feels like…"

"We've met before, but you can't remember?" the man let out a crackly chuckle, "I haven't met you, but you know me." another chuckle. "You know me very well."

Well if that wasn't a riddle to end all riddes.

"Who are you?" He finally asked.

His words brought an end to the old man's endless cleaning.

"I am not truly someone, it is difficult to put it into words, but it is fitting enough. I am a Stranger that everyone meets at least once." the Stranger sheathing his Kaimon and laid it in front of him next to Naruto's own. "As for my presence, I was roused by the sensation of that transient spirit inhabiting the body of a doll, one who has crossed the river yet returned from the other side."

Things began to click together in Naruto's head, pieces falling into place as he slowly began to work out what was going on. "You're Kaimon, aren't you? You're the one who's been trying to speak to me."

The Stranger hummed in thought, cocking his head to the side, "Am I Kaimon? I don't exactly look like a sword, do I? Though I am not sure if it's a compliment or an insult." he chuckled again, then inclined his head to look across the river into the swirling mists beyond. "I am… an aberration. A combination of the lingering thoughts of this blade's former wielder, a new 'veneration' given by the being wielded by you, a bearer of Runes, and the nature of this blade, a variation of something hidden and missing from this world."

'When the Elden Ring was shattered, the laws of the world were scattered, lost, metaphysical facets of reality and the world lost. Common sense and reality itself is not as it should be. There is so much out of place.'

Rennala had once said something similar to him.

'A Stranger that everyone meets at least once,' Naruto recalled what the Stranger had called himself, taking in the local and the feeling of familiarity he got with his presence, the cold and odd feeling he got when he wielded Kaimon, it reminded him of something old, long past. Beyond memory… birth-

His eyes flicked up. A horned white spectre loomed over him, its skin a deathly pallor, two figures skewered on a claw, a tanto swung downwards, the coldness of death…

Ice shot down his spine. "Death… you're death."

"Of a sort." The Stranger confirmed, pleased that he no longer needed to be coy, "Don't expect this to be a common occurrence, I will not be a voice in your ear like the fox, nor will I call you to speak in the future. At this point I myself am still trying to work out what, exactly, I am."

"And yet here I am, called to speak with you." Naruto snarked, earning a reluctantly gladdened side-eye from said Stranger. "Seems a little backwards if you ask me."

"Then, to avoid such a contradiction, I shall speak, and you shall listen; then, we can part ways as we both have errands to attend to. This world… there is much out of place, broken, on this plane of existence and the next. The dead come walking back into life by the grace of a Goddess, yet there is no rest for those who truly pass on. The gate swings open in the wind to allow passage through the valley across the river; you hold an important object in such a world."

Naruto fingered Kaimon lightly, the cool feeling it gave off now strangely comforting.

"That blade is more than it seems, you must understand the magnitude of what you hold, and you will have to find out its quirks for yourself, for it is Kaimon, the open gate. Think on these words Naruto Uzumaki, carve them into your soul, so that next time we meet, it is not to take you across the river, lest there be nothing waiting for you on the other side."

"...wait what?" Naruto blinked owlishly, drawing a sigh from the stranger. He made to ask another question before feeling a pulse of power through his body, the Great Runes carved into his body resonating and his form covered in gold light.

"Seems you are being called away, Naruto Uzumaki." The Stranger grimaced a thin rictus, "Think on my words, for the broken world needs some level of sense restored to it."

In an instant his body was subsumed by a pillar of golden light.

He vanished, leaving the Stranger alone at the riverside, with nothing but the spider lilies nodding to an unfelt wind.

---

(.0.0.0.)

---

The last two summons clashed.

They strove against one another, their bodies barely holding together from the amount of damage they had taken; over the long, grueling battle between endless conjured-up forces, only a handful remained, the rest having faded into ethereal motes of magic after the sorceries that held them together had run their course. The last oath-sworn Carian Knight thrust its longsword into the solar plexus of its last spectral opponent. It nodded once in a simulacrum of contentedness before fading away, its job done.

Rennala and Ranni continued to trade spellfire, a myriad of sorceries from a range of schools. Glintstone, golemancy, summons, energy projectiles, spacial freezes and transmutations of the element. So fierce had the battle between royals grown that the surface of the lake, once a still mirror to the moonless night above, was a churning mess, illuminated from below by small hillocks of residue magic that had sunk to the murky depth below. Any fish unlucky enough to have been swimming when the battle had begun now cowered deep within the crags of the lakebed, their limited cognition telling them that there was violence at the top of the food chain, and they best stay hidden until it had passed.

Mother and daughter stood across from one another atop the water's surface, each panting lightly as they bobbed up and down from the current and waves their battle had unintentionally created. Though it was not fatigue that pressed the pair to pant, for Ranni had no lungs to breathe nor muscles to grow tired, and while Rennala was somewhat out of practice in terms of prolonged warfare, she was still fit as a fiddle. No, what bade both to take comforting breaths was the emotional turmoil that was as turbulent as the waters beneath them.

Ranni's lone blue eye remained locked on Rennala's face, sharp stabs of pain jutting into her soul from seeing her beloved mother's beautiful visage so twisted by anger, anger at her. It hurt her in ways that she could not put into words, yet riding as an undercurrent was an odd pang of nostalgia, for the days when still flesh that she had giggled in joy to see her mother teach, wondering what new mystery of the moon would be revealed to her today.

'Ahhh, how those days seem so sweet, so long ago. Where I needed care, not a jot for the machinations of fate.' Ranni thought, her white dress now well and truly sodden, the inhuman nature of her doll body showing through the material. 'I wish I could return to those days, even if just to save my mother from the horror I caused to her.'

Two dozen bolts of green-blue light streaked through the air, and Ranni lifted her arms sluggishly to conjure barriers to keep them at bay.

Too late did she see that her actions had been expected, tassels of magic flying from the tails of each bolt that formed into chains that looped around her, pinning her in place. "A cheap trick," she spat, though the truth was far less dignified. For all the centuries that she had honed her magical prowess, there was a singular inescapable fact that in escaping her fate, she had been bound to. Her body, her real body long abandoned, had taken with it a large portion of her power. While it was correct to say she was one of the most powerful magical sorceresses in the land, a prolonged battle was not her forte. She would likely have to rest for weeks after this, restoring her magic in silent slumber.

"Why, Mother," she breathed, looking up at her mother, her face full of sadness. "Why do we have to do this? Surely there has to be another way…"

Rennala gritted her teeth, "Another way? ANOTHER WAY!? NOW YOU SPEAK OF OTHER WAYS!? T'was it not earlier this very battle that you derided me for thinking there were other ways to avoid the Night of the Black Knives. Where were your other ways then, Little Culver, when your brothers fell to their own madnesses in a world that you made!?"

Thunder raged in Ranni's ears anew; indignation, anger, self-reproach and, above all, fervour was a fire in her heart. An aura of pure magic enveloped her before exploding outwards in a singular cataclysmic blast, shattering the chains that bound her in place. "I did not make their fates, Mother! Radahn and Rykard chose their own paths!"

"You could have stopped it! You could have sought us out, sent messengers, sent Blaidd, an omen! Something!" Rennala answered with her own pillar of power before streaking forwards, a spectral longsword forming around her catalyst that she used to swipe at the doll-bodied demigod.

"I had to stay hidden, at least until the shattering ran its course-"

"And leave me to fall into madness, madness I still feel, that cloys even now at the back of my mind." Rennala tossed her head, eyes flashing in the light. "But not again, never again; I shan't ever return to the squalor of madness and loneliness that you imposed by your inaction."

Ranni's eye stung at the anger in her mother's tone as a part of herself she had long killed returned to life. Guilt. "I did not think Father would-"

"Leave me with nothing to remember him by than a hunk of creation and no more words!" Rennala thrust downwards, nicking Ranni's dress with her conjured sword. "Is it a confession of penitence you expect, daughter of mine? That I should somehow feel bad for returning from mental oblivion to carve out a recreation of the family I lost, to find love again? Well… I do!" she cried, lips pulled back and tears streaming down her face. "With every passing minute, I wonder what I did to deserve a second chance, that I don't deserve the love I feel, that I should not chain Naruto to a woman so repulsive as I? But I will not go back to what I was before."

Ranni sniffed, sent reeling by the words. "I know you suffered-"

"SUFFERED!? YOU DON'T KNOW A THING! YOU SIMPLY ACT AND STAND VIGIL OVER WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE UNSALVAGEABLE! YOU CANNOT BEGIN TO FATHOM WHAT I WENT THROUGH AFTER THE SHATTERING!" her mother's swings grew sloppy, her eyes red with tears. "I mourned for your death Ranni; I grieved, but by the time I had regained my senses, the shattering was upon us, and the desecration of all I knew had begun."

Ranni was forced to turn her body to mist as Rennala came at her with a overhead swing, but even she couldn't hide from the pain.

"I tried to travel to Leyndeell," Ranni froze, shocked at what Rennala had said as she got back to her feet. "I would not leave your body to moulder in some foreign land. And even in that, I failed. They barred me from the city, kept your body for their own, an item too holy to be given to a foreign witch. My own daughter, they would not give you back to me!"

Floored, Ranni could do nothing but dodge her mother as she continued to rage and cry, centuries of trauma finally coming to a boil. How had she never heard of this? Was it something that had happened when she had still been recovering from shifting to her current form?

Stabbing forwards viciously, Rennala slipped on her feet, collapsing to the watery surface and her catalyst falling from her grip. Her hair had come loose from its tight bun, and makeup smeared down her face. She hiccuped in pain, a scratch of absolute emotional overload at the back of her throat. "No matter how many times I came. How many times I asked, they would not give you back to me… I came home and wept. I failed to keep Radagon by my side, save you, and save your b-brothers…I- couldn't even get your body back from that infernal city… and that was just the start. Do you know what they did to your body Ranni?"

Ranni could not respond, rendered mute by the utter emotional breakdown she was witnessing. Rennala bawled into an open palm, overcome by the memories.

"It's still there, Ranni. Rotting on that rooftop all these years later. But what they did to it… what drove me mad… was they worshipped it." Red and blue eyes looked around, lost, unseeing her surroundings as she cried. "Those feckless devotees of the Golden Order… they enshrined your body. For hundreds of years, the only word any could speak of the lunar princess Ranni was from pilgrims travelling to the capital to BOW AND FLAGELLATE THEMSELVES BEFORE THE BURNT CORPSE OF MY ONLY DAUGHTER!"

Rennala fully dropped to her knees, taking steadying breaths, "And yet after all of that, after finding out you yet live, that you let me suffer for centuries… I still love you." she whispered.

A dagger pierced Ranni's soul. "Mother…" she choked out.

"I wish to live a new life, one with my loved ones in it… but there has been so much, so much pain, so much time… and I don't know how to fix it."

As Rennala's tears streamed down her face, Ranni felt a crushing weight in her chest. The sight of her mother's anguish overwhelmed her, and she couldn't bear to see the pain she had caused any longer. It was a moment of reckoning, a moment of deep introspection for Ranni.

As she looked at Rennala, Ranni's mind was flooded with memories of those early days long before the capital. She did not intend for any of this to happen, and she stood by her decisions to evade her fate. However, she could not deny that she had caused her mother's suffering, which tore at her heart.

With a shaky breath, Ranni finally found her voice. "I'm sorry, Mother," she whispered, her voice filled with genuine remorse. "Not for what I did, but that it brought you pain, pain that I stood by and watched because… deep down, I thought that bridge had burned."

Rennala glanced up, her eyes filled with tears and a hint of disbelief. She saw her daughter, vulnerable and tearful, and the pain in her eye mirrored her own. "How can I believe you now?"

She took a step forward, shaking despite her steeled voice. "I can't change what hath happened in the past," she said, her voice steady despite her emotions. "But I can change what happens now. I won't leave you to suffer alone again… nor shall I shun what you have built."

Rennala hesitated, uncertainty written across her features. But then, a mix of grief and hope flickered in her eyes as she considered the possibility. "Can you bear the weight of all I've endured?" she asked, her voice wavering.

Ranni nodded, her resolve firm, voice unwavering. "I shall. I'll take it all, every bit of your loneliness and solitude. Throw everything you have at me, and I promise I'll bear it,"

Rennala closed her eyes momentarily, taking a deep breath to calm herself. Then, with a sense of determination, she picked up her catalyst and got to her feet. An intricate magical circle was birthed at her feet, and she began to slowly rise high into the air, her staff glowing with the power of the full moon. Higher and higher, she rose, a great mass of energy streaming from every pour out into the moonless sky.

She looked ethereal, her grief blending with her strength, a portrait of sorrowful majesty.

Ranni steeled herself, readying her heart and mind for the immense burden she was about to carry. She opened her arms wide as if to embrace the pain that was about to come. There was nothing she wouldn't do to atone for her actions, no sacrifice too great.

Rennala slowly span her catalyst in a slow, purposeful arc, her form becoming silhouetted in a magical circle that began to expand behind her, a holographic representation of the full Moon and Carian crest that grew ever larger, gaining concentric rotating sections that continued to grow. "The shape of stars, tracing lines upon the heavens. Space, ever intangible, is given form. Within this penumbra, I see the shape of God. Within God, I see mineself." she intoed, her voice echoing over the plains as a wind began to pick up.

Streams of green and blue magic began to streak into the sky, highlighting the myriad stars and nebulae that painted the yawning void of space.

Ranni's eye nearly bulged from its socket in sheer disbelief of what she was witnessing.

"Celestial bodies open in wonder, admitting infinite possibility. Possibility dwells within empty space. And within that empty space dwells the almighty." The bands of teal and turquoise gave way to intricate magical circles that quickly spread across the sky, ranging from ones as small as a pinprick to slowly turning mandalas that were as wide as Raya Lucaria itself. Each one is linked by a filigree of gossamer strands painted in empty space, outlining the heavenly bodies in excruciating detail.

To call it a spell was a paltry description, Ranni knew, both by its scope and the fact that she knew what this truly was, yet still, it boggled her mind to think her mother possessed this much power even after her fight. One way or another, this would be the final clash of the evening. Both in a struggle for power and ideals.

Rennala danced amidst the artificial constellation, this was her masterwork, a spell of such scope and grandeur that it was as synonymous with her as it was the heavens it represented. Deploying an ethereal 'gear' into the motions of the heavenly bodies and transforming that motion into magic, magic that she shaped into a microcosm recreation of the stars that would unleash a deluge of starfallen matter with such tempestuous power that it could fell the armies of a god.

After all, it already had, long ago. 'This is the spell, the one mother used on the 12th day of the 6th month of the war against father, that utterly annihilated the armies of Radagon and gave the unstoppable servant of the Golden Order his first defeat…' Ranni thought, 'Oh mother…you are amazing.'

"Stars that govern the Carian lineage. Cosmos is an Orrery of Causality. Follow the path where we stand beyond the Gods! Become the Animus of my heaven-sent deluge." Rennala continued the aria, coming to a stop, holding off on the last line to meet her daughter's gaze, a singular white dot in the mirrored lake below.

Ranni pondered what must have gone through her mother's mind at that moment, for there was still pain in those beautiful blue eyes. Her focus flickered to the golden barrier protecting the academy, and a prickle of curiosity touched her; just what sort of a man was this, Naruto Uzumaki, whom her mother trusted to defend their home? Perhaps she would find out…

But there was the matter of the microcosm floating high above her; in a sense, this great ritual was a testament to Rennala herself, all she had done, all she had experienced, the start of her pain and its culmination. This was the weight that Ranni would have to support if she hoped to mend the damage she had done, to walk with her mother, not away from it.

She dropped to her haunches and slowly splayed her flour hands until the tips of each of her fingers touched the water's surface. Slowly, ever so slowly, the water beneath her stilled as she pushed her magic into the lake, a much simpler magic begging to take form, though of a similar scale. Ranni was a masterful witch; truly, her knowledge and skill rivalled her mother, but since the loss of her body had lost their raw potency. Now had she her ring, things would be different, but still, her answer to the attack had to be as much a statement as an attack of itself.

From her feet, the stillness of the water expanded until the entire lake was a mirror shine, perfectly reflecting Rennala's spell in its image, yet as the seconds passed did one notice that matching magical circles began to shine up from the water's surface, spinning in the opposite direction from Rennala's.

'A reflection, look upon this spell, Mother, look upon my answer.' Ranni thought, gritting her teeth with the effort. She did not have enough magic by herself to complete a total reflection of Rennala's masterwork, so she began to draw power up from the leylines, bolstering her building simulacra. 'I acknowledge your pain, I acknowledge its layers… and my answer is simple, I shall give what I need to cancel it out. So says Ranni the-' she cut herself off before whispering to herself, "So says Ranni of Caria."

However, unknown to Ranni, beyond the realms of conscious thought, in the percolating Id where instinctual desires are born before the Ego and Superego make sense of them for the waking mind did a single unbidden thought come.

'Alas, part of me wishes I could undo it all and be that ignorant child once again…'

Rennala nodded and held holding her catalyst high, its jewelled tip becoming incandescent with light, calling for the world itself to hear. "Space is but an Antrum of the great beast. Deliver you to the death that is Unbirth! My Anima is alight with celestial fire! FALL, ANIMUSPHERE!"

She swung her catalyst down, and all hell broke loose.

From the center of the thousands of celestial magical circles was born a coagulation of power, solid and swathed in flaming lunar flame. There were too many to count, and for a paused moment in time, it looked as if the universe had been born again at the beckoning of the queen. Thousands of meteors, planetoids and other celestial phenomena began to rain down towards the earth like a storm of arrows loosed by an angry war god, passing between beams of artificial moonlight that cut deeper than the sharpest knives.

Yet as they fell, so too did their mirror images rise, falling towards the sky; the earth reached for the sky and the sky to the earth in two storms of magic and might that may as well have been solid pillars of power miles across. Every projectile met its doppelganger, exploding into a ceaseless tide of explosions and shockwaves, the likes of which had not been seen since the shattering. Gravity warped at the point of impact, bending light and refracting space to give the air a picture book quality, colours that could not be named bending around disparities in space and time, a moment ubiquitous by the fact it was happening at all.

And that was just the opening salvo.

Each circle and mirror image spat its magical payload again and again, with greater speed for each repetition. The two streams of magic struggled against one another, more a battle of will than sorcery, for this was already the pinnacle of the Carian arts.

Ranni could feel her mother's soul in every collision, every dark moment and anguished cry rendered in visceral heavenfire and hitting home just how steep a mountain she had to climb. But the scope of her task did not give Ranni pause, no. It bolstered her resolve, urging her to push on.

"I will…I will…I WILL MAKE AMENDS!" she screamed above the tumult.

Rennala faded from view, the rate of spellfire growing to such a fever pitch that it was impossible to see beyond the colliding celestial bodies. Soon, the bodies themselves lost form, and the pair were on either side of a pillar of magic between heaven and earth. With one final cataclysmic shout of exertion, Ranni sent everything she and the ley lines into the attack, trusting it to embody her will, both waking and subconscious.

And then, all was swallowed by golden light.

---

(.0.0.0.)

---

Warmth

It was the first thing that registered to Ranni as consciousness swam back to her, a rather perplexing fact despite its mundaneness. Indeed, to she who had grown so used to living her life with only crude approximations of sensation as a soul pinned to a doll, she'd long since gotten over the numbness that everything entailed.

And yet, she couldn't exactly bring herself to care right now because of how comfortable she was.

So instead, she just continued to hug herself close to the object she found herself attached to.

It was broad, unyielding yet pleasantly soft and warm all at once. Ranni pressed herself against it, letting out a mewl of contentment.

"You put on one hell of a show." said a familiar voice, upbeat and boyish to the point of being infuriating. "Can't say I blame ya tho, pretty sure I glassed a forest once to teach my friend some common sense. Family spats sure are messy, huh."

Ranni's eye snapped open, and she looked around frantically, tightly squeezing her only pole of support, sensory info bombarding her as blood thundered in her ears.

"Oi," Naruto said, looking over his shoulder to where Ranni gripped onto his back like a limpet mine. "You can quit squeezing, I ain't gonna vanish. I swear, kids can be so clingy."

Sputtering at the insult, Ranni wrapped her four arms against the back of Naruto's head in complaint. "You think me a child? Certainly not, human. I am centuries older than you, do not let my childish appearance fool you, for it was mottled on my mentor!"

"Pfft," Naruto snorted, shifting the weight in his arms. "I think you need a reality check, but do you mind quieting down, she's trying to sleep."

What? Ranni bit her lip, not understanding his words, until it dawned on her that she could feel herself biting her lip. This was so shocking that she nearly slipped off Naruto's back were it not for her primary set of arms fisting lumps of his hair, drawing an annoyed grunt from the blonde

Huh… that was strange, since when were her hands small enough to both fit in a man's skull…or no longer segmented.

She looked down.

"Wh-ah, the- what devilry is this, Vagabond!?"

"Shhhh," Naruto hushed; a golden chakra arm emerged from his back, gently picking her up and placing her upon his shoulder in one fluid movement. She saw then that they were trudging back across the water towards the academy, now bereft of its golden barrier.

Looking down, Ranni caught her reflection in the water and found herself quite perplexed; because while it was still decidedly her with blueish skin, four arms and long tumbling hair, she was somewhat smaller than she remembered…and breathing.

"Ttthssss~."

Ranni held off on her tirade for now, drawn by the sound of light snores.

Looking down, she saw that Naruto was gently holding a sleeping Rennala to his chest in a Princess carry, a small smile on her sleeping visage.

"Seems you were both tuckered out by that last attack," Naruto mused, giving the newly young girl, who could not have been older than nine, a cheesy smile.

Ranni balled a fist and would have sucker-punched him but stopped when Rennala muttered something in her sleep. It was said unintentionally and in the grip of deep, exhaustion-induced sleep, but it was something that Ranni had yearned to hear for several hundred years.

Five words.

Twenty-three letters.

"I forgive you, Little Culver."

A/N: Aaaaand now we have Smol!Ranni.

Hope you all enjoyed this, Slifer and I are exhausted from writing this behemoth.

In fact, I think I'm going to pass out after posting this. Looking forward to reading your feedback when I wake up!

As ever, we're following the Ember's Rule here. That's no joke. Really, it isn't. If folks don't like this...well, we'll not continue it. Every bit of feedback helps. Reviews are the fuel which keeps me writing in these crazy times. With my tight schedule, I simply don't have time to write a story folks don't like. Without them, my inspiration cannot take wing and I can't write a word. So by all means, speak up!

Reviews are my lifeblood. Without them, I cannot write.

So In the Immortal Words of Atlas...

...Revieeeeew, Would You Kindly?

They keeps an old man alive.

And enjoy the previews.

As ever:

SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!

PLOT DETAILS AHOY!

YE BE WARNED!

Get ready to smile~!

Obvious references are obvious~!

(POTENTIAL!) Previews! What can I say? We've been busy.

The Greater Will sneered at the chaos below. It wasn't so foolish as to put all its eggs into one basket. Not this time. It had learned its lesson with Godrick.

Force of arms meant naught when assailing a fortified position. Nay, this time it would be subtle. Insidious.

This time, it would be CLEVER.

---

"How very curious...

---

"Um...can you see me?" he waved a hand warily before her face, squinting in the rain. "Hello?"

"I cannot." the blindfolded woman wobbled on her feet. "Pray tell, who is there? I seem to be quite lost. Is this castle Mourne?"

Naruto and Rennala exchanged a baffled look between themselves. The latter found her voice before the former. "It most certainly is not, dear girl."

"Oh." Her voice warbled a little. It looked like she might cry...

---

The third time, as they say, was the charm.

And so the Greater Will moved anew.

What a fool it was.

---

Little arms reached for him. "Up!"

EDIT: Hey, you made it!

As ever, we're following the Ember's Rule here. That's no joke. Really, it isn't. If folks don't like this, if people don't enjoy...well, I won't continue it. What's the point in writing something no one likes? Every bit of feedback helps. Reviews are the fuel which keeps me writing in these crazy times. With my tight schedule -two jobs!- I simply don't have time to write a story folks don't like. Without them, my inspiration cannot take wing and I can't write a word. So by all means, speak up!

Looking forward to chatting with you all~!

R&R~!