A relic of the past

'My parents died the day I was born.' Naruto's words kept repeating in her mind even as she was otherwise occupied. Could they be similar in that way?

As soon as they had reached a protected shelter in one of the building's ruins he had sat down against a wall, in need of both rest and treatment.

"Stop squirming like a child," she said though he kept on pulling his arm away from her, keeping her from taking a look at the wound and doing what she could to help. After his show of inhuman fortitude in simply ignoring the pain he was guaranteed to be in while they had looked for this place, now was the time to inspect the damage. She may not be a Maester, but she had learned many things in her life, applying salves and doing the barest of wound care among them.

"I told you; I'll be fine." Despite his insistence she could see the toll the damage was taking on him. Sweat was beading his brow and every movement of that arm made him cringe away and grit his teeth. The pain was probably the only thing keeping him alert and conscious.

"I will be the judge of that," she retorted. After another few attempts to avoid her attention, he gave in, gingerly extending his wounded arm and giving her access to the wound. They were both wearing thick leather robes, in an effort to reduce the danger of catching a stray spark and simply going up in flames but whatever fire had been created by the guardian they had encountered clearly had not been normal.

Where the burning obsidian limb had touched him, the leather was completely gone. Incinerated and burned through in a matter of moments so that the flames could reach the flesh beneath. The air above the worst burns still shimmered with heat, and every little movement cracked the blackened flesh and made blood and puss flow out.

Some of the leather needed to be cut away but there was no reason to completely destroy the robe. Unsheathing her dagger, she went to work, carefully cutting into the leather with the always sharp Valyrian steel. Some of the material farther from the main burn had been softened by the heat, fusing it to Naruto's skin but she did not want to aggravate anything before getting a better look, so she left those parts in place for now.

With the sleeve shortened a few inches and the damaged glove pulled off his hand she had better access to the wound. The small cuts on the inside of his hand were negligible and obviously far outweighed by the burns decorating about half of his hand.

Naruto's skin was noticeably hotter the closer to the burns she touched, a phantom of the flames lingering in the wounds. It was a clear contrast to the sheer power she could feel underneath his skin but he could not suppress a wince when she got near the blackened flesh on his wrist. A careful touch to the charred spots themselves elicited no reaction from him at all.

What salves she had brought for burns would be rather useless in treating such severe injuries but even if they only lessened his discomfort and pain slightly it was worth using them. Having him with a second usable arm was preferable to the alternative.

Quaithe could not help but feel some worry about the degree of injury he had sustained. She knew her own limits well, but the guardian would have been a match for some of the greatest knights she had ever seen, stronger and faster than any normal man had right to be. Without a shadow she could grasp her means of defending herself against them were limited. If Naruto died from his wounds, or far more likely lost the injured hand, getting back to civilisation was far from assured.

"This will probably hurt."

Naruto nodded and adjusted his position against the wall slightly. Ideally, she would have cooled the burns with ice, or at least cool water first but she had no access to either here so this was all she could do. No attempt at being gentle would make the experience any better so she didn't bother, simply getting everything covered in the burn salve she had brought as quickly and carefully as she could.

Except for gritting his teeth Naruto did not let any of his discomfort show, but she could feel the tension in his arm and hand the whole time as she worked.

Judging her work on his burns done she loosely wrapped the area in bandages. Wrapping tightly would stop him from moving the area too much but the Maesters knew it slowed the healing process.

"I would ask you to move it as little as possible, but I know I would be wasting my breath. Just try to keep it clean." If burns of that severity fouled there was little she could do for him.

"Thanks. But I really will be fine soon."

He seemed confident but she was not convinced. Even magic had its limits, though there were few. Beckoning the body's healing process was possible if complicated but something of this severity? Even given unlimited time and the best possible care this would never completely heal, magic or not.

"How soon?" she asked doubtfully.

"Usually happens after a few seconds," Naruto said. "Been a bit slower for a while now."

Seconds passed and she waited expectantly for something, anything to happen. Nothing did, obviously. They had been looking for shelter for near an hour after he had gotten hurt.

"Well, until that happens, I need to take a look at the cut in your side. If you bleed out, I'm leaving you here to rot."

He shrugged out of his clothing to give her access to the wound. When they had left the obsidian body of the guardian behind it had still been burning with cursed fire and inspecting it had not been a priority, but she thought it likely that the sword it had used had not been made of obsidian entirely. While incredibly sharp making larger objects of the material emphasized how brittle it was. Then again, the same should have held true for the body.

Illuminated by flickering lantern she thought it was a trick of the light at first but upon closer inspection her senses had not played a trick upon her. A circular patch of skin just to the right and up of his heart was slightly discoloured. It was no more than a few shades and yet now that she had spotted it, she could not help but wonder what had happened to cause it.

That it had been an injury was beyond obvious, quite a grievous one judging by the size and position. Quaithe could not help but think that his back likely sported a similar patch of lighter skin but that brought other questions to mind. What could have caused it? How had Naruto survived it?

Could he truly heal to such a degree?

The cut in his side was not particularly deep, stopped for the most part by the mail he always wore underneath and cleaning the wound allowed Quaithe some time to think while Naruto seemed to have trouble fighting his exhaustion, his eyes starting to droop.

'My parents died the day I was born.' Had her initial suspicion been correct? Was he the result of blood magic rituals, sacrificing lives to give him the power he wielded so casually? Blood magic was the most powerful magic. She could not disregard the possibility.

With the wound taken care of there was nothing left for her to do for him. The healing would have to happen in time.

The old wound on his chest drew her attention again. Other than the slightly off colour there was nothing else marking it as anything but a normal patch of skin. Slightly larger than her fist she wondered what could have caused it. Of the weapons she knew none would cause a wound so circular and large. A ballista bolt could fit the rough dimensions but the head of one would lead to a notable cross-pattern on the body.

On closer inspection small, almost unnoticeable cracks of discolouration lanced outward from the main circle in all directions. Variable and uneven she could make no sense of the pattern they created.

Acting on impulse she lightly ran her fingers over the spot. There was no appreciable difference in texture on the wound. If she had not been looking at the discolouration, she would have thought there was nothing there. She felt Naruto's muscles tense reflexively from the sudden skin contact and on his bare stomach a queer black marking faded into existence.

Four symbols she had never seen surrounded an inward spiral on the top and bottom. It was clearly a tattoo of some kind and yet just moments before there had been nothing there. That it was somehow magical in nature was obvious enough, but she could not differentiate it from Naruto's own.

A questing touch plunged her world into darkness.

From one moment to the next she was kneeling in a few inches of water. Naruto's presence was always very obvious to her when he was close by, his magic a shining beacon to her senses. Now, a much weaker version of the feeling surrounded her on all sides, almost sheltering her, standing as a bulwark against the world.

The floor was even and solid and a testing hand confirmed it to be stone. Quaithe stood up warily, trying and failing to gain any further insight on her surroundings. Despite her inability to see anything she did not feel any apprehension. In this place, in this moment, she was completely safe. It was not just a vague feeling, it was certainty.

Feeling safe however, helped nothing with understanding her situation.

She could not tell much of anything about her surroundings. There was no smell to this place, no light to give her sight and nothing but stone and water in reach. Quaithe would have almost considered this a realm of dreams, that she had simply fallen asleep but forgotten but that could not be. The details were clear to her and everything she experienced was more real than dreams usually were. And yet it wasn't quite real either.

Her body reacted the way she expected it to, but she felt slightly removed from it, nonetheless. Two different experiences in her life compared: her vision in Qarth and her time in the Shadow of Stygai.

Without any idea as to the dimensions of the space she was in Quaithe simply started walking in one direction, one arm extended to not run into any walls. She walked like this for a while, not even sure if she was making any progress before anything changed.

In front of her a slitted crimson eye, larger than she was tall, opened. Suddenly the space was flooded with light, illuminating her surroundings, and blinding her for a few moments as her eyes adjusted to the change.

"A new visitor comes," boomed the monstrosity revealed before her. Her eyes widened as much because of its ability to speak as because of the incredible size of the creature. She had seen the skull of Balerion, the biggest of the dragons, in the Red Keep; an awe-inspiring sight for everyone who witnessed it. Seeing something of comparable size in the flesh drove the sheer terror the Black Dread had inspired home.

Quaithe could not help but take a step back.

It was a fox in the same way that the Hightower was a turret. It's sheer size and presence set it apart from any other of its kind. With light flooding the space the dimensions of the room became clear. At least two hundred feet across it seemed to be of unending length, the light not enough to illuminate the ends. The fox was not even completely visible, at least half of it still plunged in darkness.

Naruto was so powerful that she could not overlook his presence and this thing was the same way, its power pressing down on her like a weight.

Yet she did not feel fear. Awe and intimidation and helplessness certainly, but not fear. She could not say whether she was just numb to this sudden experience or was truly not afraid, but she did not fear for her life here.

Lazily resting its head on its front paws, the giant fox eyed her with an unfathomable, rage-filled stare. Then it opened its mouth, though calling it that felt wholly inadequate to her.

"Peace. Even if I wished I could not harm you here, Sorceress."

Quaithe's mind desperately wanted to use thinking about that statement as a distraction, but she got a grip on herself instead. She understood little enough about her current situation, talking was the best way to find out that she could see at the moment. Squaring her shoulders, she faced forward.

"Where am I?"

"You are where you were before, kneeling in a ruin of destroyed Oros. The place you see now does not truly exist. This is a place in Naruto's mind, serving as a connection between me and him." Getting a seemingly honest answer from a giant fox seemed too fantastical a concept for reality and she wondered for a moment if she was simply losing her mind in visions and dreams as so many of her ancestors had done.

A place in Naruto's mind, so real that she could feel the details in the ground beneath her feet. The idea boggled her mind and the instinct to dismiss it was strong but in the end, she had nothing to refute the assertion either, except perhaps the problem of how something this massive could exist inside a normal human.

"How is it that I am here then?" Quaithe asked. If this was Naruto's mind, how could she enter it by simply touching a, admittedly magical, tattoo on his stomach? She was no skinchanger, to reach out with her own mind to that of another and enter by her own strength.

"The seal that contains me has no need for defences that keep others out." It seemed to shrug, the gesture accentuating its slightly more human body, before continuing. "Naruto also does not shield himself from you. Reduced as we are, nothing powerful stops you from coming here."

Questions sprang to the forefront of her mind immediately, but one seemed most important. "Reduced? In what way?"

"You may think us powerful as we are, but this is nothing but a fragment of our true strength. This world wishes desperately to suppress us, as it does you and all other things. But neither I nor Naruto would ever yield to such a demand. If we ever did, I suspect we would simply cease to exist."

Believing that magic was in decline was no great feat, any student of the arcane knew as much. Not only had an incredible amount of knowledge been lost to war, death, destruction, and time, but the potency of magic had been declining for decades, whether caused by the Doom or not. The degree of that decline no one truly knew, or those that knew did not share it with others, but that it was fact no one disputed.

"Why are you telling me all of this?" Quaithe asked suspiciously. She was still unsure whether he, it, was telling the truth.

"I was alive long before you were born, and I will still live when you are nothing more than dust. What concern is another's secrecy to me? There is only a single human life I care about."

"And if I were to betray him?" Perhaps she was pushing her luck, but the safety she still felt was making her dig deeper.

"I do not believe you will, Shiera Seastar."

She recoiled as if she had been struck, the amusement in the crimson eye plain and galling. Her own eyes were immediately drawn to a single strand of silver-blonde hair that had been moved into her vision by the reaction. Her hand flew to the emerald brooch hidden in the folds of her robe. She had been using the glamour for decades now, hiding her true features from the world, confident that nothing but her own will would reveal her.

Shiera Seastar was dead. Never found after journeying east to unknown lands. She was Quaithe, or another hundred names she had used since that day.

"As I said. Peace. Naruto does not yet know, and without your illusion remains. But it will not be long before he figures it out. You have not been as careful as I assume you wish to be, and he is not as inattentive as he seems." The giant fox raised its head, standing to its full imposing height. Standing on its hind legs it would undoubtedly tower over many castles.

"A final piece of advice. Naruto treasures promises more than human reason permits." Without another word it turned around and walked into the darkness, nine enormous orange tails trailing behind.

Slowly her surroundings washed away like paint, making place for the dusty ruined room they had taken refuge in. Shiera felt only vague numbness as she tried to make a decision on how to proceed. Naruto was still seated against the wall in front of her, but his eyes had closed, sleep claiming him at last. An easy target.

No, that way lay only madness. Killing him may preserve her secret, if she was even capable of doing it, but it would be an incredible waste. Not to mention it would likely mean her own death. She was under no delusion that their experience today was the limit of the dangers these ruins presented. Facing them alone was folly.

Shiera wasn't even sure anymore why she had first assumed another identity. Near sixty years had passed since then and to the world Shiera Seastar was only a figure of history now, some half-forgotten remnant of the maligned reign of Aegon the Unworthy, outweighed for most by the shadow of the Blackfyre Rebellions.

Would it be so bad to share with someone else? Did it even matter if he knew? Naruto was as set apart from other people as she was, spending his days with learning and training without any real personal contacts. She had already half suspected that he had no family anymore when he had decided to accompany her from Qarth without any need for persuasion.

Naruto shifted against the wall, turning his injured hand so that it rested more comfortably on the still whole parts of skin. From one moment to the next the feeling she had experienced in the presence of the nine-tailed fox returned and Naruto's wounded hand glowed orange and red for a second. His features shifted in discomfort before returning to the peace of dreams and rest again, the glow receding from underneath the bandages.

She worked methodically to unbind his hand, already half expecting what she ended up finding beneath. Where demonic fire had made the flesh blacken and blister, where the force of the flames had burned a ring near a half an inch deep into his wrist, a healthy hand remained. The skin was hairless and not quite smooth and wherever the fire had touched a distinctive angry redness remained, but it was healthy and a light touch elicited no pained reaction from Naruto anymore, though the skin still carried a phantom heat.

It seemed like a poor jape, that he really had been right about being fine soon, and that her worrying and efforts had been all for naught. If he was awake, she would have had words with him about being more precise in the future, but he was not and waking him for something like it seemed to be more childish than she had acted in decades.

The light cuts in his hand had disappeared completely and the injury in his side had most likely followed suit as well. Ideas about possible experiments as to the limits of this ability to heal formed unbidden in her mind but she shelved them for a later time. These ruins were hardly the place.

It was only the early afternoon but getting some rest herself did not seem to be such a terrible idea. With ash in the air, making even the bright noon grey and redness lighting the sky by night there was no need to only act in the day.

Placing Naruto's hand back in his lap she made to stand but Naruto moved his head to the side suddenly, his eyes opening slightly. They were blurry from exhaustion and sleep, lacking the usual sharp clarity and Shiera was unsure how much he could really see in the dimly lit room, but they were trained on hers, nonetheless.

"How do you feel?"

For a moment it seemed like he had not heard her at all but then his jaw moved weakly. "Better," he slurred, his voice like that of a drunk. That much was to be expected.

He adjusted his position against the wall, sitting up so that his back was straight and not half facing the floor. Somehow, he made the hard, smooth dragonstone wall look as comfortable as a feather mattress and what little clarity there had been in eyes was already leaving. Shiera turned away and reached for the lantern lighting the room.

"You have beautiful eyes, you know."

Naruto was already back to sleep when she faced him again and she stubbornly refused to acknowledge the slight heat in her face. She had been showered with compliments by great lords and noble knights as far back as she could remember, but seldom did the words come with such simple sincerity.

That was foolishness of course. He was not in control of his tongue and her glamour was in place, how much sincerity could there be in that? When he woke, he would not even remember the words.

After darkening the room Shiera went to sleep, resting against Naruto for a few hours of dreamless slumber.

Even with the ash in the air the crimson night sky illuminated their surroundings as well if not better than the sun did. The farther they continued into the reaches of Oros the more ruins there were to inspect. Until now those few they had seen had not yielded anything but dust, ash, and debris but Shiera was not discouraged. They had brought enough supplies for a week with them.

Some of the ruins were still in rather good condition but there was little of use to be found in destroyed bedrooms or kitchens.

With the destruction from earthquakes, eruptions, and the passing of time it was difficult to ascertain what parts of Oros they were tracking through. Just like any other city there had to have been city quarters dedicated to certain purposes in this one. Shiera thought that a craftsmen's quarter would probably yield the best results.

Finding an intact smithy or library of some sort would be too much to ask but glass candles and the guardians must have been manufactured somewhere. She thought it unlikely that a city as big as Oros had never contained its own means of making them and only imported them from Valyria itself.

Hours of the night passed, and they plunged further into the former heart of the city. Oros itself wasn't particularly close to any one of the nearby volcanos but the cataclysm that had destroyed the peninsula had ripped half of the city away and into the now boiling, kraken-infested sea, so their progress was met with an increase in the scarring of the land.

Some of the rifts that split the earth were more than twenty feet wide and would have stopped or delayed any other explorer, but Naruto could jump those distances even with her added weight. That did not mean that they could simply walk as they wished of course. When lava flowed thick and hot even he did not think it a good idea to jump, the heated air above catching fire in some places a few times, and when earthquakes had raised one part of the land and sunken the neighbouring one they had to climb.

The absence of other guardians was making her suspicious. Believing that the rest of them had been destroyed in the Doom and they had unfortunately encountered the only remaining one was far too fanciful a delusion.

"Nothing again," Naruto said and shouldered his pack again. The red sky and ash-filled air made it hard to tell just how much time had passed already. For all they knew, the sun was already rising.

This cluster of ruins investigated, they continued on, their destination the south-east. Their progress in that direction was faced with another cliff, about eighty feet high. The rough stone formed an overhang at the top making climbing difficult and the height meant that a single piece of rope would not be enough to bridge the distance. Usually, Naruto simply pulled her up after ascending himself.

Due south, the difference in height only increased until the ground gave away to the Smoking Sea some two hundred feet below. In the other direction she could see no lessening of the distance either though the cliff face turned away and out of sight some hundred yards away. If there were any details that would have made climbing easier in either direction, she could not see them through the ash.

In the end it did not matter.

After securely binding two ropes together Naruto absent-mindedly checked that everything he carried was safely secured to his person while inspecting the cliff-face. A running jump and he was clinging to the rough stone, his hands and feet finding cracks and edges to serve as handholds as easy as breathing. Then he started ascending.

He looked like a monkey, clambering up the cliff at that speed, but she could not deny his skill. Even though he had to climb the last stretch with his back near parallel to the ground his pace did not falter and before long he had pulled himself on top of the cliff face.

Ever since she had puzzled out the effect Naruto had on his immediate environment it had become more and more clear whenever he did. The air started to burn in her throat and she desperately wished to shed any layers she wore to reduce some of the unbearable heat. It was no real change in temperature, but instead only the heightened effect of the surroundings on her body. A weight seemed to settle on her shoulders and she could feel the curse that had fallen over this place so long ago, like a rusty knife was pressed to her whole body, the wound spoiling and festering immediately.

She waited patiently for him to throw down the rope but when a minute passed without any sign she started to get concerned. Not necessarily for Naruto's life, accounting for everything she knew he seemed rather close to unkillable by ordinary means, but definitely for their situation. He had most of their supplies with him and getting back to the boat without him would be quite the task.

They were unsure whether the guardians could hear or smell, but they had decided not to make too much unnecessary noise just to be safe either way.

Just when Shiera was about to call out anyway a rope came tumbling down towards her, shortly followed by Naruto's face appearing over the edge. Even slightly obscured by ash his blonde hair was incredibly distinctive in the dark surroundings.

Once he had pulled her up to his position the delay became clear.

Two guardians were on the ground, their obsidian bodies motionless. One was missing a leg and had almost been cleaved into two pieces, the cut from the right shoulder down to the left hip nearly complete, while the other was missing both arms and the head. One of the arms, a long black limb of obsidian was laying not far from it while the other was nowhere to be seen.

"I see you encountered some trouble," Shiera said, once she had taken the two bodies in. Now that she could take a longer look at the guardians without having to worry about the danger they presented or flames sprouting all over she could appreciate some of the intricacies.

They were long-limbed and gangly, too thin to work as an actual body, and the head was surprisingly smooth, none of the edges decorating the rest of the body present anywhere. If anything, the body looked like it was wearing armour, the material more pronounced where plate would be found on any knight. There seemed to be no points where different parts had been fused together. Instead, it looked like the whole body had been formed from one giant piece of obsidian, cut and melted and fused until this form remained in the end.

Though they did not move she did not reach out to touch them, wary of repeating the fiery results they had encountered the last time.

"Not as much this time. These were already damaged." Naruto pointed out the missing arm and leg and she quickly noted the difference in the wounds. Where he had cut them, the obsidian was parted evenly, while the spots where the missing limbs had been attached looked to have been cracked and crushed. Most likely they had been damaged by debris in or shortly after the Doom. Naruto himself sported no wounds that she could see, the visible top-half of his face showing no pain or discomfort.

In the distance four towers stood surprisingly straight. The towers were big enough to jut out of the ash clinging to the air like fog, giving her a better view of their current state and illuminating them in the red light of the sky. Dragonstone was an incredibly durable material, but it was not indestructible, well documented by the destruction they had already witnessed in Oros, so these were the first buildings they had seen that seemed to still be vaguely intact.

About two hundred yards separated them from the towers, a distance filled with debris and other ruins that looked far less promising. The top of one of the towers looked slightly discoloured compared to the rest to her, but the red light made such judgements unreliable at best, only helped along by the bad visibility.

"I'm ready again." Naruto had disconnected the two ropes and returned them to their place on his equipment. She nodded her head in his direction and started walking.

After their first steps what Shiera had assumed to just be some differently coloured stone started moving. The shape unfurled from around the tower, revealing a long neck and four short, almost stubby legs. Attached to the back of the front two legs were wide, leathery membranes, the silhouette they created as distinctive as could be.

The dragon, for what else could the creature be, raised its long neck and opened its maw, an ear-piercing shriek filling the air. The shrillness overwhelmed everything else Shiera was feeling, making her clap her hands to her ears in some effort to block out the noise and stop her from thinking that a sharp metal rod was being pierced into each one.

Chapter 14 is done and longer than even this one is, and I'm nearly done with 15 as well. I hope you enjoyed.

Finally got to the reveal of Quaithe's identity, though I guess most people were already aware. We get very little information on Shiera Seastar in the books so I'm mostly working on my own ideas here, as I said about Quaithe. That her own memories of the past have been vague and nameless until now was also intentional, reflecting how removed her own thoughts as Quaithe are from those people. I tried to make her own past slowly intrude back into her chapters as she spent more time with Naruto. We are not given a date of birth, but I'm setting it at 180 AC for this fic. Bloodraven most likely means her when he says "a woman I desired" to Bran, which you could argue is an interesting difference to "a brother I loved".

I took some liberties with Naruto's injury from Sasuke. In canon the wound is completely healed without even a little mark but I think having a little memento of it remain enhances a moment like that, especially since Naruto thinks of Sasuke as his brother. A betrayal like that should leave a mark, a physical if not a mental one. In canon it does neither so here it does.

Kurama is insanely big in canon. The one sealed inside Naruto is actually only one half, with the other stuck in his father. Complete Kurama easily towers over even the immense things from ASoIaF. On his hindlegs, he may be able to look over the Wall. Yes, that huge. The half of him we have here is probably bigger than Balerion the Black Dread was at his biggest, though a large part of that are his tails.

For those wondering about the exact time this is set, I have a year already planned and have written the story thus far with it in mind, with some clues sprinkled throughout. This is a spoiler, if a slight one, but we are currently in the year 280 AC, so a year before the tourney of Harrenhal. I have already written the first chapter of that part of the story, since I had a lot of ideas for it already, so I jumped ahead.

As always, thanks for reading, reviewing, and everything else. It really helps to keep me motivated. Until next time.