ZERO / BLEACH / TWIST / REVERSE / DYE / RED / TIE (HERE) / RED
It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting. - Elizabeth Taylor
Any powerful caster would find themselves aging slowly. But Sakura's mastery of necromancy had resulted in a sort of stasis, where she drew tiny bits of life energy from the world around her to sustain her youth.
They had noticed it when they had gone back to revisit certain cities. The librarians and the vendors had all started to go grey. Sakura looked the same and so did he.
It had taken decades of research for them to figure out what it was: an innate ability to sap life energy from creatures around her. She had breathed a sigh of relief when they found that she wasn't hurting anyone. At worst, after a particular difficult day, a nearby plant might lose one or two leaves. The plants didn't seem to mind. And neither had Madara. Older cats often complained of aching joints and losing their vision. That wasn't something he was unhappy about keeping at bay.
She kept her ability a secret. Something about how humans had strange feelings about "blood magic". Madara found the distinction arbitrary. If magic flowed in their veins as blood did, what made one different from the other? But as he remembered being chased out of towns by torches, he decided to keep his mouth shut too.
Many of the casters they had met on their travels were old in their own right. Maybe a century or two centuries. But to Sakura, they all seemed like charming little children running around with their little toys. (Madara found them ugly; but he found all children ugly, he supposed.)
Perhaps that was why Sakura had grown to love that little town so much. To see these children working so hard day after day. Making something with their own hands.
He never understood why she was so kind to humans when they had been the ones to abandon her. He never understood why, despite all she had been through, she was more willing to help than to harm.
"If I were you," he had once told her, "I'd kill a bunch of them. Just as a 'fuck you'."
"I know. And you'd be right to, I think," she'd responded.
She always understood.
Like no one else ever would. He was certain of that.
The gaps in his memory gradually lessened. Until one day, there came a day where he woke in the morning, and he could keep track of everything he had done. There were no more blank spots. The magic flowing through him no longer stabbed at his chest. He could cast spells with ease. Just the way she had once done it. Magic flowing from his heart, through his arm, out through his fingers.
Something started to feel right about the way he sat in his skin. He still felt too tall, but his limbs moved the way he wanted them to. He was certain that she would know what this feeling was. She always had her nose in a book, as if starving for information now that she had enough food. And so she had always had an answer to everything. She had grown so smart. He wished he had thought to tell her that while she was still around.
He missed her in ways that he couldn't articulate. But after the years of absence piled up, he had stopped staring at the door. Waiting for her to stomp in as she shook off snow in the winter or wiped sweat from her brow in the summer.
Once he was able to hold his new shape together (the eyes and teeth kept slipping back at first), he left on a long journey for answers. At first, he revisited their old destinations. In all that time, all of them had grown, almost to the point of becoming unrecognizable in some cases. He spent months buried in books at every library and every research institution. No one recognized him, of course. How could they? So he was able to study in peace.
It wasn't like her to speak in metaphors. So if she had promised that they would meet again, then he trusted that she meant it. Many of the texts claimed that that was impossible. He considered burning one of the books that called his search "pointless to the point of delusion". But when he thought of the face she would make if she caught him doing something like that, he decided against it.
He pored through every text he could find on necromancy and souls. Then, he moved on to books about the nature of life. The more he read, the more the ideas tangled together. Soon, he even dreamt of running through endless libraries. The pages of the books were covered in thorns. He would wake, frantically checking his hands for blood. But it was only ever a dream- the sad cousin to reality that could never touch him.
The magic pumped strong through his veins. He began to run experiments with his knowledge. Most were failures. He was used to that, though. That was how she had done research too. The twisted things that resulted from his failures were easily handled in a blast of flame. He knew she wouldn't like it. But she wasn't here to stop him.
The years went on. He grew more knowledgeable about magic, but he was no closer to finding the answers he craved so desperately.
He returned to the hut covered in dead leaves. The barrier had worn down enough that a corner of the wooden house peered out from the illusion. When he crossed the threshold, he was aware of another presence inside the house.
There was a ragged boy lurking in the shadows. He could see it dart off to try to hide in the messy bed in the darkness. The slice of dimming sunlight that came in through the door did little to illuminate the room. But Madara's eyes were keen. The child trembled as Madara's feet drew closer.
"Are you a thief?"
He could see the shape of the boy's head shake under the moth-eaten quilt.
Madara considered the lump for a moment. He could kill this child for invading this place. It had dared to intrude in this space where the two of them had once lived.
And then he thought of Sakura. Her chapped feet dragging through the dirt. Her rattling breaths as the cold seeped into her fragile little body.
"It's alright if I die. No one will miss me but you," she had told him.
Humans were filthy creatures with rotten hearts. But she hadn't liked it when she tracked blood into the hut. He was sure she wouldn't like it if spilled it in there either.
His hands relaxed.
He didn't say anything else. He shut the door.
The child would either die or live. That wasn't up to him.
Standing outside the door, he considered what to do. In the end, he wandered off to the next city to continue his research. He had forgotten all about the kid by the time he made it back to the hut. Only the smoke puffing out of the chimney reminded him of his predicament.
This time, when he opened the door, the child didn't hide. In fact, it sat frozen in place. There was something bubbling away in the fireplace. And it looked like the child had done some cleaning in his absence. The thick layer of dust that had settled over everything in the hut had reduced quite a bit. The child was on its hands and knees, scrubbing at a stain by the fireplace that never quite dried.
Madara stood in the doorway taking everything in.
"…There's no point. It won't even come out with the strongest cleaning spell," he finally said.
The boy gaze a sheepish expression that might have been an attempt at a smile. Or maybe a grimace.
"Okay. I just… what is it? It looks like wine or maybe stew?" the boy mused. He picked at the stain with his nail, brought it up to his nose. He took a tentative lick of it.
"Blood," Madara replied.
The boy blanched.
"But not mine," Madara then added. The hut was in one piece. There was no dead child inside. He walked out, shutting the door behind him.
He returned a few years later to find smoke still puffing from the chimney.
The boy was much larger than he remembered. He bolted to his feet when Madara opened the door.
"… Uh… hello!" the boy fumbled with his words.
"Still not dead?"
"Um… yes?"
Madara dropped a bag on the floor. On his way, he'd passed through a town where the dam was beginning to crack apart. It was the quickest way to return to this old hut. The entire place flooding would make travel inconvenient, he told himself as he cast a spell to mend the stones. The grateful townspeople had filled his arms with whatever vegetables they could spare from the fields. He wasn't sure what to do with bruised sweet potatoes and squash, but it hadn't felt right to refuse the gift.
Madara eyed the boy; he was uninjured. And when Madara glanced around the hut, he found that it was spotless. His eyes lingered on the bed. She had never made her bed in all the time he knew her. The neatness of the pillow and the mended blanket made a strange feeling rise in him. He pushed the emotion aside.
The inside of the hut smelled wrong now. He almost wanted to blame the boy for that. But a part of him knew. It had been years since she had set foot in this place. Her scent had already faded away by the time the child had snuck in.
It was hard to admit that he had lost many things about her. The sound of her voice was one he used to be able to pick out a chattering crowd. Now, he only had vague recollections of the exact way her words had once sounded. Her face, too. He could say what color her eyes or hair had been. But precise details had begun to elude him. Soon, he knew, time would rip what little he did remember away from him too.
Madara realized he had been glaring at the same spot without saying anything. The boy hovered nervously in the corner wringing his hands together. Madara turned to look at him. The boy jumped when Madara shoved the sack toward him with his boot.
"Eat these. I don't want them."
"Oh… alright. I… thank y-".
The door slammed. Madara was already gone.
He continued his wandering. Researching. Experimenting. He returned to the hut every few years. Just to confirm that the boy hadn't died. Instead, each time he opened the door, the boy was bigger. He was like a weed pushing its way up through cracks. Stubbornly refusing to stop growing.
Madara tried to remember if it was normal for people to change so quickly. He couldn't even remember what it had been like when his little sausage child had grown up. One day, she was small. The next, she was carrying him around with ease. At least, that was what it felt like.
At some point, the child stopped quivering in fear around him. Madara never stayed long enough to have a full conversation. He didn't even know the boy's name. It didn't really matter to him.
And then, one day, he entered the hut to find that the boy had grown into a young man. He smiled.
"I'm going to find a job and move out," he announced.
Madara blinked at him. "So?"
The boy laughed a little. "I just wanted to thank you for taking care of me all this time." He rubbed the back of his head. "I'm sure I'd be dead in the snow somewhere if it wasn't for you."
Madara stared at him. After a length, he replied: "Yes. You would be."
And the boy really did move out. The next time Madara returned to the hut, it was empty again. Blankets were neatly folded. Wood sat stacked in the fireplace. Maybe the boy was dead. He had no way of knowing.
Madara sat in the chair she had once occupied. The silence was one he was used to. He rested his aching feet, dreaming of drifting in an ocean with no land in sight.
As time passed, even the landscapes of his dream lost the ocean she had left behind. The waters drained, revealing a sandy bed covered in writhing shapes of seaweed and dying coral. And as he reached out, these things began to dissolve into ash. The fine black powder roiled like fog at his feet. It followed as he moved his hands like the conductor of some dead orchestra.
Green lightning flashed across the skies. He had only seen it once before. They had traveled to a flat plain. Miles of tall grass and dirt had stretched out around them. When the clouds had begun to fill the sky, Sakura had dropped everything to scoop him up onto her shoulders. Madara recalled bouncing around in her hood, claws digging into her the back of her neck to keep from falling. And past the folds of her cloak, he remembered watching the sky turn a sickly shade of green as thunder began to vibrate the ground.
That lightning filled his dreams now. And he wondered why this was what he remembered while he had lost so many other things.
More time passed.
Research. Experiments. His hands were covered in red as he tried to force the answers from flesh and bone.
She would hate the things he did now in his pursuit of knowledge. He was aware of that. But another part of him retorted that she would have to be present to disapprove. And none of those thoughts helped at all, so he tried to ignore them altogether.
The ashen landscape of his dream swirled with black mist. Sometimes, if he tried to remember a happier time, iridescent butterflies seeped out from under his feet. They dissolved into puffs of black smoke almost as soon as they appeared.
And then, one day, he realized that he couldn't remember what color her eyes had been. Blue? Maybe green? Or was it hazel?
He left for a long journey the following day. He spent years gathering research on obscure and forbidden spells. He harvested bodies and split them apart, only to sew them back up with incantations. He learned how to puppet the bodies. He could even enchant them to groan out a few phrases. But these were nothing more than piles of flesh and bone that stumbled around. Without a soul, the bodies were just shells.
So he moved on to creating constructs that looked like bodies. Things that, in theory, could house a soul. At first, he bound the magic into the grain of the wood. But when he realized that wood was a poor conductor of magic, he moved on to other materials. Leaves did a half-decent job before rotting away. Metal was a good choice, but it took far too long to shape the parts to fit together. Sometimes his research took him down such a deep rabbit hole that he had to sit and pause. To remind himself why he was even doing this in the first place.
During his travels, Madara slept with his bag close. He kept her bones in a pouch in the side pocket. The only time he could bear to even look at them was when he opened up the pouch to renew the protection spell over them. And even then, just the sight of her bones made an awful feeling swirl in the pit of his stomach. It was the worst when he caught a glimpse of her hollow skull with its chattering teeth.
His dreams roiled with black smoke and ash. Just like the inside of his heart. He was withered. He gnashed his teeth in his nightmares where he split through the crust of the planet and turned everything to flame and ruin.
One morning, he started awake, realizing that the day he had dreaded had arrived.
He had forgotten her face.
He packed his things and decided to return home. Perhaps some vestiges of her still remained there. Something he could cling to in the hopes of recalling her appearance somehow.
When he arrived, the forest was gone. The nearby town had spread like a disease, creeping down the peninsula. Cobblestone had replaced the patches of wildflowers and tall grass. The trees that had shaded them in the summer and dropped golden leave in the fall were reduced to stumps. When he arrived, there was a group of humans sniffing around the illusion he had strengthened around the hut. Shadows erupted from his mouth in writhing, clawed shapes. They shrieked with laughter as they chased the humans away. The water spirits that had been hiding inside of the well peered over the edge. They flocked to him, fluttering around his head and shoulders as they all panicked about the strangers.
He reinforced the wards around the hut. He set a fire roaring inside and chased off the cobwebs and dust with a blast of magic. He could have woven a web of spells together to really protect the place, the way she once had. The beginning of each spell linked to the end of the previous one. They flowed together as one enchantment, amplifying each other's properties over time. It reminded him of a woven cloth, how everything intertwined in perfect patterns. He had tried casting like her before. But it was too painful, as he remembered the shapes her hands had made as she drew the magic from inside of her to scatter across the grass. The spells always came out twisted. So he had settled for casting in a more generic manner. It was less efficient, but it was all that he had.
The interlopers were stupid enough to return the following day.
He dropped the human shape, reverting to the gangly thing that was neither person nor cat. He crawled out of the brush, letting his red eyes burn with arcane flame. The exposed bones of his jaw grinned as he warned them to stay away. They ran off screaming.
The following day, they were back. He chased them off with an army of rattling skeletons wielding blades made of ash.
He sat at the window, watching the humans flee. And for a moment, he thought that she would laugh if she saw this. The irony would not be lost on her- that the very thing that had once gotten them chased out of towns would be protecting their home now. But his smile faded when he remembered that he couldn't recall what her laugh even looked like anymore. Was it normal to forget someone so quickly? He had so little left. Surely the world could show him some pity?
They were back again the next day.
And the next.
Madara grew bored of coming up with new ways of tormenting the intruders into leaving.
By the time two weeks had passed, he was sitting on the roof of the hut. His legs swung as he watched the group of people stop on top of the hill. They gestured wildly as they whispered to each other. They were too far to eavesdrop on their conversation, but he got the gist; they were fighting about who would be sent into the line of fire first. He summoned a cloud of insects to the tips of his fingers. He shot them at the group like a volley of arrows. Their screams rang through the clearing as they ran back in the direction they had come from.
The humans seemed to finally get the message. They didn't snoop around the next day. Or the one after that. But Madara was old and he was used to waiting. He knew that this wasn't over.
A letter arrived.
They didn't have the courage to bring it over themselves. Instead, a small enchantment bound the letter together. An ephemeral squirrel carried the envelope in its paws. Madara swiped his nails through it to retrieve the paper. The vision scattered into little particles of light and color.
He skimmed it over. He'd become proficient at reading during all these years alone. She would be proud of him.
In brief, the letter claimed that someone had rightfully purchased this land. They kindly requested that he cease his attacks on the construction workers. He didn't need to read the rest of the letter as it sizzled up and turned to ash in his hand.
The next time the interlopers arrived, a tiny blade appeared in his hand. The nearest man shrieked as blood began gushing from the wound that had suddenly appeared on his cheek. But they held their ground. One of the uninjured ones began whining about the same things as the letter.
He felt the fire gathering in the pit of his stomach. It roiled through his muscles and blood, seeping up through the skin of his palm. As the human went on and on, shouting his demands from a distance, the fire grew hotter and hotter. He could feel it encasing his forearm, creeping up to his shoulder until he could feel the heat licking his jaw.
As men with muskets appeared from the brush, the flames exploded into a raging inferno. He would split them open. For their ignorance, for their arrogance, and most importantly, for the blood they had watched spilling without understanding the cost of their stupidity.
He could see panic ripple through the men. A few of them conjured shields. But the quality was laughably poor. He could tear through it like it was wet paper.
When he took a step forward, he felt sharp pain in his side. The flames spiraled across his shoulder blades and consumed his other arm too. As he stepped closer to the intruders, his feet left scorched outlines on the soil.
The pain stabbed at the left side of his ribcage again.
"What will you do?" one of the water spirits whispered.
His lips parted to reveal a snarl.
If you eat around the fuzzy bits, it's pretty good.
That's alright. I've got you, right?
It's alright if I die. No one will miss me but you.
His vision was blurring. He knew that he was crying. Moisture welled up in his eyes and spilled down his cheeks.
This was one of the only things that remained of her. This rundown hut with its slanted floors and lumpy windowpanes. His tears began to hiss and turn to steam as the flames engulfed his whole body now.
"This is her home," Madara whispered.
Something snapped in his side.
A bone-chilling shriek rose from all around him. The ground began to tremble. His head whipped around. There was no one else hiding behind him. And he would have sensed if someone had cast such a powerful necromantic spell from nearby.
When he looked down, blood stained the left side of his shirt, soaking through the fabric like a strange dye. Flecks of golden magic glittered in the stain. It was so bright that it almost hurt to look at.
A barrier appeared all around the house. It swelled like a bubble, shoving the intruders away. They toppled. But as they began trying to pull themselves upright, their eyes turned black. He couldn't tell specifically what type of compulsion was being forced upon them, but when they all scrambled to their feet and began fleeing back toward the city, he was able to put the pieces together.
As their fleeing backs grew smaller and smaller, he stole a glance at his side again. The pain was gone. Just a red stain was left on his shirt. His stare drifted to the black marks left on the ground. The barrier around the hut shimmered with a half-familiar iridescence.
Whatever command spell had been cast on those humans must have been powerful. Because the next time they returned, it was with wary expressions. They stopped at the edge of the clearing, but they didn't dare to approach.
Madara went out to meet them this time.
The desire to tear them apart was still there. But as he watched the still-standing barrier twinkle around the hut, he had the sense that spilling their blood wouldn't accomplish much. After all, humans were filthy little pests. If one fell, more would scurry up to take their place.
It took every bit of his patience to explain that he had lived in this place for centuries. That they had no right to claim this land on their own. When the humans began asking about "a deed" and "a bill of sale", Madara had to clench his hands into fists to stop from raking his nails across their fleshy throats. He tensed his jaw instead, sucking in deep breaths to keep calm. Perhaps something dangerous glittered in his eyes, because the humans soon retreated to murmur to each other about what could be done.
He pretended he couldn't hear them. But he couldn't help the way his ear twitched when he heard someone say "clocktower". He gritted his teeth, trying not to remember the last time he had seen a clocktower up close. He had done everything in his power to avoid cities with those damn things. And if he couldn't manage to avoid them completely, he at least made it a point to stay as far from them as possible.
One of the humans cast a nervous look over his shoulder.
"Do you even think he's capable?"
"He's obviously a powerful caster."
"Yes, but he's a necromancer…"
"I can hear you, you know," he called across the clearing.
All of the men flinched. They muttered among themselves for another minute before they approached with their deal.
There was some sort of curse on the ruins of the clocktower. None of them had even been born when it had collapsed in the first place. But the elders of the city had passed down the horrific tale of a tragedy. Details had grown murky and warped over time. But it was, in essence, the story of a beast who had lost his beloved and become a monster whose rampage had destroyed half the city. (This story made him regret his decision not to raze the place to the ground.)
The story went on to say that the curse had descended on the city. No clocktower that went up in its place was able to stand. It was like the ground refused to sustain the weight of the gears and wires it took to make the clock run. Tremors broke the connections apart. Or lightning would strike the entire thing when it was close to completion.
Despite what Madara had explained, the humans insisted that there needed to be payment for him to keep his land. And when he considered, again, what would happen if he simply crushed them here, he felt a dull ache in his side.
"Would you please help us? My grandfather said that you were reasonable," one of the men suddenly spoke up.
Madara glared at him. He had never seen this human before.
"What would he know?" Madara demanded.
The young man squared his shoulders. "He said that the necromancer in the woods gave him a home when no one else would. He said not to be afraid of you."
Madara squinted. If he really focused, he thought he recognized the shape of the man's nose and his eyes.
So the boy hadn't died right away. He didn't quite know how to feel about that information. The boy was a stranger to him. And so was his grandson. But for some reason, this person looked him right in the face. And when Madara met that gaze, he felt, perhaps, slightly less disgusted than he normally did in the face of most humans.
Madara relaxed his hands.
"Fine."
The blood stain was still in the cobblestone. But it had darkened over time, until it just looked like an irregular pattern in the porous rock. They had rebuilt the walls of the clocktower around it. At least this way, people weren't stepping all over her blood as they scurried back and forth in their busy, pointless lives.
He fixed their fucking clocktower.
It didn't take much time at all.
He had done so much research into magical constructs, that it barely took any time to translate his work into making a clock. He combined magical currents and a few bits of metal to create a clock that ran without gears and wires. It was just a luminous clock face and black hands connected to a magical conductor hammered from a thin sheet of metal. When he was done, his spells shimmered neon green over the surface of the clock.
The humans were overjoyed. They handed over a bunch of fancy paperwork that gave him "rights" to the home he already owned. And then they added a bunch of money, which was more than they had agreed upon.
The humans begged him to stay in their city. All their fear of his necromancy dissolved when they realized how useful his abilities were. And while they had agreed not to touch his little hut, it didn't stop them from continuing to build up their ugly little city all around it. Madara was fairly confident that no one would try to destroy the hut in his absence, he still didn't feel comfortable leaving on another journey in search of answers to a question he still didn't know how to ask.
So instead, he stayed to build a house around his home. It would be a shell, to protect it. This place where they had found shelter from a world that had always been more than happy to let them die on its streets. He wove protections into the walls, wrapped charms through the wallpaper. As the buildings around him climbed higher, he added floors too. And when the space inside started to feel cramped, he put together a complicated spell that expanded the interior while preserving the exterior. It was only then, after years of work, that he felt comfortable leaving the city again.
He traveled a changed world. The little villages had turned to towns. The towns had become cities. He struggled to recall the ways these places had once looked. But, much like his memories of her, he struggled to hold on to those thoughts too.
The descendant of the boy who had once invaded his hut was an odd one. While everyone else crept around him on tiptoe, this one spoke to him properly. It looked him in the eyes to speak.
What he felt for this man, Madara decided, was not affection. Perhaps she would have. She had always been so kind. Not him.
One day, on his travels, Madara encountered a child orphaned by a landslide. His entire village was reduced to rubble and mud. It sat wailing by the wall of dirt, crying out for parents who were no longer there to hear.
Madara considered it.
He picked it up by the back of its tattered shirt and brought it to the strange man. He tossed the child at the man's feet.
"Wha-"
"It's an orphan. Take care of it," Madara explained, already turning away.
"Why don't you do it?" the man called after him. There was gray touching his temples already. Madara didn't like seeing that.
He didn't answer. There wasn't an easy way to explain that he was barely capable of taking care of himself. That sometimes he still had trouble convincing himself that this wasn't some drawn-out nightmare. That sometimes, on the days where he felt like he might start to feel in control, the pain of the past would rush over him. Dragging him by the ankles, down into the darkness where his thoughts turned into hot tangles of rage.
But, for some terrible reason, life went on.
The children he picked up off the side of the road and plucked from ravines grew strong. They had their own children, who then went on to have children of their own.
He never bothered to learn their names, never bothered to remember their birthdays. Yet they called him uncle. And as they withered and passed away, their children went on to call him uncle as well.
Izuna was the first one he recalled clearly. The child of a child that he might have dragged out of the filth somewhere. Maybe it was because they looked a little alike. That perhaps a stranger might identify them as related from their dark hair and dark eyes.
This one, silly and bold, had called him "brother". For what reason, Madara could never fathom. In all his centuries of watching humans, he had never come close to unraveling the mystery of why they were the way they were.
And though Izuna died, like all humans did, he took an interest in the ones he left behind. The way they fought bitterly, but then turned on anyone who attempted to interfere. They screamed and raged against one another, but always chose to sit together at the table. When he commented on these, these strange creatures laughed. As if he was the one asking an odd question. And it only puzzled him more that there was always a place set at the table for him.
Years later, one of Izuna's descendants begged to be tutored in magic. Slowly, they began to encroach upon his house. Barging in as they pleased. Eating his food. Touching his spell books and handling his souvenirs. They even began to seep through from the waking world into the other one.
The ashen landscape of his own dreams remained. But outside, a long corridor stretched on into the infinite darkness. Doors appeared, sparkling with precious metals and gems fitting of each person who invaded his space. He hated that he could see those doors and know which person they belonged to. Hated even more when those doors went dark when that human had reached the end of its pitifully short life.
She would have laughed, he thought. He wasn't so sure anymore.
The chatter of these silly things. The fingerprints they left all over his house. The stupid presents they shoved into his hands during their nonsensical holidays.
They didn't fill the void. The loneliness still yawned like a gaping hole in his chest. But it was better than nothing, he decided.
And, for some reason, as he stumbled upon a little girl fumbling to cast the simplest spell in the library of the Senju Institute, he found himself wondering, for the first time in many years, what color her eyes had been.