The Cloud ANBU lived in the underground, rarely breathing the rarified air of their sister services except during assignment. Deep, deeper, and yet deeper, beyond the stone vault of the earth, within the bones of the demon, where its heart once beat, Santaru Rin listened.
She listened to the death of her way of life.
She listened to the death of her husband.
She listened to the death of a foreign king.
She listened to the death of Takayama Shimada.
She listened to the last thirty agonizing seconds of the mission with an air of ennui better suited for teenagers listening to oldsters discussing the weather. Her chakra, so commonly manipulated to overawe or ease, was held so tightly under the flesh that she might have not even been there. She looked around her twilit command center, with its coldly glowing screens and her hunch-backed subordinates. She removed her headset. The artesian well bubbled softly in the background, deaf to the sound of seven hearts crumbling.
The life drained from her then, hearing faintly her husband's arrest and that of his companions.
"Dismissed," she ordered off-handedly. The six intelligence specialists did not hesitate. Their softly scuffing footsteps sounded their own condemnation. Failure.
Her last act as Sennin. No, her second to last.
Her second in command a traitor, or as good as. Her former subordinate, her husband, shamed in combat, appearing complicit in the assassination of the King of Bear Country. The underlings of His Serenity would have Sennin Takaki Masao's head--or they would try; inevitably, Kumogakure no Sato would rescue its own. But it was too late: the damage had been done. Kumogakure had been the agent of a foreign leader's death. Not only Kumogakure, but two of its highest-ranking officers. Thus, Kaminari no Kuni also appeared complicit. Her knuckles, so cold that the stone seemed warm, pressed into the top of her desk.
Her pulse throbbed in her throat.
Takayama-taichou had killed the king. Yukimura Enishi had attended the summit undetected by her best security and the avowed best that Hoshigakure could offer. Her second in command. If this act had not made him a traitor, she could almost be proud at what her Vice Commander had accomplished in mere seconds.
With icy hands, the Sennin re-ordered her office. The artifacts, sealed in a safe. The same, noted on parchment. The parchment placed in a bone tube and marked with six violet seals. A case which would incinerate its contents if any but its intended violated the seal.
Some documents she burned. Others, already carefully annotated, were placed in sound order, making the increasing complexity of each case easier to grasp. Her steady touch restored coherence as she coldly arranged current matters in order of urgency. This she did until, in the forgotten world beyond, the sun neared its mortal plunge.
The desk, made from a stone out of heaven, a stone out of exile, was clear. Each drawer's contents, cinders. She exerted her will against the meteor and it sank down into the floor until the height was appropriate for one to kneel and write. From her waistband, a dagger. From her right hand, a brush pen. From the left, two sheets of paper.
She pushed the sheet to the left for a moment, interrupted in her thoughts by a frisson of electric chakra.
"What is this bitterness? Why is all that you give me wormwood, lord? What plans have you laid, o ancestor, that you would grow such in your garden? What flowers of evil do you await? What poisoned seed have you sown?" she whispered to the thundering one.
The pen did not tremble over the second page.
She marked the completed work with her stone seal, placed the pen horizontally above the paper. With economy, she pulled the silken cord from her raiju netsuke and carefully, firmly, painfully tied her arthritic knees together where she knelt.
The way of the ninja was dying. What remained and what replaced the path she had been trained to climb was for those without hearts, or with hearts not yet shot through and through with bile. The path she had been taught was nothing. It had been ever a fiction, an ideal to strive toward in one's hidden soul, but not a dream which could be snatched from the realm of the dream and reified.
Each year, fewer and fewer children were located with the potential. Each year, more and more of the children with potential were demon-attainted, sick in mind and soul, with none to guide them. As she opened her kimono to the waist, she wept silently, dry-eyed, convulsing, for Kaoru, for Enma, for Hikari, for the children she had lost and failed, for her son and daughter. But the silken cord binding her knees held her upright, and the ice in her bones kept her so rigid, that ice which rattled and kept her from peaceful rest.
Her breast and stomach bare, she folded the sleeves of her grey robe beneath her knees that she would not fall backward. The pale scars of her youth, the enraged crimson scars from the last year, these showed livid in the chamber's gloaming. She tenderly laid her hand on her kaiken, lefting it as though grasping the hand of a long-parted lover. She regarded the second edge, keen and yet jagged with damage unable to be honed away after years of use.
"With the voices of my dead children, I scream at thee, Raijin! From hell's heart, I stab at thee, Raiden! Thou who makes me thrice-fallen in thine own image!"
Without spectators and unplanned, she had no kaishakunin, no second to behead her and end the suffering. Only juumonji giri would satisfy the rigors of honor. She plunged the long-beloved blade into the left side of her belly and, with grief, sliced rightward, never permitting so much as a flutter in the muscles of her face. Blood throbbed from the wound, and the stench of death, and she slid the kaiken out and held it in her left hand. Her right, stained with gore, finished the letter she had begun before.
I lay my final recommendation...
Blood streaked on the paper for authenticity, she laid the pen down once more and, in a vicious sweep, opened her abdomen from sternum to navel, spilling out that ichor-poisoned void she had kept enwrapped and shielded within her body.
Not yet content, with the last strength remaining to her in that body, she slashed her jugular. As one corrupted body fell forward, another pulled back, abandoning the demon-blooded body known to Hayata Shin, Isaki Kushin, and the rest. Blood yet gushed from her abdomen, but unless one willed it, such a wound was not immediately mortal to a shinobi.
Shinobi were, after all, no mere mortals. Her hands performed the seals of her last healing jutsu, stemming the tide of blood and closing the superficial slices of cutaneous and subcutaneous tissue. The vein in her neck closed. To slash the carotid, after all, would have been to end the suffering too swiftly. Poison burned within her as taint from her bowels spread. Without treatment, she would go septic despite all of the disciplines and infusions made to her. And yet, unlike so many others, she could carry on beyond the brink of death.
It was this quality which would purchase her vengeance.
She performed the seals to eradicate the presence of this second form as she walked away. She changed garb, destroying the bloodstained rikyu kimono and its accoutrement and donned ordinary, beaten ANBU gear. She penned herself a mission docket, filed it appropriately, and issued herself a temporary mission passport under a false name she had kept listed in the personnel records in case she were ever ordered to perform a false flag operation. It was used on occasion during transit to avoid arousing suspicion, and even collected a wage that went nowhere.
Looking back over her office one last time, she felt nothing. The only sound beyond the well were the visceral death noises of a heap of meat at a sitting desk.
Her life here was over. There was but one more task, one final act to punish the one who had set her here, to punish also the one who had abandoned her to this life. She strode through the underground to the tomb of Raiden, where his mortal remains supposedly rest. Now she would ascertain, once and for all, the truth of the matter. Had it been only one more lie, one more fantasy spun by her captain, her cousin?
She pushed the slab until there was enough room for one hand to reach in. The rough interior of the sarcophagus scraped skin, but she squeezed her arm through until she could touch a fragment of bone. Concentrating, she absorbed the matter, reverting from duality again to trinity. Static hummed through her hooded hair. Muscle snapped taut, splashing a fresh wave of agony through her torn guts. She had been disemboweled before. This was no new experience.
It was funny. She could have laughed. The nearer her mortality loomed, the more vitality flowed through her. Not since killing the warhawk had she felt so...
The effort was taxing nonetheless. Determined to leave as few signs as possible, she once again cast the spell she demanded all ANBU to master. Her cells disappeared from the chamber and the sarcophagus was again sealed. Restored to her original being, she could no longer sense the hidden serpents coiled in the minds around her. She had only her chakra senses to guide her out of the darkness and into dusk.
She had devoured her god's mortal remains. Or perhaps her ancestor's. Or perhaps some hapless Santaru, sacrificed to the flesh-eating stone. It satiated her momentarily, and steeled her hollowed, pulp-filled husk for what would come next.
She strode into the secret corridors beneath the village and, shortly, exited the village after exchanging due papers. Within hours, she treated herself once more, sealing vessels ruptured and burning what toxin she could from her blood. By the end of the day, she blazed with fever aboard the train headed to Kagoshima. And when that train finally stopped, and she disembarked, she sought treatment from a long-silent friend in the capitol, bought passage on a vessel sailing to a far land, and, one day, in another place, another time, another identity, died with a name burning on her lips.
She listened to the death of her way of life.
She listened to the death of her husband.
She listened to the death of a foreign king.
She listened to the death of Takayama Shimada.
She listened to the last thirty agonizing seconds of the mission with an air of ennui better suited for teenagers listening to oldsters discussing the weather. Her chakra, so commonly manipulated to overawe or ease, was held so tightly under the flesh that she might have not even been there. She looked around her twilit command center, with its coldly glowing screens and her hunch-backed subordinates. She removed her headset. The artesian well bubbled softly in the background, deaf to the sound of seven hearts crumbling.
The life drained from her then, hearing faintly her husband's arrest and that of his companions.
"Dismissed," she ordered off-handedly. The six intelligence specialists did not hesitate. Their softly scuffing footsteps sounded their own condemnation. Failure.
Her last act as Sennin. No, her second to last.
Her second in command a traitor, or as good as. Her former subordinate, her husband, shamed in combat, appearing complicit in the assassination of the King of Bear Country. The underlings of His Serenity would have Sennin Takaki Masao's head--or they would try; inevitably, Kumogakure no Sato would rescue its own. But it was too late: the damage had been done. Kumogakure had been the agent of a foreign leader's death. Not only Kumogakure, but two of its highest-ranking officers. Thus, Kaminari no Kuni also appeared complicit. Her knuckles, so cold that the stone seemed warm, pressed into the top of her desk.
Her pulse throbbed in her throat.
Takayama-taichou had killed the king. Yukimura Enishi had attended the summit undetected by her best security and the avowed best that Hoshigakure could offer. Her second in command. If this act had not made him a traitor, she could almost be proud at what her Vice Commander had accomplished in mere seconds.
With icy hands, the Sennin re-ordered her office. The artifacts, sealed in a safe. The same, noted on parchment. The parchment placed in a bone tube and marked with six violet seals. A case which would incinerate its contents if any but its intended violated the seal.
Some documents she burned. Others, already carefully annotated, were placed in sound order, making the increasing complexity of each case easier to grasp. Her steady touch restored coherence as she coldly arranged current matters in order of urgency. This she did until, in the forgotten world beyond, the sun neared its mortal plunge.
The desk, made from a stone out of heaven, a stone out of exile, was clear. Each drawer's contents, cinders. She exerted her will against the meteor and it sank down into the floor until the height was appropriate for one to kneel and write. From her waistband, a dagger. From her right hand, a brush pen. From the left, two sheets of paper.
She pushed the sheet to the left for a moment, interrupted in her thoughts by a frisson of electric chakra.
"What is this bitterness? Why is all that you give me wormwood, lord? What plans have you laid, o ancestor, that you would grow such in your garden? What flowers of evil do you await? What poisoned seed have you sown?" she whispered to the thundering one.
The pen did not tremble over the second page.
She marked the completed work with her stone seal, placed the pen horizontally above the paper. With economy, she pulled the silken cord from her raiju netsuke and carefully, firmly, painfully tied her arthritic knees together where she knelt.
The way of the ninja was dying. What remained and what replaced the path she had been trained to climb was for those without hearts, or with hearts not yet shot through and through with bile. The path she had been taught was nothing. It had been ever a fiction, an ideal to strive toward in one's hidden soul, but not a dream which could be snatched from the realm of the dream and reified.
Each year, fewer and fewer children were located with the potential. Each year, more and more of the children with potential were demon-attainted, sick in mind and soul, with none to guide them. As she opened her kimono to the waist, she wept silently, dry-eyed, convulsing, for Kaoru, for Enma, for Hikari, for the children she had lost and failed, for her son and daughter. But the silken cord binding her knees held her upright, and the ice in her bones kept her so rigid, that ice which rattled and kept her from peaceful rest.
Her breast and stomach bare, she folded the sleeves of her grey robe beneath her knees that she would not fall backward. The pale scars of her youth, the enraged crimson scars from the last year, these showed livid in the chamber's gloaming. She tenderly laid her hand on her kaiken, lefting it as though grasping the hand of a long-parted lover. She regarded the second edge, keen and yet jagged with damage unable to be honed away after years of use.
"With the voices of my dead children, I scream at thee, Raijin! From hell's heart, I stab at thee, Raiden! Thou who makes me thrice-fallen in thine own image!"
Without spectators and unplanned, she had no kaishakunin, no second to behead her and end the suffering. Only juumonji giri would satisfy the rigors of honor. She plunged the long-beloved blade into the left side of her belly and, with grief, sliced rightward, never permitting so much as a flutter in the muscles of her face. Blood throbbed from the wound, and the stench of death, and she slid the kaiken out and held it in her left hand. Her right, stained with gore, finished the letter she had begun before.
I lay my final recommendation...
Blood streaked on the paper for authenticity, she laid the pen down once more and, in a vicious sweep, opened her abdomen from sternum to navel, spilling out that ichor-poisoned void she had kept enwrapped and shielded within her body.
Not yet content, with the last strength remaining to her in that body, she slashed her jugular. As one corrupted body fell forward, another pulled back, abandoning the demon-blooded body known to Hayata Shin, Isaki Kushin, and the rest. Blood yet gushed from her abdomen, but unless one willed it, such a wound was not immediately mortal to a shinobi.
Shinobi were, after all, no mere mortals. Her hands performed the seals of her last healing jutsu, stemming the tide of blood and closing the superficial slices of cutaneous and subcutaneous tissue. The vein in her neck closed. To slash the carotid, after all, would have been to end the suffering too swiftly. Poison burned within her as taint from her bowels spread. Without treatment, she would go septic despite all of the disciplines and infusions made to her. And yet, unlike so many others, she could carry on beyond the brink of death.
It was this quality which would purchase her vengeance.
She performed the seals to eradicate the presence of this second form as she walked away. She changed garb, destroying the bloodstained rikyu kimono and its accoutrement and donned ordinary, beaten ANBU gear. She penned herself a mission docket, filed it appropriately, and issued herself a temporary mission passport under a false name she had kept listed in the personnel records in case she were ever ordered to perform a false flag operation. It was used on occasion during transit to avoid arousing suspicion, and even collected a wage that went nowhere.
Looking back over her office one last time, she felt nothing. The only sound beyond the well were the visceral death noises of a heap of meat at a sitting desk.
Her life here was over. There was but one more task, one final act to punish the one who had set her here, to punish also the one who had abandoned her to this life. She strode through the underground to the tomb of Raiden, where his mortal remains supposedly rest. Now she would ascertain, once and for all, the truth of the matter. Had it been only one more lie, one more fantasy spun by her captain, her cousin?
She pushed the slab until there was enough room for one hand to reach in. The rough interior of the sarcophagus scraped skin, but she squeezed her arm through until she could touch a fragment of bone. Concentrating, she absorbed the matter, reverting from duality again to trinity. Static hummed through her hooded hair. Muscle snapped taut, splashing a fresh wave of agony through her torn guts. She had been disemboweled before. This was no new experience.
It was funny. She could have laughed. The nearer her mortality loomed, the more vitality flowed through her. Not since killing the warhawk had she felt so...
The effort was taxing nonetheless. Determined to leave as few signs as possible, she once again cast the spell she demanded all ANBU to master. Her cells disappeared from the chamber and the sarcophagus was again sealed. Restored to her original being, she could no longer sense the hidden serpents coiled in the minds around her. She had only her chakra senses to guide her out of the darkness and into dusk.
She had devoured her god's mortal remains. Or perhaps her ancestor's. Or perhaps some hapless Santaru, sacrificed to the flesh-eating stone. It satiated her momentarily, and steeled her hollowed, pulp-filled husk for what would come next.
She strode into the secret corridors beneath the village and, shortly, exited the village after exchanging due papers. Within hours, she treated herself once more, sealing vessels ruptured and burning what toxin she could from her blood. By the end of the day, she blazed with fever aboard the train headed to Kagoshima. And when that train finally stopped, and she disembarked, she sought treatment from a long-silent friend in the capitol, bought passage on a vessel sailing to a far land, and, one day, in another place, another time, another identity, died with a name burning on her lips.