Cold air—the kind that doesn't just bite but severs—replaces the humid, salt-slicked night of Degarashi Port.
I stand on the moon again. The vacuum of space offers zero resistance; the earth hangs above, a bruised marble. Beside me, Toneri remains in his white robes, arms folded. He has no eyes, yet the weight of his attention tracks the frantic twitch of the pulse in my neck. Chakra churns in a reverse spin toward my temples—an attempt to anchor my consciousness—but the energy simply leaks away. It pools in my jaw; the tongue freezes, heavy and unresponsive. Speech would be nothing but a wet, unintelligible slur. Internal safety measures fail to engage—just shoving against a wall that exists only in theory.
"I sense questions." His voice vibrates directly against the marrow of my teeth.
"Why did you mention Madara last time?" The words are thick in my head. Hands stiffen into blocks of wood as I cross my arms. A half-second synaptic stutter drags at my fingers. "You see my memories. The Academy covers the basics. I know who Madara Uchiha was."
Toneri tilts his head, a thin, clinical smirk touching his lips. "Do you, Sylvie-chan?"
I tighten my hands into fists, the mesh of my gloves biting into skin. "No. I know the edited version. The history sanitized by the ones who sat on the throne."
"The victor buries the roots to justify the bloom," Toneri murmurs, his posture rigid. "You look for the leaf. You should feel the ache in the soil."
"Is this going to be weird?" I bite my lip, focusing on my breathing—in for four, hold for four—but the lungs expand into an empty void.
Toneri's movements look fluid and alien as he shrugs. "The link already pulls."
He opens his eyelids.
KRRRRZZZZZT.
Gravity inverts. The lunar horizon flips.
A lurch strikes the stomach—sharp, upward—and for a heartbeat, I fall through a grey void before the scent of damp moss and rushing water slams into my senses.
Sunlight flares white-hot. The river water reeks of metallic rot carried from the Degarashi docks. The ground rolls under my feet. Two boys stand by the bank. They look roughly twelve, but their voices possess a strange, resonant overlap, as if older versions of themselves whisper through their child-throats.
The spiky-haired one—Madara—crouches by the water. He hurls a flat stone. The rock lags in the air—a jagged skip—then sinks with a hollow plink.
"Just aim it a little higher than you'd expect. That's the trick."
Madara snaps his head around, his dark hair flickering, unstable. The other boy, Hashirama, stands there with a buoyant smile. My foot pushes forward and passes through river stone—smoke. The ground resists a kick; it is solid yet unreachable.
"I don't need you to tell me that!" Madara snaps, his jaw set in a line of frustrated determination. "It will reach the other side if I put my all into it!"
He throws again. The stone skips—once... then the image stutters, ripples in the water freezing for a micro-second... then it vanishes. Hashirama picks up a pebble and tosses it casually. The sun flares with a predatory intensity, and the river smell shifts from moss to the stench of sun-bleached fish. A high-frequency whine chews through the air, making Hashirama's voice sound like it's coming from under twenty feet of water.
"Who the hell are you, anyway?" Madara demands, his face turning a dark, embarrassed red.
"Right now? I'm just your rival at stone skipping," Hashirama says.
I watch them play, but the air is too still. Sunlight sears the back of my neck. My hand passes through Madara's chest as I reach out to warn him about the scythe-wielding shadow flickering behind him.
KRRRRZZZZZT.
White-hot compression drills behind my eyes.
The roar of the river vanishes, replaced by a low thrum vibrating in my chest. The glare hardens—then collapses into a grey twilight.
The boys are different. They stand on opposite banks now, ten paces apart. Dense air resists each inhalation. They wear blood-stained armor over their small frames.
"My father is coming," Madara says. His voice has lost its boyish edge; it sounds lower, sharpening into a cadence that makes my heart stop. Madara bleeds into Sasuke—same eyes, wrong face. Vision splits, the second image lagging half a breath behind. Energy drills toward the optic nerves to clear the double-image; a needle-stab bloom of pain follows.
"I know," Hashirama replies. His body has shifted; weight balanced, hand hovering near the hilt of a blade.
The air tastes of ozone and salt. Uchiha and Senju. Madara's hand stalls, the tremor suppressed. A half-step forward—then tendons in the neck tighten. A swallow reflex hitches. Madara pulls the step back, his boots grinding into gravel with a final, crushing sound. Hashirama's eyes widen; a flash of desperate hope lights his face for the space of a heartbeat, then dies. The distance isn't ten paces of water; it's a gap that won't ever close.
"It's our duty to kill each other, Hashirama," Madara says, his voice flat.
He looks up. His eyes bleed into a vivid, spinning red. The Sharingan. A rupture in his own biology. The command to scream "Wait!" reaches my throat, but no sound follows. My mind grinds against the image. A sense of impending weight—something much worse—presses down on my skull. I lunge to break the line between them, but the riverbank liquefies beneath my boots. The roar stretches, deepening into something guttural.
KRRRRZZZZZT.
Muscles jam; the arms won't lift—just dead weight.
Ash-smog smothers the horizon. A younger Uchiha—Izuna—descends through a stuttering signal. A blurred trail of crimson and steel snaps into focus as the blade finally bites. A wet, sliding shink of steel through muscle and bone. Armor clatters into the dust.
"Izuna..."
Madara's scream—a raw, biological failure. His hand reaches—muscles freeze into a rigid claw before he can touch the cooling skin. He stays there, a statue of grief.
A sensory overload spike drills through my skull. Nerves misfire as the input hits a white-hot peak. My diaphragm seizes in sympathy with the man in the dirt. Vision goes white.
"It's breaking," Toneri's voice vibrates through the noise.
The river and the blood vanish. I am back on the moon, the silence of the vacuum ringing in my ears. I am gasping, my lungs scorched with the ghost of ash. A dull prickling spreads up my left arm. The earth hangs at a jagged angle, its rotation appearing as a series of staccato, shuddering movements.
"The... the brothers," I whisper. "They... they were made of stone?" Fragments slip; a misfire. "No. They were... burned?" A twitch runs through my hand. I recognize the clench of the fingers. Sasuke. The same fault line.
"It's the same," I rasp.
Toneri remains as still as a statue. He raises his hand to check a non-existent watch.
"No more."
"Wait!" My fingers pass through the white fabric as the moon dissolves into grey noise. "I didn't ask about my eyes! Why do they—"
KRRRRZZZZZT.
A lunge upward into the dark.
I am back in the inn at Degarashi Port.
Stagnant heat strikes like a physical blow.
Sweat-soaked fabric clings to my ribs like cold, wet lead.
Heartbeat—thump-thump, thump-thump—festival drums in the silence of the room.
I reach up to touch my face.
My fingers tremble.
My eyes ache with a dull, throbbing pressure, as if something behind them is trying to push through to the surface.