Greed had always been the true anthem of war, wearing the mask of vengeance to justify its endless bloodletting.
Their lust for destruction, their thirst for domination — all wrapped in the silk of righteous indignation.
"Violence and survival have been betrothed since the beginning of time," his father would often say, a tired smile on his cracked lips.
But violence had taken his father too.
The double-edged sword — it protects and it kills, often in the same breath.
Ebizo, one of the two Supreme Elders of the Village Hidden in the Sand, stood silently by his cracked window, watching as the last light of the sun drowned beneath the vast, ruthless desert.
The vicissitudes of life had transformed him — once a simple, hot-blooded, ambitious boy — into something harder, colder.
A schemer.
A maker and breaker of lives.
His whisper could crush families, end legacies, or elevate paupers to kings — all in the name of the creed he lived and would die by:
"Abandoned by God, forsaken by the Devil;
where the world's filth gathers,
where the dunes of heroes' ashes rise,
pile on pile of bones,
we protect and enhance;
like the desert sun, we shine brightly —
and let the shadows beneath us swallow the world whole."
It wasn't as grand as the "Will of Fire" their enemies preached, but in the end, it got the job done.
Glory without illusions.
Survival without shame.
Ebizo's meditation was broken by the sharp shriek of an eagle as it swooped through the cracked sky, a black shape against the dying light.
The creature landed with mechanical precision before him, its talons tight around a blood-stained scroll.
Ebizo took it without ceremony, unraveling it in a whisper of parchment and dust.
A severed head rolled from the unsealing smoke, its expression twisted in a final moment of agony, eyes still wide with betrayal.
Pinned to the dead man's teeth was a message:
"War sings. What will the Wind respond?"
Ebizo smiled thinly.
The time had come.
---
Beneath the golden dunes, the Sand Village — Sunagakure — prepared for the inevitable.
Men sharpened kunai with calloused hands.
Women wove seals into their children's clothes, prayers stitched in trembling fingers.
The old huddled together in the shade of broken stone, murmuring half-forgotten gods' names into the choking winds.
And in the halls of power, Chiyo, the second Supreme Elder, stirred her own cauldron of hate.
---
Chiyo.
The Puppet-Witch.
The Terror of a Thousand Screams.
Her name was carved into the nightmares of her enemies, whispered with dread among foreign spies.
She sat alone in her chamber of puppets — a cold cavern of wood and steel, where false bodies hung like corpses from the ceiling, each a masterpiece of cruelty.
Her fingers, bent and gnarled from decades of puppet jutsu, danced across the latest weapon she was crafting — a puppet made not of wood, but of the bones of a captured Leaf Jonin, stripped clean and reforged into an instrument of perfect vengeance.
Every joint, every blade hidden inside it, was a hymn to her hatred.
Chiyo hated the Hidden Leaf with a fire that no storm could extinguish.
Because of Sakumo Hatake — the White Fang of the Leaf — she had lost everything.
Her son — beautiful, fierce, beloved — slain.
Her daughter-in-law — clever and strong — slaughtered.
Their bodies left broken on some nameless battlefield, their deaths dismissed by the Leaf as "necessary losses."
The Leaf preached peace even as they murdered children.
The Leaf sang of unity even as they cut the heart out of families.
Chiyo had vowed that day: She would see the Leaf drown in its own blood.
And if she had to sell her soul, her body, her last breath to achieve it, so be it.
There were no heroes in the desert — only survivors, and the dead.
---
Across the village, preparations intensified.
The Council had declared a state of "heightened vigilance," though everyone knew the truth: War was no longer a matter of if, but when.
The people of Sunagakure lived their lives as they always had — teetering on the knife's edge between existence and oblivion.
The desert itself was a teacher harsher than any human master.
The sun burned you. The sand buried you.
Water was a treasure rarer than gold; kindness was a luxury most couldn't afford.
Children learned to wield kunai before they learned to read.
Mothers taught their sons to aim for the throat, not the heart — less armor there.
The strong survived.
The weak fed the dunes with their bones.
And now, with the specter of war looming like a vulture overhead, the air itself buzzed with fear and fevered anticipation.
Ordinary citizens spoke in hushed tones, eyes darting like trapped animals.
"Will it be the Land of Fire again?"
"Will our sons come home this time?"
"Who will be left to bury the dead?"
But fear did not stop the gears of power.
If anything, it only greased them.
---
In the Council Hall, lit by braziers that cast flickering shadows like grasping hands, Ebizo and Chiyo sat across from each other, silent.
Between them lay a map — the Five Great Nations drawn in bold strokes, each marked with blood-colored ink where old battles had been fought and lost.
Fire.
Wind.
Earth.
Water.
Lightning.
And between them all, the web of treaties and hatred and alliances more fragile than spun glass.
Ebizo broke the silence first.
"We cannot sustain another war without gaining something tangible," he said, voice low, careful.
"Survival is not a gain," Chiyo replied, her tone sharp as a poisoned blade. "Victory is."
Ebizo nodded, expecting no less.
He respected Chiyo, even feared her a little — but he also knew that her judgment had been devoured by grief.
She would burn the world if it meant seeing the Leaf suffer.
Ebizo, for all his darkness, preferred calculated annihilation to blind rage.
Still...
Perhaps the time for calculation had passed.
The Land of Fire was bloated and lazy, their borders overconfidently thin. Their Hokage — Sarutobi — old and weary of endless wars.
It was the perfect time to strike.
---
The Sand would make its move.
And it would be merciless.
---
Even now, the soldiers were preparing.
Weapons sharpened not just for battle, but for slaughter.
Puppet cores filled with poisons that could melt flesh from bone.
Genjutsu scrolls designed to shatter sanity with a single glance.
The Sand would not win through numbers.
They would win through terror.
It was not about fighting honorably.
It was about ensuring the enemy feared you so deeply that their children were born with the memory of your cruelty etched into their blood.
---
And yet, amidst the thrum of bloodlust and preparation, in the lowest parts of the village — the broken quarters, where the wind howled through cracked walls and rats were thicker than bread — the ordinary people shivered in dread.
Mothers kissed their sons goodbye, knowing they might never see them return.
Sisters sewed funeral shrouds with trembling fingers, hoping they would never be needed.
Old men, veterans of wars past, stared silently at the dunes, remembering the friends who had been swallowed by the sand.
Here, they knew the truth.
There was no such thing as a righteous war.
There was only who lived to tell the lie afterward.
---
Meanwhile, in the polished halls of the other great nations, the same game was being played.
The Land of Fire preached peace while its operatives assassinated foreign leaders.
The Land of Water purged its own bloodlines in secret massacres.
The Land of Lightning experimented on prisoners in hidden facilities.
The Land of Earth conquered and enslaved entire villages under the name of "protection."
Each convinced themselves they were the heroes.
Each drowned in their own hypocrisy.
The ninja world was a rotting corpse, wearing a painted smile.
And as the storm of war gathered strength, that corpse was beginning to stir again.
---
Back in her workshop, Chiyo finished the final stitch on her puppet.
It was ready.
Soon, it would dance among the Leaf, sowing terror and death with every heartbeat.
She leaned closer to the puppet's face — a mask carved into a grotesque smile — and whispered:
"For you, my son.
For you, my daughter.
Let them all burn."
Outside, the wind howled through the streets of Sunagakure, carrying the scent of blood and dust and forgotten dreams.
The desert was patient.
The desert remembered every drop of spilled blood.
And soon, it would drink deep once again.