Before the blood, before the fire, before the screams that echoed endlessly into the black…
There was laughter.
There was life.
There was Konohagakure — the Hidden Leaf, strong and proud — where the sun kissed the rooftops and the cherry blossoms fluttered like shy children peeking around the corners of the streets.
And in that village, three small lives burned brightly, if only for a moment.
---
Rita had hair like the winter sun — bright, wild, untamed — and a voice that always carried, even when she tried to whisper.
She was the ringleader of their trio, fierce and stubborn.
She dreamed of becoming a great medical ninja, strong enough to save every life she touched.
Her mother, a healer in the hospital, used to tuck Rita into bed with stories of great shinobi who wielded life and death in equal measure.
"You can change the world, my little fox," her mother said, kissing her brow. "One wound, one broken soul at a time."
Rita believed it.
She believed everything was possible.
---
Mishu was smaller, quieter — a boy with round cheeks and a wide smile that rarely left his face.
He was the peacemaker, the dreamer.
His father ran a humble bakery near the market, and Mishu often helped before academy classes, dusting flour from his hands as he ran to school.
He didn't want to be a warrior.
He wanted to protect.
"Like a shield," he once told Rita and Kiswa, puffing out his chest proudly.
"I'll be the shield that keeps you both safe. No matter what."
He loved books more than kunai, dreams more than tactics.
---
Kiswa, the youngest, was the spark between them.
Tiny even for his age, with a laugh like windchimes and quick, clever fingers always fiddling with scraps of paper and string.
He was a prankster at heart, often hiding the academy instructor's chalk or filling their sandals with river mud.
He said he would become an infiltration specialist one day — sneaking behind enemy lines, gathering secrets, never fighting unless absolutely necessary.
"A ghost!" he declared with wide, excited eyes.
"They'll never catch me!"
He had a mother and two older sisters who doted on him endlessly.
He had a life waiting for him.
They all did.
---
Their days were filled with training, silly arguments, sunlit afternoons sprawled under ancient trees, eating stolen dango and laughing about nothing at all.
They promised each other — solemnly, hand over hand — that they would graduate together, survive together, grow old together.
That nothing would tear them apart.
---
But promises are fragile things.
Especially when war gnashes its bloody teeth.
---
When the tensions between the nations exploded into silent orders and secret missions, the village leaders made decisions in shadowed rooms.
Children, barely out of the academy, were pulled aside.
They were told their service was critical.
They were told the fate of the village depended on them.
They were told if they loved their families, they would obey without question.
So Rita, Mishu, and Kiswa were handed forged papers, false clothes, and taught the basics of infiltration.
They were sent out — half-trained, terrified — into a world of sharpened knives and hidden traps.
Their dreams were torn from their hands, replaced with duty.
---
The desert was cruel to them.
The sand clawed at their eyes.
The sun blistered their skin.
The nights froze them to the bone.
They huddled together for warmth, whispering about home, about sweets and gardens and soft beds.
Kiswa cried sometimes, when he thought the others were asleep.
Mishu kept clutching his father's old flour-sack knapsack, as if it could protect him.
Rita forced herself to smile, even when fear gnawed at her gut.
"We just have to find a way to blend in," she said. "Pretend. Hide. It'll be fine. We'll go home heroes."
She had to believe it.
They all had to believe it.
---
And then, it happened.
The moment that shattered everything.
They were moving through a cracked canyon, preparing to assume civilian disguises, when they felt it.
A presence.
Watching.
Waiting.
An animalistic fear gripped them.
They turned — and they saw him.
---
He did not look human.
He was tall, lion-maned, his eyes like frozen steel slashing through the night.
And the fire that danced between his hands — blood-red, cold and wrong, yet searing to the flesh — was unlike any chakra they had ever felt.
It was alive.
It was hungry.
Every instinct screamed at them: RUN.
But there was nowhere to go.
They had been seen.
Compromised.
If they returned to the village, having failed to conceal themselves, their families would be shamed — perhaps punished.
The thought was unbearable.
So — terrified beyond reason — they attacked.
---
From their perspective, it was over in a heartbeat.
Mishu remembered little but a flash of light, a burning cold that made his skin peel and bubble.
He screamed, reaching for Rita, but his hand never made it.
He thought of his father, pulling fresh bread from the oven, smiling at him.
He tried to say I'm sorry.
But the fire stole his breath.
---
Rita felt the fire kiss her face, ripping her skin apart.
She clutched her mother's locket, desperate, as the world spun and the earth hit her like a hammer.
"Mama, I didn't get to heal anyone..."
She tried to crawl, to reach her friends.
She couldn't.
---
Kiswa ran.
He ran until he felt the steel kiss the base of his spine.
He fell, gasping, sobbing.
He saw his sisters laughing at the breakfast table.
He saw the tree where he had once hung from a branch, pretending to be a ghost.
"I want to go home."
He never made it.
---
Their final thoughts were not of honor.
Not of mission.
Not of glory.
Their final thoughts were of home.
Of dreams.
Of all the things they would never be allowed to finish.
And looming over them, the last thing they saw, was him.
The devil cloaked in blood-red fire, eyes like razors through ice, face carved from stone.
A force of nature, inevitable and uncaring.
Their tiny lives were nothing before him.
Ashes scattered on the desert wind.
---
In another world, perhaps, Rita would have become a healer.
Mishu would have opened a bakery.
Kiswa would have played tricks on his nieces and nephews.
But not here.
Not now.
The desert does not forgive.
The war does not wait.
And the songs they were meant to sing will never be heard.
---
The desert night was heavy and cold, weighted with ghosts.
Three bodies lay cooling under the indifferent stars.
Rita's scorched hand still clutched the broken locket.
Mishu's small frame was curled in a fetal ball, as if he could still hide.
Kiswa's wide, terrified eyes stared eternally into nothing.
The blood, dark and sticky, seeped into the sand, swallowed by a land that had already drunk too much.
Above them, Raghoul sat on a broken pillar, head bowed, hands clenched into fists so tight his knuckles bled.
He had wiped the vomit from his mouth, but the bile still burned the back of his throat.
The faces of the children haunted the dark behind his eyelids.
"They attacked first," he told himself, over and over.
"They chose to fight. They chose death."
But the excuses were ash in his mouth.
He was no hero.
He was no savior.
He was just another animal fighting to survive.
The cold truth gnawed at his gut, a voice quieter and sharper than steel:
"In this world... even children kill. And even children die."
---
Raghoul stayed there until the stars began to fade, thinking.
Of the monastery he had left behind.
Of the old, senile abbot who had spoken of cruelty hidden beneath banners of honor.
"The world is a liar," the old man had said. "It smiles at you with knives behind its teeth."
Raghoul had thought it exaggeration then.
Now he knew better.
---
He thought of many things that night.
Of strength.
Of survival.
Of the meaningless death waiting for those too slow, too soft, too trusting.
He tried to think about what kind of man he wanted to become.
He couldn't.
It was too far away, too uncertain.
All he knew — carved deep into the marrow of his bones — was this:
He had to become stronger.
Strong enough that nothing could touch him.
Strong enough that no enemy could shatter his path again.
The world did not forgive.
The world did not wait.
The world only devoured.
---
And far to the west, across endless dunes and battered cliffs, the Hidden Sand Village prepared to sharpen its own teeth.
---
The inner chambers of the Sand Council were buried deep beneath the desert stone, insulated from the wailing winds above.
The room was small, suffocating, dimly lit by weak lanterns that smoked and hissed.
It smelled of old blood and older betrayals.
Ebizo, the elder, sat at the head of the table, a gaunt figure wrapped in layers of worn cloth. His eyes were hard as dry riverbed stones, sunk deep into a face ravaged by time and guilt.
Beside him, Chiyo — the Puppet Witch — her hands gnarled with age and venom, her soul stitched together by hatred.
The lines on her face were not wrinkles, but scars of grief, burned deep the day her son and daughter-in-law died at the hands of the Hidden Leaf's White Fang.
She would never forgive.
She would never forget.
And tonight, her voice was the coldest blade in the room.
---
"The Daimyo is weak," Chiyo hissed, tapping the table with her clawed nails. "A fat slug, feeding off the blood of our people while sending our sons to die. He drags his feet while the world sharpens their swords."
Ebizo said nothing. He knew better than to interrupt her rage.
The jonin commanders, hardened men and women who had seen too many battles to count, shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
They had all lost people.
Brothers.
Sisters.
Children.
The taste of war was already on their tongues, bitter as ash.
---
"Assassinate him," one jonin spat, voice raw. "Slit his throat in the bathhouse, blame it on a Konoha spy. The people will rally."
"Too reckless," another countered. "If we fail, the Daimyo's court will turn against us. We'll be fighting a war on two fronts."
Chiyo smiled thinly, a vulture waiting for the corpses to fall.
"Even if we succeed, the council of Lords will appoint another puppet to drain us dry. Blood feeds blood, but it does not break the chain."
The room fell silent.
They all knew the truth.
The corruption was too deep.
The nobility were parasites, and the shinobi were little more than leashed dogs in their games.
---
Ebizo leaned forward, his voice as soft as the sandstorm's death rattle.
"No. We will not assassinate. We will not ignite another civil war when the storm from beyond is already upon us."
He raised a withered hand.
"Instead, we take what we need... from our enemies."
Murmurs of understanding rippled through the chamber.
Steal. Plunder. Crush.
If their own country would not feed them, then they would take from the outsiders who called themselves "civilized."
---
"Strike at the Land of Fire's supply lines," Chiyo said, eyes glittering like shards of broken glass. "Bleed them dry. Force their shinobi to defend their homes while their coffers rot."
"Strike at the Land of Earth," another jonin suggested. "Their border towns are poorly defended. Easy pickings."
"The Land of Water is distracted," another noted. "The bloody mist is eating itself alive."
Plans grew in the darkness, flowering like poisonous blooms.
Blood for blood.
Ash for ash.
---
Above the hidden chamber, the wind howled through the streets of the Sand Village.
Ordinary people — farmers, smiths, merchants — huddled in their homes, whispering rumors of the coming war.
Fathers sharpened old swords by firelight.
Mothers wept silently as they packed supplies, knowing their sons and daughters would not all return.
Children, too young to understand, played in the dust, laughing.
But soon, their laughter would be swallowed by the drums of war.
The weak would be devoured.
The strong would be carved into legends... or forgotten in shallow graves.
---
In the end, Chiyo stood slowly, her voice cutting the air like a dagger.
"Let it be known," she said, "that the Sand will not die begging for scraps."
Her shadow stretched across the floor like a spider's web.
"The world will remember... the rage of the desert."
And if the world would not remember willingly...
Then the Sand would carve it into their bones.
---