Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

"My offering?" the lanky twenty-something Keiji repeated. His habitual gap-toothed grin faded into something more wistful. "It's a bondmark. That's what they called them where I was born."

Keiji carefully pulled the bronze torc off his neck and passed it to Hazō to examine. The metal was still warm, and unexpectedly heavy, as if weighing down Hazō's hands with emotional significance it wasn't his place to bear. It was etched with five symbols spread across its curve, of which Hazō recognised only a stylised fox with its tongue out.

Miki, Hazō noticed out of the corner of his eye, had dropped back to give them a privacy nobody had requested.

"The circle is the symbol of perfection and eternity," Keiji said. "The gap is to prove you're wearing it by choice, because you can take it off at any time. But you never do, not once the smith-priest gives it to you on your wedding day."

Hazō nodded, a picture of Keiji's intentions beginning to form itself in his mind. "Do the symbols mean something too?"

"Lots of things," Keiji said. "Every decade you've been married, the smith-priest adds the sign of one of the kami, and the sign he picks tells the story of how you've spent your time together."

Hazō looked at the torc again, then at Keiji, who didn't look much older than him.

"You've been married fifty years?"

Keiji reached out to take the torc back before he answered, but he didn't slide it back into his neck. Instead, after a second's hesitation, he clipped it into his belt.

"That's what the torc says," he said with what struck Hazō as a forced lightness. "But all I know is, the last thing I remember is stringing the new bow my wife gave me for my twentieth summer, and then being in the Wilds and having two monsters fighting over who gets to eat me. Like donkeys, only bigger, and with lumps growing out of their backs that looked like human heads. I'm lucky I managed to run.

"It's not a gradual forgetting like everyone else around here," he added. "Twenty to however long I lived, all cut off with a sharp knife, edges so smooth and fine it doesn't even feel like they're there. Look at my body, too. It's like instead of my memories, they ate my age."

"I'm sorry," Hazō said after a few seconds. He already understood that in the afterlife, youth wasn't a blessing. How much more exploring would Keiji get to do before he lost too many memories and ended up moving on?

"It is what it is," Keiji said. "I try to be positive: even after dying, I must have got to go on a bunch of adventures, when my faith says I should've gone before the Ancient Deer of Judgement and on to my next life before my body hit the ground.

"Still," he said, looking down at the torc again, "before I go, I want to give my bondmark to somebody who'll care about it. That's the least my Yukiko deserves. I don't really know if there are kami in the afterlife, but if there are, there's bound to be one living at that shrine who'll treasure an offering with fifty years of memories inside it."

Hazō couldn't decipher the look Miki was giving Keiji's back. Somehow, he felt like it would be an invasion of privacy to try.

"Say," Keiji said, swerving the conversation so sharply off the topic that if it had been a ship, it would have capsized instantly, "doesn't that bluff look like a great place to make camp?"


The dead, of course, didn't eat. Even sleeping seemed to be optional, though Miki claimed she didn't feel right if she didn't lie down and let herself drift for a few hours whenever the mood took her. Keiji teased her lightly about it, saying only a woman without a care in the world could fall asleep while already in the sleep of the dead.

Thus, the camp was mostly symbolic. The campfire was doubly symbolic. As they rested after what felt like a few days' journey, the three swapped stories and speculations about what awaited them at the journey's end. Miki, an ordinary civilian in her past life, didn't have much she could regale him with, but Keiji had been a ranger, a profession Hazō hadn't even known existed. Apparently, rangers travelled the roads between settlements, sometimes carrying news and messages, but mostly keeping locals abreast of chakra beast activities–such as warning everyone to avoid a certain road while the chakra wrens were migrating across the area or telling a village that they might need to evacuate after a forest fire had driven packs of chakra beasts out of their natural habitat. Rangers needed strong arms, good aim, but above all, running legs to shame a ninja (Keiji said obliviously) and the blessing of the wind kami.

Needless to say, though, Hazō was the star of the show. He had visited the icy wastelands of Snow Country and survived (Mari's wrath). He had climbed into living caverns and beheld sky squid above the clouds. He had participated in the fertility rites of O'Uzu (sort of) and witnessed a school of chakra koi being propitiated through human sacrifice (if one omitted certain minor details). Even passed through a filter of basic OPSEC, the tamest of Hazō's adventures were as far beyond Keiji and Miki's wildest dreams as… well, maybe not completely beyond them, seeing as they were currently dead souls on a pilgrimage to some infinite mountains beneath a sunless sky, but Hazō still dared anyone to do better.


The fingerlands were pretty much as advertised. Instead of trees, there were humanoid fingers growing out of the ground, brown-skinned with green, yellow, or red fingernails. The hills were shaped uncomfortably like curled fingers buried in layers of soil. On the ground, finger-creatures of various shapes and sizes crawled around, contracting and extending to move, but they mostly avoided the travellers. The only threat was when the tree-fingers (and, on one occasion, a pebble path that turned out to be a path-finger) suddenly curled up and tried to grab them. Fortunately, these were not the handlands, and avoiding the grip of a single finger was no trouble even for an alert civilian. Honestly, it was a little boring.

The sphere made up for all that.

An orb of perfect blackness, perhaps four metres in diameter, hung in mid-air above a barren, dusty plain, close enough that Hazō would be able to reach up and touch it if he was feeling reckless. It has a distinct, heavy sense of presence, almost like a hint of the Third Hokage's jōnin aura, and despite being out in the middle of nowhere, it felt like an inevitable waypoint on their journey–as if, had they chosen to avoid it, their very path would curve itself in order to make sure they didn't miss it.

"I don't see any writing," Hazō said.

Miki and Keiji exchanged glances.

"Oh, right," Miki said after a second. "You have to poke it. We do it for good luck when we come by this way."

Hazō started looking around for a suitable tree branch or something else he didn't mind losing by poking an unknown alien phenomenon.

"With your hand," Miki said impatiently. "Go on, it doesn't bite."

Hazō sighed and reached upwards to poke the sinister black sphere.

Writing flared to life.

Hazō had imagined some kind of ordinary inscription, like one might make with a kunai on granite if one really needed to leave a message and happened not to have any blank paper handy. Instead, the characters were alive.

Row upon row of symbols orbited the sphere, written in rings of white light that seemed to pulse gently. The symbols rotated around the sphere's central axis, some with a slow and stately speed, others fast enough that Hazō was struggling to read them. In combination, they came across almost as chains binding the sphere in place.

Most were in unfamiliar scripts. Some were hieroglyphic, but didn't portray any objects or creatures Hazō recognised. Some were sequences of dots and lines. One looked like it was all a single continuous symbol covering the entire band, with markings above and below to aid interpretation. Some looked like kanji, but had little in common with the standard script Hazō was used to.

"Well? What's it say?"

"I don't know, I can't make out a–"

Hazō frowned. Actually, there was something strangely familiar about some of those scripts. He was confident that they didn't exist on any part of the Human Path he'd been to, but still, he was getting a sense of deja vu, like seeing something in reality that had only existed in his dreams…

That was it. At least one of those scripts wasn't writing. It was a solution to a puzzle, an encoded piece of the fabric of space and time, something only perceptible to those who'd drunk deep of the chalice of the Out and survived its poison. It was a message created for those like him… perhaps by others like him.

Hazō's head swam as his eyes saw one thing and his mind saw another.

"Handle with care," he read out. "Do not open without Something supervision. This way up." He paused and gave the featureless floating sphere a sceptical look. "Something inside. If found, do not something, and something something immediately. To something, use something attached."

He looked at the very confused civilians. "Was there something attached?"

"Oh, sure," Miki said after a second. "Big triangle of black metal, right under the sphere. Gave me the willies. One of the singers travelling through here a while back took it with him, said it'd make for a great story."

Hazō sighed. People were always going around messing with things they didn't understand.


You have not found any more shimmers so far. It seems they're not so common that you can run across them by accident unless you have a mountain's eye view or some other information advantage (or are prepared to spend time scouting an area).

Hazō spent some time meditating on lost memories during camping breaks. After a while of trying to use creative association on the subject of "dark descent", he was able to recover certain memories of Orochimaru's Basement that he really wishes had stayed forgotten. He strongly suspects that memories taken by Truth Lost in the Fog are unrecoverable, since they are supposedly erased rather than merely suppressed.


The mountains and the shrine draw near.

What do you do?

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