Parallel Lines | Naruto

Prologue

"Always the fool with the slowest heart. "
— Gilded lilies, Cults

PROLOGUE — A VOW OF BLOOD
───※ ·❆· ※───

When the war had begun, it never ended.

The ceaseless disarray and need for chaos slowly accumulated over time as a response to a series of events. Tensions were at its peak when the world around them had given into the chaos long before it'd even had a chance at salvation; though, it would have been an option if Ahmya had anything left to salvage to begin with.

Her father's murder was an arbitrary decision, executed at the crux of the night where the silence was drowned by the shouts of death and the screams of the innocent. The autarch of Aragakure had been assassinated by the leader of the Oogami Clan, Hanae Oogami, consolidating the future of the Hidden Village. However, she supposed that the future had always been set in stone. After all, she'd seen it all before it transpired; blood staining the Village walls, painting a mural of inevitable bellicose and tragic losses at the expense of a foreseen, greater good.

A part of her had always known, deep down, that she was made for destruction. Her desire for knowledge was undeniable. The thirst for power remained unsatisfied; an impulse left insatiable as an endless pool of darkness breached all the crevices in her mind, expanding and multiplying, restless and disturbed. Ahmya now knew she was ignorant to think that the distant murmurings would soon cease to exist, as it evolved into the cries and screams that'd bestrewn the battlefield.

Battlefield— or rather, a mere playground for the damned, those who relished the taste of blood on their lips as diabolic, soulless eyes gleamed at the selection. It wasn't her intention to hail the sounds of war and lead her people to their demise, but she didn't have the intention to stop either. Not when she, too, marvelled at the sight of an archaic power dancing at the command of her fingertips, something as natural as breathing capable of flattening mountains and splitting the world in half. Such power was meant to be used to destroy and thus, destruction ensued at a grave cost.

There was a point in time where Ahmya would argue that power was a mere fleeting thought at the back of her mind as she indulged in the world around her. She had once desired to explore the terrain humans inhabited, to learn their languages and study their cultures, to understand the origins of the energy they called Chakra and how it differed from the content that drifted through her veins, she wanted to see if the oceans were as vast and huge as she'd read in the books— even embark on a voyage as she stood on the deck where the horizons were a distinct section of an empty map, ready to be chartered and explored. She even yearned to discover new flowers and their several properties, to see if Earth truly differed from the blood-stained lands they'd fled from with haste and desperation.

"These, are the lands we were promised." Yona, her mother, would often tell her and, at the time, Ahmya would believe it- Earth resembled the gardens of heaven in comparison from the hellish terrain they'd escaped. Only now, her voice was a distance whisper in the back of her mind. "We take and we take and we take, it's time we begin to compensate for our sins. Our new beginning."

—is now a means of a lonely end.

Yona had always been a sensitive soul and in some way, Ahmya knew that her spirit was connected to the realms around them in ways she couldn't even begin to comprehend. When the flowers wilted; she would shed a tear. When the blood of her enemies were spilt; agony encompassed her being. A soul who only knew compassion and kindness had perished to illness, a merciful death in light of the darkness that now traversed the sorrowful, grey hues of the skies.