naruto : beyond the limits of darkness and light

i am your father

"Who...am...I?" a lone, starving and tired boy thought as he sat down at the base of a tree, deep in the woods as his vision was black and blurry.

X700
Orphanage, Rulid Village, Worth Woodsea, Fiore

As far as he could remember, his first memories were at the orphanage in Rulid village in the middle of the largest forest in Fiore. He was left there on their doorstep on October 10th of X700 and that was his birthday, not uncommon among orphans but he always felt something was different about him. Like he wasn't normal. And truth be told, he certainly was anything but normal among the rest of the children around him.

The orphanage could attest to his abnormality. He hardly ever cried or played with toys, he always seemed distant and detached like a lone cloud from other children in the sky. Another weird thing is his magic. Magic wasn't unusual but it sure was weird when a 3 year old could give off waves of it unconsciously, was something really really odd to find in children and the caretakers were either fascinated, frightened or a mixture as they peered over at the wonder boy every now and then.

When the boy was growing up he was setting milestones at 18 months when he could speak properly to adults and other caretakers, who were wide-eyed at that. By 3 years old he was able to read, then at age 4 he was reading books on magic and it's properties at a small library that the orphanage visited every Saturaday. The librarian could not have been more shocked or almost a bit scared at what he was able to do.

She was an old lady who thought she had seen everything when the guild wars had raged but seeing a toddler read textbooks for adults and actually understanding what the words meant, while also pulling out different textbooks related to whatever fancied him. It shocked her and impressed her to the point where she would allow the child to borrow books, a privilege usually given to adults who could be more responsible and they all gathered around when he was doing something, and just kept a little bit of distance when he wasn't because it frightened them a little. It was too unnatural to be real.

Perhaps it was because of that, they never noticed how other children would pick on him and push him away from their groups. The boy couldn't understand why that happened but realised that they couldn't understand things at his level and that was the reason for it. For that he would usually just head off on his own and ignore them, there wasn't anything he could do about it so why bother? Children could be the most cruel beings at times because they didn't know what they were doing was wrong.

The other children saw the boy getting lavished with attention every library visit when he would get special treatment and would be allowed to take books home with him, the other caretakers usually gave more attention to him because they would always say how he was "special" and "better" than the other children, and naturally that caused them to get upset and resent the boy quite a lot.

That boy's name was Naruto. Just Naruto. He was just a boy with black hair, blacker than the night sky but the strange thing about him was emerald-green eyes. To the outside world, the emeralds in his eyes would be dull and toneless. Like they were hollow on the inside but when he found a book on magic or something that grabbed his attention then they would shine up like someone lit a candle inside it and almost sparkle with radiance.

X705
Park, Rulid Village, Worth Woodsea

"So Magic is created from Ethernano's, a type of particle stored in the bodies of mages. So what's inside me is ethernano, how do I get it out to use magic? It says it's "instinctual", I don't know what that means" Naruto read out loud from a book and felt a few particles buzzing around him and tried to vibrate his hand and tense it as hard as he could, but after a few seconds he stopped and continued reading. He was 5 years old at this time and was sitting underneath a tree in the corner of the park while the rest of the children were playing in the playground.