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Konoha to Kiri. Sun Jul 07, 2013 8:51 pm
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Xiahou Yan, Age Ten.
The mud made it hard to see. He brought a wretched, broken hand to his eyes, trying vainly to stave away some of the rancid dirt that swam all around him. There was smoke rolling like a tide of churning, black wheels over him, hot and heavy with the stench of charred flesh. He couldn’t stand up, he couldn’t tilt his mouth towards the sky and breath in – he could never do that, not as long as it meant filling his lungs with that rank, dark aroma. He could only breath in the sodden masses of the earth beneath him, his face hardly an inch from the ground. Every slow, dreadful expansion of his chest threatened to suck up a gruel of grey-brown slop, peppered with broken twigs and little bits of his fellow victims. He just wanted to stop breathing. He wanted to stop, there and then, but even more than this he wanted to live. If those twigs would feed him, make him strong, then he’d have wolfed them down in an instant. If the slurry of mud would have found it’s way to his bones and untangled them, he would have drunk from the earth in great, eager gulps. It was the lowest, the worst, he had felt in all his life – and yet, if it meant living that life just a little longer, he’d have stooped infinitely further down.
The smell changed. The squalor that he crawled through gradually began to shift its shade. It began with veins of darker black, but it didn’t take long for him to realize that they weren’t black, but red; a deep, organic kind of crimson found only in one place. He began to cry. Sobs trailed from his mouth as he dragged himself through it all, his face now an abstract swirl of reds and greys. A leg drifted past him – he didn’t see it, but he knew it was a leg; for a moment he felt the toes upon it’s feet wriggling beside him, caught in the same predicament as he was. But they were different. He was crawling towards Life. It might have been a disgusting, cowardly sight, but he was heaving ever so slowly in the right direction. He should have made an attempt to tell it that – he was very conscious of this, why and how he should get it’s attention, but for some reason he didn’t.
So, towards life, he went, dragging his legs behind him like heavy fetters. He entered his new life just as he had entered the old one; covered in blood and slop and all manner of fluids, almost blind and crying openly, eyes squinting out of reflex alone. When he finally opened them, what he saw would stay with him forever.
Xiahou Yan, Age Nineteen.
The wings of a chick are false ones. Come adulthood, it will shed those tiny feathers, and for a time crawl like a snake upon the belly of the earth. Only when it’s new, broad masterpieces emerges will it be an eagle or a hawk, and only then will it truly soar. And should it starve or freeze to death amidst the sod, then all’s still good and fair on God’s green earth.
The sun was still red when Xiahou got up, his throat parched by a particularly hot night. He lumbered towards the blinds, thumbing them aside a moment as his free hand grasped for the flask set at his beside. A slither of wine-coloured daylight scorched his eyes, but the momentary blindness of sunrise was better than foraging clumsily through a blackened room. Like an open wound, the light seemed to swirl with an almost fluid quality; an illusion of the dust and motes disturbed by Xiahou’s awakening. It glared upon the edge of the flask, the steel suddenly reminiscent of bloodied edges bathed in war. Plucking it up, he swung backwards, draining its contents in single thirsty heave. It clattered, as good as forgotten, at his feet. One last watery diamond sparkled from its neck, dyed ruby-raw by morning.
"Well," He said "I suppose I've put this off long enough."
Stepping from the gates of Konoha, Xiahou hoisted the heavy bag of his belongings across his shoulder and took the first step into the wilderness.
"Fuck this place,"
/exit
Hokage: 
Kazekage: 
Raikage: 
Tsuchikage: 
Mizukage: 