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The black gates of the asylum waited at the end of the corridor beyond.
[ Item: Big Pilgrim's Key ]
[ Description: Key to the inner door of the Undead Asylum main hall. Big key belonging to a chosen Undead pilgrim. But this Chosen Undead knows not what this pilgrimage has in store. ]
"Thanks for the ominous warning," Naruto mumbled at the system, not really caring about its dramatic tone right now.
The door creaked open into a long cliff path. Moss covered everything it could reach, crawling up the broken stonework, softening the edges of old ruins that dotted the landscape on both sides.
Now what? Naruto stood there for a moment with no answer to that question. The Bell of Awakening. The land of Ancient Lords.
He did not know where either of those things were.
But first, he needed to do this.
Naruto found a patch of ground beside the asylum wall. He pulled a kunai and started to dig, one handed. The work was harder than it should have been and mattered more because of it. When the grave was deep enough he reached into his inventory and retrieved Oscar's corpse with both hands, broken arm protesting the weight which he ignored.
He laid his master down carefully.
Folded the hands the way he had seen it done in Konoha, in the funerals he had watched from a distance.
He stepped back and looked at what he had done.
It was not enough. It was never going to be enough. But it was what he had.
Naruto found a flat stone nearby and dragged it to the head of the grave. He set it in place and picked up his kunai. He was not a particularly good writer under the best of circumstances and these were not those. But he kept at it until every character was legible, until what he had put into the stone was real and could not be taken back.
Oscar of Astora.
Knight. Teacher. Friend.
He gave his kindness freely.
That is rarer than any blade.
Naruto set the kunai down.
And sat down in front of it, crossed his legs, and started talking.
"I got him," he said. His voice came out hoarse and smaller than he meant it to. Naruto pulled at a piece of dead grass near his knee. "It was really close. You would have said my footwork was sloppy for most of it and you would have been right." He paused. "The iron ball was my idea though. I think you would have liked that part."
The wind moved across the cliff.
"I do not think I could have done it without you... I do not know if you were actually there or if it was just the drugs or whatever the Astora sword's blessing does but it felt like you were there." He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a moment. "So I am counting it. That was our victory. That was us against the demon."
He pulled at another piece of dead grass.
"I am going to find the Bell of Awakening," he said. "I do not know where it is. I do not know anything about this world really, you were supposed to be the one who..."
He stopped, swallowed and tried again.
"You were supposed to come with me."
His voice cracked on the last word and that was it.
A wave of grief hit him unlike anything in his entire life and Naruto's first instinct was to look for someone to tell.
There was no one.
No Iruka to show up at the wrong moment and say exactly the right thing. No old man Hokage to sit across from him with his pipe and patience. No Teuchi to put a bowl in front of him to make him feel better.
Just a twelve year old boy with a feeling he had absolutely no tools for.
He sat down hard in the dirt.
He had spent his whole life learning to outrun feelings he could not understand. Fill the space they occupied with noise and motion until they could not find him anymore. It had worked, more or less.
It was not working now.
The grief was too big, immediate and specifically shaped.
Naruto pressed his forehead to his knee and stopped trying to outrun it.
He ugly cried.
His shoulders shook. He made sounds he would have been mortified by under any other circumstances and did not care. There was no one to be composed for and nothing left to be composed with.
He cried until his throat was raw. He cried until his eyes were swollen almost shut. He cried until his body ran out of the energy grief needed to express itself and settled into a deep, bone heavy exhaustion that pressed down on him from every direction at once.
CAWWW!
Naruto jolted upright, his hand reaching for a weapon.
CAWWW!
The sound came from somewhere along the cliff edge, and curiosity did what it always did with Naruto, arriving before caution could stop it. He slowly walked toward the edge of the cliff.
The world opened up before him in every direction at once. Vast and endless mountains with peaks lost in gray mist.
This place is so beautiful and lonely at the same time.
Naruto was still thinking it when the shadow fell over him.
The crow was enormous, as dark as the night with a body the size of a carriage. Its talons were outstretched and descending toward him. It grabbed him before he finished the thought of moving.
The world lurched as the cliff edge disappeared. Everything disappeared except the wind and the talons locked around him. The mountains dropping away below at a speed that made his stomach attempt to relocate somewhere above his head.
He did not scream.
He wanted to scream.
Okay. Okay. Calm down, Naruto. This bird is going to land somewhere. Birds always land. Just conserve your chakra, get ready when it does, and do not look down, dattebayo!
He looked down.
That was a mistake.
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The bird flew for three days.
Naruto ate from his inventory suspended in midair over landscapes that had no names he knew, drank water from a canteen he had to angle carefully to avoid it going straight up into his nose, and slept in shifts with his hands locked around the talons. Somewhere in those three days and the sheer relentless enormity of everything passing below him, his grief went quiet.
Not gone.
He could still feel it, sitting at the back of everything.
On the third day the crow began to approach a place that caught Naruto's breath.
A kingdom sprawling across the landscape below in a scale that made Konoha look like a small town sketch on a map. He stared at it with his mouth open and the wind pushing against his teeth.
The crow twisted its path toward a circular structure perched on a cliff.
The talons suddenly opened.
He fell.
The roll on landing was instinctive and deeply unpleasant, dirt and stone scraping against the armor as he tumbled across the ground and came to a stop on his back staring at the gray sky. He lay there for a moment. A warmth moved through him from the inside out. Broken arm. Cracked ribs. Three days of being in the sky in a giant crow's grip. The warmth seemed to heal his mind and body.
Naruto closed his eyes, letting the magic do its thing.