Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.

Author's Note: Hello, all! Zen speaking, and it's lovely to be back, albeit briefly, and with a story that's rather odd to say the least. Possibly one of the strangest things I've written, but it was certainly an exercise in writers' block-busting. I do apologise to readers of Dream of Winter. I really want to get back to it and keep the puzzle going, but I'm in the middle of writing my own original story and that's sucking out my energy like I've been tapped to an aeroplane. In any case, I'd like to focus on that for now, and then work solidly on Dream later.

This story was fun to write. Weird, but fun. It all started off from when I was listening to a radio dramatisation of Dante's Inferno...Oh god! A painful experience. This is nowhere near as dark, but I just liked the idea of the Sage being taken on a tour by an odd guide and maybe adding some human dimensions to the old chap.

I'm stuck in my usual corner of not being sure how to define this story. It might be affectionate parody. It might be a little crackish. Double meanings and slightly surreal scenes abound.

So without further ado, I present this very strange one-shot. Best, Zen :D

The valley filled with cup noodles extended so far into the distance that the end of it was lost in mist.

The Sage of the Six Paths noted that his understanding of cup noodles must have been borrowed from this mental dimension. He didn't even know what cup noodles were, but simply breathing in the mental air had given him an implicit understanding of whatever weird and wonderful truths were perceived in this dimension as universal, and it seemed as though, in this case, one universal truth was, 'I think, therefore I eat ramen'.

"Ye, verily," the Sage murmured, as a bundle of tumbleweed rolled by his feet, pushed along by a particularly obnoxious gust of wind, "I seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere."

There was a buzz and a vibration from his staff. He tilted it, and applied the ring at its top to his left ear. "Anon. Sage of the Six Paths, Father of All Shinobi, Son of the Demon Rabbit Goddess doth speak now."

"Anon? I thought we were setting aside the Sagely speak for today," came the Sage of the Six Paths' own indignant voice from out of the staff. "You were the one who said that we needed to 'keep up with the times' and 'update to remain relevant to a new generation'."

It was the Sage's copy, scheduled to appear in the other boy's mind, or perhaps the Sage himself was the copy and the one on the other side of the staff was the original. They actually weren't too clear on that matter themselves.

The Sage pinched the bridge of his nose. "Fine, fine. No Sagely speak. What's happened?"

"Ye, verily," replied the copy, and the Sage felt a tickle of irritation until the copy went on in a subdued voice: "I seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere."

"Ah. Well. That makes the two of us. Is Indra's Successor almost dead yet?"

"He is dying, but, he won't be at death's door for a while. And what about Ashura's Successor, Sage Two?"

"I am Sage One, I think you will find."

The copy grumbled, "I don't remember agreeing to that."

"We are the same person, Sage Two. If one of us agrees, that counts as both of us agreeing. In any case, Ashura's Successor is also still in the process of dying, but he has a while to go." There was a pause in which the Sage ducked to avoid a flying cloud of babbling thoughts. "I fear we might have been too eager to make our Sagely Grand Entrances."

"I fear you are right, and weren't we supposed to appear in their Inner Sanctums?"

Sage One sighed. "Where are you now?"

There was a thoughtful pause as Sage Two examined his surroundings. "I seem to be in a cave."

"A cave?"

"Of eyes. Lots of eyes."

There were eyes on the walls, eyes on the ceiling, and eyes beneath the Sage's feet like soft spongy cobbles, and they were red and angry, with the cold clammy smoothness of boiled eggs.

They glowed in the dark and rolled to follow his movements. Sage Two swallowed. "They're looking at me. It's rather making my beard curl."

Sage One took a moment to reflect on his good fortune that before him was nothing more than sky-high pillars of noodle packets. He cleared his throat and tried his best to sound reassuring. "Fear not, Number Two. I believe that we are both in the Outer Regions of Superficial Obsession."

"So these eyes are only the tip of the iceberg? Wonderful. Something tells me that this mind is going to be all fields of daisies from this point onwards."

Sage One once again surveyed the land before him. A very large aspect of Ashura's Successor seemed superficially dedicated to noodles. It wasn't an especially healthy obsession, but he was somewhat thankful that the noodles had appeared here and not anywhere the deeper in the boy's mind.

He froze, and turned over that thought one more time as gingerly as a dismembered gorilla hand.

He was lost in the mind of Ashura's Successor. And he needed to journey into its Deeper Parts.

A hot wind wound its way through the noodle pot towers and ruffled the Sage's robes. Sweat beaded and vaporised off his forehead.

He needed to journey into the deeper parts of a mind that was comprised not only of the paranoia, and stress of Ninjahood, but also the suffering of Jinchuurikihood, and, last but by no means least, the drama of Teenage Boyhood.

The Sage clutched his staff and shuddered at the thought.

From what the Sage had gathered from his own sons' rocky puberties Teenage Boyhood tended to come with a special brand of pathetic madness all of its own. And it was painful, for everybody involved. Especially on the ears. Indra's supposedly mighty roars of, "Nobody understands how I feel!" certainly still echoed on somewhere in the depths of his cochlear spiral, and he wasn't going forget Ashura's tortured whines, from when his stack of (ahem) questionable reading materials had been found under a stone slab, for another five hundred years at least.

All the Sage had to do was close his eyes, and he could almost smell another curtain being closed angrily in his face, and hear the much-too-enthusiastic percussive music stuttering out of Ashura's room as he banged a couple of rocks together. What the boy had found so fascinating about the sounds those rocks made – that 'rock music', for want of a better term – the Sage still couldn't understand.

Perhaps Indra had had a point. How much the Sage had really understood of either of his sons was something he had had a thousand years to mull over and it still did not feel like nearly enough.

He heard crunching footsteps and looked up. Something large was climbing the path on the other side of the ridge. It huffed as it neared; orange gravel slipping under its paws, and a moment later, a familiar head peered over the crest.

"Hello, old man." Kurama smiled down at him with a wide, white grin. "It's been a long time."

Sage Two froze, and the sharingan eyes studding the ceiling swivelled to focus on the shape that had suddenly appeared in their midst.

A pale shadow was wading through the water towards him. Its white outline flickered like a candle and as it came closer, it filled, solidified, into a sallow-faced man with poisonous yellow eyes. He held a lantern with a violet flame slung over his shoulder.

The man's face split into a smile. "My, my, my, this is a surprise."

"Who the devil are you?"

"Not the devil, although some may have you think that way. It would have been an honour to meet you in person, my Lord Sage, but since I am no longer an occupant of this mind, this will have to do." The man lowered his head in a sweeping bow. "I am the memory imprint of Orochimaru."

"A memory imprint?"

"A lingering trace. The memory that he was once here. Perhaps think of me as a ghost. In any case, I am your guide, Lord Sage. Only I have lived and wandered long enough in Sasuke-kun's mind, other than Sasuke's soul itself, to know the way to the Inner Sanctum and, as Sasuke's soul is at the moment rather busy fighting for its life, you will have to do with me. I was sent to show you the way to a reliable short-cut. You can trust me. I will get you there safely enough. After all, what could I possibly do to you when I am nothing more than a memory? I certainly won't bite."

He chuckled with a throaty clicking noise that made the Sage feel as though he had been doused in sewer water, but the Sage had a schedule to stick to. He couldn't afford to delay any longer.

"Lead the way."

A smile, and a bow that likely only passed as respectful because it could barely be seen. "Follow me closely, Lord Sage."

The Sage pulled his robes up to his knees and waded after his guide. Orochimaru slipped through the dark water with his lantern held aloft before him, but the violet light revealed nothing ahead except thick smoky darkness, red eyes glittering like stars, and, beyond, thicker darkness still.

The Sage reached out to ruffle the fox between his ears. "It has indeed been a long time, but," he narrowed his eyes and squinted, "I thought, Kurama, that you had been extracted from this boy's body – "

"Oh, I'm not Kurama-Kurama," Kurama cut in sheepishly then as the Sage's expression darkened he hastened to explain. "I'm the memory imprint of Kurama. That's like – "

"A ghost," said the Sage, and when the fox looked deeply impressed added, "so I've been told already. Have you been sent to guide me too?"

"You want to get to the Inner Sanctum, right? You don't have much time to get there, so I've been sent to show the way to the short-cut. It should take an hour and a half or so of dream-time to reach it, but I can't say you have much choice, old man. It's either that or you stay wandering in the boy's mind until this whole place shuts down. So, what do you say? Are you coming with me or not?"

When the Sage hesitated, Kurama turned his muzzle upwards. "Take a look at the sky."

There was a dim red glow on the horizon, throbbing like a slowly beating heart.

"The sun's setting already. It's not supposed to do that for at least another sixty years. Now, come on, old man. You want to help him, right? Right?"

"I don't think I ever recall you pleading with me so desperately, Kurama."

Kurama snorted. "Maybe I've just done my share of growing up at last, or maybe it's because I'm not entirely Kurama. I'm only the impression he's left behind on this mind after all. Take your pick. I don't mind which."

The Sage struck his staff into the ground and stepped forward. "I'm on a rather tight schedule, Kurama, as I'm sure you understand. I'd be very grateful if you could lead me to this 'short-cut' of yours as quickly as possible."

Kurama chuckled at the word 'grateful' and black lips peeled back from his teeth in a smile. "By the sounds of it, this kid's near-death experience is going to be pretty important for the future."

"The fate of the world hangs in the balance," the Sage replied, "along with the fate of humanity, and perhaps even the fate of the universe, depending on how charitable my mother's feeling."

Kurama gave a low appreciative whistle. "Then we'd best get going. Mind how you go down the path, old man. It gets steeper near the bottom and the gravel's pretty shaky in places."

They followed the path down into the valley.

"You mentioned that somebody sent you," the Sage whispered to Orochimaru, and as he did, the darkness stirred with echoing whispers as soft as rustling reeds. "Who?"

Orochimaru didn't answer immediately. He seemed to be grasping ahead for something. That something made itself clear when his hands brushed against an object that clinked and the lantern light glinted off metal.

"The Mind," Orochimaru said, after examining the iron door handle that had solidified in mid-air in front of them. "This collective world of thoughts, dreams, memories, aspirations and fears inside Uchiha Sasuke's head, also known as the Palace of the Soul, the Box You Think Inside Of, the Mad House but," the man glanced over his shoulder and licked his lips – or rather, he extended his tongue from his mouth, allowed it to do several acrobatic flips and loops in front of his face like a performing eel, then coiled it up behind his teeth again, "should I really have to spell everything out for the Sage of the Six Paths?"

"I am still trying to regain my bearings," said the Sage defensively, and to his chagrin Orochimaru dared to chuckle. "You laugh, young man, but it was a very complicated process projecting myself into this boy's mind from beyond the boundaries of time and space."

"Oh, of that I have no doubts, but perhaps you could try regaining your bearings faster. This mind is particularly suspicious of invaders. It might have set some traps for us. Luckily for you, Lord Sage, I trained the boy myself and if there are any traps, I ought to be able to disable them."

He tapped the door handle floating in the darkness with the tip of his finger and straightened. "Hmm…this is the wrong one. Trust this boy to make things difficult for us. Maybe this way."

As they pressed on through the passage, the eyes on the walls swivelled to follow their movements and the Sage spoke up again, "These are a lot of sharingans."

"We are in the Outer Regions of Superficial Obsession, after all. Clan honour, clan duty, clan responsibility – oh, the boy was full of it, superficially speaking." Orochimaru examined another door handle that seemed to have twisted itself out the shadows and dismissed it like the first. "But, perhaps in this case it is less clan honour, duty and responsibility, and more bloodlines, blood bonds and blood promises. Soak everything in blood and things become much clearer here. These are all the eyes that are watching and waiting for him to fail, more eyes than he can ever hope to please. And then he trapped me in his mind, with all these fine, fine eyes around me like apples ready to be plucked from trees, and I could do nothing about them but look! It tormented me so!"

The Sage watched Orochimaru dismiss another door handle with a brusque sweep of his hand. "Can I help you find the correct...er…door, perhaps?" "

"Door? There is no correct door!" Orochimaru chuckled with that same clicking noise that seemed either to be coming from his teeth or somewhere deep in his throat. "But there are plenty of handles. This isn't so much an open mind, but an easily 'openable' one. Twist the right one the right way and this mind will happily make the door for us."

Suddenly Orochimaru flickered and his sickly white skin faded to a misty grey. His hand had brushed against a bar of dark metal and a thin white outline had, for an instant, hung in the air around it as though drawn out with chalk. "This one will do."

He seized the handle, twisted, and the black and purple shadows with the roving red eyes condensed into a door.

It opened onto a stone stairwell, lit by a thin grey light.

Orochimaru made a small noise of satisfaction. He stepped onto the landing. The Sage hitched up his robes to follow through and the door disappeared with a faint bubbling hiss in their wake.

The stairs spiralled both up and down. "Where do we go from here?"

"To the top," Orochimaru said, and to the Sage's confusion promptly started descending the stairs. "Don't question this boy's logic. This all makes complete and perfect sense to him, and so long as it all makes sense to him, he doesn't give a flying thunder what the rest of us think."

"I…see?"

"We have to wait three minutes!?"

"Come on. You've breathed the air here. Just go with the flow." Kurama yawned and curled up in the dust, settling his head on his paws. "It's got a very distinctive flow, especially in this part of the mind, so we have to let the cup noodles stand for three minutes. Those are the rules."

Kurama had led the Sage through columns of cup noodle towers and lengths of billboards plastered with motivational posters with the promise of a gateway. The Sage, however, couldn't see any gate. All he saw a seven feet long cup noodle packet, lying on its side, half-buried in the orange sand.

He trusted that the fox knew what he was doing, but seeing as the fate of the ninja world was resting upon these crucial minutes of dreamtime, he asked: "Are you sure?"

Kurama twitched his ears and opened one eye. "One minute fifty seconds and counting. If you tried to open it now, you'll be sucked into the Sin Bin."

The Sage decided to take his word for it and sat down on a small orange boulder. "Kurama, I was under the impression that you had been confined to only a small part of the boy's mind and were sealed from wandering around inside it."

"I was, but others weren't. They told me the way before I came to find you. Time's up!" Kurama jumped to his feet, lifted up the lid on the cup noodle packet, and a puff of greasy vapour spilled out of the opening. Kurama wafted the cloud away with a paw and held up the lid for the Sage. "After you, old man."

"Do you have to call me that, Kurama?"

"Why shouldn't I? You are old, you are a man, and you are – arguably – my old man. What did your sons call you? 'Father'? 'Pops'? You don't strike me as much of a 'Daddy' - "

"Lord Sage, of course. As was appropriate," the Sage snapped and he pushed past Kurama into the cup noodle steam. His foot found a step – a stone step – and then another, and then he was descending out of the smoke, onto a staircase that was gently shifting in the wind.

The stairs lurched under Kurama's weight and he quickly shrunk to the size of a husky. "Guess it must have come as a shock for you: Having kids, watching them grow up and go out on their own into the world to do their own thing – "

"Watch them fall to pieces," said the Sage, before he realised he had even spoken.

Kurama opened his mouth, closed it when he couldn't think of anything to say.

The stairs led down from the deep blue sky towards spires of black rock below. They were topped with what the Sage assumed to be snow, and something about their shape reminded him strongly of certain offensive finger gestures that Ashura had often flipped towards his brother.

"You know," said Kurama, breaking the uneasy silence, "before this war, I didn't give a flying thunder about this kid."

The Sage walked on ahead, tapping each step with his staff before he put a foot on it, as though testing to see if it would hold his weight. "Is that so?"

"Heck, yeah. He's about as annoying and obnoxious and a sight to make eyes weep blood as they come." Kurama looked hard at the Sage's back. "But we're getting along better now, and what I'm trying to say is, maybe I can understand a bit of how you feel about…you know."

The Sage smiled. "Ever the eloquent one, Kurama."

"Shush, old man. I hate sentimental. Anyway, I've been watching this kid grow up the whole time, and sometimes I look back on everything I've seen him do – he might have fallen to pieces occasionally, but when you see that and then you see him pull himself back together, and get back on his feet, and keep going, you can't help kind of feeling proud of them - "

"Why are all those rocks covered in with hard white cheese?"

"Cheese?" Kurama looked at the rock that the Sage was indicating with his staff. "Oh. You mean the bird crap…I mean, guano?"

"Guano?" The Sage glanced back at the rocks. "That is rather a lot of guano on one boy's mind."

"We had a…lodger in here for some time."

"A bird?"

"Not just any bird." Kurama bristled from his head to the tips of each of his nine tails. "The world's most stuck up, irritating and full-of-himself crow. It thought it was the Universe's Gift to Mankind. Gods, that thing would never stop talking about its special little sharingan eye and yapping on about how powerful it was and its 'so cool he makes penguins freeze' master, blah, blah, blah. And then, to cap it all, it would go flying around the place and come all the way back to my cell just to rub it into my face that it was freer than I was, even though it was just a measly summons. Don't laugh! I'm being serious."

The Sage's face was as smooth as the bark of a thousand-year old pine. "I wouldn't dream of laughing at you, Kurama."

Kurama looked at him closely, but then snorted and chuckled. "Good one, good one. Well played, old man." The Sage decided to keep his ignorance quietly to himself and let Kurama chatter on. "You're right. This is the Dream Roost – that happy place where dreams, aspirations and all that kind of cheerful onwards-and-upwards-thinking stuff live, fly, and poop on the limits of reality."

"Delightful."

They pushed through a bank of clouds and jagged needles of rock rose up around them. Now that they were closer the Sage noticed other signs of life – huge mounds of shredded paper and twisted branches bound together with sticky white cobwebs and glittering with shiny objects; tangles of feathers caught in crevices; bleached bones scattered like dice on a flat rock.

It occurred to the Sage that if dreams could live and fly, then they could also die and fall.

Movement in the corner of his eye. He glanced round, staff gripped in both his hands and stopped.

Standing on top of a nearby spire was a horse.

At least, it was a horse, if a horse had been dreamt up by a man who had gone to sleep with his feet in a bucket of blood and his head on the grave of his ancestors. It was all cold reality and brutal truths: Denied fears made undeniable, given a form that could run wild, scream and trample.

Its dark coat glistened with the uneasy colours of a surfacing bruise and its face, although horse-like, ended in a curved black beak. Its wings were slick and slippery-looking, as though they were coated in a layer of tar that by normal standards should have been dripping off its feathers.

Kurama sat on his haunches and, stroking his chin, considered the strange winged horse. "What do you reckon, old man?" he said thoughtfully. "It would definitely be faster than walking all the way down."

It took the Sage half a second to understand what Kurama was suggesting and although the thought made his stomach clench, he nodded. "Speed is of the essence, but what is it exactly? I've never seen a flying nightmare."

"…well…to cut a long story short, remember the crow I told you about earlier? It got with a bunch of nightmares and had a herd of flying babies."

The Sage stared. He looked at the horse, looked up at the sky, and then back at the horse. "You can certainly…er…see the resemblance to the father."

"They've got his attitude too, the little turds. I call them the night-terrors."

"And you say it will be faster to use this…'night-terror' to get to the Inner Sanctum?"

"It won't take us straight to the Inner Sanctum, but it'll definitely get us out of here quicker."

"So, how do you propose we catch it?"

Kurama grinned. "Leave that to me."

The stairwell was in a tower and, as sceptical as the Sage had been at the start, it soon became clear that his guide had been right. Through the narrow windows in the tower walls, he could see, plain as day, that as he and his guide descended the steps the grey moorland dropped further away and the empty white expanse of sky drew closer.

Orochimaru clicked his tongue. "A rather dismal landscape outside, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't say that," the Sage said, in an effort to make conversation. "It's got some…drama to it, perhaps, but where are the dreams? Is this not the Dream Roost? I see nothing at all."

"There are no dreams here."

"Surely not?" the Sage scoffed. "Everyone has dreams. Why, even I – oh…"

Covered in blue grass, windswept pines and greying moss, an array of mounds dotted the moor. Some were as large as houses. Some were smaller than cats. A few, however, were crumbling in places to show old grey bones buried inside.

"Dead," Orochimaru said, and he made that dirty chuckling noise from the back of his throat. "Buried them alive, I should think. Lots of buried dreams. He never had time for them, not with that one in his way."

He pointed at the shadow that the Sage had taken for a mountain or a canyon ridge in the distance. Now that he looked more closely, he realised that it was a fallen colossus. It lay on its back with its hands and face turned up to the sky.

"That must have been very tall when it was standing." He had instinctively lowered his voice to a hushed whisper, because there was something about the statue that didn't so much seem fallen as laid gently to rest.

"When that was standing, it cast a shadow so wide and cold nothing could live alongside it. It's only recently that things have started to change. I heard a rumour that there are one or two dreams flying again."

The Sage peered out of the window. "I don't see anything."

"Perhaps they are somewhere at the Back of his Mind. We are in the middle of a war, after all. No time for dreams in a war. Here we are!" Orochimaru exclaimed and the stairs ended in front of a plain wooden door.

Orochimaru slung the lantern over his shoulder, throwing cracked shadows all about the landing. He turned to the Sage with a cold, excited gleam in his eyes. "It seems that the boy inherited something of my thinking that might prove somewhat alarming to you, my Lord Sage."

The hungry look in those eyes made him think that had the Sage met the real Orochimaru the man might have tried to swallow him whole. "What is it?"

"To access higher levels of strength, you must be prepared to die once."

"Oh. Must I really?"

"It's supposed to be a price only the desperate or the mad would choose to pay." Orochimaru tried the door handle. It wasn't locked. "Luckily for us, this door won't need a real toll. Reality doesn't have much of a currency here. To simply dream that you are dying will do."

"Simply?" the Sage repeated, staring at the door. "But I have never truly died. I just transcended the mortal realms and ascended to a higher plane of existence. How am I to dream that I'm dying?"

"Well, funnily enough, I have never truly died either, so that puts the two of us in the same boat." Orochimaru gave the Sage a look that strongly suggested he was beginning to suspect the legitimacy of his Sagely credentials. "Then again, most people have never fallen from a great height and still somehow manage to dream that they are. We will manage. Anyway, my Lord Sage, perhaps you should brace yourself."

The door opened with a click. Pale, tepid light flooded in.

"It's a Leap of Faith."

A plank of wood, perhaps only a foot wide, six feet long jutted out into the open air. It was shiny with condensation and creaked in the wind.

"After you," Orochimaru hissed in the Sage's ear, and he pushed the old man out onto the plank.

As soon as his feet hit the slippery board, there was an eruption of cawing and cackling, and a flurry of feathers.

Black wings snapped about the Sage with a sound like manic applause. Beady-eyed crows were burying into the folds of his robes, scratching at his face, entangling themselves in his beard, and he was so focused on shielding his eyes that he didn't notice the end of the plank until his ankles were already tipping over it.

The crows swooped down at last. They jabbed, tore, scratched, pecked, sliced and clawed with their beaks and talons, until all that was left of the Sage was a dark bloody cloud that vanished an instant later.

The quickest solution, if not the most refined, turned out to involve Kurama expanding to a size large enough that he could straddle two spires of rock and snatch up the night-terror in one hand. Unsurprisingly, the night-terror was rather subdued by this treatment and remained meek and manageable from that point onwards.

"Take us down," Kurama ordered the night-terror, as he shrank again – to the size of a rabbit – and climbed onto the Sage's shoulder. "Straight down - to Hopeless Dreams. Oh, by the way, this old man is from the Outside. You know what that means? It means that if you don't behave, when he gets out of here, he might be able to find your dad and turn him into a feather duster."

The night-terror squealed and jumped off the staircase.

The Sage most certainly did not scream. He was too busy battling with the beard blowing up into his face and trying to decide if being blinded by the beard he had cultivated over a life-time could be taken as a suitable alternative for his life passing before his eyes.

Then wings spread on either side, bringing the plummet to a jarring halt and the night-terror glided smoothly down between the rocks, startling flocks of golden-feathered dreams from their nests as it went.

At first, it wasn't an altogether unpleasant experience. Kurama was making warm chuckling noises from his place in the Sage's collar as the wind played with his whiskers; dreams and hopes of all shapes and sizes appeared on the rocks to watch the visitors go by with curious bright-blue eyes, and the initial stomach-lurch gave way to a fluttering tingle that made the Sage feel as though he had swallowed a handful of sparks.

But then he chanced to look down, and he looked down at the feathery black mane in his hands. In that instance, all the feelings faded away like colours from an ageing picture.

In the mane of the night-terror he saw faces.

More accurately, he saw no faces at all. They were blank of features. They had white spaces for eyes, white spaces for their mouths, and even though they were turned towards him, they weren't seeing him. They didn't even acknowledge his existence.

With every toss of the night-terror's head, and each strand of mane tugged out by the wind rushing between its ears, appeared new ghosts in its skin.

A circle of turned backs. People huddled in unbreakable rings. Laughter that died on approach then climbed back out of their graves on leaving.

They ignored him. They didn't even try to wound his pride because they wouldn't acknowledge he had any pride to wound in the first place. Backs turned. Blank faces looked past him and round him and never at him.

"Hey, hey…old man, don't let go. Focus. These aren't your nightmares."

Two bodies buried under a sword - one body buried before ranks of men with their heads bowed under a sky as black as their clothes - one body unburied, alone and cold, and un-retrieved, and maybe still sinking away into dark, dark waters.

A figure pierced through with iron – a figure pierced through with wood – a figure pierced through with ice all over.

Eyes that reflected a shape wreathed in flames and the smoke of burning blood.

Eyes that grew wide and terrified and filled with pain at the touch of a clawed hand.

"Hold on tight," Kurama was whispering from out of his robes, and the Sage closed his grip on the night-terror's mane and wished that he could be closing his eyes instead. "We're nearly there."

One heavy downbeat of wings. Black feathers rushing by turned into white rushing water and two stone men facing off in a valley…

The night-terror landed on the ground with a bounce. The images dispersed. The Sage's hands were wound tightly into the horse's coarse black hair. His knuckles gleamed white.

"That's that hell-ride over!" Kurama jumped off the Sage's shoulder and expanded to the size of a small pony.

Once the Sage had slid off the night-terror's back it leapt up into the sky. The Sage and Kurama were left at the base of a black rock spire, facing the mouth of a cave so dark nothing could be seen inside, but for a deep red glimmer, like the sheen on a pool of -

"Kurama, are you quite sure that there's no other route?"

"Well, there is the way through the Sea of Teenage Ninja Awkward Turtles and Jiraiya's Ero-Cupboard of Ero-Secrets – "

"On second thought, this route will do." The Sage stared into the cave and was suddenly struck by an uncomfortable feeling that the darkness was staring back, and laughing. "Are we waiting for something?"

"A hopeless dream," Kurama replied without averting his gaze. "Basically, if you see something blue, start chasing."

"Something blue? Right. That is so informative." The Sage sighed and leaned against his staff.

Kurama raised his eyebrows. "What's up, old man?"

"You know, Kurama, after a thousand years presiding over war, turmoil and countless cycles of revenge and hatred, I rather thought that a grand, show-stopping, stun-them-all-silly entrance into this Story was, not so much given, but owed to me." The Sage closed his eyes, opened them slowly with another sigh heavier than the last, and Kurama braced himself for an outpouring of self-pity. "I've seen fathers failing sons and sons failing fathers, and, then both sides failing to understand why they were failing each other in the first place, and it has happened over and over and over again. It's enough to demand why mankind insists on propagating his species. Fathers and sons are so obviously good at becoming each other's greatest sources of suffering…"

"And mothers and daughters," added Kurama, thinking of the Uzumaki women.

"And mothers, of course. Can't forget mothers. Especially mothers from other worlds."

Kurama shot the Sage a quick, sly, sideways glance then went back to staring into the cave. "I take it things were complicated then? Between you and your sons?"

"Oh! Where do I even start? My good-for-nothing sons. Good for nothing but lingering on like bad God-fruit fart. Was it enough that I had to watch them tear each other apart once? No! I have to watch them do it a hundred times over! Every imbecilic incarnation living and dying and making the same stupid mistakes. It's like they're doing it on purpose just to get my attention!"

"Maybe you just need to be more straightforward with them," said Kurama mildly. "Just tell them, 'Indra, I know that Daddy - I mean, the Lord Sage - said that he loved both you and your brother equally, but since you were always out training when the Lord Sage took your brother out on their father-son bonding fishing trips, can you really be surprised when the Lord Sage starts playing favourites?' and work it out with a pencil from there."

"I never 'played favourites'," the Sage growled, but at Kurama's incredulous huffing, the Sage gave in with a sigh. "Not intentionally."

"Hah."

The Sage glowered up at a night-terror wheeling in the sky above them. "This all feels like the cruel scheme of some incomprehensibly sadistic god - and it's been calculated to be one part punishment and one part entertainment, all at my expense. Wouldn't you agree, Kurama, that for all that cosmic popcorn fodder I must have provided, the Universe owes me not only a Grand Entrance, but the Grand Entrance of all Grand Entrances?"

"Well…"

"Wouldn't you agree, Kurama?" Kurama got the hint and nodded in agreement until the Sage was suitably pacified.

"You're very keen on this Grand Entrance, old man," Kurama noted, after a moment of peering into the dark cave again, and seeing not even a speck of blue.

Indeed, the Sage was very particular about his Grand Entrance. One did not spring from the loins of a super-powered demon rabbit goddess or moon alien without an innate understanding of the importance of a Grand Entrance.

"My mother," the Sage began, his gaze becoming distant, "descended from the heavens in a blaze of starlight so radiant it looked as though she had brought the sky to settle upon the Earth with her, and by the time she had finished surveying her strange new world, some humans were already worshiping her footprints and preserving her dandruff in amber."

Kurama whistled under his breath. "That's a tough act to follow."

"It was. And Ashura and Indra used to complain that I was a tough act to follow. Those boys know nothing of I and my brother's pains."

And for this Grand Entrance of all Entrances, the Sage had put not only a lot of thought into it, but also poured in his heart, soul, every drop of charisma he had inherited from his mother (along with her horns) and every ounce of bravado that his father must have had to somehow woo her into playing wife. And he had combed his beard. And he had picked his best Sagely robes. His Grand Entrance should have been utterly perfect.

His Grand Entrance had most certainly not involved traversing a valley of cup noodles, riding a half-crow half-nightmare fiend or tapping his toes, waiting for 'something blue' to appear in a cave that looked about as welcoming as the prospect of a snake's digestive tract.

"I'm sorry about all this."

The Sage looked up and raised his eyebrows. "About what?"

"About all this mess – with your sons. Ninjas. All us bijuus. Chakra. Everything." Kurama scratched his chin. "It's pretty decent of you to stick around trying to sort it all out, even after everything that's happened. If I were you, I would've given up on the lot of them long ago and taken a back seat for this round. I'd have let all the ninjas destroy themselves, so that they'd never cause me any trouble ever again."

"It certainly was very tempting. I can't deny that." The darkness in the cave seemed to ripple and breathe. "But I have done many things that I am not proud of, or perhaps to be more precise, there are too many things that I have not done that I should have, and every cycle of my sons' incarnations is another chance for me to set things right. I can't afford not to care, Kurama, so there's no need to apologise. However much I complain, I won't turn my back on all of you – just yet."

"'Just yet', eh? You sly old….Did you see that!?" Kurama started and rose to his feet, staring intently into the cave. He pricked his ears, narrowed his eyes, and barked: "There! Chase it! Don't let it out of your sight!"

He seized the Sage's arm in a clawed hand, and leapt into the dark, pulling the Sage in with him, and it was when their feet hit the water – yes, water, there was a pool of water, still and smooth like a slate - it lapped at the Sage's ankles – that he saw the blue figure walking ahead of them with its hands tucked in to its pockets.

"You've got to try to reach it," gasped Kurama beside him. The fox was panting. He was running on the water, but what amazed the Sage was that for all of Kurama's bounding he appeared to be running on the spot. "Go on. We've got to catch him. We've got to bring him back."

"Kurama," the Sage had decided that this silliness was dragging on long enough, "the only thing you've got to do is lead me to the short-cut."

"And that's what I'm trying to do, and for that you've got to chase that ghost! Now, come on. We're moving. We're definitely moving, and we're getting closer. We're definitely reaching him," Kurama said breathlessly, and he narrowed his eyes on the figure that walked calmly on the red and white fan stitched onto its back.

There was nothing for it. The Sage hitched up his robes, feeling decidedly undignified as he did so, and started running –

….and it was curious that as he was running, it all made a lot of more sense. He was going after something that was going away because it was going away. It was something that was already so far ahead it couldn't even hear him shouting, but he couldn't ever lose sight of it, he couldn't ever stop chasing it, because if he did, he would lose it for good – that figure in blue and white – the one everybody said didn't exist anymore, the one who had dissolved away into something hollow and bitter and raving mad - but he knew better. The chaser knew better. He was out there, still out there somewhere, and someday he was going to turn around and stop walking away….

Kurama had lied, thought the Sage, his thoughts bubbling up through the mad rush of emotion that seethed in the path of the blue-and-white ghost. This wasn't a hopeless dream. This was a dream imbued so much hope that there was no hope for the dreamer of letting go.

…..but how could it be that the Sage was running so quickly, and the boy ahead was walking so slowly and the Sage had still yet to reach him!? How could the boy not notice the effort they were going to just to bring him back? Why was he walking ahead into darkness? Was he blind? Was he being wilfully blind? Was he trying to communicate something to them via a secret language of back muscle flexes? Why wouldn't he just turn around!?

"Are you angry yet?"

"What?" snapped the Sage, sweat dripping down the sides of his face as he furiously pumped his legs through the water. "Did you say something, Kurama?"

"Good, we're getting there then. Be ready for the take-off – "

And just as the Sage reached for the back of the ghost's blue shirt, his fingers only a metre or so from the fabric, there was a rough tugging around his navel and he was jerked up into the air as though by an invisible hook.

The ghost vanished. An ugly yellow light filled his vision, and the Sage was standing alongside Kurama in a cavern filled with water, their shoulders heaving as they fought to catch their breath.

Water was dripping from a leaking pipe. The sound rang out as flat and round as a coin. Stone walls soared up towards a ceiling that was lost in shadow and thin grey mist.

Yellow ripples spread from the Sage's feet towards the bars of an empty cage. He didn't need to ask where they were. He knew from the grimace on Kurama's face and the bristling ridge of fur along his back and the bored grid-marks on the back wall of the cell from when the fox had played noughts-and-crosses with himself to pass the time.

"The quickest and easiest way to access this place was always by feeling anger," Kurama explained, as he walked towards the remnants of the bars. "Anger at himself, usually. Anger and frustration, and the pain from both – anything that made him feel too weak to deal with on his own unlocked a channel to here."

The Sage widened his eyes. "So we were chasing that ghost to - ?"

"Get angry and frustrated enough to land here, but don't get too comfortable, old man." Kurama pawed at the air with a look of intense concentration. "We won't be staying here for long. Ah-hah!"

The yellow glow from above intensified, and from out of the light unfurled a rope ladder that to the ordinary eye would have been completely invisible, but to the Sage's eyes glowed the bright blue of purest chakra.

Kurama gave the ladder an experimental tug then placed his back foot on the lowest rung.

The Sage went to stand at the base of the ladder. "Dare I ask what's up there?"

"Just the usual couple of daft old bats."

The Sage pursed his lips. "Why do all you mindscape guides have to be so cryptic?"

"Because we work on internal logic, of course. Internal logic doesn't give a damn what people from the Outside think."

And there really was no arguing with that, so the Sage jammed his staff under his armpit and began to climb, although he made sure that his feelings about 'internal logic' were clearly known by muttering all the way up the ladder.

"I always wondered what it was like to be eaten alive. It's rather different from being swallowed whole," Orochimaru remarked. He was materialising beside the Sage, shred by shred, like a macabre meat puzzle, as the crows in the Dream Roost ate him away. "That wasn't too difficult, was it, Lord Sage?"

The Sage stopped checking that all the bits of his body and robes were back together to direct at Orochimaru a mongoose-worthy glower. "I thought I was being killed!"

"That was rather the point, yes."

"Where are we? Oh, forget it! I'm fed up with asking you guides where I'm supposed to be. I am the Sage of the Six Paths! I am perfectly capable of working out how this mind works for myself." Orochimaru lifted his eyebrows as though to say he sincerely doubted that, but the Sage ignored him and rose to his feet.

After a minute of gazing at their surroundings and testing the steel beneath his feet, he turned to Orochimaru. "Bearing in mind that I am perfectly capable of working out how this mind works for myself – "

"Of course, you are."

"- and I'm feeling just a little bit preoccupied at the moment, what with the end of the world and the possible resurrection of my mother at hand, would you mind telling me – I mean, confirming for me – where we are?"

The smug expression that crossed Orochimaru's face in the waxy purple light of his lantern could have frightened to death a Mist-nin. In fact, it probably at some point had. "I wouldn't mind in the slightest, my Lord Sage. This is the Cabinet of Copied Curiosities and the Chaotic Organiser of Organised Chaos - collectively known as the Memory Vault."

"Ah. Just as I thought," the Sage lied.

They were standing on a steel box - a trunk or cabinet of some kind – one of many that hovered in the room. Some cabinets turned gently like shifting sleepers and others drifted with the slow heavy purpose of icebergs towards the steel walls, or up and down towards nothing.

The walls were studded with so many handles it surely should have been impossible for every single one to correspond to a drawer, but drawers there were. Hundreds and thousands of interlocking hexagonal drawers formed a steel filing cabinet that stretched both up and down far beyond the reach of the purple light cast by Orochimaru's lantern.

"From here it's simple," said Orochimaru, his words echoing in the vast steel space. "One of these eight million drawers contains the gateway to the short-cut. All we have to do is find it."

"Eight million?" the Sage spluttered.

"Although technically speaking this is only one combination of eight million drawers. If each drawer has six possible rotations and each is a slightly different form, and each form becomes different in relation to the forms of the six draws in direct contact with it then it does make things rather more difficult, but, there is no need to worry, my Lord Sage," Orochimaru smiled, "I have a feeling that, just this once, the Mind is on our side. It always was very sharp when it came to surviving."

"So, the Mind is going to help us?"

"See how slowly all the floating cabinets are moving? See how still the walls are? The Mind is already helping us, my Lord Sage. Everything has been slowed practically to a standstill, although," Orochimaru looked troubled, "that might be because we're running short of time. Hm? What was that?"

"What was what?"

Orochimaru stretched out his arm and held the lantern out in front as far as he could. "There seems to be a little rat in here."

To the Sage's alarm the man's arm continued to extend, long, thin and white and covered in scales the size of pennies and Orochimaru's arm had turned into the twisting coils of a snake, holding the lantern in its jaws.

Purple light danced over the draws as the snake cast the lantern over the walls. Orochimaru tensed. The Sage gripped his staff to his chest and cursed his luck that of all the doujutsus he could have inherited, the byakugan wasn't one of them. The darkness above and below them was utterly impenetrable to the sharingan.

There was a blur of flickering shadow. The snake snapped its fangs, spat and shrank back from the walls with a hiss, fleeing back to Orochimaru like a recoiling whip and returning the lantern to Orochimaru's hands.

"Stay exactly where you are," Orochimaru told the Sage and he swung the lantern around them in a glowing violet arc.

A fiery ring of purple chakra burst up around them, released from the lantern chamber, and Orochimaru and the Sage were enclosed in a shimmering purple rib-cage. It smelt of burnt ozone and copper, and in the bright purple light it emitted the Sage could finally make out the strange black shape that was crouched on the wall.

Snapping and crackling like dry leaves, it was thin and lithe-looking and shaped like a human, possibly a man. From its limbs to its long dark hair it was composed entirely of flickering black flames.

Orochimaru lowered the lantern, but the rib-cage remained around them like a protective wall.

"I wondered when I would be running into you." His lips curved into a smile. "If you are here to hinder our progress, I strongly suggest you reconsider."

To the Sage's astonishment, the human-shamed mass of flames shook its head and pointed at the drawer it was sitting on.

Orochimaru made a small noise at the back of his throat that might have been amusement but could just as equally have been contempt. "I see. A temporary truce. Well then. What is it that you want?"

The black fire pointed emphatically at the drawer beneath it again. When Orochimaru and the Sage still didn't understand, its shoulders slumped and it shook its fists at them in a silent fit of exasperation.

"What is that creature?" the Sage whispered, as the black fire continued to mime something about the drawer underneath it.

"That is an imprint of some living fire that was temporarily stored in the boy's eye. It has a habit of getting very protective whenever I attempt to go near the Sanctum, although it seems to have changed its lurking territories lately."

At last, the black fire pulled open the drawer and jabbed at something inside it.

"Oh! So you've found the gateway to the short-cut? Well, why didn't you say so earlier?"

The fire smouldered indignantly, but motioned for them to come closer.

With a twist of Orochimaru's fingers, the skeletal rib-cage dissolved into a tiny pear-shaped flame. He scooped it up into the lantern and slung it over his shoulder, then with his arms stretching into two whip-thin cords, his hands shot out from his body.

They latched onto a pair of handles on either side of the fire man. Inch-by-inch, Orochimaru drew the floating box carrying him and Sage closer to the wall, until they were hovering alongside the open drawer.

"Yes, this is the one," said Orochimaru, after squinting critically into the drawer and the black fire flared, as though to say, Well, of course it is.

From inside the drawer came the roar of falling water.

The Sage had been expecting many things when he reached the top of the ladder: Clouds, for instance, or a sun with a smiling face, a light bulb, or some other vaguely symbolic object that would otherwise have been unquestioned if it wasn't found inside a world within a mind.

What he hadn't expected was a small room with a kotatsu, a television, a basket piled high with satsumas and a wall covered in shelves near bursting with books and dog-eared albums.

More to the point, he hadn't expected the young couple sitting under the bright orange kotatsu rug, happily peeling satsumas into an old newspaper sheet until they noticed Kurama scrambling for purchase on the floor with his claws.

"At long damn last, fuzzface!" Satsuma peelings flew into the air and the woman leapt to her feet. "You took your sweet nine-tailed-butted time getting here. Have you any idea what all this suspense and boredom has been doing to me?! I haven't felt this antsy since I was carting round Naruto in my sacred feminine chamber!"

"Now, now, Kushina. Kurama has managed to bring the Sage here half an hour early. How about you give the two of them a hand up? Kurama seems to be struggling with the wood-polish," noted the man sitting at the kotatsu with a smile. He was picking bits of peel out of his hair and piling them neatly onto the newspaper in front of him.

Kushina sighed and seized Kurama by the scruff of his neck. "That's one," she announced, dumping him on the rug, before reaching down the ladder to grasp the Sage by the hood of his robes (which he was thankful for, because he wouldn't put it past her to pull him up by his beard). "And that's two. Phew! What did you do to him, Kurama? The poor man smells like a barnyard animal. Did you get lost?"

"No!"

Kushina huffed. "This is why I was saying to Minato that we should never send a fox to do a mama bear's job."

"Or papa bear?" suggested Minato, pouring green tea into four cups.

"Or papa bear," Kushina agreed fondly then narrowed her eyes into kunai-firing slits at the basket of satsumas. "But we didn't have any choice. We're just memory imprints of soul fragments – if we'd moved out of this area we would have vanished like soap bubbles, so here I am! Mama bear's sitting here, peeling goddam satsumas and waiting, doing nothing. Gods, it's been so painful!"

"Er...I apologise for any undue pain caused?" said the Sage anxiously.

Minato laughed. "There's no need for an apology really. She's worried. We're both worried. It tends to happen when you watch your own son drop near dead in the middle of a war."

"Watch your - ? Oh, I see," said the Sage in understanding, when Kushina held up a remote control and Minato pointed at the television set. The screen was filled with a fizzing darkness, like black noise. White sparks occasionally flashed across it.

Minato smiled again, and although the expression was soft it was brittle and worn about the edges. "We've been watching everything - this whole long story. Originally this room was just for surveillance room on Kurama's cell, so that we could help Naruto when the time called for it, but it's given us a chance to, in our own way, watch over our son as well."

"Through all the good times and bad times." Kushina slammed an old yellowing book onto the kotatsu and Minato dived to rescue the cups of tea that had leapt off the tabletop.

The Sage looked from Minato, to Kushina, then to Kurama, who had curled up on the rug with a satsuma between his claws. "What is this book?"

"It's an Album of Cherished Memories," Kurama replied shortly, still peeved by Kushina's accusation that he had got the Sage lost in Naruto's brain and determined to prove he was worth his salt as a guide. "It's what these two old bats do these days – they guard the kid's really important memories. You know? The memories that stick really deep?"

"They're the memories that are close to the heart, including the ones that cut too close as well." Minato sipped his tea and set it down slowly. "We look after them for him and keep them controlled."

"And occasionally read them in the bath-tub," sang Kushina. She dusted off her hands and reached for the cover. "Chapter Two Hundred and Thirty Three, Page Eight or Nine? Stop when you see a lot of white and black nothing and that'll probably be the right spot."

The Sage licked his thumb and forefinger, skimmed through the pages full of brightly coloured battles, forests, school days and a village filled with vibrant life, until he found what he wanted.

He opened up the album, and a spray of water gusted out of the page to splash across his face.

"Whoops, sorry! I forgot that the books do that sometimes. Minato, can you find his Sageliness a towel?"

Orochimaru leaned over the edge of the drawer and reached down into the valley scene with two of his fingers. Lightning crackled and spat. He winced, persisted, and eventually withdrew.

Between his first and middle finger was a shining white disc of light.

"Here we are, my Lord Sage." His yellow eyes gleamed. "This is the gateway."

The Sage was about to point out that the disc was so small it would barely be a gateway for a hamster, let alone a grown Sage in his full Sagely regalia, when Orochimaru tossed the disc into the air.

It hung beside the floating cabinet like a bright silver apple. Then it pulsed, rippled and stretched. It grew wider and wider, shimmering and spinning, until it had become a white circular door.

Inscribed into its surface was a sign in crooked red and black letters, as though scratched in with a kunai and then filled in with old dried blood.

It read:

THE FIST-BUMP BYPASS.

"The Fist-Bump Bypass?"

Kushina had pulled the wide white circle out of the Album and set it hanging above the kotatsu.

"It's the fastest way into the Inner Sanctum," Minato told the Sage. "There's a saying that when two high level ninjas' fists collide, they can see into each other's minds. Well, in this case, it's rather true. When Naruto and Sasuke come to heads especially violently, they punch open this Bypass and temporarily see into the other's Inner Sanctums. It seems as though they're only capable of being honest with each other when they're at each other's throats, which is rather a shame, but can't be helped."

Light twisted over the surface of the door as though it were water. "What is it made of?"

"Blood, sweat, tears and bad decisions that, eventually, everybody will come to regret but agree that, at the time they seemed like a really good idea. In short," Kushina folded her arms and intoned, "the Bond of Bros."

"And a fist-bump is the key to opening it from the Outside, but Inside all you have to do," Kurama reached out past the Sage and turned the handle, "is give it a push."

The circular door swung noiselessly inwards and a cool breeze wafted up from its depths. The Sage stuck his head through the doorway and immediately pulled a face. There were no steps, no ladder, no hand-holds – just a long white shaft with no obvious end, disappearing into a brightly lit oblivion far, far below.

As he stared down into its depths he suddenly felt a warmth hook into his chest. It snagged at his memories and plucked.

An infectious smile; a knack for making friends in hostile places; a laughed promise to try again harder next time; an underlying sadness, because he hadn't been the one to inherit their father's eyes and his brother never looked down, but always looked on up to higher things.

After all these years of watching, the Sage could spot a thread of Ashura's chakra anywhere, just as he could spot a thread of Indra's, even if they were as fine and fleeting as lightning in a cloudbank.

Indra's chakra resonated with a warmth too, but a different warmth: A fiery pride; a thirst to prove himself as the elder son and the inheritor of those mysterious eyes; a crushing sensitivity to exactly whose shadow he stood in and a warped self-esteem because of it; a blazing feeling of rejection, because after all the time spent training on his own to be strong enough to take up leadership after their father, that father had overlooked him.

He could feel both threads of Ashura and Indra down the shafts of the Bypass.

He sat back from the gate and took a deep breath. Kushina, Kurama and Minato watched him expectantly.

The Sage of the Six Paths cleared his throat, straightened his robes and climbed to his feet. "This may seem like an odd question, but…ah," he opened and closed his mouth, "this is my Grand Entrance, and…ah…how do I look?"

Minato looked at him closely, then cracked a good-humoured smile. "Well, I wouldn't say I'm entirely the expert on the topic of good-looking fathers making Grand Entrances in their dashing long robes, – "

"But he wouldn't deny it if you said he was," cut in Kushina, sugar-sweet.

"You are looking impeccably sagely, but," Minato put his thumb and forefinger to his chin in thought, "can I make one small suggestion?"

"Please do, by all means."

"If you want your entrance to have maximum impact and effect, may I suggest that you appear to Naruto floating in mid-air?"

The Sage was taken aback by this. What a strange request! "I certainly can, but whyever should I?"

"It's a funny human quirk. If an old man appears floating or flying in front of them, young men pay him much more attention than they ever would if he were standing or walking."

"Ah. I think I understand."

Kushina sidled closer to the Sage and the Bypass gate. "So, have you got that?"

The Sage nodded solemnly. "I believe so – "

"Excellent!" Kushina raised her foot, planted it in the middle of the Sage's back and booted the Sage of the Six Paths face-first down the shaft of the Fist-Bump Bypass. "Now, go give our son more powers so that he can get through this war alive! And send him our love!"

White light tore past him and filled his ears with the sounds of fighting. He heard fists and heels hitting flesh, hacking coughs, roars, shouts, metal on metal screeches, sandaled feet slapping down on water and the abrasive rasp of a claw scratching through a forehead protector, but that was all for a fraction of an instant and it was all over in less than the blink of an eye.

The Inner Sanctum was almost empty.

Almost.

Lying a short distance from where the Sage himself had been spat out by the Bypass was the transparent outline of a boy. As he watched, it thickened, darkened, and took on colour and the texture of clothes.

The Sage was perfectly on time for his big moment.

He breathed out a long sigh of relief and sat down on the air, making sure that he floated about four, five feet above the surface of the water at a suitably Sagely and impressive height.

He looked across at the boy. There were still no signs of life.

Glancing surreptitiously over each shoulder, the Sage licked his hand and smoothed out his beard.

Once he had combed out the tangles it had sustained either from its battle with the crows or the updraft of air from when he had ridden the night-terror, he sat still and straight again, the very picture of Sagely stone-faced dignity.

It was then he noticed that there was still some water in his sandals from when he had splashed down in the Sanctum.

He glanced back at the boy: Still unconscious.

He stretched out his foot and shook it to the side.

Water dripped from between his toes into the Sanctum pool.

...

...

...

Drip.

...

Eyes opened.

"Where am I? Am I dead?"

The Sage took a very deep breath, and began.

If you have reached the end of this strange little tale, thank you so much for reading!

Do let me know what you think, because it is rather experimental. ;)

(and if you want to see what scene was in the album, Chapter 233 of the manga, around pages 7-10, has the answer I think)

Best, Zen :D