A/N: Hello readers I'm back! For all of you who read my story thank you! I hope this new one will be as enjoyable as my previous ones.

Moving on. This story actually started way back when as an attempt to revitalize the mess that Naruto: Gods and Demons had become. However I lost interest and it wasn't until the writer formerly known as Jest795 approached me with his darkness isn't evil challenge that I finally got a way to do so, so thank you Jest for your challenge and your help in working out ideas for this. On that note I would also like to say that in the course of coming up with ideas for said challenge I found myself borrowing ideas from the plots of MadHat886's fox lord story and 26 Lord Pain's dark lord plus stories so to them I say thanks to the both of them for giving me permission to borrow their ideas. Finally I would like to thank Dracohalo117 for his help with ironing out plot points for this story and his encouragement for my foray into original non-fanfiction based writing.

Thank you all and to anyone reading this story I ask that you not only review my story but also please take the time to read the above mentioned writers' stories and give them honest reviews.

One final thing, this is not only a dark but not evil Naruto story but also a mega-crossover and harem one with most of the girls not coming from the Naruto verse. Though with that said I should also say that who precisely is in the harem is up in the air at this time. Now with that out of the way, if any of what I just said upsets you, leave now and don't bother flaming cause I will just delete it! For everyone else, just sit back, enjoy, and please review once your done. Oh and just to be on the safe side I don't own anything in this story but my own original ideas and characters...Enjoy!

Prologue: Anomaly

Free will or predetermination? This is one of the key questions that humanity asks itself when contemplating its existence. While many cling to the idea that our actions are all governed by a higher power there are many things that exist in this world and others that may shake one's faith in a divine plan or natural order of things. Acts of cruelty and degradation which make one wonder that if they were predetermined to happen then what the hell was the point of them all? For nothing shakes one's faith more than the suffering of the innocent.

And on that note, in the infinite expanse of the universe and its various alternate versions, one of the most poignant examples one can find to discredit the idea of a divine plan was currently dying alone in a forest in his home town on a particular version of a world.

His name was Naruto Uzumaki, a boy who seemed to be born to be fate's proverbial bitch. No matter what version of his life one viewed chances are 9.5 times out of 10 the boy was getting screwed by life. Not that he knew why...

As for why that was the case, one need only look back to the day of his birth for the reason for his crappy life. On that day of October the 10th, the village's leader and the fourth to hold the position of Hokage, Minato Namikaze faced with the threat of his village's apparent annihilation at the hands of the Kyuubi no Yoko (or 9 tailed demon fox) and believing in the words of his sensei Jiraiya the toad sage about an upcoming messiah sealed the demon within a newborn Naruto. His last wish before dying was that Naruto be seen as a hero for containing the fox...he was ignored.

Humans sadly cannot be counted among the most logical of creatures despite our great technological advancements. On the whole most people in their day to day lives are more likely to follow instinct and emotion than use logic, and while cold logic is by no means superior to raw emotion it for the most part tends to be better at preventing people from making rash and stupid decisions. Sadly the ninja village of Konoha did not use logic in this instant. They were in pain over the loss of their loved ones and the near total destruction of their homes. So starting on the very same day Naruto was both born and orphaned by the fox's attack the villagers, unable to take out their pain on the fox itself instead decided to take it out on its container Naruto.

For the most part the villagers did not do anything noticeably abusive to him heck they didn't even call him names for the most part. Which when one thinks about it was arguably worse than if they had insulted him because at least then he would have known why the hell everyone was doing there best to pretend he didn't exist.

Confused? Well you see when the fourth Hokage died his predecessor the third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, was forced to retake the reins of power. Sadly he underestimated how badly the common sense of the villagers would be overwhelmed by their emotions and so instead of just the important people being told the matter he went and told the whole village about what the boy contained. One near riot later and Sarutobi had realized the error of his ways but by then it was too late. So in an attempt to make amends for what had happened Sarutobi made it so none could speak aloud what the boy contained to those that didn't already know on pain of death, not even Naruto himself was to know. In this way Sarutobi attempted to give Naruto a chance to bond with those both his own age and slightly older but still too young to recall the fox attack.

Unfortunately this plan quickly fell apart as the adults unable to take their frustrations out directly on Naruto, chose to do the next best thing by warning both their children and outsiders away from the boy and subjecting him to one of the worst fates a developing child can have. And that fate was the hell that was loneliness and neglect. And so for five going on nearly 6 years of his life did Naruto suffer this fate of a lonely hell...until today when his life became a literal one.

The source of the current mess he was in could be traced to what happened several days prior. It had started as a relatively decent day all told. Naruto had awoken in the small government subsidized apartment where he had lived alone since being booted out of the orphanage some months prior under the grounds of it being overcrowded (which sadly was not entirely untrue). After rubbing the tiredness out of his bright blue eyes and eating a lackluster breakfast of almost stale cereal the boy seemingly always chipper headed to the bathroom and washed up. He did his best to manage the unruly spiky mess that was his blond hair and then got dressed in a pair of blue sandals, a pair of orange striped black shorts, and a white shirt bearing a red version of the insignia worn by the village's elite ANBU ninja corp. Before leaving his apartment he had looked himself over in his bathroom mirror one last time, a million watt smile filling his whisker birthmark clad face and mentally thought to himself that this was going to be a good day...

Nearly one entire day of rejection and hateful glares later and Naruto was finally starting to realize that just because you think positive does not mean your actual day will reflect that. Upset he ran into the woods where he worked on trying to master the basic bunshin (or clone technique) that he would be assessed on upon entering the ninja academy for the first time in two days.

He already had a decent grasp on on the other two basic techniques (or jutsu) he needed to know (namely the replacement or kawirimi technique and the henge or transformation technique) due to scrolls he had found thrown out near the academy.

As the town pariah Naruto was rarely allowed to buy anything worthwhile from the various shops in town (and the few times he did he was typically overcharged), and so to get around this fact he would sometimes poke around the dumpsters and garbage cans for things that others would casually throw away under the justification that they could just buy a newer and better version of it. Most of the time all he found upon looking was stuff that was trash even to him but occasionally he found something of value like the slightly food stained but still usable pair of scrolls on basic ninja tricks which someone had thrown away instead of incinerating it as was SOP, probably under the justification of it being too low value to waste the energy on it (or it was disposed of by a person from the notoriously lazy but brilliant Nara clan, but who can say really?).

Naruto being a boy of decent intelligence despite the prankster mask he put on to try and gain attention, immediately realized the value of what he found that day and had gone all out with using it for his training. For the most part he was successful in mastering what was in the scroll through hard work but for the life of him could not get the bunshin technique down and it was just starting to piss him off, when he overheard a commotion nearby. When he investigated he found a young girl being picked on by a group of kids for being part of the stuffy but well renown Hyuuga clan some of who had apparently talked down to several members of the group before. The boys were about to start wailing on the poor girl when Naruto being the white knight he tended to be stepped in to help her and as a reward for his good deed promptly got the girl's beating in her place.

He awoke from his pummeling induced unconsciousness to find himself alone; the girl and her attackers having vanished some time ago. Naruto feeling that all he had done was for naught had promptly dragged himself home and put the incident out of his mind.

Since that incident Naruto had just gone about his life. He had shown up for his first day of class at the ninja academy and noticed the girl from the park was in the same room as him, which seemed great initially as he had been worried, only for some reason when he went over to her she had turned red faced and refused to talk with him. After that he had promptly gotten humiliated when it was revealed that he was the only one who couldn't do the bunshin. A staff of competent and compassionate teachers would have realized that due to Naruto's "tenant" he had far more chakra energy than most ninjas had and as a result he had difficulty controlling and dispersing the amount he pumped into his techniques to fuel them. Naturally because of this he ended up overloading said techniques with various different outcomes. In this case the end result was a malfunctioning jutsu which only managed to produce one half dead looking illusionary clone instead of three normal looking ones.

Again this could have been rectified with proper teaching but unfortunately for Naruto the academy teachers tended to fall into one of several categories: either they hated him for pranking them in the past and thus they would ignore him, they hated him just for the sake of hating him due to the fox and would sabotage him, or in the case of the rarest group of them all they did not hate him but were simply too busy to help him.

Regardless of why it was the case they didn't help him the fact was that since no one gave him any aid he had to claw for every bit of progress he could, which given his determination and freakish amount of stamina and chakra actually meant quite a bit. In fact, even with the occasional moron trying to sabotage him Naruto still made enough progress that he probably would have gotten a chance to graduate given enough time.

Which at last leads us to our current situation...

Naruto had just been minding his own business training after school like usual when he suddenly found himself surrounded by several kids, some of whom wore leaf village headbands and who he recalled graduating the academy just a few days prior to his entrance there. Overall since they were obviously new ninja, fresh genin who hadn't even seen real combat, in a one on one fight they probably weren't much tougher than any civilian bully one might find. Which would have made things okay...save for the fact that there were six of them and two of them had impromptu weapons in the form of a bat and a rusty pipe.

It was on closer examination that he realized that two of the younger members of the group who lacked headbands were part of the same group he recalled picking on that girl before, while the two holding weapons and wearing the headbands looked so much like them that they had to be these kids older siblings. As for the other 2 they were also wearing headbands and were either friends of the younger members or perhaps relatives of some sort, but either way Naruto neither knew nor cared about what the truth was. All he knew was he had to run as far away as he could.

He had run for a good 5 or 6 minutes before he realized that the older kids were screwing with him and could easily catch up to him when they wanted to as one nearly did. This would have led to a beating of a lifetime except at the last moment Naruto knocked over a nearby trashcan and the kid slipped on the residue, however there was no time to gloat as the other kids kept at the chase. It was this that motivated Naruto into making the crucial errors in judgement which were now costing him his life.

Now in the majority of time-lines these events either wouldn't have even happened in the first place due to the kids chasing Naruto not even bothering to tell their siblings about Naruto's bout of heroics or alternatively Naruto would have chosen to go in a different direction than he did. That being said this was not one of those time-lines, this was the one where instead of taking one particular side street, Naruto took another and realizing that the only remaining street nearby was cordoned off for some reason, Naruto decided to instead try to lose his pursuers by slipping through a hole in a nearby fence and disappearing into the tree-line behind it.

And this plan of his seemed to work, as after heading a decent distance into the trees he noticed there wasn't anymore footsteps following him. Relieved he decided to rest for a moment and leaned up against a nearby tree for support where the combined exhaustion of his training at the academy, the subsequent chase, and it just being late in the day caused Naruto to drift off into dreamland.

If only Naruto had known why that was such a bad idea he might have reconsidered his course of action...

You see Naruto hadn't realized that the reason the kids had stopped chasing him was that they had realized just what the place he had run into was and had immediately changed course upon doing so. This was because the place Naruto had run into was known (for good reason) as "the forest of death" for the fact that no matter how harmless a creature in the forest may seem, it was probably harmful to your health whilst the ones that did seem harmful would be difficult though not unsurmountable for a chunin to go up against. Hence why this place was commonly used as part of the test to see whether or not a genin was ready to be promoted to said rank and why said exam participants were sent in teams so they could cover each other from threats coming from any angle. Sadly for Naruto not only were not all the most dangerous threats the most visible but a literal army of said threats had caught wind of him...

They were a type of ant who while possessing a proper and long scientific name were best known simply to most by their nickname of agonizers. They were small only about the size of a human thumb, they were camouflaged to hide against the dark bark of the forest trees, they had mandibles that acted like a vice trap, they had a sting that made a bullet ant sting look like a bad mosquito bite, they were voracious and there was about 10,000 of them living in the very tree Naruto was leaning against. Within seconds of Naruto beginning to drift off these little man killers got to swarming on him. Naruto's only sign that something was wrong was when he felt something crawling on the exposed skin of his arms and legs. He cracked open one eye...and immediately started screaming before he took off running all the while attempting to shake the ants off.

Unfortunately a good number of the little bastards had latched onto the hem of his clothes with their vice like mandibles and would not come loose. What's worse was they were in the perfect position to start stinging which they did so with great gusto. Within seconds their namesake agonizingly painful venomous stings went to work and Naruto doubled over and collapsed from the pain. In desperation he rolled in an attempt to crush the little crawling vermin and succeeded in doing so but also sent himself over a nearby low embankment and into a muddy stream. For a time he just drifted on it but gradually he managed to drag himself up the muck lined embankment to lay on the forest floor where the full amount of the ants venom finally started to really kick in.

Now normally several stings from the ants would have mercifully numbed the victim from the sheer pain of it all burning out the unfortunate victim's nerve endings. Sadly unlike any of the ants previous victims, Naruto had a tailed beast sealed within him who (due to the design of said containment seal) was forced to constantly regenerate all of Naruto's venom induced nerve damage and thus caused Naruto yet more agony. Even worse was that due to the sheer number of stings which were afflicting Naruto, the fox was unable to flush the boy's system of the toxin. The end result being that the sheer toxic nature of the strings combined with the agony of it all so stressed and damaged Naruto's heart that within seconds the boy had been placed into cardiogenic shock. Even as Naruto's life began to fade away within his head his thoughts were racing.

'I-is this really how it ends?' he thought mournfully 'I know I've lived alone all my life but am I really going to die alone too? It's not fair! I never got to do anything or make any friends or anything! I'm never going to be Hokage and get acknowledged! I'm never going to eat at Ichiraku ramen again! I-I'm never going to find out who my parents were...D-dammit all! Please someone if your listening do something! Anything...just please help me!'

However nobody did answer him in response to his pleas and slowly, one by one the lights in Naruto's mind began to turn off...

It's cruelly ironic that a boy who had he had enough time and training could have taken down whole armies by himself was being felled by the stings of something that you would probably crush underfoot without sparing a thought to. There was however nobody listening to the boy's silent prayers that day and had things played out normally that would have been the end of our tale. Fortunately for once the principle that sometimes an unrelated action done by one person can have unintended beneficial consequences towards another decided to take effect.

Across the psychic energy filled chaotic plane of existence which divided one reality from another and was known to some as to warp and to others as the fade or twisting nether, something was happening that would soon change the fate of our young protagonist.

Within the heart of the warp (and by extension all existence) lay a place where none but its guardians was supposed to enter under any circumstances. It was the origin point of every reality and timeline, known as the Well of Eternity to some and known by innumerable other names to others as well. Whatever one called it though what was known was this: you could theoretically gain ultimate knowledge from it if it was properly harnessed, no one had ever done such a thing due to most attempting this being flash vaporized by the well's energy before they could even get close to it, and those few who in the past had not been flash vaporized by approaching the well weren't really able do anything as before they could they had promptly gotten their asses kicked by the entities who maintained the balance of reality known as the Elder gods. Sadly for most of reality that last fact was not in effect at the moment.

You see said balance maintaining deities were currently dealing with trying to repair the mess that their subordinates, the charred council, had caused when said council's attempt to cover their own asses over their screw ups on one particular version of earth had backfired and promptly resulted in them being killed by the individuals they had tried to pass the proverbial buck to. Now forced to deal with a gaping power vacuum and prevent an all out war between the realms effected by their subordinates and their killers' deaths, the Elder gods were too preoccupied to notice a certain entity and his followers enter the well's area of reality.

His (not that one can really ascribe gender to a sapient multicolored cloud of shifting raw chaos energy) name was Tzeentch a daemonic being known to some as the Chaos god of scheming, magic, change (in all meanings of the word) and hope. Now that last one may seem out of place but in truth when one thinks about it, it makes sense. After all when someone wants something badly enough they will do anything to make it possible whether it be by making elaborate schemes, deals with untold horrors, or simply hope and pray for their desire with all their might. The reason for his being here was simple: as the chaos god of scheming knowledge of how things would play out was paramount to him and his mission. And while Tzeentch had knowledge on everything that had happened since he formed or was going on presently in the realities he dealt with directly when it came to what had yet to happen in those realities the situation was a bit more murky.

Oh sure he could use his powers to scry the future but there was one thing that tended to throw a monkey wrench into his predictions. And that something was a phenomenon known as the Schrodinger effect. Not getting into the technical details behind it, this phenomenon simply stated that if an event were to occur and it had the possibility of more than one solution then this effect would create branching timelines where things played out according to each of those possible solutions. This of course was especially bad for him as due to all these branching possibilities and an inability to know the exact position where in the mess he lay it made predicting the future longterm damn near impossible! And thus Tzeentch in order to try and compensate would have to rely on guesswork and statistics using present data to make decisions about the immediate future which to him was no way to conduct one's plans.

Hence why Tzeentch was currently trying to tap into the well as with the information he could gain due to it being the beginning of every timeline he had a much better chance at figuring out the future of every possible world.

His results...less than stellar. Not wanting to risk his own life by plunging into the maelstrom of raw energy Tzeentch had instead been trying to tap into it by substituting some of his mortal and immortal servants in his place. Unfortunately they simply did not have the power to withstand even approaching the Well as the excess energy that spilled out from it would rip them apart before they could even touch it. Which left him with a conundrum of how to go about doing this.

"My lord" echoed a voice. Tzeentch turned his attention from where he was observing the well to where the voice was coming from. The voice as it turned out was echoing from a strange vulture like entity with multicolored feathers and clad in some regal attire. This was Kairos, a greater daemon of the Lord of change variety and Tzeentch's personal vizier.

"Yes Kairos what is it?" Answered Tzeentch absently in a strange multi-tonal voice. 'There has got to be a way for this to work...' he thought to himself.

"My lord I do not mean to second guess you...but perhaps this is the wrong course of action to follow?" questioned Kairos in a small voice.

"Oh? How so?" asked his master

"Well my lord" answered Kairos a bit more confidently "It's just that short of yourself there does not seem to be a single daemon in existence that could withstand the well save for perhaps your rather distasteful siblings and they are unlikely to be of any help in this matter" He said practically spitting the word distasteful.

At this Tzeentch simply nodded or as close an approximation a gaseous looking cloud of energy could do. Now normally when someone insults a person's family members one could reasonably expect said person whose family is getting insulted would subsequently become upset. Tzeentch's fellow sibling chaos gods in his mind however ranged from tolerable in the case of his younger sibling Slaanesh, to annoying in the case of his brother Khorne, and infuriating in the case of his brother Nurgle. So to put it bluntly if they all went off and died in a gutter somewhere the only thing he'd feel was irritation over having to recalculate just how his plans would play out without them.

"And with that in mind" continued Kairos "and not wishing to see any harm come to you as your vizier and your most powerful loyal servant, I must advise you that perhaps it is best that we simply cut our losses and go."

At this Tzeentch stopped his prior contemplation and after a moment of silence simply nodded. This whole endeavor would be pointless if he kept throwing away his servants. After all what's the point of knowing your opponents strategy in chess if you don't have enough pieces to play your own counter strategy?

So with that in mind Tzeentch was about to leave...until Kairos said quite possibly the stupidest thing someone could ever say to the chaos god of change.

"Well I'm glad you've seen the light my lord. After all only a fool would attempt so pointless a task to seek something with no guarantee of succ...awk!" he choked out as Tzeentch's spectral hand suddenly appeared and began wringing his skinny bird neck.

One of the first rules everyone should know about the beings calling themselves the Chaos gods is that you should never say or insinuate that Tzeentch, or an action he has taken, was in anyway foolish or you'll find your lifespan dramatically shortened. Something Kairos had forgotten and was now going to pay for dearly.

"You little, skinny, half-assed excuse for a mentally retarded peacock you have the gall to call my actions FOOLISH?! Well then my most loyal servant given your self titled claims of superiority perhaps YOU will fare better at braving the power of the well than your predecessors! Let's find out!"

Thus summoning a ball of raw magical energy to encase the unfortunate lord of change Tzeentch then proceeded to throw his still pleading servant like a fastball at a baseball game into the Well itself.

The result of this was instantaneous with screams of pain and terror echoing out from the Well within which the writhing form of Kairos could be seen flapping about. A few minutes later a massive explosion echoed out along with a multi-colored flash of energy so bright Tzeentch actually had to dematerialize his eyes to avoid permanently losing them. After that another burst of energy and a shock-wave occurred which just as quickly as it came suddenly blasted off through the well and into parts unknown.

When Tzeentch finally re-materialized his eyes he was left stunned over what had just happened having never expected such a result. Abruptly a pained groan sounded out from somewhere nearby snapping him back to reality. A few feet away from where he stood he found the source of the groan... Kairos, miraculously still alive albeit wizened looking and now sporting an additional head.

Suddenly realizing that the shock wave from before had probably alerted the Elder gods Tzeentch decided to go while the going was good and telekinetically scooped up the mutated form of Kairos before escaping through a summoned portal deeper into the warp, where he knew the currents would hide him and his movements. As he did so though he did stop albeit momentarily to wonder what effects the surge of energy he caused might have on things before brushing it off as unimportant.

It was something he would learn in due time was a piss poor assumption on his part, one that would eventually come back to bite him in the ass. For you see just like the ripples from a stone thrown in a pond the energy and shock-wave of the event though small near their origin point grew as they travelled along through the well of eternity. Onwards and onwards they went effecting more and more worlds connected to the well with completely random and unpredictable results ranging from the mildness of unexpected rain on a day when it shouldn't have happened, to whole worlds and unrelated realities abruptly fusing together.

And then, as the energy happened to be passing through one reality something truly interesting happened.

It was a reality very similar to the one where our protagonist was currently dying in but one in which things had turned out differently. In this alternate reality, on the mirror version of Naruto's world, Naruto had still lived a difficult life but he had at least had a chance to effect some changes in his lifetime. Out of them all it was hard to pick the most unusual and unique but a major one involving his saving the inhabitants of a certain city via an unexpected bout of time travel on his part certainly ranks up there. Coincidentally as it turns out said time travel incident was just causing that reality's timeline to be rewritten when the energy wave from the well happened to graze it.

And that's when things got really strange, for as the two energies interacted there was a brief but intense surge of power...till at last a massive bolt of intermixed energy blasted out from the merging point to strike a nearby and very familiar version of reality...

The village of Konoha was to most of the inhabitants having an unusually nice day. Why was that you ask? Simple, no one had been pranked by the annoying resident pariah and that was a rare occurrence. The sad thing was that had most of the villagers known just why that was the case they probably would have been even happier...

This was something that the dying form of Naruto knew quite well as both his life and very soul began to escape his body in that isolated and lonely wood and it was something that filled him with both sorrow and anger.

Then just as he thought it was over, just when things seemed their most hopeless and his life at last began to slip away...a strange bolt of energy came forth from the sky to strike the ground before him and fill his last visions with multicolored light before darkness at last overtook him.

But this was not the end for the boy, far from it for the energy from before didn't just make a pretty light, it also created a strange growing vortex of energy. And as said vortex grew one by one all the electrical lights near the forest to began short out and fade as though the vortex was leaching all the nearby sources of electricity.

That however would be a mistaken belief though for the vortex was not merely absorbing just electricity...but every source of energy nearby! Including as it turns out the life force escaping Naruto's body which in its wake dragged forth with it a strange purplish glow with two smaller lights and a red and malevolent looking glow that erupted from the previously invisible seal on the boy's body. Then in a flash the vortex was gone and in its place a figure emerged. A perfect copy of the corpse of Naruto nearby...save for the fact it...no, he...was still alive!

'What the hell is going on?' He thought as he awoke lost and confused. Desperately the figure tried to raise his body out of the muck only to slip and slide down back into the nearby stream which carried him away...and left the earlier mentioned unmoving body behind. But the living one, the living Naruto neither knew nor cared about this all. All he knew was that his body ached and his head throbbed with even the slightest thought as he struggled to keep himself from drowning. It was a desperate near monumental task given his state but finally, with one last burst of willpower he managed to drag himself back onto the embankment. Everything hurt, hurt oh so much, and so, exhausted beyond belief he closed his eyes and prayed for sleep to wash away his pain...

Fortunately for Naruto a deity ignoring his prayers was a good thing this time. Observing the events that had just occurred on his world from a parallel realm several draconic looking deities of pure energy contemplated the unique event and to what possible ends they could use it towards. They were the Elder Gods and now, finally having become aware of things they found themselves in a precarious situation as the wave of Chaos energy that erupted from the well caused havoc throughout the multiverse.

Unable to do anything to stop the energy wave's propagation due to its size they had simply let it run its course until they could run damage control. They had expected many things to follow the wave's wake...

But not this! Not the creation of a whole new being from the soul of another!

"What should we do?" asked one of the figures

"Perhaps we should simply let the boy's new body disperse?" said another "Though the boy's soul successfully bound itself enough to the energy matrix to shape it, the presence of those other souls from the seal will soon destabilize his form due to their improper containment within his new body."

"No" answered another of the deities. "You can sense it as well. All of reality is disrupted and yet some of those worlds effected have been damaged in ways which require interaction with them in a manner which the creator has deemed outside our jurisdiction without us forsaking our power to gain a mortal form. Something I might add is beyond our scope at this time as we need most of our available power to help keep the greater part of existence from just unravelling. No, if we are to fix things we require the aid of someone who can freely interact on the mortal planes of existence...and I believe that boy is the key."

"But how are we to aid him?" asked another "The boy's form is unstable and the only thing which could stabilize him is some of our power, something we can ill afford to spend that much of!"

It was difficult to admit, but it was true and it left the deities in a conundrum until one of their number sensed something near Naruto's position.

"Perhaps..." the female voice began "Perhaps we do not need to sacrifice much of our power at all. As long as the energy is similar enough to our own it should fulfill the same purpose." She said while pointing to something that looked like some buried and overgrown ruin of a temple near Naruto's position.

"But that's where..."

"Awaken it..." said another elder god interrupting the previous voice

"But..."

"We don't have time for this! Do it now before the boy's form fades away!" screamed another.

There was some brief hesitation, but then the deities all nodded in agreement. And in that moment and using what little energy they could spare a wave of energy shot out from their forms and struck the temple.

Within the ruins it awoke...

'Awakened? But why?' it thought for a moment

'Irrelevant' it decided 'a wielder' echoed the thought. It knew that without a wielder it was not only useless its existence was hollow. And then it sensed him... so unique and filled with the same kind of power as those it was meant to help others worship wielded...but he was so broken...it knew what it must do...

'Awaken' sounded the unspoken command audible only in the thoughts of one...

"What?" questioned the weak voice of Naruto from where he lay in the muck.

'Do not die here' So simple was the phrase and yet Naruto felt compelled to obey it. Little by little he hoisted himself from the muck until he was shakily standing.

'Come to me' and Naruto did. One shaky step at a time he followed the voice into the woods until he reached the ruins.

'Come to me' it echoed again.

And he obeyed putting one foot in front of another until in this manner did he head down the buried ruin steps and into heart of the buried temple.

The walls of this place were overgrown and covered with dirt. And yet the grotesque images depicted by the walls' hieroglyphics were still visible. Images of slaughter and sacrifice towards dark and demonic looking deities. It was horrifying and yet Naruto in an almost delirious state one tends only to get during fever dreams couldn't help but want to explore despite the pain he was in. Down one hall and into another he went seeing one room after another lined with depictions more horrifying than the last.

'In here...'

He stopped upon "hearing" this and headed into the room he sensed it emanated from. Within was the remnants of another ruined staircase surrounded by a strange runic array and with a raised altar at its summit. He stepped onto the array and suddenly he felt some strange power fill him.

'Come to me'

One step after another he travelled until he reached the top of the stairs with every step making him feel more complete than before. And as he approached the alter at the top he saw it. A substantially sized book made of something dark and unnatural and bound shut with a simple metal clasp on top of an altar stained with what looked like long dried blood.

'Master'

That was all he needed to hear in his half delirious state. He reached out and touched it. A surge of power shot through him making him at last feel complete.

'What do you desire my lord?'

"Home..." he spoke aloud "...I want to go home. Please, I'm just so tired." And with that simple command he vanished from that place along with the tome in a flash of light, the temple ruins of untold millennia at last collapsing soon afterwards. A scant few seconds later in a certain government subsidized apartment the light appeared once again before it dispersed and deposited Naruto's sleeping form on the bed, the book clutched in his hands...

"Have we truly done the right thing?" asked one of the Elder gods from the place they were observing the previous events.

"As long as we contact him soon there will not be a problem." Answered one of the elder gods decisively "Do not fear, he will not be corrupted so easily even by that black tome. His will is strong and his heart is pure."

"For now..." echoed the ominous sentiments of another.

A/N: And that's the prologue of Eye of the storm. Will Naruto be corrupted by the strange sapient tome? Or will the Elder Gods get to him first? And even if they do get to him first to what ends do they plan on using him? Well whatever the case is, I hoped you enjoy my story. Look forward to the next chapter and in the meantime please review!