The scroll lay open, its crimson thread resting beside a smoldering campfire.
Akari hadn't moved in hours.
His mother's voice still echoed in his mind, as though it had been whispered not from parchment—but from blood.
> "Let them bind you, or become the fire that burns the chains."
But to burn the chains… meant burning parts of himself.
---
By morning, he was gone.
No farewell. No warning.
Only Raien knew where he might go—down, beneath the oldest sectors of Konoha, to the Pillar Archives no one dared mention aloud.
Not even the Hokage.
Not since the war.
---
The entrance was hidden beneath an abandoned well in the Senju district, sealed with a jutsu older than chakra classification itself.
Akari's fire opened it like breath parting fog.
What greeted him was not a tomb.
It was a vault of forbidden knowledge—scrolls, relics, and symbols etched in a language older than the Uchiha script.
In the center, a stone dais with three rings:
One red, one white, one black.
He stepped toward the center and felt it immediately.
The pull.
> The Lock is within you.
But the Key lies here.
---
Meanwhile, back at the Hokage Tower, Raien stood in silence as Tobirama read a single line from a black dossier.
> "Subject has broken containment."
Danzo folded his arms. "And the shrine girl?"
"Alive. Traitor to their cause."
"Then it begins," Danzo said. "Just like the prophecy."
Tobirama's eyes narrowed. "No. The prophecy never mentioned him. This wasn't supposed to happen."
Raien's voice was low. "Then maybe you shouldn't have lied about what's underneath the Fifth Shrine."
---
Deep in the archives, Akari reached for the black ring.
The moment his fingers brushed it, the vault shuddered.
A blast of ancient energy surged through him—runes lighting up across his skin, eyes flooding with violet flame.
He didn't scream.
He remembered.
Flashes of memory—not his own.
> A battlefield bathed in ash.
A woman standing against a tide of beasts.
A seal drawn in her own blood.
A child—him—sleeping beneath a burning tree.
---
The power didn't feel evil.
It felt buried.
Sealed away not to protect others from him—
But to protect him from the truth.
And now he was ready.
---
As he emerged from the well, his steps slow, steam rising from his shoulders, Raien was already waiting.
"You went alone."
"I had to," Akari said. "I needed to know if the fire in me was mine—or hers."
"And?"
Akari looked up.
His eyes—now ringed with black markings—glowed faintly.
"It's both."
---
Far away, on a ridge outside the village, Amari met with a shadowed figure—robes inked with the cult's dying seal.
"He unlocked the archives," she said.
The figure remained silent.
Amari turned away. "You said he would burn the village."
"No," the voice rasped. "He will purify it."
---
Back in Konoha, as night fell again, Tobirama stood before the flame in the Hokage's chamber.
He placed a hand on the scroll sealed in gold.
> "If he opens the last seal… the Ancients return."
Danzo stepped beside him.
"Then we prepare."
---
To be continued...