I was eight years old the first time I died.
Technically, I was in second grade. Practically, I was somewhere in the woods behind my cousin's house, staring at the underside of a fallen log and trying very hard not to throw up at the sight of my own blood.
There was a lot of it.
"Okay," I whispered, because no one else was there to say it. "This is… not great."
The day had started normal enough: bored adults, a backyard cookout, and my cousin daring me to follow him into the trees because only babies stayed near the house. I wasn't a baby, so I went. Obviously.
The plan had not included the part where the old, half-rotten plank bridge over the little creek decided to give up on structural integrity the second I stepped on it. Wood splintered. I fell. Something sharp tore into my leg on the way down.
Then there was mud and pain and the realization that I'd landed on something jagged enough to make the world go white around the edges.
By the time I dragged myself out of the water, my left leg looked like special effects from a horror movie. My cousin was gone—either he hadn't noticed I'd fallen, or he'd panicked and run back without me. Neither option made me feel better.
I tried to shout. My voice came out small and thin and got swallowed by the trees.
So I did what any sensible eight-year-old would do: I crawled for a while, then collapsed next to a log and decided to take a quick break from existence.
The air smelled like wet dirt and leaves. The sky between the branches was bright and uncaring. My leg throbbed in time with my heartbeat, except the beats were getting slower, like someone was turning a volume knob down.
This is bad, I thought, with the same dry, numb clarity I used for math homework. Like… capital-B Bad.
I knew enough about bodies to realize that losing a lot of blood in the middle of nowhere was not in the "walk it off" category. I wondered how long it would take someone to notice I was missing. An hour? Two? By then…
My fingers were going numb. That seemed rude.
I stared at my hand, fascinated by how distant it looked. Pale, smeared with red, a little too thin. It didn't feel like it belonged to me. Honestly, most of my body felt like that on a good day—like I'd been issued the wrong model by mistake—but today it was extra literal.
The edges of everything blurred.
Somewhere far away, someone might have been calling my name. The sound wobbled, stretched, then snapped.
And then I saw it.
A line.
Not with my eyes. With… something else. A faint, glowing thread stretching away from my chest, back through the trees, toward the direction of the house. Toward my cousin, my aunt and uncle, my parents. It pulsed faintly, in time with my fading heartbeat.
I tried to reach for it. My hand passed through empty air, but the thread quivered like it had felt me.
More threads shimmered into being. Thinner ones, drifting off in directions I couldn't name. To friends at school. To the cheap plastic fox keychain on my backpack. To the half-finished fantasy novel on my nightstand.
They were everywhere, delicate and bright and heartbreakingly fragile.
Huh, I thought. That's… new.
One by one, they started to dim.
The one leading back to the house went first, snapping like a guitar string. Something inside my chest lurched with it. The others followed, growing faint, then transparent.
Panic should have hit then. Instead, a weird, exhausted calm settled over me, like I'd already spent all my fear and there wasn't anything left.
I don't want to disappear, I thought, and that was the first honest, purely selfish thought I'd had all day.
The world drew in like someone was closing a fist. Light narrowed to a tunnel, then a pinpoint, then—
Something tugged.
Not on my body—on the remaining thread. The one that hadn't faded with the others, thin as spider silk and drifting off at an angle that made no sense, like it pointed sideways out of reality.
It flared suddenly, bright and insistent. Before I could decide whether that was good or terrifying, the thread yanked.
The forest, the cold, the ache in my leg—all of it vanished in a dizzy, inside-out lurch.
For one impossible moment, there was nothing. No body, no ground, no blood. Just the sense of falling sideways through a space made of colors I didn't have names for, trailing that stubborn little thread behind me like a kite tail.
I caught glimpses in the blur. Masks. Stone faces carved into a cliff. A swirl-patterned spiral like a leaf in water.
Then pain hit again.
Not the sharp, tearing pain from before. This was hot and buzzing, spreading from my chest out through limbs I hadn't realized I'd gotten back. My heart hammered hard enough to hurt. Air burned into lungs that felt wrong and right at the same time.
Voices crashed over me.
"—still alive, somehow."
"Chakra response is stabilizing. Keep pressure on the wound."
"Poor kid. No ID, no guardian… another stray, just what we needed."
A bright light cut into my eyes. I squinted, tried to flinch away, found I couldn't move much. Everything felt heavy. My leg hurt in a way that said "stitched" instead of "open," which was an improvement, but my whole body buzzed with leftover terror.
I blinked up at a ceiling made of clean white plaster, not peeling farmhouse paint. The air smelled like antiseptic and herbs, not damp leaves.
A shape leaned over me—someone in a green vest over dark clothes, with a cloth band across their forehead. On the metal plate in the center of that band, a familiar symbol gleamed.
A spiral leaf.
My brain, fuzzy as it was, recognized it before anything else.
No way, I thought.
"Hey," the person said. Their voice was calm, but their eyes were tired. "You're awake. Try not to move too much."
Their features were sharp, their hair pulled back. A mask hung loose around their neck, the kind you might tug up in a hurry when things went bad. The flak vest was the real problem, though. I'd seen that vest hundreds of times before. Not in person.
On a screen.
In anime.
"Where…?" My voice came out croaky, like a frog who'd smoked half a pack.
"You're in Konoha Hospital," the stranger said. "You were found near the village border. Badly injured, severe blood loss. Lucky for you, an ANBU patrol was passing by."
Konoha.
The word landed like a kunai.
Hidden Leaf Village.
Naruto's home.
My chest tightened. For a second, I thought I might be having a panic attack. Or another heart attack. Or both.
This had to be a hallucination. Brain hypoxia plus childhood obsession equals one last nerdy fever dream. That was logical. Sort of.
The medic—had to be a medic-nin, didn't it—checked a clipboard, then frowned slightly.
"We still don't have a name for your file," they said. "Do you remember it?"
That caught me.
I knew my real-world name. It sat heavy on my tongue, wrong in a way I'd never had words for but had learned to live with. Saying it here, in a world where I'd just heard "chakra" used in a sentence, felt like dragging that wrongness across the border too.
My gaze drifted, unfocused, to the window beside the bed.
Beyond the glass, over the rooftops of a village that should only exist as ink on a page, huge stone faces stared down from a mountainside. Four of them. The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Hokage. The last one—sharp jaw, serious eyes, hair like a golden hedgehog—looked exactly like he did in the anime.
Exactly like Naruto would, if he was older.
My heart did something weird and complicated.
I swallowed.
"…Sylvie," I said, before I could overthink it. The name slid out smooth, like it had been waiting in the back of my throat this whole time. "My… my name is Sylvie."
The medic blinked, then wrote it down without comment.
"Well then. Welcome to Konoha, Sylvie."
They moved on to check a monitor. I stared at my hands.
They were small. Smaller than I remembered. The skin was paler, smoother. The angles… different. The proportions of my wrists, the way my fingers tapered. My arms disappeared into a hospital gown that hung off me like a sheet, but I could feel the shape of my body under it in a way that made my brain stutter.
Girl, a part of me whispered, with the same simple, shocked certainty as Konoha.
I should have freaked out about that. Another day, another life, I probably would have. But I'd already bled out in one forest and woken up in another world. The usual hierarchy of concerns had been thoroughly scrambled.
So I did what I always did when reality got too big: I shoved the feeling into a labeled mental box—Deal With This Later—and slammed the lid.
The same thread from before tugged at the edge of my awareness. I let my eyes half-close and looked for it, not with sight, but with whatever part of me had seen it in the woods.
It was there. Thin but steady, stretching outward from somewhere behind my breastbone, weaving through the air like a line on an invisible map. It didn't go back the way I'd come. It went forward, into the dense tangle of chakra signatures I could suddenly feel pulsing all around the building.
Dozens of tiny flickers. Children. A few huge, turbulent presences that prickled against my senses like storm clouds. One of them, somewhere not far from the hospital, burned wild and bright and lonely, like a bonfire on an empty hill.
My fingers twitched toward it instinctively.
The door to my room banged open.
"Hey, hey, you can't just—"
"I just wanna see—!"
A nurse's protest cut off as a small shape darted past her and skidded to a halt beside my bed.
He was shorter than me by a little, all sharp angles and messy blond hair, blue eyes too big for his face. His clothes were scuffed. Bandaids crisscrossed his cheeks like he collected minor injuries for fun. A pair of ragged goggles hung around his neck.
The wild, lonely chakra I'd felt a second before flared, right there, inches away.
I didn't need the whisker marks on his face to know who he was.
My throat tightened.
The nurse caught up, panting. "Naruto! You can't just run into patients' rooms—"
He ignored her completely, leaning in close enough that I could see every freckle.
"Whoa," he said, eyes wide. "You're the new kid they found! They said you almost died. That's so cool!"
I stared at him.
Somewhere between my ribs, the thread connecting me to this place twisted, bright and sudden. It reached for him like a plant toward sunlight. For the briefest instant, I saw another thread—his this time—frayed at the edges but stubbornly unbroken, stretching out into the village and finding almost nothing to anchor to.
Almost.
He grinned at me, all sharp teeth and ridiculous courage.
"I'm Uzumaki Naruto!" he declared, too loud for the tiny room. "Believe it!"
The nurse groaned.
Despite everything—the pain, the terror, the surreal tilt of my entire existence—I felt a laugh try to climb up my throat.
Of all the fictional universes I could have landed in, it had to be the one where kids like this got turned into soldiers and loneliness was a government policy.
The universe really did have a sense of humor.
"I'm Sylvie," I managed. My voice shook, but I met his eyes. "Nice to meet you."
His grin got brighter. For a split second, the exhausted, empty parts of me warmed under it, like someone had opened a window in a stuffy room.
Somewhere far above the hospital, stone faces watched us with blank eyes. Somewhere deep beneath the village, an ancient fox curled in chains and seethed.
Somewhere in my chest, the web of invisible threads settled, one of them now unmistakably tied to the loud, impossible boy grinning at my bedside.
I had died in the wrong forest.
Somehow, I'd ended up in the right world.
And I had the terrible, exhilarating feeling that things were only going to get more complicated from here.