1,569A/N: Wow, that's a lotta reviews?! Any chance we could get this to a hundred?
Changed the tag to humor, for good measure, the better to reflect the merry little insanity of this story.
Love Bites will be updated next, I guess. Dunno. Kinda feeling down. Slifer and I tried to hold this back as long as we could, but it was just begging to be written. This story is something of a shot in the dark; no one's tried this angle yet -to our knowledge.
In short, its probably going to be either a resounding success...or an utter failure.
Time for the usual disclaimer: Once more, we're sticking with the "Embers" rule for this story, and others. If folks don't like this, it won't be continued. Meaning that if the story itself ain't popular? POOF! Gone. Completely. I'm working two jobs -might need a third soon!- so I barely have time to write; as such, I cannot afford to write something folks don't enjoy. So by all means, speak up! Your voice matters! Make yourself heard! As ever, reviews are the fuel that sustain me. Without them I cannot write a single word. Simple as that. Working nearly all hours of the day keep me absurdly busy, and I can't bring myself to write something folks don't like.
As ever, I own no references, quotes, memes or themes. Not a wit or a one. They're merely tributes to those far greater than I.
Here we go. Hopefully this puts a smile on your face and warms your heart.
Looking forward to chatting with you all once I get back from work~!
"The sins of the father are not the sins of the son.
Nor the sins of the Mother, the daughter.
Go ahead. Say otherwise. I dare ya...
~?
No Strings On Me
Marika had miscalculated.
Trapped within the Erdtree as she was, she had been able to do naught but sublimely fester on the rights and wrongs of everything from aeons past to the shattering and the here and now, bound in this gilded prison with her diametrically opposed other half, Radagon. It was...unpleasant, to the say the least. So many mistakes. So many foolish choices that, looking back, she could have avoided.
But even now, in this dark otherspace at the heart of the this hated oak, illuminated by nothing more than the shattered remnants of the Ring still incurably bound to her body and soul, Marika was not idle. She could feel the pitch and yor of the world through the Ring and its shattered remnants, each desperately trying to resolve adherence to the Greater Will- blast it to the finest ash! - and the lingering grace that she had set in motion.
She had planned to turn from the Greater Will, locking the Outer God's influence from The Lands Between and letting its denizens, deities and cryptids flourish and wither under her grace, her order, her reign, not some incorporeal cosmic voice calling for order from beyond the furthest stars. Y
Yet seeing her Godwyn, her sweet boy, butchered at the hands of that feculent stepdaughter Ranni's plans…it had forced her rebellion to be a shade more dramatic.
Had she acted too quickly? Probably. Most likely.
Did she regret it? No! Nay! Never! Not a jot, said she!
You try keeping your composure at seeing your perfect first born child carved like a pig and see how you feel!
Still, her imprisonment had taught her patience beyond that of any saint, and from said patience she had listened to the fragments whisper; both of the state of the world, the lingering feelings of the Greater Will amid that sublime ordered grace of the Golden Order, and all that lay therein. Locked as it was beyond the borders of the greater cosmos, there was precious little the Greater Will could do save pass on its malignant will to the fingers and smoulder impotently at how it could not change the damage she had dealt by shattering the Elden Ring.
That thought, at least, brought her some small bit of pleasure, even in captivity.
Ohhh, how her dark painted lips curled into an amused smile at the reminder. For a time, a terribly long time, she had believed that her hammer-blow had yielded eons of annoyance upon the unfathomable 'patron' she was still tied to.
And then one day, everything changed.
A curious tremor had rung through the Golden Order. The likes of which she could not place, an oddity that implied the unchanging Will was trying something...new.
It had taken her the better part of a decade to interpret the meaning. To see the patterns and holes in the feelings and conceptual miasma until the reality of the matter set in.
Now realization dawned. The Greater Will… intended to start anew. It had called forth a golden Elden Star from the cosmos; sent it hurtling towards the Lands Between on tides of Regression and Causality and with it something -someone?- to replace the Elden Beast. Had she been able to, Marika would have screamed. Alas, in her current state she could barely gasp.
So that was its game! Summon something with the strength to rip the fragments of the Ring from her body, then use the monstrous golden light to forge a new one; with new rules and realities of the world bereft of that which Marika deigned beautiful and wondrous.
It would be death. For her and everything she'd ever known. She'd raged against the horror of it all.
When her mind and confined body finally settled, she began to think of ways to counteract this horrifying prospect, mustering her brilliant mind and boundless guile to set a countermeasure in place. While she tracked the golden star in her mind, Marika came to several conclusions about it, the Ring and the Lands Between. Firstly was that for the awesome power she could sense, it was not omnipotent and thus surmountable. Secondly was that so long as the gossamer filaments of auric light and brilliant gold criscrossed her body, the reality of the Elden Ring would hold and this new Beast could not simply will her away.
And lastly…how curious.
This new Beast was not of the Will's creation. Bound though her body was, her mind was not. She could see it had been plucked from the cosmos, not formed by it. Therefore it could be spoken with, reasoned with, turned in accordance with her will and made to see reason...yes, yes, she rather like the sound of that.
Of course, to do that she would need an agent.
But who? Who could she trust to not only understand her desire to turn this Beast aside, but surmount it should they fail?
The answer came in an epiphany so magnanimous that she nearly laughed herself silly…who to send? Why, herself of course.
Who better suited for such a task that one such as she?
She was not completely impotent, bound as she was at the Erdtree's heart by the confounded cosmic cretin's geas. Nay, her Grace still touched the numerous Tarnished and few lost souls that crossed the plains. After all, the Erdtree itself was at its heart, still a tree. All nurturing, all giving, life-bearing. And it was from this that she drew power
So it was that she mustered her might from the fragments of the Ring still embedded in her breast.
Radagon, traitorous other half of her soul that he was, squirmed in complaint within her. "What heresy doth thou attempt now?"
'Silence, leal hound!'
Marika silenced him with a snarl. She was not yet so weak as to be subsumed by him. Not now. Not yet.
Ignoring his complaints, she began the painstaking process. Crafting a body was the easiest place to start, growing it from within the glistening gilded bark of the Erdtree. In her mind's eye she felt this errant beast arrive and slowly traverse the lands, drawn unerringly towards the tree. Debating between martial prowess and divine miracle, the goddess chose a middle-ground of her and Radagon; his strength in her shape, as she had been prior to ascending to true godhood. T'was a small matter to ignore the small blight that ached from within the ring at a second artificially created union of the two halves of one being shearing a soul.
From there she siphoned off a piece of herself, a fragment of her soul with a singular purpose and modus. She shaped it and gave it ego, that is to say, a sense of self; the better to drive away the golden beast and make it see sense. But she could already feel the new Elden Star approaching, and the beast it carried within. She must hurry! With little in the way of time or resources, she'd hurriedly pushed it into the body and birthed into the world at the foot of the Erdtree's gigantic buttress roots. A fragment of herself, yest, a little piece..
There was just one tiiiiiny problem with said piece.
...in her haste, Marika made a blunder...
...she'd made it too small.
(.0.0.0.)
Naruto was having…something of an interesting week, to say the least.
It had begun as many of his weeks tended to, sleeping in on Monday, followed by a late rise for brunch for which he had chosen to partake of in that most hallowed of establishments. After all, if ramen was the food of the gods then surely Ichiraku's was their altar. So it had been with groggy eyes and a rumbling stomach that he'd stalked through the midday Konoha sunshine, travelling through long memorized streets towards his watering hole of choice. Despite the total rebuild that Konoha had undergone after the war, he could still implicitly find his way to the ramen bar with his eyes closed.
Sounds simple so far, no? You'd be wrong.
Which is why when he'd opened his eyes he had been immensely surprised by the pillar of gilded light careening down upon him from the heavens.
It all happened so quickly that even now he could scarcely recall most of the details; but what he did remember was a feeling of being plucked and dragged upwards at speeds that sent stars racing before his vision. It was only after the initially vertigo and confusion wore off that he realized the stars were quite literal indeed; for he'd found himself floating at the heart of an immense nebulae of brilliant stars and plumes of glittering golden dust arranged into ordered filaments and constellations.
"A wanton heretic has broken my trust," a booming voice cried across the cosmos, echoing endlessly with no apparent source, no matter how Naruto owlishly looked around himself to find the speaker amidst the stars. "Order rots in the Lands Between, oh Elden Star that glints with life. A task for thee, and a boon." Naruto
He remembered that much. He also recalled letting out a somewhat... undignified yelp when strings of light and gossamer bands of black-hewed dust began to form around him, snapping taught around his body as they burned deeply. "Go then, Elden Star," it had garbled at him, "fall upon a world gone mad and seekest the golden tree that stands as testament to the folly of hubristic gods. Teareth the Elden Ring from mine digusting whore and bring about a true Golden Order upon that which is so thoroughly beyond my plan."
Without time to respond with more than a belated yelp, he'd found himself fired away from the golden constellation through a blur of bent prismatic light and fracturing reality as space bent in accordance to the will of the eldritch voice. Had he been able to speak in those scant moments -or realized that Greater Will had actually deigned to talk to him-a singular expletive filled sentence would have ripped itself from his lungs.
'I didn't understand a third of what the fuck you just said!'
What had followed was a period of tumbling through a kaleidoscopic hellscape of pulsing fractals and ambient pressure akin to attempting to headbutt your way through a Bijudama. An utterly insane prospect to anyone who kept some semblance of sanity in their life, but hardly in the top thirty weirdest events in Naruto's life. After all, he'd been tanking Bijudama since he turned sixteen.
Really, he was more annoyed than anything when, with all the suddenness of a thunderclap, he found himself crashing headfirst into a fog filled valley at terminal velocity and none of the mental faculties to abate his rapid descent. The splat he had made hitting the floor was hardly what he would call dignified -thankfully no one was present to witness it- and the immediate aftermath of his arrival had been focused entirely on coming to terms with the reality of what he had been through.
To summarize? He was having a bad time.
A lengthy argument with Kurama had insured that -after a fair amount of childish bickering over what, exactly, this bloody 'Golden Voice' had actually said- they at least knew one thing. The most useful bit of info that they could agree on was the the destination of the 'quest' they had been volunteered into was a golden tree. Thus, they'd set out to find it to get this whole annoying situation put to bed and go home, preferably before Ichiraku's closed for the evening.
It had not taken them very long to catch a glimpse of said prodigal oak, a towering trunk of spun sunlight in the form of a tree splitting the horizon for all to see from hundreds of leagues around. Naruto's blond brow had furrowed at the sight of it for two reasons, the first being that the sheer size of it made it hard to gauge its distance from them, it could have been the next valley over or it could be a country away, it was impossible to tell.
The second was far more personal and infinitely more mundane.
He'd thought there'd be some grand quest to find it, but nope. There it was. Looming in the distance.
'That's weirdly anticlimactic…' he'd thought to himself at the time.
In the week that followed, he'd slowly but surely begun the long trek towards the obvious endpoint of his journey. As he did, he'd taken time to learn the nature of the realm known as The Lands Between and its numerous oddities. After a week's travel on swift feet through forests, villages and the myriad environs between him and what he now knew to be called the Erdtree, he'd had ample time begun to think.
While Kurama was eventually able to translate the needlessly archaic manner of speech in which this "Golden Voice" had spoken into something they understood, Naruto found himself left with far more questions now than answers. What was the Elden Ring? What was this divine folly he was supposed to uproot? Was there any chance that doing what he had been ordered to do would mean he would go home?
...somehow, I doubt it. Damnit, I'm really not fond of these faceless god types.' the blond thought, looking up at the wide trunk of the Erdtree before leaping from another rooftop in a deft jump that carried him through the air as if in flight. A few hours later he had made it to the roots of the mighty gilded oak, feeling its light trickle down onto him like so much summer sun.
At last, his journey had come to an end.
He smiled softly to himself. Said smile faded to a thoughtful frown as something began to niggle at his senses; an odd call that came not from the eerie deified nature within the tree ,but something near its roots. Taking a detour into the shadow of one such root, the Uzumaki found himself enveloped in a thick fog welling up from the flower covered meadow that grew in the light of the Erdtree, walking through a strange soup of gold mist as he followed the call.
It was a trifling thing, sad and confused, yet brilliantly vivid regardless of how small, a bright light sadly twinkling amidst a cosmos of nature that the Erdtree and its light was to his Sage's senses.
"Careful," Kurama cautioned, "It's not the first time this place's trickery has nearly put one over on us so far...
Naruto grimaced at the reminder.
"Yeah, Caelid ain't a place I ever wanna go back to, but knowing our luck, we're probably gonna get drawn back there eventually." Just thinking of it made him grumble and, casting a glance to his bare feet. Soft white flowers parted before his tores beneath under the fog. The Scarlet Rot had taken his favorite pair of sandals and he'd been stumbling around on aching feet ever since. All because he'd taken the advice of a certain bald merchant who advised cutting through Caelid to expedite his path to the Plateau. "If I see Patches again I swear to the log I'm gonna kick him off a cliff."
Kurama quirked an eyebrow, "That's an oddly...specific punishment, there. And here I'd thought you'd just kick the crap out of him and be on your way."
Shaking his head, Naruto gave an amused smile, "For some reason the thought of pushing that chrome-dome off a high place feels strangely fitting. Can't say why but I guess we'll get an answer when we meet again." he made to say more before he caught a sound, muffled by the fog. He listened for a few seconds before realizing what it was.
"Is that...?
Naruto hummed in thought, opening his senses to the world and letting his awareness expand over the area. Blue eyes shimmered into gold. As far as he could discern there was nothing to worry about, nothing hidden or obscured save for an acute awareness of being watched. That came from within the tree itself; yet while it 'watched' him, seemed to hold no ill intent.
Which begged the question. What was going on here?
He followed his senses through the fog until, finally, it began to thin. Gradually he discerned a shape in the distance, a small figure hunched the ground that. And with sight came sound. He heard...crying, no, that was too tame a word. Someone was bawling their eyes out, emitting tiny confused moans and groans. Approaching slowly, the fog layer broke away from his vision to reveal a circular flowerbed of golden tulips swayed lightly in a faint breeze under the Erdtree root. And there, at the center of the flowerbed, he was surprised to see a child, no older than three.
As Naruto slowly drew closer he realized she was a tiny thing indeed; a little girl clad in a simple grey gown with a mop of finely detailed red hair. She didn't even come up to his waist; in fact, she didn't seem to be aware of her surroundings at all, hands sweeping at her eyes as she bawled.
"...!"
There was a range of things that Naruto could have done in that instant. He could have checked the surrounding area for traps just to make sure that there was nothing untoward at play here. Conversely, he could have taken advice from Kurama on how to approach. He could've sent a shadow clone in, just to be safe. Alas, all these approaches banked on a rational and predictable individual. Anyone who had spent more than an hour with him would gawp incredulously at the implication.
So it was with no hesitation that Naruto unzipped his jacket, took it off, approached the little crying redhead...and wrapped it around her shoulders.
The little girl stiffened in response to his touch- he felt the fear emanating from her. His concern deepened yet further.
"Hey there, what's wrong?" he asked in a hushed tone. "Why ya crying?"
With faltering movements, the little girl pulled her hands from her face to look up at the young man, revealing a sweet face akin to a cherub with puffy eyes. Strangely enough,her right eye was a rich hazel, slightly reddened from much crying. And yet though the left one was kept closed somehow, it remained tightly screwed shut in that way only a distressed child can manage.
Seeing him now, her lone open eye widened in familiarity before confusion joined the potent emotions coursing through her. She tilted her little head to the side to stare at him. He wasn't surprised. He looked a mess. Now that he'd donated his jacket to give the little girl to give some semblance of warmth, he was left in little than his trousers and a frayed, bloody t-shirt. Her eye strayed to the marking on his chest, trying to make sense of it, and the markings left there by the Golden Voice. Well, good luck with that. He didn't know much about it himself.
"You lost too, kiddo?" he gazed out into the fog, struggling to make sense of it all. "Wonder where your mom and dad are...? What kind of parent leaves a crying kid at the foot of a tree?"
The little girl looked up at him, her mind a blank canvas as she tried to interpret the cavalcade of feelings that the young man emitted. A feeling of tranquil calm and safety wafted from his presence. There was something about him, a golden light she could perceive beyond true sight that warmed every fiber of her little body. It reminded her of someone, but she could not place who; for the foggy memories of golden light at the beginning of her existence were as abstract as the fog that surrounded them now.
Yet there was something concise amidst the vagaries. Something she had to do.
This young man was special and she was supposed to keep him close…
...wasn't she? Her head hurt. Owie.
For the eldritch forces observing them from within and without, the outcome should've been a rational one. It was not. A child's mind is a wonderful thing. As such, they could not begin to fathom just how simply-yet-spectacularly she would resolve the paradox. Nodding her head once, dark shroud of hair jostling about her face, the little girl decided exactly what Naruto meant to her.
A tiny hand tugged at his sleeve. Once. Twice. Thrice "...pa...
Naruto blinked, still looking out into the fog. "Hmm?"
She pointed at him, grinning. "Papa!"
"...?!"
Kurama absolutely howled with laughter in his head.
Naruto's head whipped around with an audible crack. "Pa...?! No, no, no. We are not doing this shit. I ain't your dad! I'm too young for that!"
The little girl touched a finger to her lips. "Shi...?"
Kuram's laughter redoubled.
Her single hazel eye clouded in curiosity. "Shit?" she said innocently, the profanity fouling the air around the innocent cinnamon roll.
"Ah shiiiiiii-uh, crud, yeah that's child friendly." He waved his arms around in an attempt to swat the curse word from the fouled air. "You're a little too young to be saying that word!" She giggled and he blinked, clapping his hands to either side of his head. "And stop that! I'm too young to be a papa!"
"Shit!" she replied happily.
Kurama kicked inside the seal, tails thrashing as he cackled.
Naruto groaned. "You're not going to forget that word, are ya?"
Not a chance. The little girl giggled and clapped her hands. "Shit, shit, shit!"
...great, not even a minute in, and I'm already a failure as a father-no!' he rallied himself. 'Focus, damnit! I ain't a dad!'
Much to his chagrin, The child -toddler?- soon presented him with another dilemna. As he looked on aghast she began to make pleading noises, hopping up and down in place. Slender arms reached for him, her little dress flapping with every hop; his black jacket wrapped around her shoulders like a cloak. Her intentions were all too clear, even if she couldn't quite find the words for it.
Little one wanted up.
"Oi!" he scowled. "Will you listen to me! I'm not-
She flinched and whimpered, one hazel eye shining with tears. Idly, he noted the other was sealed with a black mark of some sort.
Uh-oh. He knew that look far, far too well, having seen it a time or two. Surely she wasn't gonna...?
She was gonna. The child warbled once, threw her head back, and wailed.
His heart twisted at the sound. "Calm down! I'm not your-
"NO!" she bawled even louder. "Papa is papa!" She exclaimed it as though it were an immutable fact of the world. "Nobody else is papa!" Naruto heard the distinct sound of Kurama slipping over in laughter from inside his mind and sent a flurry of blue language internally at the Bijuu, unintentionally ignoring the toddler that gestured for him.
Aaaaaand she was crying louder now! Defcon five!
"Hey! Don't cry! Oh, jeez, alright, alright," he knelt and took the little brunette into his arms. "I've got you. You're okay. What's your name...?
The little girl sniffled into his arms and nestled her head into his chest, seeking shelter. "M'lina...
"Melina, eh? That's a pretty name...shhh. You're alright. Let's find yer mama, eh?"
She hiccuped once and clung to him for dear life. No prying her away now.
Still, what manner of mother abandoned a little girl like this?
Turning on his heel, Naruto cast a baleful look up at the great Erdtree and shook his head. He could feel it tugging at him. Calling to him. Pah! Giant transcendental quests from possible ne'er-do-well deities could wait, what mattered right now was a young girl nestled against his chest for comfort. He'd be damned if he didn't see her safe.
"Right," he muttered, "I'll deal with this twiggy tree...thing, later. Guess we need to find you a change of clothes...
His peace said, he tucked little Melina close to him and returned to the fog, walking away from the Erdtree with very little intention of heading back until the girl was quite safe. Perhaps, had he been in Six Paths Sage Mode, he might have caught the distinct sound of the Golden Voice raging impotently into the dark. That, or perhaps Queen Marika the Eternal sputtering incoherently at how the so called Second Elden Beast walked away with her aspect bundled up like a fresh born babe.
In a grand game of gods, none could hope to control a paragon of unpredictability...nor a freshly born child's desire for a parent.
A/N: Was Little!Melina cute enough? We tried our best.
Once more, we're sticking with the "Embers" rule for this particular story, and others.
If folks don't like this, it won't be continued. Meaning that if the story itself ain't popular? POOF! Gone. Completely. I'm working two jobs -might need a third soon!- so I barely have time to write; as such, I cannot afford to write something folks don't enjoy. So by all means, speak up! Your voice matters! Make yourself heard! As ever, reviews are the fuel that sustain me. Without them I cannot write a single word. Simple as that. Working nearly all hours of the day keep me absurdly busy, and I can't bring myself to write something folks don't like.
Aaaand there we go. As ever, reviews keep me alive. Without them, I cannot write. So...in the Immortal Words of Atlas...
...Review...Would You Kindly? And have some previews -potential blot bin things- that I'm working on.
Things that may or may not become stories in the far flung future.
(Previews)
Blaidd gawped openly at what he was seeing, his maw wide and tongue lolling before lifting the binoculars to his face again. There it was again, the sight that had continued to baffle him for the past ten minutes since he had spotted the dot on the waterlogged horizon.
A blonde young tarnished… riding on the back of a Giant Crayfish with a small redhead on his shoulder.
He chuffed at the absurdity of it but couldn't help but peel back his lips in a lupine grin.
"My, you seem like quite the amusing fellow."
Far beyond the stars in the heart of the cosmos, the Greater Will seethed, its constellation of perfectly arrayed stars flashing dangerously. Were it not for that despicable Redahn holding back the stars, it would like nothing more than to rain solar hellfire down upon the world that defied him.
Curse Marika and her hastily created doll.
Blast the doll for leading its second beast astray.
Confound the beast for making pretend he was a man.
"I shall do unto you a travesty, beast, and when your falsehoods of civility are but ash in your mouth, you will burn this world clean in your wrath."
Melina buried her head deep into the russet red fur of the large wolf, her little arms and legs clamping her to it like a limpet as she squealed in mirth.
"Sorry…" Naruto dragged the word out in embarrassment, sending an apologetic look at their host. "Melina's kinda fond of animals."
The woman laughed, a refined bell like sound that tinkled the air, "Hush, traveller, tis not a problem, for there is no greater joy than witnessing the happiness of a sweeting, no?"
Naruto smiled softly, no words needing to be said.
R&R~!