I died with my mouth full of iron.
Not the taste, not the color - the weight. The moment when your lungs seize and your chest decides it doesn't want to lift again. I thought that was the end. Darkness pressed in and I fell without fighting.
Then I opened my eyes again.
The air was wet, full of wood smoke and crying. My body wasn't mine. My hands were too small. My voice was a bird's screech. Everything was wrong. I knew the world wasn't the same one I'd left, but I didn't know why I still remembered pieces of the old one. Faint images. Screens glowing blue. Stories about men with red eyes that could trap you in illusions. A blond kid with too much hope. The memories were fog - sometimes sharp, mostly gone.
The only clear thing was her. My mother.
She was thin, with a face that worked harder than it should, but when she held me the whole village faded. Her arms were rules I didn't need to carve. I didn't love her at first. She was a stranger and I was a stranger inside her child, but love doesn't care about logic. She fed me when she had nothing left. She pressed me against her chest and hummed when she was too tired to talk. She gave me a name, though the sound always blurred when I tried to remember it.
For two and a half years, life was small and almost kind.
The village was a stain on the map, a place of crumbling houses and narrow fields. Men broke their backs on soil that didn't want to feed them. Women bartered scraps in markets that smelled like ash more than food. Shinobi didn't live here. They passed through, or worse, hunted through. Everyone whispered about quotas and Root, though I didn't know what that meant then. I only knew my mother's hands were calloused, her eyes sharp, and her voice always soft when she spoke to me.
Then came the decree.
Children were too loud. That's how she explained it. I didn't understand at first. I thought she meant crying. But she meant something else - that our bodies leaked something adults could hide, something the white masks could smell. Feeding us was expensive. Hiding us was worse. So a rule came down, quiet and final: cull the children. Leave the rest.
The night they came, she smeared my chest with paste. It stank of burned bone and oil, mixed with something metallic that clung to my skin. She drew a spiral with her finger, muttering words I didn't know. The spiral's lines were uneven because her hands were shaking. She kissed my forehead and told me not to cry. I cried anyway, but quietly.
Then the door cracked open.
White masks walked in. Smooth bone faces, empty slits where eyes should've been. They didn't shout. They didn't rage. They just tapped the walls with three fingers in a triangle rhythm, like the world was something they could measure. People screamed outside, but not for long. The sound cut off sharp, like someone had snapped a branch.
She shoved me under the floorboards, under rotting wood that smelled of mold and dirt. She whispered my name once. Then she stood and faced them.
I couldn't see. I could only listen.
One voice, flat: "Adult. Useless. Remove."
A scuffle. A cry. A crack. Then silence.
I stayed there. My small hands pressed against the earth, nails filling with mud. I waited for her to move. To breathe. To say anything. She didn't. The smell of smoke crept through the cracks, thick and greedy. My eyes burned. My throat shut down.
At some point the house fell. Or maybe they burned it after killing her. All I know is I crawled out through ash, coughing, blind, my skin covered in soot and paste. The spiral still smeared across my chest. The only reason I lived was because she died.
The village was gone. Not empty - gone. Corpses stacked like answers nobody wanted. Ash drifted where roofs used to be. Dogs picked at hands that once held tools. White masks were still there, finishing their work. I stayed low. I crawled. Every step cut me. Every breath made my ribs scream. But I moved, because stopping meant being another tally on someone's wall.
That's when I found them.
A boy older than me, dragging a leg that didn't work right. And another one, younger, who didn't speak at all. They looked at me like they already knew I belonged. The lame one offered a hand. The silent one just watched, eyes too steady for his age.
We didn't say anything. Words would've broken us. Instead, we carved our first line into a stone with a shard of glass. A mark that wasn't a number yet, just a promise. The stone would remember, even if we didn't.
That was the night the Circle of Ash began.
Not with crowns or banners. Not with armies. Just three children crawling from ruin, their hands black with soot, their eyes too old, and a rule carved into stone:
Survive.