Farewell My... Whatever You Are to Me

While nice, the Hidden Village of Sand had exhausted its entertainments, and as much as Gen may wish to remain with Sei, talking late into the night amidst the steam of the bathhouse that he ran, both knew that this was not a possibility. At least not right now. The technicalities of the Sand Village’s doubtless view of the Konoha shinobi as a danger at best and a criminal at worst notwithstanding, Gen did have matters to attend to in his own village. He knew people there, and while abandoning them would not cause him any great emotional pain, it would cause him practical issues. He would be hunted, for starters, but his clan would never allow him to escape the village or, more importantly, their clutches. He may be a prophet, a god even, but he was their prophet, their god. He could never escape, not to anywhere on this earth.

And so he left the sand, trod away at a brisk pace to the place that everyone assumed he thought of as home, his mind cast out around him in a caution bordering on paranoia. The sand surrounding the beaten path shifted aimlessly and pointlessly, moving back and forth without care or concern for anything in the whole world but the wind. For the briefest of moments the dark haired man envied the pebbles, the lifeless soil of the desert. He shook such thoughts from his mind quickly though. It was foolish to envy something that had no will and no control over itself. It was silly to envy the sand, to envy the thoughtless nature, to envy his fellow man and their crazed motions, their inability to even explain why they acted. No, such was folly. It served him no purpose and, moreover, demeaned him. He wanted something better than the enslavement of the burbling consciousness, of the chains that were his body and this world. He could escape; he must. But it would not be to anywhere on the earth. No, he’d have to go elsewhere for that.

The sand faded slowly into a kind of desert-esque plain, a sahara perhaps, the place populated by tall grasses and wide, empty expanses, the creatures shifting slowly away from the tough skinned scorpians and quick, light furry creatures to more bovine animals, deer and the like creeping out to nibble on the grasses and drink from the pools of water that gathered. It rained a lot, a result of the humid air of the ocean and the Land of Fire colliding with the desolate climate of the desserts of the Land of Wind, the arid air desiccating the clouds, wringing them out like a dish rage and letting them float raggedly about the sky in white-gray tatters. Yogensha liked the place, liked the climate and the mixture of dry and wet winds. How nice it would be to stay there.
But alas, he could not. He could stay nowhere and belonged nowhere. He was an object, a living relic to be owned and worship and, if needed, traded. But it would have been nice to remain among the gazelle. The Land of Fire opened up into a huge forest and he realized for the first time that the wooded walls gave him little comfort; he could control them, could shape them and bend them, could break them if he so chose, but he could not make them comfort him. This conflict refused solution and lingered even as his home village rose up before him. The beast was there too, of course, but he had stopped destroying the earth as he came. Perhaps Yogensha had finally come to understand the thing, even a small part of it. It existed with him at all times now, floated always in his mind, gave him –always– new things.