(Near the end of the Second Great Shinobi War)
Sajura felt the heat before he saw it.
The desert had always spoken to him in gradients—pressure, grain, drift—but this was different. This was arrival.
The sand under his feet tried to scatter. It failed.
Sajura smiled once, thin and tired.
"So that's how," he murmured, already loosening his form.
The heat did not wait for permission.
The wind in Sunagakure was never just wind. It was a whetstone, constantly grinding the village down, turning stone into dust and dust into nothing.
The Third Kazekage sat at his desk, his fingers tracing the rim of a heavy, translucent bowl. It wasn't clay. It wasn't porcelain. It was glass—perfect, honey-colored glass that hummed when he touched it with his Iron Sand.
On his desk lay the report from the Search-and-Retrieval unit. The paper was gritty with the dust of the "Wandering Canyon."
"Found at the coordinates of the Shifting Tanuki Oasis," the report read. "The oasis is gone. The canyon has been anchored. In its place, we found the site of a high-temperature anomalous event."
The Third looked at the bowl again. It had been carved from a single shard found at the epicenter.
"The Gate is shattered," the report continued. "The Prime access point to the Hound Domain is no longer responsive to blood-contracts. It appears to have been physically cauterized from our reality."
He closed his eyes. He didn't need the report to tell him what happened to Sajura.
Sajura, the man who was more desert than human. The man who could take a sword through the chest and simply let the steel pass through a cloud of dust.
"High-temperature event," the Kazekage muttered.
He thought of the site descriptions. A valley of glass. Not just the sand on the ground, but a man-shaped statue standing at the center of the ruins. Sajura hadn't been killed by a blade or a jutsu. He had been hit by a heat so intense that his sand-form hadn't had time to disperse. He had been turned into a vitrified husk—a frozen, transparent monument to a battle that had no witnesses.
Konoha denied involvement. Iwa claimed they saw nothing.
But the scouts spoke of a ghost. A man in red armor who walked through the dunes like a god, moving toward the Sage Gates with a purpose that defied the borders of men.
A sudden, violent tremor shook the floor of the office.
The Third stood, his Iron Sand rising around him in a protective, vibrating cloud. The tremor wasn't tectonic. It was spiritual.
From deep beneath the village, in the sealing chambers where the Ichibi was kept, a roar echoed. It wasn't a physical sound; it was a psychic tear. Shukaku was screaming—not in rage, but in a panicked, fractured mourning.
The Ichibi felt it. Its connection to the Hound Domain, to the "Hanging Mirage" where the Sage Hounds used to run, had been severed. The anchor was gone.
The Kazekage looked out the window at the swirling sandstorm. With the Gate broken, the Ichibi's chakra was no longer being vented back into the Domain. It was backing up. It was becoming unstable, bloated with its own trapped power.
"Sajura," he whispered, "what did you see before the fire took you?"
He looked at the glass bowl. He could see his own reflection in the amber surface—distorted, dark, and already planning. If the Sage Gates were gone, the village could no longer rely on the Hounds. They needed a new weapon. They needed to study the way the Ichibi moved the sand.
He would call it Magnet Release. He would learn to imitate the dead.
He did not mistake this for honor.
He mistook it for survival—and that was close enough.
Outside, the sand screamed. It wasn't rage. It was the sound of something pacing a cage that no longer had a horizon.
Somewhere in the deep desert, a valley of glass stood silent, the last remains of a man who tried to hold back a god, now nothing more than an educational relic for a village that had forgotten how to pray.
Years later the air in the training sector still tasted like copper and old bone.
Rasa stood at the edge of the crater, his cloak whipping in a wind that he alone controlled. Below him, the desert floor was a mess of Gold Dust and silicate—a literal fortune in ore, wasted on pinning a child to the ground.
Gaara was huddled in the center of the pit. He wasn't screaming anymore. He breathed like someone pacing a cage too small for his lungs. —wet, hitching sounds that made the sand around him twitch in sympathetic, jagged spikes.
"Status," Rasa commanded.
A specialized sealing team emerged from the dust, their masks caked in grit. "The seal held, Lord Kazekage. But the output... it's the same as last time. The Ichibi isn't cooperating with the host's emotional state. It's feeding on it."
Rasa looked at the Gold Dust settling back into the earth. It was heavy. It was expensive. Every time Gaara lost control, Rasa had to spend a week's worth of Suna's mining revenue just to keep the boy from erasing a residential block.
"He's a sieve," Rasa muttered, his eyes cold. "We pour training into him, we pour the village's security into him, and it all leaks out the moment he feels a draft. He's supposed to be our ultimate deterrent, but all he's deterring right now is our economic recovery."
"He's a child, Rasa."
Rasa didn't turn. He knew the voice. It was the only voice in the village that still dared to use his name without a title.
Yashamaru stepped up to the edge of the pit. He looked immaculate, despite the carnage. His eyes weren't on the Kazekage; they were on the small, shivering heap of orange hair and sand at the bottom of the crater.
"The council is asking for another culling," Rasa said, his voice as flat as a horizon line. "They see a kaiju with a pulse. They see the Fourth Kazekage failing to balance the books."
"The council sees a castle they didn't build," Yashamaru said softly. He turned his head, his smile thin and sharp as a glass shard. "You keep kicking his sand castle over, Rasa. Every time he tries to build a wall between himself and the monster, you send in the assassins or the Gold Dust to crush it. You're testing his limits, but you aren't testing his will."
Rasa narrowed his eyes. "He has no will. He has a parasitic entity that mimics his nervous system."
"Does it?" Yashamaru's tone was almost playful, but his chakra felt like a wire being pulled taut. "Or is it just reacting to the environment? Suna is a cold mother, Rasa. And you? You're a landlord, not a father."
Yashamaru walked a slow, predatory circle around the Kazekage.
"Let me do it," Yashamaru whispered. "Let me be the one to see what he builds when the sun finally goes down. You've shown him that the world is a weapon. Let me show him that the people he loves are the sharpest part of the blade."
"You're his only anchor," Rasa noted, his mind already calculating the risk-to-reward ratio. "If you fail, we lose the host entirely. The Ichibi will breach."
"If I fail," Yashamaru corrected, his smile widening into something diabolical, "you get the data you need to justify the cull. You get to close the account and start over. But if I succeed... you get a weapon that doesn't just endure the desert. You get a weapon that hates it."
Yashamaru looked down at Gaara. In his mind, he wasn't seeing a boy. He was seeing the Hound Shard—the legacy of Sajura and the vitrified gates—being refined into a single, sharp point of absolute isolation.
"Don't just break him, Rasa," Yashamaru added, his voice melodic and poisonous. "That's brute force. Anyone can smash a pot. I'm suggesting we kiln the clay. We burn the love out of him until only the silicate remains. Hard. Clear. Perfect."
Rasa looked back at the pit. He saw his Gold Dust, his nation's wealth, shimmering in the sun. He saw a project that needed to be completed.
"Do it," Rasa said. "But don't do it quietly. I want the records to reflect that we explored every avenue of psychological stabilization before we moved to... final measures."
"Of course," Yashamaru bowed, his hand over his heart. "I'll make sure it's a lesson he never forgets. I'll be the ghost in his ink, Rasa. Just like the one who turned your ancestor to glass."
His chakra stuttered. Just for a breath.
Then it smoothed out again, sharp as polished glass.
He turned and began to descend into the crater, his footsteps silent on the shifting sand.
Rasa watched him go. He didn't feel regret. He didn't feel grief. He just felt the weight of the Gold Dust in his sleeves and the cold, looming shadow of a village that couldn't afford a heart.
Somewhere far beyond the village, the sun caught on a valley of glass and flashed once—
like a signal that would never be answered.