At the end of the corridor stood a massive sliding door with a fan symbol emblazoned in its center. Guarding it were the first truly non-human living beings Indra had ever seen.
On the left side was what appeared to be an entirely black human with yellow eyes, his head framed by what looked like the gaping maw of a carnivorous plant. On the other side stood his counterpart, instead of a pitch-black body, this one was pure white. They stood as silent sentinels, carrying a presence far more dangerous than the guards of the residence, both wearing mocking smiles.
As they approached the door, the creatures did not move, but Indra felt the weight of their gaze. The man, Fugaku, stopped at a certain distance, his posture rigid and authoritative, though his eyes did not directly meet those of the guards.
"Does the Matriarch await him?" The White Zetsu asked, his voice high-pitched and slightly playful, contrasting with the deathly silence of the hall.
"She summoned him." Fugaku replied, his voice short and dry. He clearly disliked interacting with the guards. "Open."
The Black Zetsu remained silent, his somber face seeming to absorb the surrounding light, while the White Zetsu let out a muffled giggle that echoed disturbingly. Without the use of hands or any visible force, the enormous sliding doors began to open on their own, revealing a crimson portal instead of another room.
"Enter, little Uchiha." Black Zetsu murmured, his voice a hoarse whisper that pierced through Indra's mind. "She is anxious to see you."
The moment Indra crossed the threshold of the portal, the scent of wood was replaced by the metallic odor of dried blood, the air becoming so dense that every breath seemed to require physical effort.
Indra was no longer in a human construction. He found himself in a subterranean cathedral of impossible proportions, where obsidian walls pulsed with a subterranean crimson luminescence. As his eyes adjusted, he looked up and felt a chill that came not from the cold, but from ancestral horror.
Chained to the vaulted ceiling by black iron links that groaned under an incomprehensible weight was a colossal abomination, with its multiple eyes closed in petrified agony, it hung over the hall like a suspended judgment. It was surrounded by a spiral of floating Torii Gates, glowing with containment seals so powerful they made the very space vibrate.
Taking a moment to recover, he soon walked down the central aisle, his footsteps echoing on the polished marble. He passed the great meeting hall, where massive doors bore the Uchiha fan. At the end of the room, the floor rose into an existential platform, a step that separated mortals from the legacy of the Progenitor.
There, beneath the shadow of a crimson moon that seemed to bleed through invisible cracks in the ceiling and the flickering light of embers rising from the floor, stood a broken throne.
The structure was of a somber grandeur, bearing the same symbol he had seen on the clan members along the way, who bowed like inferior forms. The area above it was shattered, representing the foundation of the visual power the clan claimed. The design of the throne was purposefully open, with obsidian pillars that allowed whatever was behind it to be seen with absolute clarity.
Hanging on the wall directly behind the seat was an ancient scroll whose silk seemed immune to time. In the center, a strange script Indra had never seen — 狐 — dominated his vision, surrounded by eight swirls that seemed to spin in perpetual motion if observed for too long. It was the symbol of a sealing that preceded the gods themselves, a mark of authority the mistress of the place wore as her own identity.
However, the splendor of that place was in ruins. The hall was in a deplorable state of preservation, the obsidian walls were marked by countless deep gashes and scars of ancient battles.
And sitting upon that decaying throne was the most beautiful being the young man had ever seen. Even after crossing the village and seeing various women, none compared to her. She possessed the most exquisite face, an appearance crafted by the divine, framed by a beautiful cascade of crimson hair that seemed created by blood and war.
That was Kushina, the Matriarch.
What made her presence even more mesmerizing were her eyes: deep white orbs that possessed distinct pupils, also white, creating a monochromatic and divine appearance. It was a gaze that did not seem to see the physical world, but something else entirely.
Upon her shoulders rested a mantle of immaculate white, its edges appearing woven from light itself. The fabric was adorned with a pattern of six black tomoe along the collar and nine more on the back. Above them, occupying the place of honor, stood a stylized war hammer over an obsidian anvil.
It was a tribute to Nether, the Daemon of the Forge, a mark that silently proclaimed this woman was the final synthesis of a living heresy, the remains of the forbidden mixture between the divine and the demonic.
Contrasting with the divine vestment, a relatively simple necklace hung from her neck, bearing three metallic circles.
After a silence that seemed to last an eternity, where only the crackle of embers and the creaking of the colossal aberration's chains could be heard, she finally broke the silence. Her tone was not that of a distant goddess, but of someone with a very short fuse and an even shorter tongue.
"Well, aren't you just the most insolent brat?!" She exclaimed, crossing her arms and leaning forward with a mischievous smile that lit up her perfect face. "You invade this lady's residence, stand there with a blank stare, and still have the audacity to keep staring at me without saying hello? Where are your manners, boy?!"
She let out a beautiful giggle, and her smile became truly dazzling, though it carried a hint of irony.
"Truly worthy of a being from another time, I suppose." She sighed, tossing her cascade of crimson hair. "But look, I'll tell you this: whoever created you failed miserably with your lack of manners."
Indra felt his blood freeze. Since birth, the doctrine he had been taught was rigid: the beings he would encounter in Nightmares had autonomy; they were real individuals with their own thoughts and desires, but living in a past already concluded. To them, that world was the only reality.
Indra's role was to be the intruder, the external variable that had to navigate this real world to survive. But Kushina had just shattered the essential rule carved into his mind with utter indifference.
"How..." Indra's voice failed, lost in the heavy air of the hall. "How do you know that?"
Kushina let out a vibrant laugh, but there was no mockery in it, only a genuine amusement that brightened her face. She rose from the throne with an elegance that seemed to defy gravity, the movement making the beautiful mantle ripple around her as if its edges of light had a life of their own.
She began to descend the steps slowly, her white eyes fixed on him with an intensity that seemed to burn.
"Brat, I know many things... far too many things, if you want to know!" She tilted her head, and the smile on her lips became deeper, almost predatory.
She stopped just two steps away. The heat emanating from her was like an open forge, but there was a perception that went beyond the senses. Kushina narrowed her eyes, bringing her face close to his and sniffing the air with a slight twitch of her nose.
"I see you, foreigner. And more than seeing... I feel it." Her voice dropped to a grave tone, sharp as a blade. "You carry an odor that spans millennia. I feel the unbearable stench impregnated in your soul... that smell of rot that only comes from the Weaver."
She took another step, forcing Indra to feel the crushing weight of her presence.
"You reek of Weaver, boy. You reek of threads woven in darkness and plans that shouldn't exist."
Displaying her beautiful predatory smile right in front of him, Kushina radiated an aura that filled every inch of the hall. Indra, paralyzed, realized that this woman—who was nearly the same height as the body of Itachi he inhabited, was much more than a simple projection.
"And it impresses me even more that the Spell managed to recreate a Nightmare from this place. Honestly, as much as I dislike admitting it, the Weaver is truly incredible." She said, and for a moment, the wild glint in her white eyes softened.
Kushina set her smile aside, and her expression changed. What appeared on her face was a maternal smile, something genuine and welcoming, in a way Indra had never seen in his life. Since the beginning, this strange woman had shown him, in just a few minutes, more emotions than all his twelve years of existence.
Faced with that smile, so different from the sneers and contempt of his tutors or the silent gaze of his grandfather, the patriarch of the Leaf Clan, Indra felt something he had always secretly desired: a smile of true happiness directed at him. He had kept this locked in the deepest core of his being as a weakness, he had been raised to be a weapon, with tasks and lessons to fulfill. Even when performing them with excellence, at the end of the day there was always that hateful Kabuto, claiming he could be better and that he should learn from his own body.
Because of this, his guard crumbled, he felt his own voice falter, coming out in a tone that mixed involuntary shyness with instinctive fear.
"What do you want from me, telling me all this then?" He asked, feeling the weight of her gaze pierce not just Itachi's body, but his very soul.
Kushina tilted her head, her divine mantle glowing with the symbol of the hammer and anvil, as if responding to the call of a new metal to be worked.
"I don't want anything from you. It's just that, through some crazy manipulation of the Weaver, you are here now, something that was practically impossible to happen."
She paused for a moment, studying the youth before her. Her white pupils did not focus on Itachi, the Uchiha genius or the next leader of the clan, but on Indra. She saw his broken and bruised soul, a mosaic of traumas that, under her watchful eye, revealed the story of one born of pain.
"Understand, child." She continued, her voice now softened by a kindness Indra had never known. "For someone like you to have entered this Nightmare, there are only two explanations, and both are technically impossible."
"The first would be that you are a remaining Uchiha who managed to survive the massacre. This is unlikely, for every living being united to eradicate that cursed bloodline. The Uchiha are hot-blooded and proud beings, cursed to see only blood and madness. It would be impossible for a descendant to go so long without bringing chaos and destruction with them, for they were forced into it."
"The second option." She proceeded, while the mantle rippled slightly. "Is that one of your parents carries more than one divine bloodline in their body. Something that should not occur, for bloodlines are proud and would not share the same host, they would destroy each other until only one remained. Unless... unless that parents possessed an Aspect or a divine item capable of taming them."
Kushina took a final step, standing face to face with Indra. The heat emanating from her was not just physical, it was her very presence staring at him with that maternal smile that disarmed him.
"So tell me, little Sleeper... which of these impossibles do you carry?"