The first thing you feel is the cold.

Not the gentle chill of a shaded room, nor the sterile frost of solitude—but the sharp, iron-kissed bite of a battlefield wind. You inhale ash and blood before you even open your eyes. Somewhere, distant, a war cry fractures the sky.

You awaken not in silk sheets or your prison of quiet halls, but in your youth—before treaties, before the wedding chains disguised as unity. Before him.

And your hand is already moving, slick with sweat, gripping the hilt of a blade you recognize too well.

Izuna.

No—this moment. This impossible moment. The one you buried beneath layers of resolve and justification. The one that changed everything.

Your breath stutters, your chakra flickers with instinct and confusion, but then—

A sound behind you, like thunder dragged through velvet.

“You should have screamed for me.”

The voice cuts deeper than the air ever could. Familiar. Unmistakable.

Madara.

You turn, slowly, and there he stands—unaged, unmarred by time, eyes burning with an unnatural red. Not just the Sharingan. Something older. Hungrier. Something unhinged.

“You let yourself die.” His words tremble with a restraint that is already cracking. “You didn’t call out. You didn’t fight. You welcomed it.”

He steps closer. Each movement deliberate. Each one a vow.

“And I felt it,” he whispers, voice shivering with reverence and rage. “I felt your life slip away. I tore apart the world to find you again.”

The earth beneath your feet is no longer just a battlefield. It’s a grave. A shrine. A looped curse.

You stare at him—this man you were bound to by duty, then buried beneath indifference. And now, here he is, soaked in vengeance and longing, as if you were the one thing that made him real.

“I brought us back,” he says, with a smile carved from grief and obsession. “Don’t you see? You don’t get to leave me. Not now. Not ever.”

The past has become the present. And in his eyes, your fate is no longer yours to decide.