Eight

Bonus: Skeletons in the Window

Bonus Chapter!

The first chapter of a future fic called The Wolves Will Eat You

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Story Warning: This story contains dark themes surrounding the fictitious religion Jashinism. There will be multiple depictions, both graphic and not, of blood, gore, sacrifice, ritual, self-harm, suffering, and death.

For the sake of the reader, each chapter will begin with short warnings of what the chapter will contain. Please heed those warnings.

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Kötü Kalp: The Written Word of Jashinism's Teachings

{Excerpt 01: From Tenets}

Tenet 8

Two Holy Days are observed; the birth and death of Jashin's human experience.

To celebrate The Birth, worshipers must participate in celebrations from sunrise to nightfall on the second day of April. This signifies our elation for our God to have been brought into this world to expound on the understanding of true suffering.

To celebrate The Death, worshipers must embed a needle in the palm of their most dominant hand from sunrise to nightfall on the twenty-eighth day of March. This signifies our small sacrifice in our understanding of when our God's human body had been found with thirty-five stakes driven into Their body, ending Their earthly inhabitance.

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Six-year-old Haruno Sakura swung her legs back and forth, back and forth, as she perched up on one of the fences that surrounded a nearby sheep farm. She giggled as they grazed on green grasses; they've been getting really big! It was going to be warmer in a few weeks and soon she couldn't wear her favorite green sweaters unless she wanted to be sweaty all the time, and that meant all the farms would be covered in wool stacks.

Her and all the other kids waited for the farmers to make wool piles so they could climb onto barn roofs and jump into them. They were chased off those properties all the time, but she could always hear the farmers laughing behind them.

A sheep bleated and a lamb pranced by her feet, and Sakura looked up into the bright blue sky and breathed in the crisp, Yugakure air. It would be her birthday in a couple days and Mama and Papa said they were going to take her down for a day at the coast! She was going to splash in the water, make lots of sand castles, and watch the fishers catch her favorite anchovies!

The same lamb passed by her feet again, and she watched as it sniffed at a broken part of the fence post.

"That's not food," Sakura frowned. She gasped when it started to squeeze itself through. "No, no, no—M-Mr. Farmer!"

She whipped her head up at the distant house. They probably couldn't hear her from so far out in the grazing pastures, but maybe if she yelled loud enough—

The lamb tumbled out the other side of the fence, shook itself off, and pranced across the path and into the wilderness.

"No! No, baby sheep! Come back!" Sakura threw her legs over the post and slid her way back onto the ground. Once her shoes flattened the grass and she caught her balance, she dashed into the woods. "Baby sheep! Mama says not t'go inta' the trees and your Mr. Farmer's gonna get mad!!"

The trees in Steam Country were nowhere near as thick as they were in the bordering country of Fire with their lighter woods and thinner trunks, but the land was uneven in its rocky terrain and staggering plateaus. The underbrush scratched against her already scabbed knees as she hopped over big rocks and skidded over dirt, and right when she could see that fluffy white behind, she pushed herself faster and faster and pitched herself forward.