Yuki Aoi did not sleep in the same place twice.
Snow remembered footsteps.
So did people.
The lesson had been drilled into her long before the war—before the word Yuki became something spoken only in whispers or not at all. Movement was survival. Stillness was death. The moment you believed you were safe was the moment hunter-nin closed in.
She moved with the seasons, even when the seasons refused to change.
Tonight, she rested in the skeletal remains of a border shrine, its roof half-collapsed, stone pillars cracked and weather-worn. Moonlight spilled across the floor in pale ribbons, catching on frost she hadn't bothered to dispel. The cold was comfort. It obeyed her in ways people never did.
Aoi sat near the altar, legs folded beneath her, palms resting lightly on her knees.
Her chakra moved in slow, careful cycles.
Healing always took longer when you refused to leave traces.
Shigen's wounds had been severe—worse than she'd let on at the time. Ice had preserved him, but preservation was not the same as repair. She'd returned twice since leaving him at the edge of Fire Country, each visit shorter than the last, each departure more difficult.
She shouldn't have gone back.
She knew that.
Aoi reached into her pack and withdrew a small cloth bundle. Inside was a chipped shogi piece—wooden, worn smooth by use. A pawn.
He'd dropped it without noticing during one of their escapes. She'd meant to return it.
Instead, she'd kept it.
"Tch," she muttered softly, closing the bundle again.
Attachment was how clans died.
Her eyes closed briefly as memory intruded—Mist hunter-nin emerging from fog, the unmistakable crack of sealing tags activating, the way her bloodline had been recognized almost immediately.
Yuki. Ice Release. Priority target.
She'd escaped because she always did.
But this time… she'd brought someone with her.
Aoi opened her eyes and exhaled. The frost around her shifted, forming a thin veil along the shrine's broken walls. Not a barrier. A warning.
She felt it before she heard it.
Footsteps—deliberate, familiar.
"You're terrible at staying gone," came Shigen's voice from the treeline.
Aoi didn't turn. "You're worse at listening."
He stepped into the moonlight, wrapped in a travel cloak, moving more carefully than he liked. His shadow stretched long behind him, thinner than it should have been.
"You shouldn't be moving yet," she said.
"I'm walking," he replied. "Very slowly. That counts."
She sighed, finally standing. "If they followed you—"
"They didn't," he said. "And if they had, you'd already know."
That was annoyingly true.
They stood there for a moment, neither quite willing to close the distance.
"Why did you come?" Aoi asked.
Shigen reached into his cloak and produced something small, wrapped in cloth.
"A thank you," he said, unfolding it to reveal a carefully carved charm—simple, wooden, etched with a Nara shadow pattern. "And a warning."
Her gaze lingered on the carving longer than she meant it to.
"From who?" she asked.
"My brother," Shigen said. "He knows."
That made her very still.
"Then I have to leave," Aoi said immediately.
"No," Shigen replied just as quickly. "You have to decide."
She turned to face him fully now, eyes sharp. "Decide what?"
"Whether you keep running alone," he said, "or whether you let someone see where you're going."
The frost around the shrine crept outward, reacting to her chakra. Aoi didn't notice.
"You don't understand," she said quietly. "Where I go, people die."
Shigen shook his head. "Where you go, people survive. I'm standing proof."
Aoi looked at him then—not as a shinobi, not as a fugitive, but as a man who should have been a corpse and wasn't.
And for the first time since the war began, she felt something dangerous settle in her chest.
Not fear.
Hope.
"I won't stay," she said at last.
Shigen smiled faintly. "I didn't ask you to."
The frost receded.
And somewhere far away, the war that had ended continued to cast its shadow—quietly, patiently, waiting for what came next.