It loomed above us, gigantic and unmoving—an eye so massive it swallowed the sky whole. From one end of the street to the other, there was no escaping its gaze. It was everywhere and saw everything.
It was the sky itself, and so attempting to hide from its sight was futile.
And there was no doubt that it was watching. Not idly observing—it was actively watching us. I could tell that there was a level of intelligence behind its glossy pupil. It didn't waste its time scanning across the entire street; instead, it immediately focused on the pair of outsiders intruding on its domain.
Its stare bled light, but it was no moonlight. There was no warmth in it, no serenity. Instead, it bathed the world in a color that made my skin crawl.
An anemic, pale grey hue illuminated all that the eye saw. It was the color of ancient bones left to rot in the baking sun. The shadows it cast were long and twisted, dancing in angles that made no sense.
I could feel its gaze. Not metaphorically. Literally. It pressed down on my whole body like added gravity. My bones creaked under it.
In that instant, I was certain that the eye was the cause of my body's horrible state.
Its gaze caused whatever it looked at to be bathed in an intense pressure. Both Cacophony and I were directly underneath it, but unlike the powerful Vampire Empress, my body was that of a meager human.
Not only was I human, but I was one of the weakest and physically incapable humans out there.
Even under the pressure of the eye, she was able to push through, in stark contrast, I never stood a snowball's chance in hell.
Effectively, it was like that eye was my natural predator.
All of that was terrible enough, but there was something else about the eye that gave me pause.
There was something etched into it—right into the white of its sclera.
A symbol.
No, I don't think the word etched fits.
Branded.
As if carved by some cruel hand with an unnaturally sharp blade, leaving a mark that never faded. The edges were jagged, angular, and violently deliberate. I couldn't tell if it was writing or something older. But, it honestly felt off. It wasn't from any language or script that I was familiar with, it was more like...
Like it was a mark crafted by someone who cared little for the very concept of written language. It reminded me of a child playing around and creating their signature, all without knowing or understanding cursive.
It was as though it were made as a form of mockery. Of language? Of the eye? I wasn't sure.
The mark pulsed.
Just once. A faint, rhythmic twitch beneath the surface of the eye, like a heartbeat inside a corpse.
Suddenly, the pressure the eye gave off intensified.
My vision, already blurred and unstable, now twisted. Shapes ran like watercolor down a canvas. I saw vivid colors that I never knew existed.
'Ah... It's so pretty...'
I didn't even notice as I vomited more blood or as my entire body convulsed.
Cacophony held my body, her normally calm expression melting.
Her regal, dazzling ruby eyes widened with urgency.
Her grip on my shoulders tightened. I couldn't feel it. I only knew she was holding me because I saw her fingers clench, watched her body move with frantic precision. Her mouth was moving too. To my eyes, it was a fuzzy blur of movement, and I couldn't make out any of what she was saying.
Behind us, the street twisted further.
One of the houses tilted on its axis, leaning in as if to eavesdrop. The porch of another yawned open like a maw, its wooden slats bending like teeth. The lampposts now bent at perfect ninety-degree angles, all pointing at the house with the broken fence.
The one place untouched.
The Empress had also noticed the strangeness of the untouched house. She peered at it with a sidelong glare filled with suspicion. It felt as though the gears in her mind were quickly turning. All the while, her lips never stopped moving.
Once she finally looked back at me, her expression was far different than before.
The tenseness that plagued her beautiful features had vanished. In their place was an unexplainable determination.
Finally, her lips stopped fluttering, and seconds later, something strange occurred.
Slashes and lesions spawned across the once clear skin of her arms. From them, small streams of scarlet blood rose into the air. They floated toward my body and entered through my skin.
'This whole time... Had she been chanting?'
The realization hit me somewhere deep inside the soup that used to be my thoughts. I couldn't feel the blood entering my body, but I could see it—scarlet strands, impossibly thin, threading through the air. They all shimmered under the pale grey light. As they hit my skin, there was a faint golden glow.
It didn't provide relief or healing, but it did make it so that I wouldn't die of excessive blood loss.
The raw, ceaseless leakage from my mouth, nose, eyes, and ears slowed to a cruel trickle. My breathing returned with short, shallow breaths. I was still paralyzed, though, and still suffering from nausea and disorientation.
Perhaps I would've died due to my body rejecting the blood... There was no way of knowing we were the same blood type, or if vampires even had the same blood types as humans.
Then again, maybe that was the purpose of the golden glow. It may have been a means of altering the blood to suit whoever it was being transferred to.
I wanted to ask, but there was no way I could've... At the very least, I wasn't actively dying.
For the time being.
The pressure that the eye exuded hadn't diminished or disappeared, though. It remained firmly in place, ruthlessly pressing down on our bodies. Just because it wasn't causing me to vomit blood didn't mean that it didn't hinder me.
It was impossible for me to even raise a finger, let alone move my body in any meaningful way. It was like trying to swim in a sea of thick, viscous glue.
Cacophony's head turned toward the eye above, her jaw tight, eyes narrowed with contempt.
Slowly, the giant eye blinked for a second time.
And when it opened, the brand on its sclera split. The once-sealed wound oozed a blinding, pure light.
Its shine looked like grace from the heavens, but the reality couldn't have been further from that sweet delusion.
The light shone down like threads of radiant starlight. Due to being placed on the white of the eye, it wasn't aimed exactly at what the creature was staring at.
It hit the segment of the street directly behind us.
There wasn't any sound or shockwave.
Only indiscriminate erasure.
One second, the cracked pavement and twitching houses existed. The next, they were gone. They were cut cleanly from existence. In its place was a white void.
Seeing this, my eyes widened, but Cacophony didn't think twice.
Her feet slammed against the pavement with unnatural speed, her heels clicking in rhythm as she ran. She clutched me to her chest as if I were something fragile, and I was. I was barely alive. A leaking bag of blood and bone that could do nothing to protect himself.
As she ran, the light of the eye followed closely behind her.
In its wake, all was destroyed, fixed so that you couldn't tell that anything ever existed there.
Cacophony dashed toward the untouched house, but the light did the same.
A divine guillotine from the sky, it carved reality apart in great, surgical swaths. There was neither sound nor heat, only the very concept of severance.
Behind us, a street was sliced away. Then a mailbox. Then a screaming porch.
Cacophony didn't falter. Her eyes locked onto the destination. Her legs moved with inhuman speed. They were like lightning as she struck the ground. Somehow, as she went, she got even faster. No human athlete could've been considered her equal.
Her speed was astonishing.
And yet, the light was somehow faster.
As if it could anticipate her next steps.
Just as she was about to reach the final stretch—the very last row of stones before the dirt lot—
The light fell ahead of her.
It landed across the ground like a curtain dropped onto a stage, right in front of the untouched house, carving an entire chunk of street from the world.
The street directly in front of both the house's steps and the hole in the backyard had been wiped clean from existence. An unnaturally white void served as a moat, locking out anyone who wished to enter the home.
The Empress skidded to a halt, grinding her feet into the asphalt. When she'd come to a stop, she was standing centimeters away from the edge of the moat.
"Urgh."
A frustrated groan slipped from the Empress's lips.
The light didn't stop its ruthless advance. Having concluded herding its prey, it resumed the chase.
She spun on her heel and leapt to the side just as another beam sliced down from above, cleaving the very space she'd just occupied.
Anyone other than Cacophony would've certainly been caught by the light. In its own right, the eye's destruction was impressively fast. Luckily, I had a powerful vampire on my side.
But that didn't mean that she was invincible.
The pressure coming from the eye immobilized me, and it should also be taking quite a toll on the Empress's body.
Her muscles, bones, and organs were forced to endure an unnatural, disturbingly powerful distortion of gravity. Like being forced to constantly carry a dozen semitrucks on your back while running a marathon.
And slowing down or getting tired weren't options allotted to us in this situation. Anything less than full throttle would mean instant failure.
She was panting after we'd finished overstressing the Null Street's rules, and now she was being forced to go all out against this eye's light.
How long would she last?
***
Cacophony dashed between the fractured houses, her movement a blur of crimson and shadow. Her grip on me never loosened, even as the terrain around us dissolved under that relentless, divine beam.
Despite our worsening situation, even as our destination was cut off, she never wavered.
Her head snapped to the left, eyes locking onto the neighboring home beside the untouched one. It hadn't yet been devoured, but there was no way of knowing that the eye wouldn't erase it soon.
It showed a shocking level of intellect. It was capable of planning and anticipating our moves, but I doubted that it matched our level of intelligence.
If it did, there was no reason not to simply erase everything surrounding the house and isolate it completely. Afterwards, it could freely chase its prey.
But it didn't, and so that meant that the eye couldn't come up with such a simple solution.
While it may have been smart, its mental capacity was one tier below ours.
For now, the eye had yet to determine the house to be important enough to erase, but that might not be for long.
Cacophony made her decision in less than a blink. She darted toward the neighboring house, one nestled so close to the untouched home that their gutters nearly kissed above the narrow alley. It was squat and ugly, its paint peeling, and its windows murky.
The door was hanging askew.
Rushing forward, she burst through the broken door, shoulder first, shattering what remained of it into splinters. Inside, dust was flung into the air of the empty home.
The house was small and cramped. The wood of the home was old and rotting.
The house groaned around us, creaking in protest as her supernatural speed upset the rotting structure. A support beam gave out, crashing to the floor a moment after we passed.
Cacophony barely glanced back at the collapsing debris. She gritted her teeth as she pushed her way through the stuffy halls.
The eye's light licked at the edge of the house, carving out chunks of the wall behind us. With every step she took, reality snapped and twisted. The house itself was being distorted by the effects of the breaking world.
The hall we were rushing through was twisted and bent. Its shape was ever changing. As Cacophony neared the midway point, the world around us shifted violently.
The walls of the hall slammed into her side with tremendous force. The ceiling bulged, then sank inward as though gravity had grown bored and decided to pull in a new direction.
Suddenly, the already cramped hall barely had any breathing room. There was hardly enough space for a single person.
Cacophony hissed, twisting her body just enough so that the two of us weren't crushed.
Her back scraped along the splintering wall, and I could feel the tremor in her muscles as she pushed forward. A beam of pale light ripped through the house behind us, slicing diagonally across the hallway and leaving behind a jagged white scar in space itself.
Pressing our bodies through the distorted hall, the Empress flitting through and turning sharply into what must have once been a kitchen.
Simply looking at it, you never would have guessed.
Everything in the room was being pressed down upon by an intense force. The cupboards and roof had collapsed into small wooden splinters on the floor. The sky was made visible by the gaping hole in place of the roof.
Overhead, the giant eye gazed cruelly on everything within its dying world.
Cacophony didn't hesitate. Pressing forward, she staggered after being hit with the powerful force radiating from above. Her knees buckled slightly, the floor groaning beneath her weight.
The beam struck again, annihilating the floor just behind Cacophony's trailing foot.
Cacophony twisted her body. The edge of the blinding beam touched her side.
It was only barely, and only for a moment, but that didn't matter.
All that the light touched was erased, and her soft flesh was no exception.
Suddenly, her side became bloody as a layer of skin and flesh was unceremoniously removed.
She pressed her teeth together, not letting any of the pain show on her face. The only emotion that marked her beautiful face was a burning drive for survival...
No, that might not be correct.
It was a burning drive for conquest—for victory that couldn't be extinguished.
She pushed off her back foot and launched forward, shoulder crashing through the kitchen's warped rear door. The rotted wood exploded into fragments.
Now outside, she didn't pause to breathe.
It wasn't over.
The final obstacle loomed—the fence.
The untouched home had a jagged, rust-colored wooden fence around it, crooked but intact. The gap between our current yard and the fence was only a few feet, but the eye's light was close behind us. I could feel its pressure again. It wasn't as powerful as before, but it was getting stronger.
Still carrying me tightly in her arms, she sprinted forward and leapt.
Her foot touched down once atop the branch of a distorted tree for elevation. It snapped beneath as she pushed off.
Then, she soared high in the air.
The fence passed beneath us in a blink.
We landed hard.
Cacophony's heels slammed into the dirt of the untouched backyard with enough force to shake the crooked planks of the fence. Her knees buckled on impact, and I felt the tremor run through her body. She clutched me tighter at the last second to soften the blow.
Then she dropped me into the soil.
My back hit the dry soil like a sack of meat, sending a fresh wave of nausea spiraling through my already battered frame. The only saving grace was that the ground, while cracked and dusty, wasn't as unyielding as pavement.
I gasped, blinking blearily up at her.
She was standing over me, one hand clutching her side, the other held aloft as though still expecting another beam of light to come screaming down from above.
But it didn't come.
The light stopped.
The moment we landed on this side of the fence, the pressure assailing us disappeared. No attack came for us either.
Only silence.
Overhead, the eye didn't blink again.
It stared.
But for some reason, it could not reach us here.
Its light had stopped just before the fence. It didn't dare to cross over as though that was the edge of its domain.
It wasn't as though the light couldn't touch this backyard. All the eye would have to do is move slightly, and everything here would be completely erased.
But, it didn't. It refused to do so.
Rows of plastic swords stuck out from the dirt all around us. In the center of it all was an old lawn chair.
Cacophony collapsed onto her knees beside me, and the blood from all of the gashes in her arms dripped onto the dirt. She was panting loudly.
For the first time, I saw the Empress in a state of exhaustion.
Paying her physical problems no mind, she tilted her head up toward the moonless, watching sky.
The eye above us narrowed.
It was contemplating.
It was deciding whether it was worth it to break whatever untold taboo this world had, if it was worth it, as long as it meant that it could erase the two who had escaped its wrath.