Chapter Text
The wind howled like a beast starved for blood.
A single rolling red eye stared down upon her—merciless, unblinking.
Crimson pooled beneath her feet, warm and thick, soaking into the broken ground.
Bodies lay scattered before her in grotesque, twisted silence.
The moon above was red. No—an eye.
The eye of fate.
White had turned scarlet.
Paper had dissolved beneath torrents of blood.
And innocence had been devoured by sin.
Her trembling fingers tightened around the hilt of a tanto, the blade slick with warmth.
Before she could scream, before breath could fill her lungs, the steel plunged—
Driven not by his will, but by destiny itself— straight into the soft flesh of his stomach.
A choked gasp tore free.
Her eyes snapped open. She was in her bed.
The ringing in her skull roared like thunder, dizziness slicing through her vision.
Her heart hammered violently, refusing to steady.
She was alive.
To others, dreams were flowers of sleep—fragile, fleeting.
But never for her.
Dreams were windows.
Fragments of time. Of fate. Of—
“…the future,” she whispered, black eyes fixed blankly on the cracked ceiling above her.
Outside, the storm raged, wind clawing and snarling through the night.
A rancid metallic stench crept into her nostrils—sharp, unmistakable.
She didn’t need to check.
The wound in her stomach had reopened.
Time was slipping.
Her long black hair spilled around her as she curled into herself, arms locking tight around her trembling frame.
She buried her face into darkness, desperate to erase the visions gnawing at her mind.
Desperate to hide the trembling weakness tearing through her bones.
But the gaze remained—inescapable.
Those eyes.
The eyes of fate, still watching her.
---
Footsteps pounded against the mud, drowned beneath the relentless drumming of rain.
Even so, the ripples spreading outward from his footprints betrayed every step.
He was being hunted.
Two men followed close behind, eager to finish what blood had already begun.
He could hardly move; his body screamed, his vision blurred.
But this was his fault.
He should never have shown mercy.
He had saved a dying man—offered life where death was meant to reign.
And that same man had driven a blade into his stomach while he slept.
He should have known. This was war.
Pity was a sentence.
And he had been sent here to die.
An explosive kunai sliced through the rain.
It should have fizzled uselessly in the storm, but instead—
It erupted.
The blast hurled him forward, tearing flesh, spilling new rivers of red across the broken ground.
Modified tags. Experimental.
He had never expected to see one in the hands of amateurs.
The men approached—slow, confident, certain.
He tried to stand. His body refused.
His vision dimmed, swallowed by a gathering void.
Then it happened.
Chakra surged—violent, ancient, unstoppable—flooding into his eyes.
The black irises fractured, twisting into a shape that pulsed with ominous light.
He looked up at the sky.
His lips moved in a broken whisper—words lost to the roar of the storm.
For the briefest heartbeat, the moon bled red.
Then the world cracked.
Reality splintered like shattered glass, shards of time and space collapsing in on themselves.
He fell—torn from the moment he was meant to die—
and was swallowed whole by a void that defied understanding.
Light returned abruptly.
In front porch.
Rain pounding wooden steps.
Two figures staring down at him—one with hair as dark as night, the other pale as snow, eyes glowing red.
A child lay in a pool of blood at their feet.
“Take him inside!” the white-haired man ordered, voice sharp and urgent.
“We have to save him!”
His vision dimmed again, finally surrendering.
At last, he could sleep.
And this time, perhaps—
without the watching eyes.