Ema panicked. Adrenaline flooded her body. Out! I have to get out to Viktor! She turned on her heel, intending to dash toward the main door. She froze mid-step. From the gloom of the staircase leading to the cellar, a crowd began to push its way up. There were dozens of hands, dozens of pale faces dirty with coal dust. In that darkness, only their teeth shone. They were all looking at her, smiling with those wide, cracking grins. They wheezed with excitement at having found a new toy.
She couldn't go down. The way back was a path to the grave.
With her throat constricted by pure terror, Ema turned and bolted up the stairs. Her legs were giving way, her lungs burning as if she were inhaling fiberglass.
She ran. First floor. Second floor. Behind her, it surged. She heard the sound—it wasn't just stomping; it was the wet, fleshy slapping of dozens of bare feet against concrete. She heard wheezing, jerky gasps, and that mechanical, inhuman laughter echoing off the stairwell walls, multiplying into a cacophony of madness. There were too many of them. She felt them trampling over each other, falling and rising again, chasing her like an avalanche of rotting meat with a single goal.
On the third floor, right on the mezzanine, a large window shattered with a deafening crash. Shards flew down the hallway like gemstones.
In her run, Ema instinctively grabbed the railing to keep from falling and, for a hundredth of a second, looked down into the courtyard. In that moment, in that insane adrenaline rush, the world narrowed to a single image for her. It was that feeling people talk about—that before death, time stretches to show you what you are leaving behind.
Down below, in puddles of rain and black blood, stood Viktor. He was surrounded by piles of bodies—slashed, crushed, motionless. His black coat flapped in the wind like the wings of a fallen angel; in his hand, a blade glistened, dripping with thick fluid.
In that second, he looked up.
Their gazes met. For Ema, the surrounding noise—the roar of monsters, the stomping on the stairs, the breaking glass—receded into the background. Only the two of them existed, connected by an invisible thread across the abyss of three floors.
Ema clung convulsively to the railing, hot tears streaming down her cheeks, mixing with dust and sweat. Absolute, paralyzing horror was readable in her dilated eyes. It was a silent plea, the scream of a child who knows it's the end and looks for a last foothold in the chaos. Help me, those eyes screamed. Please, don't leave me here.
Viktor's gaze pierced into her. For the first time since she had known him, she didn't see that cold, stoic calm in his face. She saw fear. Raw, human fear for her. His pupils dilated, the hand with the weapon twitched toward her as if he wanted to fly up and rip her from that nightmare. But in the same instant, he realized the distance. He realized the physical impossibility. The fear in his eyes instantly hardened. It forged into icy, murderous determination. Survive, that gaze said, hard as steel. Get to the top and survive.
That connection lasted barely a heartbeat. Reality kicked back in at full speed.
One of the figures clawed at Viktor from behind with outstretched talons. Viktor didn't even turn around. Cold-bloodedly, almost mechanically, he inscribed a silver arc with his sword. The creature's head separated from its body. Viktor stepped over it and, without a single further glance upward, sprinted toward the entrance to cut his way to her.
With a jerk, Ema peeled herself off the railing and burst onto the last floor. Into the attic.
It was a vast, open space that smelled of centuries-old mold and stagnation. Endless rows of old, gray laundry hung everywhere. It wasn't clothing; it looked like the wet, rotting bandages of the dead, swaying in the draft and sticking to her face like cold fingers. She had to fight through them, tearing them with her hands while the fabric slid over her skin like slime.
But the space didn't belong only to the laundry. Massive, blackened thorny bushes had grown through the roof. They created a maze of pain. Thorns as long as fingers tore at her clothes, clawing the skin on her arms and legs, but the pain only drove her further.
She ran to the end, under a blind skylight.
Here, the bushes formed an unnatural circle, like a nest. And in the middle of it...
Space was bending. The air rippled and shimmered like above a hot road in summer, but here it was freezing. Gravity didn't work here—dust and splinters floated in spirals around the center. It looked like a small, vibrating black hole, a tear in reality that sucked in light, sound, and existence itself with a quiet, buzzing noise. Ema felt the proximity of the thing tearing her skull apart. Her ears began to ring; the pressure in her head was unbearable.
Behind her, just beyond the curtain of wet laundry, a triumphant shriek sounded. They were here.
She had nowhere to run. She was trapped between monsters and the void.
When she could already feel the hot, putrid breath of the first creature on her back, something happened she couldn't control. Her hand rose involuntarily. Her body stopped obeying reason. Slowly, as if in a trance, she reached out with trembling fingers toward that vibrating, destructive energy.
From her throat, against her will, tore the most extreme, loudest sound. It wasn't crying. "HAHAHAHA!" That laughter was alien, sharp as a razor, full of madness that didn't belong to her.
The creature jumped. Its claws were centimeters from Ema's exposed neck. Ema touched the energy.
Paradox. The world exploded.
She didn't expect fire. She expected heat, an explosion, a scorching hell. But what came was silence.
Absolute, vacuum silence that swallowed every sound in a single fraction of a second—the shrieking of monsters, the cracking of beams, even her own breath. The world didn't switch to flames, but to negative.
The space between her and the flying creatures, which were barely a meter from her face, began to stretch. Not by meters, but into infinity. The laws of physics in the attic ceased to apply. Distance became liquid.
Time slowed into thick, motionless honey.
Ema, eyes wide with horror, saw the flight second by second, frame by frame. She saw the figures stuck in the air like insects trapped in amber. She saw their dull, insane eyes, which didn't even have time to move. She saw droplets of saliva and blood that had left their maws and now hung in space like ruby and crystal beads.
And then the gravitational anomaly caught them.
It wasn't an impact; it was a pull. Like when the universe decides that so much matter cannot exist in one place at once.
As the space around her expanded, their physical bodies couldn't withstand it. It was quiet, but all the more brutal for it.
Fascinated and disgusted, Ema watched as their torsos began to slowly, unnaturally separate from their legs. The skin on their gaunt ribs stretched to the breaking point. She saw pores expanding, gray tissue turning into translucent parchment under which purple veins burst.
Muscles stretched like rubber. Long, red fibers tightened, vibrated, and then, one by one, began to give way with quiet, wet snaps.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Bones didn't break; they were pulverized into dust.
The gravitational force was so absolute that biological cohesion ceased to exist. Arms, heads, and torsos didn't fly apart like confetti but exploded into a microscopic red mist. All that remained of them was wet, atomized organic sludge that hung in the air around Ema like a thick, bloody cloud.
And then everything accelerated. Time caught up with reality.
VOOOM.
A sound rang out like a glacier collapsing. The entire attic began to vibrate at a frequency that crushed teeth. The roof above Ema's head exploded upward. Tiles and beams flew into the sky. The moldy laundry that had blocked her way just moments ago disintegrated instantly in that pressure into gray dust and vanished into oblivion.
A huge, dark vortex formed.
It was like standing in the eye of a tornado that doesn't tear houses apart, but reality itself into prime factors. Ema lifted off the ground. She levitated in the middle of that chaos, but she didn't curl up. She couldn't. The force tore the clothes from her, leaving her there naked and vulnerable, but her right hand remained convulsively, unyieldingly outstretched directly into the center of that vibrating black hole. She was connected to it. She was a lightning rod for the destruction.
A barrier of dust and remains of bodies circled around her; the red mist coated her but didn't touch her.
"Enough... I don't want anymore... Please stop!" she whispered, while the stream of energy tore her arm from her shoulder, but she couldn't pull it back. She felt her mind shattering just like the house.
And then reality cracked. Definitively. It was like the sound of breaking glass echoing through the entire universe.
At one moment, it seemed she was floating in the absolute, cold darkness of deep space where nothing exists, only she, her outstretched hand, and fear. And then, in the blink of an eye, the world redrew itself.
She landed, but not hard. Below her spread a sea. But it wasn't made of water. It was a pure white, glowing sea, a surface thick as mercury, rippling without sound and radiating a cold, milky light. Above her arched the sky—absolute, impenetrable black darkness without a single star, pressing down like a heavy ceiling on the light below.
Ema lay on the shore, her hand still instinctively outstretched in front of her. Under her naked body, she felt the coarse sand of a gray beach that glowed faintly, phosphorescently. She raised her head. As far as the eye could see, bushes lined the beach. Thousands of dry, black thorny bushes that appeared in that strange light like petrified skeletons waiting for their prey.
The heat was unbearable, as if she had been locked in a volcanic sauna. The thorny bushes began to reach for her like hungry tentacles. She saw red blood spraying into the pure white sand. There was a lot of it. It dyed that perfect whiteness into crimson mush. This is the end, she thought. They are tearing me to pieces. The pressure of the space was crushing her. But... something was wrong. She felt nothing. No stabbing. No pain. Just that crushing pressure. How is it possible that I'm bleeding but it doesn't hurt? In the moment she was saying goodbye to life, she began to feel a touch. Someone was hugging her firmly from behind.
It was Viktor. He stood there unwaveringly like a naked statue carved from ice. His presence was like an anchor in a storm. All vibrations, crying, and chaos were instantly dampened in his grip. Viktor laid his head against hers, cheek to cheek. He reached his right hand toward the pulsating energy in front of them. The space stopped vibrating. But the bushes... the bushes began to move more frantically. More and more hot liquid began to fall on Ema's skin. It ran down her, sticking to her. Only now, in that firm embrace, did she realize it. It wasn't her blood. The bushes weren't stabbing into her. They were stabbing into Viktor. He was acting as a human shield for her. Thorns drove through his back, shoulders, arms, to keep from getting to her. She felt his muscles tense in spasmodic pain, his body trembling with every hit, but he didn't let go. Not by a millimeter.
And then it happened.