First Signs Of Saint Blood Awakening

Blood.

Blood was everywhere.

Red, sticky, warm, wet blood.

A sea of blood.

It was everywhere.

She could not tell where it ended and where it began.

All she knew was that nothing was ever going to be the same again.

She could not think straight, her head was pounding as if a thousand nails were being hammered into her skull. Her chest felt like it was going to burst any moment, but tears would not fall. Breathing became an arduous task as she scrambled through the pool of blood in search of a familiar face.

"Anyone there? Anyone!" she cried. But no answer came.

"Dad! Aunt Li! Yei Yi!" She screamed, blood splashing onto her face.

"Princess, get out of here…" Came from the dark hall.

Qing Yue froze, stunned to hear a voice, and scurried towards the sound, hope the only force fueling her, moving her forward.

Everything's okay. Everything will be fine. Nothing bad will happen. I am only overthinking.

She chanted in her head, desperately wishing her words to prove true.

"Dad! Sister Na, Sister Chu! Where are you?" She screamed, she yelled, and she cried.

But the thin voice she heard earlier did not reply.

Locked in a glass palace in the midst of a void of darkness, a sea of sticky blood surrounded the girl from every corner, caging her in its nauseous sea of crimson mire.

Qing Yue fell face-first in the sea of blood and paled, the nauseous metallic scent churning her stomach as she crawled on all four and wrapped her arms around herself.

With a haunted look in her eyes, she listlessly stared into the endless void of darkness and waited.

Waited for him.

Waited for his appearance.

As she knew he would appear.

A few heartbeats later, the dark void wrapped and she sensed a man shrouded in darkness and a cruel smile on his lips, appear before her and kneel to peer into her blood-soaked face.

"Waiting for me, pretty thing?" He drawled in a sickly sweet voice.

"Leave me alone..." Qing Yue's sounded like a croaking frog, the garbled words passing her throat barely coherent, as she fearfully choked.

"Go away! Go away!"

She desperately screamed but she saw nothing.

Before her eyes, she saw nothing but red, darkness, and then more red.

But the voice...The voice was still there.

Grinding, gritting, and scratching on her skin like the hairy legs of poisonous spiders. Loud and clear as her own heartbeat.

The next instant, the darkness vanished and Qing Yue found herself standing before a sea of corpses.

Her jolting mind was not able to register what her eyes were seeing. The mangled bodies of children; young, weak, innocent children were piled upon one another.

Limbs, blue and purple, from torture or poison, were strewn about.

And a river of bubbling blood, boiling like a concentrated acid, flowed among the corpses.

But strangely enough, the blood wasn't leaking from the body of the corpses.

No...it appeared...to be seeping into the corpses!

"This...?" Qing Yue had the strangest notion that the nightmare tonight was different, and not just because there were no torture sessions.

No, they were different because they felt more than just a nightmare.

In this dream, she sensed an ominous foreboding. A looming danger.

Lighting streaked across the sky, and as if the last string of her crumbling mind was snapped, she fell.

Before darkness enveloped her, a desperate rasp left her throat.

"No..."

A weak, silent plea. A weak, silent denial.

But no one was around to hear it.

***

Stranded in an unfamiliar land, Qing Yue ran as fast as she could, trying to outrun the shadows relentlessly chasing after her.

Her robe got caught in a stubborn twig, and as she pulled it free, she fell and crushed into numbing ice.

Her eyes teared and her skin seared, the fall drawing more than blood as she got to her feet, leaving a piece of her flesh stuck to the ice.

She could not stop, could not pause. There was a nagging feeling in her heart pushing her to keep moving, keep sprinting, keep running to hide from the menacing presence...

The blinding pain was now starting to slow down her pace, blurring her vision as tears streamed down her numb face.

She felt herself gasping, her lungs burning desperately for more oxygen. But the motion was involuntary as she couldn't think of anything more than escaping.

Her whole body screamed for a moment of respite.

But she kept running, afraid of what will become of her once she was caught by her pursuers. Ahead, she could hear or see no sign of life. The trees were dead and frozen, small icicles dangerously jutting out from them.

"It's alright. Once I cross this boundary, I'll find help. I'll find someone to help me." She whispered the words, convincing herself of a better outcome than what her senses told her otherwise.

She struggled to make her way around the frozen trees as gingerly and quickly as possible, trying not to incur another wound to slow her down even more.

And as the warm breath of her pursuers brushed against her nape, goosebumps formed over her bare arms. Terrified out of her mind, she shuffled forward, her wild eyes and turbulent mind screaming for familiar grounds.

But what she saw...

Her pulse quickened and her stomach tightened as nothing but a frozen and desolate landscape stretched before her.

No...