The Eye That Never Blinks

The wind on the surface wasn’t really wind.

It was the breath of something much larger, moving through the buildings like a machine made of steel and bone.

Hiyoru walked carefully, each step quiet, her eyes lowered. She avoided staring at the cameras fixed to every corner — circular eyes with glass irises, blinking in rhythms that ignored all logic. Some blinked too fast, like a nervous tic. Others stayed wide open, drying out, as if refusing to rest.

That was how the system watched.

Not by what you did.

But by what you didn’t.

Dead Spring was closed at her side, but the flowers hidden within pulsed faintly — like hearts beating out of time with her own. The newest one carried the ghost of a white tear from the sublevel. It was small, delicate, yet somehow heavier than anything she could carry.

She turned into a narrow street where the asphalt had caved in, spiraling into itself. At the center stood a man, completely still, staring at nothing. His eyes glowed with that synthetic violet of the network.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

But his lips never moved.

The voice pressed into her mind directly. Hiyoru’s silence was instinctive, but it didn’t protect her. The air thickened, her skull ached, and she felt thoughts that weren’t hers pressing in, searching for cracks.

You don’t belong to this system, the faceless voice whispered again.

But another voice — deeper, colder — cut across it:

You were born from it.

The man turned his face.

Where skin should have been, there was only a mirror.

And in that mirror, Hiyoru saw not herself, but the child with sewn lips — the one from the beginning.

The child raised a hand. The spiral street rippled and bent, folding inward like water being sucked down a drain.

Hiyoru staggered back. The ground cracked open beneath her, but below there was no fall, no end. Only a black void.

The child — or its reflection — whispered:

“The first lie… was never yours.”

The spiral collapsed into itself, snapping shut. When she looked again, the street was whole. Empty.

The man was gone.

A soft hum filled the air.

The walls lit up with lines of red, sharp as nerves, burning into symbols she couldn’t read.

Then a voice — flat, mechanical — spoke:

“Unit Tsukari-Hiyoru. Target confirmed. Instability rising. Immediate termination authorized.”

From both ends of the street, they appeared.

Autómata.

Faster than the first one she had fought. Their limbs were too long, their hands split into blades. Their eyes blinked in strange patterns, and the rhythm made the air itself vibrate.

Hiyoru snapped Dead Spring open.

Three flowers bloomed.

And it rained.

The storm fell not onto the ground, but onto the machines. Metal hissed, searing, a sickly sweet smell filling the air. One machine collapsed under the burning weight, but the other pushed forward through the storm. Its blade cut deep into her shoulder.

Pain shot sharp and fast — but Dead Spring reacted on its own.

One flower died. It crumbled instantly, releasing black dust into the air.

The dust touched the machine’s body.

And it froze.

Not broken — not destroyed.

Just… petrified.

The second one paused. Its head twitched. And then, like an order had been revoked, it stepped back into the mist and vanished.

Her shoulder bled slowly, but the blood was not red. It was thick, old — the color of fading ink.

Hiyoru leaned against a wall, closing Dead Spring.

The faceless voice returned, softer this time, clearer:

“Now you see. They don’t fear the lie itself… They fear what lies beneath it.”

She wanted to ask what that meant. She wanted to demand answers. But she understood, deep down, that this was not a dialogue. It was a warning.

And like every warning, it had come too late.

The scarred sky split open.

For the first time, something began to descend.

And Hiyoru knew — with no hesitation — that the original lie was coming for her.

Long before she could remember what it truly was.

     The sky above Kaiyn tore open like an old scar that had never truly healed.

From the wound did not fall light, nor shadow, but something heavier — a sound made solid, a weight of intent that bent the world around it. Towers twisted like wax caught in invisible fire, melting without heat. And the cameras scattered across the city turned their gaze upward, all at once, like eyes recognizing the face of their true master.

Hiyoru didn’t run.

There was nowhere left to run.

She only clutched Dead Spring, trembling in her hands — trembling as if it had recognized the truth long before she did.

From the wound descended a shape without a name. Sometimes it looked almost human, sometimes a storm of symbols, sometimes nothing at all. With every shift, a false memory bloomed inside Hiyoru’s mind: a birthday that was never hers, a mother she had never seen, a stranger’s smile wearing her name.

The world was no longer offering facts.

Only versions.

The creature never spoke, but its presence pressed into her like a whisper carried on bone:

“The lie that gave birth to all the others.”

The ground cracked open, lines spreading outward until a circle formed around Hiyoru. Inside it, the spiral symbols of the mirror-man glowed faintly, reappearing as if they had been waiting for this moment.

Her shoulder burned where the cut remained, but the blood was no longer dark. It shimmered silver now, reflecting the broken sky above.

“So… it wasn’t me,” she whispered, the words slipping out before she could hold them back.

The creature shifted, its form quivering as if in reply.

And then the child appeared again — the one with her mouth sewn shut.

But this time she wasn’t a reflection.

She stood directly behind Hiyoru.

Small. Thin. The stitches across her lips twitching, straining to burst open.

Instinct raised Dead Spring.

One of its flowers opened, though she hadn’t spoken a single lie. Rain poured down on the child.

But the child didn’t vanish.

Instead, she raised a fragile hand and caught one falling petal.

Her voice came muffled through the threads, trembling but clear enough to shatter Hiyoru’s chest:

“You stole my name.”

Hiyoru’s mind split apart in fragments.

She saw herself lying in a hospital bed, needles piercing her eyes.

She saw doctors with faces turned upside down, writing reports about identity instability.

She saw a city built on the corpse of a god — Oriun — where every citizen was molded from inherited lies, each one a false echo of something that never truly existed.

And then she saw herself.

No. Not herself.

The younger version — eyes unscarred, smiling softly, breathing freely.

The child.

The true one.

And Hiyoru realized with a crushing weight:

She was not the original.

She was the leftover lie — created to keep existing after the truth had been sacrificed.

The sky slammed shut, devouring itself like a mouth swallowing its tongue.

The formless creature was pulled back into the fissure, leaving behind only a scar — burned into Dead Spring. Its flowers bled endlessly now, even without fresh lies to feed them.

The child reached for Hiyoru’s hand.

Her touch was cold… but heartbreakingly familiar.

Her voice spilled directly into Hiyoru’s mind, not through sound but through ache:

“If you go on… I disappear. But if I return… then you are the one who fades.”

Hiyoru couldn’t answer.

She could only stare at the stitched mouth as it slowly unraveled, thread by trembling thread.

From the last strand came not a word, but a breath.

Her breath.

The sound of her own life, before the first lie was ever spoken.

Hiyoru dropped to her knees.

Around her, Kaiyn seemed unchanged — dead streets, hollow towers, endless rain.

But nothing was the same.

From now on, every step she took would carry the weight of a choice:

to live on as a lie, or to die in order to give truth back its voice.

Dead Spring, heavier than ever, closed on its own.

The silence was absolute.

And the sound that followed was not rain.

It was the heartbeat of the city, thundering for the first time in centuries.