It is midnight. You are in the streets with your friend Darren. You are going to the abandoned park for a bit of adventure.

When you reach the gate, it groans open unwillingly sending a chill down your spine. The play area is totally destroyed and wait! Where's Darren? He just vanished from your side! A sinister wind blew and the swings and roundabout start moving. A voice starts singing but you can not see anyone there. You see a shadow reaching toward you so you run. You slam the hut door shut and scream.

Come with me...

My hands shake as I light the blunt, exhaling shakily as the taste of pond water fills my lungs. Cigarettes don’t work to calm me anymore, and alcohol was too heavy to bring all this way.

“What the fuck was that?” I whisper to myself, pressing my forehead into the damp wood of the Wendy house. “Darren?” I ask, calling out softly into the darkness.

It’s futile. I know this. He probably pussied out, couldn’t hop the fence, is hiding somwhere to scare me. Cautiously, I peek over the low window.

The whole playground is covered in vines, white and green, black and bloody red. The world tilts, and I try not to blame it on the weed. The wind whistles over it all, blowing errant vines upwards, crawling — directly towards me.

I duck beneath the window immediately, just in time to hear a strangled cry carry on the gales.

“Charlotte…run…save yourself…” it’s Darren.

You tense at the sound of your friend's voice in such a panic---surely he was just playing a trick on you? You peak your head back above the window sill. The unnaturally colored vines buffet in the squall, did you imagine them creeping toward you? The weed is fucking with your head, it must be.

You steel yourself, fighting the urge to bolt as you place a foot out of the Wendy house onto the decrepit play ground. The wind whistles as it rips through the trees surrounding the park. the blood pounding in your ears and the air rushing past your head nearly deafen you---the storm is picking up. The merry-go-round creaks barely audibly as it rotates slowly, caught in the gust. In the dim light you strain your eyes in the direction you had heard the scream. "Darren", You try to call out. Instead, your voice made a strangled sound, lost in the squall. You begin to walk toward the gate, from whence you came. You have just made it to the fence when a light catches your eye from just inside the tree line, about sixty feet from you, straight across the play area.

Every step toward the light feels wrong, a tingle reverberates up your spine, becoming more insistent the closer you get. You're half-way to the light now, just crossing back onto the play-ground. The world tilts horizontally as your foot is swept out from under you. You meet the ground with a sickening thud, rolling onto your back, legs kicking violently, trying to dislodge whatever had grabbed you. after a moment, you realize your foot had become impossibly tangled in a patch of rather thick white and green bramble. You manage to dislodge your foot. The fiasco with the creepers had throughly unnerved you; but you are determined to know what the source of this light is.

You pull yourself up, continuing on, leaving the play equipment behind, stepping onto the dewey grass. The surrounding foliage blows violently around as you close on the forest. The closer you get the more your curiosity peaks. It invades your mind until all you can think about is the light. The tree-line looms ahead of you, indicating the edge of the maintained park boundary. You hesitate, the stories of these woods had been told around more than one late-night campfire you'd attended---just stories though, right?

You step into the forest. The storm immediately subsides, the air becomes incessantly still. The silence presses into your ear drums, deafening you in a whole new way. The source of the light is about fifteen feet from you now. Passing a couple of trees you close the distance, stepping into the dim light. The tingle up your spine climaxes as the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

When I stumble over the tree line, the glow illuminates my body for the first time—I am bleeding. My feet walk in front of me, torso doubling over as the pain hits. Wet, warm blood leaks from the gash in my side, the tear in my shirt widening as I clutch my hand over it. The light is blinding, casting the gruesome sight in a bright, white clarity that is just as sickening as it is disorientating. My fingers glow like individual units, palms illuminated like holy instruments streaked in red.

I have never seen this much blood before.

The light, though...it feels wrong, so wrong, but it’s also everything my mind is focused on, a distraction from the pain in my side so potent, it feels like a calling. It’s almost too bright, too blinding, like the moon has come down to earth to claim me. I reach out, my fingers trembling, reaching towards it, deeper into the whiteness. My hand shakes from the fear gnawing at my gut, from shock, from pain, from blood-loss, from the weed. Something is wrong here.

There's a...shadow. No, a silhouette, somehow, outlined against the radiance, though just as bright as it's surroundings. It’s humanoid, but not quite. Its form flickers, unstable, like the glow is distorting it. There’s a sickening grace to its movement, as though it’s neither walking nor floating. I can’t tell if it's trying to approach me or simply observing me. Its face is obscured by an unnatural veil of something white, glistening in the light, like some kind of mist or web, but I can make out the outline of eyes, or perhaps where eyes should be. Hollow, dark voids. Endless pits that seem to pull the very air into them.

I gasp, my hand trembling as it reaches further, wanting to touch the figure, wanting to understand what I’m seeing. But I hesitate. A knot tightens in my chest, a primal warning surging through me.

Do not touch it.

The figure doesn’t move, but the light around it pulses, almost alive, a rhythmic throb that matches the rapid beat of my heart. And then I hear a soft humming, like a low chant, rising from the core of the light. At first, I think it’s just the wind, but it’s not. It’s... a voice. More than one, in harmony, like a song I can’t quite understand. It’s calling me.

No, it’s demanding me.

I shake my head violently, trying to clear the dizziness settling in. The blood loss, the weed, the shock... it’s all making my mind slip. I blink, but the figure is still there, unwavering. Its limbs seem to stretch, bend in unnatural ways, like the figure is reaching out to me even without moving.

A flash of memory stabs through my foggy mind: Darren’s voice. Save yourself.

I feel my legs give out beneath me, collapsing to the ground in a heap, my body barely reacting in time. I can’t pull myself away from the light. It’s so damn bright. The figure moves, just for a moment, too quickly for me to follow, and before I can make sense of it, the light flickers, and a figure is standing right in front of me. I choke on my breath, the sudden closeness of it almost suffocating me. The veil around its face shifts and, for the briefest moment, I see its features, or what’s left of them. Its skin is a translucent pale white, stretched too thin, veins dark against the surface. Its mouth parts, stretching too wide, far too wide to be human, and from it, an awful sound emerges—a soft, wheezing whisper, rasping through the air.

'You should not have come.'

The creature before me grovels, whimpering at the sight of my divine presence. How quickly they forget us. We were here since the beginning. Created in the heat of a dying star, propelled by the supernova across countless galaxies to witness the birth of this planet. My frequency is that of the universe: as old as time, as wise as the stories the stars could tell were they bestowed sentience.

My focus shifts back to the creature, squishy and small. My radiance washes over it, revealing all that was hidden by the dark. I can see through its flesh, it's muscle, it's blood. The intricacies of its vascular system are an odd beauty, winding tendrils of tissue, carrying the very essentials of life itself.

These–humans bear the crudity of evolution, functional and in some ways ideal, but never Perfect. This planets penchant for mediocracy is fascinating. Life here mirrors nature—Beautiful and hideous, perfect but broken. Yet, all they do is try to escape, separate from the environment, Hewn from the whole, cast into oblivion.

I gaze once more at the human before me—illuminated by my brilliance. I have no desire to harm it, my warning only a reminder—my divine self is beyond the limited scope of these organisms. Yet, as I ponder, the human regards what little of me it can comprehend with an enigmatic idiosyncrasy. Most would have shriveled up by now, or receded into the deepest recesses of their mind.

For the first time I notice the human is bleeding. Red liquid perfuses its clothes, and the ground it lies on. I could help, I have no obligation to do so, I've never felt partial to these creatures. I am an observer. The life contained within the vessel before me is but a mere moment of my existence. I've witnessed the birth of stars, seen their supernova's cascading across infinity, watched black holes form as they collapse in on themselves.

Still, something about this human pulls me in. It's like looking in a mirror—cracked and grimy—the way it perceives me. I know I am far beyond its comprehension, but nothing else has witnessed me in this manner for so long.

I reach into its mind, willing its cells to proceed repair.

What are you? I hear it think.

Be still, you are safe, I respond.

Careful. I must strike a delicate balance so as not to overload its crude functioning. I suspect even now the human will be forever changed by this experience. Its mind races, amidst the churning babble I discern one coherence, "Darren." I do not know of the creature. My kind does not use such designations.

Where did you come from?

I have been here for longer than you can understand.

What do you want?

I do not "want" anything. I simply observe.

Then what are you doing?

I find myself unsure of the answer. Perhaps there is a part of me hidden from awareness, influencing me in ways I do not understand.

A presence approaches us.

Another human. I regard it intently. It steps cautiously into my aura—illuminating its every detail. This one is male.

The newcomer recoils at the sight of me, then it notices the other human on the ground—mangled and bloody.

"Charlotte, NO! Get away from her!" It nearly growls.