There's something out in the night sky that likes to latch onto your fears and make them into monstrous reality. Hundreds have died and no matter how much we study it, we're never any closer to stopping it. Every weapon we've tried just seems to dissolve midair or worse, it creates someone's fear and we have to abandon the site again.
We did find that it's only good with tangible fears and, luckily for me, my fear is being left by everyone I know and love and it hasn't figured out how to work that into a creature. It tries though, every now and then I'll see something in the distance that looks like someone I know running from me but nothing too bad really.
You know when you're a kid and you think your parents aren't scared of anything? I always thought my dad was like that, ex-military and tougher than anything else on earth. Then he met the creature while we were walking back from a local bar and I got to see what kind of man he really was.
His fear wore a bloodied uniform and was almost a human save for one arm which looked like it was some kind of gun. It 'fired' teeth and something acidic at us, crying out something that sounded like dad's name with every shot. When it seemed to run out of 'ammo' it collapsed and wept and shrieked to high heavens.
Dad had been pale before that but he managed to mutter out "He's calling the generals." and it made sense that he knew what his fear was doing. They always know what their fears are doing even if it looks like nothing more than a tantrum to the rest of us.
Sure enough within a few minutes the ground started shaking and great uniformed columns fell from the night sky. Legs, I realised. They started beating dad's fear to death, slowly and brutally as my dad started to cry and beg them to stop.
He called his fear a name corporal something-or-other and said it was all his fault. The generals didn't stop until the fear was little more than a pile of twitching red pulp. Then they turned to face dad and started to walk forward. I've never seen him move so fast in my life.
He doesn't go out at night now but the creature brings his fear to him when it feels like it. Dad still won't tell me who the corporal was or why it was being killed because of something he did but I get the feeling that somewhere back when he was on duty he let someone else take the blame for him, or maybe they chose to cover for him, and they were moved to a more dangerous area.
They died because of him and he's still terrified that if the truth gets out, they'll send him out to die too.
We did find that it's only good with tangible fears and, luckily for me, my fear is being left by everyone I know and love and it hasn't figured out how to work that into a creature. It tries though, every now and then I'll see something in the distance that looks like someone I know running from me but nothing too bad really.
You know when you're a kid and you think your parents aren't scared of anything? I always thought my dad was like that, ex-military and tougher than anything else on earth. Then he met the creature while we were walking back from a local bar and I got to see what kind of man he really was.
His fear wore a bloodied uniform and was almost a human save for one arm which looked like it was some kind of gun. It 'fired' teeth and something acidic at us, crying out something that sounded like dad's name with every shot. When it seemed to run out of 'ammo' it collapsed and wept and shrieked to high heavens.
Dad had been pale before that but he managed to mutter out "He's calling the generals." and it made sense that he knew what his fear was doing. They always know what their fears are doing even if it looks like nothing more than a tantrum to the rest of us.
Sure enough within a few minutes the ground started shaking and great uniformed columns fell from the night sky. Legs, I realised. They started beating dad's fear to death, slowly and brutally as my dad started to cry and beg them to stop.
He called his fear a name corporal something-or-other and said it was all his fault. The generals didn't stop until the fear was little more than a pile of twitching red pulp. Then they turned to face dad and started to walk forward. I've never seen him move so fast in my life.
He doesn't go out at night now but the creature brings his fear to him when it feels like it. Dad still won't tell me who the corporal was or why it was being killed because of something he did but I get the feeling that somewhere back when he was on duty he let someone else take the blame for him, or maybe they chose to cover for him, and they were moved to a more dangerous area.
They died because of him and he's still terrified that if the truth gets out, they'll send him out to die too.
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