Day 2,496

The skyscrapers appeared overnight, turning the otherwise silent little village into a heaving metropolis. In every window there were always at least two or three figures pacing, flailing or simply staring down at the single storey homes as the occupants inside carried out hushed conversations over old landlines, debating between staying inside, making a break for the outskirts or exploring the new city. Every conversation ended with a brief prayer that they would all still be safe til the next call.

The few who dared to venture outside were often accosted the second they closed their doors, damn near immediately confronted with people-shaped beings who talked like they'd learnt the language from piecing together whatever fragmented media was broadcast out into the endless nothing of the stars. These half-garbled attempts at speech always seemed to meet in either a swift, violent end of the villager or their disappearance. It was hard to say which silence hurt more - the deaths they saw or those they imagined.

At the peak of the city's chaos each house was surrounded by an oceanic crowd of the people-shaped beings and all of them were trying to politely break in. They would push against windows, turn door handles, stick their hands and arms through letterboxes and they were all met with terrified defiance. It came to a head when they successfully broke into three houses whose screams cut off into a disturbingly sharp silence.

At that point it seemed as though the end was truly in sight for the whole village, doomed to die at the hands of an inhuman mob until those who had invaded the three houses returned. They were covered in blood and unsmiling as the crowd parted around them and followed their lead back into the skyscrapers.

What happened next was something the surviving residents described as a haze being lifted, a veil removed, a weight thrown back up into the sky where it belonged as the world turned vague and they all lost consciousness. When they awoke, the skyscrapers had gone and the broken homes were spotless and vacant as if the murders never happened.

To this day there is only one skyscraper in the village, standing out sorely against the gentle hills as a monument to the dead they never found. Sometimes another village will report that they too have been struck by the phenomenon and another skyscraper is born to mourn their lost.

Sometimes the horizon is full of tall buildings and even though the hills are vast, they still feel surrounded.