An overpowering night. Even with the backbone of stars above its ancient darkness sprawls, swallows up the earth beneath like an oncoming ocean from above. It is the greatest enemy of the People. The night shelters their foes and predators, cloaks the stalking tigers even as helpless familiars are dragged off into tall grass or hides marauding Others, their fierce gazes and fiercer obsidian knives unseen. The night is the first and final God, a beautiful destroyer, merciless and immutable to the fates that play out beneath. The People fear it, respect it in a matter-of-fact absolutism. It is.
They pay little mind to an unfamiliar star above.
They are few. Numbers and abstractions are as far away as those twinkling, cold constellations. These people have short memories, awareness like a mirage over far away sands. But they know that they are less. The People are dwindling just as cool water dwindles under scornful sun. Voices forever vanished and dexterous, shaping hands stilled. In a world so big with the People so few, each loss is a Holocaust. Soon there will be none.
Bodies huddle in the dark as attentive, fearful eyes peer out into the blackness. Waiting. Each breath is an anxious rattle bound by animal-fear heartbeats pounding, sometimes screams erupt and throw themselves echoing into the darkness. Long grass bends, underbrush rustling as antagonizing shapes manifest for the briefest of seconds before vanishing. Unseen Others circle. Hooting to themselves. Preparing. Starlight glints over sharp, brutal looking stone knives like so many lifeless eyes.
A frenzy passes between the People. No prayers exist yet, no gods have been born to give name and respect and loyalty to what lives deep within mankind. Even their emotions are thin things. More instinct than empathy. A frost of humanity over primordial depth. The hoots rise, hands thump at muscular chests, teeth barred and feet kicking, stamping into dry season dust. No rallying cries. No sympathies pass between adults and their clutching, cooing infants. When the Others emerge, all that awaits them is untamed fear and territorial aggression. War is an ancient impulse.
The foreign star observes, sentinel over a dim world. Words-without-words are exchanged. Unfathomable processes respond. Thy will be done relayed with majestic computational composure. The prairie below experiences sudden, catastrophic daylight as golden-red illumination splashes in all directions, like a rippling sea of wildfire. Everything in a hundred miles skitters, runs, jumps, howls. Undisturbed, natural darkness has been violated, and the terror it invokes is absolute. Even the elephants, giants of memory thousands of years long and deep, scatter, turning the savanna into pandemonium as all that lives beneath their command responds. Flee.
The Others are there. The Others are not there. Binary thinking shatters like predawn darkness meeting glorious, gilded morning. The world is burning. The Night is banished. The grass is alive with motion and sound, People falling to their knees, hands upraised by this intrusive sunrise. Silent. No sounds to conjure in the face of this. Unanimous clatter as brandished weapons meet solid earth below.
The foreign star looms. It is the first made thing to ever kiss the soil of this place. It will not be the last. A passageway opens, unfurling with the same practiced and liquid ease of a blossom in springtime. And like a blossom, it bears something within. Many somethings. New, and strange to this world. They stand. Taller than the mightiest matriarch amongst those tusked behemoths. Too many feet for one individual touches down amongst the undulating grasses. The People are laid bare before their visitors. Small as children, quivering in fireball illumination.
The night has been usurped.
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