Something isn’t right. 

The woods were never this quiet. You could always hear the birds, and the rustling in the bushes as creatures darted away from your loud footsteps. Especially at this time of day, as the darkness of night began to creep over the forest, the crickets were always deafening. 

But it never was completely silent. Not in the forest. 

I’d been coming out here for as long as I could remember, always to look at the stars. I loved the woods at night; everything was so much more beautiful wrapped in moonlight. There was a certain tree I liked to climb into, an oakwood. It was huge, and I could comfortably sprawl out on its limbs. 

While I usually loved the way everything was swathed in shadow, and how shapes seemed to bend in the darkness, tonight it made me uneasy. The moonlight didn’t look beautiful anymore, now it looked like a spotlight on the things that were wrong. 

I crept along, cringed at how my footsteps sounded like hammers in the silence. I kept looking around, but nothing seemed technically out of place. I don’t know what I really expected to find, a dead body maybe? An old forgotten shrine to a God of the forest? A werewolf? Who knows, but whatever it was, I didn’t find it. Not then, anyways. 

The only abnormal thing was that I didn’t see any animals at all. Even the bugs that usually swarmed around me were gone, and there was no indication that they had ever even been here at all. 

I should go back home. 

I shook my head at myself. No way. This was my forest, and I had to find out what was going on. Life wasn’t a horror movie, nothing terrible was going to happen. The worst thing that could possibly take place was that I would fall out of a tree, and I could deal with that. Everything would be fine. 

I walked farther on, my sense of unease growing with every step. I was determined to make it to my tree, however, and pushed down my morbid thoughts. 

I grinned once I saw my oak, its familiarity welcome in the face of whatever it was that had befallen the forest. I jogged over to it, sure that everything would be fine now. 

I was wrong. 

I looked up through the branches, a smile on my face as I grabbed a handhold in the bark, ready to climb. I froze when I saw what was sitting on a branch, on my branch, however. 

There was a… person. They were leaning against the trunk of the tree, a leg lazily dangling off the branch. I squinted when I looked at them, and I would never be entirely sure why. But there was something wrong with them. Their hair was long, too long; I could see strands of it falling below the branch, swaying in the nonexistent breeze. Even from the ground, I could see they were smiling, and their teeth seemed unnaturally shiny and sharp. Their ears pointed out past their hair, and their skin was spotless. The air was hazy around them, and it was hard to get my eyes to focus. 

While all of these things were unsettling on their own, the thing that sent shivers down my spine was that they were staring right at me, practically through me, like they could see everything I’d ever done, all my thoughts and feelings and fears, written on my skin for them to read as they pleased. 

A chill went down my back, and all of the sudden, the silence of the forest was overbearing, overwhelming, and it felt like I was drowning. Drowning in the silence that had never existed in the forest before, silence that surrounded whoever they were. 

With a feeling not unlike a speeding baseball to the face, I knew with sudden certainty that I had to get out of the forest, had to get away, as far away as I could from the thing in the tree. 

Because whatever it was, I knew, it wasn’t human. And I felt like a mouse caught in a lion’s den, because even though I’d turned and started running, crashing through the undergrowth, crushing sticks and leaves and mushrooms underfoot, the only sound besides my heaving breath, I knew it was useless. 

Some millions of years' worth of instinct hit me in that moment, and I knew escape was futile. There are some things you can’t outrun, and this thing was one of them. They say if you can go fast enough you can keep death at bay, but I had found something far worse than death. 

Or, more accurately, it had found me. 

And as I ran, faster and faster, adrenaline coursing through my veins, high from fear and the knowledge that this would be the last thing I would ever do, I cursed myself silently, maybe out loud. I tripped over a tree root that I’d never noticed before, and I hit the ground, hard, scrambling around as fast as possible so at the very least I could watch it come for me. 

And it did. In the blink of an eye, the silent forest was filled with a roaring, a rushing, as my blood pounded through me, fear and rage mixed with awe, with wonder as I blinked, then saw it standing in front of me. 

Saw it’s unnaturally pointy teeth, stared into the eyes with no pupils, into the face that was void of expression save for a terrifying smile that was nearly glistening. It was beautiful. It was petrifying.

It was a reminder that there is always something more powerful than you, something you can fall to. Something you can’t survive.