The veil was always there, glimmering and shimmering in high humidity between the two hills. It wasn't much to look at, just at a glance-corner of the eye kind of shine-if one stood for long. The locals had dubbed it The Whispering Line.

No child was ever released to play near, though no one cared to say why. Hunters had evaded the place as if it were ground to eat them up. Only the whole-timers, then, drunk on moonshine, muttered about things beyond the veil that consumed the brave, the foolish, and the desperate souls in their way.

But one winter night, the frost clawing at the window, and the moon looking in with a low abase, the veil breathed a tremor. And something came through it.

When the last echoes of that scream faded out into silence, the veil itself began to begin to ripple, a shimmering surface bulged like a membrane on the stretch about something of mighty size pressing upward on the wrong side. Heavier air poured down, seemed to press and strangled the breath of town.

People began to step outside their houses, fascinated by the noise. Eyes scanned across hills, and for a moment, nothing else was said. There was no wind. No rustling leaves. Even the crickets, which seemed to chirp day and night during the winter had ceased.

Then the veil tore.

It didn't tear cleanly; it ripped apart like flesh, an open wound to the dark unknown. A reek spilled forth - sugar-sweet and sickly-wrong, like decaying fruit married to burning hair. What stepped through wasn't easy to see. At first, it was just a shadow, far too large for this world, dragging with it the same dark that had swept over the sky.

Then came the sounds: clicking, scraping, and the wet slap of flesh against flesh. The first creature emerged, moving on too many limbs, its form shifting like smoke trapped inside a skin that didn't fit. Its head - or what could be called a head - was a mass of eyes, each one blinking independently, dripping with something thick and black that hissed when it touched the ground.

It did not just look at you; it devoured you with its glance.

The first one it looked at was Garrett Tully, the butcher. He froze in the middle of the road, his face a mask of confusion and terror. His body began to shudder, then shake violently, as if he were trying to pull away from some invisible grip. His eyes went wide, bulging, and then - horribly - they rolled backward, sinking deep into his skull until there was nothing left but dark, empty sockets.

But he didn't fall. He didn't scream. He just stood there, his breath coming in shallow, rattling gasps, staring blankly into the night as the thing moved past him.

Others ran. Some screamed. Some prayed. None of it mattered.

More things poured through the tear in the veil, each more grotesque than the last. One crawled on its belly, dragging a pulsing sack that swayed and squelched as it moved. Another walked upright, its body impossibly tall, its arms stretching so far that its hands scraped the ground, leaving deep gouges in the dirt. Its mouth was too wide, too long, splitting its face in half, and when it opened, there were no teeth - just a void that seemed to pull at the air around it.

It wasn't long before the feeding began.

The creatures did not lunge or attack as most people expected. They did not need to. One glimpse, one whisper, one faint brush of their existence was enough. People crumpled where they stood, their bodies convulsing, spasming, as something unseen was ripped from their throats. Whatever the creatures took left the victims alive, but hollow. Their faces slackened, their limbs twitched, and their voices - that they spoke at all were mere garbled echoes of the horrors that they witnessed.

It wasn't a slaughter; it was a slow unraveling.

By dawn, the veil was still torn, its edges writhing as if alive. The creatures had vanished, but the town was unrecognizable. Corpses lined the streets, but they weren't bodies. They were shells - people with no light left in their eyes, no spark of who they once were.

And then the whispering began.

From the husks came faint, sibilant voices, speaking in a language no one could understand. But the tone was unmistakable: worshipful, reverent, like a prayer to something vast and unending.

The veil wasn't a doorway. It wasn't a mouth.

It was a promise.

And it had only just begun.