I grew up in a quiet, gray town surrounded by the Black Pines forest. The name came from the way the trees stood, tall and dense, their needles so dark they looked scorched. The forest had a way of swallowing light, and when the wind pushed through the pines, it made a sound like thousands of voices whispering at once.

  Nobody in town went too far into those woods. Hunters skirted the edges, hikers stuck to the marked trails, and kids like me were told to stay clear of the deeper parts. There were stories, of course. Old tales of disappearances and strange lights drifting between the trunks at night. I never paid them much mind. Not until I saw the light myself.

  It happened late in the autumn of my seventeenth year. I remember the sky had been an overcast shroud for days, pressing down on the town like a heavy hand. There was a sense of waiting in the air, though for what, I could not say.

  I had gone for a walk after dark, something I did often to clear my head. My father used to warn me against it, claiming the Black Pines had ways of calling to people, especially when night settled thick. Maybe I should have listened.

  As I followed the road past the old sawmill, my eye caught a flicker of light between the trunks. At first, I thought it was someone with a lantern. The light bobbed gently, weaving deeper into the forest.

  Curiosity, more than fear, tugged at me. I stepped off the road and followed the glow. It led me past fallen logs and moss-covered stones, past hollow trees that moaned when the wind curled through their bones. The deeper I went, the stronger the light grew, until I realized it was not coming from a flame at all.

  It pulsed with an unearthly rhythm, steady and slow, like the beating of a giant heart. A pale green, almost translucent hue, as if it came from beneath the earth itself. My breath felt tight in my chest, but I pressed on, as though I had no choice in the matter.

  Eventually, I reached a clearing where the pines bent away in a perfect circle. At the center stood something that should not have been there. A monolith, smooth and black as obsidian, towering higher than any tree around it. The light spilled from thin, jagged veins that ran across its surface, illuminating strange symbols that crawled like living things.

  As I stood frozen, I heard it. A sound beneath the wind, beneath the groaning of the trees. Not a voice, exactly, but a message nonetheless. Words without language, meaning without sound. It filled my mind like water filling a hollow vessel.

  You see us now.

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  My mouth went dry. I wanted to run, but my legs refused to move. My thoughts felt stretched thin, as though something enormous and ancient had plucked them like strings on a harp.

  The monolith pulsed again. Images bloomed behind my eyes. Stars swirling in impossible patterns, constellations I had never known but somehow recognized. A galaxy folding inward like a flower at dusk. Vast shapes drifting between the stars, too immense for my mind to fully comprehend. They had no faces, no eyes, but I felt their gaze all the same.

  You are the herald.

  The words pressed deeper, carving themselves into the marrow of my bones. A heat spread through my chest, and when I looked down, I saw that my skin had begun to glow with the same pale green light. The veins beneath my flesh were lit like rivers of fire.

  Panic surged in me at last, snapping whatever trance had held me. I turned and ran, crashing through the undergrowth, branches tearing at my clothes and skin. I did not look back, not even when I heard the sound of something colossal shifting in the woods behind me.

  I stumbled back onto the road, breath burning in my lungs. The lights of town never looked so welcoming. I forced myself home, locking every door and window behind me as if such things could protect me from whatever I had seen.

  Sleep did not come easily, but exhaustion dragged me under sometime before dawn. In my dreams, I saw the monolith again. I saw it cracking open like an egg, spilling forth a radiance that swallowed the sky. I woke screaming, drenched in cold sweat.

  For days, I tried to convince myself it had been a hallucination. Maybe a trick of exhaustion, or a fevered dream brought on by the chill of the forest. But the changes in me were too real to deny.

  My veins still glowed faintly in the dark. No matter how much I scrubbed, the strange symbols etched into my skin remained. Worse still, I could feel something moving beneath the surface, coiling tighter with each passing day.

  I began hearing things. At first, just whispers at the edge of my hearing. Then voices, clear and insistent. They spoke of the stars, of distant worlds where suns burned black and oceans boiled away to reveal continents of bone. They told me secrets not meant for human minds.

  They told me of my purpose.

  I tried to warn the others in town. I told them about the monolith, about the message in the forest. But they only looked at me with pity and fear. Father said I had always been prone to flights of fancy. The doctor prescribed pills that dulled the terror but did nothing to stop the transformation.

  Now, as I write this, my skin has hardened like stone. My eyes have turned the same pale green as the light from the monolith. I can feel my heartbeat slowing, my breath growing shallow.

  I know what waits for me. The thing beneath the pines is waking, and I am the vessel it chose. Through me, it will rise, and through it, the stars will weep and fall from the sky like dying embers.

  If you are reading this, stay away from Black Pines. Burn this letter, forget my name, and pray that the earth remains sealed a little while longer.

  Because when I finally go back to that clearing, it will not be as the boy who wandered in. I will return as the herald of something far older than time, something that has hungered in silence beneath the soil for eons beyond counting.

  And it is almost awake.