Fear The Night -

“Elara.”

The rattling stopped.

For three years, the village of Stillwater had obeyed a single commandment, carved into the oak doors of every home: Fear the Night

Not through the windows, not through the cracks in the foundation, but through the soft, unguarded places behind her eyes. The places where sleep lived. Or was supposed to.

They called the lost ones the Hollow . By day, they looked like neighbors. They walked, they spoke, they smiled. But their eyes were wrong—milky and distant, like moonlit puddles. And at night, they didn’t sleep. They just stood in the dark, facing the woods, whispering words no one could translate. Waiting. “Elara

“It’s all right,” the voice said. Not her father’s anymore. It was flattening, becoming something else. Something that only borrowed human vowels. “We don’t hurt you. We just want you to see .”

Elara looked at the hammer. At the boarded window. At the small crack beneath the door, where a thread of silver mist had begun to seep into the room, curling like a question mark. Or was supposed to

“Fear the night, little one.”