The Thing has been terrorizing our town for a year now. It feeding on our livestock. Since all this started, people have been waking up with strange wounds that heal into scars that resemble odd, incomprehensible letters.

I'll be the sixth person to fight The Thing. I'll be the first to return. If I return. I'll return. I can win. I have to.

I gather my supplies: Gun and ammunition, Kevlar vest, flashlight, dagger, bandages and antiseptic, sage, matches, candle. I don't know what I'm up against, so I'm preparing for everything.

I head into the forest. I'm worried that it might take a long time for me to find the place, but soon I smell this scent that's kind of like campfire smoke, and I go towards it until it stings my throat.

Soon I see the clearing. Its surrounded by boulders, and full of little that are in bloom, even though it's November.

I'm going to be honest here: I was expecting this place to look a lot scarier. With all the creepy shit that's been going on this year, I was expecting demonic runes and a flaming portal surrounded by bones.

But this place is… nice. It seems like a place where a friendly sprite might live, not The Thing.

Then I feel something. It's not a ghostly chill, it's kind of a soft feeling, like I'm wearing a velvet robe. It's difficult to move, like the air has turned to honey. It's behind me, I can feel it.

"Well," says a voice that isn't human but isn't frightening, "I suppose another one was bound to come here eventually".

Suddenly I'm on the ground, and the voice is inside my head, it's saying please, you don't know what you're doing, this isn't what it seems like, you should run away, get out like the other ones who came here, you should leave. runawayrunawayrunawayrunrawayrun.

But I always was stubborn, so now I'm standing up, and somehow I know what I have to do like something stronger than me wants The Thing dead, and I pick one of the flowers at my feet and burn in, and the voice is crying inside my head now, and spots are rushing in front of my eyes, and now I'm unconscious on the ground.

I wake up, stumble back home. I have one of those wounds now.

Months pass, my injury heals, The Thing does not return. I did it. I won.

Then it happens: someone says look, there's smoke on the horizon, and someone else says it's shimmering, that's odd, and then iI am in a place that is empty. I don't know how I got here, but I can't leave, and then the place shatters and it is gone, and I wake up and the town in gone, even things that should not have burnt are reduced to ashes, and everyone is dead except for the ones who have those scars.

I understand now, that I did not really win.