We used to believe in ghosts.

Somehow a ring of firelight makes everything outside it even darker. We didn’t know what lurked in the woods beyond, and yet… That creeping sense of dread when you shut off the basement lights and dash up the stairs; you think that’s there for no reason? Hell, it’s a survival mechanism.

And I’m not talking about avoiding tigers and wolves.

We thought we were clever with our science and rationality, assuming our universe has to be well-ordered and sensible, demoting the supernatural to superstition and banishing it to a shrinking island of ignorance which we all knew would disappear as we drove our inquiries further and further into the unknown. We thought we could just catalogue everything and then it would play by our rules. We drew a neat little circle around the “logically possible” and thought we had a good grasp on everything within it.

Call them ghosts, spirits… demons. They danced around our little oasis of light, just beyond our reach.

But they wanted in.