Wicht von Astert

[Unseelie]

Things changed. Old ladies dug up older and older superstitions, doors locked at night. There were gunmen posted on the stairs. Children no longer went out, and businesses closed down overnight. It happened in other places, too, but nowhere were the changes so drastic as in Astert, a little town on the edge of civilization, a town besieged, first by strange disappearances and stranger deaths, then by nightmares and sleepwalkers...Men ended up in straight-jackets, crying out in terror. Terrified of the darkness, any shadow..terrified of their fellow men. Children, in the night, would crawl into one another's beds, and strangle their siblings. People moved away. People ran away, out into the screaming Hamburg winter wearing nothing but their nightgowns...The town dwindled from many thousands to just over a thousand.

Shapes were seen. Wandering the edges of the settlement, wreathed in windblown snow, wearing mantles of ice. Sometimes men, sometimes women...sometimes recognizable. The terrors that haunted the town were legion, and the host that surrounded them...too disturbing to count. To alluring.