Hypaea

Meteorites can laugh. That was his final thought, shortly before everything had dissolved into dust and the shadow took with her the dilapidated landscape into the vast void above. Months ago, there had been an uproar in town over a fallen star. The grazing field was scarred on impact, but thankfully no one had been injured. White shards were found strewn across the vast expanse, and no creature dared to approach them. The men soon found out why: the shards were insidiously, and hideously, shifting in color. The rancher who owned the field took his losses in stride, and left the shards well alone; perhaps it would shed its alien properties over time and become as one with their mundane brethren. But they did not; what remained of the livestock grew weak and soon died, producing tasteless meat that sported the same alien sheen as the shards outside. There was a poison in the land, an insidious devourer of body and mind. Several days later, the white shadow had come under the invitation of moonlight, stalking the blasted heath with the fervor of a starving beast. By day there was no sign of it except greyer fields than before—one step closer to becoming dust in the wind. What appeared to be its cast-off carapace, much like the shards, gave no indication where the mysterious creature had gone. But the thing had a name, and was a being: a porcelain carapace of petite humanoid proportion, cracking and splitting at whim from the colors within. A soft, coy giggle, accompanied by some otherworldly, tinkling cadence. Gazing thus into her alien eyes—those unknowable pools of vast and bottomless hunger—the rancher muttered in a fit of instinctual frenzy: "Hypaea."