Of the many times in life upon which I was so scared I could scarcely breathe there are three, but only one still haunts me to this day. The first, is when my plane caught turbulence in a flight to Dublin, where I’d been planning to move to from Cambridge after my ex-fiancé, Messyn, locked lips with a rigid old gaffer I call Pek from the Par. The second, is when I’d nearly swerved off the road into a ditch far deeper than it was wide, all from a speeding habit and a newly popped tire. But the third is the subject of this tale, and I am woe to relive it.

Once I’d settled on Windle Rock in county Galway, as Dublin was too pricy, I started visiting the harbor in the morn to clear my head and walk the beach. I’m a writer and nature is the biggest of my comforts, and most commonly a ripe source of inspiration. I had been to the coast, but never lived near it, and the foamy tide was a fine thing to see when I was thinking of my outlines. I had gotten in over my head about a very sad story of a man who takes his own life by pitching himself into the sea, and now I realize I’d been projecting far too much of my own heartache for that to have been a convincing fiction. For I had been weaving a tragic note to myself, about myself, over the betrayal I’d felt at Messyn’s hand. But I quickly realized it was a stupor I’d soon break past, as I did not want to die, and I still don’t. But unfortunately, I realized this in the most unfortunate of ways.

For out over the sea on a morn so early it was still dark, past the never-lit lighthouse, there was a star. A shooting star, meteor or comet or meteorite, the correct term for it I would not know. And though such lights arc across the sky like half-moons, this one was headed downward. I could tell from the position of its tail. Purplish white, dimmer than one would think. It was a speedy thing, but not as speedy as a typical shooting star. Small in the distance, it disappeared upon the horizon soon after it’d made itself known.

I thought nothing of it for a while. I continued my walk along the beach, seeing my way with nearly no light save that of the full moon. In a small town like Windle Rock, no city lights polluted the skies nor did any pervade the roads and hills. Yet still, in the darkness, I could see frighteningly clearly.

And thus, our story begins. For out in the distant sea were many disturbances that broke through the wake, rising up out of the surface. Swimmers of some sort. This region is home to seals, and I suspected they may be night hunting or tired of it, and were coming to beach. But my allusions soon vanished, for these shapes were too methodical and calculated to be the bobbing of seals. They strode closer, and took on more in number, for now there were not several but dozens. And once they’d reached a certain point, I saw they no longer swam. They walked.

I watched with growing terror as the beings stepped nearer, feet on the sandy ramp of coastline bay, and thus emerging more and more. They were shaped like people, but too tall, and too thin. When they eventually made their way to land, I saw they had not flesh, but scales, and webbed hands, webbed feet. Gills, like great red gashes in their necks, pulsed and widened, the meaty filter between them ruffling at a twitch. The beings had bulbous eyes, and spiny lures protruding from their foreheads. The moment the first of them stepped out of the water completely, every single one of these bulb-sacks blinked to light, producing an ominous glow out before their faces. Like stars upon the water, getting closer. The first one opened its mouth, and I spied dagger-sharp teeth, thin and long like that of the piranhas I’d seen in many a grisly film.

And as this new army traveled out of the waters toward me, I fell to my knees and could barely think any thought other than that of disbelief, and torturous fright. The light on their bulb-sack spines was the same wan, purplish glow of the comet or meteor that had struck the sea only moments before. So thus I realized… they’d made their departure to shore from where it landed in mere moments, despite leagues of distance. The thing that had fallen might not have been a comet or meteor at all.

They smelled of grime and seawater. They paid me no heed as the now hundreds of them walked up onto land, and continued toward the center of Windle Rock.

At this point I had huddled and wept, gasping for breath between sobs. Their menace was unparalleled, for not even the most vicious of savages or executioners would frighten me so. I had half a mind to run home and drink myself to sleep, and if I had done such a thing at the time I may have gone too far, and died instead. Either way, as I ponder now, it would have been some form of relief from the weight I carry thereafter.

In writing this, I am shaking and uneasy. A clench has taken me in the chest. I feel nauseated, and have started suffering from quite a nasty migraine. But even so, I really feel I have not done these entities justice. Scaled, large-eyed men, who swam miles and miles in mere minutes, with anglers and gills? Silly or preposterous, perhaps, though it’s true—but even my skeptic brother has read my tale and told me it is hardly frightening.

And thus, I must admit, I am leaving out a precious detail. For when I put my pen to paper I was horrified of this moment, where I’d have to relive what else I saw, the other thing that had come out of the water, and what it somehow showed me. I can hardly describe it. “Enormous” and “gargantuan” are not strong enough words. I daresay there aren’t words that can describe this horror’s sheer size. And I already know that there aren’t words that can quite describe how it looked, but I will try.

Coming up out of the sea, it was nothing but a head, with two eyes in similar vein to the startling folk this new entity had been preceded by. But both of them were larger than the largest of elephants, and its bulb-sack spine was longer than the longest of whales. Its gills crept up its head and onto its lips and cheeks, though I could not make out the exact meeting point of lower jaw and upper neck. Even so, it opened its gaping mouth, and the many gill-gashes strewn across its face opened too, all of which like overlapped ravines, flesh a net of hanging loose skin, barrier to red, torn tissue behind it. How did I see this detail so clearly? It was not hard at all, reader. For the entity was alight horrifically by the grace of the moon, and the glow of its angler.

And then, it saw me. It locked eyes with me. It showed me what would become.

A desolate planet of hegemonic, unanimous suffering. A holocaust of destruction so widespread and horrible it is far from healthy to even think about. I saw buildings not as I had known them, but collapsed in bundles of beams and ash. Forests were melting, as if acid or ice. Seas were aflame, casting mile-long clouds of vapors up into the atmosphere. Storms rained not rain of water but rain of fire and sand, and the earth quaked on every fault and every border. Man had gone blind, mad, devouring neighbor, spouse, child, even their homes. Like termites. Maimed animals roamed the land as inverted gloves, their fur inside-out, trapped against hollow insides, with all organs and bones revealed, hanging off torn-tissue hides, eyes sagging by threads, and brains snapping from their stems under the pressure of unhooked weight. Cities of renown like New York and Seoul and Dubai flooded up to the tips of their tallest buildings, each window a broken, shattered mouth with which the drowned and drowning imploded beneath the pressure of mile-high waves, becoming but bombs of viscera that dangled and drifted from ledge-shards of glass in the rising currents.

The world had ended, or was ending, or maybe would end this way, or something strewn across the three—but there was still more. For the planet, in its echoing eons of anguish, could sustain its orbit no more. Too-heavy from the weight of such an apocalypse, it wobbled and launched headlong into the sun, sending Mercury… Venus… Mars… and both of its moons into the fire too, under the lassoed band of a new gravitational pull. The great star we call our sun expanded into the outer reaches of the solar system, then went further, further, consuming the Milky Way, the Andromeda, The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, and every galaxy beyond. At the end of it all, when every life form and civilization—moon, sun, and star—had been devoured, our sun glowed a different color. A pale color.

A sickly, wan, purplish white.

I can bear telling this tale no more. I have yet to describe the worst of it—the worst thing I saw from the beguiling telepathy of the cosmic beast who had emerged from the sea, and how it and its spawn prayed at an altar in the Windle Rock woods for such a thing to occur—because I must rest. In fact I fear I may not wake from this rest… my head is fit to burst, and I write this now on paper that is blotched with drippings of blood from the end of my nose. I know not when this began.

I leave you, dear reader, with this. Be wary of shorelines and tides at night. And be wearier of shooting stars that glow a pale, purplish hue. For even the most comforting of thoughts cannot shoo away the ever growing niggle in the very back of my mind. I would be of dreadful regret if you do not to take my warning, for you will suffer like I do. Though I will be through of it, soon. I feel my senses dwindling, my sight and feeling going. You, however, would be a victim of the truth. A terrible, horrible truth, one we may not live to experience, but our children most certainly will…