These aren't the stories your mother told you.

No.

These are the other stories.

Alien.

It was cold that night.

Colder than normal for that time of year.

I remember clear as yesterday, though, how could I not, given that it was when this nightmare began.

I'd been out in the field tending to my flock where I'd first seen the light in the night sky.

It was a fiery speck that twinkled like a distant flame at the end of a pitch-dark cellar.

I remember glancing up at the time and disregarding it as meaningless, the folly of the heavens,

but I'd soon find my initial assessment to be wholly inaccurate.

A while later, for reasons still unknown to me, I glanced up a second time to see the spec had now doubled in size.

This time it held my gaze, and I just stared upwards until my neck got sore.

Within the burning orange, the shape of a dark disc was now visible.

There was something solid in the fire.

A rock maybe, I thought. I considered running to the local town to alert the village council in case it was something more, but thought better of it.

What's the point? I'd asked myself.

Space rocks fall in my fields all the time.

Only recently had I found a large meteor the size of my skull still smoldering

in its crater not too far from where I was standing that night. This was just another

rock. I was sure of it. After rounding up my wayward cattle and hoiding them into their

night dwellings, I set back to my house,

...