Creeping Shadows
Maybe you've heard of them. Old wives tales of creeping shadows that steal children in the night and eat livestock. You might brush it off as a story to keep children in at night. But it's real.
One night, you hear a drunkard rambling on a long spiel about having seen moving shadows. To be honest, it is quite a tale. To bad you are not a child, easily scared. But you make your way home.
You'll never admit it, but those tales have wormed their way into your head. You are paranoid, checking dark corners, but then realize what you are doing and try to make yourself stop.
It doesn't work. The whole way home, you nervously check over your shoulder to see if something is following you, because it feels like there is.
Wrong move.
Constantly looking behind, you don't see the shadows shift in front of you. There is something very important you don't understand, something no one ever tells you, because know one has ever come out unscathed.
They are hunting you. Moving as you do, waiting for you to step into a dark curve, or under a tree's shadow. There are reasons people fear dark forest paths. They are patient and appallingly so. They know who they are hunting and they know how to do it.
By now, you are unintentionally avoiding shadows, as your instinct scream at you to find light and shelter. But then clouds cover the moon, and you find yourself at a very dark, very isolated part of the road. Apprehension and fear threaten to overwhelm you as you feebly attempt to convince yourself that the tales are just that. Tales.
But to no avail. You see something moving in the corner of your eye, and you desperately want to look but you desperately want to run as far away as you can. But you look.
Horrible shapes dance before your eyes, shadows that play with your mind, as you stand, unable to move. You feel petrified in every sense of the word, literally frozen into stone. But you're not. Still vulnerable flesh and blood that is easily scarred, and a mind twisted and manipulated in to unadulterated fear. The shadows loom before you, and you pray for your life to be ended.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, you hear a whisper of You just might get that wish. Finally, you run, as the same voice whispers, We are the Vashta Nerada.