He felt himself falling. His body was limp, his mind was empty. As a new vessel or an old one being discarded, he fell. Dark, angelic music floated through his mind, abstract and aloof, floating high in the clouds of the star lit night, just as he. He heard a bat flutter. His eyes snapped open. Indeed, he was falling. To either side he looked and saw clouds, dark blue in the night, moonlight reflecting off their tops and dark shadow caressing their undersides. Far above, he saw stars in the sky…then he saw the bat, madly fluttering away. His clothes and his cape fluttered around him. His back was to the ground.

He moved his arms slowly, his muscles ached as if he had just been holding the weight of the world for an eternity. He looked at the fingers of his right hand as he moved them between him and the full moon. What had happened? One inescapable thought hit him…sooner or later, he would hit the ground…

With that thought, he was out…maybe he had hit the ground…now…it was too soft to be the ground…

A scream pierced the air. His brown/red eyes snapped open. It was dawn. He had landed in a plain, grassland. The shoots of grass played at his loose clothes and the exposed fingers of his right hand. He heard the scream again.

He jumped to his feet. His eyes scanned the land around him. To the horizon the lands lay, asleep under the stars. His cape fluttered gently in the wind. The scent of cool morning air was blown on the back of the wind, and mist lay heavy on the land. He heard the scream again.

He spun around to see…something. He couldn’t make out what it was but a shadow with huge glowing orbs for eyes. It seemed to be formless, but large. Its glowing eyes pierced the night as they looked about, settling on him. It screamed out again.

He instinctively reached to his side. Finding a weapon there, he took it in his right hand, drew it forward, took aim right between the two glowing eyes, and gently pulled back the trigger.

The echo of his gunshot rang loud and clear in the crisp morning air, bouncing off the distant hills and ricocheting among the mists. The shadow screamed out again as its top half was cast back, it was easily thirty feet tall. It leaned forward, again prepared to charge when a second shot rang out, hitting its left eye.

The glowing orb closed shut and the shadow let out a blood curling squeal of pain. A third shot rang out…the right eye’s light vanished. In a yelp of pain and rage, the darkness of the shadow coalesced, then blew apart in an explosion of darkness. The man bent forward, covering himself with his cape as the darkness spread out under the moon, above the land of mist, below the starlit sky, on the dawn of a new day…he fell…