PRL Serials

Many preparations were made on Wiis for the coming Triple Night, when no light from the two suns of Wiis would reach the planet’s surface during a standard daylight cycle. The last one occured fifteen trounts, or about twenty eight years RET, ago and the military imposed a strict curfew, barring civilians from leaving their homes from sundown the night before the eclipse, until the suns rose the following day. 

There are many stories told of what happens during an eclipse, when most Rhasdwiis stay indoors and pray to the stars to ward off the evil D- who are known to stalk the night. Some say the D- feed on the bodies of Rhasdwiis victims and the D- are believed to be behind any mysterious disappearance or murder of a Rhasdwiis that goes unsolved. During an eclipse, some say the D- perform twisted rituals to the moon that blocks the light of the stars and they hope to lock the planet in permanent darkness so they can rule the planet and use the Rhasdwiis like livestock. 

Riswin Hojar grew up with these stories in the mountains of Broman where she lived in her mother’s house and worked in the technology repair business that she operated. She never quite understood why people panicked when an eclipse occurred. It was definitely a shock when the suns never come as you expect, but it was just darkness. They experienced darkness regularly and the D- hadn’t managed to lock the planet in permanent darkness. 

The home of Riswin’s mother and the family business is equipped for barricading against the Triple Night, though in all of the trounts that the Hojar family has lived in the Broman mountains, there has never been any incident during the eclipse and no one in the family had ever seen a D- in person. This is true for the average Rhasdwiis, and lockdown procedures during the eclipse are largely done out of an abundance of caution and to reassure those who believe in ancient myths and legends that describe the D- as monsters empowered by the darkness. 

It was all just children’s stories to Riswin and she was resentful that she’d lose an entire day of business at the repair shop. During the last Triple Night, she was much younger and back then she was happy for the day off to do nothing, but her siblings told scary stories that made her afraid of the dark and prompted her to use a nightlight.

As she barricaded the repair shop, she laughed at the fear she experienced when her siblings told stories during the eclipse of what dwelled in the dark. One story that was particularly scary to her was one about the D- twins, Eli and Alo, two males who supposedly wandered the dark mountains in search of children.

“The twins are tall,” Riswin’s older sister told the Hojar children old enough for such stories during the last eclipse as they gathered in the family room of their home. “They have long arms and the pouches on their chests are loose and sagging. They’re not old, but they are breeding D-, so their pouch got saggy a long time ago and they have to always wear a shirt or they would trip over the skin. The D- males have to have kids as soon as they are able, their own parents make babies with them because they want to make as many D- as they can so there’s eventually more of them than us. And you know what happens when there’s more of them than us?”

Riswin’s sister looked around at her siblings who looked at her with wrapt attention.

“They’re gonna come after us, and they’re gonna eat the young, weak Rhasdwiis. Like Riswin’s size, you’re a snack to them. If they ever come to the Hojar house and slip in through the barricades, they would smell Riswin, young Rhasdwiis blood is like a treat to them and they can sniff it far off, and eat her in her sleep before she ever woke up.”

This sent chills down Riswin’s spine as a youth and as she locked down the repair shop in her young adulthood, she chuckled to herself for ever having believed any of it. 

“Eli and Alo are breeders,” Riswin’s sister continued. “They’ve had so many babies, but the D- don’t let them raise their own babies because D- men are dumber than the average Rhasdwiis man. But Eli and Alo got mad. They had all these babies that were taken from them, and when they got old enough, they killed their parents and ran away to the mountains. People say the D- hate the mountains because there’s not enough caves up here for them to hide. But Eli and Alo have lived here so long, it was the only place they were safe from the other D- who wanted to kill them for killing their parents. And since Eli and Alo have been in the mountains, little Rhasdwiis children have gone missing more and more every trount. They steal the children who go wandering around in the dark and they put them in their pouches that are big enough for six, maybe eight young Rhasdwiis, and drag then back to where ever it is they live. They try to take care of them like their own children, but everytime the children disobey, Eli and Alo rip off a part of them and eat it. None of the children survive for long.”

The story was enough to make Riswin uncomfortable around adult Rhasdwiis males who like children; she’d figured that any man could be so desperate for children that he might kidnap her and take her away from her family. But what creeped her out the most was the physical description of Eli and Alo. They were said to be long and thin with stick arms and legs with sickly white skin that hung off their bodies like slack rubber. Their faces were wrinkled and old, dry like paper. Their eyes were beady black and sometimes glowed red, like four dots in the darkness. They were hairless with shiny bald heads that reflected moonlight. Riswin often had nightmares of finding herself in complete darkness and panicking when she saw the four red dots floating in the distance and approaching her. 

As she finished locking down the shop, Riswin stood outside the building. The suns were setting on the last daylight she would see for three nights. She chuckled to herself, at her younger self. And then at the people her age and older, grown adults, who still cowered inside against stories of the D- that occured so long ago – if they actually happened – that no one knew a person with first hand experience of an encounter with the D-. Not even the military that braved the Triple Night to protect citizens against their fears. 

She knew that the D- were real, but in the video she had seen of them, they looked like a different kind of Rhasdwiis who had adapted to conditions that called for different things than her environment. She imagined that if she lived underground, her deep red skin would probably be pasty white without the suns to darken it. And their black eyes that glowed red, were just adapted to see in the dark. It was strange to see what could have been an average Rhasdwiis but with starkly different features, but it was all very explainable and there was no reason to believe that they actually fed on the bodies of the Rhasdwiis. It was just fear of something different but so familiar.

“Lock down the outside gate before you come in!” Riswin heard a sibling call to her from a distance and she waved back at them as they headed inside the main house. 

Riswin hopped into her craft with long wings like a spaceship that was mostly used like a car to hover over the mountainous terrain. She flew to the outside gate that was a high wrought-iron gate with parallel beams all along the perimeter of the Hojar estate, and when she engaged the lock down, an invisible barrier engaged that made the fence nearly impenetrable.

As she got back into her craft, the suns were low behind her and there was darkness in the distance that reduced visibility of the mountains around her. She stared into it with a hand on the craft, like she was arrested by something in the darkness. 

Then four red dots appeared, or she was sure that she saw them, glowing red dots that she could make out if she squinted. She left the craft and approached the gate, and as she did, she noticed the red dot approaching her.

Could it be, she thought to herself and she leaned against the invisible barrier. Were the stories from her childhood real, had Eli and Alo come to take her at the start of the eclipse?

She resisted the urge to drop the barrier when she realized the lights were no longer approaching. She couldn’t risk the lives of her younger siblings just to satisfy her curiosity, but she stared at the red dots for longer than she realized. By the time she looked around herself, the light from the suns was completely gone and Riswin hurried to her craft to head back to her mother’s house.

As she maneuvered the uneven ground, she spoke with her mother via the craft communicator and she mostly yelled at Riswin for taking so long to return to the house. Riswin was distracted, but she knew her family lands well enough to navigate with half of her attention, and it wasn’t long before she reached the house and she slowed the craft to land it next to other vehicles that the family used. 

Riswin didn’t notice that as she got into her craft at the barrier and headed toward the house, the four red dots continued to approach the barrier and then levitated over the high reach of the fence. She didn’t notice the dots in the distance behind her as she powered the craft down and secured it.

When she banged on the door that had already been barricaded shut, she cursed as she was forced to wait while her family inside undid all the locks and finally swung the main door open. Her younger sister was there, ready to laugh at her for being locked out, but Riswin was surprised when the smug look on her face began to melt.

“Move!” Riswin said. “Let me in.”

Her sister stood there looking past her and finally Riswin turned and saw the four red dots about a couple of yards from the front door.

“What is that?” her sister asked with a trembling voice. 

“Get inside,” Riswin said, shoving her sister inside and then frantically securing the door behind her. 

But it was no use. As soon as she bolted the last lock, it exploded off of its hinges and the Hojar family screamed in terror at the two white bodies with glowing red eyes staring at them.

“The time has come,” one of the white figures said. “The permanent night of Wiis is upon us all.”

Riswin didn’t want to believe it. The D- weren’t monsters because they looked different. But she watched as the white bodies murdered her mother and shoved her younger siblings into their pouches.

“You are young,” one of them says to Riswin who is still with shock. “You can come with us. Or face the fate of your parents. We rule the permanent night.”

Riswin didn’t know what to do. She watched her younger siblings struggling to breathe in the pouches and she knew that they would die like her mother and older siblings who lay massacred around the room. 

She fell to her knees and sobbed, and she didn’t resist when she felt a hand grab at her shirt and drag her out of the house.