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The first one lands in Texas, out of a clear sky, and by all accounts, it’s impossible to miss. He’s already dead when he hits the ground, his enormous body crumpling onto the earth with a thundering crash.
His hair is golden, and even dead, it shimmers in all forms of light, unnatural, and the same colour as his blood, which pools beneath him like molten gold. His clothes, too, are strange; almost reminiscent of a Roman soldier but exaggerated, almost cinematic, closer to what a director would want for a Hollywood film. He could almost be human if not for the fact that he measured at around ten feet in height.
It hits the news faster than anyone could react, spread like a virus, fueled by panic and conspiracy theories. And once the autopsy results were leaked? It seemed that every intelligence agency under the sun was involved, no matter how much their spokespeople tried to deny it.
Cass didn’t hear about the incident until a week later. Her parents had dragged them off on a remote camping trip; no Wi-Fi, and the cell signal was basically a rumor. She provided a beautiful sounding board for everyone to bounce off of that first week back at school. Stories piled on top of one another, as everyone clamoured to be the one to fill her in, school. Stories piled on top of one another, as everyone clamoured to be the one to fill her in, eager to share what they thought they knew.
Simply for being out of the loop, she became a minor celebrity.
But ideas ran dry. No answers were forthcoming, and experts on the news began to mumble about ‘isolated incidents’ and ‘unanswerable questions’. And the school’s focus turned swiftly to the next big thing when Lily and Josh were caught together behind the gym. The golden man sometimes came up, but less and less, as the conversational possibilities were exhausted.
And then the second one fell.
This time, on a college campus in Florida. Cass was around to hear about this one, first-hand, crowded around one of the school computers at lunch, everyone vying for a glimpse at the newly released photos — grainy, zoomed-in shots sold to the media by the students who’d been nearby, cashing in on their five seconds of fame.
It became obvious they were of the same species. The autopsy once again revealed golden blood, darkened organs, and stomach acid that burned through metal like water through tissue. But they were not identical. Subtle distinctions in bone structure, in the way they were dressed, led online theorists to whisper about castes, families, forgotten civilizations.
At home, Cass pulled the photos up again. She studied them in silence, traced the lines of their faces with her fingers, as if she might recognize them. Nothing came of it, just an uneasy feeling deep in her gut that she couldn’t escape, even as she turned her focus to the upcoming exams. She was far from the events, and they held no relevance to her life, she told herself, there was no reason for her to think about it.
Seven more fell, scattered across the world.
After hearing about the third disappearance, Cass sat on her roof for hours, feeling the night pressing down around her, the stars like scattered seeds she could almost recognize.
One fell within driving distance of her school. Police set up blockades and warned
people to stay away, but crowds still gathered, climbing over barriers for a glimpse of the golden giants, desperate for a real-life look at the unknown beings.
Slowly, they became background noise to the realities of life. Nine beings. No answers. No movement. Just the slow settling of mystery into mundanity.
The world moved on. News cycles churned. The golden beings faded into background static. Cass even stopped checking the photos, and hadn’t heard them mentioned on the news for over a month when the bodies started vanishing.
Cass felt it before she saw the headlines — the tug in her gut, like a memory waking up. By the time the news broke, her hands were already shaking, even though she told herself it was just caffeine. Or stress. Or nothing.
It was easy to conceal that odd yearning when everyone was invested, when everyone had opinions: scientists from all disciplines, guards and police, politicians, even the conspiracy theorists were granted air-time to discuss whether it signaled the end of the world.
She joined the rest of the school in reading news articles and watching the few grainy clips of footage that still remained. Footage that people in high-security facilities had been fired for providing to the media.
Three vanished within a week. One was gone between guard shifts, the steel doors still locked from the inside. Another dissolved into nothing mid-transport, the convoy left gripping scorched air. And the third seemed to have never been there at all, the facility housing it left simply emptied. No breach. No signs of movement. Nothing.
People were rattled. The remaining bodies stayed under lock and key. Police and military increased surveillance, brought in more and more cameras to monitor every second of every day.
As people speculated on the news, Cass felt herself haunted, by waking dreams or memories that didn’t belong to her. At night, she rolled over in her bed, eyes open. Every time she shut them something seemed to flash across the darkness, as though there was something in her room with her, moving whenever she couldn’t see. One night, she woke up whispering a word she didn’t understand. Something with too many syllables. Something that tasted like metal on her tongue.
Cass ripped the pictures from her wall one night in a panic, stuffing them into the trash like they were toxic. She slept better for exactly three hours. Then the dreams returned, but sharper, louder, demanding.
The news moved on again, but it felt disingenuous, as though someone had ordered all media outlets to stop talking about the beings. Independent publications continued to speculate, continued to ask if the fallings — as they were unanimously known as — were a predecessor for something bigger.
Her classmates jumped on that suggestion almost instantly, agreeing without a doubt that there was something coming, even if they couldn’t agree on what it would be.
Cass didn’t remember printing the photos off, but they were there, pinned to her corkboard in a pattern that eyes couldn’t make sense of. At first it looked like nothing. But she saw it again, and again. In the condensation on her shower door. In the mud near the curb.
Always the same branching lines.
In the frost on the windowpane, the lines didn’t just look familiar, they itched, like something buried under her skin. As she traced them with a trembling finger, a word pushed against her throat, half-formed and gasping for air.
She wasn’t the only person uneasy with the whole thing. Most people allowed the topic to fade into the background again, but there was an uncomfortable air around it. The first Sunday of Advent nearly saw a riot in St Peter’s Square when the Pope mentioned the angel Gabriel.
The pull intensified. The memories continued to haunt her, and she found herself followed by a strange sense of déjà vu, certain she had been somewhere, or seen something. Twice, she woke to find herself leaning out of her bedroom window, despite knowing it had been locked just hours before. The second time, she leant out further, stared out into the dark, her heart pounding and whispered into the silence.
“What do you want?”
There’s no response, just the unwavering feeling of being watched.
The next morning, she shut her laptop, turned off the news alerts. She stopped looking up at the sky. Pretended not to see the shapes in the clouds. But the ache in her chest only worsened, a tightness she couldn't explain.
And then, just when everyone was starting to write it off as some mass cultural panic, a woman appeared. A living woman, ten feet tall, with the same golden hair.
She didn’t fall, as the others did, so much as she floated down, landing with a force that shook the planet. Cass watched on news broadcasts as cracks appeared in the earth around her, in that same branching pattern that she couldn’t escape.
The woman didn’t speak, didn’t respond to those who tried to communicate with her with anything other than a benevolent smile. It was clear she was the ‘something bigger’ that people had worried about. And yet she brought no answers.
News stations worked in tandem to document her wander across the world; scientists and diplomats attempted to offer her the bodies of the remaining males, but she smiled that same benevolent smile and continued to walk.
At school, her friends talked about the woman in hushed tones, speculating about her motives, about where had come from and where she was going.
“I think she’s looking for someone,” Cass said aloud one day at lunch, her voice barely above a whisper.
Her friends stopped mid-sentence and looked at her, perplexed. But Cass couldn’t explain it, couldn’t explain why those words had felt so true, so urgent. The knowledge only seemed to be connected to the deep pull that remained inside her, one that only grew stronger day by day, and more painful every time she saw a video or photo of the woman.
She had started in Texas, the same place that the first one had landed, and worked her way across America and Canada, crossing from Alaska to Russia, an unsettling meander.
Cass tracked those movements, spread a world map out on her bedroom floor and traced the path she was taking. A path that was slowly bringing her closer and closer to Cass. As she approached, the pattern began to appear more and more frequently — visible in the bark on the trees, in the clouds above her, even in the lines of her own skin — until she stopped, in the middle of the street to see a broken car windscreen with the same lines, and was hit with both the sudden realisation that the lines were letters, and with an oncoming bus.
Just before she hit the ground, she saw the woman’s face replace the bus driver’s for a moment, that same benevolent smile now directed at her, and a hand reaching out.
The bus horn tore through her, but it was the woman's smile that made her breath catch. Cass stumbled forward, half a second of doubt — and then she understood. The lines, the dreams, the ache in her bones — they were a map home. She reached out, not for safety, but for belonging.
People gathered around, voices shouting and the sounds of an ambulance siren in the background, but all Cass could see was the woman, waiting for her. And as she was loaded up onto a stretcher, she stopped pulling back, stopped rejecting the signs, took the woman’s hand and allowed herself to be led home.
By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, Cass's stretcher was empty. Some said she walked away. Others said she was never there at all.
#
Years later, after the bodies had decomposed and their legacy had faded into questions unanswered, a young scientist appeared at a conference to reignite those conversations. Later discussion would reveal that no one recalled studying with her, no one recalled being her supervisor, and yet her papers had been published, with units and measurements that no one recalled learning.