Skinwalker Sky

The demons came quietly at first. They weren’t the red guys with horns from old stories. They were black, shapeless things—pure evil that slipped into the world like oil through cracks. They could change shape. They wore human skin like cheap, stretched-out clothes. Underneath, they were wet, wriggling masses of black slime and tentacles.

They went straight for the people in charge. Presidents. Billionaires. Religious leaders. They forced their way inside—through mouths, eyes, asses—ripping into the mind and body. One fat senator woke up choking as a grey alien with huge black eyes shoved itself into him, fucking his soul until nothing human was left. He became a puppet. They all did.

Once they controlled the powerful, they turned the whole world into a slave pen. Factories ran day and night. People bled from their hands while reptilian bosses in suits watched and laughed. Wars started just for fun—bombs tearing kids apart, bodies exploding in red sprays while lizard overlords jerked off in bunkers to the screams on screen. The greys got into tech guys and made phones and apps suck the life out of everyone. Scroll, obey, fuck, forget. That was the The demons didn’t crash through the sky like in some blockbuster movie. They just… slipped in. Quiet. Patient. Like smoke under a door you forgot to lock. No horns, no pitchforks—just these ancient, wrong things from places that don’t show up on any map. Shapeless black messes that could twist themselves into whatever would scare you most, or fool you best. Greys with their big heads and dead black eyes, probing your thoughts like icy needles. Reptilians hiding under human skin, tails tucked away, smiles too wide and too sharp. Mantis bugs that clicked and stared like they were already carving you up in their heads. Shadow things that hung in the corners of rooms, waiting for you to look away, their whispers slithering into your ears like wet worms.

But in Montana, the land had its own secrets, buried deep in the soil and whispered on the wind. Folks had been telling stories for generations—Blackfeet tales of Thunderbirds, massive winged beasts that could summon storms with a flap of their feathers, carrying away the unworthy in talons like lightning bolts. The Crow spoke of the Shunka Warak’in, a hulking wolf-hyena hybrid that prowled the plains, its howl a curse that could drive men mad, stealing shapes and souls under the moon. Out in Flathead Lake, the Kootenai warned of Flessie, the serpent of the deep, its humped back breaking the water’s surface to drag fishermen into the abyss. And then there were the skinwalker legends, borrowed from Navajo kin but twisted by the northern winds—shape-shifting witches who wore the pelts of animals and men, their eyes glowing yellow in the dark, mimicking voices to lure you close before peeling away your skin to wear it like a coat. Grandpa Thorne used to say these weren’t just stories; they were warnings. “The land’s got eyes, Elias. And sometimes, those eyes blink back.”

The truth ran far deeper than surface whispers or fleeting sightings ever revealed. These beings—the greys with their cold, unblinking eyes, the reptilians coiled in ancient cunning, the shadows that slip between light and memory—were no recent arrivals, no sudden invaders breaching our skies. They had walked the Earth long before recorded time, their presence threaded silently into the very weave of its history, its myths, its bloodlines. They were not newcomers; they were the original unseen architects, embedded in the planet’s bones since the first dawn.

.Ancient petroglyphs in the badlands depicted elongated figures with black eyes summoning circles of fire and bone, calling forth storms that looked suspiciously like Thunderbird wings. Tribal elders whispered that the skinwalkers were the first possessed, corrupted by these cosmic parasites eons ago, trading their humanity for power in blood-soaked rituals. Protection spells existed too—circles of salt and sage, etched with symbols from old languages, meant to ward off the shapeshifters and lake dwellers. But over time, people forgot. Forgot the chants, the offerings. And now, the old horrors were stirring again, blending with the new ones, turning Montana’s big sky into a canopy of dread.

Elias Thorne was nobody special. Forty-two, thinning hair, living in a beat-up two-story on the outskirts of Billings, where the Yellowstone River murmured secrets to the night. He used to crunch numbers for a trucking company, but lately, the job felt like a trap. His wife Mara had left five years back, tired of his “moods” and the endless winters that pressed down like a weight. She took their daughter Lily, now sixteen—black hair dye, earbuds in 24/7, always scrolling through feeds that Elias didn’t understand. Lily texted him once a month. “I’m fine.” That’s it. Elias missed her laugh, the way she’d curl up with him during thunderstorms, asking about Grandpa’s stories. Now he mostly drank cheap whiskey alone, staring at the cracked ceiling, wondering if the shadows up there were moving on their own.

It started small for Elias. Late-night news. The president on TV, talking about “unity” or whatever, but his eyes looked wrong—too shiny, like wet glass. Then the face flickered, just for a second. Long grey skull underneath. No mouth really, just a slit leaking something dark. Elias paused the stream, backed it up, played it again. Nothing. He laughed at himself, called it burnout. But the laugh didn’t feel real. That night he dreamed of Flessie rising from Flathead Lake, only it wasn’t a lake monster anymore—it had grey skin and black eyes, and it whispered his name in a voice like cracking ice. He woke up sweating, the air in his room thick with the scent of wet earth and decay, like something had been standing at the foot of his bed.

Down the block, Sarah Wilkins worked doubles at the truck-stop diner off I-90. Thirty-eight, tired eyes, hands rough from years of plates and bleach. She’d grown up on the rez, half-Crow, half-white, listening to her grandma weave tales of skinwalkers that could imitate a loved one’s cry to draw you into the woods. Sarah had laughed it off back then, but now… now she believed. Her son Tommy was ten, obsessed with scary movies—Insidious, The Conjuring, all that “something’s in the house” stuff. Lately he’d been drawing pictures on notebook paper: people with extra arms, eyes like black holes, labels in shaky kid handwriting. “They live in the Further now.” But one drawing was different—a big wolf-thing with sloped shoulders and a hyena grin, labeled “Shunka.” Sarah asked where he got the name. Tommy shrugged, his voice small. “Heard it in my head, Mom. It says it’s hungry. Says it’ll protect us if we let it in.”

Sarah’s grandma was Crow, used to tell stories about the Crazy Mountains—how the peaks were cursed, how people who went in came out wrong, babbling about headless ghosts and demons in the fog. “Draw a circle of ash from a sacred fire,” Grandma would say, “chant the old words: ‘Aho, spirits, stay beyond the ring.’ It’ll hold ’em back.” Sarah always thought it was just old family talk. Now she wasn’t sure. She’d started sketching crude protection spells on the kitchen table—circles with intersecting lines, symbols from faded books she’d dug out of storage. But they felt flimsy, like drawing on fog.

The takeover wasn’t loud at first. Just powerful people changing. A senator on C-SPAN suddenly speaking in a voice that sounded like two people talking at once. A tech CEO whose shadow didn’t match his body—longer, thinner, moving wrong. Boardrooms started smelling like burnt hair and old pennies. Then the rules changed. Wages froze. Overtime became mandatory. Phones got new updates that made your head hurt if you tried to look away. Wars kicked off over nothing—missiles lighting up the sky while lizard-faced generals watched from bunkers, grinning. But in Montana, the possessions hit closer to home. Ranchers reported cattle mutilated in perfect circles, organs gone, no blood spilled—like summoning rituals gone wrong. Hikers in the Beartooths vanished, their screams echoing like skinwalker calls, only to reappear days later with yellow eyes and twisted grins.

Elias saw it happen to his boss, Mr. Hargrove. Used to be a loud, back-slapping guy. Now he sat in meetings with his head tilted too far, tongue flicking out quick like a snake tasting the air. One night Elias stayed late fixing a report. Heard scratching in the ceiling vents. Looked up—something mantis-shaped skittered across the tiles, compound eyes glinting under the fluorescent buzz. Hargrove walked in right after, smiling too wide. “Working hard, Elias?” His breath smelled like sulfur and rotting meat. Elias swore he saw the man’s shadow stretch, like a Thunderbird’s wing, blocking the light for a second. “You feel it too, don’t you?” Hargrove whispered, his voice layering with something deeper, raspier. “The pull. The hunger. Join us. We can make the pain stop.” Elias backed away, heart pounding, the air growing colder, thicker, like the room was filling with unseen fog.

Sarah’s breaking point came when Tommy disappeared. Not kidnapped—gone. She found his bedroom closet door open, the air inside cold and thick like freezer burn. She screamed his name, stepped in, and the world tilted. She wasn’t in the house anymore. She was somewhere else—gray fog, crooked hallways that bent the wrong way, distant screams that sounded like laughter. Tommy was there, curled up, a reptilian thing coiled around him like a boa, whispering promises in a voice that made her skin crawl. “Power. Safety. Just let go.” But in the fog behind them, something bigger moved—Shunka Warak’in shape, eyes glowing, waiting. And farther back, a skinwalker silhouette, pelt dripping like fresh kill, mimicking Tommy’s voice: “Mom? Help me, Mom.” Sarah’s blood ran cold. She remembered Grandma’s words, traced a hasty protection circle in the dirt with her shoe, muttering the chant under her breath. “Aho, spirits… stay beyond the ring.” The fog recoiled just enough. She grabbed her son, dragged him back through whatever door she’d come through. They woke up on the bedroom floor, gasping. Tommy had claw marks on his arm that looked like wolf tracks. “It hurt, Mom,” he whimpered, tears streaking his face. “But it promised to make me strong.”

Word got around slow. People in diners, gas stations, church basements. “You seeing this shit too?” Yeah. They were. A mechanic whose tools floated when no one was looking. A nurse whose patients’ shadows tried to choke them at night. Elias and Sarah met at one of those groups—folding chairs, bad coffee, people trading stories like war wounds. Elias shared his dream of Flessie; Sarah talked about the skinwalker in the fog. “These things… they’re not just aliens,” Sarah said one night over lukewarm coffee, her voice trembling. “They’re the old ones. The legends. They’ve been waiting.” Elias nodded, rubbing his stubbled chin. “Grandpa said the land remembers. Maybe we gotta remember too.” They started digging—old books, tribal contacts. Learned about summoning circles drawn in blood and ash to call the entities, but also how to reverse them with spells of banishment. Elias sketched one on his palm, a simple ring with runes. “Feels stupid,” he muttered. Sarah touched his hand. “Feels like hope.”

Their bond grew in those dim meetings. Elias opened up about Mara, how he’d pushed her away with his silence. “I was scared of being weak,” he admitted. Sarah shared her fears of failing Tommy, of the rez life she’d escaped but never really left behind. Tommy warmed to Elias, calling him “Uncle Eli,” showing him drawings that now included protection circles. “This’ll keep the bad guys out,” Tommy said proudly, holding up a crayon sketch.

Then the shift happened.

It wasn’t some big rebellion with guns and flags. It was exhaustion. People just… stopped caring. Elias stood in the parking lot at work one morning, watched Hargrove step out of his SUV. The man’s face flickered—grey alien underneath, pulsing veins. Elias didn’t run. Didn’t scream. Just said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “You look like a pissed-off Shunka with a bad suit.” A couple guys laughed. Hargrove hissed, but the sound came out weak, like wind through the Crazy Mountains. Elias traced his palm circle subtly, whispering the chant. Hargrove staggered, his form rippling like a bad signal.

Sarah took Tommy to the park one Saturday. A crowd had gathered around city hall. The mayor was on the steps giving a speech. Halfway through, his skin split—reptilian scales shining wet under the sun. People didn’t panic. Someone yelled, “Nice costume, asshole!” Another threw a half-eaten burger. The mayor convulsed, puked black sludge that smelled like death. Parasites crawled out—little wriggling things that died when they hit the pavement. Sarah muttered a protection spell under her breath, and the crowd seemed to echo it subconsciously—no fear, just resolve. The crowd just watched. No cheers. No fear. Just tired shrugs.

Across the country it was the same. Presidents shitting glowing chunks on live TV. CEOs clawing at their own faces as mantis legs pushed out their throats. Greys flickered in and out like bad reception until the signal cut completely. Skinwalkers howled in the night but found no victims to mimic, their pelts sloughing off in defeat. The entities starved. Fear had been their food. Without it, bolstered by rediscovered spells and circles etched in driveways and basements, they withered.

But when the last shadow thing slunk back into whatever hole it came from—maybe one of those old mining tunnels under Butte, or the deep cold of Flathead Lake—the world didn’t celebrate.

It just got quiet. Too quiet.

Elias and Sarah sat on her couch one night, Tommy asleep between them, a protection circle drawn in chalk on the coffee table just in case. The TV was off. No one felt like turning it on anymore. Phones stayed in pockets. People still went to work, still ate, still fucked sometimes—but it was mechanical. Eyes blank. Conversations short. Lily texted Elias less. When she did, it was one word: “Whatever.” But last week she’d called, voice shaky. “Dad? I think something’s watching me. Like… from the stories.”

Tommy stopped drawing monsters. Stopped talking about movies. He just stared at the wall sometimes, like he was listening to something far away. Once he whispered, “The Shunka’s still out there. Waiting. And the skinwalkers… they remember.”

Elias felt it too. A heaviness in his chest. Not fear exactly. Worse. Nothingness. Like the part of him that used to feel wonder or anger or hope had been scooped out and the hole left behind was slowly filling with gray. The protection spells felt weaker now, the circles smudged by indifferent feet.

Outside, the stars looked the same. Cold. Distant. Watching. Sometimes, on windy nights, you could almost hear wings—big ones—circling high above the plains. Or a distant howl that wasn’t quite wolf, wasn’t quite human.

And somewhere in the quiet—in the spaces between heartbeats, in the long empty hours after midnight—something older than the greys, older than the lizards, older than fear itself, began to stretch.

It didn’t need screams. It didn’t need terror.

It fed on the silence. On the nothing. On people who had forgotten how to feel anything at all.

And it wore the old shapes Montana always knew: a wolf-hyena grin in the dark, a hump breaking the lake’s surface, thunder rolling with no storm, a skinwalker whisper in the wind.

It was patient.

It had all the time in the world.

But Elias glanced at Sarah, their hands touching over Tommy’s sleeping form. “We can’t let it win,” he said softly. “Not yet.” She nodded, eyes fierce in the dim light. Maybe there was still a spark. Maybe the lore had one more chapter.