Perhaps if they had mentioned the fangs, the others would have become nothing more than Halloween costume fodder. Like space Dracula or shimmery brooding teen antiheroes struggling with a sort of sobriety and looking for humanity in high school chem labs. Instead, the elders hid this one significant detail away, and in doing so, the others from beyond retained just enough humanity that their stories were relegated to the place where deities go to live long and inspire wonder. And when humanity’s spirituality faltered, they were wrapped in the frantic embrace of conspiracy and kept on life support through the arts. Truth, even the tampered truth, endures all.

My earliest memory of the others is meeting a slender being at the foot of my bed when I was just six. I knew it was a mother, somehow, but I can’t tell you how. Perhaps it was her gentle eyes and soft mannerisms that imparted a sense of safety. She sat on the quilt on my bed and felt along the stitches with her long pale fingers. When I jumped awake and caught the sight of her, she smiled, but only with her eyes, and when she spoke, she looked away and out the window like communicating with me took a thoughtfulness that was beyond the scope of ordinary life.

“Do not fret, young one,” she softly said. “I have come merely to conclude my observation period.”

I remember those words so sharply now, even as other memories from my childhood have faded with time. I can feel my stunned silence clutching at my throat even now as I recall it.

“I have been monitoring your line for a very long time. You are who I have been waiting for.”

“Me?” I croaked.

“You won’t see me again after tonight, young one,” she turned to me slowly and her gaze cut through me, sending a shiver down my spine.

She gently reached out to rest her hand on my toes where their jutted up beneath the quilt and a wave of calm washed over me. My throat softened and I eased back into the pillows.

“Rest now, but you must remember just one thing.” She began to stand ever so slowly, like she was desperately trying to keep an animal from being spooked off.

I nodded as my eyelids grew heavier, heavier, heavier.

“Endurance requires surrender.”

These words, largely meaningless and confusing to my young mind, became like a puzzle to work out as I fell asleep each night, and as I grew up, still confused by their larger purpose, the phase morphed into something much closer to a prayer.