u/TejanoLocoDeRioBravo

I live in a small town in rural North Texas, and we like telling stories. We've got a bit of an oral tradition, even. Gives you something to do with friends and family that's not drinking, watching football, or listening to talk shows. The internet's still struggling to catch on here. Myself, I only like it for Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Kindle eBooks, and creepypasta: things I'd have gotten hard copies of back in the day, or modern evolutions of oral tradition.

But we like it that way. We like it here. I've been far enough south to attend some Tejas Storytelling Association events, which I enjoyed immensely, and each time returned home with my wanderlust satiated. It's quiet. It's cozy. You can hear the rain on your roof while you're by the fireplace reading a book, and let it play a soothing score for the words, or while you're in bed at night, and let it sing you to sleep.

People talk to you. People listen. You can breathe.

And you can pray.

God, can you pray.

I hope he sends an exorcist. A real one, whatever they're like. I know too much about the internet's crackpot Bible-thumpers to trust myself to ask around there, and this region's home to some of the absolute worst, so not here either. In fact, I have never felt more lost and alone.

So let me tell you a story.

There was a very nice couple who owned a farm not far from where I live. Richard was German-American, and very far from Fredericksburg, where he grew up. His wife Valentina was even further from Laredo, where her parents stayed to take care of her grandparents after they all emigrated from Mexico. She and her two siblings eventually continued north. Her brother picked up a wife, she picked up Richard, her sister got an undergraduate degree, and finally they all settled down here, closer to Oklahoma than to where any of them started.

I put together this outline over the course of many front-porch Arnold Palmers and a few shared lunch breaks. I'm the odd job guy around here, so I have even more than usual occasion to get to know people on top of being single, and sometimes even get to talk to them at their work, as with Richard and Valentina.

And I couldn't help noticing the inexorable trend northward. Why not stay in Laredo with her family? Why not stay in Fredericksburg with his family? Why not stay in Denton with the University of North Texas, where her sister went? You're never much more than an hour's drive from wide open spaces here anyway, not unless you're smack in the middle of Austin, Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas, and get stuck in traffic. You can go almost anywhere to get away from everything else. It is one of many things we Texans love about our state.

So why here? Why north?

Were it as simple, in Valentina's family's case, as "The Land of Opportunity" or "the cartels", I would not have wanted to tell this tale. These good people were actually extremely fond of "The Land of the Sun", and even missed it occasionally. And were it as simple for the others, including Richard, as going with their spouses, there would at least be other witnesses for me to commiserate with.

But ... it was not that simple.

I am calling "it" Strahlender, because I have read too many creepypastas. It is a German name that means, roughly, "The Radiant One". It sounds a little like "slender", and Slenderman's most famous adversary was "Der Ritter", a German knight with bright armor and a bright sword. And German's guttural harshness, at least in an English-speaker's ear, is a further added benefit: this ... creature, demon, monster, whatever it is, is much more violent than the Rake, and only somewhat less inscrutable.

I think the original theatrical poster for The Thing conveys about the right idea: a blinding light shines out of an Arctic researcher's hood as it reaches towards you. Only take away the hood and the researcher. Leave the light and the reaching. Not the hands. Just the reaching.

It was really abuelo and abuela who'd wanted to cross the border when Valentina was about ten years old. Mama and Papa said it was because they'd seen El Sol Velado, "The Veiled Sun". Or thought they had, because a bright light that devours those who consume the Holy Eucharist unworthily could hardly not be a superstition. That was just older Catholics and their weird fancies for you. But what could you do? They were family.

Or rather ... that was what Valentina's parents thought her grandparents thought happened.

Oral tradition ought to be taken seriously. The line between fiction and reality is in truth so thin it almost never matters. Every reality we experience is a kind of fiction related to us through our minds by our bodily senses. Every fiction related to us by a fellow human being reflects their own lived reality.

And it is a curious thing to live among storytellers. The fabulous, the factual, and the more or less embellished coexist splendidly, whether in the living room, at the bar, around the dining table, or on the front porch.

Yet for all the lies floating around, I've found that the oldest tellers tend to have one or two tales they cannot share without an undercurrent of real fear, and usually reticence. There's always something by the time you reach a certain age. Something you really can't explain, or don't even want to, so much that you feel sorry anyone else has to hear about it. And it usually feels personal, even if you can't say why.

Knowing enough about both folklore and Catholicism to suspect a miscommunication, I eventually took the liberty of asking Valentina what her grandparents' exact words had been. Her quiet surprise and uncharacteristic coldness told me I was prying, but still she graciously disclosed:

"They said El Sol Velado comes for those who take living blood."

You'd have to be pretty deeply in denial to misconstrue that as referring to the Holy Eucharist. But if her parents had been, Valentina definitely wasn't.

This told me two things: first, that she was hiding something, about which neither comfort, nor condolences, nor further questions were wanted; and second, that El Sol Velado ("ESV") was one of those stories.

I don't know what came over me or what good I thought would come of it, but I felt inspired to follow up my suspicions with an outrageous social experiment.

I went to the National Shrine Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a December 12th, its patronal feast. You might possibly face a bigger crowd if AT&T Stadium ("Jerryworld") ever hosted a Super Bowl (the Cowboys themselves would likely not be playing, but still). It is by far the most important holy day for the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex's stupendous immigrant community, possibly surpassing (I leave it to you to decide whether this surmise indicates the idiosyncrasies of Latin American Catholicism, or my total ignorance thereof) even Christmas and Easter.

I parked in downtown Dallas, just barely close enough to walk. And walk I did. And loitered outside the cathedral in the crush. And talked to anyone that I could find an appropriate pretext for.

And anyone I could engage in more-than-superficial conversation, I eventually asked about El Sol Velado.

As you'd expect, most didn't know what I was talking about, and most were polite, although a few were annoyed when they realized I'd concealed an ulterior motive. Some thought I was asking about a weather condition where the sun shines down through fog, haze, or clouds, and helpfully clarified. One fellow, a kindred spirit, talked about descriptions of dim light and occlusion in poetry, which made sense of others who'd thought I was asking about songs or lyrics. After that he and I had a wonderful time talking about all manner of things literary.

But a handful showed surprise that gave way to naked fear, after which they left, often not bothering with an excuse. Two cases bear special mention.

First, one woman immediately turned to her husband, a few feet away with their children, and hurriedly asked if they could leave right away, not knowing or caring that I could follow their Spanish. They did so, although she at least bade me a warm farewell, albeit with a totally fabricated excuse about her spouse remembering something important.

Second, a complete stranger overheard one of my otherwise-unremarkable attempts, tapped me on the shoulder, decked me flat as soon as I'd turned around, and departed without further ceremony. No words were spoken, and this occurred in full view of a police officer. She asked if I was alright and whether I knew the man. I told her that I was, that I didn't, and that I'd probably earned it by being culturally insensitive so would she please forget about it. As far as I know she did.

I felt my suspicion adequately confirmed: whatever ESV really was, it not only felt real to more than a mere handful of people, but they were scared of it, and didn't want to talk about it.

So, returning home, I did the simple math to determine the year in which Valentina's family had left Mexico, and searched up "el sol velado 1985".

There had been two peculiar deaths in their city that year, both people whose houses burned down with them inside. One was considered a tragic accident, the other a still-unsolved arson. News reports mentioned rumors of connection to some bogeyman, which were universally chalked up to local superstition.

But the usual suspects (Reddit and 4chan) were hotbeds of speculation. The more innocent posts ("Someone I know thinks ESV killed some people back in the 80s. Are they crazy?") got replies which contained nothing new to me, but at least confirmed I was onto something: ESV was supposed to be some kind of vengeful spirit that targeted blood-drinkers. Less innocent posts, suggesting ESV was more than an old wives' tale or that the poster had seen it and had hard evidence for its existence, got shut down by moderators, leaving only the shouting matches and snark in the comments, usually about failure to produce any of the alluded-to evidence, as though readers would always take claims of its existence on faith.

Weird, but still no more than an urban legend. Some people persist in thinking that Bigfoot, Mothman, and the Chupacabra are real, and for all I know they are. But where their existence was supported by now-debunked evidence, ESV's was supported by none at all.

... except the silence of the people I'd actually spoken to, their mute dread of a thing whose name should not be spoken lightly if at all. A mere urban legend could inspire any amount of fear, but it would not inspire silence.

So I steeled myself for a mental sewer dive and headed over to 8chan.

Two points of supposed witness evidence stood out as having been ignored, in their opinion, by the police and media: bright lights, and a humming sound like an electric motor.

No other details agreed, and there were the usual complaints about discussions having been locked or deleted on 4chan and Reddit. Then there were retractions, followed by accusations of selling out, retractions following counter-accusations ... but I took this to be the usual inane devolution of all sufficiently prolonged 8chan discussions.

But still no hard evidence. What's more, "bright lights" and "droning hum" are both fairly common alien abduction tropes, and posts reflected this: 8chan had "better" pet theories to shore up than ESV, so many other incidents got folded into the topic. Finally I gave up, satisfied I'd learned all I could for a time (although I've had a strange urge to bathe more often).

Afterwards I did not dare bring up this subject with Valentina or Richard, since I felt myself driven more by morbid curiosity than neighborliness. Christmas that year passed without event, and this was even when Valentina introduced me to the other three: her twin brother Alejandro, his wife Abigail whom he'd met back in Laredo ...

... and her kid sister Solina, who was my own age, angelic, and somehow still single.

We reach the end of events I can recall without enormous distress. Thank God it's Friday. I am going to play video games until the pain in my chest subsides, I can breathe more than once every eight seconds, and my keyboard is not in danger of getting ruined by tears ...

... it is Sunday evening. I am going to bathe, shave, and make no further mention of breaks I take from writing unless, God forbid, they directly impact the tale.

... right. Solina. Christmas did not pass without event that year. She was the event.

I had not been to church in nearly a decade, but this time Valentina and Richard invited me to join them for midnight Christmas Mass. The local parish was by no means large or remarkably beautiful, but I was told they were welcoming and that there would be a light reception afterwards. I accepted.

It wasn't hard to follow along, and I didn't feel obliged to join in with the responses even though I knew them. I didn't receive Communion or even go up for a blessing, but the homily was at least interesting. It's hard not to have some idea of the true "spirit" or "meaning" of Christmas in our post-Dickens world, but the pastor connected gift-giving with not just neighborliness but a much older idea: sacred hospitality, the notion that the widow, orphan, beggar, and sojourner have rights that can only be guaranteed by those better off than themselves. All such people, he claimed, fell under the heading of "guests", or even Jesus' own "little ones", since they are in so many ways smaller than others. He did not mention immigration as such because that would have been political (and, I now reflect, too narrow for his true theme), but it felt topical to me anyway, perhaps because of my recent adventure at the National Shrine. Whatever the case, I shouldn't have been surprised by warm fuzzies at a Christmas service, yet there I was.

All of which is to say that my senses were not entirely overwhelmed by "love at first sight", but it certainly caught me off-guard. Solina was the cantor for that service, so I got to hear her lovely voice more than the rest of their small choir. But until she was in the lectern for the Psalm, she was no more than a voice. Then she was barely more than a pretty face, until finally Richard dropped her name and muttered something about how much she'd been practicing and how far she'd come.

Suddenly she became a person with a name and a history: close family of close friends, who had walked a very long road north together. This gave me tunnel vision until she finished and rejoined the choir. Until then my mind blocked out everything but her face and her voice, intent on convincing me that she was the most beautiful of all God's creatures, that I'd better find an excuse to talk to her, and that I'd better not make a fool of myself. I told it that finding an excuse to talk to her would be making a fool of myself and that life doesn't need my help sorting certain things out, please and thanks. It found this offensive but politely held its tongue.

Then sure enough, apropos of absolutely nothing, Valentina introduced us at the reception by asking how on Earth I'd kept missing her sister at Tejas Storytelling Association events. Solina and I spent a very pleasant two hours coming to the conclusion that no, really neither of us knew how that had happened, by which point people were leaving and cleaning up and oh it was so nice to meet you I guess I'll see you around ...

Then Richard reminded her that I was the person to talk to about some work she needed done on her house, which kept us going until the pastor kindly asked us to leave the empty building. She asked if I'd walk her home so she could show me what needed doing, and there really wasn't much, but we were still sitting on her front porch merrily chatting away when the sun began to rise.

That gave us some pause. She broke it by observing that she really wanted to keep talking but she'd feel a lot better about it if I'd kiss her and ask her to be my girlfriend first. I did so, she accepted, and that was that. We finally parted ways around lunchtime, strangers to an item in a little under twelve hours.

The next six months were the happiest of my adult life. I have been struggling to cling to them in the aftermath of Strahlender's arrival. This has prevented me from adequately grieving. It is good to set that down in stark frankness, yet to let this memory be so tainted leaves me filled with a mix of impotent rage and lingering dread much more enfeebling than sadness. I would prefer to just be sad. I hope spreading the word, even if it is not believed, will be the first step towards that.

I'd felt strongly about women before. At the time it didn't occur to me to wonder what was different about Solina. We shared many interests along with most of our worldviews, and found each other painfully attractive. But we could both say that about a handful of exes as well. Much as I hate to admit it, I think it came down to two very boring, very unromantic things.

The first is that we were both stable and independent adults, she as a music teacher and I as a handyman, odd-job guy, and occasional writer. I usually had at least one project going at her house at any given time, and she'd pay me for them with her own money, which I'd turn right around and spend on gifts or dates. Once she mentioned feeling bad about making me do so much for her and then getting showered with attention, so I showed her the accounting sheet I'd kept. She turned bright crimson and promised never to bring it up again if I didn't, so we didn't, although she agreed with me that it was definitely good for a laugh that time.

The second is that she roped me into praying the Rosary with her. Not always kneeling in a church or sitting across from each other like good, pious kids either. We usually liked to keep our arms around each other and her head on my chest or shoulder, and prayer was a nice way to not lose my mind from all that contact. Meanwhile, talking even briefly about intentions or meditation topics was a shortcut to hopes, dreams, fears, doubts, heartaches, everything, and at a very manageable pace, too. And me about ten years "lapsed", not sure whether she was losing religion on my account or I was regaining it on hers.

Whatever the case, after six months of this I'd begun asking myself when and how I'd propose to her. Then one day in June began the sequel to my half-buried obsession with El Sol Velado.

It was a Monday afternoon, and as I lay on my back working on pipes in her downstairs bathroom, she came home from work early and started sobbing on the couch in her living room. I kept a pretty loose schedule, so although I was welcome she wasn't exactly expecting me any more than whatever had just happened.

So I finished what I was doing before going to check on her, and by that point she'd calmed down enough to pour herself a glass of wine. Or rather, she was on her second glass after the first had helped her calm down. And she was not a habitual drinker, much less an emotional one, so I was already braced for the worst.

She was surprised, embarrassed, afraid, and relieved to see me. She didn't want to be held. She told me she loved me very much but wouldn't hold it against me if I broke up with her. I asked why she thought I might do that. She told me her family was cursed and if I'd pour her a third glass of wine she'd tell me about it. I told her I didn't think more alcohol was a good idea but I'd do it if she let me hold her while she talked. She laughed, sighed, rolled her eyes, and assented.

Papa had died. Mama had been very distraught about the fact that they'd fought recently and not made up. He went out for a motorcycle ride around midnight and didn't come back.

Fire engines dispatched to smoke plumes about fifty miles outside town the next afternoon. At the epicenter, his charred remains, split clean in two at the waist. In a ditch off the side of the highway halfway back to town, his crashed motorcycle, and the kind of godawful splatter you might get if he'd hit cheese wire at ninety-odd miles an hour. Only then his bike would have been damaged too, and it wasn't.

Therefore, a freak accident with a flatbed trailer and some badly secured cargo, as the police seemed to think, given the alternative was a passing motorist with a ... a broadsword? A polearm? And there you had it. The whole trouble was how obvious that sort of fellow would have been, and how they'd moved the body twenty-five miles, started a brush fire, and departed, mostly in broad daylight, and all without being seen.

But all my own imagination cared about was: fire, bright lights, and a humming sound like an electric motor.

So I went out on a limb and asked Solina if she thought it was El Sol Velado. She'd been doing okay until then, but I might have been more sensitive: shocked to hear that name in the mouth of her own dear gringo, she spit out a mouthful of wine all over her coffee table and proceeded to blurt out the whole sordid history between sobs.

They had a craving for blood, she and her siblings. They were pretty sure it was hereditary and went back at least two generations, but neither parents nor grandparents had ever talked about it. Abuelo y abuela were hyperreligious wackadoos, and mom and dad were both stormy, passionate types with a tendency to get too physical, so there wouldn't have been much reason to listen anyway. But Valentina and Alejandro had been close enough to figure it out for themselves, and believed the previous generations had been coping with the same problem in different ways, or failing to.

They'd lucked out that it hadn't become a problem for them until they were in Laredo and both hitting puberty, a few years after Solina was born, and that they quickly hit on a solution: morcilla or moronga, a blood sausage especially popular around Christmas time. No wonder mama and papa got along better at that time of year. Solina's hermano y hermana didn't tell her until after they'd taken her to Fredericksburg, where blüdwurst could be found in the German cuisine. The move had been Abigail's idea, since she and Alejandro had actually bonded over their shared fondness for that dish and turned out to have the same problem, as had Richard a few years later.

Which of course begged the question of why they'd kept moving if they'd been managing, however barely.

Solina was born two years after the move to Laredo. Her siblings were both twelve years old. Alejandro and Abigail were high school sweethearts who dated through college and got married right after.

They'd hardly gotten back from their honeymoon when one of Abigail's cousins died: run off the road and burned to death in his pickup truck. What did his traumatized wreck of a date tell police after she'd regained enough lucidity to talk, the pain of her own burns kept down by morphine?

That there had been bright lights, and a humming sound like an electric motor.

"El Sol Velado!", abuela had said, and been screamed into a corner by mama for peddling her base superstitions to the bereaved. "It comes for those who take living blood", she had continued, repeating the warning of more than a decade previous, then adding, wary but unfazed, "Be careful of your friends, it does not care if the innocent stands too close to the guilty", and mama had thrown her out to live in a motel with abuelo for a month for speaking ill of the dead.

Everyone else except the "kids", two of whom were now grown (three if you counted the new inlaw), chalked the survivor's testimony up to the cocaine she'd been on along with the deceased. But Alejandro and Valentina were the opposite of sure about that, and shared their concern with Abigail, who promptly made arrangements for the three of them to go to Fredericksburg, where she was originally from. Then, with no confidence in their ability to discuss the real problem but with compelling excuses about their careers and Solina's social life, her older siblings determined to convince their parents to send her with them.

This was hard, because it meant staying to care for their aging elders unaided. But Valentina had the bright idea of throwing them under the bus, asking her mother if she really wanted Solina to come of age in the shadow of superstitions that had already caused so much trouble. And ironically, that did the trick (serendipitously, it also meant they missed the wave of violence following the formation of Los Zetas by the Gulf Cartel, while their forebears did not).

At this point I interrupted to ask what evidence there was for El Sol Velado's motives. Had any of its known victims consumed blood? Solina told me that she'd never known for sure, but the risk was serious enough to be worth avoiding, especially since they'd known some fellow immigrants to "joke" about being vampires, and some of Abigail's acquaintances about being werewolves. In such company the probability of collateral damage from El Sol Velado seemed high, whatever you thought of the local average sanity level.

But yes, and this was particularly hard for her, mama had mentioned that papa had bitten her and drawn blood during their fight. He'd never done so before, and it hadn't sounded too bad, but mama had otherwise glossed over it because their arguments were so physical anyway.

Yes, physical. Not violent, not abusive: physical. That was how Alejandro and Valentina had described them to me in our earlier conversations, and even Solina spoke of them that way. They didn't often leave marks on each other, and involved the children even less. The kids had gone on to decide they didn't want that in their relationships, and so far had avoided it. But as for mama and papa, that was just how they were. And yeah, it was probably wrong, but could you tell them that?

... not any more, you couldn't. Not papa, at least.

Solina was ten years old when they arrived in Fredericksburg, old enough to understand the fear and the arguments but still in the dark as to her siblings' benevolent conspiracy. She enjoyed school, made friends, and had as good as two sets of parents once Richard came along. His and Valentina's courtship had been brief, almost perfunctory, but their love had been real and had lasted. Valentina got an associate's degree. They wanted for nothing. Life was good.

Then Solina got her first cravings, not too long after hitting puberty, and her sister noticed the signs. Solina wasn't convinced until she noticed the unusually pleasant effect that locally-made blüdwurst had on her, and was grateful she'd agreed to try it.

Learning to cope was a team effort, and she did well. It grated on the others that the Holy Eucharist seemed to work better than anything else for her, which meant near-daily Mass attendance and some extremely unpleasant reminiscences of their zealous grandparents. But care for Solina won out, and it got easier once they figured out how to take turns chauffeuring her from school and back in the middle of their work days.

And life was not just good, life was better, because they'd faced something dark and awful together and come out closer and wiser on the other side.

Eventually Solina turned fourteen. She was getting ready to start high school. Everyone was excited.

Then one night, which had been noisier than usual with emergency sirens, Richard called Abigail, who backed him up when they talked to Alejandro and Valentina, who were frustrated and heartbroken but supportive: everyone would have to leave again.

Richard explained that he had not heard of El Sol Velado before meeting his wife, but it felt uncannily like something he had heard of: Der Blutmond, "The Blood Moon", a peculiar urban legend about the lunar eclipse which worked out similarly to "The Veiled Sun".

More than two generations ago there had been a family of cannibals. Their homestead was fairly remote from Fredericksburg, but they were connected to a series of disappearances from there. The law arrived to apprehend them and found the whole property ablaze and the owners' dismembered corpses in the cold storage, scattered among the remains of the victims. They assumed an outraged local had taken the law into their own hands, and it was just as well they lacked the evidence to pursue them, because they lacked the motivation.

A blood moon had been out that night. Mere window dressing on a gruesome case, except that families wanted closure, and following up on the victims' stories for them revealed an extremely unsettling pattern of full moons. Not all on exact nights, but never more than three days before or after. And with fourteen confirmed "vanishments" spread out over several decades, this was too much to be chalked up to coincidence: these man-eaters had either been werewolves, or thought they were.

This morbid local trivium was kept out of the press. In theory the police wanted to keep Der Blutmond's file open, which meant keeping investigative follow-up out of the public eye. But there was also the tricky business of giving attention to a vigilante that many, including some cops, saw as a hero. Journalists in turn found themselves unequal to walking this fine line, especially given the blatantly fantastic circumstance of the full moons. There had been no formal gag order that Richard knew of. None had been needed.

Some years later a woman was found with an arm amputated at the elbow, staked through the heart to the ground with a fencepost uprooted from nearby, her wirecutters left daintily on her chest as if in accusation. None of the livestock were harmed or had gotten away, and she had no criminal history. But she'd died on the night of a full moon, nay, a blood moon.

Therefore?

Must have been infected with the ways of those old cannibals, and been dispatched by Der Blutmonde for her trespass. This vile rumor, Richard confessed, had gained the force of legend from fear, and the case left untouched despite obvious foul play.

Tonight was, he shuddered to point out, a blood moon. He had been working late in the family butcher shop, and heard a loud humming sound like an electric motor, unlike any of their machinery, and growing louder as though approaching. He'd run toward it to investigate, through several rooms to the other side of the building.

At its loudest he had to forage a spare key to their long-term storage, locked from inside: the sound came from inside, and a bright, steady white light poured out from under the door. By the time he got the door open the light had faded and the sound was receding. Within he found his sister bleeding out on the floor from a single diagonal cut down her torso, too deep for a knife and too clean for claws. He immediately called 911 and did everything he could, but she soon lost consciousness, and died in the ambulance.

Her last words to him before slipping away, spoken with great effort and a tone of desperate urgency?

"Der licht ... der brummen ... der ritter, DER RITTER!"

The light, the hum, the knight, the knight. She saw her attacker, and thought it looked like a knight.

Friends, partake briefly of the ludicrous mental image from which, hearing this development in Solina's account, I could no longer escape:

There is a centuries-old monster hunter, not unlike Slenderman's foe, who went up against the greats of history and prevailed, only to be worn down by time and bloodshed until nothing remained but a vengeful specter, totally bereft of humanity. It stalks the Earth, eternally crusading against what it identifies as the forces of evil and darkness, but no longer driven by anything save passionate, pitch-black hatred of "sin". If vampires and werewolves are real, and if their true nature is as often hidden from themselves as from others, and if they are ultimately people just struggling to get along like you and me, then it is their most pitilessly unrelenting persecutor.

I will henceforth refer to "The Shining Knight" as Strahlender for simplicity. You know now why I call it that. There only remains to finish telling what it did to us.

Richard feared his sister's death would be attributed to Der Blutmond, and that the resulting notoriety would spell the end of their peaceful life in Fredericksburg. The others agreed the danger sufficient to uproot again. Depressingly, Richard's future communications with former acquaintances proved him correct.

Whence Solina began high school in Dallas ...

... and finished it in Fort Worth after Strahlender took a favorite teacher. Then around the time Solina graduated, Strahlender took several refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They agreed they couldn't run forever, but Solina wanted to study music education at the University of North Texas anyway, and north they went again.

Strahlender made no further appearances after that move, or if it did, they didn't catch wind of them. But Denton County is a core production area of the Barnett Shale, and their house was close to a compressor station. Read: floodlights on the horizon, and 24/7 low-frequency industrial droning. Soundproofing and blackout curtains solved those problems, but it was not fun to drive past at night.

At night, it felt like Strahlender watched them from down the road, confidently concealing itself in the activity rather than feeling threatened by it.

But another move north, to the middle of nowhere, solved that problem in turn. And for six years they enjoyed unsullied peace and contentment for the first time since Fredericksburg. Solina even found me.

Did papa's death mean it was all over again? That Strahlender had returned? Would mama be safe? Would anyone? They'd need to have another emergency meeting, and had scheduled it for tomorrow.

It was getting late by the time Solina finished bringing me up to speed. I offered to take her out to dinner. She accepted, but we hardly spoke. Taking her home, I asked to continue our conversation since I'd had some time to think. She accepted.

I shared the account of my adventure to the National Shrine in Dallas, and the independent research I'd done afterwards.

I shared my conviction that Strahlender only reliably came for blood-drinkers and flesh-eaters, and that its mercuriality otherwise was not far beyond that of cancer, road accidents, or any other violent criminal.

I shared my deep admiration for how she and her family had borne up under its assaults, and how privileged I felt to count them as friends.

I shared my willingness to stay faithful to her, whatever they needed to do next, and even to follow them if they moved again, if they would have me.

She was struck silent. By the light of the one lamp we'd turned on, her face was a battlefield between horror, relief, disgust, and gratitude.

This awkward pause extended until I felt moved to propose to her. Shocked and at first disbelieving, she accepted.

It was not ideal, but it was romantic enough in its way. When the time for the meeting came, and Solina asked me to join as her fiance, we unanimously decided to stay: the others, more than a decade older, had already developed the sense of resignation that Solina only just arrived at. And they approved our match, as did mama, abuelo, and abuela when I met them at papa's funeral in Laredo.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving ...

The shadow of Strahlender hangs over us but is not as black as when papa had just died. Marriage preparation is going splendidly. I've begun joining Solina for Mass every now and then, and she's becoming more and more affectionate in public, which makes me feel like some kind of superhero. We are recovering the joy the proposal lacked.

I walk her home. It's snowing unseasonably early. Our hands and lips are chapped. We step inside, and she's so passionate I start to wonder if she'll invite me to bed, which her religion would frown on but I wouldn't refuse.

Until she breaks our kiss suddenly with a hurt and terrified look, runs upstairs, and locks her bedroom door behind her. I wait, stunned, for about five minutes, then realize that my chapped lips have opened and are bleeding.

I get a text from her saying she loves me and it's been wonderful but she has to leave and never come back. I text her back "blood?" and receive no reply. I wait downstairs for about half an hour, desperately hoping she'll change her mind or that I'll think of something, before deciding that nothing I can do will influence what Strahlender does. I text the others a brief description of what's happened, but do not receive any replies.

I go home and lay awake until emergency sirens jolt me out of bed. I call Valentina to ask if she's heard from Solina. No answer. I try Richard, Alejandro, and Abigail. No answer. Finally, I try Solina herself.

She is in her car, driving and sobbing. Barely audible in the background, but getting louder, is a humming sound like an electric motor.

"It's behind me." she manages to say, "I'm so, so sorry ... "

A collision, screeching tires, and her screams as she is run off the road. She pants with terror as her car comes to a stop. The hum continues. There are squelching, crunching footsteps in the dirty snow. They have a subtle but distinctly metallic clink to them.

"I love you. Really, I do." are her last words.

"I love you t-" I am cut off by breaking glass and her screams as Strahlender reaches through the window, grabs her, and yanks her out through it. She is flung onto the ground but does not beg for mercy or even pray. She cries out weakly as she is stabbed, and falls silent as she dies.

I hear Strahlender pick up the phone. It pauses. The hum continues. Then footsteps in snow. Footsteps on asphalt. It drops the phone onto the road and crushes it under its boot. The call ends.

In a daze, I walk out into the night in my pajamas towards the sirens, which still blare. Her siblings' houses are both burning down.

I stay out long enough to introduce myself to the first responders as a close family friend.

I stay out until it is clear there are no survivors.

... that was two weeks ago. The police helped me call down to Laredo to break the news, which went as wretchedly as you'd expect. Since then I have been left alone with my thoughts. It did not take long to decide to write up this account: there is nothing I can do about Strahlender except warn others.

And there you have it. "They all died. The end."

Part of me wonders how Strahlender would judge me, as close as I was to

I was drawn away by a bright white light through my window and the humming of an electric motor pulling into my driveway. It seems I shall indeed find out what Strahlender thinks of me.

It opens the front door effortlessly and without force. Footsteps in the hallway. My own door op

My computer says I last modified this draft yesterday. I do not remember working on it, nor any of the people or events it describes. I have no way to know if I was carried away by madness or inspiration, or if I suffer some kind of amnesia. The outcomes would be the same, and (down this road lies madness, but ... ) Strahlender somehow wiping minds, erasing evidence, and discrediting witnesses would do much to explain its supposed elusiveness.

But there is really no use speculating.

I feel an awful emptiness. Everyone around me has become a stranger, the more so the better I knew them. I no longer have any plans for the future, nor hopes, nor interests. I am going to complete this draft and post it anyway so that I can delete it from my computer and leave whatever it represents behind with everything else, because this place does not feel like home any more. In fact, for me it has gone so far to hell ...

... yes, I think I shall go to Mexico.

Chafing against my dating fast

Strahlender, the Shining Knight