The town of Elmsworth had always been quiet, a place where the wind whispered through the pines and the only sound was the creaking of old wooden porches. It wasn’t until the summer of 2023 that the sky above the town began to change. At first, it was just a few people reporting strange lights—flickering, pulsing, moving in ways that defied logic. They were too fast for planes, too slow for meteors. No one could explain them, but they kept coming. It started with a man named Thomas who worked at the local gas station. He was known for his late-night shifts and his habit of staring into the sky while sipping black coffee. One night, he saw it—a long, dark shape hovering over the hills, silent and still. It didn’t move, but it didn’t disappear either. He stood there for what felt like hours, his breath fogging in the cold air, until the thing finally vanished as if it had never been there. Word spread quickly. Soon, others claimed to see the same thing. A group of teenagers from the high school said they spotted it near the old mill, glowing faintly like a ghostly lantern. An elderly woman named Mrs. Hale swore she heard a low hum in her sleep, like a song sung by something ancient. The townspeople began to talk, not with fear, but with a kind of hushed curiosity. Then came the photographs. People started taking pictures, some with their phones, others with cameras they hadn’t used in years. Most were blurry, but a few showed something unusual—a faint, oval-shaped object hovering just above the treetops, surrounded by a soft, silver glow. When the photos were printed, the images seemed to shift slightly when viewed from different angles, as if the object itself was alive. A local journalist named Clara decided to investigate. She interviewed everyone from the teenagers to the mayor, asking questions that no one had really considered before. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” she asked. The answers varied. Some said they’d seen similar things as children, but never so often or so close. Others admitted they had no idea what it was, but they felt something watching them, even when the sky was clear. Clara found an old book in the library, titled *The Sky’s Watchers*, written by a forgotten author in the 1950s. The book spoke of “the watchers,” beings that hovered above the world, unseen by most, but always present. It described how they would appear during times of great change, as if to observe or warn. The text was filled with strange symbols and diagrams, some of which looked like constellations, others like something else entirely. One night, Clara drove out to the hills where the sightings had been most frequent. She parked her car on a dirt road and stepped out into the darkness. The air was thick with the scent of pine and damp earth. She held her flashlight, its beam cutting through the fog. Then, she saw it. It wasn’t the same as before. This time, it was closer. It hovered just above the ground, its surface shimmering like liquid metal. It didn’t make any noise, but Clara felt a pull, as if the air around her had become heavy with something unseen. She reached out, but the moment her hand touched the edge of the light, a wave of cold washed over her, and the object disappeared. She returned to town, shaken but determined. She wrote her article, describing everything she had seen and heard, but the editor refused to publish it. “Too strange,” he said. “We can’t risk the town’s reputation.” But the sightings didn’t stop. If anything, they grew more frequent. People began to report dreams of flying through the stars, of voices speaking in languages they couldn’t understand. Some said they woke up with strange marks on their skin, faint and glowing, like fingerprints from another world. The last sighting happened on the night of the autumn equinox. A child named Lily was walking home from a friend’s house when she saw the light again. This time, it wasn’t alone. There were several of them, arranged in a perfect circle, floating silently above the field. She ran back to town, shouting for help, but no one believed her. By the time the adults arrived, the lights were gone, leaving only a strange silence in their wake. No one knows what the lights were. Some say they were natural phenomena, others say they were something else entirely. But the people of Elmsworth remember. They remember the way the air felt heavier, the way the stars seemed to watch them, and the way the sky, once a simple expanse of blue, became something vast and unknowable. And though the lights have faded, the feeling remains—that somewhere, beyond the reach of human eyes, something is still watching.