16 Aug Feed the Fireflies

Part I

The leak didn’t come from a whistleblower site, or from an agent trying to make a name for himself. It just appeared, first on a message board for paranormal enthusiasts, then on Twitter, then TikTok. By the time the FBI issued a takedown request, it had been mirrored on a hundred different servers. Within hours, it was global.

I didn’t need to watch the footage. I’d lived it. But by the time Director Pearce called me in, it was already too late to contain.

The video begins in the middle of the approach. Bodycam footage from Agent Alvarez, one of my men, silent except for the scrape of boots through brush. The timestamp and location are blurred out, but the footage is clear enough. A farmhouse sits at the end of a gravel driveway, paint peeling from the sides, windows boarded, roofline sagging. Not a soul visible from the outside. No lights, no movement. Still as a tomb.

Alvarez flashes a hand signal—go.

The team breaches. A door is blown open with a quiet flashbang. The moment they cross the threshold, the audio cuts out for nearly four seconds. On the raw footage, it came back as a wash of static and whispered syllables—not English, nor any modern language. Simmons later told me it was ancient Latin, but we weren’t supposed to have his report yet. Not then.

Inside, the home is unnaturally dark, every window painted black from the inside. The flashlights barely push through the gloom. The air is thick with dust, floating like ash. Scattered throughout are empty children’s beds, four to a room, and walls scrawled with what appear to be crayon circles, layered until the color turns black.

The first child appears at the 02:11 mark. She’s seated on the kitchen counter, head tilted to one side, eyes closed—or so it seems at first. As Alvarez steps forward, she turns her head slowly toward the camera. What the footage doesn’t capture, the part you need to be there to feel, is how wrong it was, the way she moved. There’s no tension in her neck, just a smooth, rotating pivot. Like a puppet on a string.

The flashlight catches her face. Her mouth is moving; she’s whispering. As for her eyes, she has none, only smooth, pale indentations where they should have been. The skin is puckered, as though the eyes had never developed. A birth defect, maybe. That’s what we thought. That’s what I told myself.

Then she leapt off the counter and climbed up the wall.

It looks fake on the footage. Her hands and feet find impossible purchase on the cracked plaster. She scrambles across the ceiling like an insect. The team opens fire. Alvarez’s camera jerks upward as muzzle flashes illuminate the room. A moment later the child is gone, vanished into a ceiling crawlspace. A shriek echoes behind them, and another child bolts down the hallway on all fours, teeth gnashing.

Chaos erupts. Rooms are breached. Screams fill the air, some from the agents, some from the children. One child is found inside a closet, rocking and biting their own arm. Another lashes out with a shard of broken mirror.

At the 04:32 mark, the camera picks up the chant. Dozens of voices, high-pitched and overlapping, all whispering the same phrase over and over again:

“Magistratum Lucifugae… magistratum lucifugae…”

No one on the team knows Latin. We didn’t realize what they were saying—not until later.

A dozen children are found in the basement. Alvarez’s camera captures the whole descent—thirteen wooden steps, each one creaking. The flashlight flickers. Then the beam lands on the gathered forms.

They’re all naked, sitting in a ring, arms held outward, fingers twitching in rhythm. No one blinks. They’re not even breathing, it seems.

Then one of them turns, mouth hanging open. Their teeth have been filed.

At the sight, an agent slips and crashes into the circle. The moment is chaotic. One of the children leaps onto him, hands clawing at his face. Two others follow. The bodycam jerks, twists, and crashes to the ground, followed by screaming. Screaming and wet sounds.

Then something crawls into frame.

It’s never fully visible, but it’s clearly not a child. We see just the edge of it—a leg, maybe, thin and bent at two points. It resembles a shadow in the shape of a person, except less than a person. There’s no detail, no substance. It doesn’t reflect the light—it bends it, like smoke.

The screaming stops. Alvarez’s bodycam lies sideways on the ground. Heavy breathing and muffled whimpers are heard. The only figure in frame is one of the eyeless children. She leans close to the lens, so close her pale face fills the screen.

“Feed the fireflies,” she whispers.

The video cuts out.

* * * * * *

None of that should’ve left the archives.

When I confronted Pearce about it, he looked me dead in the eye and said, “What footage?”

“Sir, we all saw it.”

He held up a hand. “Officially, nothing was recovered. The house was empty. The lead was faulty. Team found nothing. Case closed.”

“Agent Alvarez is dead, sir.”

“Alvarez is on extended medical leave. I suggest you let him rest.”

I stared at him. “That… thing. That chant. The girl without eyes. What were they doing in that house?”

Pearce closed the folder in front of him and tapped it with a single finger. “You’re on administrative leave, Griggs, effective immediately. Pending psychological evaluation.”

He slid the file into a locked drawer.

“They weren’t children,” I said. “Not anymore.”

He didn’t look at me.

I left without signing the paperwork.

That night, the footage leaked again, this time with a watermark no one recognized, overlaid with the words: PROTECT THE DARK. FEED THE FIREFLIES.

I should have walked away. I should have burned every copy and never looked back. Instead, I started watching frame by frame, looking for answers.

And what I saw in the freeze-frames—what crawled past the lens in flickering pieces—was not meant for human eyes.

Not meant for any eyes at all.

Part II

They stuck me in a glass box with a federal badge and a view of the parking garage. Technically, I wasn’t suspended. I was “on leave pending resolution of administrative concerns.” That’s the phrasing the Bureau uses when they want you to shut up and disappear, but haven’t figured out if you’re a liability yet.

It didn’t help that I kept asking about the raid.

They transferred the official report to a restricted file that I could no longer access. My credentials and login history were all scrubbed. Alvarez was still “in recovery,” according to HR. I’d called his phone twice before someone in Records quietly warned me not to.

Still, it wasn’t until they assigned Dr. Simmons that I realized someone upstairs wasn’t just covering their ass. They were afraid.

* * * * * *

I met Dr. Lyle Simmons at Quantico back in ’21. He wasn’t Bureau, not officially—he worked under contract through Behavioral Services, mostly on cult-related task forces. He was good at identifying delusional frameworks, ritualistic conditioning, and trigger phrases. I didn’t know him well, but he had a reputation as being intelligent, clinical, and almost too sensitive. The kind of guy who walked out of a briefing and didn’t sleep for three days.

“Agent Griggs,” he said as he walked in to conduct my interview. “Thanks for meeting. I’ve been given temporary access to the Lakeburn footage. I’d like to go over what you saw in person.”

“It’s already in the report,” I said.

“I’ve read the report.”

“Then why am I here?”

He set down his tablet. “Because I’ve been watching that footage for five hours, and something’s wrong with it.”

I sat up. “Corrupted?”

“No. Too clear. That house was pitch black, but the lighting in the footage is pristine. The focal tracking never fails. The frame never jitters, even during the assault.”

“That’s bodycam stabilization.”

“Not to this degree.”

I waited.

He tapped the tablet. “There’s a time-stamp skip at 04:41:13. One second becomes eleven. The audio during that segment loops back on itself, but slightly off pitch. And when I ran a spectrogram—” He hesitated. “—it produced an image.”

“What kind of image?”

He turned the screen toward me. It displayed a mandala of concentric spirals, like a stylized wasp nest. Or maybe a fly’s compound eye. At the center, a symbol appeared. I recognized it immediately. I’d seen it carved into the shoulder of one of the children.

Dr. Simmons pinched the bridge of his nose. “Officially, I’m supposed to log this and move on. But I’ve reviewed hundreds of anomalous recordings, and I’ve never seen one generate new structure like this. The audio’s behaving like a carrier wave.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the footage itself is broadcasting something.”

I didn’t answer. My stomach had already begun to turn.

He tapped the screen again, voice lower now. “There’s another issue. Since I started reviewing the footage, I’ve had… episodes. Lost time. Blackouts. And today—”

He trailed off.

“Today?” I prompted.

He didn’t speak for a full five seconds. Then he flipped the tablet back around and shut it off.

“I’d rather not say.”

* * * * * *

The next day, Simmons collapsed in the review lab.

They told me it was a seizure, that he’d bitten through his tongue and was in ICU under neurological observation. I wasn’t allowed to see him. His chart was sealed under Bureau security orders. But someone on the janitorial staff leaked the security footage from the lab.

I watched it three times.

He sits calmly at first, then freezes—utterly still. His eyes go wide, then roll back. His lips move. And for a moment, he whispers something.

The transcript overlay shows it: “Ad lucem post tenebras magistratum lucifugae.”

After darkness, into light, it translates to. The Magistrate of Flies.

Then he begins screaming. Blood pours from his ears and nose, his hands clawing at his face. He knocks over the screen, smashes the tablet, and begins laughing. His mouth moves without sound. Whatever he’s saying, it’s in rhythm.

The same chant.

They sedate him after four minutes.

In the hallway outside the lab, his fingernails left marks on the tile. Patterns. I didn’t recognize them at first. Then I remembered the basement stairs—the way the children had scratched symbols into the wood.

I looked them up. They’re from a pre-Latin dialect used in early Roman cults of domesticated plague deities. Forgotten gods. Gods of waste, and rot, and unclean light.

Gods that feed in the dark.

* * * * * *

Later that week, I was called into a private meeting with Senator John Marlowe. I’d seen him a dozen times in classified hearings, grandstanding about funding, or making vague statements about “America’s children.” Always smiling. Always in control.

The meeting took place in a neutral building near Langley, with no security cameras in the hallway and no recording devices of any kind.

He greeted me with grandfatherly warmth. “Agent Griggs. I’m so sorry to hear about your reassignment.”

“I wasn’t reassigned.”

He smiled, as if I’d confirmed something he already knew. “You’ve had a difficult week.”

I didn’t respond.

“I understand you’re concerned about what you witnessed during the Lakeburn operation. It’s only natural. What we find in the darkness often challenges our assumptions.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper. On it was the spiral-eye symbol.

“I know what this is,” I said.

“Do you?” His gaze sharpened. “This is not a threat, Agent Griggs. It’s an invitation to peace. Let those events rest. You served your country. That’s what matters.”

“You’re involved,” I said. “Those children—”

“You saw exactly what you were meant to see.”

His voice was calm. Absolute.

He rose to leave.

“We all serve something,” he said. “Some of us just have better lights to guide us.”

He opened the door and walked out.

On the table beside me, something buzzed. A small glass jar.

Inside, trapped against the side, a single firefly blinked.

* * * * * *

I filed three reports that day, none of them acknowledged. My badge was disabled by morning. My personal email pinged from a burner account that read: “Check the symbol. Senate server. Project: AESTUS LUX.”

There was a web address, hidden behind four proxy layers, embedded in an inactive legislative subdomain.

I opened it. To my surprise, it was a video.

It opened with a black screen, and then transitioned to a scene of a circle of children, blindfolded, hands raised to blinking lights.

Over the footage, a voice whispered, “The fireflies know the way.”

Then static, followed by the words, “The nest is growing. Light is hunger. Light is law.”  And a phrase at the bottom: “Magistratum Lucifugae: Rise again.”

I closed the tab.

I was shaking.

And I knew I was already too late.

Part III

They were all dead within five days. Three people—two agents and one technician—each connected to the Lakeburn footage, each found under circumstances no one wanted to call connected.

But I knew. We all knew.

The first was Lauren Finch, a digital archivist who’d mirrored the raw raid footage onto a thumb drive. I’d spoken to her once, years back, when we were both stuck on a joint ops task force. Smart, quiet, and too damn honest for her own good.

Her body was found in her apartment in Arlington, seated upright in the bathtub. An empty wine bottle was on the counter; there was no sign of struggle. But she’d wrapped a string of decorative firefly lights around her neck, looped three times. One end was still plugged in. The bulbs were still blinking when the police arrived.

The medical examiner ruled it a suicide. The toxicology report said she’d been sober.

Next was Paul Myrick, an analyst out of the Richmond field office. He was one of the first to tag irregularities in the audio metadata from the bodycams—specifically, the segment with the overlapping Latin chant. According to internal logs, he flagged the phrase “Magistratum Lucifugae” as a security anomaly and then attempted to open the .wav file in a sandboxed environment.

He never finished the analysis. They found him slumped over his desk three days later, skin desiccated, hands curled inward like claws. A forensic agent at the scene described it as “insectile rigor.” It was not a term I’d heard before.

Someone tried to redact his last entry. I pulled the logs anyway.

In it, he’d written a single line in the analysis field before he died: “The light doesn’t just call them—it feeds them.”

There was a symbol sketched in his blood on the linoleum below his desk: a segmented circle, like a wheel or the lens of a compound eye, crossed through the center.

I’d seen it before.

The third victim was Rina Bell, the IT contractor who’d shared the hidden AESTUS LUX link with me. They found her body in a soybean field fifteen miles outside Reston. Her eyelids had been removed, surgically excised. The local PD said she’d “wandered off during a mental health episode” and somehow walked barefoot through two miles of forest, without shoes or a jacket, and no flashlight.

She’d methodically carved shallow notches into both arms in a controlled manner. It wasn’t a suicide attempt. It was a pattern.

I matched the symbols against a series of glyphs I’d pulled from Simmons’ analysis folder, and found the same sequence: Blindness, brightness, obedience, ascend.

It wasn’t a language I knew, but the translation was consistent. They weren’t just killing whistleblowers. They were scripting something into the deaths.

* * * * * *

I returned to Simmons’ lab—now sealed, but my Bureau ID still worked on some older doors. The review suite was quiet and unused. The shattered tablet had been removed, but I found a single printout tucked behind one of the cabinet drawers. His handwriting was rushed and uneven.

They’re not praying, he wrote. The children aren’t invoking the Magistrate—they’re feeding it. The chant is a mnemonic shell, a housing. The more people hear it, the more structure it gains. Auditory ritualism. It rides the sound.

Below that, he’d scrawled: “DO NOT LISTEN WITH HEADPHONES.”

I took the paper, photocopied it, and burned the original.

Simmons was still in a medical facility, listed under an alias. I wasn’t allowed access. I tried anyway.

A nurse stopped me in the hallway outside his room. “He doesn’t talk,” she whispered. “But he hums.”

“Humans do that in trauma.”

“No. Not like this.”

She looked down the corridor, then leaned in. “It’s Morse code.”

I blinked. “What’s he saying?”

She hesitated. Then, barely above a whisper, she said, “The nest is not local.”

* * * * * *

The last breadcrumb came from a retired field agent named Joseph Nae, who’d served in South America during the ’80s. He contacted me through a Proton email, using an untraceable burner account. The subject line read: “PROJECT AESTUS: Before It Was Yours, It Was Ours.”

His message included an image attachment: a scanned page from an old CIA psychological operations manual. Within the document, there were more crude diagrams and Latin phrases, and most disturbingly, a series of black-and-white photos of blindfolded children beneath flickering lanterns.

One caption stood out: “Subject Group 7-B—sensory fasting, response to photic stimulus. Mag. L.”

I wrote back immediately. Nae replied once, writing: “They moved the facility stateside in ’92. I filed the wrong report. I said the subjects were unresponsive. Truth is, they responded too well. Light-starved minds, ritual reinforcement—it didn’t create obedient children. It created mirrors. We thought we’d invented the practice, but those glyphs predate Rome. You want the source? It’s not in the archives. You’ll find it at the estate. He kept everything.”

Attached was a clipped floor plan of a private residence in Maryland, a stately manor set against dense forest. The property of Senator John Marlowe.

The basement was labeled: “REARING ROOM – Level -2.”

* * * * * *

That night, I booked a one-night stay at a bed-and-breakfast fifteen miles outside Marlowe’s property line. I didn’t bring a laptop, just a burner phone of my own, two flash drives, and a disposable camera.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, but I left the firefly jar from his office in my apartment window.

Inside, something was still blinking.

Part IV

The road to Marlowe’s estate ran like a vein through pine-dense woods, paved in old concrete and surveillance-grade silence. His property, officially listed as Shady Hollow Agricultural Trust, sat behind two automated gates, one guard station, and a wall tall enough to be mistaken for a dam. Nothing about it said private residence. Everything about it said containment zone.

I approached under the guise of a scheduled meeting. Credentials borrowed, cover story airtight: I was part of a Department of Agriculture audit regarding land-use exemptions. His staff met me with warmth and a clipboard. Not a single guard questioned me.

The estate was enormous. Overgrown gardens framed a house too clean for its age. Mid-century colonial, three stories, windows so dark they looked lacquered. Inside, it was colder than expected, the kind of chill that came from stone cellars and steel reinforcements.

Marlowe met me in a sunroom that hadn’t seen the sun in years.

“Agent Griggs,” he said, as if we were old friends. “I was hoping you’d come.”

He poured tea and motioned to the chair across from him, porcelain clinking.

“I assume you’re not here about zoning violations.”

“You’re running a covert conditioning facility under your home,” I said, “and children have died because of it.”

He smiled softly, as if I were a student who hadn’t yet understood the lesson. “That word,” he said, “Children. Such a volatile term. You assume the ones in that house were born, raised, and nurtured like the rest, but you would be wrong. I can assure you they weren’t. They were grown in darkness, fed only enough language to serve, in preparation for the fulfillment of their destinies.”

“Fed to what, exactly?”

His smile widened.

“To whom, Agent Griggs. Let’s be precise.”

He stood and walked to a nearby cabinet, removed a slim file, and handed it to me. Inside were diagrams, handwritten notes on photosensitive neural development, and a line graph labeled: STAGE II: LUMINESCENT INDUCTION.

“Project Aestus Lux wasn’t a Cold War failure,” he said. “It was a foundation. Obedience without surveillance. Loyalty without memory.” He flipped a page. “Light is more than stimulus. It’s nourishment. It teaches. It shapes. But remove it during developmental phases—and introduce patterned light later—and you can write on the mind.”

“Why fireflies?”

“They’re symbolic,” he said, “and practical. Pulsed light. Organic strobes. The children follow them, like migrating birds follow stars.” He leaned in. “You saw the footage. You know they weren’t broken. They were engineered, literally made for this.”

“I saw children mutilated.”

“No,” he said, “you saw vessels.”

He walked toward a panel in the wall and pressed a button. The far end of the room slid open—not a door, but a section of wall designed to pretend to be permanent.

Behind it, a staircase descended into black.

Marlowe turned. “Would you like to see the ritual room?”

* * * * * *

I followed.

At first, it was ordinary—a servant’s stairwell, comprised of old paint and stone, the air bone dry. But after the first turn, the steps became cleaner, newer. Around the bend, the concrete was poured and sealed, the walls lined with reflective metal. A faint, rhythmic buzzing vibrated up through the handrail.

After another two landings, the air changed, warmer now, laced with a smell like scorched sugar and pine sap. And beneath that more inviting fragrance, something animal.

We passed a door labeled: REARING A-3, and then another, this one marked: INDUCTION—ACTIVE.

Finally, we reached the last level.

Upon our arrival, a heavy iron gate slid open on its own. Inside was a tiered, circular chamber reminiscent of a hollowed-out beehive. The floor sloped downward to a central basin of polished glass. Dozens of reclining chairs lined the perimeter, each one wired with cranial nodes and light ports. The walls were dotted with small portholes, each no wider than a jar lid—and behind each, an assortment of lights blinked faintly.

Fireflies.

Hundreds of them.

In the center of the room, a thin black pillar reached from floor to ceiling, wrapped in cables. At its apex, a mirrored cube spun slowly in place, projecting light pulses downward in hypnotic rhythm. And scattered throughout the chairs were children—blindfolded, still, and barely breathing, Some twitched as the lights pulsed; others whispered under their breath.

“Do they sleep?” I asked.

“They learn,” Marlowe said. “Each light pulse is a syllable. A command.”

He walked to the basin and touched its surface. The glass shimmered. Beneath it, something else stirred.

I saw children reflected, but they weren’t children. Their eyes were open, but empty. Their mouths moved, but out of sync with the sound. Behind them, forming from the darkness like something assembling itself from suggestion alone, was a figure, standing motionless. A silhouette made from absence, too thin to be human.

The Magistrate.

Its presence burned across my vision even when I blinked.

I staggered back. “What is that?”

“Not what,” he said. “Whom.”

The children in the chairs began to chant, low and disjointed at first, and then as one. “Magistratum Lucifugae… Magistratum Lucifugae…”

Marlowe looked at me, his satisfaction palpable. “When they speak its name in full, it notices. When many speak it, it listens. And when the prepared sing in unison—”

He raised a hand, and a panel of the mirrored cube opened. Inside, fireflies writhed in a tight sphere, their blinking growing increasingly erratic.

A moment later, the light shifted, and the children’s voices trembled. One of them convulsed, frothing at the mouth. Another burst into tears. A third laughed.

The Magistrate flickered beneath the glass and grew taller.

“You’re sacrificing them,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “They offer themselves. Light must burn. That’s the rule.”

I backed toward the exit. Something was crawling along the ceiling, just above the mirrored cube, long-limbed and jointed wrong, watching us.

I ran. Marlowe didn’t follow.

As I reached the stairwell, the chanting rose in pitch. I couldn’t help but listen in horror as a child screamed.

The lights blinked once, and then everything went dark.

Part V

I woke underground.

The floor was warm, pulsing faintly beneath me. My limbs ached, and my mouth was dry. I couldn’t remember when I lost consciousness or how I got here. There was no door and no light source, only the hum of a thousand tiny wings.

Then, blinking—tiny, rhythmic pinpricks, all around me.

Fireflies.

They flared once, then again.

I sat up. The room was circular, approximately twenty feet in diameter, with walls of smooth matte stone. Nestled in alcoves along the perimeter were more than a dozen children. Their eyes were gone, the skin smooth and clean where the sockets should have been. Their mouths moved silently, whispering something I couldn’t hear, and that I’m not sure I wanted to.

One of them turned toward me, seemingly sensing my presence, and smiled knowingly.

“You’re here,” she said, without opening her mouth.

I recoiled.

She didn’t move.

Another child stirred in the shadows. Then another.

They all began to hum, low and dry and hollow, like wind through a cracked reed.

The blinking lights intensified. Then, the whisper came, not from any one mouth, but from the room itself. From the walls.

“You brought your own light.”

My chest seized. I looked down. Beneath my coat, on my chest, I detected the faint red blink of a bodycam. Someone had strapped it to me while I was unconscious.

I reached for it, but my fingers wouldn’t respond.

The children rose, moving with the same jerking grace I remembered from the raid, like marionettes lifted by strings threaded through invisible wounds. One by one, they gathered in the center of the chamber, circling something I hadn’t noticed before: a raised platform made of packed soil and wire, pulsing faintly beneath their bare feet. And in the center, coiled like a sleeping wasp in a glass shell, was the Magistrate.

Its limbs were wrong, its silhouette shifting between two- and three-dimensional space. Its face, if it could even be called that, was a lattice of flickering darkness, punctuated by twitching lights that mimicked pupils. Every time it moved, the children twitched.

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered.

The girl nearest me answered. “We are not. You were.”

“I tried to stop it.”

“No. You fed it. You watched. You listened. You named.”

I backed toward the edge of the room. My hand found a smooth indentation in the wall. A socket.

Another child stepped forward, hand outstretched. From her palm, a firefly lifted and floated toward me, blinking softly, and settled in the socket.

The wall lit up and, for a moment, I could see through it. Beyond the chamber, there were more rooms. More cells. More children. Some were crawling, some sitting. Some were strapped into chairs, blinking in rhythm with wall-mounted projectors. In one room, a technician guided a child’s hand as they traced the segmented spiral into soft clay. In another, a firefly swarm formed the glyph midair, living light scripting language onto flesh.

In one of the cells, I saw Alvarez, and stifled a gasp. His mouth was sewn shut, his eyes gone. But he was still alive.

The camera on my chest blinked once, then again, recording everything.

The children turned toward me in unison. “It’s your turn.”

“No.”

“You saw,” they whispered. “You listened. You believed. That’s all it takes.”

I tried to run, but my legs collapsed beneath me.

A hand steadied me, not a child’s, but Dr. Simmons’s. His face was pallid, stitched across the cheeks like a rag doll, but the eyes were still his, still familiar. Still human.

He knelt beside me. “It’s too late,” he said dejectedly.

“Help me,” I begged.

“I did,” he replied. “I warned you. You stayed.”

I reached for the camera again, desperate. He pushed my hand aside.

“They need a vessel. A witness. Someone to carry the light to the next mind.”

The children stepped forward, surrounding us. Their voices rose in unison. “Magistratum Lucifugae… Magistratum Lucifugae…”

On command, the room brightened. Fireflies blinked faster, then stopped blinking altogether. Now they glowed. And from beneath the platform, veined wings unfurled.

A shadow spread across the walls, tall and elegant and wrong.

The Magistrate stood.

And suddenly the light was inside me.

* * * * * *

The final footage appeared online two days later, on different platforms this time. Government archives. Private news servers. Streaming platforms. The evidence appeared all at once, everywhere, with no upload trace. It was filmed from a bodycam perspective and began with static before focusing.

On screen, I recognized the concrete stairwell, the spinning, mirrored cube, and the room full of children chanting. And over it all was my voice, clear and steady, leading the ritual, guiding the light, whispering instructions.

The final image was of my unblinking face, blank and expressionless, a firefly crawling into my mouth.

Darkness followed. And then words appeared onscreen, momentarily, before they too blinked out:

THE NEST IS GROWING.
FEED THE FIREFLIES.

God help us all.