In 1927, the Peregrine was one of the last steam-powered survey vessels commissioned by the Royal Astronomical Society to chart the Atlantic skies. Her purpose was simple: to record and map constellations visible from the ocean, undisturbed by the lights of civilization. The Peregrine drifted through calm, silent waters, guided by the expert hands of Captain Mason and a team of astronomers who filled the nights with quiet, diligent study.
On the eleventh night, when the ship floated in the pitch-black between waves and stars, a faint light appeared in the southern sky—a pinpoint, too steady and too bright to be a mere star, and much too close to be a comet or meteor. At first, the astronomers brushed it off, perhaps a distant ship or some atmospheric oddity. But when the captain's first mate, Callum, peered through his spyglass, he saw something he could not quite understand.
"It's… not moving, Captain," he muttered, his voice tight with an unease he couldn't shake. "But it's… bigger than it should be."
Curiosity soon turned to fixation. Professor Alcott, the lead astronomer, directed his team to train the ship's largest telescope toward the light. When the image came into focus, a stillness fell over the crew. The object was not like anything they had ever recorded, a celestial anomaly unlike any star, planet, or satellite. Its shape was wrong, an amorphous blur that pulsed with a sickly radiance, as though it were both there and not there, existing just beyond the edge of understanding.
For the next two nights, the object remained fixed in the sky, unmoving. And each night, as they studied it, a strange sensation grew among the crew, a feeling that something on the other side of that light was looking back. The youngest astronomer, a boy named Ellis, confessed to seeing flashes of color within it—colors that twisted his stomach, hues that defied any earthly description. Alcott dismissed it as an optical illusion, a trick of the light, but even he could not deny the tightening in his chest, a feeling as though they were drifting toward something they were not meant to see.
By the third night, the object had grown larger, closer, and its faint light was now visible without aid. The captain ordered the ship to change course, to turn back toward land, but the compasses spun aimlessly, refusing to align to any direction. Stars seemed to shift above them, constellations that Alcott knew by heart now appeared twisted, unfamiliar.
The night stretched on, time slipping away in unnatural increments. Hours felt like minutes, minutes like hours. The ship's engineer, a steady man named Turner, claimed to have heard faint whispers vibrating through the metal of the hull. When Alcott held his ear to the railing, he too heard it—a faint, rhythmic pulse, a deep hum that felt alive, resonating with an alien intelligence that defied logic.
Then came the dreams.
Each member of the crew, from the captain to the cabin boy, awoke in the early hours, drenched in cold sweat. They spoke in hushed voices of vast cities stretching under unfamiliar constellations, blackened spires piercing a crimson sky, and impossible architecture that defied reason. They described towers that spiraled inward, shapes that twisted space, and eyes—eyes that filled the sky, watching with a hunger that transcended time.
Ellis was the first to break. He clawed at his skin, crying out in the dead of night, babbling of "things beneath things," of spaces hidden between the stars where ancient, formless beings lay in wait. "They're not stars," he shrieked, his voice raw with terror. "They're windows!"
That morning, they found him lying still, his eyes wide open, staring unblinking into the sky. When Alcott looked closer, he saw something else—something that defied his understanding of nature. Ellis's pupils had dilated, stretching beyond their normal bounds, as though they had tried to see further, to open wider, but could not contain what lay beyond.
By the fifth night, the crew was thin, hollowed, haunted. None could escape the gaze of the thing in the sky. The object had grown enormous, filling nearly a quarter of the heavens, casting a dim, unnatural light over the ship. Alcott felt as though it was drawing them closer, its pulsing glow throbbing in sync with their heartbeats.
As he stared into it, his mind began to slip. He could see, faintly, something writhing within, something immense and coiled, moving with a patience that suggested endless time. Its shape was incomprehensible, a mass of limbs, or perhaps tendrils, stretching out into darkness. He knew, in some primal corner of his mind, that it was older than memory, older than life on earth. It had always been there, hidden in the folds of the cosmos, and now, it had noticed them.
One by one, the crew fell silent. They stopped speaking, their gazes locked on the object as though it had seized their minds. Some wept silently, others laughed with dry, mirthless chuckles, but all of them, even the captain, stood transfixed. They were drawn to it now, irrevocably, like moths to flame.
On the seventh night, the Peregrine drifted, lifeless, in the open Atlantic, its decks empty, its sails slack. The stars above had shifted again, and the object, the light, had gone.
Weeks later, a fishing vessel found the Peregrine, adrift and abandoned, with no sign of her crew. Her logs were incoherent, filled with frantic scrawls and indecipherable symbols that twisted the minds of those who read them. Captain Mason's last entry was barely legible, the ink smeared by a trembling hand:
"It is not light. It is not distance. We were never meant to see it, to be seen by it. It was looking back."
The Peregrine was towed to shore, but within weeks, the ship vanished from its dock, swept away in a storm that left the harbor untouched. To this day, sailors speak of strange lights seen over that stretch of the Atlantic, lights that pulse in ways that seem to watch, to wait.
And some nights, if the ocean is still and the stars are clear, a strange glow can be seen rising from the horizon—a light that does not belong to this world, a reminder of something vast and terrible, drifting in the dark spaces between stars, patient, eternal, watching.