A vast, frozen expanse under an endless black sky. The only light comes from a pulsating AURORA BOREALIS. But it’s wrong. Not the usual gentle, green curtain, but an angry, electric bruise of lurid GREEN and sickly YELLOW, pulsing like a living thing.
DALE (30s), cynical and pragmatic, hunches against the cold, his breath pluming. He struggles with an old fibreglass shovel, his movements stiff inside a heavy parka.
Beside him, SAMI (30s), a passionate idealist, slips on the ice. A yelp. She windmills her arms, steadying herself. A plastic SLED she’s hauling, loaded with spray paint cans and frozen tarps, nearly tips over.
CASSIE (30s), quiet and observant, is already kneeling by a pre-drilled hole in the ice, trying to secure a rope with numb fingers.
Her voice is thin, swallowed by the HOWL of the wind.
She stomps a boot. A low, resonant THRUM travels up from the ice, a vibration you feel more than hear.
Dale stops, listening. He feels it in his teeth. He jabs the shovel into the snow, the effort pointless.
He wrestles a frozen tarp from the sled. It CRACKS like old leather.
He gestures a mittened hand at the angry sky.
Cassie pushes herself up, rubbing her gloved hands together. Her gaze flickers to the aurora.
Sami nods, her braids straggling from under her toque. She grabs a can of spray paint, shaking it. The ball inside RATTLES, loud in the eerie quiet.
A faint GREEN MIST, thin as smoke, drifts across the ice at their feet, catching the light from above. It radiates an impossible cold. Dale’s fingers begin to ache inside his mittens.
He stamps his feet. The THRUM from the ice intensifies, a low, guttural vibration that resonates in his chest.
The green mist thickens, swirling.
The wind DIES. Utterly.
A sudden, oppressive SILENCE descends, broken only by the deep HUM.
Cassie’s eyes are wide. She touches her ears.
The mist is now a creeping, opaque shroud, maybe a hundred metres away, advancing on them. It swallows the horizon.
He fumbles with a frozen knot on a tarp, his fingers stiff and clumsy.
She points with a trembling, mittened hand.
Further out, a patch of mist thins, revealing the snow beneath. And pressed into the snow are TRACKS.
They are not human. Not animal. Long, slender depressions, like something impossibly heavy was dragged gracefully across the ice. Along their edges, a faint, repeating pattern, like the impression of a vast, intricate chain.
And from within the tracks, the snow itself GLOWS with a sickly green light.
Dale stares, his heart hammering.
Sami is utterly still, her bravado gone. Her face is pale in the alien light.
Dale feels a sharp, electrical ache in his temples. His vision distorts for a second, the edges of the tracks blurring, then snapping into focus with impossible sharpness.
Morbid curiosity overrides Dale's fear. He takes a hesitant step forward. The cold intensifies, a piercing pain in his lungs. He can taste static in the air, a metallic tang.
She follows him, her hand gripping his sleeve. Cassie hangs back, her expression thoughtful, distant.
She points to the surface just beyond the tracks, where the mist is thickest.
The lake ice there is different. Not rough and opaque, but smooth, impossibly clear, like polished glass. It shimmers with an internal light.
And BENEATH the crystalline surface, something moves. A vast, sprawling network of fine, iridescent VEINS, pulsing with the same sickly green light. A living, glowing circulatory system under the ice.
Dale feels a wave of vertigo and nausea. The HUM rises to a high-pitched WHINE that makes his teeth ache.
For a flash of a second, his vision sharpens. He sees faint, SKELETAL STRUCTURES shifting within the veins. Reaching.
He blinks hard. They’re gone. Just the shimmering ice remains.
A cold gust of wind hits them, smelling of burning copper and wet earth. The green mist SURGES forward, swallowing the tracks and the shimmering ice.
They are now at the very edge of the shroud. The cold is a physical pressure. Dale’s lungs burn.
He grabs Sami’s hand, his own trembling.
He turns to pull her away, but something GLINTS in the snow at the very edge of the encroaching mist. Small. Metallic.
Ignoring Sami’s pull, he lunges for it. The cold sears his gloved fingers as he scoops it up.
CLOSE ON DALE'S HAND
He holds a metal FRAGMENT. It's impossibly thin, yet rigid. Cool, like polished obsidian.
Etched into its surface is a SYMBOL: a complex spiral made of smaller, interlocking spirals. It radiates a faint green light, mimicking the aurora.
A tiny, distinct HUM vibrates from the object, a perfect echo of the sound filling the air.
Dale stares at it. The chilling conviction is absolute. This is not from their world.
The mist touches the tips of his boots.
FADE TO BLACK.
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