Strix

The trespasser, burdened by stolen wealth, staggered into the woods, his hands clutching ill-gotten trophies, their weight a mockery of his desire. He moved not with purpose, but with the desperate hunger of one who knows nothing but grasping, consuming, and never truly having.

Shadows, thick and pulsing, bloomed like dark flowers, tendrils of malice creeping across the air. The trees themselves seemed to whisper, their voices lost in the rustle of unseen things. And then, from the blackened silence, she appeared — the Strix.

Her hair, long and tangled, hung like the forgotten detritus of a dream, streaked with gray and madness. She was naked, but it was not the absence of clothes that exposed her — it was the absence of anything human. Wildness coiled around her like a living thing, an unnaturalness that stretched the very fabric of existence. Her eyes — eyes that did not belong to a world of flesh — burned with an intensity that could not be borne.

No words, no sound, only the ancient, inevitable force of being undone.

Roots, thick and serpentine, erupted from the earth as if the very soil sought retribution. They coiled around the trespasser’s limbs, his breath caught in the unforgiving vise of a nightmare. His wide eyes, now glassy, saw not the coins scattered on the ground, nor the silver cup fallen in frantic haste. His vision was consumed by the witch-demon's gaze, the world constricting and fading in on itself.

He writhed, but there was no sound. His agony was as silent as the inevitable collapse of all things — a scream that could never escape, a soul that could never flee. His greed, his trespass, had invited this—this unholy return to the earth from which he had tried to steal.

And then, as the darkness grew colder, as the moon itself seemed to shudder in revulsion, the Strix withdrew. Into the night she retreated, leaving behind nothing but the unsettling silence of a forest now aware of its own emptiness. The air, once thick with vengeful power, had become an oppressive void.

The night was no longer simply cold — it was a tomb, a sepulcher of icy warmth. The trespasser’s body lay still, forgotten, and the world around him pressed ever closer to the brink of nothingness.