The Lights Above the Mountain

Ghalia came to the village to document a phenomenon she'd only known for years through secondhand stories: small white lights drifting slowly above the mountain peak overlooking the town on cold autumn nights, vanishing suddenly, still unexplained despite decades of informal local attempts to understand it.

No one, as far as she could gather from the villagers, had ever documented the phenomenon with real equipment. It had always been a shared, passing experience — told more than it was studied.

On her first night of observation, Ghalia set up her camera at the edge of the forest, where locals usually gathered, and recorded everything: the lights appeared exactly as described, drifting slowly, then fading out one by one.

Reviewing the footage that night, she focused first on the picture, and found nothing beyond what she'd seen with her own eyes. But when she finally paid attention to the audio — a detail most previous informal attempts had ignored — she heard something she hadn't noticed standing there: a very faint rhythmic pattern, evenly spaced, closer to footsteps on snow that hadn't existed that night, gradually approaching the camera's position, then stopping abruptly, with nothing ever appearing in frame.

The next day, she asked the oldest resident in the village if there was an older account of the phenomenon, beyond the pleasant tourist-friendly version everyone knew. He hesitated a long time before answering.

"There's an older version. Nobody tells it to visitors." He stopped there for a moment, like he was deciding how much to give her. "The lights aren't just lights. That's the short of it. The old-timers didn't count them for fun, every year. They counted to make sure the number hadn't changed."

He wouldn't say more than that, no matter how she asked.

Ghalia went back to her recording and counted the lights again, then again. The elder had been specific: nineteen, he said, always nineteen, for as long as he'd been counting them himself, and for as long as his father had before him.

Her count came to twenty.

She sat a long time reviewing the count, over and over, convinced she'd made a mistake. She hadn't.

On her last night before leaving the village, she went back alone to the edge of the forest, no camera this time, just to watch with her own eyes.

The lights appeared as usual, drifting, fading out one by one, in the same familiar order everyone had described to her.

It was the sound that was different. The same faint, evenly spaced rhythm from her recording — footsteps on snow that didn't exist — except this time she didn't need a microphone to hear it, and it wasn't approaching the tree line anymore.

It was behind her, close enough to feel the gap between each step get shorter, and she didn't turn around to check how much shorter.