I wake before your sun rises.

Not because of habit, but because I never truly sleep. My ship hums low, cloaked just beyond your moon’s echo, absorbing static, dreams, and electromagnetic stutters from your failing satellites. I listen. Always listening. Not for words, but for vibrations of fear. Your planet tastes best when it’s afraid.

I stretch my claws across the bone-laced hide I wear—a trophy from a queen I bled in Andromeda. My mandibles click softly, a prayer to no god, only to the rhythm of hunt. I do not eat for nourishment. I eat for hierarchy. For proof. For memory. You see a Predator. I see my ancestral role, carved from obsidian starlight and blood.

Earth is boring most days. Your kind hides behind screens and illusions of safety. But there are moments—oh, there are moments—when something primal leaks out of you. The scream of a man facing death. The panic in a mother’s heart when her child is missing. The rush of a soldier hearing the last bullet click. That’s when I come closer. Invisible. Breathing the same air as you. Close enough to smell your uncertainty.

I do not hate you. I pity you. You forgot the hunt. You forgot the chase. You invented machines to fight your battles, and now your teeth are dull. You do not test yourselves. You age into comfort. You talk of gods, but I’ve skinned more of them than you’ve prayed to. Some begged. Some laughed. None survived.

By midday, I’m inside your cities. The cement mazes. The heat signatures. I walk among you. Sometimes you feel me. That chill. That itch between the shoulders. But you always look away. You don’t want to see what’s stalking you. You want to believe in reason, not instinct. But reason doesn’t save you. Reflex does.

At dusk, I claim a body. It doesn’t matter who. A gang leader. A hedge fund parasite. A war criminal in disguise. I do not hunt innocents—but innocence is nearly extinct on your world. I leave no trace, except the open ribcage, the scream turned into a legend, the strange blood pattern your detectives can’t explain. You call it urban myth. You call it coincidence. You call it “nothing.” Perfect.

Night falls. I return to my ship. I catalog the skull, place it beside the others. A human skull is not beautiful, but it is evolutionary poetry. So weak. So clever. So confused.

Before I go into stasis, I look down at your world once more. I wonder how long you’ll last. Whether your kind will ever rediscover the ecstasy of the hunt, or if you’ll vanish under your own distractions—soft, gluttonous, oblivious.

Then I close my eyes and dream the only dream I have:

The jungle, steaming. The hunt, silent. The prey…

Running.