It's 12:38, and I'm still awake.
Chances are, it will be at least two before I actually go to sleep.

This happens to me sometimes, when there is no school to regulate my periods of rest and activity; I become nocturnal.

Lately I generally haven't been waking up till past noon. By the time I've started doing things, it's practically evening. And then, worst of all, the night opens up before me, long and lonely.

Don't get me wrong; I like night. Or I do, when I'm outside and there's starlight and breezes and much, if subtle, activity. But when it's just me, alone in my room with nothing but infinite black outside my windows and my computer screen glowing like a hellish monolith, it wears thin.

At eleven, most of the interesting people have logged off. The few who remain can't be talked to because they understand, as I do, that company ends shortly after the sun goes down.

Nightmares don't always require sleep; the longer I sit here, the more terrifying my suroundings become, untill my mind casts me into a desert, a woodland, a wilderness filled with... concepts, but concepts as they were before man came and swallowed them into our minds. Concepts as they were when they had feet and flesh, and could walk and prey among us. There I see rage, burning like a fire elemental, stomping the landscape and devouring all in sight before moving on; Lust dances arround, dressed in pretty clothes, swirling and laughing. Fear is here also, a black and freezing cloud, now apearing as a small child who leaps and clings to you when you pass by, blinding and chilling with his touch; he does not mean to e so cruel, only tries futiley to find heat enough to warm the infinite chill of his soul.

And there, moving invisibly between these great and pure and proud creatures, is the most terrifying of them all; Civilization. They have not seen it yet; it is invisible, growing like a frost over the land, showing it's face only rarely, when it knows it is safe; it's face is gentle, subservant, trustworthy. At least, it is untill you look at the smile, which stretches back to before any of these other creatures arose, and, the more you look at it, the more it ceases to be a smile and becomes a gaping maw, a lifeless and endless hunger which consumed everything that came before and will consume you too.

Civilization is cold; it is soulless. It is the demon that comes to all the good and proud and twists them, binding them in chains, draining their blood and leaving the once great and mighty to lay in the ground and wimper, broken and destroyed.

Sometimes, if you dig hard enough, you can still see what came before; look back to the simple days when cold and hunger were without, not within, when giants walked the earth and dragons flew the primal skies, shrieking their defiance. Civiliaztion cannot destroy these things, much though He despises them; they are the foundation on which He is built, the axe He hangs over our heads to keep us in line, obeying his commands, playing in his plastic-and-steel halls, feeding Him.

For that is how Civilization takes us all in, the reason for which we, generation after generation, sell Him our mind and souls and write our names in synthetic ink in his book; He offers to shelter us from the Night.

And still the Horned Man and his hounds ride the winds in their Wild Hunt.