In the shadowy woods, it dwells, lurking in the hidden shadows and the sweet smell of fallen leaves. It approaches with the sound of those leaves swirling in an unfelt breeze. One cannot mistake the creature for anything but that thing you can't remember from your dreams last night.
It should make more noise. That is your first thought as you look upon it, and it is standing on digitigrade feet. It stands upright, canted slightly forward. Knees bend the right way, though you could swear it looks as though they shouldn't. Its shins are covered in a hard armor that looks like the cracked callouses of weather toughened feet. The creature is thin and about the height of a short human. Its chest is broad compared to the rest of its body, the skin stretched tight where it is visible. Long arms seem to have mobile elbow joints that slide up and down the limbs in a waterlike rippling. It can bend those arms, with their ground dragging hands, anywhere it wishes. You don't see it, but you know it can do the same with its knees, too. The hands seem to vanish into the ground, but when it lifts them, you can tell that the fingers aren't all there, as though this world cannot hold all of them in place.
Midnight blue skin-- not scales, not fur, though it is covered with a soft layer of thin, unobtrusive hair-- is patterned in dark not-violet stripes. These burn the eye to look upon in a way that makes you try to rationalize them, try to force a name to this color. You have a feeling that, around this creature, maybe space and time bend just a bit more than normal; maybe your brain isn't meant to see it. But you see it anyway. The only spot of pale blue is a blue so grey one's mind gets confused in early evening and morning. The chest, pale perhaps from being stretched over a body that doesn't quite fit in this reality.
The creature's face would be of little note, but it contrasts sharply with the body. The strange coloration remains, and the face is wreathed in a mane of that same not-violet. In fact, as you stare, you realize that those tiny body hairs are this color as well, that it bends and distorts the creature you stare at in odd ways. But the face. The face is unremarkable. Simple lips. Black eyes, an upturned nose. The face of a child or a soft faced adult. You can never be too sure because it is so hard to look at with that mane surrounding it.
Clothing. You think it might have clothing, because there are breaks in the strange colors where it doesn't distort so much. Black cloth that wraps tight around stomach and hips, that should preclude graceful motion but does not. This cloth is unadorned, but one can almost believe that there are universes inside of it. You know. You know that this is more than a mere piece of clothing. It is where the creature stores what it steals.
It steals universes, not the already made, but the potential. Every universe and world and bit of creativity trapped in the minds of those it preys upon. It creates them full, unlocks them from the limits of human minds and language, and puts them in the Real. Every thought, every flight of fancy that would be alternate to what is real is made Real, made into an alternate universe. Each world building experiment, each hypothesis, each religion in all of its forms. For this monster is the creator of alternates. The victim, the prey, is hunted, inspiration, ideas, inventions, and idle thoughts drained. They say that if you are an unimaginative person, you may survive with just the feeling of having run a marathon. But for those of us who create, who dream with all our beings... we may find ourselves trapped in one or all of our worlds, unable to relinquish them. And then. The mortal body drifts to madness.
The monster smiles. For as long as it can make more universes-- and there will always be more universes-- there will be more prey...
