Silent sneaky black with movement like an arachnid, but having only five fluidly flexible sword like limbs, all five except one ending in sharp points, almost like a misshapen hand except the tentacle like fingers did not end in a palm. Instead they ended into one another with no real torso. The one that was different from the others had a back facing hooked point protruding from the head, which wasn’t really a head, there were no eyes, mouth, nose, or ears and ended rounded compared to the legs, with an odd shape at the end, almost as if it hid an opening, an orifice, for what he did not know. Years ago, as a child he decided to call it a control point, whatever that meant. This appendage in action appeared almost as though it served a dual purpose, as both a guiding cognitive apparatus and a defense mechanism for when the legs, with their sharp points, could not contort to serve pain. The control point, or head if you will, was the only outlier of uniformity of this silently moving amalgamation that was the apparition-like Rangarook.

He heard it, the noiseless sound of an insincere silence. Foreboding. Ominous. A fictionally feigned silence, controlled, metered, it presented as a dangerous silence that lay beyond silence, a difference he knew, recognizing it stirred him from the deepest annals of sleep into an abrupt state of complete and total awareness, there was no grogginess. He was highly alert, yet maintained a semblance of no change physically that could provide any clue that his consciousness state had changed.

Laying there motionless maintaining the same cadence in breathing, with closed eyes, he slowly allowed first one eyelid and then the other to relax, to assuage uncontrolled muscle tension, which was necessary to open them slowly, providing the tiniest slit to view his surroundings.

Many years ago, when the danger began, he had perspicaciously taught himself to sleep prone on his back at a slight incline to allow him to survey his surroundings without the slightest movement, for observation or until compulsatory action, whichever might be required. 

An incline facilitated a wider view of his surroundings while mitigating the requirement of movement when unexpectedly stirred from a sleep state. Sleeping this way had become natural, except in more recent times he knew when they would come as it was precipitated, the visits had all been precipitated.