The sisters Melanie and Violet are out celebrating a given Friday. Nothing significant is happening, nothing at all. It's just yet another end-of-the-week night out, and that's all.

But when looking back at it, they agree that it was the start of everything happening later.

Something... entered their lives that night, an ominous, beyond powerful force they could neither fathom nor grasp. It reaches out to them, and they can't help but respond. They can just as much deny it as they can stop breathing. It's there, no matter where they turn or what they do.

Melanie detests her job, even though she refuses to admit that fact. Violet has let go of the old and is reaching out to the new. Her hands reach into the darkness. Her fingers fumble there, shaking a bit, searching for something to grasp. She finds Paul and Laura and others, finds an entirely new existence beyond the mundane she rejected.

It satisfies her for a while, but she isn't content, not completely and she keeps searching, keeps exploring what's at the tip of her tongue, the scent in her nostrils, the call in the night drawing her.

It's always there, an impulse she can neither deny nor resist.

There's something going on, in the city and outside it, in the deep, deep forest, a transformative force engulfing everything, including everyone. A large modern city is crumbling to dust, drowning in blood and falling apart at the seams.