The Northern Lights fanned beautifully like waves in a pond that had been disturbed by a stone. Jason looked at them, memorised. He scanned the landscape that spanned out in front of him, the barren frozen lake that had started to fracture into icebergs with the approaching summer heat in the forefront and the beautiful conifers and breath-taking mountains in the back drop. He looked across at Rachel, every detail of her face illuminated by the highly charged particles. He looked at her features, that were by no-means un appealing under daylight, but like the cold Norwegian landscape, an aspect of vitality could be found when lit by the Aurora Borealis. He pulled her close for a kiss, and then poured her another glass of the Moet, and gently clicked the flutes; what a perfect moment. He did not have to worry about anything in this space, he found great peace with the nature that spanned as far as the eye could see. However, Jason reflected, for there to be a perfect moment there must have been a moment of pure terror, a moment where the acid in your stomach feels like it might eat its way through the lining of your stomach and consume your very soul. The moment when the floor beneath you becomes a foreign concept and your orientation is completely skewed. Now 20 years ago, for someone’s Jason’s age that might have been losing a job, getting dumped or finding out your car was broken. He instead recalled a memory of the first time he had gone out into the woods to go shooting. Using an old service M16, he had remembered catching sight of the 2nd most beautiful animal he had ever seen. It was a stag whose coat was the rich brown of an acorn in autumn, its antlers ornate and perfectly symmetrical, they looked like they were designed by the man upstairs himself. He had remembered all this detail in the split second that the beast had been caught in his crosshairs before he pulled the trigger. Then he felt the rifle punch him in the shoulder as the deer fell from view. He had only been 12 at the time and this was the first time he had ever shot a rifle, due to the need to preserve whaat little ammunition they had, and had just nicked the neck of the creature. As such, it was not a kill shot and the animal was squirming and writhing in distress as the life drained agonisingly slowly in great squirts from its neck, colouring the freshly fallen snow with a dark crimson red. He had approached the creature and raised the rifle to end its suffering, but his father had stopped him because they couldn’t afford the bullet. So instead the pair had waited a safe distance away for what couldn’t have been any more than 10 minutes, but to Jason had felt like 3 lifetimes. He felt as if he had let go of 2 things during that time, his childhood and his belief in God. He had suspected that the whole reason that his father had taken him out there to perform an archaic rite of passage into adulthood. But seeing that animal die slowly and Jason having little control over its suffering, gave him time to reflect that an incomprehensible number of random events had transpired to lead this deer to be in his crosshairs. If the wind had been in a different direction, the bullets gunpowder had been balanced differently, hell, if the rotation of the earth had been in a different orientation the bullet might have missed and that Stag would have gone merrily along, no wiser to the horrible, and gruesomely painful demise it had narrowly missed. Alas the Stag had ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and Jason could rip his gaze away from those black, lifeless eyes. He became aware of the tangent that he had gone down, and decided to stop feeling so melancholy, he was in a winter paradise with a beautiful girl, he currently had very little to complain about. Apart from the Alien invasion of course.