Halo Fanon:Haloween

Well now, folks, October's here, and that month brings up one very specific association. It's every year, about this day, that spooks and spirits come out to play, and no, I don't mean kind of spirit. Soon enough, we'll all be strutting around in our MJOLNIR costumes and knocking on doors, or turning off every light in the house and not answering the door so we can horde all the sweets for ourselves. Which leads me to another fine tradition of the Halloween season: scary stories, spooking your friends with the most spine-tingling tales you can come up with.

And we're a group of storytellers, are we not? So let's don our conspiratorial hoods and set out to chill one another to the bone. The Halo Universe is filled with elements prime for a horror story when seen under the right light. If you're not a Spartan, being stalked by active camouflaged Elites is terrifying, as the cadets of Corbulo Academy discovered. The Flood lurked in the darkest depths of space for millennia, and may still be hiding somewhere out there, hungry to consume a galaxy of flesh and blood and bone. Rampant AI haunt the wrecks of forgotten battleships, Prometheans guard the Forerunners' ancient structures with the aggression of animals and empathy of machines, and unassuming humankind can sometimes be the most dangerous game of all. All of these can be frightening by themselves, but how they're interacted with can also be a source of ideas. Remember, legends of the "Ghost of Onyx" were told by SPARTAN-III recruits after seeing lights in the forest at night, and while they didn't know it, we knew these had to be Onyx's autonomous Sentinels going about their business. . . or could it have been something else? Make use of the unknown, be inventive, and have fun with it!

Now, I'm not gonna ask you to go to all this trouble tricking without a treat in return, so what's in it for you? Well, any spooky story written during the course of October gets to add the shiny new Halo-ween (I know it's a bad pun, but how could I resist?) Eraicon to their page, and join the list of ghost stories to be shown off on the Main Page through the whole month of October! Anyone can participate, and all sorts of entries are welcome, from stories to poems to even articles, pending approval. So start setting those cauldrons a-bubble and craft something sinister!