The Hungry Dark

The shadows recoiled from the light of the torch, like smoke from a breeze. Darkness shifted and churned just beyond, like a great and hungry host of locusts, held barely at bay. Safety was still far away, and the torch burned so quickly.

Where darkness pools and gathers, where shadows grow deep and sharp, where no light touch the ground, darkness becomes something more than just absence. It is like a living thing - an sea of black, inky void, deep enough to drown the world.

by Midjourney by Q

Where the dark is deep, it is like solid enough to touch and sharp like iron. Unseen from without, it moves and churns, with waves that lap against the light and become like smoke as it touches it. Far from formless, it takes a thousand shapes to hunt those who brave it, always probing ways to tear down the last vestiges of light and plunge all of creation into everlasting darkness.
The hungry dark loses its form when touched by light. It becomes like smoke, dense and dangerous at first, then withering away. Only by light can mankind battle the endless void of hungry teeth and tentacles, the prowling things of shadows, the all-consuming dark.

Have you ever been caught in a river? Limbs heavy from the water, hapless to do much but struggle against the current? That's an inkling of what is like to drown in the hungry dark.

Something alien guides the dark, controlling it as the singular swarm. Though hungry, the dark is patient and cunning, ever adapting to the defenses raised against it. Ever since the shattering of the sun, the darkness has swallowed much of the world, turning countries and continents into wastelands, old and glorious cities into abandoned haunts. Whatever it is, it is doing something out there, far from light and from human eyes.

by Midjourney by Q

Inch by inch, light by extinguished light, more and more of the world descends into the dark. It never tires, never rests, never ceases its endless advance upon the ever-shrinking circles of illumination where life still thrives.