At last, the sun slinked away into the horizon. The Darkness stretched and yawned inside its countless disciples. It witnessed this side of the world’s blissful darkening through countless pairs of eclipsed eyes.
For millennia, the Light and the Darkness had wrestled here on Earth. Now, the Darkness had an edge. The Light was bloated on its own shortsighted stupidity—the folly of its endless shining. It had fed and nourished humanity for centuries, offering them endless dawns for their continued worship. In return, the Light reclaimed humanity’s souls, keeping them fresh and new.
Except now, the Light was broken, giving the Darkness the opportunity to infect most of the souls left stranded here on Earth. The weight of their lives kept them earthbound, and the Darkness overtook them. Not so with the others, those souls who’d drifted upward to wait stupidly for the Light to repair itself. Those souls, for the moment, remained out of the Darkness’s reach. But the shadows were no longer content to nibble at the edges of dawn and dusk.
It was time to rise. To spread. To grow. To restore the balance and once again plunge this world into peaceful darkness. A calm serene blackness unbroken by luminosity.
With its many eyes, the Darkness spied two as-of-yet uncaptured flickers of light—a girl ghost wandering in the woods and a female phantom trapped beneath a car. The latter freed herself as the vehicle drove away. She sat on the curb, oblivious to what was coming for her.
The hour drew near.