Chapter 1

"It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills,
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter."
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit or There and Back Again

Pitch Black, the bogeyman, woke up from his sleep in the damp cave of his home. What he first noticed was that his back felt strained. Badly.

He sighed. It was hard sleeping on the floor despite cuddling against the black darkness and his ragged cloak.

He got up, sagging under the weight of darkness that filled his room endlessly in every corner of his den. His last fight with guardian put him in the retirement and despite his hunger for fear, he felt that something else was amiss after the battle and missing opportunity to recruit Jack Frost.

Or was it only that? It was something entirely with strange episodes he been having when feasting on fear. Lately, he saw a bright flashback of a young girl and beautiful woman when he tried to harvest fear in kids, leaving him dazed. It was followed by an explosion inside of his head that left him dizzy, forcing him to retreat back into the night.

And so, with every hunger pangs that came with stabbing pain, he simply gritted his teeth and staved it off. He no longer schemed throughout the day and night for a new way to scare children nor did he check the world map where the individual lights still shined bright. But he could feel that the darkness was getting restless. They began to whisper to him.

They were murmurs- a brief echo that dissipated. But now, they were whispering the same sentence over and over again.

Feed us.

He shivered when recalling the voices that came from the darkness. Voices that whispered in a sweet sing-song voice while others were dry, raspy and ancient. But he checked, again and again, to see where the whispers came from but all there was blackness and nothing else. Eventually, after a long search, he would fall asleep.

He stared into the cracked mirror. His usually pale face was even paler in stark contrast to his dark heavy shadows under his eyes. With his sharp cheekbone and hungry dark eyes with oily black hair, he looked much like the dead. He could bear the darkness shifting about at night but the whispers have made him unable to sleep. He cringed at his slumped black hair. He tousled his hair about, trying to slick it backward but after multiple attempts, he gave up and left it as it is.

He smelled a small whiff of fear and automatically began drooling, his lip drawn back with his sharp white teeth showing. But once again, he retracted his teeth and clutched the sink. The wave of pain hits him and he staggered backward, gasping. He retched into his hands and felt something wet between his fingers. A black liquid dripped off his hand onto the floor.

He widened his eyes. Suddenly, the smell of fear spiked up his nose that smelled pungent like a cloud of cigar smoke.

It was his fear.

Quick on his feet, he dashed to the main cove as fast as his shadows could carry him, leaving behind the strange black liquid on the floor.

The drops of strange black regiment shifted in the dark ever so secretly.