The world around Bandle was pitch black now. The air around him was filled with the sound of screaming people who were also engulfed by the darkness. Bandle found himself stumbling about as people began blindly bumping into him as they stumbled around in the dark, trying to find their way out of whatever was causing it.

Then suddenly the darkness was pierced by a bright, flickering light. “Finally!” Kroff grinned. He had just managed to light his hands with a bright, but flickering, yellow light. “Everyone…whoever can hear my voice, snap out of it! Use your magic if you can to light the way!”

Then, the area around them slowly began to light up with people using their magic as Kroff instructed. Despite this newfound light source, the black liquid smoke still swindled around them as a violent wind had begun to surge around them.

“Tell me…” said a voice in the air.

Bandle jumped as the voice sounded like someone had whispered right into his ear as if they were only inches away from his face. He whipped around, his axe already swinging, but it only hit the open air. No one was there.

“Tell me, little Jord-men…what do you desire?”

“Who are you?” Bandle shouted, still spinning around, looking for the source of the voice. “Who’s there?”

“Hmm.” Said the voice in the dark. “Very well then. If you won’t simply tell me what you want, I suppose I will have to force it out of you.”

A gasp turned Bandle’s attention back toward his brother, who was now being lifted into the air by some invisible force. Kroff’s eyes then turned a solid black, his skin started to turn an ashy grey with black veins. A long, raspy sort of wail that started all around them then droned its way out of Kroff’s mouth before he said, “I want…I want…oh mighty Friend of Darkness, Foe of all Fae, and Farmer of Slaves…grant me the strength I need to keep my family safe!”

“Is that all you want? Very well then…what will you give me in return?”

“Give you?” said Kroff. The sound of his voice had returned to normal, but his eyes and skin still showed he was very much under the entity’s influence. “What do you want from me? I’ll give you anything. Anything to save my children from whatever madness this is that my brother has released!”

“No, Kroff!” Bandle shouted. “Snap out of it! We don’t know what we’re dealing with here! We don’t know what this thing can do or what it is!”

Bandle looked around for help, to see why none of the other men and women—not even his family—were saying anything. It was because they were all suspended in the air just like Kroff was. Each of the villagers was pale grey with blackened eyes, muttering to, presumably, the disembodied voice.

“I will grant all of your wishes.” Said the voice. “I will do all of this...but in exchange…you must give me your magic.”

“What?” said Bandle. “No, everyone wait a minute—”

It was too late. Within minutes, piles of gold coins began appearing around the feet of several villagers, some villagers like Kroff began growing in strength, and then something truly strange had begun to happen. There were a few villagers who were now surrounded and being embraced by people made of shadows.

“Olaf!” said one woman who was hugging some of the shades. “Oh, you’ve finally come home! And you brought the boys back too! Oh, thank the Faun!”

“No, thank me.” Said the voice. “I will save you from all of your hardships. But there are still several of you who have not taken my deal. Why is that?”

“No…no!” Kroff was coming back to his senses, raising his hands up in the air and trying to use his magic. But he was unable to conjure up anything more than a few sparks of light.

Bandle rushed over to help by pulling Kroff out of the air. Once he was down, Bandle smacked him in the face. “Wake up, Kroff!  Keep fighting it!” Bandle could see the rest of his family members now. They had split up to help the guards’ attempts to snap the villagers out of the demon’s dark enchantment.

A wave of black smoke then pushed Kroff back with so great a force that he went flying backwards and slammed into his wagon. His bison, already agitated by the commotion, then broke free of its harness and went running off into the village.

“You. What is your name, Jördling?”

Bandle looked up at the wagon and when he saw someone standing on it above him, he jumped to his feet to back away from his cart. The figure was hidden by shadow and smoke so that Bandle could only make out an outline of the man. Bandle grabbed a torch that he had on the wall of one of the market stands and threw it toward the shadow man in hopes of getting a better look at him.

The shadow man made no attempt to move. Instead, he just stood there and as the torch passed right by his face, Bandle’s blood ran cold as the light of the torch completely failed to touch the man. The light did not show his face, or his body, it didn’t show the man’s age, or reveal anything about the man. It was almost like the man wasn’t there at all and the light was being actively swallowed up by the dark. Instead, the torch landed in the wagon and set it aflame. The resulting fire that started only created a silhouette of the figure.

“I’m sorry. The light doesn’t work on me. Truthfully, I can’t remember the last time I felt the light’s embrace…or if I ever even did.” The shadowy man dropped to the ground and began walking towards him. He was tall; when he was on the wagon he was couched over, but now that he was standing upright on the ground, Bandle could see that the top of his head reached the heights of some of the nearby cabins.

“What are you?” Bandle asked.

“Hmm…that’s interesting. I would have thought that the Fae would’ve taught their subjects to know one of my kind whenever they see one.” Then the shadow man looked up towards where the stars should have been if it were not for the dark. “Well, judging by the positions of the stars, I suppose it has been several centuries since they ruled these lands, but you should still know better. The Fae used to call me a Friend of Darkness. I live in this frozen Jörd that you hauled out of the Dark Place back up in the mountains. Thank you for that, but enough talking. I need to eat now.”

The Friend of Darkness then screeched into the sky as his head expanded and contorted beyond what should have been possible. It got to the point where his entire head peeled away and out of his newly enlarged mouth sprouted a mass of shadowy tentacles with mouths and teeth of their own. Those writhing new mouths then slithered down the man’s body and towards the floating bodies of the villagers that had been too busy enjoying their granted wishes to know what was happening.

Bandle watched in horror—his body shaking as the tentacles began devouring them alive. Why didn’t the scream, though? Bandle’s eyes were locked on the villagers’ smiles. Clearly too enthralled to care, one woman, in particular, smiled softly at the shade posing as she lost loved one as one of the tentacles ate away at her. Just before she dropped to the ground, the woman said her last words to the shade in front of her. “I missed you so much, Mahler. I’ll never leave your side again.”