Black Days

At first, no one noticed. The sun still rose, but it felt… thinner, as though someone had turned down the brightness. A pale gold at dawn, it never quite made it to white at noon. People blamed the season, or pollution, or their own tired eyes. I did too—until the day it didn’t rise at all.

The night before had been warm, heavy with summer humidity. I was lying awake, listening to the far-off hum of the city, when the air changed—thicker, heavier, as if the atmosphere had been replaced with water. Then came the silence. No traffic, no crickets, no hum of transformers. Just the slow, suffocating stillness.

When I woke, the window was black. I thought maybe the power was out, the streetlights gone. But then I realized—this wasn’t night. It was something else.

I checked the clock. 7:12 a.m. The sun should’ve been blazing in the sky. Instead, the world looked like the moments before a storm—except the clouds were wrong. They weren’t drifting. They were still, a jagged wall of dark, stretching from one horizon to the other.

That was the first day.

By the third day, people stopped going to work. By the fifth, the power grid failed. And by the seventh, we understood: the darkness wasn’t weather. It was alive.

They called it the Veil. It swallowed light the way a black hole swallows stars. Flashlights sputtered after a few seconds, candles burned low and died without smoke, and even fires seemed to choke on the air. You could only see a few feet ahead before the black swallowed everything.

Some people fled the cities, hoping the countryside would be brighter. I heard rumors about “safe zones” where the sun still shone, but no one I knew ever came back from trying to find them.

I stayed. I told myself it was because I knew the streets, because I could scavenge and survive here. But deep down, I think it was because I didn’t want to risk finding out there was no light anywhere.

It was on the 14th day that I saw them for the first time.

I had been moving through an abandoned grocery store, taking what I could carry. As I turned down an aisle, the dark seemed to move. Not just the normal ebb and flow of shadow, but something shifting inside it—fluid, deliberate. I froze.

Two shapes emerged—long, jointed limbs, bodies thin as wire, their outlines just visible in the dim grey. No eyes, no face, but somehow I felt their attention lock on me.

I ran.

From then on, I wasn’t just hiding from the dark. I was hiding from what lived in it.

The days bled together. Food ran low. My radio picked up only static. I found myself talking to the shadows sometimes, just to hear a voice. Maybe it was madness. Maybe it was the Veil whispering back.

One night, as I lay awake in my barricaded apartment, I saw a flicker—faint, but real. Light.

I went to the window. Across the street, in the building opposite mine, a single candle burned in a high window.

It was impossible. Candles didn’t last here.

I didn’t think. I just moved. Down the stairs, across the empty street, into the cracked lobby. I climbed by touch, my hand sliding along the rusting rail, until I reached the 12th floor.

The door to the apartment was open.

Inside, the light was blinding compared to the darkness outside. A small table, a single chair. And sitting in that chair, a woman. Her skin was pale, her hair white as frost, her eyes the color of winter sky.

“You made it,” she said, as though she’d been expecting me.

I stammered something about the candle, how it hadn’t gone out.

“It’s not the candle,” she said, smiling faintly. “It’s me. The dark can’t touch me.”

She told me the Veil wasn’t a storm, or a plague, or a curse. It was hunger. It fed on light, on warmth, on life itself. And it had been feeding for a long time, quietly, until it finally decided to take it all at once.

“But you—” I began.

“I am what it can’t eat,” she said. “And so are you.”

It took me a moment to understand. All the days I’d survived without freezing, without starving completely. All the times I’d escaped the shapes in the dark.

“You came because you felt it,” she said. “Because the light in you was still burning.”

She leaned forward, the candlelight flickering between us. “We can stop it. But we’ll have to go where it’s thickest.”

I thought of the shadows that moved, the way the Veil swallowed even fire. I thought of the endless, starless sky.

And then I thought of what it would mean if we didn’t try.

I nodded.

She blew out the candle.

For the first time in weeks, the darkness didn’t move.