Artifact: The Hungry Dark
Power: Major.
Description: A large mason jar covered in black house paint inside and out, obscuring its contents. The lid is sealed with wax and someone has daubed a crude, angry skull and crossbones on top. It rattles when you shake it.
If opened there is darkness inside, darkness and the burned out remains of a small lightbulb wired to a corroded 9 volt battery. If opened in the wrong circumstances there’ll be nothing but darkness outside too.
Effect: The hungry dark is the remains of a long disbanded cabal’s attempt to deal with a swath of darkness that made their town unnavigable by night. The person who preyed on their community is still around, a reformed tenebrae breeder who now drives an ice cream van and tries to live a quiet life, and would frankly be shocked and dismayed to learn they failed. And maybe a little intrigued.
The hungry dark consumes artificial light. Opened under any illumination other than sunlight (moon and starlight doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, maybe they’re not strong enough) it plunges the lit area into darkness. The stronger the artificial light the stronger the effect, the hungry dark lurches out of confinement and latches onto the source and converts its output into inky blackness that effectively blinds anyone in the area.
It won’t stop there. If another source of artificial light is within sight of the magickal darkness it too is consumed and converted, then sources within range of that and so on. It would be an apocalyptic situation if not for the fact that it requires ongoing sustenance from these light sources and is burned away by sunlight. Nevertheless, rooting out and destroying hidden patches of a widespread hungry dark in the daytime would be a tremendous and potentially sisyphean feat. Any one of them could lead to a new outbreak.
If completely destroyed the hungry dark reforms around its last active food source and lays dormant, waiting for another chance to spread.
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