That black world revealed itself in the deepest, most terrifying hours of the night — the kind of night when an impenetrable darkness presses down like a weight and the whole world seems to sleep in uneasy silence. Even the animals refused to come out. Dogs stopped barking. A strange hush spread across the land, so dense that time itself seemed to stall; moments hung frozen, as if a heavy black shadow had settled on the earth and swallowed all light.
When the darkness took hold, a doorway opened to a dreadful, demonic world — a realm where it was always night. Yet curiously, to the denizens of that black world, night felt clearer and more vivid than day ever does to us. They saw everything in that perpetual night as if it were daytime, while we humans, helpless in our daylight-bound senses, could see nothing in the dark. So these fiends hunted most effectively at night. They were creatures of hunger and cruelty, a cursed people whose only purpose was to feed on humans. They devoured human flesh and blood, and even the bones were not spared.
No one had ever seen them hunt and lived to tell the tale. Those who caught a glimpse of them never survived.
A terrible incident occurred in a small village on the edge of this world. There lived a poor family, always burdened by debts and worry. Three of them shared that cramped home — a husband, his wife, and their three-year-old daughter. Despite their poverty, they were cheerful and deeply in love with their little girl. They supported one another through every hardship, never imagining their happiness would soon turn into a flood of bloody tears.
One night the father was returning home after work, walking along the lonely road. Suddenly, a peculiar sound came from behind. When he turned around to look—his head fell from his shoulders as if a wind had sliced it away. In an instant both his severed head and his torso vanished into the air. At home, his wife grew anxious as the hours passed. Taking her daughter in her arms, she stepped out into the night to search. As she walked the same road, she heard her husband's voice from behind. When she turned, the same fate befell mother and child.
At dawn, some villagers came by for a task and found the home abandoned — food and belongings left untouched, the place as if the occupants had simply vanished. The family was gone. Fear gripped the village. Some muttered that maybe the family had run away because of debt, and that was that — a story people told until another day erased it from memory. But one by one, others went missing in the same manner. Soon the entire village became known as a deserted settlement, its secret buried behind silence and rumor.
The truth, however, was darker: the villagers had not fled nor been spirited away — they had been hunted. No one remained alive to expose the secret. How many families, how many villages had that accursed black world devoured? No one could say.
And yet, the ravenous creatures of that realm did not know that a calamity of their own was about to begin. The method with which they preyed on humans would be their undoing — something born within their own night would soon turn on them and hunt them in return, among them, within their own shadows. Even in that world there was no justice. Rich and poor existed there as they do here, but mercy was absent. The weak perished from hunger while the strong alone were allowed to enter the human world. The weak were forbidden to leave; they suffered in silence, starved and forgotten.
Then a strange and unique event happened among one of those poor families — something that had never occurred in that black world before. A child was born, unlike any other. At first glance the newborn looked like a human skull: its face resembled a cranium, its small body appeared skeletal, as if made of bone. The child's parents were stunned. But whatever it was, it was theirs, and they embraced it.
In that cursed world, children were born already hungry for human flesh — a grim fate accepted by all. Yet this child was different. It ate, yes, but only the meat of dead animals, the carrion that even the poorest in that realm refused to touch. When the other inhabitants learned that a child with a skull-like face had been born, they flocked to the family's home and laughed at them cruelly. They mocked the family's poverty and deemed them worthless. They beat them, cursed them, and placed social restrictions upon them. Food and basic sustenance were withheld. The family was so weak they could not even cross into the human world for help. Starvation came swiftly.
In the end, hunger claimed the lives of the child's parents. The small skull-faced child was shackled and locked away. It wept endlessly, but its cries only made the others laugh harder. Alone, bound and abandoned, the little child with the human skull-like face was left to the darkness.
And so it began: the black world continued its nightly feasts, its quiet towns swallowed one by one, and a strange, fragile hope — or perhaps a terrible misfortune — took root with the birth of that lonely child.