Lightbender Tales: The Black Sluagh

It was always there. Quiet, unnoticed, just beneath the surface. You felt it in the static of the TV when you flipped past the news of another murder. You heard it in the echo of gunshots, the kind that made people say, "It’s just how things are." The streets whispered it, the cracks in the concrete, the hollowed-out buildings, the boarded windows, and the endless cycle of blood and silence. Something was moving, unseen, fueling a violence that felt like it was coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

In the middle of the night, Marcus woke up to the hum. It wasn’t loud, but it was constant, like a swarm of insects just out of sight. The apartment was still, too still. He glanced at his phone. 2:43 a.m.

He rubbed his eyes, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stared into the dark. The hum persisted. It wasn’t his imagination. It never was. He’d felt this before, but it had been faint, lurking in the background of everyday life. This time, it was stronger. Realer.

He didn’t know when it started, but Marcus had long suspected that there was something bigger behind the violence. Not just systemic. Not just historical. Something else. He felt it the night he lost his cousin on 47th Street, standing over the body, watching the blood leak into the gutter. There had been something in the air then, too. Something thick and foul, like decay, but no one else seemed to notice.

It was always there.

Marcus lit a cigarette and opened the window, hoping the night breeze would help, but it didn’t. The air was dense with it. It crawled up his spine, an unseen presence wrapping itself around him. He exhaled, eyes scanning the empty streets below, and that’s when he saw them. Just for a moment—a mass of shadowy figures hovering above the buildings, moving like smoke. They didn’t walk. They drifted, like a black fog, an army of eyes with no faces, slipping through the night.

The Sluagh.

He’d heard about them. Ghost stories from the old heads, whispered at late-night domino games. "Spirits of the damned," they said. "The ones who died with hate in their hearts, who carry it from generation to generation, looking for the next soul to corrupt." But Marcus didn’t believe in spirits—at least, not until now. Not until he saw them himself.

The hum grew louder, and the Sluagh began to move. Marcus watched, frozen, as they glided down into the streets. They seeped into the cracks of the city, into the skin of the people sleeping in their homes, into the hearts of the angry and the broken. A gunshot rang out a few blocks away. Then another. And another. He could feel them feeding on it, stirring the violence, pulling strings that no one else could see.

This was no coincidence. The Sluagh had been there all along—fuelling the rage, the desperation, the self-destruction. They thrived on it, an unseen force behind every act of senseless violence, whispering into the ears of the forgotten, twisting their pain into chaos.

But Marcus wasn’t going to let them take him. Not like they had taken his cousin, his brother, and countless others he’d known since childhood. He knew what he had to do, but the weight of it pressed on him. They were too many, and he was just one man.

Yet he couldn’t just sit there. Not while they hollowed out his neighborhood, his people. He wasn’t going to watch another person fall to them. So he moved—grabbed his jacket, his knife, and stepped out into the street. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he had to face them.

The Sluagh drifted down the alleyways, invisible to everyone else, their darkness trailing behind them like the stench of death. Marcus followed. He wasn’t afraid anymore; he was angry. Angry at the silence, angry at the lies that had kept people blind to what was really happening.

He found them gathering at a dead-end corner where the streetlights flickered like they were scared to stay on. The air was thick, suffocating, and the hum buzzed in his ears. The Sluagh circled a group of teenagers—young, angry, and armed. Marcus could see it, the way the spirits clung to them, whispering their poison, feeding their rage.

"Not tonight," Marcus said, stepping forward, his voice steady, but his heart racing. "Not this time."

One of the spirits broke away from the pack and turned its attention to him. It didn’t speak, but Marcus could feel its pull, like a hand reaching into his chest, trying to grip his soul. The others circled around, and for a moment, Marcus thought he might not make it out. But he wasn’t like them. He hadn’t died angry. He was still alive, and as long as he was alive, he had a choice.

He stood his ground, staring into the empty void where the spirit’s face should’ve been. "You’ve taken enough."

The hum grew deafening, but Marcus didn’t move. He couldn’t fight them all, but he could resist. He could refuse to let them win. And in that moment, he felt something shift. The Sluagh recoiled, just slightly, like they could sense the fire burning in him.

Marcus knew they weren’t gone—not yet. They’d be back. But as he watched them dissolve into the night, he knew he wasn’t powerless. Not anymore. The Sluagh might have been feeding on the pain of his people for centuries, but he could see them now. And that was the first step to stopping them.

Tomorrow, the streets would look the same. The news would report the same stories of violence, and the cycle would continue. But Marcus had seen the truth. And now, he knew what to fight.

The real enemy had always been in the shadows. And Marcus wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.