The Lucevore

"The Lucevore is a foul and accursed creature, one that thrives in the deepest darkest places. The beast is blind, yet constantly afflicted with an insatiable hunger--not for flesh or bone or the blood of the innocent, but for light in all of its forms. Physical or spiritual.

To this day, not even the most adept magicians and sages know how exactly it feeds on light, or why it even exists. Legends only speak of a time aeons ago when these beasts walked the earth and tormented all men under an age of darkness, an age of eternal night.

In those days, the Lucevore and its brood were mighty and feared, routinely devouring the light of the Sun and the stars, and the flaming souls within every human, every animal, every living thing (particularly the pure souls of the young).

Death and darkness followed this horrible monster wherever it went, and it was only the sacrifice of countless warriors and mages, and the will of humankind that even a fraction of humanity survived those unspeakable millennia of terror and suffering.

Indeed, there came a time in which humankind had had enough of the Lucevores, and fought back following the Age of Metal, the Age of the Blade.

Then came the Age of Insurgents, upon which these demons of the dark were finally driven away or slaughtered en masse, forced back into the ground from where they came, or into places where light could not reach.

But humanity, fearing the eventual return of any surviving Lucevores, sought a solution that would sate these creatures' appetites. In shame, the rulers of the world's nations came together, and decided that every month, the bright soul of an innocent child would be sacrificed to the maws of a Lucevore--a practice thousands of years old."