The Carrion Maven by Casey Douglass

It seeps through the streets like a pressure wave, its higher dimensional traversal sending billowing ripples of aether amongst the massed crowd. It probes their glowing minds. Myriad carnival light-bulbs flicker as its broiling black smoke sucks at their glass.

Millennia old, it hunts for novelty, for new experiences to shape and to occupy, for lives to subsume. A murder here, an affair there, despair everywhere. It gurgles and clicks as one mind gives off an unknown shade. It has not seen this variety before! It penetrates and gorges, revelling in the psychic flotsam.

The world grows one shade dimmer.