Hungerbeast Demon

Gerald ran from the looming shape that kept appearing closer and closer each time he looked over his shoulder. He ran until his knees threatened to give out, and then ran further still. After what felt like hours, he looked over his shoulder and found no shape, looming or otherwise, behind him anymore.   He slowly came to a stop, looking around for the creature that had chased him so far. After a moment, he heard it; the soft wheezing of wind through a hollow, though it seemed to come from all around him.   As he turned around once more, the shape was uncomfortably close, its body writhing and shifting, gaunt and undulating. Its maw opened and devoured his very being, the sight of its unending circles of teeth the last thought running through his mind.

 

Devouring Abyss

  There are creatures in the abyss, gnawing on the edges of reality, and the Hungerbeasts are among the worst of them. Imagine a being starved not just for food but for existence itself - gaunt things with translucent skin stretched too thin over too many ribs, their bodies contorting in ways that suggest they never learned the rules of shape and form. Their eyes, if you could call them eyes, are black, bottomless pits. When they look at you, it's not hunger for flesh they convey. It's hunger for everything; your thoughts, your memories, your very sense of self.   They do not walk. They shamble. They slither. They lurch forward with limbs that lengthen and shrink like shadows cast by an unsteady flame. Their mouths are the worst of it though; cavernous voids ringed by too many jagged teeth. The Hungerbeast's maw doesn't just consume, it unravels. Anything devoured becomes nothing. A book swallowed will have never been written. A man consumed will have never been born.   Stories, told in whispers around campfires, say they were once mortals, souls who, in life, wanted too much. They gorged themselves on power, love, or ambition until nothing could satisfy their cravings. When they died, they tumbled into the abyss, still starving, until the abyss shaped them into its image. Now they exist as hunger incarnate, stalking the desolate wastes of otherworldly realms - or slipping, by some horrible accident or forgotten pact, into the material plane.  

Fiendish Starvation

  Hungerbeasts are most dangerous in darkness. In the light, they are hideous and terrifying but still bound by the laws of space. In the shadows, they seem to fold into the void, reappearing far closer than they should. Some scholars insist that they aren't truly moving, that they are merely erasing the distance between themselves and their prey.   What they crave most is what they cannot have: the spark of divinity, the essence of gods and mortals alike. They stalk forgotten shrines and the ruins of temples, desperate to taste a fraction of eternity.   And if you hear one - because they do make sounds, groaning and sighing like wind through a hollow tree - then pray. Not to be spared. That's foolishness. But pray for the world to forget you before they reach you, so that when you are gone, at least something of you remains.