At first, no one noticed. The moon was just... brighter. Too white, too still. Streetlights looked weak beside it. News anchors joked about a "supermoon on steroids." Telescopes streamed record views; millions tuned in.
But under that light, something was wrong with the world. Birds flew in confused circles until dawn. The tides came early and did not recede. Satellite feeds kept freezing—half the frames went black, then came back inverted, as if the night sky itself had flipped.
I was at the observatory, watching the eastern ridge of Mare Imbrium. There was movement. Not clouds—movement inside the craters. The shadows didn't match the terrain anymore. They pulsed, shallow and rhythmic, as if something underneath was breathing.
By midnight, social media burned with comparison shots: the crater lines changing shape. Some called it atmospheric distortion, others viral editing. But anyone watching live knew better. The moon looked... awake.
Scientists ran emergency broadcasts. They said gravitational readings were inconsistent, that the lunar surface emitted low-frequency resonance like a beating heart. Radios caught it—a bass hum crawling through static, slipping under skin.
At 2:13 a.m., the Pacific began to withdraw. Water peeled away from the coastlines, like a tide pulled by something far stronger than gravity. People ran toward the beaches, filming the horizon swallowing itself.
Then the glow dimmed. The moon's face cracked—not visibly at first, but light fractured through the rifts like veins of lightning trapped in stone. Each rupture widened. Through telescopes, the shadows weren't flat anymore. They had depth, motion, intent.
I tried calling my sister in Seattle. Line dead. The sky was shaking, the air thick. Our instruments stopped responding one by one. Through the window, I saw the moon's disk—no longer circular. It began to unfold.
Not break apart. Unfold. Like something was turning itself inside out. Layers of light peeled back, revealing darker membranes beneath, twitching with impossible geometry.
Someone screamed. Someone else whispered a name. "Lunatharoth." I don't know who said it. Maybe no one did.
When the first wave hit, every building bent before the sound did. It wasn't thunder, it was pressure—an unseen hand pressing down on the planet. The oceans didn't crash; they rose, drawn upward in tendrils toward the vast white thing blooming in the sky.
I found myself writing, though my hands shook too hard to hold the pen. The power died. The hum kept going.
We didn't survive and I am the only with only minutes left to live. The Moon hovers before me, unravels itself that my mind couldn't comprehend. My mind slipping away, my vision blurred, and before I knew it—
My mind was full of madness, and my body was consumed.
—Fragment recovered from the Cerro Tololo Observatory logbook, presumed written moments before the phenomenon reached Earth's surface.
The Moon was gone.
Not shattered, not hidden — simply gone. For the first few minutes, telescopes and radar arrays all over what remained of Earth's orbit recorded only the afterglow: a dying white smear that refused to fade, hanging motionless against the black. Then, slowly, the stars behind it bent.
At first, no one outside the debris field knew what they were seeing. Astronomers from the surviving orbital stations described a distortion, something like heat shimmer, warping their lenses no matter the distance. But by the time they could align their sensors, the distortion had already moved — faster than light should bend, faster than space could recover. They called it the Receding Eye. It wasn't moving away from Earth. It was moving through the stars.
Weeks passed, or what passed for weeks among those who still counted time. Across the neighboring systems — colonies and outposts humanity had seeded in the preceding centuries — people began to see their moons pulse with light. Some thought it was reflection from the anomaly that consumed Earth. Others believed it was radiation echo. But the pattern was unmistakable: every moon on every inhabited world began to glow in a rhythm, like breath.
And then they saw him.
Lunatharoth did not descend in fire or fracture the void. He arrived as presence — a rolling displacement of color and geometry, a vast silhouette that changed form when you blinked. Through telescopes, he resembled a silver lattice folding endlessly into itself. Through naked eyes, he looked like a wound in space. To some, he was a sphere of blinding white; to others, a spiraled halo twisting like a whirlpool. No single view matched another. Every recording device, every photoreceptor, every brain produced its own version of what was seen.
The first planet to fall was Eridani-IV, a mining colony of three million. The transmission lasted thirty-eight minutes before silence. The final images showed oceans lifting in waves that did not crash — they simply stretched upward, tapering into the sky until they dissolved into nothing. Mountains folded into dust without smoke, and the surface flattened into something like liquid mercury. No bodies were found, no debris. Only smooth, reflective plains that rippled slightly when viewed from orbit.
Then came Ardan Prime, a world not unlike Earth — vast seas, wide cities, multiple moons. The moons bloated like balloons, expanding until they filled half the planet's sky. At their center, a single eye formed — enormous, pale, lidless. The people of Ardan described it as "the moon's heart opening." Within hours, communications faltered. Observers from a neighboring system recorded the entire planet dimming, as if its atmosphere absorbed light instead of scattering it.
By then, panic spread across the known Milky Way. Alien civilizations — the Corothi, the Elyans, the Drosine Clusters — transmitted warnings. Their messages translated poorly, fragmented by distance and static:
"He consumes everything. The world bends toward him."
"Do not look directly. Do not think his name."
"He does not move. Space folds itself to him."
The words varied, but their meaning was constant. Whatever Lunatharoth was, his existence broke the framework of light and matter itself.
Entire cultures tried to flee. Colony ships launched blind into dark space, engines burning until their cores failed. The more advanced species tried to communicate with the entity, projecting radio pulses, coded signals, even psychic frequencies across the void. None received a response. Some reported success — a pause in the distortion fields, a brief stillness — but moments later, their systems collapsed as every particle of mass in their vicinity stretched thin and vanished.
Observers began to notice a pattern. Lunatharoth didn't destroy randomly. He consumed moons first, peeling them apart like layers of bark, then drifted toward their host planets. Where there were no moons, he created them — compressing debris into perfect spheres of pale dust, seeding them with his own reflection. When the orbit stabilized, the process repeated. Always the same sequence. Always the same silence.
On one distant planet, Kheron-3, a collective of scientists gathered in an underground facility. Their atmosphere sensors recorded the light curve of Lunatharoth as he approached. Every calculation contradicted the laws they knew — his mass infinite, his temperature undefined, his gravitational field constant regardless of distance. A researcher named Dr. Saleth made a final broadcast before the feed cut:
"He's not an alien. He's a God — an ancient One. We were not meant to orbit his shell. The moon was not dead rock. It was containment."o
That was the last message ever received from Kheron-3.
Within months, the Milky Way's structure warped. Spiral arms bent toward a central axis that glowed faintly white. It wasn't the galactic core. It was Lunatharoth, still unfolding, still feeding. Stars closest to him flickered out like dying candles. The further ones twisted into trails of light curving toward the void.
And yet, somewhere beyond the chaos, a transmission survived. No one knew where it came from — maybe a probe, maybe a survivor adrift in interstellar space. The signal was weak, buried in static, the words transcribed from a decaying log. It was written in human syntax, though no one could confirm if the author was entirely human anymore.
"He doesn't destroy. He consumes. Every scream, every thought, every photon, he bends them inward. The universe reflects him now. The stars we see are his eyes. The moons we name are his limbs. And the light we call dawn is just him remembering."
The message ended with silence, except for faint breathing — steady, calm, almost peaceful. Then one final phrase, too quiet for most recorders to catch, but recovered later through signal cleaning:
"We thought the Moon was watching us. It was waiting."
From then on, the records stop. The outer systems ceased broadcasting. The Milky Way became a smear of white reflection in the telescopes of distant galaxies, a shining scar where once a spiral of life had been.
No one knows if Lunatharoth continued beyond — if he crossed into other galaxies, or if he simply stopped once the echo of the moon's light was gone. Some distant observers say they see a faint silver halo growing on their own moons now. Others claim it's only the trick of gravity and fear.
But among the silent radio bands of space, where human signal and alien pulse alike have faded, one tone hums beneath all others — a low, rhythmic pulse like breath.
It matches the pattern recorded from Earth, long ago, when the moon first shone differently.
There was no sound in the region once known as the Perseus Arm — just the drifting residue of what used to be matter. Lunatharoth moved through it like a shadow swimming in oil, his form no longer smooth or radiant but fragmented. The reflection that once cloaked him now cracked apart, trailing streaks of faint white across the void.
He had fed until the stars dimmed, until no moon remained to cradle him. Every pulse, every planet, every lattice of light had folded into his mass. Yet something felt wrong. The universe around him was quiet, but not the kind of silence he commanded. It was stillness — a pause too deliberate.
That was when he saw her.
She stood in the black between two dead systems, a small figure surrounded by nothing. No ship, no air, no tether. Just a faint, human outline against a field of distant ruins. Her hair drifted without wind, her eyes faintly luminous, not reflecting light but generating it — a soft, controlled brilliance that refused to spread.
Lunatharoth hesitated. In all the ages of his being, hesitation was foreign to him. He was the absence of fear, the appetite of creation itself. Yet in that moment, something ancient in him recoiled. He expanded, stretching his form into countless shapes — tendrils of glass and metal, spirals of liquid gravity — but her gaze followed every movement, calm and exact.
She spoke, though there was no vibration, no air to carry the words. It wasn't language, not truly. It was intention pressed into existence.
"You've eaten too much."
The phrase didn't accuse or condemn. It sounded almost curious, like someone noting an animal that wandered too far. Lunatharoth responded not with words but presence — a deep distortion that rippled across the void, bending debris and shattered moons into waves.
She didn't move.
The waves collapsed around her, dissolving before they touched her skin. She lifted one hand — slow, deliberate — and the light of every surviving star bent toward it, drawn like water. Her body didn't glow brighter; the universe simply dimmed around her.
Lunatharoth tried to flee. The act itself bent reality, forcing light to fold backward as he compressed himself into a corridor of warped geometry. Yet for the first time, distance failed him. The void around her refused to let go. Every point of space he reached folded back into her proximity, as if she were the center of all possible directions.
She turned her wrist slightly. Lunatharoth convulsed. His mass fractured into layers — planetary shells, luminous dust, and the remnants of moons long consumed. Each peeled away like paper, dissolving into pale streaks that faded on contact with her light.
She wasn't angry. She didn't even look satisfied. The gesture was simple — correction, not punishment.
He tried to expand again, reaching for the conceptual fabric that bound reality itself. But the structure he once manipulated now resisted him. He felt his own reflection shatter, his awareness fragment into noise. For the first time, Lunatharoth understood what it meant to end.
The woman floated closer. Her expression was neutral, almost humanly tired.
"You should've stayed asleep."
The words were the last thing he perceived. His body, if it could be called that, compressed into dust finer than starlight. The space he occupied folded shut, erasing every trace of his presence.
Where he had drifted for eons, there was now only stillness.
Lara — the human, or what resembled one — watched the last fragment scatter. Around her, the ruins of galaxies lay quiet. She glanced toward the faint horizon where another universe shimmered faintly, untouched by the collapse. For a moment, her eyes softened — not in pity, but contemplation.
"Curiosity," she murmured, more to herself than to the void. "That's what always kills us."
She turned, and the light that surrounded her folded inward, leaving behind nothing but the usual darkness of space — vast, neutral, unaware that a god had died there.
And for the first time since the moon's strange awakening, the universe rested.
The death of Lunatharoth came without spectacle — no light, no sound, only the absence of something immeasurable. Space folded where he had been, and the void felt lighter, as if a pressure had lifted from existence itself.
Worlds began to settle. On Eridani-IV, the frozen oceans held still as if caught between breath and prayer. The hollow skies of Ardan Prime thickened again with dust. Gravity, long bent beyond repair, returned to its quiet rhythm. Even radiation softened, humming like a lullaby for a recovering cosmos.
Lara drifted among the remnants, her form steady against the soft pulse of rebuilding space. The light that once radiated from her had dimmed to a faint shimmer — not exhaustion, but completion. Around her, fragments of moons and wreckage drifted in orbits that slowly found balance again.
She hovered near what was left of Lunatharoth — a sphere no larger than a clenched hand, its surface silvered and uneven, humming with traces of what he once was. She watched it turn once, twice, then stop entirely, like a heartbeat losing rhythm.
Her gaze softened. Then, almost inaudibly, she began to speak.
"Canticle of the Ninth Root."
The words were not a command. They were remembrance — the kind of recitation that holds weight even when no one is left to hear it. Her voice was level, each syllable falling like dust across an endless floor.
Lo, 'neath the Tree where thought is born,
The roots of truth are rent and torn.
Where silence coils and reason dies,
The dawn forgets her ancient skies.
There lies the womb that bore the flame,
Yet none remember whence it came.
For every fruit that wisdom yields
Shall rot beneath those shadowed fields.
No wind may stir, no soul may tread,
For light there bends as though it's dead.
The sap that feeds both god and man
Flows backward to the first began.
Beneath all law, beneath all creed,
It gnaws upon creation's seed.
No hate it knows, nor love, nor pain,
Yet hungers still for thought's refrain.
The angels shun its sightless face,
Where knowing folds to its un-place.
The stars avert their gleaming eyes,
Lest mind recall what underlies.
O seeker, still thy yearning breath,
For knowledge there is wedded death.
The crown above, the root beneath —
One blooms in light, one sleeps in grief.
Thus whispered once the elder tone,
Before the Trees were overgrown:
"All truths return where shadows flow —
To the cradle of DARKNESS BELOW "
The sphere cracked on the final word. No burst, no sound — just a faint shudder, and then nothing. The silver dust dispersed into the void, absorbed by space itself.
Lara's eyes lingered where it had been. The poem wasn't a warning, nor a plea. It was truth: the acknowledgment that all things — gods, stars, thoughts — eventually return to their origin.
Far beneath the planes of reality, deeper than law or time, a faint tremor ran through the unseen lattice. A pulse too slow to measure, too vast to describe.
The universe was healing. But something beneath that healing stirred — the same rhythm that had existed before all creation, patient and indifferent.
Lara turned her gaze toward a forming nebula, pale and gentle, unaware of the old things beneath it. Her voice was calm, barely audible.
"The Darkness Below," she said. "It's still listening."
Then she vanished into the starlight, and the cosmos — young again, unaware of its own history — carried on.