In a silent, desolate world where the sun never rose, a deep cobalt light bled through the clouds each night, staining the land in endless twilight. Some claimed the sky itself had been wounded long ago, and that the glow was not moonlight at all, but something leaking through a tear in the heavens.
Legends spoke of a presence beyond those clouds. A dormant goddess whose awakening had once drowned the moon in crimson for a thousand years. That age ended in catastrophe, remembered only through a single relic: an archaic journal rumored to have been written in blood, the same blood that once fell from the sky.
Clyde Nox Pvolae was born into this world.
He lived in the City of Cristae, a sprawling metropolis named after the folded structures of mitochondria. Silver towers and hollow tunnels stretched endlessly beneath the cobalt firmament, dim and lifeless.
The people of Cristae avoided speaking of the sky. They feared what lingered behind it, whispering of unseen eyes and voices that could pierce the soul. "Do not look upward," was a phrase Clyde had heard more than once, spoken half in jest and half in dread. He understood that fear, even as he felt drawn to what it concealed.
At Cristae Academy, he excelled in history, tracing fragmented accounts of the Cataclysm through texts so ancient their ink had nearly faded into dust. Yet every truth ended the same way, broken, censored, or erased entirely.
That changed the day he entered the city's forgotten library.
A few days after his graduation, while searching for remnants of lost knowledge, Clyde found a book hidden deep among dust-choked shelves. It resembled a journal, its cover stiff and darkened, as though soaked in something long dried.
When he reached for it, something pulled back.
The sensation was subtle but unmistakable. As his fingertips brushed the surface, whispers slipped into his mind. A single name echoed like a pulse inside his skull.
"Noxella."
The library dissolved.
Clyde stood in a field of pale flowers glowing faintly beneath a blue moon. The air was unnaturally cold, and a heavy pressure settled behind his thoughts, as if something unseen was watching him without moving.
He turned.
Above him loomed a colossal moon, swollen and blood-red. Its surface was not smooth—countless crimson eyes covered it, opening and closing in slow, uneven rhythm.
His breathing faltered.
A dull pain pressed at his skull. The whispers returned, louder now, overlapping until they blurred into one continuous sound.
"Noxella."
The word did not come from one place. It came from everywhere at once.
For a moment, the red moon seemed to shift.
At its lower edge, faint markings began to appear—thin lines of light forming a ring across its surface. They looked like a mechanism rather than a natural feature, a circular track etched into the moon itself. Along that ring, small luminous indicators glowed at uneven intervals, some bright, some dim, some nearly gone.
A countdown.
A timer marking the time remaining before the Cataclysm.
The indicators pulsed faintly, counting down in a rhythm too slow to measure but impossible to ignore.
Clyde's vision wavered.
The pressure tightened.
The eyes on the moon turned, all at once, focusing downward.
The whispers surged.
"Noxella."
The sound pressed in from every direction, no longer just a voice but something that surrounded him completely.
Then, abruptly—
Silence.
Clyde was back in the library.
The shelves stood still. Dust floated lazily in the air. The silence felt normal again, almost convincing, as if nothing had happened.
But his breathing was not steady.
His hand had not moved.
He was still standing where he had been, facing the shelf.
His reflection trembled faintly in the glass of a nearby display case.
Without realizing it, his hand drifted toward an old flintlock resting nearby—a relic left behind on the shelf, untouched and forgotten. His fingers closed around it.
The metal was cold.
He raised it slowly.
The shot echoed through the quiet library.
The sound faded quickly, leaving behind a ringing stillness.
The journal slipped from his other hand and hit the stone floor, its pages turning on their own before settling open.
On the page, lines of text appeared in a dark, wet script, as though freshly written:
"The crimson moon is not something to be gazed upon."
Scarlet spread across the tiles beneath him, pooling outward in silence around the still form beside the fallen book.