## CHAPTER 87: The Crimson Eclipse
The grand dining hall of the Valerius estate fractured like brittle glass, the phantom images of her father and her younger self dissolving into cold, erratic streaks of light. The world spun violently, tossing Lyra through a disorienting void that made a feeel like she was falling into nothing but darkness, until her boots slammed hard against a solid, uneven surface.
She staggered, dropping to one knee as she tried to catch her breath, her chest heaving heavily. Her sharp wit instantly went to work, analyzing her new environment, but for the first time in her life, her internal archive failed her completely.
*Where am I? This isn't one of my memories. I've never seen this place before in my life.*
She slowly stood up, her eyes widening as she looked toward the horizon. The sky above was not the gentle grey of the valley or the familiar blue of the capital; it was a thick, suffocating blood-red, as if the heavens themselves were weeping open wounds. Thick, ash-colored clouds rolled sluggishly across the dark expanse, and as Lyra raised her gaze to the highest point of the sky, her heart nearly stopped.
Hanging ominously in the celestial bleed was a massive, glowing sphere. It was an exceptionally rare, terrifying phenomenon she had only ever read about in the most restricted, historical texts of the royal archives—the **Crimson Moon**. According to the texts, it was an omen that only manifested during cataclysms of absolute slaughter, a celestial event that hadn't been documented in over a decades.
As the realization of the sky settled in, the metallic, iron-heavy scent of blood hit her nose. Lyra gasped, her gaze dropping to the ground as she finally began to grasp her immediate surroundings.
Horror, cold and absolute, locked her joints.
Spanning far and wide, stretching out as far as her eyes could physically see into the bloody horizon, lay a literal mountain of dead bodies. They were stacked carelessly on top of one another—thousands of soldiers, high-ranking royal knights, and elite vanguard fighters, their armor shattered, their banners torn and trampled into the mud. The sheer scale of the carnage was dizzying, a wasteland of silence where an entire empire's army seemed to have been systematically executed.
"Silas!" Lyra screamed out into the dead air, her voice cracking under the weight of the nightmare. "Silas, what is this?! What are you showing me?! Stop this right now!"
Her voice echoed hollowly across the mountains of the dead, receiving no response. The cold, suffocating pressure of the mana here was dense enough to make her dizzy.
Then, out in the far distance, a subtle ripple in the freezing air caught her attention.
Rising slowly from the center of the battlefield, standing atop a mountain of fallen knights, was a dark, heavily shadowed figure. The silhouette stood completely motionless against the backdrop of the blood-red sky, shrouded in a dark, undulating haze.
Lyra's breath hitched. Believing the figure to be Silas, she took a desperate step forward, her boots slipping slightly on the wet earth. "Silas! Is that you?!" she called out, picking up her pace, driven by a frantic need to break the illusion.
But as she closed the distance, her analytical eyes began to pick up strange, terrifying anomalies about the silhouette. It was too tall, too imposing. And rising prominently from the crown of the shadow's head were large, jagged, sweeping structures that looked exactly like a set of massive, demonic antlers.
Lyra slowed her pace, a profound, instinctual dread wrapping around her throat. For some completely inexplicable reason, the terrifying shadow felt intensely familiar. The invisible weight radiating from it pulled at something deep inside her soul, but her mind frantically spun in circles, unable to comprehend *why* she recognized it, or *who* it could possibly be.
Suddenly, the shadowed figure stiffened.
Slowly, deliberately, it turned its head toward her.
The moment the figure's face aligned with hers, the dark fog masking its features parted just enough to reveal a pair of piercing, brilliant crimson eyes. The exact shade of fresh blood, the exact same shade as hers. The moment those eyes met hers, Lyra—Valerius—froze completely in her tracks.
Every single cell in her body screamed at her to run, to flee from the unadulterated monster standing before her, but her muscles refused to move. The sheer, suffocating gravity of the entity's gaze pinned her to the earth.
The monster didn't walk. It didn't run. In a sudden, explosive burst of absolute speed, the dark shadow zoomed forward, transforming into a roaring blitz of black fog that tore across the battlefield directly toward her, parting the mountain of bodies in its wake.
Before the terrifying entity could reach her form, the blood-red reality violently shattered for the last time.