The Moon bled in silence.
No one on Earth could hear the sound—because there was none. Vorax's influence wasn't sonic, wasn't gravitational. It was conceptual. A silence that devoured meaning. A stillness so absolute that motion itself forgot how to exist.
And in that silence, the Moon began to crack.
First came the fault lines—spiderwebbing across its cratered face, glowing with dull, malignant crimson. Then came the tremors that rippled through lunar bedrock, turning stone to dust in an instant. And then the whispers began—echoes from the mouths of Vorax, not carried through space, but carved into reality itself.
"Truth fractures. Faith rots. Light ends."
---
Back on Earth, at the Tower of Fate, the fallout of Batwoman's infiltration left the sanctum wounded and burning.
Zatanna stood atop a floating shard of stone as magical debris circled in chaotic orbits. Raven clutched her side, dark blood staining her cloak. Doctor Fate hovered over the epicenter of the damage, hands glowing, muttering ancient stabilizing spells just to keep the tower from collapsing into a magical singularity.
"She didn't just infiltrate," Zatanna said through clenched teeth. "She imprinted. The Batwoman planted something inside the Tower."
Fate's voice echoed like thunder: "A corruption seed. Old magic—void-born. I've seen this in dying realms. She's marked us."
Raven growled. "And Vorax is already moving."
From the broken observatory dome above, they looked to the sky. A scarlet halo encircled the Moon, cracked like porcelain. Swarms of dead satellites drifted in orbit, orbitals failing, data going dark.
Zatanna whispered, "If he shatters the Moon, the tides will go mad. Billions will drown. And that's before he even touches Earth."
Fate said nothing. He already knew. This wasn't a war.
It was extinction.
---
On the Moon, Vorax took another step forward.
His humanoid shape was more suggestion than fact now. His bones shimmered between form and function. Dozens of shrieking mouths stretched across his chest and back, each muttering secrets in dead dialects. His arms dragged behind him, impossibly long and folding into the void like rope into black water.
Around him, lunar stone folded in on itself, forming an impossible altar.
The Moon, once a celestial bystander, now served as a gateway.
From below, Earth's few remaining arcane sentinels sensed it: he wasn't just breaking the Moon—he was infecting it.
The Moon's light flickered.
---
In Metropolis, chaos began.
The oceans surged with no warning. Tsunami sirens blared across continents. Strange auroras painted the sky in alien colors. The stars dimmed.
In the Hall of Justice ruins, Superman's statue cracked at the neck.
In Gotham, the Bat-Signal flickered and died.
In Atlantis, the sea convulsed as if rejecting the world above.
---
At the Witchfire Crucible, the last magical defense Earth possessed, Constantine and Deadman watched the chaos unfold through a portal window shaped like a screaming face.
"That's no ordinary moonquake," Deadman muttered, hovering, his spectral body vibrating with unease.
"No shite," Constantine hissed, lighting a cigarette with a shaking hand. "That thing up there's not just breaking the rock. He's unraveling its purpose."
He took a long drag.
"Moon governs tides. Time. Madness. Myth. You crack it the wrong way, and all of that comes undone. Calendar breaks. Magic surges. People start seeing their dreams bleed into the waking world."
Deadman's eyes widened. "So what do we do?"
Constantine exhaled slowly.
"We make a call."
---
Back at the Tower of Fate, the last of the magical wards flickered into place, holding the tower together by raw willpower.
Zatanna stood before the scrying pool, watching as the Moon continued to fracture. Lines of red glowed across its surface like veins pulsing with infection. Something inside it—something ancient—was waking.
Or worse…
Being born.
"I've seen this before," Zatanna said quietly. "In the Mirrorverse. In the Timeline Where Magic Died. A being—something beyond the Source Wall—came through a gate formed from the corpse of a moon. That being… it ate stories."
Raven's face went pale. "Like Vorax."
"Exactly like him."
Doctor Fate turned to them. "Then the fractures aren't just physical. They are narrative. Symbolic. The Moon is being rewritten."
"Into what?" Raven asked.
Fate's helmet glowed.
"Into the first meal."
---
In orbit, Vorax raised his arms.
The dozens of mouths across his body screamed as one—not sound, but declaration. The vacuum around him warped, distorting physics.
And the Moon shattered.
Not into rubble. Not into dust. But into concept. Lunar rock dissolved into symbols, sigils, screaming glyphs that once defined its meaning. The sky turned black, then red, then blank.
Tides on Earth reversed.
Children forgot dreams.
Wolves howled and turned to stone.
A rift opened—just wide enough—for him to pass through.
---
And from that fracture, a scream escaped.
Not from Vorax. From something inside the Moon—something that had been waiting.
Bound. Forgotten. Buried in humanity's collective myth.
And now, awoken.
---
Back on Earth, Zatanna dropped to her knees.
"Did you feel that?" she gasped.
Raven nodded slowly. "It wasn't just him."
Fate turned to the sky. His tone, for the first time, cracked with uncertainty.
"There is more."
Behind the broken veil of the Moon, beyond the rift, something else stirred.
And it would not remain hidden much longer.