Darkness did not fall—it grew.
As the Hollow Moon shifted into stillness, the world waited, frozen between breaths. Satellites lost signal. The sky above the Northern Hemisphere shimmered with auroras that did not belong to solar winds. Faint whispers, mechanical and organic at once, slithered into radios and dreams.
At the edge of Earth's magnetosphere, the Watchtower remained powered only by residual energy. Cyborg's eyes blinked open as his systems restarted, flickering red.
"I've got… partial visual again," he muttered, standing amid the ruined operations deck. "Telemetry confirms it. The Hollow Moon just opened… a gate."
"Define 'gate,'" Diana's voice crackled through a backup comm channel.
"Not metaphorical. A literal gate. Like a pupil dilating."
In space, the Hollow Moon bloomed.
It didn't fracture or shatter—it simply pulled back its skin like a dead eyelid, revealing an interior more vast than its exterior dimensions allowed. Something moved inside. Slow. Methodical. Alive.
Back on Earth, the tremors began.
Seismic networks around the globe flared red—earthquakes not caused by plate shifts, but by sympathetic resonance. The Earth was being sung to. Not with sound, but frequency. The Hollow Moon had begun to sing its lullaby of death.
And across the world, the first seed fell.
---
In the South Pacific, a storm raged unnaturally. From a cyclone's eye above a long-dead volcanic island, the atmosphere bent. Clouds turned black. Gravity twisted.
Then—a beam of lightless matter dropped from orbit.
It didn't explode.
It landed, embedding itself a hundred meters beneath the crust like a meteor wrapped in silence. Coral turned to glass. Fish died without floating. The ocean stilled for thirty seconds, then surged with such violence the tide struck five coastal nations in one synchronized pulse.
Beneath the waves, the object pulsed.
The Hollow Moon had planted its first Seed of Negation.
And the world would soon know what it meant to be unmade.
---
At the Hall of Justice, Batman moved like a man who hadn't slept in days—but couldn't afford to notice.
"The energy signature is unlike anything we've logged. It doesn't match Darkseid. Doesn't match Vorax. Not even Spectre-levels," he said.
Martian Manhunter stood with arms folded. "That's because it isn't meant to kill. It's meant to erase."
"You're saying this isn't destruction?"
"I'm saying it's anti-recognition. The object wants to be forgotten. Like it's not just outside our understanding—it wants to cancel it."
Superman paced near the center. "That Seed hit deep ocean. If we don't move fast, it might trigger fault lines we can't seal."
Green Lantern, battered but focused, nodded. "I'll take a team out there. See if we can extract or contain it."
Batman held up a hand. "No. We don't touch it. We analyze from orbit. The minute we interact with it physically, we risk acknowledging it—and that might be all it needs."
Flash zipped back into the chamber with a folder of blurry photos. "Picked these up from our Japanese contact. Civilians near Tokyo started reporting dreams of a 'black flower in the sky'... four days before the Hollow Moon appeared."
Diana's eyes narrowed. "Precognition?"
"Or psychic bleed. It's not just attacking now. It's been growing roots in time."
A silence fell across the chamber.
Then Batman said it: "We're behind. Already."
---
Elsewhere, hidden in a corner of space untouched by coordinates, the Batwoman Who Laughs drifted between rifts of bleeding light.
Below her, suspended between Earth and the Hollow Moon, a tendril of its surface peeled away—curling like an eyelash made of fossilized thought. From it dropped another spore of dark crystal. Not aimed this time. Offered.
She reached out her clawed hand and caught it.
It was cold and warm at once—alive, perhaps, in the way certain memories still breathe after trauma.
"You remember me, don't you?" she purred to the Hollow Moon.
It did not speak.
But the spore pulsed in her palm like a heartbeat.
"I was your answer before they even asked the question."
Behind her, her own court of corrupted souls watched—the twisted echoes of Earth's heroes, fractured by madness, tethered by promise. They hung suspended in gravity-void armor, laughing in fragments.
She crushed the spore into her chest.
It sank into her ribcage without blood.
And the Batwoman Who Laughs changed.
---
At the Tower of Fate, the air tasted like prophecy.
Zatanna recoiled as her last glyph flared and shattered. "The spell's not enough. Even the Tower can't stabilize the breach."
Doctor Fate's voice echoed hollow through the helm. "It is not a breach. It is a wound in the timeline."
"What do we do?" Constantine growled, lighting a cigarette with a flick of dragon bone. "Cross our fingers and wait for the Hollow Moon to ask us the right bloody question?"
"No," Fate said. "We give it a better answer."
"And how do you answer a hollow god?"
"You fill it."
Zatanna froze. "With what?"
Fate turned slowly toward the shimmering outline of a being floating in a secondary ward—something bound in chains of paradox.
"Him."
Behind the ward hovered Chronomancer Prime—a being who once fractured the time stream to undo the first Crisis, shattered into atoms by paradox, then resurrected by unknown forces. He had no mouth, but smiled with every eye across his body.
"Chronomancer knows the hollow," Fate said. "Because he tried to become it once."
"Are you mad?" Zatanna hissed. "You let him out, he'll rewrite reality out of spite."
"Then we give him a bargain," Constantine said, eyes narrowing. "He wants to rewrite time. We give him the Hollow Moon instead."
Fate didn't nod. But the silence was agreement.
---
Across the world, birds flew the wrong direction.
Winds blew backward.
Children began humming the same tune at once.
The world was listening to something that hadn't yet spoken.
But in the crater beneath the South Pacific, the Seed bloomed.
From it rose a figure—a malformed, skeletal colossus with no face and too many arms, each ending in an open palm. In its chest, where a heart might be, spun a hole that screamed in reverse.
And it began to walk toward the shorelines of Earth.