The streets of "Lunareth" were empty.
And yet the shadows whispered.
Every step I took seemed to wake them. My shoes scuffed against broken cobblestones, the sound echoing louder than it should have. It was as if the city itself wanted me to remember, I don't belong here.
The air was colder than the night should've been, sharp enough to bite through the thin coat I pulled tighter around myself. Calling it a coat was generous it was too torn, too thin, reeking faintly of the stranger who had discarded it before me. But in a city like this, even scraps were treasures.
Somewhere far away, a dog barked. Not the playful kind. The sound was raw, almost feral, carrying through the alleys like a warning: blood was close. A chorus of howls joined it soon after. They had already caught my scent.
I wasn't surprised. Stray dogs, stray people… Lunareth had both in abundance.
Hunger gnawed at me, cruel and steady. Not just in my stomach it lived deeper than that, in my bones, in my chest, in my mind. But the emptiness around me gnawed harder still.
Once, this city had been alive. I could still remember it. Lanterns burning bright along marble plazas, fountains overflowing with water that glittered like silver, markets bursting with the colors of fruits, cloth, and voices. That was Lunareth as I knew it in my childhood.
Or maybe that was just the Lunareth of memory.
Now, the fountains were dry. The plazas cracked. The marble bled rust where iron showed through, and the lanterns held only smoke.
Now, it was nothing but shadows and whispers.
A memory flickered through me, uninvited.
Sunlight on a playground. My mother's voice, warm but tired, calling my name. Her hands calloused from endless work holding mine as we crossed the street. Her laughter. My smile.
That world had burned away years ago.
Now there was only me.
And the cold.
I turned down a narrow alley, my eyes scanning the ground instinctively. Not for threats this time, but for scraps anything remotely edible. Even rot was still food.
That's when I saw it.
A small bundle wrapped in thin paper, resting near a broken crate.
Bread.
I froze.
Bread never just 'appeared' in Lunareth. Not unless it was bait. Not unless someone wanted you to follow it into a trap.
And yet…
My stomach twisted. My hand reached out before my brain could protest. I crouched, heart pounding, and picked it up. The paper was smudged, wet at the corners, but the handwriting scratched across it was unmistakable.
I recognized it before I even looked closely.
My mother's.
The note wasn't long. Just a single word, written across the wrapping.
Son.
My son.
The moment I saw it, something inside me cracked.
It wasn't the bread that mattered.
It wasn't even the word.
It was the fact that she still remembered me. That after everything, after the eclipse that had shattered the sky and stolen my childhood, she still thought of me as her son.
My knees hit the stones. I sank to the ground, clutching the bread as if it were sacred.
"...Mother."
The word slipped out before I could stop it. My throat tightened, the syllables cutting like broken glass.
For a moment, I could almost imagine her beside me again. Her tired smile. The way her hair always smelled faintly of rain. She had never been rich, never powerful. Just an ordinary woman, raising an ordinary boy in a world that was slowly falling apart.
We weren't poor, not truly not like the beggars who lined Lunareth's gutters. But we weren't secure either. Sometimes the cupboards were full, sometimes they weren't. My family teetered between enough and not enough.
And yet… she gave me everything.
And I…
I had given her nothing back.
Not even a smile.
Not anymore.
Because the day the eclipse came, I lost the ability to smile.
The first time it happened, the moon bled red.
People called it an omen, a curse, a joke from the gods. But that wasn't the truth.
That night, the sky fractured. Something ancient, bound for centuries, snapped free. And with it, my life.
I was eight years old when it happened. Too young to understand, too old to ever forget.
The screams of that night still echoed in me.
My mother never blamed me. Not for what I became. Not for what I could no longer control.
But deep down, I blamed myself.
A sound jolted me back.
Footsteps. Heavy. Dragging.
I froze where I crouched, clutching the bread tighter, sinking deeper into the shadows of the alley.
A figure passed the entrance. Cloaked, shoulders hunched, dragging something that scraped against the cobblestones. I couldn't see their face only the outline of a hood, the glint of something metallic trailing behind, and the faint muttering of words I didn't recognize.
They didn't stop. Didn't glance my way.
But I didn't breathe until the sound of their steps faded into silence.
This was Lunareth. If you were seen, you were prey.
When I finally exhaled, I realized how hard my hands were shaking. The bread was crumbling in my grip.
I hated this life.
I hated what I had become.
But in this city, children who didn't fight were swallowed whole.
The shadows whispered again.
And this time, I whispered back.
"Is this really all I am now? A shadow clinging to scraps… in a city that doesn't even remember my name?"
The bell tower rang.
Once, its sound had been clear, proud a declaration of Lunareth's heartbeat. Now it groaned with rust, hollow and broken, like a corpse too stubborn to collapse.
Midnight.
The city's dead hour.
I stood, the bread in my hand, the hunger inside me momentarily quieted.
But then it came again.
That feeling.
The pull.
It started as a pressure in my chest, then spread outward like invisible claws dragging across my ribs.
I knew what it meant.
The eclipse.
I didn't know when.
I didn't know how.
But I could feel it. Looming. Just as I had felt it the night everything was stolen from me.
The night the moon bled.
The night I stopped smiling.
The night Lunareth's silver lights went dark.
Above me, the clouds parted.
The stars shrank away.
And the moon
The moon was watching.