At first, the world remained blissfully ignorant. The moon was merely brighter, a bleached bone hanging in the velvet sky. While news anchors celebrated a supermoon with jovial curiosity, I stood within the cold, sterile walls of the Cerro Tololo Observatory and witnessed the beginning of the end. Within the craters of Mare Imbrium, the shadows were not static. They pulsed with a rhythmic, shallow cadence. I watched through the lens, my breath hitching as I realized the moon was not a dead satellite of rock and dust. It was breathing.
By midnight, the lunar surface emitted a low frequency resonance that hummed through the atmosphere. It was a vibration that crawled beneath human skin like a slow acting fever, vibrating in the marrow of the bone. At 2:13 a.m., the Pacific Ocean began to retreat from the coastlines. It was not a standard tide. The water was drawn away from the shores by a force far more ancient and demanding than gravity. Then, the lunar face fractured.
Through the telescope, I watched the disk unfold. It did not break into jagged shards. It turned itself inside out, revealing layers of translucent membranes and impossible, non-Euclidean geometry that the human eye was never meant to process. Someone behind me whispered a name that felt like a prehistoric curse: "Lunatharoth."
As the power grid failed and the oceans rose in silent, watery tendrils toward the stars, I recorded my final log with trembling hands. My mind was a fractured mirror, full of a madness that was both terrifying and holy. My body felt consumed by the sheer, cyclopean scale of the sight. Then, the Moon was simply gone. It did not explode. It simply ceased to occupy our reality.
For a few agonizing minutes, only a dying white smear remained against the black of the void. Then, the very stars began to bend. Astronomers from the surviving orbital stations called it the Receding Eye. It was not retreating into the distance like a physical vessel. It was treading through the very fabric of space and time, a predator moving through the tall grass of the galaxy.
Weeks passed in a twilight of existential fear. Across the colonial outposts of humanity, from the red dust of Mars to the icy moons of Jupiter, every satellite began to glow with that same sickening, respiratory rhythm. Then He arrived. Lunatharoth manifested as a rolling displacement of color and light, a silver lattice folding infinitely into its own center. To look upon Him was to witness a raw wound in the skin of reality.
Eridani-IV was the first to be extinguished. It was a mining colony of millions, yet it vanished in a heartbeat. Its oceans lifted into the heavens and dissolved into nothingness, pulled upward by an invisible straw. Its mountains collapsed into dust without a sound, as if the molecular bonds of the planet had decided to surrender. Next came Ardan Prime, where the moons bloated like pale corpses until a single, lidless eye formed at the center of the sky. Alien warnings from the Corothi and the Drosine reached us in static-filled fragments: "He does not move. Space folds itself to him."
The pattern was absolute and terrifying. Lunatharoth sought the moons first, peeling them apart like rotted bark before claiming the host planets for His hunger. If a world was solitary, He compressed the surrounding debris and asteroid belts into a perfect sphere of pale dust to seed His own reflection. Within months, the Milky Way itself began to warp. The great spiral arms of our galaxy bent toward a central axis that was not the galactic core, but the insatiable hunger of the entity.
The Smallest Light
Lunatharoth drifted through the skeletal ruins of the Perseus Arm, a shadow moving through a sea of black oil. He had fed until the stars flickered low like dying candles, yet He hesitated. In the void between two dead systems stood a woman. There was no vessel to protect her from the vacuum, and there was no atmosphere to sustain her lungs. There was only a human silhouette generating a soft, controlled brilliance that defied the absolute zero of space.
Lunatharoth expanded, manifesting vast tendrils of glass and liquid gravity that stretched for light years, yet the gaze of the woman followed His every contortion. She did not flinch as the stars distorted around her. She spoke with an intention that cut through the silence of the vacuum: "You have eaten too much."
The entity lashed out, sending ripples of cosmic distortion that should have shattered the foundation of reality. The waves of force collapsed and went cold before they could touch her skin. She lifted a single hand, and the light of every surviving star bent toward her palm as if she were the new gravitational center of the universe.
Lunatharoth attempted to flee, folding the dimensions of space to escape her reach, but the void refused to surrender Him. Every direction He chose led Him back to her presence. She turned her wrist with the casual, terrifying grace of a master clockmaker. The entity convulsed. His mass fractured into planetary shells and luminous dust. Each cosmic layer peeled away like wet parchment in a storm.
"You should have stayed asleep in the stone," she whispered into the dark.
With a final gesture of her fingers, He was compressed into a fine dust, thinner than starlight and colder than the end of time. The space He had occupied folded shut with a silent finality, erasing His existence from the record of the stars. The woman, Lara, watched the silver fragments scatter into the distance. She looked toward the distant horizon where another universe shimmered, pristine and untouched by the appetite of gods.
"Curiosity," she sighed, her voice heavy with the weight of eons. "That is what always kills us."
The universe began to settle into a cold, haunted peace. On the ruins of Eridani-IV, the frozen oceans remained still, caught in a permanent state of prayer. Gravity returned to its quiet, ancient rhythm, anchoring the dust of a billion lost lives. Lara hovered near the final, shriveled remnant of the god. It was a silver sphere no larger than a human hand, humming with a dying, frantic heartbeat.
Her voice fell like ash across the vacuum as she began to recite the Canticle of the Ninth Root:
"Lo, beneath the Tree where thought is born,
The roots of truth are rent and torn.
Where silence coils and reason dies,
The dawn forgets her ancient skies.
Beneath all law, beneath all creed,
It gnaws upon creation's seed.
No hate it knows, nor love, nor pain,
Yet hungers still for thought's refrain.
O seeker, still thy yearning breath,
For knowledge there is wedded death.
The crown above, the root beneath,
One blooms in light, one sleeps in grief.
All truths return where shadows flow,
To the cradle of the Darkness Below."
On the final syllable, the silver sphere shattered into a million tiny sparks. The dust was absorbed by the eternal void, leaving nothing behind. Lara lingered in the emptiness for a long moment. The poem was not a warning for the living, and it was not a plea for the dead. It was an acknowledgment that all things, from the smallest thoughts of men to the greatest gods of the stars, eventually return to the silent, dark origin.
Far beneath the planes of reality, deeper than the reach of time or light, a faint tremor ran through the unseen lattice of existence. It was a pulse too slow to measure and too vast for any human mind to describe without breaking. The universe was healing its wounds, but something beneath that healing remained patient and watchful.
"The Darkness Below," Lara whispered to the emptiness. "It is still listening to us."
She vanished into the starlight, leaving the cosmos young again, beautiful in its ignorance, and utterly unaware of the eye that had once watched it from the center of the moon. The stars continued to burn, indifferent to the god who had almost extinguished them.