At first, the world remained blisfully ignorant. The moon was simply brighter, a pale bone hanging in the dark sky. While news anchors happily celebrated a supermoon, I stood inside the cold, sterile walls of the Cerro Tololo Observatory, witnessing the start of something ominous. In the craters of Mare Imbrium, the shadows moved. They pulsed rhythmically. I looked through the lens, and my breath caught as I understood that the moon wasn't just a lifeless rock. It was alive.
By midnight, the lunar surface emitted a low-frequency hum that resonated through the air. This vibration crawled beneath human skin like a slow fever, reverberating in our bones. At 2:13 a.m., the Pacific Ocean began retreating from the coastlines. This was not a typical tide. The water was pulled away from the shore by a force older and stronger than gravity. Then, the face of the moon cracked.
Through the telescope, I watched the disk unfold. It didn't shatter into sharp pieces. Instead, it turned inside out, revealing layers of translucent membranes and strange shapes that the human eye was never meant to see. Someone behind me whispered a name that felt like an ancient curse: "Lunatharoth."
As the power grid collapsed and the oceans silently crept upward, I wrote my final log with shaking hands. My mind felt shattered, filled with a craziness that was both terrifying and sacred. My body felt overwhelmed by the vastness of what I saw. Then, the moon disappeared. It didn't explode. It simply vanished from our reality.
For a few agonizing minutes, only a fading white smear remained against the dark void. Then, the stars began to warp. Astronomers from surviving orbital stations named it the Receding Eye. It wasn't moving away like a ship. It was navigating through the fabric of space and time, a predator gliding through the galaxy's tall grass.
Weeks passed in a twilight of fear. Across human colonies, from the red dust of Mars to the icy moons of Jupiter, every satellite glowed with that same unsettling rhythm. Then He arrived. Lunatharoth appeared as a swirling mass of color and light, a silver web folding infinitely into itself. To see Him was to witness a wound in the fabric of reality.
Eridani-IV was the first to disappear. It was a mining colony with millions of inhabitants, yet it was gone in an instant. Its oceans lifted into the sky and vanished, pulled upward by an unseen force. Its mountains turned to dust without a noise, as if the very bonds of the planet chose to give up. Next was Ardan Prime, where the moons swelled like pale corpses until a single, unblinking eye formed in the sky. Alien warnings from the Corothi and the Drosine reached us in static-filled bits: "He does not move. Space folds itself to him."
The pattern was clear and frightening. Lunatharoth targeted the moons first, tearing them apart like rotten bark before consuming the host planets. If a world was alone, He compacted nearby debris and asteroids into a perfect sphere of pale dust to create His own reflection. In months, the Milky Way began to warp. The great spiral arms bent towards a point that wasn't the galactic center, but rather the unquenchable hunger of the entity.
Lunatharoth drifted through the ruined Perseus Arm, a shadow in a sea of darkness. He had feasted until the stars dimmed like dying candles, yet he hesitated. In the space between two dead systems stood a woman.
There was no ship to protect her from the vacuum, no atmosphere to help her breathe. Only a human figure radiating soft, controlled light that defied the cold void of space.
Lunatharoth expanded, sending out vast tendrils of glass and liquid gravity stretching for light-years, but the woman watched Him closely. She didn't flinch as the stars warped around her. She spoke with an authority that cut through the silent void: "You have eaten too much."
The entity struck out, sending waves of cosmic distortion that should have shattered reality itself. The force collapsed and went cold before it could touch her. She raised one hand, and the light of every surviving star bent toward her palm, as if she were the new center of gravity in the universe.
Lunatharoth tried to escape, warping space to elude her grasp, but the void wouldn't let him go. No matter which way He turned, He found Himself back where she was. She moved her wrist with a casual grace, like a master clockmaker. The entity convulsed. His form fractured into planetary shells and glowing dust. Each cosmic layer peeled away like wet paper in a storm.
"You should have stayed asleep in the stone," she whispered into the dark.
With a final flick of her fingers, he was reduced to a fine dust, thinner than starlight and colder than the end of time. The space He occupied closed up with a quiet finality, erasing Him from the stars' records. The woman, Lara, watched as the silver fragments scattered into the distance. She looked toward the far horizon, where another universe glimmered, pure and untouched by the hunger of gods.
"Curiosity," she sighed, her voice heavy with ages. "That is what always kills us."
The universe started to settle into a cold, haunted calm. On the remains of Eridani-IV, the frozen oceans lay still, stuck in a never-ending prayer. Gravity returned to its quiet rhythm, holding the dust of countless lost lives. Lara hovered near the last shriveled piece of the god. It was a silver sphere no larger than a human hand, pulsing with a fading, frantic heartbeat.
Her voice fell like ash into 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."
With the last syllable, the silver sphere shattered into a million tiny sparks. The dust was swallowed by the eternal void, leaving nothing behind. Lara lingered in the emptiness for a moment. The poem was neither a warning for the living nor a plea for the dead. It was a recognition that all things, from the smallest thoughts of people to the greatest gods, eventually return to their silent, dark origin.
Far beneath the layers of reality, deeper than time or light can reach, a faint tremor passed through the unseen web 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 void. "It is still listening to us."
She vanished into the starlight, leaving the cosmos young again, beautiful in its ignorance, and completely unaware of the eye that had once watched from the center of the moon. The stars continued to burn, indifferent to the god who had nearly snuffed them out.