Story 1192: The Moon Falls Down

At 2:13 a.m., the moon began to shudder.

It wasn’t noticed at first. A few astronomers in quiet observatories noted that the craters seemed to ripple. One insomniac child in Elder Hollow drew it in crayon—a moon with a face, and the face was crying. But no alarms sounded. No warnings went out.

Only the dreamers knew.

Clara Veil, who had not slept in nine days, felt it in her blood. She stood atop the charred remains of the Marionette Theatre, looking skyward as the clouds parted and the moon’s glow turned red, then black, then alive. It pulsed with a heartbeat no human had ever heard, yet all felt it in their spines.

Something had woken it up.

In the ruined cathedral beneath the city, Evelyn Blackmoor stood at the edge of a bottomless chasm. Beside her, the Ash Prophet whispered in broken tongues, each word a flake of burnt paper. "The moon is not a rock," he said. "It is a prison."