The soldiers tried to restore order, but order had abandoned the city. Gunfire cracked in the air—warning shots meant to push back the stampede. Instead, panic worsened. Families trampled one another. Vendors screamed as their stalls collapsed. The seawall trembled with the force of the surging waves, as if it too would give way.
Ulysses ducked into a side street, lungs burning. He wasn't running from the story—he was running to keep from being crushed beneath it. His camera swung against his chest, useless against the blur of fear around him.
He stumbled into an alley where candles flickered at a makeshift shrine. A group of old women knelt there, rosaries clutched tight, their voices quivering as they prayed:
"Hail Mary, full of grace… deliver us from the hour of death…"
The moon's red glow filtered even here, painting their faces in blood-colored light. Ulysses wanted to ask them what they thought was happening, to capture their words for his article—but the questions froze in his throat. The women weren't speaking for him. They were pleading to something greater.
He leaned against the wall, pulling out his notebook. His handwriting was jagged, almost illegible: The moon bleeds. The people tremble. The sea roars.
A sudden vibration rattled the concrete under his feet. Not an aftershock—something deeper. He heard it, too: a low hum, resonating through the ground, through his bones. He pressed his ear to the wall. The city itself was humming, like a struck bell.
The hum swelled until the women stopped praying and looked around in terror. Ulysses ran back toward the bay, heart slamming.
When he reached the seawall again, the sight stopped him cold.
The moon now filled nearly half the horizon, massive and suffocating, its veins of darkness spreading wider. Its pulsing throbbed so powerfully that the waves answered in rhythm, crashing with deadly force. The crimson light bathed everything—buildings, faces, even the foam of the sea—in an otherworldly glow.
And then the impossible happened.
The moon moved.
Not rising, not setting—approaching. It slid closer with deliberate slowness, as if drawn toward the earth by some invisible hand. The crowd shrieked. Some collapsed in prayer. Others ran blindly into the night.
Ulysses clutched his notebook so tightly his knuckles whitened. His breath came shallow. Words formed in his mind, though he didn't know if they were his own or borrowed from the priest's cries:
"The heavenly bodies will be shaken."
The fisherman from before stumbled past him, eyes wide with terror. "It's beginning, anak! It's all beginning!"
Ulysses wanted to answer, but the words locked in his chest.
Above, the moon pulsed again—one great, blinding heartbeat that washed the bay in light.
And Ulysses, caught between the stampede of fear and the whisper of faith, realized with terrible clarity: this was no longer just a story.
It was a reckoning.
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End of Chapter 8