In a silent, desolate world where the sun never rose, a deep cobalt light bled through the clouds each night, staining the land in endless twilight. Some claimed the sky itself had been wounded long ago, and that the glow was not moonlight at all, but something leaking through a tear in the heavens.
Legends spoke of a presence beyond those clouds. A dormant goddess whose awakening had once drowned the moon in crimson for a thousand years. That age ended in catastrophe, remembered only through a single relic: an archaic journal rumored to have been written in blood, the same blood that once fell from the sky.
Clyde Nox Pvolae was born into this world.
He lived in the City of Cristae, a sprawling metropolis named after the folded structures of mitochondria. Silver towers and hollow tunnels stretched endlessly beneath the cobalt firmament, dim and lifeless. Clyde moved quietly through its streets, keeping to himself. He wore black formal attire trimmed with faint gold, his pale features often shadowed beneath a tilted top hat long fallen out of fashion. His slender frame and distant gaze gave the impression of calm isolation, as though he existed slightly apart from the world around him.
The people of Cristae avoided speaking of the sky. They feared what lingered behind it, whispering of unseen eyes and voices that could pierce the soul. "Do not look upward," was a phrase Clyde had heard more than once, spoken half in jest and half in dread. He understood that fear, even as he felt drawn to what it concealed.
At Cristae Academy, he excelled in history, tracing fragmented accounts of the Cataclysm through texts so ancient their ink had nearly faded into dust. Yet every truth ended the same way, broken, censored, or erased entirely.
That changed the day he entered the city's forgotten library.
A few days after his graduation, while searching for remnants of lost knowledge, Clyde found a book hidden deep among dust-choked shelves. It resembled a journal, its cover stiff and darkened, as though soaked in something long dried.
When he reached for it, something pulled back.
The sensation was subtle but unmistakable. As his fingertips brushed the surface, whispers flooded his mind. A single name echoed like a pulse inside his skull.
"Noxella."
The library dissolved.
Clyde stood in a field of pale flowers glowing faintly beneath a blue moon. The air was unnaturally cold, and a heavy pressure settled behind his thoughts, deliberate and watching.
He turned.
Above him loomed a colossal moon, swollen and blood-red. Its surface was covered in countless crimson eyes, blinking slowly against the cobalt sky. His breath caught. Pain split through his skull as blood seeped from his eyes, the whispers growing louder and overlapping.
"Noxella."
The sound pressed in from every direction.
The pressure became unbearable.
Then silence.
Clyde was back in the library. His reflection trembled faintly in the glass of a nearby display case. Without realizing it, his hand reached toward an old flintlock resting atop the shelf, a relic from an age long buried.
The metal was cold against his temple.
The shot shattered the quiet.
The journal slipped from his grasp and struck the stone floor. Its pages turned slowly, as if guided by an unseen hand, before stopping on a single passage written in fresh, dark blood.
"The crimson moon is not something to be gazed upon."
Scarlet spread across the tiles beneath him, pooling around the still body beside the fallen book.