Chapter 1: The Quiet Before

“People talk about monsters like they’re stories. They forget we were once the stories too.” — Anonymous, survivor of the 1999 Cataclysm

The hum of the school’s broken ceiling fan did little to fight the sweltering heat trapped inside Detention Room 2B.  Dust clung to every corner. The fluorescent lights flickered, half-hearted and forgotten—like most things in this school.

Jordan tapped her pen against the desk. She had already broken one earlier. Across the room, a boy sat with his feet kicked up on the desk, hood over his head. His eyes, when they did glance up, seemed like they didn’t belong to a teenager at all. Sharp. Calculating. But so utterly… bored.

Richard.

She didn’t like him.

He hadn’t spoken a word since they'd been shoved in here, both sentenced to an hour’s silence for different crimes.

 Hers: punching a boy who called her a “Hothead” 

His-  ridiculing his English teacher about “what real darkness meant” while dissecting Christopher Nolan’s dark knight.

She rolled her eyes.

“I can feel you judging me, it’s gross” he muttered finally, not looking up.

“You make it easy,” she shot back.

His lips twitched. “Popular people always think they’re above everyone.”

“Oh, and so I should assume you think sitting in the dark makes you deep?”

Their eyes met, briefly—and something unspoken passed between them. It wasn’t attraction. It wasn’t recognition. It was… something else. Familiar. Unsettling.

A flicker.

It was gone before either could name it. Somewhere, far from the flickering lights of Detention Room 2B, the sky shuddered—and did not stop.

Elsewhere, in a crowded English classroom, Luna sat cross-legged on her desk, surrounded by her friends. Break time meant noise, gossip, chips, and heated debates over old spirit battle clips on their phones.

“Did you see that AZO video from last month?” one of them asked, shoving a screen in Luna’s face. “That spirit user somewhere in Malaysia, who nearly tore a hole through reality. Think it was real?”

"The AZO’s overdramatic,” someone scoffed. “I know that the world we live in is weird, but come on.”

“Shhh,” Luna said, smiling gently. “They keep us safe, remember?”

No one could forget the world they lived in. Spirit essence, once myth, now science. The AZO—Astranomical Zenith Organization—had formed after the 1999 Cataclysm, the day reality cracked open and monsters poured in. The day humanity learned they weren’t alone. The day 100,000 lives were lost.

Now, spirit users trained. Monsters were studied. And the word “spiritual” no longer just belonged to religion.

The girls laughed. Chips crunched. Screens flashed. But Luna’s world was quieter beneath it all. A beat slower. A breath deeper.

Luna always felt like she didn’t belong. The weird dreams. The fever spells. The haunting whispers only she could hear when everything else fell silent.

 Sometimes she wondered if everyone else was just pretending not to hear it too—the soft whisper that crawled under her skin when everything else went quiet. In her last dream, a voice whispered from behind a mirror:

“It’s not yours. It never was.”

Her fingers grazed the chain around her neck. The moonstone charm pulsed slightly—warm.

“Luna, you good?” one of the girls asked.

“Huh? Yeah. Just tired.”

She smiled again.

Later that afternoon, Luna walked home beneath clouds that carried the threat of rain but never delivered. Her father stood outside their gate, watering the last stubborn flowers of winter.

“Hey, little moon,” he greeted.

“Hey, dad.”

They settled on the porch with cups of warm rooibos. Her father always made it strong.

“You’ve been tired a lot lately,” he said softly, after a moment. “I’m fine.”

“You still having those weird dreams?”

Luna looked away. “Yeah. They’re getting… louder.”

He didn’t push. He never did. But the worry in his eyes deepened. His wife, Greta, used to say that dreams were messages. Luna had inherited that part of her.

“You remind me of her more and more,” he whispered to himself.

They watched the sky darken, slipping into evening. Luna, later dozed off on the couch as the news droned softly from the living room. “…scientists confirm that in exactly seven months, a solar eclipse will occur—the first in 200 years. Experts believe the eclipse’s path is eerily aligned with predictions from the Nostradamus scrolls…”

The newscaster’s voice shifted to a message from the AZO: “As we prepare to commemorate the victims of the 1999 Cataclysm during this year’s Nostradamus Event Memorial, we urge the public to remain alert. The world is not what it was. Spiritual anomalies continue to rise. We must remember—and learn.”

Luna’s father turned off the TV, sighing. He stepped outside and looked up at the moon—silver, full, and silent.

“You’d know what to say, Greta,” he murmured. 

“She’s starting to feel it, too.”