Era of the Living Moon

New York City never really slept, but at eight in the morning, it felt like it was groggily dragging itself out of bed, bleary-eyed and regretting all its choices from the night before. The streets still carried the weight of last night's revelry, the air thick with the mingling scents of burnt coffee, car exhaust, and the faint, lingering remnants of street food that had somehow survived until morning. Taxis honked, pedestrians shuffled along with varying levels of enthusiasm, and somewhere in the distance, the unmistakable sound of an argument over parking drifted through the cold February air.

I weaved through the mass of students flooding Washington Square Park, shifting my bag over my shoulder as I did my best to avoid the caffeine-starved freshmen moving like zombies toward the nearest overpriced coffee cart. The arch loomed ahead, grand and indifferent to the hurried lives scurrying beneath it. I always liked the way it framed the sky—a perfect picture of New York's constant contradiction of permanence and change.

Beyond it, the city stretched out like an unruly puzzle, all steel and glass and unfiltered ambition. New York didn't just exist—it demanded existence, pressing itself into every available space like it was afraid the world might forget it if it ever stopped shouting. And somewhere beyond the endless sprawl of buildings and neon, beyond the smog-choked sky, the moon sat, unseen in the daylight but always there. Watching. Waiting.

I had always been fascinated by it. The moon had a presence that even the city's noise couldn't drown out, an ancient observer of everything below it. It was older than nations, older than gods, even. A silent, celestial guardian that had seen the rise and fall of empires, the struggles of humanity, and—most recently—my impending astrophysics lecture with Professor Langley.

My phone buzzed.

Jake: Yo, Nate, what class you got this semester?

I smirked, already knowing where this was going, and texted back.

Me: Astrophysics with Langley.

The three dots appeared almost immediately.

Jake: Damn, bro. My condolences.

I shook my head, stifling a laugh as I dodged a guy on an e-scooter who had very clearly decided traffic laws were beneath him. Jake wasn't wrong. Langley was famous for his tangents—what should have been a discussion about the orbital mechanics of exoplanets would, without fail, spiral into a two-hour lecture about the history of astronomical mistakes and why 17th-century scholars were all absolute morons.

Jake: You bringing a pillow?

Me: Nah, but I might need one.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket and climbed the steps of the Silver Center, stepping into the warm, coffee-saturated air of the building. Students clustered in groups, either desperately cramming before class or debating whether skipping entirely was the better life choice. Someone had taken over the lobby piano, lazily playing something that vaguely resembled jazz.

I made my way to the lecture hall, scanning the crowd out of habit. Aurora Reyes leaned against a nearby pillar, scrolling through her phone, her deep blue eyes flicking up briefly as she caught me looking.

"You ready for another semester of suffering?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.

"As ready as I can be."

She smirked as she tucked a lock of her rose gold hair behind her ear. "Langley's in a mood today. I heard him ranting to some poor TA about how modern scientists don't respect the art of discovery anymore."

"So it's going to be one of those lectures."

"Definitely."

We walked into the lecture hall together, the dull murmur of conversation filling the space as students filed in. I dropped my bag onto my usual seat near the middle—close enough to see the board, far enough to avoid direct fire. The walls were lined with massive windows that let in the pale morning light, and outside, the city rumbled on, oblivious to the mysteries of the universe being debated in this room.

Three more months. That was all that was left. I was graduating early—one last semester, and then I'd be done. No more late-night cram sessions, no more wondering if my caffeine intake was approaching lethal levels. I should have been excited. Instead, I just felt like something was off, like I was standing at the edge of something I couldn't quite see.

I rubbed the back of my neck and glanced at the clock. Langley still had five minutes before he officially started wasting our time. My gaze drifted toward the windows, where the sky stretched endlessly above the city. Even in daylight, I could picture it—the moon, hidden beyond the bright blue, waiting for its time to rise.

The universe was vast and unknowable, filled with things humanity had barely begun to understand. I had spent years studying its intricacies, but even now, something in me knew that we had only scratched the surface. The moon had seen it all.

A flicker of light filled my vision.

A screen—translucent, glowing, and impossible—hovered in front of me.

"Moonfall Has Begun. Your Class Has Been Assigned. May Luna's blessings be upon you."

I blinked. My pulse spiked. The words didn't fade.

Around me, students shifted in their seats, confused. Some rubbed their eyes, others whispered urgently, gesturing in front of them as if they were all seeing the same thing.

'Does everyone see this?'

My screen flickered, shifting.

Main Class: Astral Equationist (★★★★★)

Five stars. Some distant part of my brain registered that detail, filing it away as significant without understanding why. The rest of me was still struggling to process the impossible reality of what I was seeing—a video game interface hovering in real space, presenting information as if reality itself had been coded, quantified, categorized.

A sharp, bloodcurdling scream tore through the room.

The sound was primal, raw—the kind of noise humans weren't meant to make. My head snapped toward it, just in time to see a girl in the front row convulse violently, her spine arching at an impossible angle before she collapsed onto the floor. Her limbs twitched spasmodically, her skin blanching to a porcelain white that cracked like fine china, dark veins spreading beneath the surface like ink through water.

For one heartbeat, the room remained frozen in collective shock—that moment of suspended disbelief where the brain refuses to process what the eyes are seeing.

Then her eyes snapped open.

They glowed silver—not metaphorically, not the poetic silver of storm clouds or polished metal—but actual light, pulsing and alien, emanating from where human irises should have been. And in that moment, looking into those inhuman eyes, I understood with absolute clarity that whatever was looking back at me wasn't human anymore.

The screaming began in earnest then, a cacophony of terror as reality itself seemed to fracture around us. More bodies hit the floor, their skin paling, cracking, veins darkening as they transformed. Some students scrambled backward, knocking over chairs in their desperation to escape. Others stood paralyzed, unable to process the horror unfolding before them.

The girl—that thing that had been a girl—jerked upright with impossible speed, head twitching at an unnatural angle. Her silver eyes locked onto the nearest student, and in a movement too quick to follow, she lunged.

Blood splattered across the linoleum in a violent arterial spray.

The fragile membrane of civility ruptured completely. Panic exploded outward like a supernova, students screaming, shoving, trampling each other in blind animal desperation to escape. The transformed weren't just attacking—they were feeding, tearing into flesh with inhuman strength and hunger, and with each victim, more transformed, eyes flaring silver as the infection—or whatever this was—spread.

"Move!" Aurora's voice cut through the chaos, her hand closing around my wrist with bruising force. The shock of human contact jolted me back to my body, breaking the horrified trance that had momentarily paralyzed me.

We ran, stumbling over abandoned backpacks and overturned chairs, pushing through the mass of panicked bodies toward the exit. But we couldn't move fast enough. The room had become a storm of movement—bodies fleeing, bodies turning, bodies falling. The air filled with the metallic tang of blood and something else—something alien and electric, like ozone after lightning strikes.

As we fought toward the door, one thought crystallized in my mind with perfect, terrible clarity:

This wasn't a glitch.

This wasn't a dream.

This wasn't even an attack.

This was transformation. Evolution. Selection.

The game had begun. And we were all playing whether we wanted to or not.