On a dark night beneath a dazzling spread of stars, at the very heart of an ancient dark forest, there stood a lone temple.It was a structure of weathered stone, forgotten by maps and time, that seemed to breathe with a mythical aura.
The shadows around it clung with purpose, and the air hummed with a silent, potent energy, as if the clearing itself held its breath.
The interior of the temple was a cavern of echoing silence and immense scale. Six monolithic pillars, carved with runes swallowed by centuries of dust, held up a vaulted ceiling lost to gloom.
At the far end, illuminated by a single, perfect shaft of celestial light, was a stone altar, its surface worn smooth by rituals long erased from memory. And near it, a figure stood impossibly still.
He was a man clad in a robe of absolute black, a void against the dim stone. His face was a complete mystery, a darkness under the hood where no facial features could be discerned, not the hint of a chin or the curve of a cheek—just an abyss.
Slowly, with a ritualistic grace, he stretched both of his hands toward the beam of moonlight that fell through a circular opening in the temple roof directly above the altar.
The silvery light, which should have passed through his fingers, instead gathered upon his upturned palms. It pooled like liquid mercury, swirling and merging, pulling itself together from a diffuse glow into a tangible, radiant mass.
The light began to reshape itself. It softened, forming curves and gentle lines, condensing into a small, luminous form. Within moments, the figure of a baby lay cradled in his hands, sculpted from moonlight given flesh.
The infant's face was soft and peaceful, its hair a spill of darkness as deep and endless as a black ocean. With a little tremor, a slight flutter of new life, the baby opened its eyelids.
They revealed a pair of wide, observing eyes the color of ashes—a pale, solemn grey that held a knowing depth far beyond a newborn's first blink.
The tiny chest rose and fell with a first, silent breath. Then, upon the child's right palm, a mark began to glow. It was the symbol of a crescent moon, shaped like a drawn bow, and it shone with the fierce, pinpoint brilliance of a captive star.
As if this sign unleashed him, the robed figure's featureless face began to change.
The darkness churned and distorted, the empty space shaping itself into the hollows of a mouth and a pair of deep eye sockets. But no eyes filled them;
they remained pools of absolute night, a horrifying absence in a newly formed face. From that stark mouth, lips colorless as old bone curled upward into a smile that was anything but joyful.
He opened his mouth and spoke. The voice was low, a dry rasp that seemed to grate from the stones themselves, hoarse from disuse or perhaps from containing too much power.
"Finally," the archbishop intoned, the words hanging in the sacred air. "The Apostle has appeared."
He looked down at the child in his hands, the ashen eyes staring back into his own emptiness. The infant did not cry. It merely watched, its bow-moon brand pulsing softly with a rhythm like a second heartbeat.
"I..."
the figure declared, his hollow voice gaining a resonant, ceremonial weight that vibrated through the temple pillars.
"Archbishop of the First Unknown God, will bestow upon you a name of glory. A name that shall be whispered in reverence and feared in the realms unseen. A name that shall be your destiny and your burden."
He paused, the silence thickening around the pronouncement. The very starlight from the hole above seemed to bend toward the child.
"Your name," he rasped, the final word leaving his lips like a seal being set upon fate itself, "shall be Eclipse"
As the name "Eclipse" echoed, shaft of moonlight blazing down upon the altar flared with a blinding, cold fire.
The symbol on the baby's palm answered, its stellar light flaring once, bright enough to cast the archbishop's terrifying, eyeless visage.
In that moment, the temple's mythical aura solidified into history, and a story written in moonlight and shadow began, with a silent child at its center.