Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig brant.net. NS
Answer
brant.net. 5 NS dns1.kwic.com.
brant.net. 5 NS dns2.kwic.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
dns1.kwic.com. 5 A 199.58.116.46
dns2.kwic.com. 5 A 199.58.119.2
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0