Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig epic.com.mt. NS
Answer
epic.com.mt. 5 NS ns2.epic.mt.
epic.com.mt. 5 NS ns1.epic.mt.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0