Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig ndless.net. NS
Answer
ndless.net. 5 NS iris.ns.cloudflare.com.
ndless.net. 5 NS hugh.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0