Chapter 4: Abyss Currents
The night objective cleared. I was alive, and that was enough for now.
The pressure never lifted. Darkness never changed. After a while, I stopped expecting either to.
Down here, the sea had its own rhythm—slow, patient, merciless. It pressed from all sides, endless and heavy, a weight that couldn’t be fought. When I pushed against it, pain bloomed through the bones of this new body. When I let it move me, the pain faded.
That was the first lesson the abyss taught me: yield, or break.
The second was silence. No sound carried far. The ocean swallowed everything, even thought, until it was only the slow hum of depth—the heartbeat of something too large to see.
I let myself drift through that silence for a long time. The cold should have numbed me, but the gills worked without complaint, pulling life from water that felt more grave than home. The body I had—whatever it was—understood this world better than I did.
And then I felt it: warmth.
Faint, distant, but real. Not heat like a fire, just a small difference, a whisper of softness in the water that brushed the gills like breath. It was the first thing down here that reminded me of life.
I followed it.
The current split into lanes—cold ones that dragged and warm ones that slipped fast and smooth. I slid between them, letting instinct choose the path. The warmth grew stronger. It carried a strange metallic taste, like rusted iron on the tongue.
The dark around me deepened. I clicked once, the small pulse that had become my only way to see. The echo came back full of shape. A ridge. A ledge. The ground itself rising into a wall of stone, then breaking open into cracks that glowed faintly.
A volcanic shelf.
Heat breathed from its vents, steady and even, sending ribbons of warmer water curling upward. Around those vents, life gathered—so much life that the water thrummed with it. Plankton drifted like snow, thicker than I’d ever felt, and larger shapes floated lazily through them, their movements smooth and dreamlike.
It was beautiful in a way the surface never was. A cathedral built out of darkness, fire, and silence.
My gills flared open at the scent. Hunger stirred, sharp and familiar. The ache was no longer a sound in my head but a voice in the blood.
Not yet, I told myself. Be deliberate. Be human.
But the ache didn’t listen. It never did.
I let myself take one slow sweep through the edge of the cloud. The taste hit immediately—salt, warmth, and something alive, something that sang through the gills as they drew it in. The ache eased.
Then the voice returned.