Dark Dive
I’m drowning, and that’s not a figure of speech. Effectively drowning, anyways. The air in my tank is stale and flat. It tastes of metal and salty sweat. I’ve been breathing it too long; about ten times what I’d planned for. The dive had gone wrong. The inside of my helmet feels as if it’s closing in. Not a foreign feeling for a diver. I focus on the circular window in the front of my helmet. It’s about the surface area of two palms, the moisture of my breath freezing to in the delicate pattern of an icy hexagon. I stare into the black flood beyond that ice, and slow my breathing by a great effort of will. The muscles in my limbs get heavy, weak.
An explosion erupts in a ball of flame, bursting apart that black ocean for an instant. My ship. All my friends. And with them the only hope of rescue I have.
In that flash I see the outline of the creature I’d thought to hunt. A mass of ebony, cruel tendrils snake outwards from it. Dozens of them, curled and coiled. Tentacles unlike any I’d seen before. They appear to be smooth, without the suckers of a squid. A horror of the seas unlike any I’d before seen. And snaking from its center, the cable that fastens to my belt. I am bound to that black fiend.
The explosion sends a massive shock-wave, but it does nothing to harm the monster. The tendrils simply ripple like seaweed in the drift.
The wave wraps the front of my body in a too strong hug. I’m flung far in the water, in an arch. I’m spinning, retching inside my helmet. I taste vomit in the back of my mouth. Blood flows fast into my hands, my feet. I have to pull the release on my cable. It’s a small clasp the size of a finger. I can’t pull up on it. My fingers don’t have the strength.
This ocean is too large, too stretched out. My oxygen tank is working overtime, and failing. I’m drowning. It’s slowly coming home to me. I’m drowning, dying. My lungs scream, beg and begin to shake as I jerk on the release that secures me to that creature.
All goes black, and my lungs go numb as I continue to breathe useless air.
I wake to the sound of dripping water. It’s dark, dark as pitch. The front glass plate on my helmet, I realize, is broken. That’s why I can breathe. The air tastes of moss and dead barnacles. Sounds that imply a respite from the endlessness of the sea, and the tendrils of that nightmare.
Having removed my heavy diver’s helmet, I feel light enough that my weakened body may be able to stand. It clatters to the floor with a hollow bang that echoes through rock. Our helmets come equipped with a light, but it does not come on. I run my fingers through a crack that’s along the front of the helmet, extending all the way from the light and into the glass view port. I feel some pain in my chest as well. My ribs are broken.
But first, my whole body is beginning to shake from the wet in my suit. I pull my arms from thick rubber sleeves that end in gloves, and rest one hand on the floor. It’s stone. Rough and porous.
I know where I am. At that one touch, my mind comes awake with the knowledge. Stranded in one ocean cavern of many millions that might be in these oceans. Even if I’m looked for, I will not be found.
Within the cavern, there is no light. But there is breathable air, somehow. I search my way deeper in on my hands and knees, like one of the Argonaut’s engine boys. The thought of the engine boys, their faces smeared with grease and their clothes of thick canvas; it gives me a shudder to think that there are no engine boys anymore.
I never really knew them, and yet, the thought that they’re dead strikes me as shameful. They did not choose the whaler’s life. They’d joined up to fix engines. The sea had not called to them as it had the others. As it had called me.
It had called to me first when I was a boy in Ilvermorn. A safe place, that. Boring, I’d always thought. I never really understood why it was so safe until after setting sail. Ilvermorn is a world with its own starlet, a ball of flame suspended in the middle of the sky. I’d grown up calling it Chamuel, meaning ‘blessing light’, as my mother had called it. It is ever bright.
It was a safe place thanks to the sacrifices of my forefathers, and my elder brethren. As the young often do, I fled that safety. I lied about my age in order to leave Ilvermorn, and I think Captain Gideon knew it. I was fourteen when I joined the Argonaut’s crew, though I told them I was eighteen. If my crewmen did not know at the time, they’d figured it out by my eighteenth birthday. It’s a quartet of years that were utterly transformative. I grew taller, had to shave every day, my shoulders broadened. I grew into the suit. But I’ve found that, so far, this year; rather, this day has changed my circumstances more.
Yesterday, I had a crew. Just like the four years before it. Jethro, Ephraim, and Captain Gideon. Jethro and three other Harpoonists had gone out with me, and the five of us made bets on who would strike first. I did. And the rest of them hunted their last.
Hours pass, and I only get colder. My body tries to defy me with shivers, and I hold them at bay with little success. I never should have slept. I never should have let myself stop moving, even for a minute. The cold will set in before long. Foolish. I’m a dead man walking, but at least I’m still walking. My legs are feeble. One hand is against the wall, supporting what my legs cannot.
My dreams come to me unbidden in haunting flashes. It’s not a fully connected thread, or idea, or story. My mind mixes the truth with fiction of my dream. But Jethro… his death is the same in both.
I put my back to the wall.
Jethro. Dead.
Jethro, who had joined a cycle before me, who had always told me the tales of his own people of Estersong. I recall how he marveled when I told him the stories of my people. I can still remember the look in his eyes when I would tell him the story of Odysseus. Every single time, his eyes would make the same shape. He was older than me, but he never lost his childish wonder.
I put down my head, and I try to weep for him. Selfishly, I want to weep my own loss of a comrade. My breathes rail against my chest. I wish I could let it out. It’s something vast as the ocean is vast. Empty as the ocean is empty. I have lost all to the sea, and the sea itself fills me to overflowing. I am broken in its whelming tide.
It takes me a moment to get under control.
I’ll die here.
“No. Not this. Get up, Lazar.” My tongue feels thick, and I slur out the words. I slap myself. “Get up, and find something to burn.” Unlikely, but my only chance. It’s the thought of dying cold that spurs me to action above anything else. To my mind it seems like it would mean cold for eternity, as my body slowly decays inside this rock.
The cavern walls are dark, unknowable. But my searching hands find purchase on a ledge, and I use it to pull myself to a standing position. My knees are weakened by the cold. The chill begins to grow numb, losing its initial bite but putting my muscles to sleep. I walk. I must walk, or die to the impending frost as it slowly takes my hands, my feet, and the rest of me, into a deep slumber. I may have some hours yet to live.
Quite suddenly, I notice a change up ahead. A slight shift in my vision from perfect black to a hint of grayish blue. There is a light ahead of me, I can be certain of it.
I make for its source.
Rounding the corner, I get up on my knees so I can better see around the room. It is a much wider space inside. The light comes from a plant that fills the room. The air is rich to my lungs, thick to breathe. I know this plant, and am familiar with the taste it produces in the air as it recycles it. It’s a smell that is, for me, deeply connected to the sea. Rauyav is what they called it Ilvermorn, though everyone has their own name for it. Where the Isles smell of salt and all taste of different mosses and grasses, the sea has ever tasted as such for me.
It’s the same as the plant we put in our respiration units on the Argonaut. It’s a cheap and plentiful plant, and unlike almost every other method of scrubbing, it needs no rock on which to grow, but needs only sea water and air. Best of all, they grow to fit their environments making them a cheap alternative to respiration units.
But this one is huge. It grows wall to wall in this chamber, filling the immense space. In isolation, each branch is a haphazard amalgam of twisting green root and wide luminous leaf. In concert, the thing has grown till it seems an altogether different thing. It makes me think of a tree. I have only ever seen one in my life, and that was many years ago, in Ilvermorn.
At its center, sits the body of a diver. Not one of the Argonaut’s. Far too dead for such a recent event. The body looks to be male, very old, and strangely dried out. The eye sockets are empty, and the skin is gray and stretched over the face of the skull. It’s as if the plant drew every last drop of moisture from him until it could find another source. This man, though dead, has saved my life through some strange turn of fate. It’s as if even though dead, he lives on through the plant itself. He has lost his agency perhaps, but his life still brings forth new life. This plant, for one. And my own, for another.
Against my better judgment, my body decides to sleep. I’d fight it if I had the fight to give. But instead, the sleep comes, and I dream of the first time I tasted of that plant’s air.
But, in my dream, it’s also last night’s run. They contradict one another, overlap. I have experience, but none at all. I am calm but also on the verge of a mental break. It is both together, experiencing both at once. My mind slips in and out of the remembering.
The Argonaut’s engines rumbled with anticipation, hands sweaty as they gripped harpoon guns. The divers held their helmets of brass with round glass view ports. The creature measured by our instruments was large, maybe a whale. One of the older sailors said it’s Kirlaka, devourer god of the deep. Beside me, Micah whispered a prayer to the sea. That prayer saved my will to dive.
Micah is dead now, I recall. Buried at sea, after being taken by mind sickness.
He reached out, and corrected my grip on the harpoon. My hands were sweating, sticking uncomfortably to the inside of the gloves as they shifted on the palm of the grip. Micah said that the creature we hunt will make itself known once we see it with our own eyes. The instruments can show many things, he told me, but they cannot tell the shape of things. Only our eyes may do as much.
Engines hummed as we clasped our diving helmets on. All sounds became muffled, like burying your head in a pillow. Then, everything became a blur. I splashed down into the deployment tank, and the water was warm. They closed the hatch over me, as I completely submerged myself. My lungs devoured the air from my respirator tank. I heard the snick, snick of its air valves taking in the air for scrubbing. Then I remember the thought I’d had the first time I was in this tank, listening to the scrubber work the air between the leaves of that plant… Keep me breathing. I could feel the engine’s hum vibrate through the water.
I was sloshed to the side as the engines shifted, slowing the vessel. The hatch opened, and the water froze me. But not as much as the view. Before me, were the stars. Balls of light, piercing the water in their intense glow. The sea fills the place between the worlds and the pockets of civilization that grow in the bubbles. The water seemed clouded, though its clarity was near perfect. The sheer distance of it all tricked the eye until it appeared black. It never ceased to take my breath.
Nearby, I saw an asteroid, full of holes. There seemed to be air bubbles formed within its cracks. Many such rocks exist in waters where the scrubber plants grow.
Beside me, Jethro snaked out. So did Captain Gideon, though in reality, he always piloted while on the hunt. I turned behind to see Micah, Ephraim, and one of the Engine boys whose name I never knew. All of them were girded in diver’s gear that fitted them. The boy was wearing the suit I used to wear when I was fourteen pretending to eighteen.
Then we felt the tremble of water. It sounded almost like the click of a tongue, but rapid and overlapping. The Argonaut changed course, and we were swung far out in front of an incredible tentacled mass. Remembering our bet, I fired before I understood what I was seeing.
A swirling mass writhed before me.
It had no visible torso, as a whale or turtle would. All before me were tentacles sprouting from its center. The center where I’d planted my harpoon. I clasped the harpoon’s cable to my belt from habit, before turning to see my companion’s faces. I wanted to gloat. But I saw instead a horror.
The beast’s tentacles were long, and reaching past all of us, grabbed hold of the Argonaut. One, wrapped around the center of the vessel, squeezed. I felt the explosion of the engines as the Argonaut was ripped in half. I disengaged the cable holding me to the Argonaut without thinking. I was in shock, but something inside took over. It was like I watched myself act.
A powerful wave from the explosion reached me an instant later, and left me spinning free, until my harpoon line snapped tight.
I wheeled my head around, looking for my compatriots, only to find the mass of the beast came somewhat between us. They had still been attached to the vessel when the shock-wave hit their bodies. Jethro was broken, body bent strangely in half. I couldn’t see Gideon or the kid anywhere. One tentacle reached into a cloud of red that must have been Micah. It ripped him free of the cable, and ate him.
That’s when I wake up.
My whole body aches, muscles stiff from the cold. I decide to stand. Or, decide to try.
Shifting my weight, I roll over onto my belly. The floor is hard, and cold to my near naked flesh. I have no clue how long I’ve been asleep, but if I can’t dry out soon, I’m as dead as the man I share my cave with.
I stand, with one hand against the wall, and take a step. My joints are stiff, and a little bruised. They squeak and pop, protesting the motion.
The dead man stares at me. The scrubber holds him in a strange sort of animated state to my eyes. It cradles him. My bleary mind decides that it loves him, and has promised to care for him in death. And so, it will remain here, by his side, evermore.
“I’m Lazarus.” I say to him. “I figure, since I might have an extended stay, you’d best know my name.” I pause a moment, before adding, “You’re probably the last person I’ll ever know.”
