The tunnel opened like a vein of liquid night, curling upward from the deeper currents of the Abyss. I knew this path as I knew my own breath—an instinct older than memory, older than the shifting sands of the deep. The water around me hummed with the pulse of the Abyss, a low, steady rhythm that spoke of patience, of time folded in layers, of creatures sleeping in their sealed halls.
Light touched me here for the first time in what I understood as forever. Not the sun, not yet, but glimmers spilling from cracks where the tunnel met the shallower currents above. It wasn't warmth, only color—a wash of blue and green, dancing over the ridges of coral and stone, reflecting off the delicate fins of small, curious creatures. They knew me, as I knew them, moving in patterns that needed no thought.
Above, the surface world churned unknowingly, oblivious to the kingdoms below. I felt its pull, faint, distant, like a heartbeat in the wrong chest. There were whispers in the tunnel—currents bending around my presence, currents older than the Trinity themselves—but no fear. Only the song of the Abyss, the sigh of sealed leviathans sleeping in hidden trenches, the careful balance of life bound and yet free.
I pressed forward, through the narrowing passage, and the walls opened into a cavern that stretched wider than I could see. Coral towers reached toward unseen skylights; schools of phosphorescent fish spun through the water like sparks; stone cliffs fell into darkness, home to the imprisoned leviathans whose eyes flickered briefly, curious, at my passing. This was my cradle, my world, my memory—the Abyss not as sailors tell, not as surface dwellers fear, but alive and infinite, patient, and perfectly mine.
And when at last I reached the edge, where the currents hinted at land above, I felt… nothing but wonder. No desire to flee. No fear. Only the knowledge that the surface would always be strange, and that my home, the Abyss, was eternal, vast, and unyielding.