The submersible, the Acheron Deep-V, was a tiny, pressurized bubble of arrogance. It hummed with the sterile sound of life-support systems and recycled breath—a sound I now found repulsive.
I didn't need to swim to the hull. I didn't need to touch the steel.
I sat in the silence of the bone-cathedral, miles below the sub's reach, and closed my eyes. Vespera wrapped her translucent arms around my neck, her own heart beating against my spine, acting as an amplifier for my consciousness.
[...Find the thread, Elias. Pull until he unravels...]
I reached out with my mind, riding the "Hum" like a sonar wave. I felt the cold metal of the sub, then the frantic, tiny heartbeats of the crew. And then, I found the one that tasted like old resentment and expensive coffee.
Aris.
He was asleep in his cramped bunk, his brow furrowed even in rest. I didn't enter his dream; I became it.
The dream began in the old library of our childhood home. The air was dry, smelling of dust and ink. Aris was sitting at the mahogany desk, frantically trying to assemble a puzzle of the Atlantic Ocean.
"It doesn't fit, Aris," I said, stepping out from the shadows of the bookshelves.
Aris looked up, his face pale. "Elias? You're dead. You fell from the Pillar. I saw the displacement... the math said you couldn't survive the impact."
"The math is a cage," I replied. I walked toward him, my footsteps leaving wet, glowing smears on the expensive rug. I wasn't wearing my wool coat. I was wearing the skin of the abyss.
"What are you?" he whispered, reaching for a letter opener as if it could protect him.
"I am the answer to the question you were too afraid to ask," I said. I leaned over the desk. My face began to shift—my jaw unhinging slightly, my eyes reflecting a thousand years of darkness. "You didn't come here to save me, brother. You came because you were jealous that the madness chose me and not you."
Suddenly, the library floor began to liquefy. Saltwater bubbled up from the floorboards, soaking his shoes. The books on the shelves turned into rotting kelp.
"Get out of my head!" Aris screamed, the water rising to his waist.
"I'm not in your head, Aris. I'm in the water you drink. I'm in the air you scrub. I'm the Hum you hear when the engines stop."
I reached out and touched his temple with a silver, webbed finger. I showed him the Drowned City. I showed him the crushing weight of a mile of water. I let him feel the absolute, terrifying peace of having a heart that no longer needs to beat.
"Tell the crew to turn back," I vibrated, my voice shaking the dream-walls until they cracked. "Or I will let the Silence in. And the Silence never stops hungry."
Aris bolted upright in his bunk, gasping for air.
He scrambled for the sink, splashing his face with water to wash away the nightmare. But as he looked into the mirror, the reflection didn't clear. The water in the basin was a pulsing, neon turquoise.
And for a split second, he saw my eyes—vast, nebular, and entirely inhuman—staring back at him from the drain.
"Elias?" he whispered, his voice trembling.
Outside the thick titanium viewport of the sub, a massive shadow drifted by. It wasn't a shark. It was a man-shaped silhouette, glowing with a soft, vengeful light, holding the hand of a goddess.
The Acheron Deep-V groaned as the external pressure suddenly spiked, the metal screaming under a force that shouldn't exist at this depth.
[...He is breaking...] Vespera purred in my mind.
"He's broken," I replied, opening my eyes back in the ruins. "Now, we just have to decide if we let him drown, or if we let him watch us rule."