The deeper a person descends into the ocean, the quieter the world becomes. Not silent, exactly—silence implies absence. The deep has its own kind of presence, something thick and watchful, a pressure that isn’t just physical. Captain Eli Navarro knew that feeling better than most. Twenty years of deep-sea recovery work had taught him to respect the pressure as much as the dark.
But nothing had prepared him for the trench.
It didn’t have a name, at least not officially. His research team had cataloged it only as Sector R-13, an unassuming dip on sonar until a month ago, when the seismic readings around it had begun fluctuating without cause. Then came the images—distorted, glitchy, but unmistakable: right angles. Symmetry. Architecture.
Not coral.
Not volcanic.
Not natural.
The kind of geometry that made the human mind twitch.
“What do you think it is?” Hana asked as she checked the seals on the submersible hatch. Her hands shook slightly, though she tried to hide it.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Eli said, tightening a bolt. “Whatever it is, nobody’s seen it before. That’s all that counts.”
The dive began at 05:13. The sun was barely a smear behind the clouds as the submersible dropped beneath the surface, swallowed whole by the darkening water. The ocean pressed against the hull in slow increments, a tightening fist the deeper they went.
At 1,000 meters, the blue faded.
At 3,000 meters, the world turned black.
At 6,000 meters, Hana stopped making jokes.
At 7,200 meters, the first whisper came.
It drifted into the cabin like a sigh through a distant hallway—soft, warped, barely human. Eli froze. Hana’s head snapped up from her console.
“Did you—?”
“Probably interference.”
But interference didn’t carry vowels.
The whisper brushed the edges of Eli’s mind, a syllable half-formed, like someone trying to speak underwater. He swallowed, gripping the armrests harder.
“Send a ping,” he said.
The sonar pulse echoed into the trench…and what came back wasn’t an echo.
It was a voice.
A warbling, layered mimic of the ping, elongated into a shape that felt uncomfortably close to speech.
Hana’s face went pale. “That wasn’t—”
“I know.”
The trench came into view without warning.
One moment, the lights illuminated nothing but drifting particles. The next, the beams caught something enormous—shadowed pillars rising from the ocean floor, arranged in a sweeping circle like the ribs of a colossal, rotting beast.
“God…” Hana breathed. “It’s a city.”
Eli didn’t correct her. He couldn’t. There were avenues—broad, sloping paths lined with stone-like structures. Archways half-collapsed. Towers leaning at impossible angles. And everything coated in a thin layer of pale silt, like a city dead for far longer than humanity had existed.
The whispers returned.
Soft. Slow. Consonants dissolving into liquid vowels. They drifted not through the water, but through the walls of the sub—through Eli’s bones, his teeth, the soft tissue behind his eyes.
“It’s in the comms,” Hana said, adjusting the frequencies. “But it doesn’t match any channel. It’s like it’s…bleeding in.”
“Stay focused,” Eli said, but his own voice sounded distant. The whispers tugged at the edges of his thoughts, brushing against memories he didn’t want touched.
Childhood.
His father’s voice.
The sound of rain on a tin roof.
Voices aren’t supposed to know your memories.
They navigated deeper into the ruined city, lights sweeping across structures whose surfaces seemed to ripple under the illumination—not movement exactly, but something close. A trick of the light, he told himself.
But the light wasn’t tricking anyone.
“Look at that,” Hana whispered.
Ahead, an enormous dome rose from the sea floor, partially collapsed. A faint glow pulsed from cracks in its surface—anemone-like organisms expelling light, perhaps.
But the whispers grew louder as they approached.
More insistent.
Layered.
Like a crowd gathering just out of sight.
Eli reached toward the console to adjust the cameras…and froze.
For a moment—just the faintest flicker—a shadow passed across the dome’s interior. Something long-limbed. Something that moved with purpose.
“Did you see that?” Hana whispered.
“No,” Eli lied.
Because the alternative was admitting something impossible.
The glow inside the dome shifted to a warmer tone, like the embers of a dying fire. The whispers swelled as though they sensed the sub’s presence and were responding.
Words.
Not human—but structured.
Purposeful.
Hana pressed her palms to her headset. “It’s not random. Eli, it’s not random.”
Eli felt pressure in his ears, the same pressure that came with deep anxiety attacks. The same pressure he’d felt ten years ago when he’d lost a diver on an ill-fated recovery mission in the Devil’s Channel.
“Turn us around,” Hana said suddenly. “Now.”
“Hold on—”
“Eli, turn us around. Something’s—something’s wrong.”
Before he could answer, the lights flickered. The sub lurched, an unseen current gripping it sideways. The dome’s interior flared with sudden brightness.
And then—
Nothing.
A blackout.
For three full seconds, they drifted in total darkness.
When the lights returned, the city had changed.
The pillars looked closer.
The dome’s surface had shifted.
And something was pressed against the glass.
A face.
Or something like one.
Long.
Boneless.
Too smooth, as if sculpted from wax.
Hollow eye sockets staring through the glass with absolute absence.
Then it was gone.
Hana screamed.
Eli grabbed the controls and forced the sub backward, thrusters whining. The sonar pinged wildly—objects moving around them. Closing in. The whispers had become a wall of noise, crashing against their skulls.
“Surface!” Eli shouted. “Now!”
The ascent was chaotic, instruments failing one by one. Hana sobbed quietly, clutching her helmet like it might protect her from the voices. Eli could still feel that face in his mind—a psychic afterimage burned into memory.
At 3,000 meters, the whispers began to fade.
At 1,000 meters, the pressure in his chest eased.
At 400 meters, the comms cleared.
By the time they breached the surface, the sky had never looked more terrifying in its normalcy.
Three days later, after the debriefings and the medical checks, Eli met Hana behind the research station. She looked thinner, haunted.
“Do you still hear it?” she whispered.
Eli hesitated.
Hana’s eyes brimmed with dread.
“You do,” she said. “Me too.”
That night, Eli dreamed of the city.
Not drowned.
Not ruined.
Alive.
Lights flickered in its towers.
Shadows walked its streets.
And beneath the dome, something vast stirred.
When he woke, the whisper was louder.
Close.
Right beside his ear.
“Come back.”
He didn’t sleep again.