The Weight of Glass

It started, as these things always do, with a glint. Just a flicker on the sonar, a signature that didn't make sense, too geometric for a natural formation, too sharp for a wreck. Two hundred fathoms down, off a forgotten trench in the Pacific Rim. My old man, God rest his soul, he always said the ocean gives you nothing for free. He was right. It gives you things, alright, but you pay for them, a slow, agonizing interest on your soul.

I was down there in the 'Sea Serpent', a tub held together by rust and my own stubbornness, looking for a Japanese freighter sunk during the war, rumored to be carrying gold. Had my son, Leo, with me that trip. Fourteen, all gangly limbs and wide-eyed wonder, dreaming of pirate treasure. He was the one who spotted it on the long-range scan, a perfect, impossible grid. "Dad, look!" he'd yelled, his voice cracking with excitement. And then, we dropped.

The sub's lights, usually just pinpricks in the black, caught something. Not metal, not rock. Glass. Miles of it. A city, stretched out beneath us, shimmering with an internal, ethereal light, like a thousand frozen constellations. Spires, domes, arches, all forged from some kind of obsidian-dark glass that pulsed with soft blue and green luminescence. No kelp, no barnacles, just smooth, impossibly clean surfaces. It was... untouched. Perfect. Like a dream pulled from the depths, fragile and terrifying.

Leo's face was pressed against the viewport, his breath fogging the glass. "It's Atlantis," he whispered, awe in every syllable. My own heart hammered against my ribs, a dull thud in the oppressive silence. Atlantis. Yeah. And it was ours. Mine. The thought came like a poison dart, quick and sharp, right after the initial, pure wonder. This wasn't just a discovery; this was *it*. The big one. The one that’d set us for life, get Leo into that fancy marine biology program he talked about, lift the debt off my back like a whale breaching.

I remember the way I clapped him on the shoulder, too rough, forcing a grin. "You got that right, son. You got that right." But my eyes, they were already calculating, dissecting. How to get it up. How to keep it secret. How to make it *mine*. That night, back on the surface, I lied to the company. Logged a faulty sonar reading, a patch of methane vents, nothing more. Leo, he looked at me, a question in his eyes, but he kept quiet. He trusted me. That was the first cut.

The next two years were a blur of hushed calls, shady investors, and modified equipment. I told Leo we were exploring new deep-sea mining techniques, a 'prototype project.' He was always keen to help, always tinkering, always so damn smart. We retrofitted the Sea Serpent, added a heavy-duty manipulator arm, specialized cutting lasers, cargo bays. Every piece of new gear felt like a chain tightening around my chest.

We went back, just us two, when the new moon swallowed the light. The city was still there, waiting, still breathing its soft, alien glow. We started with a small dome, barely ten feet across, something that looked like a chapel, maybe. The plan was to detach it clean, bring it to the surface, and sell it piece by piece to some ultra-rich collector. The lasers hummed, cutting through the ancient glass like butter, surprisingly strong, surprisingly pliable.

Leo was in the external arm, guiding the cuts, his face illuminated by the blue-green light, a ghost in the abyss. I watched him through the viewport, giving instructions over the comms. "Easy, boy, easy now. Don't rush it." But I was rushing it. Always rushing. He hit a joint, a connecting strut between two sections of the dome. A low hum vibrated through the sub, then a crack, sharp and sudden, like ice giving way.

It wasn't just the dome. The entire section of the city, where we'd been working, began to groan. Cracks spread through the glass structures around us, faster than thought, spiderwebbing across arches that had stood for millennia. The internal light of the city flickered, then surged, a blinding, emerald flash that made the entire ocean floor pulse. Something... shifted. The ground beneath us bucked. I saw the dome we were cutting, twisting, folding in on itself, and then, a massive spire, thin as a needle, but miles long, started to lean. Slowly at first, then faster, faster.

"Leo! Get clear!" I screamed into the comms, but my voice was swallowed by the sudden chaos, the grinding shriek of fracturing glass, the groan of the deep. The spire fell, a leviathan's spear, not directly on us, but beside us, sending a wave of compressed water and debris crashing into our work site. I saw the manipulator arm, where Leo had been, twist and crumple like tin foil, ripped from its mounts.

The viewport cracked then, a hairline fracture spiderwebbing across my vision. All I could see was churning glass dust, the last, dying pulse of the city's light, and then black. Total, absolute black. I don't know how I got out of there. The Sea Serpent was battered, limping, but I pointed her nose up and jammed the throttles. Didn't look back. Couldn't.

I'm on the surface now. Always on the surface. Been twenty years. Never went back down. The freighter? Still sitting there, probably. The gold? Doesn't matter. Leo... he never made it back. Never found a trace of him. Just that damn glass. I see it when I close my eyes, every night, that blue-green glow, just before the spire falls. Before the crack spreads. Before the black. And I hear his voice, "It's Atlantis." And I know. I know it wasn't treasure. It was a grave. And I put him in it. I did. I'm telling you. It was me.