Aqualuna's Shroud

Silas had salt in his veins and the taste of failure on his tongue for thirty years. They called him mad, chasing whispers of a city of glass, swallowed whole by the ocean off the coast of what used to be Persia, or maybe Egypt, depending on who was drinking. He’d sunk every cent, every favor, into this obsession, a name whispered in ancient texts: Aqualuna. Not glass, not really. More like crystallized memory, polished by a thousand thousand years of currents. The old man, they’d say, finally lost his mind to the sea’s dark stories.

His crew, a motley bunch of cynics and dreamers, mostly just needed the pay. The submersible, *The Deep Maw*, was old, groaning, but reliable. She’d taken him to places no human eye had ever seen, always looking for *that* glint. The pressure outside, down at eight thousand meters, would crush a man flatter than a desert snake. Inside, it was cramped, stank of stale coffee and unwashed bodies, but it was home. The sonar pinged, a dull, rhythmic reminder of the void. Days blurred into weeks, staring at screens, sipping lukewarm coffee. Every anomaly, every blip, a fleeting spark of hope quickly extinguished.

Then it hit. Not a blip, not a whisper, but a solid, impossibly vast structure on the sonar. It filled the screen, an outline too sharp, too geometric for any natural formation. "Hold," Silas rasped, his voice raw, sandpaper against his throat. His hands, gnarled and scarred from decades of deep-sea work, trembled barely perceptibly as he adjusted the controls. The crew exchanged glances, a mix of disbelief and weary expectation. Had the old man finally cracked, or had he actually found something this time?

The *Maw* descended, slow, deliberate, each meter a victory against the crushing blackness. The external lights, usually just pinpricks in the abyss, began to stretch, catching something. Not rock. Not coral. It was a shimmering, ghostly luminescence. Like moonlight caught in ice. Then, a wall. A smooth, dark, impossibly high wall, made of something akin to obsidian, but clear, refracting the sub's powerful beams into spectral greens and blues. It wasn’t fragile like glass, no. It was ancient, solid, a colossal, transparent monolith.

He guided *The Maw* along the perimeter. Towers, grand and impossibly delicate, rose from the seabed, their points lost in the gloom above. Streets, wide and empty, lay paved with the same dark, polished crystal. He saw arches, porticos, buildings shaped like colossal, faceted gemstones. It wasn't a ruin; it was a ghost city, perfectly preserved, encased in the deep's cold, eternal embrace. No erosion, no silt covering everything, just the sheer, stark architecture of a civilization beyond his comprehension. It was like looking into a frozen moment, a civilization paused, waiting.

He found an opening, a grand entrance to what might have been a public building, a temple, maybe. The *Maw* eased through, the hull scraping faintly against the ancient material. Inside, the light caught dust motes, eternal motes, dancing in the silent currents. Pillars stretched to an unseen ceiling. He piloted the sub through what looked like immense halls. No furniture, no artifacts, nothing human-sized. Just vast, echoing spaces of crystal. But then, a faint marking, etched into a wall. Geometric, intricate, unlike anything he’d ever seen.

Silas zoomed in the external cameras. The markings weren't just etched; they seemed to be *part* of the glass, shifting, almost flowing within its depth. They pulsed faintly, a nearly imperceptible shimmer that made his scalp prickle. This wasn't just a city; it was something else entirely. Who built this? And why did they build it out of this material that seemed to hum with its own peculiar energy? What kind of people lived here, if they were people at all? The thought made his stomach clench.

He moved *The Maw* into what appeared to be a central plaza. Here, the structures were slightly different, less monumental, more intimate. And there, frozen in the clear, dark crystal of a collapsed dome, was a shape. Not a complete figure, but an impression. Like something had fallen, pressed against the hardening, cooling material, and been swallowed. He saw curves, limbs, a delicate, fragile outline. Not glass, not quite. It was solidified volcanic activity, an ancient disaster. Pompeii, but colder, deeper, preserved in something harder than ash. The city hadn't been built of glass; it had *become* glass, the people with it. A sudden, catastrophic event, trapping them, solidifying their world in a flash.

The realization hit him like a physical blow. This wasn't a grand, proud civilization building their city of wonders. This was a place of frozen agony, of lives snuffed out in an instant, their world turned to crystal. The beauty he’d seen now felt like a shroud. The silence, once awe-inspiring, was now heavy with the ghosts of a thousand screams. His lifelong obsession, finally resolved, had brought him not to triumph, but to a profound, chilling tragedy.

He didn't stay long after that. The weight of it was too much. The crew, seeing his ashen face, didn't ask questions, just started the slow, arduous ascent. The lights of Aqualuna, fading behind them, seemed to weep. Back on the surface, the sun felt harsh, the air too thin. He looked out at the vast, indifferent ocean. What would he tell the world? That he’d found not a city, but a tomb? A beautiful, terrible monument to an unimaginable end? He closed his eyes. The light of the crystal city still burned behind his eyelids, a cold, silent fire. He just kept seeing that fragile impression, forever trapped.