Shattered Depths

The pressure readout on the console flickered, a nervous tic in the absolute blackness outside. Ten thousand feet. Marcus felt it in his teeth, a dull ache that wasn't just physical. Beside him, Lena adjusted her comms, her face a pale oval in the dim glow of the instruments. Her knuckles were white on the armrest, a quiet admission of the knife-edge they rode. "Ready for the deploy, Marcus?" Her voice, a steady current through the static, tried for casual. She failed. He heard the tremor.

"Ready as we'll ever be," he grunted, the words feeling thick in his own throat. The submersible’s claw arm extended, a clumsy metal limb, and carefully released the smaller, one-person exploration vessel. It wasn't much more than a reinforced sphere with thrusters, lights, and a viewport. Their only ticket down, and hopefully back. Marcus tapped the comms. "Lena, you're clear. Keep it tight. Thirty minutes, no more. If that signal shifts an inch, you're pulling out, understood?"

A beat of silence. Then, "Understood." Her voice crackled back, already distant. He watched her tiny light disappear into the void. Then, his turn. The transfer was always the worst part, that brief, dizzying moment suspended between two pressurized cans, the water pressing in from all sides, a vast, indifferent palm. He squeezed into his own pod, the viewport a small eye into utter, eternal night. His breath hitched. The air tasted stale, metallic.

He descended, a solitary tear falling through an ocean. The sub’s thrusters hummed, a lonely vibration in his bones. For what felt like hours, there was nothing but the dark, the crushing weight, the data stream a cold, objective comfort. Then, a flicker. Not a star, not bioluminescence. A gleam, a sharp, unnatural angle in the distance, cutting through the abyssal black like a shard of broken mirror. His heart picked up a frantic beat. He keyed the comms. "Lena, you seeing this?" His voice was a strained whisper.

"Affirmative, Marcus. Looks like... structures. But they're reflecting everything. Hard to get a clear image." Her voice was tight, thin. He pushed the thrusters, nudging his pod forward. The glimmers grew, coalescing into forms. Not rock, not coral, nothing organic. Sharp, precise geometry. Towers, arches, spires. All made of a dark, almost obsidian-like glass. It wasn't just reflecting his lights; it seemed to drink them, only to spit back fractured, distorted images.

He came to rest on what felt like a street. Silt, fine and ancient, coated the glass. But even through the grime, the material pulsed with a latent, impossible sheen. This wasn't natural. Not even close. The structures rose around him, impossibly tall, impossibly delicate, yet clearly untouched by millennia of crushing water. He aimed his high-intensity lights, trying to penetrate deeper. The glass shifted, seemed to ripple, showing him not just his own pod, but twisted, elongated versions of it, stretching into infinity. It made his stomach clench.

Lena’s voice again. "Marcus, I'm... I'm seeing something. Inside the walls. Like, like inclusions." His breath hitched again. He knew what she meant. He’d seen it already, out of the corner of his eye, but had dismissed it as a trick of light, a pressure-induced hallucination. He swung his pod around, angling his lights at a particularly large, dark wall of glass. And there they were.

Figures. Trapped. Not carved into the glass, but *within* it. Like flies in amber, but these weren’t insects. They were tall, slender, vaguely humanoid, their forms stretched and distorted by the glass, as if caught mid-scream. Their faces were pressed against the inner surface, contorted into silent agony, their eyes – where eyes should be – were just blank, dark voids that seemed to swallow the light. Thousands of them. Every wall, every tower, every spire. Filled with these things.

A cold that had nothing to do with the water seeped into his bones. His lungs burned. He tried to speak, but only a choked gasp escaped him. The glass city wasn't just reflecting; it was holding. Holding something ancient, something that shouldn’t be. He imagined the immense pressure, not just from the ocean, but from whatever force had pressed these beings into their crystalline tombs.

"Marcus? You there? What the hell are these?" Lena's voice was sharp, a thin thread of panic pulling at his control. He could see her pod now, a distant light, a tiny insect darting between two towering glass obelisks. Her light flickered, erratically. He watched it, frozen. The glass around him seemed to hum, a deep, resonant thrum that vibrated through his pod, through his very bones, bypassing his ears entirely. It felt like the city was *waking up*.

The imprisoned figures, the distorted faces, they weren't just staring *out*. They seemed to be staring *at him*. Not with eyes, but with the dark, empty sockets that suggested eyes. He tasted copper. His hands, clenched on the controls, trembled violently. He wanted to scream, wanted to claw his way out, but there was nowhere to go. Just glass, and the ocean, and the things inside.

"Marcus, my thrusters are... they're acting up. I can't get full power." Lena's voice was ragged now, bordering on a sob. Her pod was drifting, slowly, towards one of the massive glass structures. He watched, horrified, as it seemed to be drawn in, inexorably. The faint shimmer of her suit lights reflecting in the glass around her, multiplying, distorting, until it looked like a million Lenas, a million pods, all being pulled into the dark, crystalline maw.

He slammed his own thrusters, trying to turn, to help. But the thrumming grew louder, a vibration that seized his very organs. The glass around him pulsed with a faint, internal light, like a sleeping thing slowly opening its eyes. The faces in the walls seemed to press closer, their silent screams magnified, not by sound, but by pure, mind-numbing dread. He saw one of them, closer than the others, its distorted face almost touching the outer skin of his pod, its dark, empty gaze boring into his own. He swear he saw its mouth move, a silent, gurgling soundless syllable.

Then, Lena’s scream. A raw, piercing sound that tore through the comms, echoing in the confined space of his pod, and then, abruptly, cut off. Her light vanished. Just gone. The ocean went silent again, except for the insistent thrumming that now seemed to originate from *inside* his own head. He slammed the ascent button, felt the pod groan under the strain. He wasn't looking back. He couldn't. He just kept his eyes glued to the depth readout, watching the numbers tick down, willing himself to surface, away from the city that wasn't just made of glass, but seemed to *be* glass, and watched with a million empty eyes.

He broke the surface hours later, the submersible pulling him in, the air tasting like freedom, like salvation. They got him out, stripped off the suit. He stood on the deck, shivering, not from cold, but from something deeper. The crew was asking questions, demanding answers. He just stared at his hands, seeing the faint, distorted reflections of the ship's lights in the polished steel, seeing the shimmer, the deep, dark gleam. He couldn’t shake the feeling. He could still feel the thrumming. He still felt the dark glass pressing in, from the inside.