The Glare of the Sunken Eye

Rourke hated the pressure suit, the way it hugged his skin like a second, tighter corpse. Every breath a controlled hiss, every movement a fight against the inert weight of the ocean bearing down. Three clicks down, off the charted shelf. This wasn’t just a salvage job; it was a desperate plunge into the 'unconfirmed anomaly' the old charts vaguely hinted at. A whisper of something too big, too regular, to be natural. A whisper of glass.

His submersible, the *Leviathan's Maw*, groaned a constant protest, rivets straining. The viewport, thick as a man's arm, showed only the endless, crushing black. The sonar, a weak pulse in this dead world, painted a vast, improbable structure ahead. Not rock, not coral. Something… sculpted. Too straight, too sheer.

“Rourke, you there?” came the crackle from above. Henderson. Always Henderson. His voice sounded thin, stretched across the miles of water. “Anything yet? Just confirming you’re not seeing things.”

“Seeing plenty, Hen. Nothing good,” Rourke grunted, the words tight in his throat, competing with the blood pounding in his ears. He wasn’t just seeing something. He was feeling it. A prickle on the back of his neck, like being watched. The hair bristled, even through the thick helmet liner.

Then, the light hit. Not the sub’s own beams, though they flared across the black. No, this was an internal light, radiating from the structure itself. A ghostly, cerulean glow, refracting, splitting, multiplying. It wasn't artificial. It was *there*, deep within the glass. And the city shimmered into view. Spire after spire, impossibly tall, impossibly thin, all made of some dark, obsidian-like glass. Towers reaching up from the seabed like starved fingers, each surface a perfect, flawless mirror that warped the sub’s own lights into a dizzying funhouse of distorted reflections.

No organic lines here. Everything was angles, geometric precision, alien symmetry. He swung the sub closer, feeling a cold dread seep into his bones, bypassing the suit’s insulation. There were no windows, no doors he could discern. Just endless, polished obsidian, reflecting his own terrified face back at him from a hundred different facets. And within those depths, something else. A movement. A ripple of deeper blue, like a cloud passing across the moon, except there was no moon down here.

He cut the sub's main engines, letting the thrusters hold him steady. The silence that fell was absolute, broken only by his own ragged breathing. He pushed the external cameras, zoomed in on one of the larger towers. The glass wasn't opaque. It was translucent, like black ice. And through it, he swore he could see shapes. Not clear, not distinct, but shadows. Vast, slow-moving forms, like leviathans trapped within a crystal cage. Or maybe, not trapped. Maybe they *were* the city. Maybe the city was just their shell.

A dull *thump* vibrated through the hull. Rourke jumped, heart hammering against his ribs. He spun the sub around, beams cutting through the gloom. Nothing. Just the vast, glittering expanse of the city. He checked the sonar. Nothing had moved. But the feeling of being observed intensified, pressing down on him, heavier than the ocean itself. He realized, with a sickening lurch, that the reflections weren't just reflecting his sub. They were reflecting *him*. His suit, his helmet, his eyes, distorted, stretched, multiplied across a thousand surfaces, like a monstrous insect pinned under a microscope lens.

Then, from the depths of the city, from the very core of one of those impossible spires, a faint sound reached him. Not a clang, not a groan. It was like a chord, played on glass, a low hum that vibrated through the water, through the sub’s hull, through his very skull. It wasn’t a note he knew. It was a frequency that clawed at the edges of sanity, making his teeth ache, his stomach clench. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to shake it off, the sound seemed to resonate inside him, a chilling counterpoint to the steady thrum of his own pulse.

He opened his eyes. One of the reflections, his own distorted face, seemed to shift. Not his own movement, but something within the reflection itself. A flicker, deep behind his reflected eye, like a tiny, glowing ember igniting in the glass. It wasn't his imagination. He could feel it now, the cold awareness. The city wasn't just a structure. It was a vast, ancient eye, staring back. And he was caught in its gaze, seeing himself reflected, seeing something else reflected *through* him, something vast and patient.

“Henderson,” Rourke choked, his voice barely a whisper in the comms. “Get me out of here. Now. The anomaly… it’s not empty. It’s watching.” He slammed the thrusters forward, away from the impossible light, away from the million eyes that seemed to open and close with every shuddering reflection. He didn't wait for a response, just drove the *Leviathan's Maw* toward the crushing dark, the low, humming chord of glass growing louder, not behind him, but *inside* him, vibrating in his very bones.