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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ad_blake on 2025-07-18 00:45:12+00:00.

The cavernous blackness loomed before us, a gaping maw, hungrily waiting for whatever fool dared to venture into its depths.  Although all light was lost only a few inches in, shards of broken coral and shell rimmed its opening, refracting the headlights of our vessel in a strange pattern of splintered rainbows across the sea floor.  Anyone else would see a wicked, jagged-toothed sneer.  A warning to turn back.  But those of us aboard The Erebus only saw promise.

The Erebus was an experimental deep-sea lab designed to carry a multinational research team to the depths of the Mariana Trench to study extremophile life and tectonic activity.  Aboard we had a xenobiologist, a geologist, a technician and systems operator, a navy lieutenant acting as our military liaison and security, and myself – the captain.  And on our third day at the bottom of the ocean, just east of a subset of islands near Guam, I stationed us at the lip of the deepest known point of Earth’s seabed.  All we had to do was cross that barrier of never-ending dark and plummet forth to the small, slot-shaped valley on the trench’s floor.  All we had to do was breach Challenger Deep.

“Are we ready, folks?”  Of course I knew they were ready.  These people, except for maybe the lieutenant, had been preparing for this for years.  So, after looking each of them in the eye and detecting not anxious apprehension at facing an unknown few men had ever braved before, but instead an unwavering resolve, I began our descent.

Deeper and deeper The Erebus crawled.  Natalia Reyes, the technician,  steadily worked the knobs and dials on the console in front of her.  She was equalizing the pressure and monitoring the SONAR system while I guided us through the void.  The plan was to settle on the floor of the ‘Deep – 11,000 meters below the surface – and spend whatever time we needed mapping not only the topography, but the life.  Not just the extremophile microscopic organisms that thrived in extreme environments or the angler fish of nightmares.  Dr. Patricia Voss, the xenobiologist, had some grandiose desire to find sentience.  Through her research, however harebrained other experts perceived her to be, she believed she had discovered the capacity for free thought in the depths of the ocean and this mission was her chance to prove it.  Maybe she was right, but I think all those thoughts swirling in that big brain of hers with nowhere to go gave her a God complex.

We were following a rough topographical sketch of the trench that Don Walsh and Jaques Piccard had laid out following their first voyage to the bottom with the Trieste.  Dr. Nils Halberd, the geologist, had it laid out before him and assured us as we descended that everything we were seeing matched up with what had been recorded.  Lieutenant Wade Harker stoically gazed at Natalia, who was doing just what she needed to in order to keep things steady.  And Dr. Voss was pouring over her notebooks and charts, muttering to herself about who knows what.

But as we neared the 11,000th meter, a rumble from below shook the Erebus just enough to get us all to notice.  Normally, this wouldn’t have been anything to worry about.  The Maraiana Trench region is known to have its fair share of geological activity of varying intensities – active volcanoes, earthquakes, hydrothermal vent systems, things like that.  It was the creaking of tectonic plates shifting and separating that worried us.

Natalia and I did our best to keep the sea-lab on the straight and narrow, following our original trajectory, but the activity below us forced our hand.  We looked out the sheath of inches-thick glass in front of us and beheld a fissure cracking open the ocean floor.  It started as a hairline fracture along the silty bottom of the valley of the trench, almost imperceptible beneath the crushing obscurity of the dark oblivion.  Then, with a deep, seismic groan, as if the Earth was taking its first exhale after holding its breath for eons, it widened.  Sediment billowed up in plumes as the crevice tore through the seabed like wet tissue paper.  Superheated gases bubbled up in frantic bursts, rising from the void as brittle coral formations crumbled and drifted into it.  The surrounding terrain gave one final, terrible tremble, and then all settled, leaving a yawning rift in its wake.

“What the hell is that?” Natalia breathed in an awe-struck whisper, craning her neck to get a better view.  “Nils, do you know what could have caused that?”

The geologist had a look of terror on his face that told me he had no idea, but still he responded: “I mean, it had to have been some sort of earthquake; maybe too much pressure built up in a vent over time and it finally just…burst…”

He continued on, rattling off a multitude of explanations while the rest of the crew listened with rapt attention.  Well, all except for one.  The rest of them may not have seen, but I did.  Dr. Voss was still hunched over her notes, still muttering, but now there was a broad grin plastered on her face.  I never got a clear answer as to why she was so pleased, and she’s not around any longer to tell, but as our days above that newly-formed fissure progressed, I started to think that maybe her muttering had something to do with its creation.

As the dust settled and the shock of watching a natural phenomenon happen before our eyes wore off, a discussion of what to do next ensued.  Did we continue with the original plan?  Or now that we were faced with this great, profound wonder, did we take what fate had gifted us and explore further?  I don’t think myself or the Lieutenant were all too excited to veer off course, but the three big brains on board saw no other option.  We would dock the Erebus on the floor of Challenger Deep, but rather than explore the valley that surrounded us, we would dive deeper than any man had ever dreamed to venture.

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On that first day, we decided to send out a small, exploratory vessel that sent a live feed of what it was seeing back to us.  Natalia and myself would be in charge of guiding it while Dr. Halberd mapped what he saw.  Voss would get her chance when we took a water sample or if Halberd found any living thing as he watched the live feed, but until then she just got to sit back and watch the magic.

We led the little pod, aptly named the Noctis Rover, into the split and found ourselves surrounded not by the basalt walls of the Earth’s crust, but instead in a cavernous opening, as if this trench-within-a-trench had always existed and we had merely cracked its shell.  We were beyond the hadal zone – we were in a world that was utterly alien.  At first, it appeared lifeless, nothing more than a grotto of fine, gray silt and jagged rock formations.  But the further the Rover went, the more we noticed.  There were strange, translucent creatures drifting slowly in front of its mechanical eyes.  Not unlike sea cucumbers, the pale and gelatinous forms moved in sluggish waves.  Noctis continued its extensive dive and witnessed soft, flabby bodies with the vacant expressions of deep-sea blindness hovering just above the surfaces of jutting outcrops littering the walls in staccatoed succession.  Improbable life was clinging to every facade – fields of tube worms, microbial mats with a faint, bioluminescent glow nourished only by chemicals released from the depths of the Earth rather than sunlight – and in its quiet stillness, it was easy to believe we were the first to ever see it.  We had stumbled upon the end of the world, or perhaps the beginning of one.

And then, amongst the awesomeness of unknowable, teeming life, we saw it.  The Noctis Rover had caught something massive in its sights, hewn from roughly shaped stones stuck together without the help of any type of mortar – a cyclopean structure.  It was almost castle-like, something pulled straight from the legends of giants and eldritch gods.  It rose from the inky blackness not as if it were built, but as if it had grown from some ancient impulse in the stone itself.  It defied the laws of all familiar geometry and physics, with impossibly large blocks each the size of a small house, so precisely aligned that not even the thinnest blade could slip between its cracks.  Its walls leaned at unnatural angles, tilting inward and outward, enmeshed with one another in a jaunty dance.  And their surfaces, weathered and pitted, were etched with symbols whose meaning had long since decayed.  The architecture of this place did not follow the logic of human design.

It took an incredulous gasp from Natalia to snap us all back to reality.

“What is it?”  Harker asked, still not taking his eyes off of what the screen in front of us was displaying.

“The SONAR…it’s picking up a frequency.  It’s extremely low and it’s being emitted by that…thing.  That structure.”

This was the point when Dr. Voss decided to leave her notes and speak up.  “We should take the Erebus down there, y’know where Noctis is.  That’s where we should dock.”

“Are you insane?” Harker scoffed.  “We have no idea what’s down there or if it’s safe.  I know you scientists are all about discovery and new frontiers and all of that, but I think this is where I draw the line, don’t you think Captain?”  He looked to me expectantly.

“I mean, I think t…

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