Beneath the black waves of the Chusku Sea, lies a forgotten trench known only in legends—the Maw of Yzath. In the 1800s, sailors would go silent when they spoke of the waters just north of the Maw. They would pass it with their eyes averted, fingers crossed, muttering words to ward off whatever things they feared most. But after the nautical charts were redrawn following two missing vessels and a strange island sighting, people assumed that the Maw of Yzath was merely another abyss among countless others. So, the maps went on, and legends went silent.
It wasn't until 1933 that anyone heard of the Maw again. A research vessel from Norway, the Valknut, was charted for a deep-sea exploration after rumors of a "pale forest" on the seafloor spread. Captain Harald Johansen, an experienced man of sea and silence, gathered a crew and prepared for what he described as "a brush with the bottomless dark." He found the legends absurd, but something in him shifted as they neared the coordinates.
The Valknut drifted over the trench at midnight, the engines humming a low drone as if to keep the vessel still while its occupants wrestled with unease. The sonar operator, a young woman named Ingrid, watched the screen, waiting for echoes of the sea floor. But her face turned pale as she noticed something odd. There was a void on the sonar—no floor, no walls, nothing. Just silence. Like a scream cut short.
"Nothing down there," she muttered. "It's...it's swallowing sound."
Captain Johansen, his face drawn tight, forced himself to look at the sonar. "It's just a glitch," he said, as much for his crew as himself. But deep down, a chill gnawed at him.
They deployed the first submersible, a crude metal capsule named Explorer I. A diver named Oscar—tall, quiet, with eyes that never quite met yours—descended alone, his voice crackling over the radio as he moved deeper. There was only static at first, punctuated by shallow breaths and muttered prayers. The crew listened intently, hoping for descriptions of rock formations, maybe even deep-sea creatures.
But what Oscar reported was…something else.
"I'm seeing…columns. They're massive. Spiraling," his voice wavered. "They look alive. Not moving, but…pulsing."
Columns, in the bottom of a trench? A low murmur spread through the Valknut, and they exchanged nervous glances.
Oscar's breathing grew ragged. "It's like they're…watching."
Then, silence.
Johansen barked into the radio, "Oscar! Respond!"
Only static.
Then, out of the silence, came a low hum—a sound too deep, too vast. It was as if the sea itself had found a voice, and that voice was filled with disdain.
More nervous than before, the crew decided to send down Explorer II. They brought it down slowly, cameras fixed, hoping to see the strange columns Oscar had described. But the feed only revealed darkness, a black so complete it seemed to devour the light.
And then—just for a heartbeat—a glimpse. The columns, rising from the abyss, twisted things covered in pale tendrils that gleamed like ancient bone. And at the center of this forest, something gargantuan. It did not have a shape or a form; it was an absence, a thing that the eye could not truly hold. It seemed to blot out the very fabric of reality, an emptiness that pulsed as if aware.
Then a whisper, like ice against flesh, reverberated through the hull of the Valknut. No one could say if it was inside their heads or outside, but it spoke in words they could not fully understand—words of distances beyond measure, of spaces beyond stars.
"They are here…" It was Ingrid's voice, but hollow, as if something else spoke through her. Her eyes were glassy, her hand gripping the radio.
Suddenly, the submersible's feed went dark. But this was not the failure of technology; it was something alive, something with a will. It felt as if a lid had closed over the Valknut, shutting out every star, every trace of light.
Then came the final transmission from the depths.
"They were never gods…" It was Oscar's voice, but stretched thin, like a memory unraveling. "They remember us… from before… the first… light…"
The hum returned, deeper now, until the hull of the Valknut creaked in protest, its metal groaning like old bones.
One by one, the lights on board flickered. Shadows grew thick, seeming to take on shapes—faces, perhaps, watching with eyes that had seen everything and nothing, eyes that knew what lay beyond life, beyond time.
The crew could only stand there, paralyzed, as the hum grew louder, filling their ears with a sound that was not sound—a sensation, a void, a thing alive with awareness. Each person felt it pry into them, sift through their memories, relive their fears. And in that silent darkness, each knew with awful certainty that something was watching them—something beyond understanding, a thing that had known the dark before the stars, that had known the silence before the first breath of life.
No one survived the Valknut's descent into the Maw of Yzath, or at least, that's what they say. But some nights, sailors swear they hear a hum rolling up from the depths, carrying a whisper of ancient things—things that were never gods, things that linger in the folds of dark water, waiting, watching, knowing.
And if you listen closely enough, they say, you can hear the last words of the crew drifting over the waves.
"They remember."