The trench walls closed in around us, their jagged edges glowing with eerie phosphorescence as K'thal led us deeper into the abyss. The Leviathan's spawn still shrieked in the distance, but their cries grew muffled, as if the ocean itself sought to silence them.
Cho stirred in his arms, her eyelids fluttering as the silver liquid worked its way through her veins. When she gasped awake, her pupils were dilated—*changed*—flecked with the same iridescent shimmer as K'thal's skin.
*"What did you do to her?"* I demanded, my voice trembling through the water.
K'thal didn't answer. Instead, his coral mask shifted, tendrils retracting just enough to reveal the sharp curve of his smile.
Then the seabed *moved.*
The Leviathan's spawn had stopped chasing us—but now I understood why.
The fissures in the trench floor weren't just cracks.
They were *breaths.*
The hum deepened, vibrating through my ribs like a predator's growl. The glowing eyes shifted, blinking in unison, before the ground itself *arched* upward—scales the size of ship hulls sliding against one another as the creature beneath us woke.
K'thal's grip on me didn't falter, but his mercury eyes flickered with something I couldn't read. Anticipation? Dread?
The Leviathan's spawn had stopped chasing us.
I realized why when the first fissure blinked.
The entire trench floor was breathing.
K'thal's grip on my wrist became vise-tight as the water turned viscous, heavy with the metallic tang of something ancient waking. My parasite twitched violently, its translucent tendrils burrowing deeper into my neck as my CHIP sparked back to life with a searing jolt:
**WARNING: BIOSIGNATURE MATCH – 99.7% CONVERGENCE WITH [OMEGA-TIER PREDATOR]**
**LAST RECORDED ENCOUNTER: [CLASSIFIED]**
**ESTIMATED TIME SINCE LAST FEEDING: [ERROR: NEGATIVE VALUE DETECTED]**
The screen dissolved into static, then reformed as a single pulsing command:
**DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE IT**
Too late.
The pupil focused.
Not just large - *infinite*, its iris a spiraling gallery of drowned faces, their mouths moving in perfect sync with the voice vibrating through my bones:
**"You taste like him."**
Cho's body arched in K'thal's arms, the silver fluid in her veins now glowing bright enough to silhouette her skeleton. Her jaw unhinged with a wet crack, releasing a sound that made the water itself recoil – a frequency that shouldn't exist this deep.
K'thal's coral mask began *peeling* at the edges, revealing glimpses of something slick and iridescent beneath. "Don't look," he warned, but the current ripped the words away as the trench wall behind us *moved*.
Not rock.
*Ribs.*
The realization hit like a pressure spike – we weren't in a trench. We were in the fossilized remains of something even older, something the Leviathan had been *guarding*.
Cho's transformed hand clamped onto my shoulder, her new claws drawing blood as she forced me to face her. Her eyes had become perfect mirrors, reflecting not my face, but the thing rising behind us – a silhouette so vast it warped perspective, its edges flickering between solid and smoke.
The parasite at my neck *screamed* in a voice that wasn't mine, its bioluminescence flaring pink for one terrible second before the entire world *twisted*.
Suddenly I was seeing double – the abyss around us, and another place superimposed over it: a cavern of glowing coral, where hundreds of figures in pearlescent armor stood frozen in silent vigil.
A memory.
*Not yours,* the parasite whispered. *His.*
Then K'thal was between us and the waking beast, his mask now half-shed to reveal the true horror beneath – a face that flickered between human and something far older, his teeth too many, his eyes burning with the same silver as Cho's.
"Run," he snarled, except now his voice came from everywhere at once, vibrating through the water like a depth charge. "Before it remembers *all* our names."
The last thing I saw before the current took us was the beast's true maw yawning open – not a mouth, but a *doorway*, its edges lined with the same glowing coral from the vision. And carved into the archway, a single phrase in a language that predated humanity:
**"ABANDON LIGHT, YE WHO ENTER HERE."**
Then darkness.
Real darkness.
The kind that *answers back.*