Deep
They’d all heard the stories.
They came from the Deep, from further than anyone could have imagined.
The stories were whispered in the seediest of taverns.
They came from the Deep, their skin glowed like diamonds, they were bigger than the biggest ship.
The people telling the stories were not the type to listen to, no, they were the forgotten captains, the old pirates, the ones nobody would take seriously.
They came from the Deep, they were older than the stars, they were indescribable in every way.
Kienna had listened to the stories, all of her crew had.
She’d worked for so long to get where she was standing.
Her crew behind her, beside her.
The Deep stretching before them, their strongest beams barely seeming to touch the beginning of the black.
“Captain, empty ahead,”
“Full speed.”
Their ship was huge. It had to be, to carry all the supplies they would need to get to the Deep.
That was where they could be found, that was where Kienna would find them and find the stories true.
Their beams swept back and forth, over and under and through the darkness, the ship’s bubble pulling the hulking form of it along.
They’d been traveling together for seven years, on and on, as fast as they could and as slow as they could. Five babies and four deaths, unrelated. Discoveries made, discoveries logged. Seven years leading to the overwhelming blackness stretching before them.
They still had a long way to go.
The whispers spoke of generations ago, when pirates hid in the sheltering dark and cities were built closer to the Deep than anyone had gone for a long while.
They’d seen the cities, stopped and scrounged for what they could in their twisted remains, the gravity having stopped fully working long ago, dust and debris floating up to brush the ceilings and atmosphere bubbles in a drifting, surreal landscape of broken human pride.
The stories spoke of them coming, sweeping out of the darkness, enraged at the use their blackness to steal, enraged at the light encroaching on them.
The history books told a different story, a story of limited resources, rusting metal, dangerous failures, society changing.
Kienna saw both.
She saw the twisting of the old structures they found, the decay, the rot.
She saw the way the history books told the truth.
But she also heard how every person told the same story, not inconsistent.
They were huge, they came from the Deep, the ripped into engines, they took apart cities.
Their skin glowed like diamonds, they were older than anyone could comprehend, their eyes burned with old anger and old rights and old wrongs, they hulked above the cities, they came from the Deep.
And now Kienna was going to reach the Deep.
“Captain, asteroid belt ahead, suggested measure?”
“Adjust course up, full speed.” The automated bridge whirred as it adjusted its course and the solar panels on the back, absorbing the last bits of energy they could to store before the ship was swallowed by the Deep.
They continued on, as quiet as ever, every crew member doing their job in the almost silent dance they’d fallen into in the years since they began.
Slowly, the darkness enveloped the ship, an almost physical presence that was claustrophobic, pressing against the hull and the bubble, the beams cutting a swath but not really illuminating much.
In the Deep, time seemed to jump and skip and yet stand still. A month could feel like an hour, and yet an hour could feel like an eternity.
Slowly, the engines slowed down, the solar energy depleted. They raised their sails, pulling on long stowed ropes to capture the energy of the particles flowing around them, turning their sleek ship into something bringing to mind the pirate ships of old, running on stolen energy.
Months stretched into more years, the same thing, the same silent, pressing blackness, the same small meals and small beds, and they were nowhere to be found.
The crew sat around the tables, the babies born onboard now old enough to listen to the stories with wide eyes.
They came from the Deep.
Even now, even on a mission where everyone believed the stories and everyone was chasing the stories, they were told in whispers.
They came from the Deep, their skin glitters and glows and flashes like diamonds, they’re bigger than us, bigger than this ship.
The little ones’ eye widened, the ship was their whole world, anything bigger than the ship was beyond their wildest dreams. Even the ones old enough to have seen the abandoned cities didn’t remember their size, they couldn’t comprehend anything that big.
They came from the Deep, they’re here, we’ll find them, their light will reach us, they’re here, they came from the Deep.
Kienna stood in the bubble, watching the beams move through the Deep, listening to the stories the children retold as they played at her feet, waiting to finally see them.
Because they came from the Deep, even as her crew, one by one, lost pieces of their hope, they came from the Deep and Kienna was going to find them.
And then one day, they came from the Deep.
They came, three of them, larger than anyone had imagined, their skin as bright as the brightest diamond any of them had ever seen, slow and somehow more than any of them had ever imagined.
The children pressed their faces to the smoothness of the bubble, staring with wide eyes at the mammoth creatures they’d heard stories about for their entire lives, the moving lights under the skin nobody had heard stories about, the blind eyes and smooth movements, like they were swimming through the black, lighting it with their own light.
Kienna stood with them, seeing them glide through the Deep, seeing everything she’d looked for for more than a decade of her own life glide closer.
Soon, though, her and her entire crew looked at each other in anger as they passed beneath them, so close it felt like they could touch.
They came from the Deep, but their eyes didn’t burn with injustice like the stories had said, they melted with pain, with fear, with sadness.
Their skin glowed like diamonds, but the moving lights that hadn’t been spoken of were not jewels moving over their skin, they were drops of bright blood, flowing from shards of metal and glass embedded in their skin.
Their mouths were large enough to destroy those old cities, but they opened not in a threat to the ship but in gasps as though they were dying.
The third day they were visible, another one of them appeared, much smaller, somehow even brighter than the other, eyes that didn’t show the same hurt.
The larger ones seemed to stop, to slow, to look up into the bubble and plead.
Kienna watched their eyes calm, their skin dim, the flashes of light dim, their mouths stop opening in that pained way.
She watched the small one bump into the others. She was unsure of how long it took to reach them, but she watched its eyes fill with a fraction of the same sadness she’s seen before. She saw its light touch the cuts on the others, and she saw what caused them.
Beyond metal and glass, she saw windows and metal poles and pieces of city.
She saw a record of the destruction of the cities, all right, but neither how the stories told nor how the history books did.
She saw how they had been cut, how pieces of the city had been pushed inside their skin, killing them slowly for generation after generation of human, but only one of them.
She saw a child, just as the ones on the ship, unable to understand what it was seeing.
She saw the child look up to the bubble and see the light of it and choose to follow, and she saw the same resolve harden in her crew’s eyes as she felt harden in her own.
“Back.” She said firmly, starting the ship back on its journey towards what they had once called home.
The truth was, their ship was home now, their ship was home, and they were their own family.
They came from the Deep, all of them did now, and they had one of them on their side.
They came from the Deep and never again would anything from the Deep be hurt, never would they have reason to have eyes full of hurt and pain, never would they bleed because of cities from the past.
They were from the Deep, and they defended their own.
