Deepanalabyss 🔔

Kaelen touched nothing. He had read the accounts. The abyss fed on attention.

Kaelen stepped onto the first stair. It creaked but held.

Falling in the Deepanalabyss was not like falling in the world above. There was no ground to meet, no sudden stop. Instead, the darkness grew denser , like sinking into honey. His descent slowed until he was drifting, suspended in a warm, thick blackness that pulsed with a slow rhythm— thump-thump, thump-thump —like a heart the size of a city.

The darkness began to take shape. Not a monster. Not a god. Something worse: a mirror. A vast, curved surface of black glass that showed Kaelen his own reflection—except the reflection was smiling, and Kaelen was not. Deepanalabyss

And then he was falling too. He did not die.

He managed to choke out: “What are you?”

The Sulfer Rift was not on any map. The locals called it the God’s Throat—a vertical wound in the earth, three miles across at its widest, descending into a darkness that had no bottom. No expedition had ever returned. The last attempt, fifty years ago, had used a hundred men, steam-powered winches, and a cage of enchanted iron. They paid out rope for seven days. On the eighth day, the rope came back up, neatly coiled, with a single bloodstained glove sitting on top. Kaelen touched nothing

Kaelen felt something brush his ankle. Not a hand. A thought that had grown fingers.

Kaelen kept walking. The abyss wanted him to stop, to doubt, to turn back. That was the first rule of the Deepanalabyss: The descent is the defense.

At the eighth hour, he heard the whispering. Kaelen stepped onto the first stair

By the fifth hour, the air had grown thick and warm, like breath. The staircase narrowed until his shoulders scraped the walls on either side. The green flame of his lantern cast shadows that moved independently of the light source—they scurried ahead of him, as if eager to reach the bottom first.

And Kaelen looked. To be continued?

A pause. The pulse quickened.

Below is the beginning of a long story titled If you’d like me to continue it or pivot genres (sci-fi, horror, romance, etc.), just say so. Deepanalabyss Part One: The Call from Below Kaelen had always dreamed in shades of absence. Not black—black was a color, a velvet curtain behind which things could hide. No, his dreams were the shape of missing things: the negative space where a memory should have been, the cold echo of a voice never spoken, the geometry of a hole in the world.