The heavy iron and brass of the Abyssal Suit felt less like armor and more like a sarcophagus. Corin stood on the splintering wooden deck of the Carrion Crow, the wind howling across the jagged, black waters of the Sunken Expanse. Rain lashed against the heavy glass porthole of his helmet, obscuring his view of the crew securing the massive umbilical tether that would keep him alive. He smelled the rancid, coppery tang of the blood-engine strapped to his back. In this cursed age, steam and coal were insufficient to combat the crushing pressure of the deep. Only alchemical blood, harvested from the massive leviathans of the upper currents, possessed the arcane density to power the suit’s atmospheric wards.
Lord Vane, the nobleman who had financed this suicidal expedition, stood wrapped in a heavy sable coat, his face a pale mask of greed. Vane stepped up to the edge of the diving platform, tapping his cane against Corin’s brass breastplate. The sound echoed dully inside the helmet. Vane leaned into the speaking tube connected to the suit’s external receiver.
“Do not fail me, Tide-Reaver,” Vane’s voice crackled through the brass tubing near Corin’s ear, distorted and tinny. “The Pearl of Obalis rests in the Grand Cathedral at the city’s heart. Retrieve it, and I will pay you enough gold to buy your own island. Fail, or attempt to run, and I will cut the tether myself. The crushing dark will have you.”
Corin did not bother to respond. He simply reached up with his heavy, articulated gauntlets and pulled the primary release lever. The iron clamps holding him to the gantry snapped open. For a terrifying second, there was weightlessness. Then, gravity claimed him. Corin plummeted off the deck, the two-ton suit hitting the black water with a thunderous crash.
Instantly, the violent roar of the surface storm was extinguished. It was replaced by the dense, suffocating silence of the deep, broken only by the rhythmic, mechanical heartbeat of the blood-engine chugging on his back. Plunging downward, the light of the surface quickly shifted from a turbulent grey to a deep, bruising sapphire, and finally, into absolute, velvet blackness.
Corin flicked the ignition switch on his chest. Twin beams of sickly yellow alchemical light erupted from the shoulders of his suit, cutting a meager cone of visibility into the impenetrable dark. The umbilical chain rattled above him, dispensing slack as he sank deeper into the abyss. Down here, the temperature plummeted, but Corin was sweating profusely inside the padded leather interior of the suit. The claustrophobia was a living thing, a cold hand wrapping around his throat.
Three hundred fathoms, he estimated, checking the brass dial on his wrist. The pressure outside the suit was immense, a cosmic weight pressing against the enchanted metal. The hull groaned, a low, metallic shrieking that set Corin’s teeth on edge.
Obalis had once been the crown jewel of the continent, a city of towering spires and profound magic. But three hundred years ago, the sea had simply swallowed it in a single night. The Church claimed it was divine retribution for the city’s delving into forbidden, abyssal magics. Corin didn’t care about theology. He only cared about the gold.
Five hundred fathoms.
As he sank, marine snow—a continuous shower of organic detritus, dead scales, and feces from the creatures above—drifted through his light beams like ash. But as he looked closer, Corin realized it wasn’t just scales. It was flakes of pale, waterlogged skin.
Then, the sea floor began to materialize in the gloom. The yellow beams swept over a jagged, impossible landscape. Stabbing upward through the silt were the blackened, algae-covered spires of Obalis. They looked like the rotting teeth of a buried god. Corin fired his suit’s ballast thrusters, slowing his descent. With a heavy, reverberating thud, his iron boots struck the cobblestones of the sunken city. A massive cloud of grey silt billowed outward.
Corin stood perfectly still, waiting for the sediment to settle. He checked his harpoon gun, bolted to his right forearm. The blood-engine was holding the pressure at bay, but the dials were in the red. He was at the absolute limit of the suit’s endurance.
As the silt cleared, Corin looked down the main avenue of the drowned metropolis. His breath caught in his throat. Suspended in the water, tethered to the balconies and streetlamps by long ropes of black, slimy kelp, were thousands of human bodies. But they weren’t decomposed. Their flesh was bloated, pale, and luminescent. And as Corin’s lights swept over them, their eyes snapped open in perfect unison, glowing with a piercing, abyssal blue.
