Walk The Depths With Me

He had always loved the sea. His cheeks rosy and bitten by the cold, but he didn’t care, the wind whipping his baby blonde hair in a sudden updraught. She would always remember him like this, chubby cheeked, barely five years old in the sweater she had knit him from what remnants of wool and thread she could salvage from worn out socks.

She had longed to take him here, trawling the magical secondary world which lay deep beneath the surface. Together they slowly ambled through the great forests of kelp and brine. Eerily quiet and empty. A shadow would flash into the swaying rhythm of the darkened fronds, a moment of terror, than the relief of revelation of an old tyre inner floating past. False alarms.

Next, they traversed great coral cathedrals, blindingly white spires of an ancient creature weaving upwards, branching out at odd angles. They wove through the winding alleys of bone, hands gripped tight in a clasp, their little pocket of air keeping them warm and dry.

A skeletal fish silently carved a path through the broken detritus that had lodged between towering complexes of coral, primordial cities that once had stood interconnected, now severed and isolated, but identical in the eerie white colour palette.

Suddenly a thrust upwards. An invisible force surged, pulling them through the darkened waters. He still held the look of wonder and joy, this new sensation a wild ride through the fathomless depths.

She could make out the cresting of the surface, the way it fractured and sent rays of light splintering down towards them from above. Patterns heaved and shifted as they darted upwards. A dark shadow sat deep in the waves, strangely circular and dense.

With a muffled clang, they struck the cold metal surface and were pulled upwards into the salty air with a sudden yank. Darkness and shadow painfully replaced by blinding light even through the greying smog.

Hopelessly glued to the cold metal, they strained downwards to no avail. They rose high above the surface, tiny pieces of scum and plastic dropping back to the slick surface below, a rainbow of colours now visible as the tiny waves crested and illuminated. Infinitely more colourful than the white and dying browns of below.

As far as the eye could see, discarded items of yesteryear bobbed contentedly on the surface, like a living carpet, sighing inwards and heaving out in the great breaths of the ocean. It rose to heights in places, nearly mistakable for land, but then it would dip drastically in a larger swell, betraying its lack of foundation.

The magnet swayed chaotically in the air when it hit the pinnacle before swinging in towards the vessel. It was broad, the width of a small town, and a labyrinth of rising and falling belts, persistently spinning on their tracks. Smaller armatures and robotic humanoids welded in place worked on the decks, each glued to their stations, focused on that one aspect for an eon. Each a cog in the machine that must forever move on, move forwards to make amends. Forever deathless.

Long, spindles of metallic arms lazily trawled through the water on all sides, picking up the largest of the debris. As their vision focused and adjusted to the open air, the magnet dropped its field, sending them plummeting onto the deck, a slowly shifting conveyor belt, rough against their backs.

A fine haze sat above intermingled with the clouds, or maybe far below, it was hard to tell with the way the tufts of white and sickly grey swirled to and fro. No birds sliced the upper currents. No song perforated the lapping of the waves on the hull, only the creaking and sighing of metallic joints, betraying the slow work of salt and time, as the arms continued to sift the murky seas. And a low, crunching rumble emanating from deep within the heart of the ship.

Like a rollercoaster slowly rolling up an incline, the sense of dread and foreboding grew with each nearly smooth bump as the belt dragged on. Then, all of a sudden, falling fast.

The fragile, gold-clasped locket fell into the grinding gears, at the last moment the halves splitting in two. One small heart-shaped window of a young boy in a bright blue sweater, laughing in the wind, fell first, obliterated in the darkness. The other remained, pushed upwards momentarily by the half-intact arm of a sofa, a moment frozen in time of a young woman and man busily tying down the sails on a small boat. The couple folded in on themselves and vanished, to join the echoes of other voices in the bowels of the fires.

She had longed to take him here. They both had.

All of those years ago.