[HR] heres my first time writing
I like Lovecraftian horror and subnatuica, so I wrote smth thats a mix of both of them. Please critique what's bad and praise what's good, thanks
Undefined Continuity By : Henry Quick
The silence down here? It’s not just quiet. It’s heavy. It’s high-pressure crap that shoves against your eardrums until they throb, like you’re stuck at the bottom of a pool listening to the world hold its breath. In training, the suits called the "void" a lack of signal. They lied. Or they’re just idiots who don't know what it’s like when the sun hasn’t touched the mud in ten thousand years.
The settlement was doing that rattling thing again last night. Not the normal vent-hum, but a deep, bone-scraping shudder that made the coffee in my mug ripple into little grey rings. The logs called it "tectonic settling." Bureaucratic horseshit. Rami was twitching, swearing he could hear the old ghost stories bleeding through the comms-static—all that garbage about "original dwellers." Elias was worse. He just sat there, skin looking like wet ash in the LED glow, staring at his monitors. He kept mumbling that the data was "within parameters," but he’d chewed his lip until the blood started to crust. We were all looking at the same screens, seeing those weird-ass gaps in the sonar, and just… lying to ourselves.
We took the Drifter down past the shelf. It’s a different kind of dark down there. Not empty. Dense. Like trying to pilot a sub through a vat of oil. Below the ice, the core heat keeps the water liquid, but it feels wrong—pressurized into something thick. We drifted past the fungi-forests. These pale, bloated things that don't make a sound but seem to turn as you pass. No fish. No whales. Just things that talk to each other through micro-shivers in the silt.
Then we hit the Black Current.
The sonar didn't just glitch; it went full-blown schizo. It started spitting out distances that were physically impossible—objects three miles away one second, then three inches from the glass the next. We tried to make a joke of it. The joke died when the "presence" showed up on the scope. It wasn't a shape. It was a hole. A void in the data where the sound just… disappeared.
"Don't move," Rami whispered. He wasn't even looking out the viewport. He was staring at the air in the cabin like it was about to turn into shattered glass.
Something touched us. It wasn't a collision. It was a drag. A slow, heavy weight—like a giant finger tracing the rivets on the hull. It wasn't hunting. You hunt when you’re hungry. This thing was just noticing us. It moved through a school of bioluminescent jellies, and they didn't even scatter. They just… stopped being. They didn't die. Their light just got soaked up into the dark, leaving a hollow space where life used to be.
I stopped thinking about "aliens" then. This wasn't a creature. It was a glitch. It moved like a breath being drawn through a skull the size of a mountain range.
Elias just broke. He didn't scream or anything—just stood by the oxygen scrubber, eyes glazed over. "It’s not life," Rami choked out. "It’s what was here before life was invented."
We tried to bank the sub, but the Drifter wouldn't bite. It wasn't a mechanical failure. Every time I moved the stick, the sonar predicted our path before we even took it. We weren't driving; we were being allowed to move. "It's learning us," Elias muttered. His voice sounded like sandpaper on a coffin lid.
Then, everything went dead. The engine hum, the creak of the pressure-hull—even my own breathing felt mute. The sonar pinged once—a long, agonizing screech—and the screen flashed a single error: Undefined Continuity. I felt naked. Not skin-naked. Soul-naked. Like the thing had reached inside my head, turned out the pockets of my memory, and found them empty.
It let us go.
The Drifter shot toward the surface like a cork. No heroics. No narrow escape. It just got bored and spat us back out. We bobbed in the slush of the surface-dock, the hull pinging as it cooled, and nobody said a damn word.
I’m back in my bunk now. The vibration is still there. It’s not in the floorboards, though—it’s in my teeth. It’s in the way the light flickers in the corner of my eye. Rami is right. It doesn't need to chase us. It’s already everywhere. Silence isn't a gap anymore. It’s a weight. It’s a breath that the world is finally, slowly, starting to let out.