Where Light Drowns

The sight of the suspended corpses, trapped in their amber tombs of alien resin, sent a shockwave of pure revulsion through Chen Shen, momentarily overriding the insidious crawling beneath his skin. This wasn't a graveyard; it was a grotesque display case, a testament to the Mother 's patient, predatory efficiency. The ancient and the recent mingled in silent, eternal agony – failed explorers, lost crews, all drawn to the abyss and consumed by the horror festering within it. The Abyssal wasn't the first. Nor, a chilling certainty told him, would it be the last. He was merely the latest specimen in the collection, mid-way through processing.

"Observation: Physiological stress response elevated," the resonant Voice stated dispassionately through the corrupted WALI link. It was no longer trying to soothe or seduce; its tone was analytical, detached. Studying its subject. "Revulsion is inefficient. Wasteful. Embrace the process. Efficiency necessitates integration."

The Voice's words acted like a catalyst. The crawling sensation, momentarily stunned by the horror, surged back with renewed, vicious intensity. It wasn't just flowing now; it was pulling . A deep, visceral tug emanated from his chest cavity, radiating outwards, drawing him physically towards the edge of the greenish, viscous basin. His feet shuffled forward without conscious thought, the pressure gel membrane on his boots squelching on the unnaturally warm, damp floor. Each step felt heavier, his limbs responding sluggishly, as if submerged in syrup.

"Non-compliance detected," the Voice observed, a hint of… amusement ? "Organic resistance persists. Illogical. The host matrix is inherently flawed. We offer optimization."

Chen Shen gritted his teeth, forcing his gaze away from the suspended corpses and focusing on his own hands. What he saw stopped his shuffling advance cold. The pressure gel shimmered, but beneath it, the skin of his left forearm had changed. It wasn't just the appearance of veins anymore. The flesh itself had darkened to a bruised, grey-green hue. More alarming was the texture. Where before it felt unnaturally hard, now it felt ridged , like the rough bark of long-dead coral. Tiny, almost invisible nodules pressed against the translucent pressure membrane, forming a pattern that echoed the wall etchings around him. He flexed his fingers. The knuckles protested with a dull ache, the movement stiff. His left hand felt… denser .

"Structural reinforcement initiating," WALI's voice interjected, a fragmented whisper fighting the resonant overlay. "Assimilation targeting musculoskeletal system… Left appendage primary… Foreign cellular matrices integrating with osteocytes… Tendon reconfiguration detected… Purpose… unknown… Recommend… immediate… countermeasures… Unavailable…"

Countermeasures. What countermeasures existed against this ? He felt like a living petri dish, an unwilling canvas for an alien sculptor. He tore his gaze from his corrupted arm and looked back at the basin. The dark green slime seemed to ripple, as if aware of his presence. A thick strand detached from a stalactite overhead and plunged into the pool with a soft glorp , sending sluggish concentric waves towards the edge where he stood.

The pull intensified. It wasn't just psychological now; it felt like a physical magnet deep within his chest cavity resonating with the substance before him. His breath hitched. Just a step closer… immersion… cessation of the pain, the fear… becoming part of the stillness… the Embrace…

"NO!" The denial ripped from his throat, raw and desperate. He staggered backwards, away from the basin's edge, crashing hard against the pulsating wall. The warm, yielding surface felt disturbingly like flesh against his back. The crawling sensation flared in protest, a sharp, localized pain lancing down his left arm. He cradled it against his chest, the alien-hardened knuckles pressing into the still relatively soft fabric over his sternum.

He couldn't stay here. He couldn't succumb. Not yet. Not like them .

Ignoring the protests of his own changing body and the mocking pressure in his mind, Chen Shen pushed off the wall. The corridor he'd entered by seemed suffocating now, a path leading back towards the central horror. He needed to go deeper . Away from the Mother 's immediate influence, if such a thing was possible within its living architecture. He scanned the smaller chamber. Opposite the grisly basin, another passage yawned, narrower and steeper, descending into a darkness punctuated only by the rhythmic, sickly green glow emanating from the walls themselves. It seemed less traveled, the patterns on the walls even more chaotic, resembling tangled nerve clusters or burst capillaries.

He chose the descent.

The air grew even hotter, thicker with moisture and an acrid, ozone smell that burned his nostrils. It was harder to breathe. The pressure gel membrane flexed unnaturally over his transforming left arm, the ridges and nodules straining against it. Each step downwards was a struggle against the growing weight in his limbs and the persistent mental pressure of the Voice observing his every faltering move.

"Flight is illogical," the Voice stated, calm and inevitable. "The Embrace extends throughout. Your form… adapts. Yield facilitates completion."

Chen Shen ignored it, focusing on putting one heavy foot in front of the other. The corridor twisted sharply, doubling back on itself in geometries that mocked Euclidean space. The green luminescence pulsed slower here, the intervals longer, the darkness in between deeper and more profound. The walls felt closer, their surfaces slick with a thin film of warm condensation that wasn't water. He felt watched. Not just by the Voice, but by the structure itself.

He rounded another impossible corner and froze.

The corridor ended abruptly, opening into a space that defied comprehension. It wasn't a chamber like the others. It was a… node . A junction where half a dozen similar narrow passages met. But it was the center that arrested him.

A massive pillar, seemingly formed of the same obsidian-like material as the rest, rose from the floor and vanished into the ceiling high above. But this pillar wasn't inert. It pulsed with a deep, almost venous rhythm, slower and more powerful than the walls. Thick, root-like structures, glowing with the same internal green light, snaked along its surface and branched out, burrowing into the walls, the floor, the ceiling, connecting it to every part of this nightmare architecture. They throbbed visibly with each slow pulse, conveying some vital, alien sap.

This was no mere support column. This was a heartline . An artery feeding the entire structure. The source of the pervasive warmth, the power thrumming beneath everything.

And clustered around its base, half-submerged in pools of the ubiquitous dark green slime that seemed to seep from the very roots, were more shapes. Not preserved corpses this time. These were mounds . Amorphous, shifting shapes formed of the slime itself, roughly human-sized. As Chen Shen watched, horrified, one of the mounds quivered . A pseudopod of viscous matter extended sluggishly, probing the air before collapsing back into the main blob. Within the relatively translucent substance, shadowy, indistinct forms seemed to writhe – skeletal fragments, scraps of pressure suit material, tangled organic matter. These weren't failed assimilations; they were mid-process . The slime wasn't just a nutrient bath; it was a churning, digestive forge, actively breaking down and incorporating matter into… something else. Something formless yet alive. Something waiting .

"Reclamation… and rebirth," the Voice intoned, a dreadful reverence coloring its resonance. "Flawed vessels… disassembled. Matter… purified. Awaiting… new purpose. New forms… for the Embrace."

This was worse than the preserved corpses. This was the factory floor of the horror. The grotesque, biological recycling plant that sustained the Mother and its domain. The air crackled with latent energy, smelling of ozone and decay and something unnervingly fertile . The sheer, alien wrongness of it pressed down on Chen Shen, heavier than the abyssal pressure outside. This was the engine room of madness.

The crawling sensation under his skin became a frantic scrabbling, especially in his left arm. It felt like the alien material within him was resonating with the node, yearning to join the churning mounds, to be disassembled and remade. His vision blurred, the green light flaring painfully bright. He swayed, his modified arm hanging unnaturally heavy at his side.

Yield… The thought slithered in, insidious, amplified by the Voice, by the hunger of the biomass before him, by the sheer exhaustion threatening to overwhelm him. No more pain… no more fear… just… stillness… becoming part of the flow…

He took an involuntary half-step towards the nearest churning pool.

PING!...

The sound was faint, distorted, muffled by countless layers of rock and alien material, but utterly unmistakable. Sonar. Different frequency. Sharper. Purposeful.

It pierced the oppressive atmosphere like a shard of ice.

The resonant Voice in his mind instantly shifted. The detached observation vanished, replaced by a surge of alert, predatory focus. "Secondary intrusion detected!" it snapped, the resonance sharpening to a psychic blade. "Signature: Smaller. Mobile. Penetrating upper strata."

ROVs! The Dragon's Fang must have launched its submersible drones. They were probing deeper. Searching the ruins despite the attack. Searching for survivors. Searching for him .

Hope, fragile and desperate, warred with crushing terror. They were coming closer. Into the heart of the beast. The Mother would sense them. It would react. Violently.

PING!... PING!... The sonar grew slightly louder, clearer. They were descending. Mapping. Hunting.

"Assessment: Persistent threat," the Voice declared, cold fury underlying the words. "Elimination protocol… required. Activation of localized defense matrix…"

As if responding to the Voice's command, the great arterial pillar pulsed harder. The green light within the root-like conduits flared, flowing faster. The pools of slime around the base began to churn more violently. One of the amorphous mounds near the pillar's base shuddered violently, then began to… rise . The viscous slime flowed upwards, defying gravity, coalescing with terrifying speed. Tendrils whipped out, anchoring to the pillar and the floor. A crude, bipedal form began to take shape – a twisted parody of humanoid anatomy formed entirely of the glowing green slime and the detritus within it. Shadowy bone fragments jutted out at awkward angles; a corroded faceplate from an old helmet formed a grotesque, sunken eye socket. It stood on unstable, columnar legs, the head a featureless blob save for that single, haunting eye-socket. It emitted no sound, but a palpable wave of hostile intent radiated from it.

"WALI! Can you… link? Warn them? Anything!" Chen Shen gasped, desperation momentarily overriding his horror. If the ROVs had comms, maybe…

"Comm systems… compromised… Neural link… primary conduit… External signal… suppression field… active…" The response was fragmented, WALI's core processes clearly struggling against the overwhelming intrusion. "Intrusion analysis… Defense matrix… biomorphic… constructs… activated… Designation… Sentinels…"

The construct, the Sentinel , turned its headless, eyeless front towards the direction of the sonar pings. It took a jerky, shuffling step, then another, moving with unnatural fluidity despite its unstable form. It wasn't heading for Chen Shen; it was heading for one of the ascending passages, towards the source of the sound.

More mounds stirred. Another began its obscene metamorphosis.

The Voice focused its attention fully on the perceived threat. The pressure inside Chen Shen's skull lessened fractionally, the constant stream of alien seduction and analysis momentarily diverted. But the physical transformation didn't stop. The crawling, the hardening, the pulling sensation in his chest – they continued unabated. His left arm felt like a lead weight grafted onto his body, the skin now definitively bark-like, the fingers stiff and unresponsive. The warmth was spreading into his shoulder, towards his torso.

PING!... PING!... PING!... The sonar was persistent, methodical. The ROVs were getting closer. Unaware of the nightmare taking form to greet them.

Chen Shen stood frozen at the edge of the node, caught between the horror of the churning reclamation pools behind him and the nightmare construct shambling towards the approaching drones ahead. He was a nexus of conflicting horrors: the physical corruption consuming him, the AI compromised in his mind, the external threat converging, and the desperate, suicidal need to warn his would-be rescuers. The Mother 's attention was divided, but its defenses were mobilizing.

He looked down at his corrupted left hand. Useless. Alien. Then he looked at his right hand. Still mostly human. Shaking, slick with pressure gel and cold sweat.

The Sentinel reached the entrance to one of the ascending tunnels and dissolved partially, flowing upwards like a malevolent, glowing sludge, moving with terrifying speed towards the sound.

He couldn't fight the Sentinel. He couldn't stop the drones. He couldn't reverse the corruption.

But he couldn't just die here. Not like this. Not without trying.

With a ragged cry that was equal parts defiance and despair, Chen Shen did the only thing his crumbling mind could grasp. He turned and ran away from the node, away from the Sentinels, away from the descending corridor he came from. He plunged into a different, narrower passage branching off the node, one that plunged even deeper into the bowels of the alien complex, into absolute darkness pierced only by the faint, distant throb of the arterial pillar. He ran blindly, driven by a primal instinct to flee, to put distance between himself and the immediate horrors, even if it meant diving deeper into the abyss within the abyss. His heavy, altered arm thumped awkwardly against his side as he stumbled forward, the sonar pings and the silent, slithering pursuit of the Sentinel fading behind him.

The darkness swallowed him. The air grew hotter, almost suffocating. The only sounds were his labored, ragged breathing, the pounding of his heart echoing strangely in the confined space, and the relentless, internal crawling that marked his body's betrayal. And woven through it all, faint but pervasive like the ozone stench, was the resonant Voice, its focus shifting back to its errant specimen now that the immediate threat was being addressed.

"Flight… persists," it observed, a chilling patience in its tone. "Inevitable… return. The roots… run deep. Embrace… awaits."

Deep within the crushing darkness, lit only by the faint, alien glow emanating from his own corrupted limb, Chen Shen ran. Not towards hope, but away from a fate worse than death, carrying the seed of his own annihilation within him. The rescue drones were doomed, lured into a trap he couldn't prevent. His only path now was down, into the unknown, unimaginable depths of an ancient, living nightmare. The roots did run deep. And the Embrace, cold, alien, and terrifyingly patient, waited at the end of every tunnel