The Eye in The Deep
One of my own illustrations : Portrait of Cornelius Hickey. Frame of “The Terror”
In the middle of the ocean, in its depths, where no one has ever reached nor ever will, a round mark appeared. Formed by stones that had moved into unreadable symbols, with an eye at its center that opened, the earth began to tremble across the world.
In that same moment, somewhere in the world, there was a ship moving slowly through a canal in a city. Sailors called it a Leviathan, a sea devil, one that doomed anyone who boarded. It almost sank once, causing thousands of deaths.
One of the workers aboard was a survivor of a previous catastrophe. A proud man, now older, he felt a strange bond with this ship that brought nothing but misfortune. When he heard creaking, like something scraping along the hull, fear set in. He saw images of his past, and panic followed when he noticed how little water there was in the canal. What scraped the ship was the canal itself, barely covered. Then he looked up and saw it.
A colossal wave advanced, rising higher than anything he had seen. It seemed to have a life of its own, as if gathering water to cause the greatest possible damage. It swallowed every building in the city.
The man ran inside, slamming doors, shouting at the others to hold on. There was no time. The water beneath the ship surged violently. The stern lifted.
For a moment, the vessel stood upright. People hung in the air, then dropped, bodies striking walls, breaking apart on impact.
They all saw it at once. The same mark burned into their eyes. Whatever had awakened beneath the sea was showing them what came next. The crust split. The oceans sank inward. The land folded in on itself, reshaped under a force too vast to resist.
Published in the Dark Lore Digest
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