Chapter 1: Claimed by the Deep
The deck groaned, a long, low sound of bending metal and tortured rivets that vibrated up through the soles of Mark’s boots. The viewing port wasn't a window anymore; it was a wound. A jagged, star-shaped breach open to the endless red, its glass teeth glittering in the feeble glow of the emergency strips. Beyond it, the ocean.
It wasn't water.
It was blood. Warm, slow-moving, fathomless blood, stretching to a horizon lost in a crimson haze. The smell hit him first, before he’d even fully processed the sight—not the copper-tang of a fresh cut, but the deep, cloying, organ-rich scent of it aged, mixed with something else, something salty and vast and utterly alien. It was the smell of the moon itself. Phobos. Or what was left of it.
“We shouldn’t be here.”
The voice was a tight whisper from his right. Linsky, the junior tech. Kid was maybe twenty-two, face pale and shiny under the helmet’s light. He was staring at the breach, at the red tide lapping just a few meters below the fractured edge.
“No shit,” Mark said, his voice flat. He didn’t bother looking at the kid. His eyes were on the current. It moved wrong. Not like a liquid, but like a muscle. Contracting. Relaxing. A slow, deliberate pulse that swirled the thick plasma. “Should’ve died in prison. Would’ve been cleaner.”
“Don’t say that.” Linsky’s voice cracked. “They said the station was stable. They said the atmospheric shell—”
“They say a lot of things.” Mark finally turned his head. His own reflection in Linsky’s faceplate looked back: short beard, long black hair tied messily back, eyes that hadn’t seen a good night’s sleep in a decade. The face of a man volunteering for a one-way iron lung dive because death on Earth seemed too complicated. At least here, it would be final. “Stable’s a fairytale here. Everything here is hungry.”
A heavier groan shuddered through the deck. A new crack snaked its way up from the corner of the breach with a sound like breaking bone. Chips of glass pattered down into the abyss.
“We need to fall back to the core module,” Linsky stammered, backing up a step. “Seal the bulkhead. Wait for the pick-up shuttle.”
“There is no pick-up,” Mark said. He wasn’t being cruel.Just accurate. This was the end of the line. The final, failed observation post. Humanity’s last, stupid peek into the red. The higher-ups probably already had the reports filed: Expedition lost. Phobos-Alpha facility non-responsive. The blood ocean is inimical to life. They’d move on. They always did.
The current below bulged.
It wasn’t a wave. It was a swelling, a sudden, massive density rising from the deep. The blood parted around a shape so vast it defied sense. A shadow within the crimson, rising with impossible silence.
“Oh, God,” Linsky breathed. He fumbled for his sidearm, a useless little projectile thing. “What is that?”
Mark didn’t answer. He watched it rise. He felt a strange, quiet calm settle over him. This was it. This was the atonement. Not a quick blast of vacuum, but consumption. Return to the source. Poetic, almost.
The thing breached the surface.
It wasn’t a fish. It wasn’t a whale. It was a god, if gods were made of nightmares and biology from another dimension. Its skin was not skin, but layered, iridescent scales the color of tarnished silver and old bruises, each one the size of a manhole cover. Its body was a grotesque, elongated mass of muscle and sinew, flowing into a tail that seemed to coil down into infinity. And its head… its head was a flattened, wide-mouthed horror. Too many eyes, small and black and beady, but each one holding a pinprick of cold, intelligent light. They weren’t animal eyes. They were knowing eyes. And its mouth was a lipless gash lined with rows upon rows of needle-like teeth, yellowed and serrated.
It hung there, suspended in the blood, half its impossible body still submerged. One of those ancient eyes rotated in its socket, fixing directly on the two small figures in the broken glass eye of the station.
Linsky screamed and fired. The shot was a tiny pop, swallowed by the vastness. It ricocheted harmlessly off a scale.
The deck lurched violently. Mark’s boots lost traction. He slid, scrabbling for a grip on the smooth floor, toward the breach. Linsky wasn’t so lucky. The sudden tilt threw him forward, past Mark, arms pinwheeling in a silent, screaming arc out through the shattered opening.
There was no splash. A tendril, thick as an ancient tree root and glistening with red, shot up from the blood. It wrapped around Linsky’s torso. The scream was cut off with a wet, crunching snap. The tendril retracted, dragging the limp body down into the deep.Gone.
Mark had caught the edge of a buckled support strut, his fingers white-knuckled. He dangled, legs kicking over the open red maw. The cold, blood-scented air rushed up at him. He looked down.
The creature—Froggy, the name arrived in his mind, absurd and perfect in its horror—was closer now. It had drifted silently to just below the breach. One huge, barnacled fin rested against the outer hull. Its head filled his entire view. He could see the texture of its scales, the mucus-sheen on its teeth. He could feel the heat radiating from its body, a furnace-warmth cutting through the station’s chill.
One of its smaller, anterior limbs, ending in cruel, articulated claws, reached up through the breach. It moved with delicate, terrifying precision. The claw didn’t grab him. It gently, almost curiously, tapped the chest plate of his environment suit.Tap. Tap.
The sound echoed in the silent, dead station.
Then the claw hooked under his harness. With no more effort than a man plucking a flower, it lifted him from the strut and pulled him through the breach.
The world inverted. The last lights of the station fell away above him. The warm, thick embrace of the blood ocean enveloped him. It pressed against his suit, seeping instantly into every seam, stinging his eyes, filling his nostrils with its iron truth. He was sinking, pulled down by the claw, into the dark, red heart of the moon.
He expected the pressure to crush him. It didn’t. He expected the cold. He found unbearable, body-temperature warmth. He expected to drown. He breathed, the liquid passing through a miraculous, horrifying filtration in his suit’s ruptured systems, oxygen pulled directly from the blood. It tasted of pennies and memory.
Down they went, through layers of shifting crimson. Shapes moved in the gloom—vast, indifferent silhouettes, schools of things with too many teeth, glowing gently like distant stars. This was their sky. He was falling through it.
Froggy descended to a… place. It wasn’t the sea floor. It was a cavern, a colossal bubble of air trapped in a cathedral of black rock, the ceiling held up by giant, crystalline growths that glowed with a soft bioluminescence. The air here was breathable, thick with moisture and the same metallic scent, but cleaner. The blood ocean formed a lake in the center of the cavern, a roiling, living pool.
The creature deposited him on a smooth, flat stone ledge at the pool’s edge. It withdrew its claw. Mark collapsed, retching, blood-tinged fluid streaming from his nose and mouth. He ripped his helmet off, gasping in the strange air. His suit was ruined, soaked through. He was alive. He wasn't supposed to be alive.
A low sound filled the cavern. It wasn't a growl. It was a hum, a vibration so deep it resonated in Mark's teeth and bones. Froggy had settled half in the blood pool, its colossal head resting on the ledge beside him. One giant, cold-light eye was level with him. Watching.
Tentatively, Mark pushed himself up on his elbows. He was shivering, not from cold, but from adrenaline and the sheer, reality-shattering wrongness of it all. He met the creature’s gaze. The intelligence there was vast, ancient, and utterly inscrutable.
“Yeah,” Mark coughed, his voice raw. “Hi.”
The eye blinked, a slow, deliberate shuttering of a nictitating membrane.
The hum changed pitch. It became a rhythm. Almost a… purr. The end of one of Froggy’s limbs, not a claw this time but something softer, sucker-lined, brushed against Mark’s bruised cheek. The touch was startlingly gentle.
Then it moved. With a speed that blurred its mass, Froggy shifted. Its body pressed him back against the smooth rock. The warmth of it was immense, overwhelming. He was pinned, not with violence, but with inescapable weight. The rows of teeth loomed near his throat, a whisper away from his carotid. He could feel the heat of its breath, a humid, fish-scented exhalation.
And he felt something else. A pressure, thick and insistent, pressing between his thighs. It nudged against the seam of his suit, a seeking, living heat that was unmistakable in its intent. It was massive, a slick, tapered column of flesh that throbbed against him.
This was the reward. This was why he was spared. Not for atonement. Not for a quick death. The fear left him, replaced by a hollow, laughing void in his chest. Of course. The gods didn’t want to kill the last human. They wanted to keep him.
Froggy’s head dipped, its teeth just grazing the pulse point in Mark’s neck, a possessive threat. The pressure below increased, a demanding, inexorable push. The suit fabric strained.
Mark let his head fall back against the stone. He stared up at the glowing crystal ceiling of his new world. A soft, broken sound escaped his lips. It wasn't a scream. It was the last sigh of a man seeing the final, grotesque shape of his fate.
The hum deepened, approving.