Awaken the Leviathan
Seven Lesser men
It had been a week. Seven days of darkness punctuated by the feeble attempts of the men’s headlamps to cut through the black. Seven days of hiking, crawling, and squeezing downward. A week of plumbing the depths of the world. Originally the expedition had consisted of twelve people. They had toasted champagne at the cave entrance for National Geographic photographers and excitedly checked and double checked all the sprawling gear at base camp. But base camp was far behind now…and far, far above. Only five of the twelve remained. Five desperate human beings clawing their way deeper against their fears and against the clock. The journey was exhausting, but the claustrophobia was the real test. The deeper they went the more panicked they became until, one by one, seven men had abandoned the expedition and begun the climb back to sunlight. But five had scrambled forward, rationing food and more importantly battery life in the desperate attempt to make the deepest expedition humankind had ever dared into the very bones of the earth.
Those That Remain
The five remaining expedition members consisted of a geology professor from Cambridge who went by Dr. Thorn, A brother and a sister from Sweden who were the team’s rappelling and scuba experts, an American adventurist bent on turning the expedition into a documentary, and a scrappy undergraduate student who was unfortunate enough to be recruited by Dr. Thorn mostly to carry his share of the gear. The crew had taken to calling the young student baggage Ben.
One Last Dive
Whatever lack of character or grit had held back other expeditions, and even the seven members of their own crew, did not show itself in these five. They had passed the flag for the previous depth record over eighteen hours ago and now faced the greatest challenge. The passage they had been following for days had grown narrower and narrower until they were stooped over and turned sideways to squeeze through gaps in the cold rock. Now their way was blocked… or nearly blocked. The passage ended in a slab of rough rock with a narrow crack at the bottom that went straight down into dusty darkness. They currently sat at a depth of 4.96 miles, if even one of them could slide down this crack for another few hundred feet they would have reached a depth of five miles, one last desperate push was all it would take. Some of them thought they should just turn back. After all, they had already set a new record. But they were so close to 5 miles and each of them wanted to reach that milestone. The only problem was that the crack was too small for most of them to fit through, and at this moment under stresses beyond what normal people can tolerate, below dizzying miles of rock and dirt, four pairs of eyes fell on Baggage Ben.
The ten minutes or so of anchoring ropes and finding the harness was a frenzy as the very soul of each of them screamed to turn around and start the journey back to open air, wind, and light. Ben was harnessed in and poised over the crack, he looked up at his four teammates, the only living things among so much stone, and he lowered himself into the crack.
Down the Crack
The comforting sound of breathing and shuffling around was quickly lost as he rappelled down the crack to be replaced only by the sound of rope through the hardware on his harness. The two walls were only two feet apart so he couldn’t push off from them with his feet. To his tired mind the walls seemed malevolent, straining to crush him, as if the crack was getting narrower the deeper he went. But it wasn’t a trick of the mind, the crack was indeed narrowing. It pressed against his chest as he inched deeper. The thought of becoming wedged so far below his team, below everything, had almost overcome his will when from far above he heard Dr. Thorn shout “just a few more feet and we’ve done it!” He let out a breath of air and it allowed him to sink a foot further. He felt open air around his feet, the crack must be widening! Dr. Thorn and the other members of the expedition cheered Ben on as he descended. He let out even more air and wedged himself further down. Now he felt the open space below him. He let out all the air in his lungs. The walls crushed his chest and squeezed at his ribs as he squirmed. He descended an inch, then two. As his body began to demand air he pushed once more and fell into the open space below him.
The Heart of the World
The light of his headlamp jerked and then bounced to a stop as the rope caught him. Directly above Ben could see the crack he came through. The hole seemed impossibly small compared to the size of the room he was in now. The ceiling was a huge slab of rock, seamless except for the crack Ben’s rope disappeared into. Slowly lowering the beam of his headlamp Ben traced the ceiling until it disappeared into a bluish haze. The light swept through the haze until it hit the floor far below. On all sides the chamber was too large for the light to reach the walls. Ben looked down, the ground was visible thirty to forty feet beneath him. He hung just a few feet under the ceiling. Taking a deep breath Ben saw the fog from his lips rise through the beam of his headlamp and suddenly realized how cold it was. The floor below seemed so inviting, so solid. He began to descend, letting the rope slip through his hands faster and faster. The whirring of the rope echoed through the massive chamber. Something deep in Ben snapped, his eyes became wild as he rushed towards the floor below. Then accidentally let the end of the rope slip through the rappelling gear and suddenly it was quiet as Ben fell twenty feet through thin dark space.
The Inscription
Ben shook the stars from his vision and spit blood onto the cold rock. He wiped his mouth and stood up. Above him his light just caught the end of the rope dangling limply out of reach above him. He turned back and spit another mouthful of blood on the ground. His fingers were numb with cold. On the dark rock in front of him where the blood reflected his light, there were words. The writing was strange, not just unfamiliar but it seemed to shift and change in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Symbols that at first appeared to be circles were straight lines that then crossed back on themselves without ever curving. Ben’s eyes danced across the symbols over and over again and at some point, Ben realized he could read it, and he had been reading it. It read “Awaken the Leviathan”
Awaken the Leviathan
Even as the words formed in his head Ben felt the rock under his feet rumble and then stop, rumble and then stop. The rhythmic pattern was oddly comforting to Ben as it grew stronger, until he recognized it as breathing. The Leviathan was awake.