The dark rock ledge ended at the lip of a yawning underground tiered arena that smelled of ancient slaughterhouses, black flesh-rot, and rotting swamp kelp.
Arthur stood at the cliff edge, his halogen searchlight cutting through a thick, greasy yellow haze that hovered over the floor of the three-hundred-meter basin.
What lay below was not a deep-rock formation. It was a living nightmare born from one hundred and forty-two years of human arrogance and corporate fault.
In the center of the flooded basin sat the Corpse-Mother of the Rift.
The monster was a pulsating, mountainous mound of rotting biomass over forty meters tall and nearly a hundred meters wide. It had formed from the decades of discarded genetic refuse, failed chimera amalgams, and aborted man-made embryos dumped down the drainage chimney pipes of Work-yard 7-B and the Boreas Rig before the Cataclysm.
Soaked with the leaking Zone 5 aether of the unsealed mantle, the dead flesh had refused to rot.
Instead, the discarded tissues had fused together into a leech-like colonial super-organism. Embedded across its waving, grey-white surface were the recognizable features of hundreds of different beasts. The frozen ribcages of polar bears, the multi-jointed legs of deep-trench crabs, the weeping compound eyes of giant bats. The distorted, screaming facial bones of long-dead mining engineers.
