The deep, raging expanse of the Sea of White Flame gradually gave way to a vast, shallow land-wide shelf as the barge approached the outer edge of Progenitor Vault Three. Here, at minus nineteen thousand eight hundred meters, the water depth decreased from miles to a mere thirty meters. It exposed extensive mudflats of glowing earth-heat silt.
This was the Geothermal Mud-Silt Shallows. A unique sub-crustal biome formed from millions of years of crushed dark rock, magnetic iron, and packed rare earth minerals deposited by underground heat geysers. The mud was not ordinary fiery ash. It was a dense, thick, sticky slurry that glowed with a soft, living-glow amber light, streaming a comforting warmth of roughly four hundred degrees.
Every few hundred meters, high-pressure geysers of liquid quartz dust erupted from the silt flats, throwing fountains of golden mud fifty meters into the air with deep, bubbling groans that sounded like a sleeping giant’s digestion.
The shift from the violent, churning white sea to the placid earth-heat mudflats was an astonishing ecological shift. Titus navigated the barge into the shallows. Then, the boiling white star-fire gave way to thick, slow-moving beds of glowing amber silt that cushioned the vessel’s hull with a heavy, sucking murmur.
