The titanic stone valves of the inner water-lock settled into their recessed dark rock sills with a bone-shaking shudder that sent plumes of dead silt swirling into the black water.
Behind Ren Vale, forty feet of carved fiery rock sealed shut, cutting off the Grand Avenue of Seals. Ahead, lit up only by the cold emerald glowing of Deep-Diver Ren’s diving lantern, stretched the massive nave of the Great Scriptorium of the First Epoch.
It was six thousand deep-water lengths beneath the sky. The deep water pressure registered at one thousand fifty sea-weights—more than fifteen thousand pounds pressing upon every square inch of stone, flesh, and bone. In the sunlit world above, such pressure would have reduced a pine timber to splinters, crumpled a copper diving bell like an empty eggshell, and crushed human organs into a crimson smear.
Yet here, at the total floor of the Mariana Rift, the crushing weight was not an engine of destruction. It was an instrument of eternal preservation.
The great hall was fully flooded, filled with stale, anoxic hadal salt water that had not felt a solar ray or a heat draft in four hundred years. The water was devoid of dissolved oxygen and microbial rot. Because of that, and because the huge pressure held every stone grain in rigid balance, the stonework looked as though the scribes had laid down their styluses only yesterday.
