The ocean at this depth knew nothing of warmth or light. It did not rage like the surface waves nor shimmer like the shallows. It simply was; still, cold, and ancient, a vast expanse of silent pressure and eternal blackness.
Here, in the abyssal plain, time moved with the pace of dying stars. And within this void, something new and strange had been born.
Mark drifted in that darkness, not quite alive, not quite dead. The last thing he remembered before awakening here was the cold metal of the injection chamber holding down his limbs. He was no longer a man, no longer skin and bone and breath. His form had shifted into something soft-bodied, slippery, and limbless in the traditional sense. He had become an octopus; just another strange creature in an ocean full of the bizarre.
But unlike others of his kind, he did not scramble for shelter beneath rocks. He did not squirt ink and dart away into the black. He did not search for food or mates or meaning. He simply floated, letting the ocean cradle him in its ancient arms.
There was no fear in him, no confusion or curiosity. There was but resignation.
'Of course, this is how it ends,' he thought with a strange calm that came from accepting that endings rarely arrive as expected, 'No judgment. No flame. Just another form, another waiting room for death.'
He had no reason to move. He wasn't going to survive down here, and even if he did, what then? What could an octopus do to right the spirals he had set in motion? He would simply become another part of the ecosystem, food for the next monster to wander by.
That was fine.
In fact, it was preferable.
The silence here was different from the one in his cell. There were no voices echoing off concrete walls, no Elijah humming cultist prayers or Big Sam laughing about skulls cracking under pressure. There was no clanking metal, no buzz of incandescent lights, or moths. There were no souls haunting him. Just the crushing, peaceful nothingness of the deep.
And yet, in this new yet stale silence, his memories began to stir. Not the ones he had accepted long ago; the killings, the courts, the screams. Not the code he had constructed like a flimsy fence around a burning building.
No, these memories came from somewhere older, something deeper. He remembered being a boy. He remembered Her. His mother's voice returned to him not with warmth but with a clinical sweetness that made his skin crawl, even in a body that had no skin to crawl upon.
She had never shouted. Never beat him. That would have been too easy to define, too visible, too treatable. Instead, she whispered poison into his ear each day, smiling as she tore him apart from the inside.
…
"You don't need friends. They'll only leave."
"You don't need school. You're smarter than those idiots."
"You don't need things. They're distractions."
And when he rebelled, when he packed a bag and tried to escape into the world beyond their rust-bitten fence, she made sure he remembered his place.
She took the bag, the books, the letters he had hidden under the floorboards, and fed them to a fire pit behind the house.
He remembered standing in the cold, watching the smoke rise like ghosts of hope he was never allowed to have. Everything he loved; burned.
And she would stand behind him with a hand on his shoulder, soft as snow, "You'll thank me, someday."
He had buried the memory so deep it had disappeared. Or so he thought. Because now, for the first time in years, he remembered what happened next.
He hadn't just escaped. He hadn't simply run away. He had killed her. Not in self-defence. Not in a moment of rage. No bruises or bloodied fists.
He had planned it.
Smothered her while she slept, then sat beside the body until morning. When the sun rose, he packed what little he had left and walked away from the house, never looking back.
…
He had always told himself the code kept the evil at bay. That the boy had been his first mistake, the one that tainted his hands and broke the chain of righteousness. But now he knew the truth.
The code had not been a principle. It had been a prison. A desperate structure built by a mind unravelling under the weight of its own guilt.
'It was never about justice,' he thought, his body listless in the tide, 'I wasn't the line separating the monsters from the world. I was just another one of them; pretending I had rules so I wouldn't have to admit what I was. I was not the code… I was the darkness the code kept at bay…'
The epiphany felt like a wound. And then something caught his attention. From above, a cylindrical object was slowly drifting through the water, spinning lazily as it descended into the abyss.
It glowed with a strange, bioluminescent green that seemed too deliberate to be natural. Mark watched it with cautious detachment, noting how the surface shimmered in the darkness like some kind of alien artifact.
He reached out with his tentacles, wrapping them carefully around the object. It was a canister; smooth metal, about the length of a human forearm, with reinforced seams and a thin glass viewing strip.
The liquid inside pulsed faintly, an unnatural neon hue that contrasted violently with the void around it. And on the side, barely visible through the sediment and pressure-worn grime, were the faded block letters; 'ENERGYNE'.
'What the hell is this?' he thought, turning the canister slowly in the water, 'A chemical? A weapon? Some discarded experiment that fell from a boat or a lab ship?'
Whatever it was, it had no business being in a place like this. The ocean didn't glow. Not like this.
Before he could form another thought, something moved from below; fast and silent. A massive shark, almost indistinguishable from the darkness around it, lunged upward with terrifying speed.
Mark didn't even have time to flee. Its jaws opened wide, teeth like jagged ivory scythes, and clamped down on both his body and the canister in a single devastating bite.
Pain; raw, searing, immediate, tore through his form as chunks of his limbs were shredded and sucked into the monster's maw.
The canister cracked violently under the pressure, shattering in an instant. The green liquid erupted into the water in a cloud of glowing tendrils, piercing the shark's gums with glass shards and flowing into the open wounds.
The shark jerked, convulsing, bleeding as it thrashed away into the dark, its form flickering through the glow like a possessed spectre.
Mark's torn body floated in the cloud of chemical light, ink and blood seeping into the water. Pieces of himself were gone; just severed meat and nerves, but he was not dead.
Not yet.
And as the glow of the green liquid faded into the endless darkness, a new glow emerged from inside Mark's cells.