My name is Elias, and for five years, I was the Senior Stability Engineer aboard the Aethelred, a floating monolith of steel and excess. She was twelve decks of pure hubris-casinos, ice rinks, and six thousand guests eating prime rib while cutting through a thousand miles of open ocean. We were a city built to spit in the face of the sea, and that's precisely what killed us.
The night the sea decided to collect its due, I was in the auxiliary sub-level monitoring the stabilizer fins. The Atlantic was flat, black, and perfectly calm. It was a joke among the crew that we could sail the Aethelred on a puddle. That smug certainty, that belief that we had mastered the water, was our fatal insult to the primordial power beneath.
The first sign wasn't a crack or a tremor, but a sound. Not the familiar moan of the hull, but a deep, subsonic drone that felt less like vibration and more like pressure-like a thousand atmospheres pressing on my sternum.
I checked the hydro-acoustic monitors. They were screaming, but the readings were impossible. They showed vast, complex sonic signatures, too deep and too powerful to be natural whale calls or distant seismic activity. It was a noise that sounded like depth itself.
"Bridge, this is Engineering Sub-Level, I'm reading unprecedented sonic feedback," I keyed into the comms. "It's like the abyssal plain just learned to sing. Requesting immediate reduction in speed, or a vector change."
The reply was dismissive, delivered with the practiced impatience of a captain who only dealt in profit margins. "Sub-Level, maintain course and speed. We've got a slight acoustic anomaly, likely mineral deposits. Don't panic the party deck."
I looked at the window of the stabilizer control room. Through the thick, armored glass, the ocean should have been a flat black sheet. Instead, it was churning with a deep, unsettling luminescence. Not bioluminescence, which is soft and blue, but a sickly, sulfurous yellow-green, as if something vast and corroded was being dredged up from the deepest trench.
Then, the true noise began.
It was no longer just a subsonic drone. It was a choir. It sounded like water, yet was unmistakably structured, like a hundred thousand voices gargling a single, mournful hymn. It was a sound layered with the crackle of ancient coral, the grind of tectonic plates, and the eternal, cold whisper of the drowned.
The Drowned Choir.
It was the sound of Tiamat's ancient rage, the salt sea goddess calling her primordial children.
The lights flickered, not due to an engine fault, but as if the very concept of electricity was struggling against the overwhelming, liquid chaos outside. Alarms started blinking on the structural stress monitors-not for lateral forces, but for vertical pressure. The ship was being squeezed, crushed from below and above, despite the flat sea.
"Bridge! We are taking impossible load readings! Hull integrity is compromised! This is not weather! This is a forced structural failure!" I screamed.
The only reply was static and a high, shushing sound, like waves withdrawing over sand for a million years. The comms were dead.
I burst out of the control room and into the main engineering access corridor. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in three minutes, and the air was now thick with a metallic, saline reek-not of the sea surface, but of hot, corrupted brine.
I ran toward the central elevator shaft, needing to reach the upper decks to assess the damage. That's when I saw the water.
It wasn't gushing in from a breach; it was seeping through the sealed bulkheads in a thousand tiny, impossible places. It was black and viscous, and where it touched the clean white polymer deck, the material instantly turned brown, blistered, and began to rot. The water was corrosive, infused with a salt and heat that should not exist in the North Atlantic.
I knelt down, touching the liquid. It was warm, oily, and alive. As I drew my hand back, the fluid didn't drip, it coiled back toward the deck, seeking purchase.
A sudden, violent shudder ripped through the Aethelred. It wasn't the shudder of a rogue wave; it was the sickening lurch of the ship's internal geometry changing.
I staggered, catching myself on a steel support pillar. When I looked back toward the end of the corridor, I saw the impossible: the sealed, reinforced bulkhead door at the rear of the deck was warping. The steel was not buckling under external pressure; it was bending inward, being molded by an incomprehensible force.
A low, guttural roar joined the choir-a sound so massive it felt like it was tearing the air molecules apart.
The seal around the bulkhead door failed, not with a pop, but with a sickening, wet shlick. A gout of the black, corrosive water sprayed inward. The water was followed by something that was not merely water.
It was Mūšmaḫḫū.
I only knew the mythological name because my grandmother, a historian of the ancient Near East, had used it once to describe Tiamat's monstrous children: the "Exalted Serpent."
But this was no mythological carving. It was real, terrifying, and impossible. It was a serpent, yes, but it was forged from the very elements of the primordial sea. Its "scales" were plates of calcified, black coral and oxidized titanium; its body was fluid yet rigid, propelled by muscle and pure, cold rage. Its eyes were not orbs but swirling vortices of the yellow-green luminescence I had seen outside.
It burst through the bulkhead, its immense, serpentine head filling the corridor. It wasn't breathing air; it was inhaling the very atmosphere of the ship. Where its immense coils brushed the steel walls, the metal instantly corroded, turning red and flaking away into rust dust.
This monster was not just a creature of the sea; it was water's revenge on human metal.
Panic seized me. I turned and ran, scrambling past the failing auxiliary generators. The choir was everywhere now, whispering, demanding, drowning-a symphony of the dead and the yet-to-be-drowned.
I reached the stairwell, but the emergency lights were failing, casting the spiral of the steel cage in an intermittent, sickly pulse. I climbed, my boots slipping on the black, oily seepage.
On the third deck, I smashed open an emergency hatch and staggered into a part of the ship designed for human pleasure: the Grand Atrium.
The atrium was a five-deck-high marvel of glass, polished marble, and chrome. It was supposed to be a place of light and music. Now, it was a tomb.
The thousands of passengers-the ones who had mocked the sea with their relentless consumption-were not running. They were paralyzed. They were huddled near the central glass elevator, their hands pressed to their ears, their eyes wide and weeping. They were not reacting to the physical collapse; they were reacting to the Drowned Choir.
The horrifying truth: The water-music, the voice of Tiamat, was broadcasting directly into their minds. It was showing them the absolute, indifferent, eternal depth that they had dared to cross.
Then the windows shattered.
Not from pressure, but from a deliberate, focused strike. The colossal, two-story-high panes of impact-resistant glass facing the open sea exploded inward, not with shards of glass, but with a sudden, overwhelming wall of black, swirling brine.
The water that flooded the Atrium was not merely cold and wet. It was intelligent. It flowed not as a single body, but as thousands of tiny, grasping hands, coiling around the passengers' legs and dragging them down.
I scrambled back, witnessing the true horror of Tiamat's creation. The water wasn't trying to drown them; it was trying to incorporate them. As the brine touched skin, the flesh instantly paled, turning waxy and cold, yet the victims did not die. They thrashed, their mouths wide, but their screams were instantly silenced and absorbed into the Choir, joining the wet, eternal song.
The Grand Atrium was now a swirling, colossal washing machine of corrupted sea and dissolving human beings.
I turned to run towards the upper security bridge, the only place with a chance of finding a working satellite comms link. I dodged a torrent of water that was now flowing up the central marble staircase, defying gravity with the will of the goddess.
As I reached the elevator bank, I saw the largest, most terrifying reflection of Tiamat's influence. The central, panoramic glass elevator was stuck between the fourth and fifth decks. Inside, a terrified family-a mother, father, and two small children-were trapped.
And they were not alone.
Clinging to the exterior of the glass shaft, a dozen monstrous figures-the Umu-dabrutu (Vicious Storm-Beasts)-were scaling the elevator. They were composed of the same corrosive black water and ancient metal as the Serpent, but shaped like huge, lumbering apes with heads of solidified brine and teeth of jagged, sea-polished stone.
They weren't smashing the glass. They were singing.
Their contribution to the Drowned Choir was a low, resonant, terrible chant. As they sang, the elevator glass began to turn opaque, then white, then finally dissolve with the sound of a thousand microscopic cracks.
The family inside looked directly at me, their faces contorted in silent, absolute terror. They weren't screaming-they were already being drowned by the sound.
I couldn't help them. The sheer, overwhelming, intelligent chaos of the sea had claimed the Aethelred.
I made my choice. I slammed the door to the maintenance stairwell behind me and started the climb, the sound of the Drowned Choir following me up through the floorplates, a constant, sickening symphony of my own failure.
I didn't hear screams anymore, only the music of the deep. The Aethelred was no longer a cruise ship; it was a vast, floating coffin, and Tiamat had claimed it as a stage for her grotesque, eternal recital. I kept running, hoping the surface-the sky-might still offer sanctuary from the endless, suffocating will of the salt sea.