Exodus Nebula

Chapter Eleven

The chasm's depth was nearly one-thousand meters. Gireiah's initial estimates were a testament to his own lacking understanding of the situation before him. While typical sunlight on a cloudless day penetrates no more than five-hundred meters deep in exceptional seawater conditions, light from the city below penetrated well over that distance due to the fact that it was indeed not filled with seawater, but rather a kind of water that 'assisted the Kinsuo metabolism and mobility', according to Eulliam. The water supposedly had a higher density, lower freezing point, higher specific heat capacity, greater oxygen content, and a greater visibility than even that of air.

Indeed, as they transitioned from being above the region where the seawater terminated to being below it, Gireiah could detect the changes. His living suit produced a different kind of fins, appearing more like flat, triangular blades, retracting the old. His movements became more fluid and more in buoyant equilibrium, as if less effort was required to keep him stilled, hovering, or accelerating on multiple axes. Despite his lacking experience and older age, he felt incredibly versatile and nimble flying through the waters.

What before seemed to him like light being blurred though the water by sheer distance turned out to be a layer of rising, diffusing microbubbles stationed consistently about halfway up the chasm, generated from the activities of the city below. They appeared to him like the cloud layer in the terrestrial atmosphere that he was naturally familiar with. The bubbles rose to a certain point where they then became dissolved back into the water, forming the 'cloud-tops'.

Travelling through them was about as disorienting as it got.

Below them, however, the city was revealed in fantastic clarity. He could have begged for the time to document the experience in his journal.

The city was a squirming colony of larvae. Everything moved, even the structures themselves seemed to be shifting and twisting. There was no proper frame of reference to view the bustle, to determine what was and what was not stationary or fixed, besides, perhaps, the chasm wall to the far of either side of them, hundreds of meters distant.

"I know this will be greatly disorienting to you," Eulliam said. "I will instruct your suit to follow me, so you may, if you wish, focus less on the travel and more the scenery."

"Thank you, I will."

The sensation was that of flying, without all the turbulence and engine noise. They were moving fast, very fast, and they were accelerating... Before long, Gireiah felt a rumble across his body, a slight vibration, or subtle, yet, rapid undulations. They were cutting through the Kinsuo water like a blade. They grew lower and lower. In the distance around them, Gireiah could see other figures of illumination trailing foggy trails of microbubbles behind them like the contrails of powered aerocraft. As they grew even lower, Gireiah noticed that all movement within the city bled these contrails, and the city was roped, hatched, and entangled by them. When they no longer surpassed the tallest of the conic structures, they had integrated themselves and their path with the flow of the traffic. Looking at himself and Eulliam beside him, he couldn't determine exactly what was powering their cutting acceleration through the water. Examining his and Eulliam's suit, a sheath of conically-shaped bubbles concealed them from the waist down, like a dress of wavelike, immaterial smoke. The dress then collected itself in a pinchpoint at their feet and blended into an up-curving tail at their trail.

The spherical and conic structures seemed to have no well-defined edge or face to them. Along their exterior, anemone structures swayed and even seemed to swirl in cyclic patterns. They were difficult to observe, the whole scene of it giving him a migraine. At certain instances, he believed he saw figures and components of the traffic decelerate into the conic and spherical structures, as if to enter. At another point in their race about the city, Gireiah caught sight of one of the large animals he had seen previously at the chasm's lip. It was a whale-like creature that seemed to brush against a conic spire, illuminating it. The scene was pushed behind another anemone-lined structure before he could interpret it.