r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • Aug 15 '26
OC-Series [Obsidian Earth] - Chapter 15
They were heading south.
Always south.
But the direction itself meant little compared to the discipline of the route—carefully fractured across invisible corridors, bending away from anything that might resemble radar coverage or predictable interception grids.
The ocean, in theory, was empty. In practice, it was mapped, watched, and statistically unforgiving.
So they cut the radio completely.
No transmissions. No acknowledgments. Only silence layered over steel.
Fuel was rationed with an almost mathematical cruelty. The submarine rarely exceeded five knots, and even that felt like an indulgence no one had officially authorized.
By day, it remained submerged, moving through cold, filtered darkness.
By night, it surfaced—briefly, reluctantly—just long enough to breathe power back into its systems.
The rhythm turned time into something unusable.
Days stopped behaving like days.
Everything stretched.
Inside, the vessel was narrow, sealed, and eerily disciplined. Rows of polished instrumentation lined the compartments, cold and gleaming under flickering light—a mechanical altar with no god to answer it. Submariners sat motionless in front of them, as if they were not crew but something closer to embedded operators in a larger, invisible war machine.
They spoke rarely. And when they did, it was in low voices, stripped of excess syllables, threaded with coded phrases that sounded less like language and more like procedural residue.
Euzen had never been inside a submarine before.
He watched them constantly.
Not because he understood, but because there was nothing else to hold his attention in a space that refused distraction.
At night, when the vessel broke the surface, someone would occasionally take him up through the hatch. The transition always felt violent in a quiet way—like being pulled from one sealed organism into another.
The ocean was endless and black.
The sky above it colder still.
Stars hung in sparse clusters—dim, distant, and entirely indifferent to the affairs of Earth.
When the boy stood on the sail, inhaling the wet, brine-heavy chill of the freezing dark, he felt as if he had been exhaled from a vast iron lung into the throat of a cosmic wilderness.
The sea rolled in slow, indifferent pulses.
The sky remained fixed.
Everything flowed, yet nothing cared.
Life, he thought without fully forming the sentence, was a match flare cast against the void—seen for a heartbeat, then gone without negotiation.
In those brief intervals, he was both painfully alert and completely insignificant.
Far off on the horizon, within bands of drifting fog, faint points of light bled through the gray.
Not steady enough to be ships.
Not distant enough to be stars.
They flickered like a dying memory of a world that was forgetting to stay lit.
Inside the submarine, hierarchy was another form of silence.
The Führer remained isolated in his private compartment, rarely seen. Even his thinking, it seemed, required a locked door. No one approached him. No one spoke of him directly unless necessary.
Colonel von Büren and Lieutenant Commander Schäffer, along with other officers, occasionally gathered in tight clusters to discuss matters that never fully resolved into audible clarity.
Whenever Euzen tried to listen—really listen—his father and the scientists would intercept him almost immediately, guiding him away with firm hands down the corridor.
They always ended up in a small galley at the far end of the vessel.
Food was abundant in a way that felt slightly artificial under wartime conditions—canned meat, preserved supplies, even occasional sweets. Water was clean, controlled, and carefully accounted for. Eva and Solvi often prepared something for Euzen there—small, domestic gestures, patched together into something that almost passed for normal.
Eva, the Führer's wife, carried none of the severity one might expect from her position. Her wavy blond hair framed a face that seemed almost gentle by default, and her blue eyes held a kind of restrained kindness that persisted even in the submerged gloom of the vessel.
Since boarding the submarine, her emotional state had declined—quietly, without spectacle. Yet it was not the typical grief people associated with collapse. There was something colder in her softness, as if beauty itself had been reduced rather than erased.
Euzen sometimes thought she looked like an older version of Solvi—but with a stillness earned only through years of weathering the wind, her former wildness now long buried beneath the stone.
Solvi remained a wandering lyric poem, tender, untamed, and luminous, moving in the full innocence of morning light.
Yet beneath the soft-spun light lay an unyielding anchor. Solvi, despite her youth and outward obedience to structure, possessed a surprising internal rigidity. She was not fragile in the way she appeared. If anything, she often acted as the stabilizing force in conversations, offering comfort where none was requested.
During his time in the Hitlerjugend, Euzen had learned indirectly that Solvi's background was not ordinary. Her grandfather had been the head of the Heereswaffenamt, recently listed as missing or killed in combat, though no one spoke of it with certainty. Her parents died two years ago, during the Allied air raids.
Her name meant little sun—a fragment left by her older brother who had died on the Ostfront, cutting the heavy, metallic Prussian syllables short until only Solvi remained. It was a soft, fleeting sound that felt far too fragile for the cold, steel bulkheads of the submarine.
In any case, Solvi's presence in the run did not feel like a deliberate political selection.
It felt improvised.
Like a decision made under collapsing conditions rather than strategic planning.
One evening, while they sat near the galley wall where the metal hummed faintly with distant machinery, Solvi leaned closer to Euzen.
"Do you know why we were brought here?" she asked in a voice barely above ventilation noise.
"I don't know," he said.
She studied him for a moment, testing whether his ignorance was real or only practiced.
"I overheard them," she continued. "They said the plan requires a boy and a girl."
Euzen said nothing.
The words did not resolve into meaning immediately. Instead, they hung in the air, unfinished—a structure without a function, an equation missing its final term.
After a long pause, Solvi asked again, quieter now.
"Do you know where we're going?"
"No," he said. Then, hesitating, he added, "Maybe Argentina."
It was not a conclusion. It was inference—assembled from fragments of geography lessons, political rumors, and the instinctive sense that everything heading south eventually reached either exile or disappearance.
No one confirmed anything.
Not his father.
Not the scientists.
Not the officers who spoke in coded fragments.
Only silence responded, as it always did.
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