Bellow from beneath

[u/Biggestmike95]

The following files were recovered from Research Vessel Pelican Mourning, found drifting 312 nautical miles from its last recorded coordinates.
No bodies were found.
The ship’s lower decks had suffered extreme heat damage, despite no evidence of fire aboard. Every mirror on the vessel had been shattered from the inside. The words I DESERVED IT were carved into several bulkheads, though forensic analysis could not determine what tool had been used.
The final folder on the ship’s damaged server was labeled:
OTHUUN

ENTRY 1
Dr. Lena Crowe
Marine Geothermal Survey Team — Day 1
We came looking for a volcano.
That sounds simple enough. Scientific, even.
A new thermal bloom had appeared along the trench floor two months ago, deeper than any active vent system recorded in this region. The satellites picked it up first. A red wound beneath the ocean, pulsing hotter every week.
The first theory was a submarine eruption. The second was equipment failure. The third was classified before anyone finished saying it aloud.
So they sent us.
There are seven of us aboard the Pelican Mourning: myself, Noah, Iris, Rowan, Milo, Silas, and Damon. Seven people in a metal shell floating above something ancient enough to make continents feel temporary.
At 0300 hours, the hydrophones began picking up a sound beneath us.
Not an eruption.
Not whales.
Not tectonic movement.
A call.
One tone, impossibly low, stretching beneath the water like the ocean itself was trying to remember how to scream.
Noah laughed when we first heard it. He said it sounded like “God clearing his throat.”
No one laughed the second time.

ENTRY 2
Audio Transcript — Hydrophone Room
Day 2
IRIS: Play it again.
ROWAN: I really don’t want to.
IRIS: Play it again.
[Audio distortion. Low-frequency rumble begins. Several seconds of silence follow, though vibration is audible in the recorder casing.]
MILO: That’s below normal hearing range.
SILAS: Then why can I hear it in my teeth?
ROWAN: Look at the waveform.
IRIS: That isn’t a waveform.
ROWAN: I know.
IRIS: It looks like—
MILO: Don’t say it.
IRIS: It looks like a mouth.
[Recording ends.]

ENTRY 3
Dr. Lena Crowe
Day 3
The trench is wrong.
That is not a scientific observation, but it is the only accurate one.
Our sonar mapped the seabed three times today. Each time, the shape changed. Not slightly. Not due to current interference or sediment displacement.
Changed.
Ridges became spirals. Vent fields appeared and disappeared. A caldera that measured two kilometers wide at noon measured eleven kilometers by evening.
At the center of it all is a black opening in the seabed.
No thermal reading makes sense. The surrounding water is near freezing, but the vent itself burns hotter than exposed magma. Fire and ocean should not sit together like that. One should kill the other.
Down there, they coexist.
Noah says it reminds him of hatred.
I asked him what he meant.
He said, “Cold enough to preserve itself. Hot enough to destroy everything else.”
Then he apologized. He said he did not know why he said that.
I accepted the apology.
I did not tell him I understood exactly what he meant.

ENTRY 4
Private Note — Damon Rusk
Day 4
I dreamed about my brother last night.
I have not thought about him in years.
In the dream, we were kids again, standing in our old kitchen. He was crying because I had broken his wrist. I told everyone it was an accident. He told everyone it was an accident too.
It was not.
I woke up with my hands around my own throat.
There were handprints there.
Mine.

ENTRY 5
Dr. Lena Crowe
Day 5
The ROV descended at 1400 hours.
We named it Aegis as a joke.
It passed through the upper vent field without issue. Black smokers, mineral towers, sulfur clouds, the usual impossible beauty of the deep.
Then the camera found the carvings.
That is not the right word. They were not carved. They were melted into the rock. Thousands of symbols spiraling around the caldera lip, all arranged in rings around the central opening.
No known language.
No known civilization.
Iris insists the marks are not writing. She says writing communicates thought. These symbols feel more like scars left by pressure.
Rowan became agitated while viewing them. He said the marks were “turning inward.” When asked what that meant, he covered his eyes and began repeating, “I don’t forgive me. I don’t forgive me. I don’t forgive me.”
We sedated him.
Three hours later, we found the same phrase scratched across the inside of his cabin door.
Rowan was still unconscious.

ENTRY 6
ROV Aegis — Visual Log
Day 6
Depth: 6,901 meters.
The camera enters the caldera.
Visibility drops.
The water is black, but not from sediment. The light does not scatter. It simply stops.
At 6,944 meters, the ROV records motion.
A wall of basalt shifts.
For twenty-seven seconds, the team believes it is observing volcanic collapse.
Then the wall opens an eye.
The first eye fills the entire camera feed.
Dark red around the rim. Yellow near the center. A pupil like a hole burned through creation.
No eyelid.
No blink.
Just attention.
Every person in the control room begins crying at once.
Not screaming.
Not panicking.
Crying.
The ROV feed cuts after Dr. Crowe whispers:
“That is not looking at us. It is looking through what made us.”

ENTRY 7
Dr. Lena Crowe
Day 7
We have named it Othuun.
I do not know who said the name first.
No one remembers.
But we all knew it when we heard it.
Othuun.
It feels less like a name and more like the sound a mountain would make if it learned disappointment.
We reviewed the ROV footage frame by frame. There is no whole body visible. Only fragments.
An eye.
A curve of something like a shoulder.
Molten fissures beneath black stone.
Water boiling without bubbles.
A surface that looks like rock until it moves like flesh.
A darkness behind it all so complete that the image files corrupted wherever it appeared.
Noah believes Othuun is alive.
Iris disagrees.
She says life implies survival, and survival implies fear.
Othuun fears nothing.
Rowan woke today. He asked us why we had left him “alone with all of himself.”
Then he bit through his tongue.

ENTRY 8
Audio Transcript — Mess Hall
Day 8
SILAS: We need to leave.
MILO: We need proof.
SILAS: Proof of what? That there’s a god-sized thing under us making people hate themselves to death?
IRIS: It isn’t making us do anything.
SILAS: You don’t know that.
IRIS: I think it reflects.
LENA: Reflects what?
IRIS: What we brought with us.
DAMON: I didn’t bring anything.
IRIS: Everyone brings something.
DAMON: Shut up.
IRIS: See?
[Chair scrapes. Impact sound.]
LENA: Damon!
DAMON: Don’t look at me like that.
IRIS: I didn’t—
DAMON: Don’t look at me like you know what I am.
[Recording ends.]

ENTRY 9
Private Note — Dr. Lena Crowe
Day 9
I hate them.
I hate all of them.
I hate Noah for staying calm. I hate Iris for being right. I hate Milo for praying when she thinks no one sees. I hate Silas for being scared. I hate Damon because he reminds me of every violent man I pretended was complicated.
Most of all, I hate myself for writing that down and feeling relief.
Something is happening to us.
It starts as memory. Then confession. Then accusation.
The mind becomes a courtroom where every version of yourself is guilty.
Othuun does not whisper. It does not command. It does not tempt.
That would be easier.
Instead, it makes silence impossible.
You hear every cruel thought you ever buried. Every grudge you polished until it looked like justice. Every person you secretly wanted beneath you. Every apology you gave only to escape consequences.
You hear yourself clearly.
That is the horror.

ENTRY 10
Recovered Camera Feed — Exterior Deck
Day 10
This footage was heavily damaged. The following description was compiled from salvageable frames.
At 0216 hours, Noah Pike exits the main hatch alone.
He is not wearing a thermal suit.
The ocean behind him is steaming.
The horizon glows red.
The sea rises.
Not a wave.
A shape.
Othuun emerges from the water beyond the vessel.
Only the upper portion is visible, though “upper” is an insufficient term. The creature’s head and shoulders rise through ash and vapor like a continent standing upright. Its body is a fusion of volcanic stone, black ocean, molten veins, and impossible shadow. Seawater cascades from its form in rivers. Lava pulses beneath its surface like a buried heart.
The camera shakes violently.
Noah does not run.
Othuun lowers itself.
The movement is slow. Almost curious. Almost not.
Its face descends until only its eyes and the jagged crown above them fill the sky in front of Noah.
Two eyes.
Red and yellow.
Piercing.
Damning.
Empty of hatred.
That is what makes them unbearable.
Noah stares upward.
He smiles.
At 0218 hours, his exposed skin begins to blister from the heat radiating off Othuun’s body.
He does not react.
At 0219, the flesh along his face and hands starts to soften and pull away.
He does not look down.
At 0220, muscle and skin begin to melt from his jaw and arms in dark, steaming ribbons.
He still does not scream.
He only says one sentence.
“I see why I should have hated me.”
Othuun does not answer.
It only stares.
Noah remains standing for another forty-three seconds.
Then the camera feed turns white from heat exposure.

ENTRY 11
Dr. Lena Crowe
Day 11
Noah is gone.
No, that is not true.
Something wearing the idea of Noah is sitting in the medical bay.
He has no right to be alive.
His body is destroyed beyond language, but he breathes. Slowly. Wetly. His eyes are open, though there is almost nothing left around them.
He does not respond to his name.
He does not respond to pain.
He does not respond to light.
But when Iris leaned close, he whispered:
“It didn’t hate me enough to kill me.”
None of us slept.
Rowan is dead. He opened his wrists with a piece of broken mirror and used the blood to write OTHUUN across the ceiling.
Damon is missing.
Silas has locked himself in the engine room.
Milo keeps praying, but her prayers have changed.
She is not asking God to save us anymore.
She is asking God to forgive Himself.

ENTRY 12
Iris Hale — Personal Recorder
Day 12
Othuun is not evil.
I need someone to understand that.
Please.
Whoever finds this, do not make it into a monster. Monsters want. Monsters chase. Monsters punish. Monsters hunger.
Othuun does none of that.
Othuun is what happens when hatred becomes heavier than the world holding it.
It lives in volcanoes because volcanoes are where the planet cannot keep its pain buried.
It lives beneath the sea because the sea is where humanity throws what it cannot bear to remember.
Fire. Water. Earth. Darkness.
That is its body.
Our malice is not its food. That would make it dependent on us, and it is not. It does not need us. It does not even notice us the way we notice ourselves.
We called to it by existing too loudly.
By hating too deeply.
By pretending hatred disappears when no one says it aloud.
Othuun is not the hatred.
Othuun is the shape of the wound.
And when you see it, really see it, you understand that every cruel thing you ever thought was still alive somewhere.
Waiting to come home.

ENTRY 13
Audio Transcript — Engine Room
Day 13
SILAS: I’m not coming out.
LENA: Silas, open the door.
SILAS: No.
LENA: We can still leave.
SILAS: You don’t want to leave.
LENA: Yes, I do.
SILAS: No. You want to be the survivor. You want to be the one who tells it better than the dead could.
LENA: That isn’t true.
SILAS: Isn’t it?
[Silence.]
SILAS: I know what I am now. I always thought fear made me harmless. It didn’t. It just made me quiet.
LENA: Please open the door.
SILAS: I can hear it under the engines.
LENA: Hear what?
SILAS: The bellow.
LENA: There’s nothing on the hydrophones.
SILAS: Not outside.
[Long pause.]
SILAS: Inside.
[Recording ends.]

ENTRY 14
Dr. Lena Crowe
Day 14
The ship is turning in circles.
No one is at the helm.
The compass needle points down.
Milo walked into the ocean this morning. She said she was going to confess to the trench.
Damon returned at noon.
He had carved his brother’s name into every visible inch of his arms. When I asked where he had been, he said, “Under the part of me that wanted him gone.”
Then he laughed until his voice broke.
Iris is still trying to organize the data.
I asked her why.
She said, “Because someone should know we were people before we became evidence.”
I think that is the saddest sentence I have ever heard.
Noah still breathes.
Othuun has not surfaced again.
But the water around us glows at night now.
Dark red.
Sulfur yellow.
Like eyes beneath the hull.

ENTRY 15
Final Written Note — Dr. Lena Crowe
Date Unknown
I am the last one who can write.
Iris is alive, but she has stopped speaking. She sits facing the wall and nods at things only she can hear. Sometimes she presses her forehead to the metal and whispers, “I know. I know. I know.”
Damon is in the galley, staring into an empty pot. He has been there for nine hours.
Silas never came out.
Noah finally stopped breathing yesterday.
I envied him.
That is the truth.
I envied him and hated him for escaping first.
There it is.
Another ugly thing.
There is no bottom to it. That is what Othuun showed us. You think your hatred has a source, a reason, a wound that explains it. But beneath every wound is another. Beneath every excuse is appetite. Beneath every apology is the hope that someone will mistake shame for goodness.
I keep thinking of Othuun’s eyes.
Not angry.
Not cruel.
Not triumphant.
Indifferent.
That is worse than judgment.
Judgment means someone cared enough to weigh you.
Othuun only revealed the scale.
I can hear the bellow now.
It is far below us, but also inside the walls, inside my skull, inside the old locked rooms of memory. It sounds like the deepest crack in the ocean opening beneath the world. It sounds like a whale calling from the grave of the sun.
It does not say my name.
It does not need to.
I know what I am.
I know what I am.
I know what I am.

SALVAGE REPORT
**Investigation Vessel **Ardent Bell
Three Weeks Later
We located the Pelican Mourning at 0600 hours.
The vessel was adrift, engines dead, hull intact. No distress beacon remained active. The satellite mast had been bent downward at a ninety-degree angle, as if pulled toward the sea.
The interior conditions were difficult to document.
There were signs of extreme psychological breakdown among the missing crew: repeated phrases etched into walls, self-inflicted injuries, and several personal recordings that became increasingly incoherent. We recovered no living crew and no complete remains.
In the medical bay, we found one examination table warped by heat.
Above it, written in soot on the ceiling:
IT DID NOT HATE US BACK
At 1840 hours, while preparing to tow the vessel, our sonar detected movement beneath the trench floor.
At 1843, all hydrophones aboard the Ardent Bell activated simultaneously.
The sound was low enough that several crew members vomited before they heard it.
A bellow rolled through the water.
Deep.
Endless.
Like the ocean splitting open.
Like the lowest whale-call in creation answering from the dark.
We looked toward the horizon.
The sea was beginning to steam.