A Letter to the Luminous Deep (The Sunken Archive, #1)

by Sylvie Cathrall

Well, she was my mother, and I colloquially call it “home”.

(Though there is also something a little voyeuristic about it, of course. Alas that the dead may have no privacy in the name of posterity.)

I once promised myself that I would never write down or otherwise document my darkest days (perhaps because I thought that letting them slip out of my mind with the passage of time would spare me from ever experiencing the pain they caused again).

I would not be entirely surprised – nor alarmed, quite frankly – if you, of all people, learned how to sail through time. If you do find yourself making such a discovery, would you be so kind as to take me with you? There are some places in the past I would like to visit.

Will it surprise you to know that I do not enjoy correspondence? I find it unbearably limiting. There is so much “written” in gestures, in gazes, in wrinkles, in the touch of a palm or the flick of an eyebrow.

Compared to the rich world of conversation, writing a letter feels like representing a constellation of stars – a collection of enormous Suns! – by drawing simple lines and dots on paper. Serviceable, but leaving no scope for the imagination.

Well, I propose that when one spends one’s life feeling as though a calamity has happened every other second, perhaps one can better manage a true calamity when it occurs.

As a result, I have been eager to learn what I can about the following: bioluminescent ecosystems, legendary and unusual methods of transportation that cannot be explained by Science, and… really, any other previously observed aquatic anomalies.

“I can’t argue with you there. We are not exactly living in the most reasonable of times. It takes very little to sow doubt in the most rational human hearts these days when the world is so increasingly