Andy jammed into him, and they both slowed as they came to the wedge end. Matt righted himself and hovered, panning his light one way, then the next. He examined the walls…there was nothing that even remotely indicated humans had touched these depths, let alone some sort of entranceway or passage. Andy floated up beside him and shrugged. Matt nodded, and pointed along the length of the fissure – they’d do a slow traverse along the craggy corridor and then surface.

As Matt and Andy were coming to the end another flashlight flickered above them. They came up together to find the small form of Tania and the much larger one of Hartogg, together looking like a mother whale and its calf. Tania waved them on to the fissure she had checked and led them down into the crack. About a third of the way in they came to a stone block embedded in the fissure wall. To Matt it looked like a piece of the ruined lighthouse that had tumbled in during the cataclysm, and then become overgrown. But Tania tapped it and shook her head.

Matt guessed she meant it shouldn’t be there. She should know, she’s the archeologist, he thought. He moved his flashlight along its edge, and saw nothing that indicated it was anything other than what he initially suspected – a block of stone. He looked back at her and shrugged again. Andy, who was performing his own inspection, turned and made growing-over motions with his hands.

Matt nodded and hung suspended before the slab for a moment, looking at its shape and size, then reached out. As soon as his fingers touched the edge of the stone, his mind exploded with vivid images – he saw the world, Earth, but not the Earth as we knew it. The scene was so ancient there was no moon yet captured by our gravity. The sky had few stars, and our world bubbled and steamed as it still cooled.

It should have been impossible to recognize, but Matt knew it was our own. He looked out over a vast, blood-red landscape. The seas had not yet formed, but it was not devoid of life – there were monstrous creatures, fighting and mating, killing and maiming. Things with vast evil intellects whose machinations touched the entire universe, and whose life spans could ride out a thousand apocalypses.

The sounds were terrifying: their bodies were so huge that mountains were crushed to dust when they fought, and craters were smashed into a continent’s crust when they fell. Impossibly, Matt’s mind registered it all, and the worst came when he inhaled and the smell of their blood and excrement filled his nostrils. He ripped away his mouthpiece and jetted a stream of vomit into the water. Immediately the murky cloud started to settle towards the bottom of the crack, and dozens of small fish shot from nowhere to pick out the larger chunks as it floated down – A free feast, pre-chewed, Matt thought.