3,200 m – 4,100 m · pelagine

The Trench of Avals

A long bathyal trench, seat of the Tyrian Court and the most-mapped Pelagine settlement reachable by submersible.

Avals is the trench I have approached twice, both times in a submersible, both times to the same kilometre and a half off the eastern wall. There is no diver in this water. There is a pressure hull, a few square centimetres of acrylic, a beam of light that gives up at ten metres. What follows is what was visible through that beam, and what the instruments rendered onto monitors when the beam reached its limit.

Avals is the trench the survey first learned to describe. It runs roughly north–south for four hundred kilometres along an old fracture zone, and the Tyrian Court keeps its principal seats along its eastern wall between three thousand two hundred and four thousand one hundred metres.

What can be observed

Nothing, by a human, except through a porthole. At four kilometres there is no diver in the water; there is a pressure hull with a person inside, a few square centimetres of acrylic, and a beam of artificial light that travels perhaps ten metres and gives up. What the journal records of Avals is what was visible through that light, and what was rendered onto monitor screens by the submersible's instrumentation.

What is known

That the Court's principal architecture is constructed; that it is luminous in the long Pelagine spectrum; that it is older, by their reckoning, than any human habitat on the shelf. That the eyeless lurker is regarded by the locals as a nuisance more than a threat, and is not, at any rate, of interest to them.

What is not known

A great deal.

I have stopped trying to describe the Court's lights as anything other than what they are. They are not bright. They are very precise. The distinction matters at this depth.