The Scar

moultanomoultano Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
edited September 2015 in Subnautica General Discussion
I recently finished reading The Scar It's an absolutely fantastic book. (Minor spoilers ahead!)There's a passage near the end where some of the characters descend in a bathysphere towards an unimaginably large sea creature called an "avanc". It seemed like the sort of thing Subnautica fans would enjoy.
The Scar wrote:
After uncountable minutes, the darkness outside was momentarily broken, and the crew gasped as time returned to them like an elyctric shock. Some living lamp was passing them by, some tentacular thing that inverted its body with a peristaltic wave, enveloping itself in its luminescent innards and shooting away, its austere glimmer snuffed out.

Chion ignited the lamp at the bathyscaphos’s front. It stuttered on, its phosphorous glow casting a cone of light. They could see its edges as clearly as if they were marble. There was nothing visible in the lamp’s field except a soup of minute detritus, particles that seemed to eddy upward as the Ctenophore plunged. There was nothing to see: no ocean floor, no life, nothing. That crushing emptiness they had illuminated depressed them more profoundly than the darkness. They descended unlit.

The iron carapace began to creak under the pressure. Every ten or twelve seconds there would be another sudden shuddering creak, as if the pressure increased in sudden, discrete zones.

The percussive stroke became stronger the lower they went, until suddenly Johannes realized that it was not just their own craft, not just the metal around them that shook, but the sea-the whole sea, the tons of water to all sides-vibrating, spasming with sympathetic shock, in echoes of the thunderous strokes rising from below.

The avanc’s heart.

....

The lamp flared into life again. The cold beam speared into the unceasing marine light. Johannes studied the water, its suspension of particles, and saw it judder with the avanc’s heart. His mouth was thick with saliva at the thought of the millions of tons of water eager to crush them.

Something became sensible below them, like a ghost. Johannes was chilled. They descended toward a great flat zone of lighter darkness-a ruptured, pebbled field that insinuated itself into visibility. At first utterly faint, it grew in solidity, its random, rugged contours sliding into sight in the phosphor beam. Slimed and rocky, it stretched out on all sides, broken by stains, lichen growths of the deepest sea. It harbored deepwater animal life. Johannes saw the faint flickerings of blind, eel-like hagfish; squat echurians; thick, blanched trilobites.

“We’re in the wrong place,” said Chion thickly. “We’re coming down above the ocean floor.” But as she spoke the last word her voice broke and became a trembled whisper as she realized her mistake. Johannes nodded with a kind of triumph and awe, like a man in the presence of his god.

The avanc’s heart beat again, and a huge ridge cracked the vista, reconfiguring it suddenly, rising twenty feet high, sending dust and muck particles spinning. The thick crest burst up across the surface of the gnarled plain, scoring as far as Ctenophore’s lamp could pierce, and branching, splitting into two or three, tracing pathways across the plateau.

It was a vein.

Filling with blood, pulsing, protruding, and sinking slowly back again.
The submersible was perfectly positioned. They were above the avanc’s back.

Even Kruach Aum, emotionless as he was, seemed stunned. They hunkered together and muttered for comfort.
The landscape below them was all beast.
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