The water is thick here. Heavy with silt and memory.

Light filters down in bruised shafts, and the shapes it casts are not benign. A roofless cathedral slouches in the deep, its spires gnawed blunt by pressure and time. Arches yawn wide, their tracery softened by coral and coated in whispering tendrils. Columns rise like ribs, like broken fingers, like prayers that never reached the surface.

Fish avoid it.

The currents do not.

Things move through its bones—quick, darting silhouettes with too many limbs or none at all. They flit between pews long since petrified, weaving through currents like incense smoke through stained glass. The windows are gone. Only edges remain—jagged mosaics through which the sea watches itself.

There is a sound. Not music. A low, tolling ache that vibrates in the chest and the teeth, felt more than heard. The bell still hangs. Its rope is gone, but the sea moves it now, gently, insistently. It swings without rhythm. Its clapper, barnacle-studded and robed in weed, strikes only when it wishes.

It never echoes.

At the altar, a shape waits.

It is not a priest in any human sense, but it is robed. Its limbs bend and furl with a solemn grace that speaks of ageless wisdom. It does not speak. It does not need to. Its stillness is liturgical. Its presence: a sermon delivered entirely in silence.

Worship is not expected. But it is understood.

Something is remembered here. Something is repeated. The ritual is not dead—it has simply changed languages.

Congregants come and go.

Some never leave.

In the silt, old names are written in trails. They are not names you would know. They are not names you could speak.

But they are written. Carefully.

Lovingly.

As though they matter.