Eleven years have passed since my father was seized by an ancient monster—an interdimensional relic of a Mars gone before our ancestors stood erect. What had appeared supernatural could now be rationalized. Moreover, it could be destroyed.

I descend into cyclopean ruins kilometers beneath the red surface. Here, no sunlight can dispel the predatory apparition if it were to sense my life. I have only a flashlight and my burden as I climb furtively onto the chthonian masonry—a thoroughfare for bygone Nephilim—now charnel ground.

Beyond dingy windows, indistinct shadows undulate with each step I take as though they stalk me through their ruins. Unnerved, I deactivate my flashlight and adjust my eyes to the faint luminescence of prehistoric lamps dying in solitary half-life. Obscure movement continues to dance at the corners of my vision as I trek the boulevard.

Leaving the immemorial city, I come to a stygian shore fed like ichor from blisters in the plutonic escarpment. I follow the placid creek till its termination into tenebrous shafts. The re-enabled light strobes, disturbed by radiation, revealing lurking creatures—or imagined loathsome, flickering beings. Guided by the trickle of an antediluvian river, I make my way to the hypothesized precipice.

Finally, the antechamber opens into the nexus of a thousand dribbling streams cascading to a realm unfathomed yet. Each drip causes light to ripple across the event horizon till it converges into effulgence at the singularity. I remove the parcel from my back and press the sequence.

It would not bring my father back. It would not repossess the oceans. But I prayed to gods—long forgotten—that it would destroy the eldritch thing that prowled in the dark protecting the primeval liquid which birthed life in Sol.

The package plunges through the portal…. to where the giants reside.