Crimson Anchorage

By Ethan Ross

CRIMSON ANCHORAGE

The abyss doesn't just take life. It archives it.

On Monday, December 22, 2025, the state-of-the-art salvage vessel Peregrine locates a ghost story three miles beneath the frozen surface of the Bering Sea. The S.S. Arcanum, a luxury liner that vanished in 1912, doesn't sit on the ocean floor as a wreck; it stands as a monument, perfectly preserved in a pocket of impossible physics where the crushing pressure of the Aleutian Trench cannot reach.

Elias Strode, a diver haunted by a family lineage he doesn't fully understand, is the first to cross the shimmering veil into the ship's dry, lavender-scented interior. He finds a world frozen in time: a grand gala in mid-motion, where waxy, translucent passengers wait for a song that never ended. But the Arcanum is not a ship—it is a living organ, a biological archive fueled by a parasitic entity known as the Great Crimson.

As the 1912 regression begins to bleed out of the trench and into the modern digital grid, the world's technology begins to rewrite itself into a nightmare of steam and brass. Sarah Jenkins, encased in the experimental Aegis exosuit, must descend into a shifting labyrinth where the laws of physics are being unmade by a century that refuses to stay buried.

To stop the global "seating," Sarah and Elias must confront the Heart of the Trench. But the Anchorage demands a pilot, and the only way to silence the waltz is to become the ground for the static.

In the deep, there is no rescue. There is only the Anchor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethan Ross
• Release date: Dec 22, 2025
• ISBN: 9798233485374

Ethan Ross

Ethan Ross is a versatile and prolific author who refuses to be confined to a single genre. While he is acclaimed for his bone-chilling holiday horror, such as the terrifying Santa's Slay List and the short story collections like The December Dark, he demonstrates mastery across the literary spectrum. In addition to crafting relentless tales of winter dread and forgotten folklore, Ross also writes romance that explores the complexities of human connection, high-stakes thrillers that keep readers on the edge of their seats, and many other genres, proving his capacity to engage audiences with a wide array of narrative styles and emotional depths. His diverse body of work showcases a broad storytelling range that promises something for every type of reader.

Book preview

Prologue

April 14, 1912 – The North Pacific Abyss

The S.S. Arcanum did not move through the ocean like a ship; it moved like a secret.

While its contemporaries were celebrated with champagne and newsreels, the Arcanum had slipped out of its moorings in the dead of night, carrying forty-four passengers who shared a singular, terrifying pedigree. They were the architects of the new century, men and women who had grown bored with the physical laws of the world and sought to reach into the dark places beneath them.

Julian Strode, the ship’s second engineer, stood on the steel grating of the lower engine room, three decks below the waterline. The heat should have been unbearable, a roaring furnace of coal and steam, but tonight, the air was freezing. His breath came in plumes of white mist that hung in the air, unmoving.

He looked at the pressure gauges. The needles were pinned past the red line, yet the pipes weren't bursting. Instead, they were sweating a thick, violet liquid that didn't drip—it crawled. It moved upward, defying gravity, weaving itself into the rivets of the hull like a parasitic vine.

Julian, a voice rasped from the shadows behind the massive Parsons turbines.

Julian turned to see the Chief Engineer, a man who had spent thirty years at sea, now huddled in the corner. His eyes were gone, replaced by two pits of pulsing, crimson light. His skin had taken on a waxy, translucent sheen, looking less like flesh and more like molded salt.

It’s not sinking, Julian, the Chief whispered, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering over stone. It’s descending. The Heart has opened its mouth, and we are the tongue.

Above them, in the Grand Ballroom, the gala was in full swing, though it was a dance of the damned. The orchestra played a waltz that Julian didn't recognize—a series of discordant, stretching notes that seemed to vibrate the very marrow of his bones. Through the floorboards, he could hear the rhythmic thump-shhh, thump-shhh of a heartbeat that didn't belong to any human engine.

Suddenly, the ship groaned. It was a sound of absolute agony, the scream of thirty thousand tons of steel being squeezed by a giant’s hand.

The Arcanum didn't strike an iceberg. It struck a fold in reality.

At 11:40 PM, the ocean surface didn't break; it simply opened. The ship tilted vertically, its bow pointing directly at the center of the earth. But the water didn't rush in. Instead, a shimmering, crimson veil swept over the decks. It entered the lungs of the screaming passengers, turning their cries into a wet, bubbling silence. It fused the fine silk of the women’s dresses to their skin and turned the men’s tuxedos into iron shrouds.

Julian watched as the violet oil from the pipes reached his boots. It didn't feel cold. It felt heavy—heavier than mercury, heavier than lead. As it climbed his legs, he felt his memories beginning to bleed out of him, sucked into the walls of the ship. The Arcanum was no longer a vessel; it was a memory bank, a living record of every soul on board, preserved in a vacuum of impossible physics.

As the ship plummeted into the Aleutian Trench—three miles of vertical, crushing dark—the pressure should have flattened it. Instead, the occult geometry built into the hull’s design activated. The Arcanum created its own atmosphere, a bubble of dry, stagnant time where the year would always be 1912, and the music would never stop.

It settled onto a ledge three thousand meters down, nestled in the silt like a pearl in an oyster. The lights in the ballroom remained lit, fueled by the pulsing red veins that now ran alongside the electrical wiring.

For one hundred and thirteen years, the passengers sat at their tables, their waxy fingers clutching silver forks, their blind, glowing eyes fixed on the doors. They weren't waiting for death. Death had been denied them.

They were waiting for a Strode to return. They were waiting for the 22nd of December, 2025.

The ship took a long, slow breath of recycled air, and in the silence of the abyss, a single door on the promenade deck unlatched itself, clicking open in the dark.

Chapter 1: The Zero-Point Horizon

The Bering Sea was an expanse of jagged glass, reflecting a sky that had turned the color of a bruised lung. Aboard the Peregrine , the air smelled of ozone and expensive machinery. It was December 22, 2025, and the world above was preoccupied with the winter solstice, but on the deck of the state-of-the-art salvage vessel, time was measured in depth.

Elias Strode adjusted the seal on his haptic feedback collar. The suit was a marvel of modern engineering—a pressurized weave of carbon nanotubes and liquid cooling. He wasn't just a diver; he was a pilot of the Aura-7, a submersible that looked more like a spacecraft than a sea-vessel.

Check one, two. Sarah, do you have my vitals? Elias’s voice was low, filtered through the internal comms of his helmet.

Loud and clear, Elias, Sarah Jenkins replied from the bridge. Her face appeared on his HUD—a flicker of blue light in his peripheral vision. Heart rate is a bit elevated. Eighty-five. Nervous?

I’m sitting on three thousand meters of vertical ocean, Sarah. I’d be a fool if I wasn't, Elias muttered. He checked the seal on the hatch one last time. Initiating launch sequence.

The Aura-7 was lowered into the churning gray waves. For a moment, the world was a chaos of foam and bubbles, and then, the silence of the deep took hold. The sunlight faded from gold to a pale, sickly green, then to a deep, bruised indigo, and finally, at five hundred meters, it vanished entirely.

Elias switched on the external floodlights. The beams cut through the marine snow—the constant drift of organic debris falling to the sea floor—like twin sabers. He was a mile down, then two. The pressure outside was enough to flatten a city bus, yet inside the carbon-fiber shell, he felt nothing but the slight vibration of the thrusters.

Approaching the ledge, Elias, Sarah’s voice crackled. "Scans show the Arcanum is sitting right where the 1912 logs predicted. But Elias... the sonar is doing something strange. I’m getting a return that looks like... a heartbeat."

Copy that. I see it now, Elias said, his breath catching.

Through the viewport, the S.S. Arcanum emerged from the gloom. She was a ghost of steel, her prow cutting through the silt like a blade. She looked untouched. No coral, no rust, no sign of the century she had spent in the dark. But as he drew closer, the HUD in his helmet began to scream.

Sarah, I’ve got a massive pressure drop! Elias shouted, his hands flying over the manual controls. It’s impossible. The gauge is reading zero PSI. I’m... I’m in a vacuum.

He watched in a state of clinical terror as the water literally pulled away from the sub’s hull. A shimmering, translucent veil of crimson energy was pushing the Pacific Ocean back, creating a pocket of dry, stagnant air around the wreck. Without the buoyancy of the water, the Aura-7 became a lead weight.

Elias! Your telemetry is flatlining! What’s happening? Sarah’s voice was a jagged edge of panic.

I’m falling! Elias yelled.

The sub plummeted through the dry air, slamming onto the oak-planked promenade deck of the Arcanum with a bone-shattering thud. The electronics flared once—a bright, blinding white—and then died. The life-support hum vanished. The HUD went dark.

Elias sat in the pitch-black cockpit, the only sound the ragged rasp of his own breathing. He reached for the manual emergency light, his fingers trembling. He clicked it on, the beam cutting through the dust that had been disturbed by the impact.

Outside the viewport, the Arcanum was waiting.

He moved to the rear hatch, the metal wheel freezing to the touch even through his gloves. He turned it, expecting the crush of the ocean, but instead, he heard a long, slow hiss—the sound of a lung being punctured.

Elias stepped out of the sub and onto the deck. The air was dry, smelling of lavender, expensive tobacco, and something old—the scent of a tomb that had never been opened. He walked toward the grand entryway, his boots clicking on the wood.

Then, the music started.

It was a gramophone, scratchy and distorted, playing a waltz that seemed to stretch the very air around him. Thump-shhh, thump-shhh. The ship wasn't just a wreck; it was breathing.

From the shadows of the mezzanine, a voice—soft, feminine, and echoing as if from the bottom of a well—drifted down to him.

You’re late for the seating, Mr. Strode. The Captain has been keeping your glass full since the ice broke.

Elias turned his light toward the voice, and the beam caught a woman in a tattered silk dress, her skin waxy and translucent, her eyes glowing with a faint, pulsing red light.

Chapter 2: The Glass Horizon

The bridge of the Peregrine was no longer a place of quiet observation; it had become a combat center where the enemy was the ocean itself. Sarah Jenkins slammed her palm against the haptic interface of the primary navigation console, her breath coming in sharp, jagged bursts. On the massive curved monitor that dominated the bridge, the icon representing Elias Strode’s Aura-7 had turned a mocking, static-filled gray.

Talk to me, Miller! Where is he? Sarah’s voice was a whip-crack, cutting through the cacophony of warning sirens and the rhythmic groan of the ship’s hull as it fought the rising Bering Sea storm.

Miller, the lead systems engineer, was a man usually defined by his clinical detachment, but now his fingers were trembling as they danced across a transparent keyboard. He’s gone, Sarah. Not dead—gone. The telemetry didn't just stop; it inverted. One second he was at four thousand PSI, and the next, the sensors reported a total vacuum. It’s like he fell off the edge of the world.

He’s on the ship, Sarah whispered, her eyes fixed on the last known coordinates. "The Arcanum didn't just sink; it created a pocket. A bubble."

Outside the bridge windows, the Alaskan winter was proving why it was the most dangerous environment on Earth. Waves the size of office buildings hammered against the Peregrine, sending plumes of freezing spray that instantly turned to ice against the glass. The storm had arrived two hours ahead of the most sophisticated AI forecasts, a localized meteorological anomaly that seemed to be centered directly over the Aleutian Trench.

Captain Vane, we need to deploy the secondary ROV, Sarah said, turning to the man standing in the shadows of the aft deck.

Captain Elias Vane—no relation to the protagonist, but a man who shared his grim determination—stepped into the light. He was a veteran of the Arctic salvage wars, a man who saw the ocean as a sentient adversary. He chewed on an unlit cigar, his eyes reflecting the red emergency lights of the bridge.

The ROV won't survive the transition, Jenkins, Vane said, his voice a low rumble. If there’s a vacuum pocket down there, the moment the drone hits the pressure differential, it’ll be like a bird hitting a stone wall. It’ll disintegrate.

Then we use the ‘Aegis’ suit, Sarah countered. It’s designed for high-gradient transitions. I’ll go down myself.

No, Miller interrupted, his voice rising in pitch. Look at the localized sonar return. This isn't just physics, Sarah. It’s... it’s a broadcast.

He tapped a command, and the bridge speakers filled with a sound that made the hair on the back of Sarah’s neck stand up. It wasn't the white noise of the deep sea.