The Mountain That Ate Humanity / Chapter 1: Vanishing Point
The Mountain That Ate Humanity

The Mountain That Ate Humanity

Author: Brett Donaldson


Chapter 1: Vanishing Point

At a depth of ten thousand meters beneath the Atlantic, a team of American scientists made a discovery that would shake the very foundation of reality—a colossal, living mountain—its surface heaving gently, like some monstrous heart, lost in the pitch-black Atlantic depths.

The lead professor broke under the pressure, his sanity slipping through his fingers. His hands shook so badly he spilled his water twice that morning. When the nurse tried to comfort him, he flinched, eyes darting to corners no one else could see. For days, he repeated a single phrase like a broken record, his voice rising and falling in the sterile echo of the hospital ward:

"That thing down there—it’s alive. We were never supposed to find it. We’ve already lost."

"The mountain is John Gable. John Gable is the mountain."

In this world, humanity does not exist at all.

The following morning, he vanished from his locked hospital room, leaving behind no trace—not so much as a hair on his pillow or a footprint on the polished tile.

All that remained was a battered, yellowed diary, left open at his bedside, its pages curling as if from some invisible heat. It was a record—perhaps the only record—of the truth behind the world as we know it.