This is a draft of the first chapter of Son of Hel, my novel currently in progress. It is rough, so naturally contains some overused words or wordy phrases. This is to show the expansion of the concept over an earlier version of the same work. There is of course no guarantee that any of the following will be in the final.
I’d like to see that land beyond Pole. That area beyond the Pole is the Center of the Great Unknown.
——Admiral Richard Byrd.
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It was the End of the World.
It was a place few mortals had seen—and most who had seen it had not survived to tell. At the pinnacle of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean’s surface turned to ten feet of ice, but beneath that ice, the deep waters still flowed. At the Symmes’ Hole, the very lip of the world—a vast opening 16,000 miles across—the water poured over a great cliff down into the planet’s interior in a massive waterfall that dwarfed every other spectacle on the planet. Deep in the world’s crust, in mazelike caverns fed by this tumbling sea, were light and life and vast civilizations that the men of the surface, crawling like maggots on a corpse, could hardly dream of. The water flowed through these subterranean networks like blood through the arteries until it at last emerged at the Symmes’ Hole of the south, a never-ending waterspout thousands of feet high.
But the Symmes’ Hole at the North Pole was not a mere void: Standing in its exact center, jutting starkly into the sky and supported by no one knew what, was the Black Precipice, a dark, windswept mountain tall enough to rival Everest, entirely of lodestone. This mountain it was that caused all compass needles to point inexorably north.
Though enormous, the Black Precipice was invisible from the distant lip of the Symmes Hole, shrouded as it was in a thick ring of icy mist. Few explorers had glimpsed this terrifying mountain, and most who had, had soon met their deaths in the bottomless drop of the waterfall. Though clever in his inventions, man had not yet built the flying ships capable of crossing that chasm and landing safely on the Black Precipice’s craggy cliffs—so those who dwelt on its rough and barren slopes remained, for the time being, unharried by the rapaciousness of human greed.