The Salt

The people of Halifax have a thousand legends and stories and warnings about the expanse that was once the Halifax Harbour and the seabed beneath the Atlantic Ocean, the place they call the Salt.

They say it is haunted, that it crawls with ghosts that grasp anyone who dares stray onto its desecrated ground to drag them down into its not-so-watery depths. They say it is poisonous, all the pure water evaporating all at once long ago, leaving the refuse and the chemicals and the contaminants behind to leach into the body, infect it with new diseases with every breath, every touch, every footstep. They say it is barren, the kind of place whose plants bear no fruit and might never again, whose skeletons lay unburied and bleached in the smoke-reddened haze of midday sun.

It is all those things and more. It is a place that has been destroyed, a place that lies in sprawling, desolate ruins, the kind of place that should belong only to the stubborn and the stuck. It is a place whose moonscape craters and sunken valleys hold secrets and truths better left forgotten, whose vast plains are inscribed with the weight of all that has been done to them, whose very air itself is hostile to anything that might dare try and breathe life back into it.

It is all those things, and it is home.

A collaboration with Cynda and Kit that started as a lost Blaseball Short Circuit, and which has morphed into something much bigger.

Content warnings for death, bodies, body horror, and unreality, with additional content warnings on specific stories.

Come check out The Salt on AO3!