Late Pleistocene

Northwestern Pacific Ocean

18,000 Years Ago

The exhausted female leads her seven surviving pups into deeper water, the adolescent male closing in from behind.

A thousand feet and the blue ocean turns gray.

Twelve hundred feet and they are enveloped in eternal darkness, the chill of the ice Age instensifying.

The juvenile male moves in, targeting the runt of the litter, an eight-hundred-pound male.

The newborn pup darts away, only to be seized from behind, the larger adult severing it with one devastating bite.

Mother whirls around and attacks, sinking her teeth deep into the thick layer of flesh behind the adolescent's head.  The female shakes the male back and forth, the two grappling Megalodons intent on settling their territorial dispute, the pups' lives hanging in the balance.

Titanic reverberations ripple through the Pacific.  The six pups flee, racing deeper into the twinkling depths.  Luminescent creatures blink in and out of existence, tempting a few of the young to feed, but the gnawing cold keeps them moving, forcing their swimming muscles to work harder.

The pressure increases, but has no effect on the pups.

The surface reverberations fade, still the escaping young continue their journey deeper.

In time, the pups reach a swirling layer of minerals and debris, the water sizzling.  Fight through the maelstrom, they enter the valley of a prehistoric sea.

A balmy tropical current soothes the Megalodon young, the warmth originating from a petrified forest of volcano-shaped stacks.  Plumes of superheated sulfurous water pump out of these hydrothermal vents, filling the submarine gorge, spawning an oasis of life.  Clusters of ghostly white tube worms flutter in the warm stream like unfettered African grasslands.  Squid dart in and around the Riftia, feeding off the chemosynthetic life forms.  Schools of primitive fish move through the hydrothermal layer as one, their formation meant to ward off attacks from larger marine life.

The Megalodon young have entered a haven of existence that pre-dates the time of the dinosaurs.  Warmed by the Earth's core, nourished by a food chain that has never seen the light of day, Nature's apex predators will remain within these primal waters for the rest of their reign, living and breeding, avoiding extinction, until one day in the distant future, when the vents run dry and the prey disperses—

—forcing the few surviving creatures back to the surface from which they came . . .