Updated blurb.
The air hung thick, a soup of recycled breath and the damp rot of the fungi farms that clung to the curved wall. The glow of the cultivated spores cast long, flickering shadows, a perpetual twilight that pressed down on everything. At the deepest levels fish persisted in water, carefully farmed. Plants were grown under special lights. Generations had been born and died in the Shafts, a warren of holes clawed into the earth after the Sundering. The world above was a ghost story, a tale told to keep children in line – a place of light and open air, lost forever.
The Echo Network, a crackling whisper across the rock, was all that held the Shafts together. Each one, a world of its own, built from steel and concrete. Different customs, different ways of doing things, all born from the same fear. Fear of the outside, fear of the Sundering, fear of what lurked in the rock between them. No tunnels, no paths. Just the echoes.
The Sundering had taken everything. The sky, the sun, the memory of what it meant to walk under them. All that remained was the rubble feed. A grainy, flickering image of broken concrete and twisted metal, the only view of what was left of the world above. It played on a screen in the upper levels, a constant reminder of what they had presumably lost.
Now, in Shaft 7, something had shifted. The hatch at the top, the one sealed tight since the Sundering, had groaned open. Rust flaked off the heavy metal as it moved, the sound echoing down the levels like a death knell. A spiral walkway, swallowed by the darkness of the shaft above, was all that could be seen. No light, no sound. Just the open hatch and the promise of what lay beyond. Was it opportunity? Or just another layer of rock, another crushing silence? The air grew heavy, the silence in the shaft was palpable. No one moved, no one spoke. The only thing certain was a vast uncertainty.
Last edited by Art in the Blood; Wed 15/01/2025 00:51 UTC.
