A light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it.

It was dark.  Pretty much all of his world was.  Dark caverns, dark tunnels, dark dreams, all with a small sliver of light that was the staircase up.  Nobody went up though, at least not the sane folks.  They stood just outside that column of light, squinting their eyes at what was completely foreign to them.  I say eyes, but they really were more of indents in a face, super sensors that felt heat and touch and sound.  Nothing much resembling an eye by the standards of you or I or any of the ones who trapesed about on the ceiling, out in the sun which shone one small column down into the darkness.

Anyway, he was sitting there at the edge of the light, dimmed now to the point that it was bearable to stare at it.  He wondered much.  He wondered what it was, that offness that his senses could just barely perceive in the center of the chamber.  It had the same feel of heated iron, stoked long in a furnace, but it was not hot.  It had the same cascading bouncing nature of water, but it did not flow or fill the area in the same way.  It was akin to the flames and glowing magma of deep in the heart of the world, but it did not consume and was not tangible.  Yet it still burnt when skin passed into it.  His people at least.

The ones from up above could live in it, craved it, seemed so nervous to be down in the darkness where everything was calm and good.  He heard them whisper in fear at the footsteps out of their vision when they descended to trade their wares for gems and metal.  If their bodies were whole, their minds must surely be scorched dry.  They would trade away the valuable root-carvings and strange moss-kin that they had for bits of the ground.  Most of the things they would trade much for were even useless, brittle bits that did nothing but scatter the scorching light when they touched it.  A few of his people's traders had been hurt by the light that did that once or twice before they took precautions, wearing the cloaks they had traded for in the past to shield themselves.

Cloth was such a marvel, why would anyone accept for trade bits of silver of gold for it, he did not know.  The light must make them crazy, it must.  And yet, they survived, they lived elsewhere, outside of the earthmother's bosom, and from the records they thrived.  Nowhere else did such a pillar of light exist, though, so this lone area was a singular contact point to all of a civilization.  Perhaps small, for what would be left of the world if so much of it was the bosom of the earthmother?

And why did the light pulse, sometimes irregularly, sometimes disappearing altogether?  Why did water fall in down to his world from there, droplets like a stalactite might make?  Was there one up there in the light on the ceiling, was it the source of the light, hot and glowing and bright like a river of magma?  He would not know, for he could not venture into the light.  The light would burn him, scarring his skin.  Blacksmiths who worked too close to the rivers of flame came back burned and hard-skinned from their time, but it usually took years or at least months to reach the severity that light patch could cause at full brightness.

It was almost time for the column to become brighter.  He picked himself up from the floor where he sat and pondered and strode back into the tunnels before he would become roasted.  Maybe with enough cloth, he mused. . .