Sunset on the Fear-Filled Past: A Moon to Guide the Children of the Future.

Hurrying back through the forest, Carolus pulled his feathered cloak closer around his body.  It was a bright day, but so little of the sun's rays penetrated the treetops, evergreen roofs supported by wooden pillars.  It was approaching the equinox, and the snow turned the whole area white, obscuring his path back to the village.

Well, city would be a better term for it, but Carolus would always remember the village he knew and loved.  Trade had boomed after construction of the well.  That hole in the land, a land impervious to downwards movement past a a few span, stretched down and down.  The sheer tower that stretched down into the earth was a marvel.

A dangerous marvel the previous elders had said.  They had kept the whole village away from it, formed a great walled circle around the hilltop it existed on.  They feared to close it up though.  There had been prophecies, he had heard, though the elders had kept them to themselves, written them down on scrolls and hidden them away in their huts.  They had hoarded away the knowledge and spread rumors of boogeymen coming out of the hole to scare off the curious.  And then they died.

The fire had spread through the village burning homes indiscriminately, like a wave washing up the beach until the land was smooth again.  He still heard the screams of the burned in his head, still remembered sitting in the ashes of his home, wondering what he could do to survive.  That winter had been a hard one, though not quite as nippy as this chill he fled through on his way back from the southern kingdoms.

Walking ahead of him, the sun was quickly making its way downwards to meet the earth again, casting fleeting shadows back through the trees.  Then in front of him the treeline cleared and he saw the city.  It had grown much since he had left.  The wooden huts had expanded out into stone dwellings, chimneys sighing out smoke from warm fires.  Two stone walls rose up in front of him, one on the town perimeter to keep out the wolves that roamed the land, and the other stretching up to surround the hill in the town's center.  The gate stood open, a guard resting inside next to a fire at the watch-house barely gave him a glance.  He had dressed in the village custom, which at least hadn't changed much in the interim it seemed.

Carolus knew he would need to find an inn soon, but the hill drew him in first.  The town itself lost its nostalgia in the cobbled streets and stone houses that now stood in defiance of the past, but the hill would always be the hill.  The wall around it was not the barricade of the past, but a building's fortification, though this gate too swung open in the chill wind.

Despite the warm feathered cloak, he shivered.  It was as it had been, but for the well.  Some Mason had made steps to spiral down into the depths, a fact that would have scared the elders back to life if they could know.  Stepping up to the edge, Carolus looked down deep into the darkness, trying to see the demons of the past that had frightened him in his youth. More wind, whipping around on this the highest part of the city, wrenching loose a feather from his cloak, then fleeing down the hole with its prize.  The white shape fell downward, sucked in by the earth, and in that darkness something darker moved away, taking with it a small bit of the sky-world.

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. . .