Excerpt: Donovans Head

Deep, deep, deep, and deeper still, below the Namib dessert there was activity; it was time for The Rising.
The hive worked on its biological clock, and it was very accurate although there appeared to be no physical reason for the activity to start, other than the word of the Shandants in each city. Preparations had been in progress for some time, and amongst young and old there was a deep, instinctive frisson of excitement building. The older Sandans were particularly enervated, feeling the vibration running through the ancient dwelling place. None of them remembered the last such event, but to a human observer the ‘feeling’ would have been palpable.
These creatures were not human, they were far older than other species on this world, and this event was something that happened so rarely, that, even amongst these extremely long lived people, The Rising was only known from folklore, told in the stories the Shandant’s passed down to one another. The current Shandantine, head of all the Shandants, had read the sands that sifted and moved, and reached so far down the ancient rock face, to these ancient lands far below the surface, and decreed that the time to rise was coming again; the time when they would rise and experience the portentous conjunction of certain stars, planets and suns in The Sky so far above them. Stars and planets that they only knew from their star charts, long held safely by the Shandants down the millennia.