Excerpt: Apotheosis

Feiyta awoke and wandered. It was not morning or night to be known to him, for the same stone that he walked upon was the ceiling of his world. There are not seasons as we know them. No blue, cloud scattered sky or orange, low hanging sun to tell the cycle of time. Just dense, ancient stone above and below, as well as to either side far, far away. Before and behind was limitless darkness. Around the perimeter of vision was the constant, solid rock environment. His world was a colossal tube through solid stone. The tunnel went on forever and, it is known, that if one could travel to the end, they would end up in the same place they began their trek. And to carve into the stone was an endless endeavor. Stories abound of tunnelers who carve deeper than those before them until the whole impetus was halted by the inevitable threshold of survival under exertion and access to sustenance. The rock was the same layer after layer without end. Beyond the tunnel was rock, on and on forever, and this everyone knew.
Feiyta stepped surefooted across the slimy walking path worn into the ground from centuries of use. He passed several conversion and storage huts for the many useful fungi, molds and algae that grow rampant among the nooks and crannies about the terrain. Everything in his realm was powered, nourished and realized by the many forms of symbiotic life dwelling along side his people. They were nesting nomads that chiseled out enclaves in the rock walls only to abandon them and move to another, carved by ancestors ages before. The migration was informed by the ebb and flow of moisture, predators and the winds.
Feiyta was haunted by the notion that the winds were much more powerful in utility and implication than the superstitious elders who assigned personified attributes to the characteristics implied by these drafts. He respected and was awed by these sometimes gale force currents, but found a natural, sometimes predictable quality to their occurrences. His days were spent electrified by the possibilities that his curiousity might yield.