Siliciternum, Volume 1.1.1

Aermelia

A People Underground

“It’s not a prison if you’re taught to love the walls.”

Aermelia had never seen the sky.

She had been born into the tunnels, cradled by stone, swaddled in the hush of earth. Her first breath had echoed off limestone walls, her first steps lit by fire that knew only shadow. The world above was not myth, but memory—handed down through voices that trembled, not from fear, but from reverence.

The tunnels sprawled like veins, not carved by human hand but discovered—long before language, long before law. They ran deep beneath the outer crust of what once had a name. No one here used it now.

At the heart of this underground refuge lay the Commons—a wide, circular atrium where the walls had been scraped smooth by generations of hands. From there, hallways stretched outward in slow, deliberate lines. One led to the resting quarters, another to the chamber of stories, and a third—longer than the rest—led to the exit. Or what passed for one.

Beyond that narrow threshold, past the torches that marked their sacred edge, lay the farm. It wasn’t much. A sloping patch of soil, half-feral, clinging to the underbelly of the world’s last breath of open air. Mushrooms, roots, and lichen grew thick where the light still touched. The farmers knew how to coax flavor from fungus and ritual from scarcity. Meals were simple—eaten raw, as they grew—except on days of celebration. On those days, someone would leave. They would cross the threshold into the forgotten cities and barter for dried meats or salted things, luxuries from a world they refused to rejoin.

Aermelia lived for those days. Not for the food, but the sound—the way the group swelled with song when the fire pits were lit, the way stories bled longer past bedtime, and how the silence afterward always felt just a little less permanent.

Branching out from the Commons like ribs from a spine were the living quarters—narrow chambers carved into the stone with no ornament but necessity. Each room held just enough: a bed hewn from the same rock as the walls, a chair passed down or assembled from scrap, a mirror dulled with time, and a dented bucket that stood guard beside the door. That bucket was more sacred than it seemed. It held the day’s draw from the 'river' that ran beneath them—an underground spring that whispered louder than any elder. The river beneath the walkways ran cool and constant, its sound rising through the stone like a whispered hymn. It wasn’t loud—it didn’t roar or churn—but it was always _present_, a soft, layered cadence that seemed to sing just under hearing. The kind of sound that wrapped around thought, not breaking it, but shaping it. Children learned to fall asleep to it. Elders claimed they could hear voices in the current—not speaking, exactly, but remembering.

Some said the water remembered what the people had forgotten.

The main tunnel wound gently downward, with broad stone walkways bridging the chasm carved by the river's flow. One could stand on the landings and hear it rushing below, see it glinting in the bioluminescent half-light—alive, as if aware of being watched. Occasionally, a child would drop a stone over the edge and wait for the splash, hoping to time it right. The splash never came when you expected it.

The walls were cobbled from cool grey stone, fitted together with such precision it was unclear whether nature or some long-vanished hand had shaped them. In places, the floor shifted upward into stairs—leading to higher tunnels or spiraling into deeper, narrower passageways. No part of the settlement was truly level. The earth itself rose and fell like a great breathing beast, and the people had simply learned to walk its rhythm.

Roots—thick, gnarled, and ancient—wove in and out of the walls like veins. From these roots bloomed flowers not found in any known catalog of surface flora: translucent petals that pulsed with soft indigo and green light, blooming in silence, refusing to wilt. They were never harvested. It was understood. They were not belongings, items to be claimed as one's own.

The tunnels were lined with arched passageways, cut tall enough to give even the tallest among them a sense of reverence while passing through. Along the archways and throughout the walls were etched markings—symbols that no sage had ever deciphered, no elder dared to guess aloud. The glyphs glowed faintly, in the same rhythm and hue as the blossoms. Some swore the writing shifted when no one was watching. Others said it was the light that changed, not the letters.

Aermelia often traced them with her fingers when she passed. Not out of understanding, but out of ritual. The way one might touch the frame of a doorway before entering a room full of memories. This was not a city, not even a village. It was a womb. A wound. A sanctuary carved from the bones of something ancient and half-forgotten, where every stone and stairway bore the hush of a people who had learned—long ago—to survive without rising.

They did not call it home because it was comfortable.

They called it home because it was all most of them knew as habitable.

No one knew who had built the tunnels. Not even the sages, though they pretended not to care. Ask them directly and they would frown, deflect, remind you that the walls were strong, the water clean, and the surface a place of rot and ruin. They would say things like _“You’re safest when you stay grounded.”_ Or _“Curiosity rises; survival stays low.”_

It wasn’t forbidden to ask questions. Just... discouraged. As if history were a gust of air that might crack stone if spoken too loudly.

Aermelia had learned to keep her questions quiet verbally. Everyone did, eventually. But that didn’t stop the thoughts from blooming—like the glowing roots along the walls, reaching for something beyond stone. The language carved into the archways, the impossible flowers, the very shape of the settlement—it all hinted at something older, something forgotten on purpose. And if the sages knew more, they held it with the same clenched gentleness they used when handling fire.

Safety was always the reason.

It was the answer to every question and the boundary to every conversation. Safety justified the silence. It explained why history was never taught, why maps were forbidden, why the old names had been swallowed in dust and replaced with simple ones—Tunnel One, Commons, Root Hall, River Mouth. Names that meant nothing to the past, but everything to the present moment. Safety was why no one left alone. Why tools were rationed. Why no one built _upward_.

But safety from _what_, no one could say. Some claimed the surface had collapsed. Others whispered of sickness, or fire, or creatures that had traded the sun for something worse. But there were no records. No images. Just warnings, repeated like prayer and polished down until they gleamed with ritual: _“It is not safe above.”_ _“Above is where the forgetting began.”_ _“The ground is where we are kept. The sky is where we are lost.”_

The river that ran beneath them had no source.

Or if it did, no one had found it. The sages had sent scouts in the early years—carefully, sparingly, with strict orders and enough rope to retrace every step. But every attempt to follow the current upstream ended the same way: a loop. A dead end. A disappearance. No spring. No aquifer. Just more tunnel, and the same clean, rushing water—cool and clear, seasonless, endlessly creating the musical soundtrack for day to day life.

It never flooded. Never slowed. Never ran dry. And so, in time, they stopped asking. They took their buckets to the edge and filled them in silence. They built their bridges and stood above the flow without looking too long. It was easier to call it providence—some benevolent pulse of the earth. Safer, too.

Year after year, it continued to run—untouched by drought or decay, providing drinkable water no matter the season. It had become as ordinary as the roots that grew through the walls or the flowers that bloomed without sun. A mystery, yes—but one they had grown used to. No more questions were asked.

The river remained. And they drank from it daily. Still, Aermelia wondered. If a thing had no beginning, did that mean it had no end?

Only the farmers were permitted to leave the tunnels.

No one else—not the sages, not the healers, not the keeper of tools—had clearance to approach the surface. And the farmers, though revered for their role, were a quiet and distant class. Chosen young, trained in silence, and marked by a woven clasp they wore across the shoulder, they answered to no one but the Council of Elders. They did not speak of what they saw above.

Not even in whispers. Not even to one another. When asked, they simply bowed their heads and redirected the conversation. The few who tried to press for answers were met with that same phrase, again and again:_“The world above is not for us.”_

And so, most stopped asking. Still, every few weeks, one of the farmers would slip through the outer gate and return with dried meat, surface salt, or rare spice—small things for special days. They claimed to trade with surface wanderers, though no one ever saw these traders. No one knew their names. It was the closest the people ever came to contact with the world above.

Aermelia had once dreamed of becoming a farmer. Until she saw how they changed. How their voices grew distant, their eyes unreadable. As if something up there had taken hold, and refused to let go.

____

“Aermelia.”

A pause.

“Aermelia... come on, now.”

A second pause. Then a sound—a _drip_ against stone, echoing from the bucket at her bedside.

She blinked once. The ceiling above her curved like a dome, its cobbled surface glinting faintly in the light of the flowering root just beyond her doorframe. The bud had opened in the night, casting a warm violet glow across the room. Dust hovered in it like something sacred.

“Aermelia.” His voice again—low, steady. Merren never raised it. He never needed to. The words always found her, gentle but unyielding, like water through stone. She pulled herself upright from the stonebed, blanket sloughing off in a heap. Her back ached—mildly, routinely. Sleep on rock long enough and you stopped noticing.

The room held everything it ever had: the smooth stone chair beside the wall, the iron mirror polished enough to hint at a face, and the bucket, half full of springwater from last night’s draw. She splashed some on her face—cold, sharp—and exhaled into her palms. There was no clock. Only rhythm. The blossom outside her door was her cue. It never bloomed the same way twice.

She dressed in practiced motion, pulling the fabric wrap across her chest and shoulders, tying it with care. Her fingers brushed the clasp at her hip—plain, utilitarian. Not a farmer’s clasp. Not a Council mark. Just hers. Plain meant safe; it also meant still stuck underground.

She stepped out into the tunnel. The roots along the wall pulsed gently, their blossoms lighting the hallway in irregular intervals. It gave the illusion of movement even when nothing stirred. Her footsteps made no sound on the smoothed path. Overhead, the ceiling arched just high enough to feel open but not free.

The day had begun. She turned left at the main arch and followed the path downward.

The corridor curved with the stone, smooth and familiar beneath her bare feet. As she descended, the air cooled—the kind of cold that came not from wind, but from age. The sound of the river rose with each step, soft and continuous, a quiet ribbon of movement beneath the waking tunnels.

Aermelia passed under two more arches before reaching the lower walkway. The stone path stretched out over the chasm like a bridge between lungs. Below, the river moved—fast in some places, slow in others, but always the same clean, clear current. It shimmered in the glow of the flowering roots, picking up the soft purples and pale greens of the blossoms overhead. There was no smell. No algae. Just water and stone and the endless sound of motion.

She knelt at the edge and lowered her bucket by rope. The handle creaked as it met the pull of the current, then steadied. She waited, counting the seconds in her head. Five. Six. Seven. Then she drew it back up—full, cold, heavy. It always felt a little heavier than it should.

Balancing it above her head, she made the walk back in silence. Past the arches. Up the slope. Through the first hallway bend, where the roots were thickest and the light dimmed. Her arms ached by the time she reached the room.

Merren was already up, seated on the stone chair. He didn’t look at her when she entered, just reached out and steadied the bucket as she set it down between them.

He nodded once. “Nice balance.” She didn’t answer. She never did, not until the tea was made. Once the water was set in place, Aermelia turned to her corner and began to clean.

There wasn’t much to straighten. She owned very little. That was the way of things here—not out of deprivation, but design. Fewer possessions meant fewer attachments. Fewer attachments meant fewer questions.

Still, she kept order.

She folded the blanket on her bed with two practiced flicks of her wrist, smoothing out the edge with her forearm until the corner lay flat. A single crease remained, as it always did—where the fabric had worn thin from years of sleep.

She lifted her chair and set it properly beneath the alcove shelf. Beneath it: a small bundle wrapped in cloth. She unwrapped it carefully, revealing her belongings, lined side by side in quiet ritual.

A brush for her hair. A brush for her teeth. A doll—stitched from fiber and worn from years of being held more than played with. And then: a brush for the doll’s hair. And a brush for the doll’s teeth.

Each had a place. She cleaned each one. Not out of urgency, but rhythm. When she was finished, she wrapped them again in the cloth, tied the corners, and tucked the bundle back beneath the chair. Her side of the room was now spotless. Still, silent, prepared.

She reached for her doll—its stitched face faded, but intact—and smoothed the yarn hair with the designated brush. Not hurried, not pretending. Just presence. The ritual of care, practiced like breath.

Aermelia had long outgrown the gift. It no longer fit the proportions of her world. The limbs were too soft, the eyes too gentle, the threadbare dress far too small for someone her age.

But she could not bear to part with it.

Sometimes, without meaning to, she found herself brushing the doll’s hair and wishing—quietly, achingly—that it was her mother brushing her own.

That it was warm hands at her scalp instead of her own fingers.

That it was her mother’s voice, low and melodic, saying the words she could no longer remember.

She blinked, slowed the brush. Set it down carefully beside the bundle.

The doll stared up from her lap, unchanged.

Aermelia smoothed the dress once, then folded the arms across the chest, as if tucking something in for sleep. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. The walls glowed. The roots hummed. The room was still.

She stood before the cracked washbasin, brushing a loose lock of chestnut hair off her forehead with a practiced sweep of her hand. Her face was alert and clever, high cheekbones dusted with freckles, eyes the color of early autumn leaves, curving into a sardonic half-smile as she inspected her reflection. Her eyes, large and dark, settled on everything with a quiet, discerning intelligence, asking questions without ever needing words. Her brows were steady, framing her expression precisely—not arched in surprise or worry, but shaped by years of interpreting silence. Her mouth remained neutral yet expressive, ready to twist effortlessly into either wit or warning.

She tied her hair into two practical, dense braids that framed her face precisely, each secured with utilitarian wraps, hinting at discipline instilled from a young age. The rest of her hair was hidden beneath a hood woven in deep slate blue, draping softly over her head and shoulders, well-worn and familiar against her frame. A small silver locket rested at her throat—a relic from another life—briefly touched and shrugged into place with confident ease.

Her clothing was a fusion of practicality and style. A fitted linen shirt in deep forest green was worn beneath a weathered leather vest, creaking softly with movement. Over this, she wore a long, intricately patterned tunic of deep clay red etched with geometric threadwork, sleeves fitted yet allowing ample motion. A braided leather belt cinched her waist, carrying small pouches and a dagger, secured by a simple, functional knot. Faded brown breeches tucked neatly into scuffed leather boots, marked by long journeys across familiar stone paths.

She carried herself with an alert, restless energy, hands loose at her sides, fingers brushing against the stone walls as if sensing the vibration of the tunnels through her skin. Her attire and demeanor spoke of someone tempered by survival, not hardened by it—old enough to bear history in her eyes yet young enough to question and challenge its truths.

Merren appeared in the doorway just as she slid on a soft woolen cloak over her shoulders. He leaned against the frame, shoulders squared but face lined with weariness. He cleared his throat quietly, a gentle, tired reminder in his voice. “You know we have a gathering today, right?”

Aermelia rolled her eyes and smirked, tilting her head as she picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “Again? Didn’t we just meet, like yesterday?” she quipped, voice laced with playful skepticism.

He pushed off the doorframe and stepped inside, arms crossed with a hint of exasperation that spoke of caring too much. Merren sighed softly, voice steady but amused. “You know it’s been a week. I see you constantly marking the walls with the day,” he said quietly, arching an eyebrow at her—remembering the tally marks she’d carved in the corner of the wooden doorframe.

She shook her head and gave a theatrical sigh, crossing her arms. “It just seems like a waste of time,” Aermelia replied, flicking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her tone was skeptical but not harsh, teasing even as she folded into a carefree stance.

Merren’s lips quirked in an understanding smile. He stepped closer, placing a hand gently on her shoulder with an affectionate firmness. “Don’t care to hear about the end of days, again?” he asked softly, a hint of humor in his tired eyes.

Aermelia chuckled, glancing up at his weary face with a mischievous glint. “They’ve been talking about the end of days for 16 years. I wish it would come already,” she said, tapping her finger against the dagger at her hip. The words were half-joking, half-weary truth, though the defiant edge in her smile showed she wasn’t entirely serious.

She flicked a glance at her father, watching the quiet understanding in his steady gaze. In that exchanged look, everything about their long routine – survival meetings and prophecies and stubborn hope – settled between them unspoken.

The chamber breathed in blues and bronze, carved from stone so old it seemed to remember voices. Arched ceilings vanished into shadow, the curves overhead echoing in silence, while soft light glowed from the symbols etched behind her — not sunlight, but something older, something stored.

Behind her, the underground arches curled like ribs of the past, and ahead, though no doors were open, she felt the passage widening. Aermelia stepped lightly into the hallway. The glow from the illuminated plants followed her in soft pulses, their colors shifting with the temperature of the stone—violet, then blue, then that pale green that made her feel most awake. She let her fingers graze the vines as she passed, brushing against petals she had known since childhood. They bent slightly under her touch, but never broke.

Each room she passed was closed and quiet, tucked into the wall like thoughts in a tidy mind. The doors were uniform—arched stone frames with smooth stone lids, polished with habit. Everyone kept their space in order. Disorder made people nervous. She moved through the lower corridor with practiced ease, stepping over the familiar places where the floor dipped and the wall roots thickened. Then up a set of stairs carved into a spiral—no handrail, just the memory of balance. Then down again, three steps to a level passage beneath a long archway that looked, in the right light, like it might open its mouth and speak.

She skipped once, landing on her toes like she was still a small child. Her braid bounced over her shoulder. She did not head for the Commons.

Not yet.

Instead, she turned left at the sixth arch—a narrow hall with barely enough space for two shoulders wide. The roots here were thinner, the light dimmer. The air felt more still. It was a hallway that no one used anymore. Not because it was forbidden, but because it went nowhere. But Aermelia had always liked it. The floor here showed little wear. No prints or grooves, just the cold, steady hush of stone. She walked slowly now, letting her footsteps echo.

At the very end, the hallway stopped. Not with a door. Simply a wall—solid, pale, and blank, save for one thing; a single square of stone, etched with row upon row of checkmarks, each group of five marked by four vertical lines and a diagonal slash across them. Dozens of rows. Hundreds of marks. She knelt beside it.

Sixteen years. Carved by hand. She ran her fingers across the nearest row. The older ones were worn soft. The newer ones cleaner, sharper. A private calendar. A quiet protest. A reminder.

She had never been to the surface, the 'real world' as she called it. Not once. She had never felt real wind, never seen real stars. But someday—someday when she was older, when she could choose—she would walk out and count the sky for herself.

Aermelia rested her palm flat against the wall.

Sixteen years underground.

Not forever.

Just... long enough.

She stayed there a while, crouched before the wall, her eyes scanning the etched tally marks like she was reading a passage only she could decipher. The most recent row was nearly finished.

One year and Twelve weeks until she turned eighteen. There was no formal name for it, but everyone underground understood what happened at that age. The Decision. The Departure. Some whispered it like a ceremony. Others like a dare.

At eighteen, you were given the choice. You could stay—become a part of the adult collective, take your trade, bind yourself to the systems below. Or you could go. Up. Out. One year on the surface, free to decide if you belonged among the roots or the sky.

It sounded fair enough. Balanced, even. But no one who left ever came back.

Not once.

No stories. No returners. No letters tucked into crates of dried meat. Just silence. A complete severance, like the surface swallowed them whole or fulfilled them so completely they never even thought to send a word. Depending on who you asked, that meant either death or happiness. Aermelia wasn’t sure which scared her more.

She pressed her thumb to the most recent mark—fifteen slashes down, three to go in the row. After that, just two more rows. Then her year. She exhaled, and it fogged faintly against the cool stone. They called it a rite of passage. A gesture of trust. But Aermelia had her own word for it, a word she never spoke aloud:

Doomsday Sect.

See, the sages and their subterranean followers dubbed themselves a **sect**, not out of religious zeal, but as a deliberate nod to their own exile. It was a quiet act of defiance—a rejection of the world above, with its sterile rituals and suffocating conformity. Beneath the earth, in candle-lit chambers and echoing tunnels, they preserved fragments of truth and memory that the surface had discarded. Calling themselves a sect carried the irony they favored: it spoke of unity forged by isolation, wisdom sharpened by shadows, and loyalty born not of dogma, but of shared secrets and survival.

This underground world, with its rituals and rules and endless warnings about the surface—it felt less like protection and more like preservation. Like something trying to keep itself from being forgotten by force. She wasn’t angry. Not yet. But she was aware. And that awareness was growing.

At the end of the main path, the last arch gave way to the Common Room — if such a word could be applied to a place where nothing was common and no one stayed for long. Aermelia stepped into the warm hush of it, past a line of clay mugs stacked earless by the wall, past the vented stove humming against its own age, and found her seat without thought, as if it had been waiting since dawn for her weight to bless it.

The morning table was already laid in its predictable chaos — bowls of softened grain, two knuckled baskets of carrots, and the mushroom pile: a modest heap of gilled domes, some split from storage, some fresh enough to perspire. The smell of wet stone and boiled roots drifted up in lazy spirals — the scent of another underground morning.

She took a mushroom from the bowl — a flat-cap, harmless, almost sweet — and as she chewed, the memory arose uninvited.

The first time someone brought mushrooms underground, they had not known which ones to trust. The hero of the mushroom realm had been a farmer — or the closest thing to one — no older than fifteen. His name sounded like a sigh — Eris, or Eron, or something vowel-heavy and leaf-soft, easily misspelled, easily mourned.

He had returned from the Surface with a sack of fungi plucked from the dew-fed ridges of the old-world forests: the blue-capped _Lactarius_, the copper-spotted _Amanita_, a few brittle _Mycena_ with stems like glass. He claimed they grew in the shadow of towering oak. That he’d named them in words that sprouted from dreams caused by the same mushrooms.

Just as with every invention of man — the wheel, the wire, the wheat grain — testing was mandatory. So he took it upon himself to test them. Not with charts or rats, but with the only method the Subterranean had left: the body.

One cap per day, boiled and blessed, swallowed under torchlight with a journal at his side.

Some made him laugh. Some made him weep. One turned his vision gold for six hours and made him speak only in numbers. But he always woke up the next day. Until the one that turned him to stone. They said it was _Inocybe fastigiata_, or something that wore its face. Pale-topped, fibrous. Unimpressive. The kind that hides its cruelty behind beige. They found his notes still wet with ink. No final entry. Just a smear where the pen trailed off the page.

No one ever touched a mushroom he hadn’t tested. Not even the yellow-veined ones that grew fat near the light wells, pulsing gently with whatever passed for breath. The memory was etched in them like fire on clay: _this is the cost of certainty._ And yet, no one ever spoke of what happened to his body.

Aermelia had never seen a burial. Not once. Not even in the quiet, not even in the in-between moments when the generators fell silent and the rooms hummed with nothing but thought. The dead, in her world, simply… stopped being seen. They left. Or disappeared. Or were placed where no one had to look again. There was no earth to dig, no wind to scatter ashes. Just walls. Just the next day.

She chewed slower now. Not in mourning, but in rhythm. In reverence for the things no one else would say aloud. She reached for a carrot — stubby, striped with soil — and broke it with a twist. The crunch was comfort. The way routine could sometimes be a gravestone. She did not cry for the boy. Not today. But she did remember. And remembering, down here, was almost the same thing.

Aermelia chewed the last of the carrot like it had wronged her. Across the table sat Elder Marn — thin as a root and just as gnarled. His tunic hung loose where muscle used to be, and his eyes squinted even when he wasn’t trying to read. He ate like he was already finished living — one scoop, one swallow, one sigh. After exchanging pleasantries, Aermelia questioned, “Tell me about your childhood, then. What did you do growing up? You didn’t want to leave these tunnels?”

The elder stirred his bowl, which no longer steamed. “Child, I am old. I have seen many leave these tunnels to never return. Maybe outside the walls of these caverns there is a better life, I do not know. I simply know that none have returned, and I do not wish to join them, better life or not.”

She threw up her hands, nearly knocking over a stack of cups. “_Then TELL ME_, what did you do to pass the ever-living boredom that never ceases? It may be easy enough at your age, senses dampened by the inevitable wrath of aging, but at mine, I need _EXCITEMENT_. I need a little bit of _CHAOS_, something that is not mundane. I want to run halls that are not made of stone! I want to see the outside world for myself.”

Marn raised an eyebrow the way a rock might consider rolling. “Child, the outside world is unpredictable, ever changing. You would not survive a night. We don’t even know if life outside of these tunnels exists.”

“You keep simultaneously putting me down _and_ ignoring my question about your childhood,” she snapped. “At least keep me entertained with stories or _SOMETHING_ for the love of—” her thoughts and voice trailed off. Time for a change of subject: “When did you transfer down here?”

“Sixteen years ago,” he said. “Same as you. You were just a bundle of noise on Merren's back.”

She leaned forward. “Then tell me. Tell me why you stayed. Why you don’t _want_ to go back.”

He didn’t answer. Just scraped the bowl like it might yield something deeper.

Aermelia didn’t say anything. She hated how calm he was. How final.

“Do you miss it?” she asked.

“Every day,” he said. “But just because you miss something doesn't mean it still exists.” He went back to stirring his food. She finished the last of her breakfast — one more carrot, one more mushroom from the boy’s sacred shortlist — and stacked her plate on the collection shelf without looking. The next thing on the schedule was the weekly meeting, which was not a meeting in any useful sense of the word. Nothing _happened_ underground, not in the way a meeting might require. There were no disputes to settle, no votes to cast, no announcements that hadn’t already been posted on the rations board three days prior. It was just called a meeting because calling it a **ritual** would’ve scared the children, and calling it **what it really was** — a group-wide patience test — was apparently bad for morale.

They gathered in the Long Room, seated in concentric circles around the central flame basin. Above them, the iron pipes sighed with the groan of recycled heat. Aermelia sat in the outermost ring, knees drawn up, already regretting not slipping away.

The problem: today’s speaker was the rhyming sage. She’d forgotten. Not that he was forgettable — far from it — but her brain had evolved a defense mechanism against the psychological damage of repeated exposure. His name was Brother Halbert, though she and her father had long ago rebranded him _Prophet Limerickus the First_, Patron Saint of Awkward Silences and Uncomfortable Meter.

He stepped forward, arms out, beard braided into the shape of a question mark, and began.

"Before the earth was green,

And the sky was blue,

Before the world contained me,

Or your mother birthed you,

Our maker yon made each and every being,

continually giving us all we are needing.

He cared for us all, as all of us are:

The care of a sister

the trust of a brother:.

He loved like a mother,

he cared like a father,

and carved for us all a place we shan't falter..."

“Stop... just... please, let someone else tell the story,” she screeched.

Her voice cracked across the circle like a pickaxe through glass. A few heads turned. One person gasped, though it sounded more like a hiccup. Her father ducked his head and pretended to fiddle with his laces.

The Twelfth Sage — _he always insisted on the number, never the name_ — blinked in gentle offense, his expression unreadable beneath the patchwork of face paint and ritual soot. His hands folded theatrically over his heart.

> “Oh child, how you wound with your plea,

> Though I speak merely in pure poetry—”

“No,” Aermelia said, standing now. “You speak in chants. Everything you say sounds like it was written by a haunted nursery rhyme generator.”

Someone snorted. Her father coughed to hide a laugh.

The sage tilted his head, delighted. “The Twelfth was cursed to rhyme,” he said, breaking meter just long enough to sound eerily sincere, “though I call it a blessing. The voice of the Maker flows in cadence. What sounds strange to you is sacred to me.”

Aermelia crossed her arms. “You weren’t born talking like this.”

Someone clapped. It was unclear if it was ironic.

She turned to the group. “Please. Someone. Anyone else. Tell the story this time. Tell it in _actual sentences_. Tell it without forcing the word ‘fortitude’ to rhyme with ‘attitude’ again.”

Silence.

Even the flame basin flickered uncertainly.

The Twelfth Sage bowed. Not to her, but to the room.

> “My tale is a gift, not simply a task.

> But if others disapprove, they must simply ask

> Let one rise and speak,

> Let a new voice peak—”

“**I volunteer!**” someone shouted from the third ring. It was a young maintenance tech. Nervous. Sweating. Holding a manual.

He hadn’t meant to say it.

But it was too late.

The Twelfth Sage smiled.

> “Very well, a new light shall gleam.

> Though I’ll be back — with _next week’s theme._”

Aermelia sat down, victorious but unsure whether she had won, or just postponed torture. Her father leaned in, hand half-covering his mouth, aiming the joke low enough that only she could hear it.

“Apparently all the old scrolls are written all the same: lines 8, 10, then 9 syllables. I think he’s trying to bring about the ancient ways…”

Aermelia blinked.

“Out of order, don’tcha think?” he added, glancing sidelong. “If that’s the case, it isn’t working.”

She scoffed, mostly out of reflex. “It isn’t working,” she repeated flatly, then resumed scowling in the general direction of the flame.

The joke was lost on Aermelia. Not because she didn’t understand meter, but because she’d grown up in a world where rhythm meant scraping chairs and timed rations, not poetic resurrections. She didn’t care if the scrolls were written in couplets, triplets, or ancient math. She just wanted someone — _anyone_ — to talk like they weren’t delivering lines at a cursed spoken word.

Across the circle, the Twelfth Sage was humming something that may or may not have been in key. The volunteer reader had begun to sweat through his collar. The Sage stood now at the flame basin, both hands trembling around a tattered booklet that looked suspiciously like an air filtration manual. His voice cracked as he began, not from fear but from reverence. He had long since held dear a story: of good versus evil, light versus dark, a rivalry that would last within and throughout time.

"Yes, we shall live," he declared, almost chanting. Everyone joined in chorus.

> “We shall live as kings.

> Deep underground,

> with light amongst… other things.”

Aermelia blinked slowly. “_Other things_?” she muttered. “Bold use of vagueness.”

Her father coughed into his hand, the sound somewhere between a chuckle and a wheeze.

The Sage continued, oblivious to the skepticism radiating from the outer rings. His words poured out now in short, uncertain bursts — as if the light had shown up halfway through and handed him cue cards written in damp chalk.

"Long ago," he said, voice rising, "there was war. A war of opposites. The light, proud, graceful, and true. The dark, controlling and manipulative. They battled not with weapons, but with the growth of creation. And when the true light could no longer shine, it protected her children."

Someone sneezed. A spoon clattered.

"And so we wait,” the Sage pressed on, “not for return, but for renewal. Not for escape, but for transformation. For one day we shall emerge, not as we were, but as we are meant to be."

Aermelia leaned sideways toward her father. “Are they _still_ calling it transformation? That’s what they called it when the last guy went *blind*.”

He nodded solemnly. “Then he started a rock garden and called it an prophetic altar.”

The Sage lifted his arms as though expecting applause. “The darkness is neither curse nor blessing. Just the absence of light."

That line actually got a few nods. Someone whispered “Hear, hear!” though it may have been sarcastic.

Aermelia tapped her knee in frustration. She could feel it happening again — the slow drift of echo through every chamber. One bad poem, one confident speaker, and suddenly the entire room was ready to believe they were royalty amongst the earthworms. She stood before she could stop herself.

“Then why are we still eating mushrooms and breathing secondhand air?” she said.

Silence. Even the plants seemed to pause. Her father closed his eyes, the weight of the moment settling quietly between them. Aermelia recognized this silence, this deliberate, measured emptiness, as permission—maybe even an instruction—to carry on.

And so she did, spending the rest of the day absorbed in the familiar monotony of her assigned tasks. She scrubbed down the walls of a corridor streaked rust-red by pooling condensation, the scent of stagnant mold lingering stubbornly on her sleeves. Afterward, she moved to inventory duty, counting food supplies and affixing expiry tags to sterile crates whose contents had never touched soil or felt sunlight. Little was said. They all moved through their duties in hushed efficiency, the silence broken only by the sharp clatter of an occasionally dropped tool or the distant hiss of water lines cycling through their mechanical rhythms. Life underground continued in its precise routine, leaving no room—or perhaps no permission—for feeling.

When her shift ended, she returned home, pulling the curtain to their living space doorway aside with the weight of a full day on her shoulders. Her father was sitting in the corner, polishing something — an old heirloom he refused to throw away. He looked up just long enough to register her exhaustion, then gestured for her to sit.

“You look like the tunnels finally caught up to you,” he said.

“Maybe they did,” she answered, sinking into the bench. “Maybe I’ve been running from them longer than I thought.”

He chuckled. “You’ll outrun them. You have better shoes than I did.”

“Shoes don’t help if you’re running in circles.”

He paused. “You’re not in a circle. You’re in a spiral. You’re heading somewhere. You just can’t see the center yet.”

Aermelia didn’t respond right away. She reached for the teapot, poured what was left, and sipped it even though it had long gone cold.

Her father didn’t push. Just nodded, and returned to polishing. “You did good today.”

“I didn’t do anything that mattered.”

“Sometimes surviving _is_ what matters,” he said. “But if that’s not enough for you… then keep asking the questions. Just don’t ask them louder than the walls can bear.”

Aermelia stared at the wall. At the pattern of mineral stain that looked a little like a door.

“I’m not sure I care what the tunnel can handle anymore.”

He didn’t respond. Just kept polishing. The quiet between them was not disapproval — just weariness. The kind that settled in when you’d already fought the same fight she was still gearing up for.

---

The next day arrived like it always did — with the quiet bloom of cyan light unfurling from the ceiling vines, painting the room in its soft, ghostly blue. No sunrise. No clocks. Just that hush of inner-schedule that told the mind to tell the body that it was time to begin again.

Aermelia stirred. Sat up. Pulled the tin basin close and rinsed her face with water that still tasted faintly of minerals. She combed her hair with her fingers, the same way she always did — loose, then tighter, then loose again. She hugged her doll. Held it like it meant something, like it didn’t just survive out of habit.

Behind her, a voice — calm, familiar, worn-in:

“Still got that old thing, huh?”

She didn’t turn around. “Yeah...”

The bunk behind her creaked. Her father, Merren, sat down. Not close. Not far. Just within the radius of memory.

“You know,” he said, “your mother picked that out. Back before...”

He let it hang.

Aermelia kept her eyes on the stitching at the doll’s side — the one she’d tried to fix when she was nine, and again when she was eleven, given up on ever since.

“Selara...” he said. “Oh how I miss her.”

Aermelia didn’t speak.

“She died the day you were born,” Merren continued. “I wasn’t ready. For any of it. Not for her death. Not for being a father. Not for the silence.”

He clasped his hands like he was praying to something long gone.

“She was part of a group — the ones in charge now. The Sage Collective. I thought they were harmless. A little strange, maybe. Always talking about cycles and preparation and the coming dark. But after she died, I didn’t know where else to go. And they said they had somewhere. A place underground. A place to outlast whatever was coming.”

Aermelia turned, just slightly. “You joined for her?”

“I joined because there was nothing else. They knew the way to the tunnels. Said it had to be kept secret. Said only the faithful could find it.”

He looked down at his boots. “So I said I believed. And maybe I did. Maybe I still do, a little.”

They sat in silence for a while, the light from the plants radiating above them, humming. It's quiet cyan spreading across the ceiling in roots and ribbons.

“So you brought me here,” she said.

“I brought _us_ here,” he replied. “To this. Whatever _this_ is.”

She looked at her doll. The softness in it had long gone flat. She laid it down, carefully, on the edge of the cot.

“It doesn’t feel like belief,” she said. “It feels like containment.”

Merren didn’t answer.

And the light, patient as ever, just kept on glowing.

Then he stood.

Crossed the room to a storage crate she wasn’t supposed to know existed. From beneath a folded blanket and a coil of frayed wiring, he pulled out a small box — clunky, analog, covered in dust like a thing forgotten on purpose. A pictograph viewer. One of the old models from Costa, back when stories were burned into film instead of memory.

He loaded the reel. Clicked the side dial.

A flicker. Then a soft burst of cyan across the opposite wall.

And there she was.

Selara.

Captured in sun-washed grain, standing on a cliffside terrace with the ocean behind her and the sages arranged in a loose, colorful orbit — their robes bright and mismatched, more pageant than priesthood. Selara stood at the center, pregnant and luminous, her hand resting on her stomach like she was keeping time with the child inside.

“She believed in the primordial light, true virtue,” Merren said quietly. “But she didn’t follow. Not like the others.”

Aermelia watched the flickering image, silent. The frame wavered slightly, caught in the rhythm of the machine’s hum.

“She’s beautiful,” she said.

“She always was.”

For a moment, the walls didn’t feel like walls. They felt like memory, blooming in cyan.

Then the reel clicked empty.

And the light returned to its usual shape.

Aermelia left without another word. The doll stayed on the cot, face to the wall. The halls were dim and breathing again — the soft blue of the roots overhead pulsing in slow waves, as if the tunnel itself were dreaming.

She passed the kitchen, the meeting chamber, the murals she had long since stopped pretending to admire. Then turned. Down the passage few used. The one that didn’t lead anywhere. The dead-end tunnel. At the end, her work waited. A wall covered top to bottom in hatch marks — five by five by five, neat rows chiseled by finger or tool, a record of her time in this place. Sixteen years of remembering. One line for every day she hadn't run. The next wall was blank.

She stepped toward it, fingers still sore from yesterday’s count. She pressed her thumbnail against the stone, made the first slash — a diagonal, clean and deep.

The wall shifted.

Not just a vibration. A mechanical pivot — stone moving with unnatural silence, like it had been waiting for her. A recess opened where none should have been, as if time itself had blinked.

Behind it: dark. Not the dark of tunnels or pipes, but the dark of withheld knowledge.

She stepped back.

The mark still burned on her nail.

The wall stayed open like a perforated prophecy

And then—

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