Prologue
200 Words
The house burned like a beacon on the cliff side, flames l*****g the night sky, smoke reaching up like a hand to the heavens. To the people in the village, it was a tragedy. To the people below, it was the end of the world.
More than three hundred meters beneath the surface of the earth, in a vast, winding lattice of tunnels and corridors carved generations ago, an alarm bell clanged furiously. Its echoes died in the smoke before they could reach the surface.
No-one above had heard that bell in centuries. No-one even remembered it existed.
But the people below did.
Those people were the Underkin, descendants of a long-forgotten settlement that had fled underground during a war no history book ever bothered to mention. Over hundreds of years, they had built a living, thriving society: farms lit by bioluminescent moss, libraries carved into stone, homes warmed by geothermal vents. They had heard stories of the surface – stories of sunlight, wind, and oceans – but no living Underkin had ever seen them.
Tonight, as the house on the cliff burned, the tunnels and chambers below filled with smoke and would soon be nothing but ash and ruins.
- Writer
