When we descend, make sure you pack light. They said the black provides – Don’t look back up – this is the one.

What we had and what we lost on the surface is a price to pay for the world we created down in the abyss …

when the light fell,

when we escaped the sickness,

when we ran from the fight and founded humanity -

again.

We began like vagabonds in the vastness of space, left with no sense of direction nor any form of guiding compass, the physical and of the moral kind. Left to our own devices and left over dilapidated materials we blistered our hands and spilt blood for her. Our creation.
With rags thrown on our bodies we excavated the land better than the moles ever could, until one day she learnt to do it by herself. How fast time had passed since our desperate beginnings, when we were at war with ourselves and the world. I still recall the piercing sirens which howled like banshees in the night …

We learned to deal with the tremors which bellowed from above, a reminder of what we were escaping from. She grew fast and her hunger was insatiable, filtering her tentacles through the darkness, she reached forth with boundless freedom and laid waste to the deep. She never stopped. We traversed her roots and made it our home, for as long as it lasted.

And we were destined to be the last.

Her thick carapace would provide us with shelter and warmth to last a millennia, yet we were to be buried alive - buried with the bones of our ancestors who laughed at us.

They thought we were delusional.

Arrogant beyond measure.

At this rate, we’re going to send ourselves us into a spiraling new kind of hell –

Bloody Ludicrous.
                             Don’t you think?

This new world we conjured up from our callouses took our fears, and then took our insecurities - transforming them into a hope that projected itself downwards into the future. Some would come seeking refuge from the storm, hide away from the rest of society and never seen from again, those were the ones she swallowed up and left to digest in her cold metal belly - the ones who she deemed unfit for survival. Others came with an open mind and heart, the ones who figured out that the system only had room for those who integrated with the city. We created the city, and in turn she created us – A cycle made virtuous or vicious based on the choices we make together.

We moved along like electricity on a grid, plugged into the body of her mangled metropolis. She was built like babel and I tell you, if you ever get the chance to witness the great plains of corrosion and red rust you’d think we actually managed to get to mars. The city does not tell our past. It holds our future history like the scars on our bodies, the foundations of steel and the extravagant intertwining of lost souls like you and me. Looking at us from the core, up from below, you would see a thriving constellation of life from all corners of the earth connected by an array of platforms and rail systems. We managed to tame the perpetual abyss with some form of unearthly navigation.

She lured us in to play and to work until they were one in the same, the dirt engraved onto our cheeks, and the soot entrenched in our palms from the old mines were all part of history. We strapped on our gas masks and hacked away with fervour at the mantle. We fed her well and offered up our sacrifices of magnificent ore and minerals. Black onyx and marble were her favourites and were reserved for her most sacred inner chambers. Glow worms made our burrows their home, dripping from the cathedral like viscous neon pearls. Their twinkling illuminations that would fade in and fade out left us in a therapeutic sort of trance. They were beacons of a new dawn, a reminder that we could make it and it felt good knowing we weren’t alone down here.

Day became obscured by the night like a distant memory, containing and concealing one another; creating what we now know as to simply exist – sometimes I can never be too sure. The only warmth some have ever known permeates deep from her bosom, an ominous glow from the generators which sustains the very livelihood of the city. The kaleidoscope of lights brings to mind the soft kiss of the sun and oh how many times I would tell the little ones tales of that bright beautiful ball in the sky that used to rise by day and fall by night like something straight out of fantasy.
                                                                                      Now that is all is a low droning hum.

Back to the black we go …

Lower