Terra Vergine

He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth, creeping furtively toward the stream he generically called "water". Towering overhead, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from sight. Clinging to their foot-thick stalks were other fungi, parasites on growths that had once been parasites themselves. Burl was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted about his waist, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth his tribesmen had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His fair skin showed no trace of sunburn. He had never seen the sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi which, along with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew. Clouds usually spread overhead, and when they did not, perpetual haze made the sun but an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a sharply edged ball of fire. Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungi, colossal molds and yeasts, comprised the landscape about him.