F E L K A
Felka flinched slightly at the sound of the man's voice. If she had been standing she would have undoubtedly stumbled, but she was safely on her knees. The young woman supposed she had seen the man when she came into the shrine, as well as another person or two, but while telling her story and compsoing her prayer she had totally forgotten his presence. Papa had always wondered how she of all his children stayed alive when she could barely walk in a straight line without tripping over a boulder she had missed because she was examining an interesting lichen. Now strangers had heard her pray aloud, and it was even worse that it had been such a selfless paryer. There was little room for self-scarifice in this world if you wanted to survive.
"Oh! Umm...," Felka exclaimed and then trailed off, hesitating. She wasn't used to speaking with people. Since her father's death, she had fallen out of the habit of speaking every day. There wasn't anyone to talk to after all. Some weeks she might make her way into town to trade medicinal herbs for goods she couldn't forage from the wilds, but she couldn't remember the last time she had spoken to a stranger. Until the massive influx of Outlanders, her curiosity had mostly constrained itself to plants. So she faltered. How could she explain her wild dreams of piled up prayers to these strangers? It was nothing more than a story she had made up to make herself feel better, she was self-aware enough to know that. No one knew why they were constrained in the dome, and no one knew what had happened to the gods. Well, she could only tell them what she knew.
"Mama said they can't hear us cause the New Gods locked us up in this bubble." Felka shrugged and rose to her feet, taking care to watch where she put her feet. Once she was steady, the woman shrugged and spread her hands. "Other folks say it different, I s'pose, but I figure this way we're more trapped than abandoned." Her voice was soft and a little hoarse from disuse. Unsurprisingly for a half-starved girl with no formal education, she was far from well-spoken. Despite that Felka spoke confidently. She had put her faith in this story and this worldview and she would not be shaken from it lightly. "Don't really need faith they exist, though, do I? All I gotta do is look at that damned dome to know there's somethin' in the world I don't understand." People who struggled with uncertainty rarely survived to adulthood in this world.
