Lacking a scriptural text or canon of rituals, the stratomezan worldview did share one thing in common with religion: a central miracle.

The soul-wind, it was believed, was a vital life-force that permeated the atmosphere. While possessing no mind of its own, it was driven by an inexorable will to indwell a biological host, for only then could it awake to true consciousness. The soul-wind could not animate any type of creature, however. A bug was too constricting and birds, having hatched fully formed from eggs, were too fixed in their forms. Only the spar-dwelling salamanders were large and malleable enough to provide suitable hosts.

The stratomezans did not take this belief solely on faith. The soul-wind was backed, if not by hard science, then at least by a preponderance of anecdotal evidence. The most convincing proof was an affliction that could strike down a strato in a matter of hours and for which there was no cure: altitude induced cellular de-cohesion syndrome, or alt-atrophy for short. Alt-atrophy took a low and a high form. Descending to a lower altitude triggered a reversion back to a more primitive form. At the other extreme, ascending into space caused one to dissolve away entirely.

This explained why the stratos never conquered space or came down from their sky islands to colonize the lowlands. Even flying was looked upon with trepidation. The lesson of alt-atrophy was clear: any stratomezan that dared venture outside the blessed stratosphere was doomed. This was no mere religious mumbo-jumbo. There was live footage of it.

Stratomezans had tried on five separate occasions to launch someone into space and safely return them back home. Each time, scientists had been convinced that, secure within a self-contained bubble of pressurized atmosphere, one of their number—and his soul-wind—could survive the void of space. Yet each attempt had ended in catastrophe. The last would-be astronaut was just completing his first orbit when he lost consciousness and started to decompose.

Over the next few hours, the on-board cameras broadcast the rapid descent into formless protoplasm. Facial features began to sag then the eyes engorged and squelched out of their sockets. The chest cavity collapsed inward and the arms drooped, the hands swelling up like blood-filled balloons. The gut bloated obscenely and split open with a fleshy hiss; jellied muscle and viscera oozed forth, boiling into putrescent froth. After three thousand years, the event was still fresh in the collective memory. The stratomezans had long memories to match their long lives.

The accounts of low alt-altrophy were no less disturbing. They always began the same way. An intrepid adventurer, dismissing the dogma of the soul-wind, set out on a solo expedition to study the T-alpha civilization firsthand. Soon after landing, he became delirious and collapsed, unable to rise again. His body would twitch and hump as if in the throes of a seizure then go still, giving every appearance of being dead. Over the next few hours, the internal organs, including the bones, would dissolve away, until there was only a skin-covered blob with a pair of bulbous black eyes, still perfectly formed, floating on top. The skin didn't split open as it did in space, the atmospheric pressure being sufficient to equalize the internal forces.

There the mass would sit for up to three days, giving off a sulfurous vapor that repelled scavengers and flies. Even when frost formed on its surface, the eyes still remained clear. A reflex action caused them to blink from time to time, depositing a tear-like fluid. Left alone, it would eventually go stiff and start to decompose, but in some cases a T-alpha might happen across it. Seeming to act out of some ancient instinct, it would remove its clothes and cavort around the fleshy mass in a rhythmless dance. After an hour or so of this, it would come to itself as if snapping out of a trance, looking breathless and dazed. After getting dressed, it might linger for a while to see if anything happened. When nothing did, it would grow impatient and leave.

In due time, something would happen. So slowly as to be indiscernible at first, the skin would settle and crease. Below the surface, bigger changes were at work as bits of protoplasm coalesced into ever larger clumps. Though seemingly random, there was a deep order to the process. The shapes fit together in specific ways to form tissues and organs. Viewed at high speed, the last few hours looked like a special effect. Inside a blubbery sack of skin, ropes of muscle wrapped around shafts of bone then sutured themselves together with a latticework of blood vessels. Proto-limbs ratcheted themselves into place until a forearm took shape here, a foot there. The bulge of a gut would appear followed by the roundness of a buttock. The eyes found their place in a bulbous lump on its way to becoming a face.

The whole mass would jerk and shudder then start to lurch upward, collapsing back on itself a few times until, quivering and unsteady, it would finally manage to stand upright, a squat toad-like thing with a broad face and a fat paunch. A T-alpha, just like the one that had wandered by a few days before. It would blink and glance around, unsure of where and who it was. It might take a few tentative steps, testing its balance. Eventually, a T-alpha, maybe the same one, would wander by and lead it away to its village. Retaining no memory of its former self, it would live out the rest of its foreshortened years as a member of T-alpha society.