A few steps away opened a passage leading into darkness. Aarvo nodded and ignited his jets at minimum, lighting the path with their pale blue glow. In the flickering light, its surroundings immediately took on a much more sinister appearance than before: the inner walls of the skull, visible in the interstices between the vaults and the veins, became as black as tar and slimy. The translucent silver veins, the ridges and wide vaults turned a sickly blue-gray instead. Their surface seemed almost to throb and ripple under the thrust of a viscous pulp, as if the uncanny alien life of the grokr had started flowing through it again.
Aarvo hesitated, unnerved by the sudden change. "'Cause it wasn't weird enough already" he grumbled through his teeth. He tightened his lips in a determined grin and forced his steps forward into the depths of the skull. As he advanced into the growing darkness, his pupils opened all the way and the glare of his jets seemed to extend its reach. The space beyond the bubble of light became again a compelling sensation that drew him on. Was it curiosity this force he felt or something else? A call, a trap that was about to close around him?
"Nonsense!" He shrugged off those creepy thoughts and continued to follow the path as it made a curve to the right, then left, and finally narrowed down into a tunnel completely encased in icerock.
Aarvo crouched on his knees, then on his belly, stretched out his hand through the duct and peered into it, but the weak flame of his jet couldn't get to the end of the long passage. He knew the belly of the grokr lay there, as he had seen from the outside, and that the beast had been sealed for who knows how long, so there couldn't be anything else down there, right? Then why was he so afraid? It couldn't be the darkness, because he was used to the deepest nights in space. Was it because of the unnatural quiet then? Or the oppressive narrowness that pressed around him from all sides? Or the fact he was crawling inside the corpse of a dead beast that could fall apart at any time with him inside it?
Enough! He better stop scaring himself!. He pulled back his hand, threw one last glance behind him, then crawled into the narrow tunnel. His shoulders started scraping against the icerock at his sides.
"Are we sure this is a good idea?" A voice in his head said.
"It's big enough, otherwise we wouldn't have even got in."
"You better be sure, because if we get stuck, nobody, I repeat, nobody can come and get us out."
Aarvo gritted his teeth. As if he didn't know... Then, a cold shiver crawled down his throat, when he realized that he hadn't actually thought about it. He was alone, completely alone, without even his mother's voice telling him what to do. In front of him, the tunnel went on seamlessly. He sank his sharp fingers into the walls and pulled himself forward as fast as he could. His body started scratching against the walls with an unbearable screech, then suddenly the tunnel came to an end.
Aarvo scrambled out and stood up. He slowed down his overheated core and cleared his mind of the fog of unreasonable panic that had flooded it.
"It's all right" he said out loud, looking around. His pale jets couldn't light up the whole cave that opened in front of him, but they still allowed him to distinguish some peculiar traits: at the sides, two columns of icerock sprang out of the floor covered with dust and shot diagonally upwards, disappearing in the darkness. Two other columns instead pierced the darkness above him and plunged through the dust floor. Above him stretched a tongue of white, opaque rock, or perhaps it was bone, which shrank as it stretched into an arc.
Aarvo wanted to see more, so he placed both hands on the nearest column and forced a stronger jet from the back of his hands. A blaze of harsh blue light flooded the hollow belly of the grokr. At the end of the cave Aarvo glimpsed two more columns of translucent ice emerging from both sides of the dusty floor and sinking higher up into the ceiling. There, the tongue of opaque white rock that arched against the ceiling ended in a sharp, jagged tip, suspended in mid-ether. He also thought he saw veins of icerock sticking out of the dusty floor and stretching out in parallel rows along the inner walls.
He turned his jets down and went over what he had just seen: the space around him was almost completely empty. Everything inside the body of the grokr must have turned to dust, everything except its shell.
So, that's what happened when you died, he thought. His mother moon had turned into dust as well, and so had all her children, animals and plants that had once inhabited her. That's why there was so much dust everywhere... If even this colossal monster had melted into dust, there was no doubt that it too would one day become gray and crumble to the ground. He shuddered and tore himself away from his own fantasies. It wasn't a smart thing at all to think about inside the body of a dead beast! What was wrong with him? Was he trying to freak himself out?
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