Aarvo headed south, and as he made his way to the center of the far side he felt the heat of the moon's prairies become more and more oppressive.
At one point, as he was struggling forward, his eyes blurred, peering through the blinding white hammered by daylight, he again noticed that all the stems of the prairies around him were swaying in the same direction. He was struck by an intuition and stopped. He turned toward the sun and closed his eyes. After a few moments of waiting, he started feeling the slight pressure of the solar wind on his skin. He opened his eyes and studied the prairies in front of him. Yes, the stalks were all bending in the direction of the solar wind, he was sure of it. He smiled—it was a small satisfaction but he figured it out. On the other hand, he didn't understand why they kept getting hotter and hotter as he moved south.
His mind went back to Rochroa, the colossal grokr he had left at the crater. He had decided to call it so-red giant-because it seemed the most appropriate name for such a monster. For the first time since he met it, he thought that even though Rochroa was dead, it didn't mean that there weren't any others like it living somewhere on the far side. Perhaps all the others lived underground. Perhaps the giant grokrs came to the surface to die, so as not to get in the way of others underground—provided these were actually the monsters his mother had told him about. Or maybe they had nothing to do with the creatures that lived under Lissa's skin. And maybe, above all, maybe it was time for him to start looking down there even though he'd rather not to. After all, the far side was starting to look less frightening now that he knew it better.
He looked around and realized that not too far away, to his right, one of those strange holes he had always avoided cut the ground open. He decided it was time to take a look. After Rochroa, he couldn't imagine anything as frightening.
As he approached, he made to hold his rock shield closer and only then he realized he no longer had it with him. At the same time, he also realized he had forgotten his glowing pod in the crater. He turned around and looked back, but by then Rochroa's lair was no longer in sight, hidden behind a series of ridges—and he didn't even know in which direction exactly, because he had been wandering all this time without minding where he was going.
Aarvo cursed his own stupidity, but stayed where he was. Even just the idea of going back to the crater depressed him. He' d make do with what he found, he thought. He spotted a boulder nearby, came at it with his sharp hands, and in a short time he carved out another shield. He sharpened a couple of pieces of stone and soon felt ready to face the new challenge that awaited him. The only thing missing was a glowing pod, but he couldn't spot any in sight. He shrugged and headed towards the black hole that broke the monotony of the lunar prairies in front of him.
When he arrived at the edge of the large pit, he focused for a moment, then slowly leaned over, peering down. A stretch of black eyes returned his gaze many times over. Aarvo startled, but kept his eyes fixed on the crowd of beasts squatted down haphazardly on top of each other at the bottom of the deep pit. By daylight, he immediately recognized them: they were grokrs, but they were tiny compared to Rochroa and greenish instead of red. Like Rochroa, however, they were all covered in dust - and dead.
He raised one of the stones he had brought with him and threw it into the pit. The projectile hit the head of one of the grokrs and split it in two. Aarvo stared horrified at the head shattering and rolling over the corpses of the other grokrs underneath. They were all dead, no doubt. He looked away and scanned the bed of the pit filled with corpses. What were they all doing there, piled up on each other? Why had they died like that? His eyes landed on a darker shadow inside the shadow cast by the edge of the pit and recognized a downward bent in the walls—apparently, this wasn't just a blind hole, but the exit (or entrance) of a tunnel going underground.
'They're eating me from the inside, under my skin...'
So that was the entrance to the the monsters's den? And these little grokrs were the monsters?—little so to speak, because they were still much bigger than him. And down there lay their cities and the flying machines that they had used to come to Lissa? He struggled to imagine grokrs could do such things, because they looked more like the old animals of Lissa than like trkrits, but perhaps he was wrong—he hoped he was.
Now, he really wished he still had his glowing pod with him. He turned around and searched the landscape once again. Nope, no pods in sight, and he really didn't feel like going on a hunt who knew where to find one.
A solution perhaps was at hand, he thought, as he waded listlessly through the moonhair. All around him spread an endless expanse of glowing stalks—they weren't pods, sure, but if he gathered enough of them, they would probably make as much light. Yeah, but the problem was that to cut them off he had to put them in his mouth and stand that disgusting taste not once, but many times over. He felt like throwing up just thinking about it.
He knelt down and grabbed a stem between his fingers. How come there wasn't a better way to cut them off? Had he really exhausted all options?
Suddenly his face wrinkled in a smile—no, he hadn't tried everything yet. He looked down and stared at the nozzle on the back of his hand: he hadn't tried to burn the stalks with his jets! And why not? After all, he was able to melt rocks with his flames, so why shouldn't it work on moonhair? He hadn't tried in on the pods for fear of ruining them, but now that he had and endless of moonhair, who cared if he charred a few ones before learning how to to cut them properly?
He bent the stalk between his fingers, drew the back of his other hand closer, and ignited his jet.
He bent the stalk between his fingers, drew the back of his other hand closer, and ignited the flow of super-compressed gas.
Instead of melting, the stalk of moonhair first sucked in the flame through its fabric, turning the same shade of blue, then it suddenly swelled up at the tip into a ball, letting out a flurry of electrostatic lightning bolts.
Aarvo let it go in a hurry, but before he could step away, the tip of the stem exploded in his face into a bubble of blue plasma.
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