Aarvo woke with a start flinging his arms up to shield his eyes from the explosion, then realized he was lying on his back. He sat up and looked around in bewilderment. What happened? Did he pass out? Did he have a dream? The dazzling light hurt his eyes, while the moonhair howled around him and pressed against him with unbearable heat.
A sharp, burning pain on his face, palms of his hands, chest and thighs surfaced in his consciousness. He touched his face and found it warm and full of deep scars, his eyes swollen and inflamed. He couldn't see well and only after a while he managed to recognize the blue scars he etched on his palms, arms and thighs. His face was probably as bad, he thought. The plasma bubble must have whipped him so hard that it had carved those deep marks into his rocky skin. So, the moonhair wasn't just weird and bitter but it could also turn into a crazy explosive ball, if you handled it the wrong way.
"Good to know" he grunted and stood up. At that very moment, a sickwalker floundered in the thick of the prairie, staggered out nauseously on its threadlike ends and headed towards him full of his sick and twisted life. A wave of disgust pulsed in Aarvo's blurry head, he jumped back, keeping its eyes on the misshapen creature as it passed by and rolled away toward the grokr's pit. For an instant, Aarvo thought of warning the creature of the danger it was heading for, but before he could make up his mind, he saw it blindly reaching the edge of the crater, cross it, and drop into the abyss.
Aarvo shivered and shook his head. "Did he really have to creep in there?" He walked to the edge and looked down: now that the sun was lower, the pit was almost all in the shade, but at the bottom of the hole, lit by its own light, he saw the sickwalker stuck between the carcasses. At least it didn't get in the tunnel, he thought. He stood by and watched it wriggling inconclusively between two grokr skulls, unable to break free, and thought that perhaps it was time to face these creatures once and for all. Stuck as he was, the sickwalker couldn't do him any harm and perhaps it might even be grateful if he pulled it out of that trap he'd gotten himself into. If ghosts could feel thankful though, because if it was actually dead and was just pretending to be alive, he wasn't sure it'd care much.
He turned around and stared at the moonhair at his feet, massaging the scars on his face. Before doing that, though, he needed to get a light that could shine though the darkness that awaited him there. Which only meant one thing...
Trying not to vomit, he crouched down, put a thread of moonhair in his mouth and detached it from the stalk. He spat out the disgusting blob that had melted on his tongue and noticed that this time it didn't crystallize right away, but instead remained soft and sticky. He shrugged—perhaps it was due to the heat of the sun.
He cut another stalk, but when he passed it into his left, where he held the first one, he saw that the cut ends of both moonhair threads had turned towards each other. Their surfaces were shaken by a myriad of bubbles that soon burst out into hundreds of fine silver filaments. As if they possessed their own will, these tiny tentacles stretched out towards each other, intertwined into a thick web and formed a sort of fibrous scar that finally joined the two cut ends.
"Here we go again" Aarvo hissed between his teeth "I should have called you weirdgrass and not moonhair. Now, how am I going to pick you up if you do that?" He took the two ends and pulled them apart, but they staid perfectly welded together.
"Right" he grumled, but then had an idea that changed his mood at once. That wasn't bad at all: instead of walking around with a bunch of scattered moonhair stalks, now he could tie them all together and maybe even keep his hands free...
A triumphant smile chipped his face and remained sculpted there even after dozens of stalks of moonhair had passed between his lips, turning his mouth into a pulsating mass of disgust.
When he was done, the glowing coils from the bundle of stalks he had wrapped around his body stood out loose in all directions, making him look more like a luminescent space bug than his old self.
Aarvo definitely felt stupid looking like that and for the first time in his life was grateful nobody else could see him. He tried not to mind the suffocating heat that radiated from the moonhair clinging to his skin, but only managed to shift his attention to his swollen, burning tongue, then stepped closer to the edge of the pit and jumped down.
With a couple of bursts of his jets he stopped his descent and landed smoothly on the blanket of dead grokrs.
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