The Light Within

“Where are we going?” If Deerlegs weren’t so exhausted, her voice would be filled with annoyance. As it was, her tone was as still as flat as her disheveled feather crests, which plainly displayed both her fatigue and her irritation at their situation.

She helped Embargo along, nudging him and guiding him when he stumbled and lost his footing. If they were in Highcliff, he would have been told to stay in a cave until he was healthy again so he didn’t just slip off the cliff face and into the water, or onto the rocks below. Being so unsteady like this was fatal on the cliffs. But, then again, if they were in Highcliff, he would be tended to by someone by now rather than made to work himself to the point of illness and exhaustion.

“You promised those couple of creepy cryos that you were going to help us!”

Her words seemed to fall on deaf ears, if she hadn’t heard Tobias say that Halberd’s hearing was actually far better than most euoplo’s. Which meant that, up until this point, he’d been ignoring them.

“We said you’d get medicine, not that we’d do the administration,” Halberd corrected. Of course his first words since they’d left the “jail” would be as unhelpful as that.

“Then why are we out here in this forsaken place again?” Deerlegs snorted. The action immediately sent a pulse of pain through her dome. The wound had stopped bleeding, at least, but there was still a very obvious split in the skin where she’d collided with Raya’s hammer.

Her headache persisted - as did her question. Were they off to break and haul more stone? Chew and rip away plants that threaten to encroach upon the edge of the city of Atlantis? Dig debris out of the riverbank so there’s a walkable path and the courtiers don’t hurt their poor feet? Mix clay, sand, and straw to make patches to their crumbling buildings?

They weren’t heading towards any of the usual work spots that they’d been brought to in order to do community service work. This time they were following a path along the river, and there was a droning sound that was getting louder the further on they walked, and the further from Atlantis they grew. The jungle was thicker here, leaves and vines almost seeming to peer over the riverbank in judgment as they walked the rocky path.

Halberd seemed to see fit to let her question go unanswered, for he continued to walk in silence.

The droning became louder and louder until it became a roar, the river surface shifting and rippling to move ahead rapidly. Deerlegs realised it before Embargo did - they were approaching a waterfall.

Great. So they were going to be thrown over the edge and dumped rather than be given appropriate medical care.

But to Deerlegs’ great surprise, Halberd didn’t stop at the cliff face to knock them down below. Rather, he started on down a side path that lead down the cliff, not really bothering to pause and see if his charges were following. They would simply follow if they could, or be swallowed by the jungle. One of those options meant that they weren’t Atlantis’s problem anymore.

Embargo was breathing rough again with the exertion of traversing along the uneven trail, and going down the cliff to the base of the waterfall wasn’t any easier. His vision was blurry again and his feet unstable, but it wasn’t the fault of any toxin this time. He knew his wounds were festering, he could feel the fever burning him from the inside. It was hard to think about anything other than putting one foot in front of the other and even that, he had trouble with. He was grateful to have Deerlegs helping him along. Without her help, he wasn’t sure that he would have made it.

No. He knew he wouldn’t have made it. Yes, he had stepped in the line of the slingshot to keep her from being attacked, but if she hadn’t been there to free him from the plant’s jaws, or to fight for them to help him, he would be dead twice over.

Her touch, the softness of her feathers and the strength of her beside him, was welcome.

Halberd finally stopped and waited for them at the base of the waterfall, mist gathering on his armour in the form of small beads and droplets of water. He tilted his head. Something was odd.

“There is a path behind the water,” he said as they finally joined him. There was no decorum or grandeur to his words, just straight to the point. “It has what you need.”

“You’re not coming with us?” Deerlegs asked, suspicious. This felt an awful lot like a trap, or a trick to see if they would run. They wouldn’t run - Embargo couldn’t, and she wouldn’t leave Embargo - and a trap just felt needlessly extravagant at this point. They’d already proven how little they cared for the lives of the islanders.

Halberd snorted quietly, an electronic kind of sound. “I have no need for medicine. I will wait here, for your return.”

That seemed to be the end of it. The longer the pachys waited, the more soaked they became thanks to the mist churned into the air by the relentless pouring of water.

It took a moment to find, but the path they were on now did seem to continue on and cut behind the waterfall. Whatever Halberd had noticed, Deerlegs and Embargo didn’t; they followed the path, Deerlegs guiding Embargo onwards, with the singular purpose of finding a remedy in mind.

It was darker behind the waterfall, and loud. The light rippled and danced as it shined through the water. The sound was thunderous, pounding, echoing across the cave walls. It wasn’t just some shallow depression that they had walked into, either. The cave opened up and lengthened into a tunnel. The surface of the rock was wet and slick, but Deerlegs didn’t see anything that would actually help them.

She nudged Embargo gently, who roused slightly and straightened up at her touch, and they began the trek deeper into the cave.

Once they were some way in, Deerlegs expected the only light in the tunnel to be that which came from Embargo’s spots and quills. She expected the light from in front of the waterfall to die out and fade away. She was surprised, and wary, to see that was not the case.

There was light from up ahead. A faint glow, not unlike Embargo’s spots. Another bioluminescent dinosaur?

She sniffed, but could only catch the scents of wet stone and… fungi. The scents of growing things. That was impossible. Plants didn’t grow where no light shined, even Embargo had said as much, and he knew quite a bit about living in dark places. It was impossible, but it was hard to argue with what her eyes revealed to her as they continued on.

Embargo was glad for the light. It made it just slightly easier to see where he was putting his feet, and he was focusing very hard on walking in a roughly straight line. The glowing fungi and mosses that grew along the ground and up the walls were… beautiful. It was nice to not be the only bioluminescent thing around again. It felt less lonely, even if these were just plants and mushrooms.

When Embargo started to truly tire, Deerlegs slowed them down and helped him to the ground so he could rest and drink from the very narrow stream that was fed by the spray the waterfall kicked up. She hadn’t found anything but the glowing flora, and she was almost too scared of them to even try to use them as medicinal herbs. This couldn’t be what Halberd meant.

And yet… 

“It is.”

Deerlegs jerked around at the sound of the monstrously soft voice that she loathed to recognise. One set of pale eyes reflected dimly in the light of the flora around them; the other was revealed by the faint reflection in the glass of her lamp, almost like a candle flame. The cryos from earlier had somehow made it into the cave without anyone noticing, without either pachy even realising that they were there.

Deerlegs’ feather crest raised, as well as the fin of feathers between her shoulders, as she bristled before them.

“We just want to help.” Tobias almost sounded confused, like he wasn’t really sure if that was what their purpose here was. There might yet be something more that drew them to this place, but since they were here now, then that was what they’d do.

“We don’t need-” Deerlegs cut herself off with a stamp of her foot, biting her tongue. They did need help. It was only thanks to the cryos that they were here to find Halberd’s mystery medicine in the first place, even if he hadn’t told them what they were actually here to look for.

Deerlegs inhaled, then exhaled in a long sigh through her nostrils. She glanced towards the dark ceiling, a rough stone roof overhead, then back towards the cryos. “... We need-”

“The moss will help.” Ghostlight’s lantern swung gently as she spoke. She tilted her head, then angled her muzzle towards the wall where some of the glowing moss grew. “The fungi wouldn’t hurt, but… they’re better to help an upset stomach than to soothe angry wounds,” she mused faintly.

Deerlegs looked between the two of them with a distinct look of mistrust. Why did a couple of cryos even want to help them in the first place? Dinosaurs like them ate pachys. But her question wasn’t going to get an answer.

Ghostlight was watching Tobias, who was gazing into the depths of the cave with a look that said he was far away. There was so much history here. Echoing faintly, whispering as it traveled through the earth. He could almost hear what the whispers said. The cruelty of this place. The majesty, the wonder. It was incredible, a marvel of ingenuity. Oh, miraculous. So beautiful.

Deerlegs looked between the two of them, annoyed that they seemed to be ignoring her now. She didn’t trust them by any means, not by a long shot, but Halberd had sent them in here for medicine, and the moss and fungi were the only things even remotely medicinal that they’d seen. Moss it was.

She scraped some of it off the wall and chewed it into a paste, sitting beside Embargo and applying it gently but liberally to all the wounds on his hide. The chewed moss continued to glow faintly, and left a shimmering paint wherever she drew it over his body. His bioluminescence shone from beneath it, creating yet another layer of brilliance. It was pretty, in a way.

This was a touch that Embargo didn’t enjoy as much. As gentle as Deerlegs was trying to be, it still stung when her hands brushed over one of the ragged, angry punctures. The moss paste stung fiercely, but Embargo grit his teeth. She was helping him. She didn’t need to know that her efforts to help, hurt.

He opened his eyes some time after she was finished, after they sat in silence. He was deeply unsettled by the cryo’s presence (if they were there to kill them, they should have already - he was weak and injured, what were they waiting for?) but it was Deerlegs that caught his attention. She still had glowing moss residue on her hands and muzzle, and just faintly, she looked like she had her own bioluminescence.

“Your dome,” he murmured. She was hurt as well. He couldn’t smell fresh blood anymore, but he knew that the split was still there. She needed to get some of the moss on her wounds as well, so that they didn’t sour.

Due to their small arms, though, he knew she couldn’t reach. Embargo sat up with a grunt, pausing for a moment to get his bearings once he was upright. He started to make to get up, to fetch his own bundle of moss, but Deerlegs brought him some before he had a chance to even put his feet beneath him.

He snorted quietly, amused, but chewed it into a paste as well. When it was ready, Deerlegs gave him a long look before bowing her head. As gently as he could, he smeared the glowing paste on her dome, covering the split entirely.

Again, they sat in silence, gazing at one another in the gently lit dark. Now… Deerlegs had her own glow. It was beautiful.

But a sound, a quiet shift of stone, distracted them both and put them back on edge. They had forgotten, just for a moment, that they weren’t alone. That they were in a tunnel in the earth far, far beneath the ocean, surrounded by hostile dinosaurs that didn’t care for them in the slightest.

It wasn’t Tobias or Ghostlight that had caught their attention, though. It was Halberd, his glowing armour lighting his path.

“Good. We’ll return when you’re ready.”

The pachys looked back into the dark. Where had the cryos gone?