Those Left Behind

It was unnerving, walking through the Alpha lab again. It might have even been upsetting, if Gloam’s and Rime’s hearts hadn’t been hardened to the reality of life buried under the earth long ago. Besides, they were out now. Free of the confining walls that had previously meant their long, slow deaths. They could feel the sun on their hides rather than the dullest sense of warmth from old lights that were on the verge of going out. They could feel real wind rushing over them instead of the faintest breeze coming up from below when the cold threatened to spill out from the frozen room where the most horrific specimens were kept.

Their goal was a place deep within the earth - the Grave of the Ancients. Both acros carried in their jaws bones from their kills, a way of honouring the fallen by means of placing pieces of their bodies amongst their ancestors and kin. The practice was ridiculous to Gloam, but she knew that it meant a lot to Rime, so she went along with it. She was pretty sure that Rime just missed the lab as well, and as twisted an idea as that was, it made a sad sort of sense.

Gloam’s footsteps echoed Rime’s as they strode through the ghostly, empty hallways. There was no one here now but the two of them, with only ghosts for company. As good as life was on the surface, the lab was where they had hatched. Where they had grown up, where they had fought, where they had survived. For the longest time, it was all they had ever known, and all they thought they were going to know. No one could have guessed that they would eventually know what it meant to live rather than simply survive.

Walking through Zone B was strange. They now knew what a real jungle looked like. What it sounded like, what it smelled like, what the air tasted like. Everything about this place was artificial. Even the sweet scent of blooming flowers was exaggerated, twisted by whatever the upwalkers that once ran this place had done to them.

Rime felt a twinge of regret in her heart as they passed through the dacen-less greenhouses. Memories of a hunt gone wrong, a relationship gone sour. Gloam nudged Rime’s thigh with the tip of her muzzle, and Rime knew that Gloam was thinking about the same thing, but all was forgiven now. It was in the past, they had made amends. That had happened at a difficult time in their lives, and they had moved past it. They hunted together again, and there was no prey that they couldn’t take down.

Rime paused, briefly, at the top of the stairway. It was a long way down, and they both knew what waited for them at the bottom of the near-black stairwell. Zone C. Their home for countless days. Below that, Zone D - the cold room and its frozen souls locked in endless torment, knowing no rest, the Grave of the Ancients, and Nidhogg’s lair. It was hard telling whether or not the poor, twisted creature still remained in the reactor room, if they had passed away, or if they had joined the other lab-bound dinosaurs in their exodus. Gloam didn’t want to find out, and that was fine with Rime as well.

After another encouraging nudge from Gloam and a quiet rumble back from Rime, the pair made their way through Zone C. Home. The numerous cages had kept them safe and sane, dividing up sections of the zone for acros to claim as their lairs without argument. Finding a peaceful solution was vital to staying alive. Arguments wasted precious energy, and they didn’t have a lot of ways to recover energy lost. Not without trying to hunt a dacen, or… each other.

Most of the cages were empty now, though. Even Basalt, who Rime suspected had stayed just to see her safe, had moved on beyond the confines of the concrete and steel walls. Rime was glad. Basalt deserved everything that the surface had to offer them for as well as they had done with raising her.

The cages that weren’t empty, never would be. They contained the bones of acros that had never been able to break free. Their cages weren’t homes, but prisons. They were their deaths. It was hard to be witness to again, especially now that Gloam and Rime had tasted freedom. Gloam might not have shared Rime’s spirituality, but even she could feel something lingering down here in the dark, watching as they walked past and ever deeper into the gloom. What cruelty their kin had been subject to.

The exam rooms that they walked past lent even more credence to the cruelty of the upwalkers. Tests of all kinds had been performed on their earliest kin. Injections, pieces taken from them, anything to get a reaction. The upwalkers had just watched.

Even the youngest of them weren’t safe from the upwalker’s curiosity. Gloam’s gaze fell upon a row of horrible jarred specimens kept safely on a shelf. Hatchlings. Hatchlings that were too small even to have hatched, pulled prematurely from their eggs for unknown reasons. Their kin had tried to move one of the jars, once. To bring it to the Grave so that it could hopefully know peace, even despite its state of preservation. They… hadn’t been careful enough. The jar fell, and shattered on the ground, spilling its foul contents. The stench that filled the room (and spilled beyond) had been potent enough to make them ill. No one could touch the hatchling, least of all gather it in their mouth to move it. They had left it there, on the ground. Left it to dry and mummify.

Rime rumbled quietly, drawing Gloam’s gaze away from the desiccated, shriveled, pathetically small body cradled by jagged shards of glass. She was coming.

The cold that greeted them before they could step into the Grave was no better than the preserved specimens of the zone above. Artificial, like the warmth of the greenhouse, and the air tasted bitter and metallic. Even worse was the bodies that were forever locked in ice throughout this area. Some were fully intact, some were frozen in a permanent state of half-rot thanks to the infrequent freezing and thawing brought on by the power surges. Pieces of them were forever suspended in ice. Some of them were still in roughly the right formation, with their bones and tissues grimly outlining what had once been a larger body in the rot-tinted ice. Some were so mixed up that it was almost impossible to tell what they had been, save for the shape of their skulls, which floated near the bones of their legs, or their ribs, or the vertebrae of their tails.

Gloam hated this place. Her breath came from her nostrils in clouds of fog, her hide twitching as her body tried to warm her. Rime felt more at home here. Sometimes… this was the only place that she could escape to when the zone above felt so crowded that she couldn’t breathe. She could come here, the cold making her feel alive, and she didn’t have to share the air. The only ones here were long dead, with no desire to share her breath. And she… felt that they needed company. They would never know peace, locked in the ice. Their spirits would be restless forever, and there was nothing that any of them could do about it. All Rime could do to try to ease their pain was keep them company, speaking with them from time to time. She visited less, now. She hoped they didn't mind.

Finally, finally, they reached their destination. Not quite the bottom of the pit, but deep enough.

The Grave.

Dozens and dozens of bones greeted them as they stepped into the room full of corridors made by towering shelves. The air in here was dry and dusty, but somewhat warmer than the cryo room and its restless spirits. Rime paused in the doorway, taking in the sight of it. Gloam waited patiently, quietly. They had been raised on the same stories, had both placed a bone pulled from one of the cages when they were old enough, but this ritual had never had significant meaning to her. She looked at the bones here and saw a place to be forgotten, not remembered.

But this was important to Rime. She saw the bones as something more than just dusty old remnants of dinosaurs long gone. Memories, friends, family, rivals, prey. There were even bones from upwalkers here, though neither of them were sure if another acro had put them here, or if they had been brought by the upwalkers themselves. Once upon a time, there had been order to how everything had been laid out. Bones were placed on specific shelves in specific sections. Some had even been joined together by the upwalkers, put on display for reasons that no dinosaur would ever truly understand. Maybe they had been especially fond of the dinosaurs that the bones belonged to. Maybe they revered them. Maybe they wanted to remember them.

Rime stepped forwards slowly, reverentially, and placed the bone that she had brought amongst the others that had been added by many acros before them. There was no order to how the bones were placed anymore, just wherever there was space and wherever they felt like the bones needed to be. Gloam followed Rime's lead, adding her offering as well, while Rime spoke softly to whatever spirits might be listening and watching them.

Rime told them of what they had seen on the surface: the many different kinds of dinosaur, the lakes, the rivers, the clouds, the sky, the sun. The changing of the seasons and weather were especially strange, their kin would never believe the things they had seen. And the world above… it was so big, so grand. A puddle surrounded them, their island, and stretched into the horizon forever. She had been doubtful at first, but it had grown on her. It was beautiful.

Gloam felt a light chill crawl over her hide as Rime spoke, and she swore that she had felt something like another acro brush up against her side, but it was probably nothing more than an artificial breeze stirred up from the cold room.