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SUMMARY: A mutant comes face-to-face with history in the caves of his ancestors.

How beautiful the caves were! Their hard grey walls and long, narrow tunnels brought a feeling of peaceful solitude to all who entered. Dozens of large, flat rocks littered the dirt floor, making it the perfect place for meditation. And if you listened closely, you could even hear the faint echoes of an underground stream mingled with the silence. For Smight, a young man of average height and lean build, this place stirred in his breast a grand sense of history. His father had told him much about what went on in these caves during the Great War which had occurred long before he or even his father's birth. It was here in these caves that his people had flourished in secret, just out of the reach of man. For two hundred years they bode their time, finally bursting forth from the womb and overthrowing their human aggressors in a storm of blood. It had always intrigued him, what life in these narrow subterranean tunnels might have been like. Following his normal routine, he lay down on a flat rock, breathing deeply and lazily closing his bright yellow eyes. Gazing longingly at a primitive cave painting, he drifted to sleep, entering the theater of the past.

In his wishful dream, he lived during the prehistoric era, in the very same cave he had dozed off in. He shared this cave with his two army buddies, now ancient mutants like himself: Ripper, a tall, muscular mutant with hair the color of fresh blood and a pair of giant, leathery bat wings on his back, and Ether, who was a head shorter than Ripper, with shiny black hair and dark blue skin. They all dressed in homespun wool and crudely-made leather, a big change from the factory-produced clothing of the present. The three sat at a stone table devouring a meal of yams, bean sprouts, mead, and the main staple of their ancestors' diet, human. The human they feasted on had originally been captured by one of the mutant patrols that braved the deadly outside world in hopes of bringing back human meat. Human meat, Smight's father had once told him, had not always been the readily available commodity it was today; it was in fact a delicacy. Every mutant longed for the succulent taste of human meat back then, his father had genially explained, but most were lucky to dine on rabbits, mice, and birds. As it went in his dream, his friend Ether had purchased the human as part of a pair from a patrol in exchange for some homemade weapons; at first he had intended to breed the pair, as some mutants did, but ultimately he decided that it was too much trouble. Humans, like other animals, seemed constantly at the mercy of illness and parasites, so keeping them alive for too long could prove difficult and costly. After fattening him up for a few days, the blue-skinned one had slaughtered, skinned, and cleaned the male, the larger and deadlier of the two, in a small, secluded chamber in the back of their cave. Smight had watched his father do this as a boy, and had done it himself as a soldier. You simply snapped the neck, cut its throat, and bled it for a while.