[2020] [Spoilers] A theory about Thrax and the Void Runners

(this ended up being too f*cking long so just go to the tl;dr at the bottom if you don't wanna watch me try to find pepe silvia or whatever I'm doing in this thread)

So in Dough's recent video about the next update, he shows off the chronicle pages you can get from the hunt pass. In one of these, Priyani and her crew stumble upon a giant relief depicting Thrax coiled around a piece of Void Runner technology. (No, Dough, it's not a Pangar-Hellion hybrid.) It's common for cultures to depict animals which they consider important or dangerous in their artwork and integrate their beliefs about those animals into their folklore--some Egyptian gods, for example, have the traits of dangerous animals like crocodiles, lions, and hippos. In many of these cases, this directly correlates to religious beliefs, as in the example I gave. There's numerous others from around the world, so it's probably safe to say that this relief indicates great respect and/or fear for Thrax.

This is already some substantial dirt on the Void Runners, but there's some things Thrax does that stick out to me as odd. The first is that it can vore you. Much like Malk and Torg, Thrax has an attack that can potentially instakill you if your team lets it; only, for this attack, Thrax f*cking swallows you. No other behemoth has been observed eating people before, or even attempting to do so. Malk bites you and chews on you, but it never imbibes you. To Thrax's credit, it pukes you back out no matter what AFAIK, but it's still weird that it'd do this at all. In fact, it appears that, based on some of the gameplay I've seen, you can actually fight back from within its throat, so this means Thrax is explicitly putting itself in danger. Why would it even have this adaptation? It'd probably work on an unarmed human, but it's still downright bizarre that it can even do this when it risks injury in the process.

A weird quirk of behemoth evolution, right? Could be, but I don't think so, because it's not the only or strangest thing Thrax does. After it spits a blob of umbral goop at you, it does something no other behemoth does: it laughs. No other behemoth expresses emotion in any capacity. Breaking a part will cause most behemoths to roar at you, but this is most likely a threat display for warding off slayers, the only predator behemoths really have, by way of intimidation. The lore AMA thread from a while ago basically confirmed that behemoths don't really think or feel, so why would one openly taunt you? It doesn't add up--at least, not without the Void Runners.

My thesis here is that the VRs may have shared some kind of relationship with Thrax and its ancestor(s), causing Thrax to evolve behaviors to which the VRs would respond, allowing it to live around them without fear of being hunted by slayers (or whatever anti-behemoth organizations existed at that time), or perhaps to exploit their resources (more on that in a sec). The VRs, believing Thrax to be a god or something connected to their god(s), worshiped the behemoth and made sacrifices to it. This is why it swallows people--it evolved to do this because the VRs would make sacrifices to it, a tradition it exploited to keep them worshiping it rather than attacking it. The laughter developed so that the VRs would believe it was a thinking, feeling entity, as you would expect of even the most asinine gods. It's either a taunt to heretics or a sign of appeasement.

That brings me to the mysterious technology we see in the Deeps. The esteemed doctor considers this a representation of a bond between behemoth and technology, and I think this holds merit. I believe the Thrax in the relief coils around one of these objects because they're meant to be used as shrines to summon or interact with the behemoth. One can only imagine what such rituals would have looked like, but this is probably where the human sacrifice came in. I think this is also the primary reason why Thrax coexisted with the VRs; these devices may have been a means by which it could easily feed on aether, allowing the VRs to act as a legitimate food source--though it's unlikely that the VRs knew that this was what the behemoth really wanted.

This is also probably why the VRs died out--they didn't kill the behemoths that threatened them and fed on the aether of their homelands, so their little corner of the sky became inhospitable to them. (Either that, or they encountered new behemoths they weren't familiar with, and a Shrowd just killed them all one day.) That explains why we go down in this escalation rather than up--the islands have sunk thanks to the unchecked behemoths. But we still have one more question to answer: while exploring, Priyani finds a sword, evidently left behind by the VRs. This is actually the sword from the hunt pass, implying that this is a slayer's weapon. But if the VRs had slayers, why did they worship Thrax?

Here's my answer: not all of the VRs believed in the Thrax cult. The nonbelievers used technology from the outside world, either bought, stolen, or scavenged from airships full of slayers, and made weapons to fight back. How else would there still be life, such as fungi, on these islands? If unchecked, the behemoths would have drained away all the aether and made them totally inhospitable to everything. Someone had to be fighting back. For all we know, the Thrax cult was only a secretive minority among the VRs. It's possible that the VRs never died out at all--they escaped, and Priyani only just missed them on their way out.

TL;DR Thrax's weird behaviors indicate that it may have been worshiped as a god by the VRs, a theory supported by the massive relief depicting it. The attempted symbiosis with the behemoth is likely what brought about the VRs' downfall and why this escalation is so unlike the others so far. The VRs may very well be out there, still fleeing from that which they once thought to be their god.