Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

Before we head down the slope, I pull the Reef Cloaked Cape from Oliver hands and hold it out to Rhayne.

"Yours."

She stares at it. Then at me. Then at it again.

Her hands reach out but stop halfway, hovering over the fabric like she’s afraid it’ll bite. The chromatophore cells in the cape shift color under the firelight—dark grey bleeding into charcoal, then into something almost invisible against the night air.

"I... this is..." She swallows. Her fingers brush the surface. The material ripples under her touch, responding to her body heat, adjusting its shade to match the tone of her skin. "This is too much."

"It’s a tactical assignment, not a gift."

She pulls it around her shoulders. The cape settles against her frame like it was grown for her—the chromatophore cells dimming, softening, blending her silhouette into the ambient shadow. Her storm-cloud eyes peer out from beneath the hood, wide and wet, her mouth working on words that won’t form.

She gives up on words. Pulls the cloak tighter. Stares at the ground.

"Thank you," she whispers. So quiet I almost miss it beneath the crackle of the dying pyre.

"Move out," I say, before the moment can grow roots.

Boris leads us down the eastern slope of Lost Ark’s elevated quarter. The path is packed dirt—steep, switchbacking twice through layers of stone and clay before leveling out at a wide, torchlit entrance carved directly into the mountainside.

The mouth of a cavern. Fifty feet across. Iron-reinforced archway, torches flanking both sides, the stone worn smooth by thousands of footsteps.

We step inside.

The cavern opens like a lung taking its first breath.

The ceiling is a hundred feet overhead—natural rock, uncut, the surface alive with clusters of bioluminescent mineral deposits that cast the entire space in a deep, steady blue light.

Not OXI blue.

Cooler.

The color of glacier ice seen through forty feet of water. It doesn’t flicker. It breathes—a slow, rhythmic pulse that makes the shadows move like tides.

The space beneath it is enormous. A natural cathedral turned into a market district.

Hundreds of stalls are arranged in rough rows along the cavern floor, each one built from whatever was available—stone slabs balanced on stacked carcass bones, wooden frames lashed with cured tendons, metal sheeting hammered flat and propped against the cave walls.

Vendors behind every surface. Buyers moving between them in a dense, slow river of bodies. The sound is a low roar—haggling, bartering, and arguing, the specific acoustic signature of commerce happening at volume.

"Holy..." Oliver stops walking. His mouth is open.

"Annoying," Lola announces, pulling her hood down over her ears. "Too loud."

She’s right about the noise. She’s wrong about everything else. This is the most impressive thing Lost Ark has shown me.

I start walking. Studying.

The economy reveals itself in the first thirty seconds if you know what to look at. No Scales exchanging hands. No currency at all. Every transaction is material for material, service for service, component for finished product.

I stop at a leatherworker’s stall. The sign is a slab of flat bone with scratched text:

[Chitin-Plated Trousers — 10 Chitin Plates]

[Reinforced Vest — 15 Chitin Plates + 3 Sinew Cords]

[Boot Resoling — 4 Chitin Plates]

The trousers on display use maybe five plates of chitin in their construction. The leatherworker charges ten.

The surplus five aren’t profit in the traditional sense—they’re his operating capital. He trades those five to the next vendor for thread, tools, cured hide. That vendor trades them forward for food or OXI supplements.

The whole system runs on margin and circulation. No bank. No mint. No abstract value. Just material flowing through a closed loop where everyone skims enough to survive and nobody accumulates enough to dominate.

Except whoever controls the supply of raw materials. And that would be whoever controls access to the battlefield.

Boris.

I glance at him. He’s leaning against a support pillar, arms crossed, watching me study the market with the quiet amusement of a man who knows exactly what conclusions I’m reaching.

"Smart system," I tell him.

"Wasn’t designed. Just happened," he shrugs. "When Scales became worthless, people went back to what worked before money existed. Took about a year."

"Who regulates disputes?"

"Me," he says it without ego. Just fact. "Disputes go to the hall. I arbitrate. Nobody likes it, but everybody prefers it to the alternative."

A year to build a barter economy from scratch. Arbitration by the strongest man in the room. It’s feudalism with extra steps and better intentions.

I keep moving. Reading signs. Cataloguing prices. The conversion ratios tell a story:

Monster hide is cheap—abundant, easy to harvest. Sinew is moderate—requires careful extraction. Chitin is the baseline unit—standardized thickness, consistent quality, easy to verify.

But teeth and fangs? Expensive. Claws? More so. And anything from a Rank-C creature carries a premium that makes everything else look like loose change.

The Stalker parts in Oliver’s bundle could buy us a full equipment overhaul and still leave margin.

"Uncle," Lola tugs my sleeve. She’s stopped in front of a stall selling small mechanical components—gears, springs, pressure valves, all salvaged from monster carcasses and jury-rigged into functional parts.

"That one." She points at a tiny brass pressure regulator no bigger than my thumb. "Lullaby needs it."

"How much?" I ask the vendor—a wiry woman with oil-stained hands and a missing front tooth.

"Eight claws. Rank D or above."

I look at Lola. "We have those?"

"Oliver does."

"Then Oliver is buying you a present."

"Oliver is annoying but useful," she confirms, already moving to the next stall.

Rhayne drifts beside me, the Cloaked Cape shifting colors with every step—matching stone, matching shadow, matching the blue light overhead. The other shoppers give her a wide berth without knowing why. Their eyes slide off her like water off glass. The camouflage isn’t just visual. It disrupts attention.

"This place feels alive," she says. Low. Almost to herself.

It does.

The market has the pulse of an organism, like intake, processing, and output. Raw becomes refined. Need becomes trade. Trade becomes survival.

We push deeper. The cavern narrows slightly, the stalls thinning, the blue light dimming into something murkier. The vendors here are quieter. The goods are older, stranger, less immediately identifiable.

Then I feel it.

A pressure. Faint but distinct—the kind of energy signature that brushes against your passive sense like a fingertip trailing across the back of your neck.

My feet stop before my brain gives the order.

Thirty feet ahead, tucked against the cavern wall where the blue light barely reaches, is a shop, not a stall, a real shop.

If you could call it that.

A blanket on the ground. A few objects arranged with no visible logic. No sign. No prices. No vendor fully visible. All of this is organized around a door.

But there is an old man. Sitting on a bench, in the shadow behind the blanket, legs crossed, hood pulled low. Motionless. The kind of stillness that isn’t patience—it’s concealment.

The energy coming off that shop is wrong. Not hostile. Not dangerous. Just... displaced. Like finding a saltwater fish in a freshwater river. Something that doesn’t belong to the ecosystem it’s sitting in.

My [Link] hums. Not the sharp ping of an abyssal item or a relic. A low, steady vibration that I’ve only felt when something old is nearby. Something with a history that predates the market, the city, maybe Lost Ark itself.

"Keep walking," I tell the group. "I’ll catch up."

Boris raises an eyebrow but doesn’t argue.

A click in my mind brings it all together, like a puzzle finally complete after sensing that displaced energy.

A mix of horror and disgust turns my stomach.

"What have you been doing here... Boris?"