Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

I look up.

Whatever’s falling out of the top of the tower is drifting down through the air like packing foam on a lazy breeze. Dozens of them.

No... more. It’s like a slow, rotating snowstorm.

I squint.

Something is wrong.

I ate some scales just in case. 45 Scales—I eat them in chunks.

[Scales: 590 -> 545]

[OXI: 1,600 / 1,600]

As they fall, I feel the true size of the objects. I just couldn’t parse the scale against the empty sky. By the time the closest one is halfway down, the depth perception clicks into place, and I feel my stomach drop.

They’re not snow.

They’re huge.

Each one is big enough to cover half my body if it lands on me. Two wings of what look like flower petals spin slowly above each one, rotating like the samara of a maple seed, and under the petals, suspended, hangs a bulb—pulsing, membranous, wrapped in something like wet silk.

Something alive inside?

Beside me, the runes are still lit steady blue.

Oliver is staring up with his mouth open. Rhayne has her hand over her brow. Lola is standing a little apart from them, face turned to the sky, eyes wide and bright, her mouth open in silent amazement.

I stretch my senses out through the cold, past the hum of the tower, into the descending cloud.

The pulse under the silk isn’t just biological.

My feelings flare.

Beasts...

"COLLECT EVERYTHING, NOW!"

The spell breaks. Oliver drops his jaw, turns, and starts grabbing gear. Rhayne is already moving. I don’t need to look at Lola—she felt it a half second before I finished the sentence. She’s past the fire before Oliver has lifted the first strap, her metal case snapped to her back, not looking at anything else we left behind.

Good girl.

The first pod hits the ground.

It cracks open with a wet, lung-deep sound—not a shell breaking, a breath releasing.

We run immediately.

Another lands thirty feet to our right. Another fifty feet ahead. The pulse under the silk has gotten louder now that they’re down—a low percussive thump I can feel in my chest, out of rhythm with my heartbeat and making me want to fix it.

Every pod in the field is throbbing at a slightly different tempo. The whole desert sounds like a drum circle warming up.

One of them lands right in front of our path. We sprint past it, close enough that I feel the heat bleeding off the casing against my face—unnatural heat, fever heat.

Two seconds after we clear it, a scream comes out of it.

Not a hatching sound. A gutter—low, wet, thick, half-formed.

I turn my head enough to see.

Something is coming out of the casing. Long. Pale. A jaw unfolding in three pieces. I don’t wait for the rest. I face forward and push harder.

"KEEP RUNNING! DO NOT LOOK BACK!"

The field is a nursery now.

Pods are splitting open on every side of us. My senses are pulling in energy signatures I didn’t ask for—involuntary and constant.

Rank F... Rank F... E... another E. Rank D. Another D.

A Rank C somewhere ahead and to the left. And under it all, a handful of readings that are higher than I’d like to confirm out loud.

I notice something else.

They hatch small. Smaller than the casings that held them. A Rank E creature is crawling out of a pod that could have held three of them. But within seconds of emerging, they swell—skin stretching taut, limbs lengthening, wet fur drying into fur that isn’t wet anymore.

They’re drinking in the chaotic energy of the ground around them. Growing at a rate no animal should grow.

Half a mile out, past the edge of the nursery, the desert rises into a wall.

A cliff face, maybe forty feet tall, sheer and dark against the false sky.

A Cover, if we reach it...

"TOWARD THE WALL, MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!"

I’m at the back of the formation. Oliver ahead of me. The girls ahead of him. My shoulder is screaming under the torn bandage, but I keep my legs moving.

Two Shellcats wake up in our path.

They’re newborns, maybe thirty seconds old, shells still soft and wet at the seams, eyes cloudy white and not yet focused on light. But they’re big enough to trip a Ferredon and their front claws are already hardened and they’ve decided that the four warm bodies running past them are lunch.

The first one launches at Oliver’s hip.

I’m already moving.

I draw Eventide left-handed and step into the cat’s arc. The blade goes through the base of its neck where the shell hasn’t finished fusing to the black ink hide. There’s no resistance. The head comes off wet and the body keeps going for two more feet on momentum alone before it folds into the frost.

The second cat is already committed. It’s going for Rhayne.

I pivot—weight on the back foot, no fancy footwork, just a short hop to get my line—and put Eventide through the top of its skull. Down through the soft plate above the eyes. The blade finds brain before it finds bone. The cat’s legs stop working in the middle of its pounce and it skids face-first into the sand at Rhayne’s heels.

"GO. KEEP MOVING!"

[OXI: 1,508 / 1,600]

I watch the number drop for a second before I force my eyes back up. Eventide retracts into its handle. Two kills in two seconds and I’m already down ninety OXI.

I look around, scanning the area.

I can’t afford this battle.

Three hundred feet to the wall.

Another pod drops in front of us. Bigger than the others. Noticeably bigger. Big enough that the wind from its landing kicks frost up to my waist.

Oliver and the girls are past it before it opens. I’m the one still closing the gap.

It cracks.

And my blood goes colder than the air around us.

The thing coming out of it isn’t a hatchling. A plate of dark scale pushes out first, then another, then the curved ridge of a shell—a turtle shell, but wrong. Overbuilt. Artillery-grade. The casing peels back and the shell keeps coming. And coming. And coming.

A head follows. Oval. Heavy. Jaws built like a snapping turtle’s, but scaled to something apex. The eyes are still closed. The skin around them is still wet with birth fluid.

It’s already the size of a wagon.

And it’s still growing.

My memory spikes. Not a warning—a shove. My muscles know what this reaction means, and it only fires when something is well above my pay grade.

Tide Turtarex.

The name lands in my gut the moment I think it.

Rank B.

I’m Rank E. On a good day. With a clean shoulder. A prepared battlefield and a plan.

None of those things are true right now.

The Turtarex opens its eyes.

It takes half a second to focus. The pupils slide, lock onto the four of us—the only warm moving things in its field of view—and hold.

Its head tilts.

Then the massive body shifts under it, legs pushing out and finding the ground, and the thing starts to run.