Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

Duvilin opens his mouth again, trying to explain himself, but no words come out.

I wait.

He closes his eyes for a few seconds and runs a hand over his face, searching for something that seems to exist beyond the immediate reach of his own consciousness.

In all the time I’ve known him, I’ve rarely seen him hesitate like this. Even when he didn’t know an answer, he usually admitted it easily and moved on.

Now he seems to know the answer is there. He just can’t reach all of it.

"You said you remembered something about the world," I say. "What?"

Duvilin breathes deep.

"The world... master."

"That didn’t narrow down any of the possibilities."

He ignores it.

"I remember people. Many. Streets... houses... a society."

His brow tightens as he tries to organize images that apparently arrive broken.

"There were cities. Very large buildings. Some I recognize and don’t recognize at the same time. I know they were familiar to me, but I can’t say where they were. There were children running between the houses, markets, soldiers... machines too."

"Your civilization?"

Duvilin takes a while before nodding.

"I think so."

The answer carries little certainty; I feel his voice tremble slightly.

I lean my body forward.

"Did you have a name?"

I know a lot about the old scriptures — maybe it’s something I can tie to what I already know.

He closes his eyes again.

"We did."

"What was it?"

The silence returns.

Duvilin presses his fingers against his own leg and shakes his head.

"I don’t remember."

That’s starting to irritate me, but not with him. I know the feeling of having information trapped behind some wall inside your own head. It’s a frustration born of the sense of powerlessness.

And beyond that, pushing Duvilin would probably only make him repeat the same fragments.

"Then forget the name of the civilization. What do you remember most clearly?"

Duvilin stays still for a few seconds.

When he opens his eyes, there’s something different in them.

"The name of the world."

My curiosity wakes all the way up.

"Thirstfall?"

He answers almost immediately.

"No, master. That isn’t the name of the world I remember."

I straighten my posture.

"Then what is it?"

Duvilin looks at me.

This time the hesitation doesn’t seem to come from memory.

He knows.

"Tell me."

His mouth opens.

"It was called █░█░░██░█—"

The sound crosses my ear without forming a single word.

I flinch back on reflex.

I’ve heard that before.

The same impossible interference, as if the information existed in Duvilin’s mouth and was destroyed in the small space between him and me.

’Damn it... Ocean’s Law...’

A window appears.

[FIREWALL ACTIVATED.]

Duvilin looks to the side, searching for something he probably can’t see, then back at me.

"Did you hear it, master?"

"Yes. ’Firewall activated’ popped up here, but nothing changed."

I stand and go to the desk.

If the problem is the voice, there are simple ways around it.

I grab a sheet of paper and push it, along with an ink pen, toward Duvilin.

"Write it."

He takes the items and begins.

For a moment, it seems to work.

Duvilin sets the tip of the pen on the paper and draws a symbol I don’t recognize, because it’s incomplete. It isn’t any modern alphabet of Azure Prime. The shape vaguely resembles certain runes I’ve seen in old structures, though it’s far more elaborate.

Before he starts the second mark, the first dissolves, shifting and losing its shape.

I stare as the ink moves on its own across the paper. The strokes separate, spin, and rearrange into a meaningless sequence before Duvilin can start the next symbol.

"Stop."

He lifts the pen.

The second rune starts to warp too.

Within a few seconds, what should have been a name turns into a set of disconnected shapes.

I take the paper.

"So it isn’t the voice."

Duvilin watches the result with the same concern I feel.

Ocean’s Law isn’t censoring a sound. It’s censoring the information.

That makes the problem more interesting and much worse.

I think for a few seconds.

"Let’s do it differently. Don’t speak. Just confirm or deny."

Duvilin nods.

"This place you remember — is it on another world?"

He shakes his head.

’A no.’

I frown.

"So it’s here?"

Duvilin nods.

I look at him for a few seconds, trying to figure out if I phrased it badly.

"Here, on this world where we are now?"

Another yes.

The answer eliminates one possibility and opens a dozen worse ones, confusing me completely. After all, he’d said it wasn’t Thirstfall.

I get an idea and point at the floor.

"This planet I call Thirstfall... your people called it by another name?"

Duvilin confirms.

I stand frozen.

’So that was it.’

Duvilin’s civilization didn’t exist on some distant world before arriving here. It wasn’t a foreign race lost through some portal or event I didn’t know about.

They lived in Thirstfall.

They just didn’t call the place Thirstfall.

My head is already forming the next question when Duvilin doubles over in agony. The change is so abrupt that it takes me a moment to react. He grips his own head with both hands and drops to one knee.

"Duvilin?"

The ancestor tries to answer, but the sound dies before it comes out.

The skin of his hands begins to unravel into blue smoke.

I stand immediately.

"Stop. Don’t try to remember anything else."

The smoke climbs up his arms.

Duvilin grits his teeth as his whole body starts to lose consistency. For the first time, I see real pain cross that face. Not a controlled combat reaction. The expression of someone having something torn out of their own existence.

I reach out on instinct, and my hand passes through part of his shoulder, which is already dissolving into a kind of smoke.

The interface appears in front of my eyes.

[FIREWALL VIOLATION DETECTED.][Restricted Information Threshold Exceeded.]

Duvilin tries to lift his face.

For an instant I think he’s going to say something, but his body comes apart first. The blue smoke spreads through the room and vanishes a few seconds later, leaving only the empty chair.

[Ancestor Duvilin has been forcibly dismissed.]

I keep looking at the message.

"Son of a bitch..."

The firewall understood.

Not just the words. Not just the writing. Even the indirect questions were allowed only as long as they didn’t cross some invisible limit.

The moment I started building real information from the answers, Ocean’s Law stepped in.

I look back at the paper on the desk. The scrambled runes are still there, useless.

An entire civilization existed on this world before everything I know. Various accounts, scriptures, and remnants are still visible in Thirstfall, but nothing is like what he described. So complete and full of life... like Earth.

And the best part: now Duvilin remembers that place. He just needs to tell me.

Maybe other ancestors exist too, and something inside the system considers the information dangerous, keeping even the planet’s original name from reaching me.

That changes the way I need to look at Duvilin.

If the memories unlocked when I evolved to Rank C really made Duvilin remember that civilization, he could know much more about the Drifters if I evolve further. Maybe about the Aion Codex. Maybe about things I don’t even know I need to ask yet.

The problem will be keeping him materialized long enough to find out any of it without Ocean’s Law tearing him out of the room.

I let my breath out and throw myself back onto the bed.

Enough.

My head has spent the entire day switching between false prophecies, a real apocalypse, the Deepwarden, Overmemory, erased memories, and a civilization censored by the system itself.

For a few minutes, I just want to exist without solving anything.

I lie looking at the ceiling.

A small spider crosses a crack near the wall.

It has legs too thin for its body, small translucent plates over the abdomen, and two bluish points that glow every time it changes direction. It doesn’t look dangerous. It’ll probably spend its whole life in this dormitory eating things smaller than itself.

Even so, it would never exist like that on Earth.

My eyes follow the animal until it disappears behind a beam.

How many things in this world had I accepted simply because they were normal in Thirstfall?

Animals.

Plants.

OXI.

The ocean sky.

Even humanity itself, living under that same suspended ocean.

Now I know other people looked at this same world long before us and called all of it by another name.

’What happened to them?...’

I keep thinking about it until exhaustion wins.

I don’t notice when I fall asleep.

The first thing I see is fire.

Then a city.

Pale towers rise among enormous trees, so tall that the branches pass platforms built several floors above the ground. In the next instant, the same towers are broken, cut through by smoke and light.

I don’t know where I am.

I don’t know when, either.

People run along a wall. They have features similar to Duvilin’s, elongated ears and bodies covered in light armor that glows at specific points when they move.

Machines advance below.

Some walk on six metal legs, carrying structures that fire bursts of light against the walls. Others seem to have been built around living creatures. Flesh crosses plates, cables plunge into exposed muscle, and shapes I can’t identify advance alongside soldiers in completely different armor.

The image changes before I understand who’s fighting whom.

I see a forest burning.

An enormous structure falling from the sky.

Hundreds of figures crossing a bridge while something explodes behind them.

Then I see Duvilin.

I recognize him before I understand the battlefield.

He looks younger, though age is hard to measure in that race. He wears armor I’ve never seen and holds a bow very different from the one associated with him now.

He’s covered in blood, and I don’t know whether it’s his or someone else’s.

Duvilin pushes through an enemy formation while lights cut the space around him. An arrow leaves his hand and passes through some machine before exploding on the other side. He spins, draws another, and strikes a huge creature at the point where metal meets flesh.

Then he stops.

The bow rises.

Something begins to gather on the string and, for an instant, I see lines.

The same ones Drifter Mode showed me in the room, but in far greater quantity. Currents of force and OXI cross the battlefield and seem to converge on the arrow between Duvilin’s fingers.

He draws it to the limit.

An entire section of the enemy army stands before him.

Duvilin is alone, but something hits him first.

The impact comes from the side with violence, tearing him off the ground and breaking his stance.

His body passes through smoke, slams against a metal structure, and falls among the wreckage.

The bow disappears from his hand.

I see blood spread beneath him while the war continues around him.

Duvilin tries to get up.

The arm fails.

For a brief instant, his eyes stay open, looking at something above the battlefield I can’t see.

Then I open mine.

The dormitory is dark.

The small spider is gone, and the chair in front of me is still empty.

I stay lying down, breathing slowly, while the last image of Duvilin on that battlefield begins to fade from my head.