Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 88: Tide Worm

I tell the group we’re moving out. Supply run. If we don’t restock before Phase Two, there won’t be walls worth defending.

Lola is sitting in the sand near the dying pyre, dragging a stick in slow circles. The posture of a child who has been told the playground is closing.

"I just wanted one more shot," she mumbles. Not to me. To no one.

"Next wave," I tell her, "after my signal, you can shoot as many times as you want. Deal?"

She looks up. Something behind her half-lidded eyes catches fire.

"For real?"

I nod.

She’s on her feet before the nod is finished, slinging her gear onto her back with the sudden, violent enthusiasm of someone who just received the best news of their life. The apathy evaporates like spit on a hot pan.

Terrifying child.

I turn to Rhayne. "You good to ride?"

She gives a quiet nod. The blood has been cleaned from her face, but the dark circles under her eyes tell the real story. She’ll hold. She always does—right up until the second she can’t, and by then it’s usually too late to stop her.

Boris pulls several canteens from his inventory. Animal bladder, sealed with wax. He hands one to each of us.

"Don’t let the stars fool you," he says. "That sky is a lie. The desert underneath it is real. Gets hotter the closer you ride to the tower—heat mirages, dehydration, the works. Drink before you’re thirsty."

He’s right. Even standing here with the night air still cool against my skin, I can feel it—a faint, dry pulse radiating from the tower’s direction.

Not heat exactly. The promise of it.

A few minutes later, Jacob rides in on his Ferredon, pulling six more behind him on braided leads.

"Dryden." He tips his chin.

I raise a hand.

"Here are my babies," he says, patting his mount’s neck. The Ferredon closes its ferret-like eyes, leaning into the touch. "They’ll get you there and back before Phase Two hits. Smart animals. Voice and pressure commands—better than any horse."

"Anything I should know before I get on that thing?" Oliver asks, eyeing the nearest Ferredon the way a man eyes a roller coaster he’s been dared to ride.

"They’re docile as ferrets," Jacob starts. "Understand basic commands better than—"

Oliver doesn’t let him finish.

"If I have to try, let’s try!" He swings a leg over the Ferredon’s back, grabs the reins, and kicks.

"Go!"

The Ferredon goes. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Oliver doesn’t.

The animal surges forward with a burst of acceleration that has no business coming from something that looks this ridiculous, and Oliver’s grip lasts exactly half a second before inertia peels him off the saddle like a bad sticker.

He spins backward—one full rotation—and lands flat on his back in the sand with a sound somewhere between a grunt and a prayer.

His face is crimson. Could be pain. Could be shame. The sand in his hair says both.

Jacob watches the entire thing with the patient expression of a man who has seen this exact scenario play out forty times.

"...but hold on tight," he finishes. "They’re faster than they look."

Rhayne’s lips twitch. She catches it, kills it, looks away. Almost.

I mount my Ferredon without comment.

[Mount: Ferredon]

Once everyone is saddled and Oliver has made peace with his animal through what appears to be a hostage negotiation conducted entirely through body language, we ride.

Boris and Jacob at the front. My squad behind. The Ferredons cover ground faster than anything their anatomy suggests should be possible.

Lola is enjoying herself—both hands barely on the reins, swaying with the animal’s rhythm like she was born in a saddle.

The city shrinks behind us. The pyre becomes a dot of orange, then nothing.

Then the silence comes.

Not gradually. It drops. Like someone closed a door between us and everything that makes sound.

The desert ahead is black. Not dark—black. The kind of darkness that has texture. The starlight from the false sky above barely scratches the surface, and what little it reveals is flat, featureless sand stretching in every direction.

I can’t see more than a hundred feet ahead.

Boris shifts in his saddle. Lifts his chin. Inhales through his nose with the slow deliberation of a hunting dog testing the air.

"Reef Sand Sharks," he says. Flat. Informational.

My hand finds Eventide.

"Lola. Back in formation. Now."

She pulls her Ferredon alongside mine without arguing. Whatever she read in my voice was enough.

Jacob’s lead mount—the Alpha, the one he calls Max—starts acting wrong. The animal’s gait shortens. Its ferret head jerks left, right, left. The ears flatten against its skull.

"Max is sensing something," Jacob says, his voice dropped to a register I haven’t heard from him before. "He’s an Alpha. Doesn’t spook easy."

Alpha mounts in Thirstfall are bred for exactly this—bigger, braver, smarter. If an Alpha is spooked, whatever’s out there is above its threat calculus.

Max stops.

Dead stop. All four legs locked. The other Ferredons pile up behind him in a chain reaction of confused, nervous shuffling.

The darkness presses in. I can feel the weight of it against my skin, thick and physical, like being submerged in something that isn’t quite water.

Boris draws his axe.

"No time, Jacob. We push through."

Jacob leans forward and gives Max a command. Low. Firm. The animal’s muscles bunch under the saddle—every instinct fighting the order—but it obeys. One step. Two. The formation moves again.

The next half mile is the longest distance I’ve ever covered on a mount.

Eyes appear in the dark.

Not one pair. Dozens. Glassy, reflective spheres hovering at chest height in the blackness, spaced too evenly to be random. They track our movement with the patient coordination of things that have decided they’re not hungry yet. Just watching. Just measuring.

Nobody speaks. The only sounds are the hot gusts of desert wind, the rhythmic thud of Ferredon feet on packed sand, and my own heartbeat drumming behind my ears.

A tremor runs through the ground.

Subtle at first. A vibration I feel in my body before my brain registers it. The Ferredons feel it too—every animal in the line starts stamping its feet, fighting the urge to bolt.

Max lets out a sound I’ve never heard a Ferredon make till now. High-pitched. Urgent. A biological alarm that bypasses language and goes straight to the hindbrain.

"Shit—" Jacob hisses.

"RUN!" Boris roars.

I drive my heels into my Ferredon’s flanks. The animal doesn’t need to be told twice—it explodes forward with a lurch that nearly rips my arms from their sockets.

As I pass Lola, I swing my arm and slap her mount’s hindquarters hard enough to launch it into a dead sprint.

The formation shatters. Seven Ferredons running flat out, riders pressed low against necks, the desert floor blurring beneath us.

For three seconds, I think we made it.

Then the ground behind us detonates.

A column of sand erupts skyward—not an explosion, an emergence. Something massive punches through the desert floor from below, and the displacement wave hits us like a wall of compressed air and grit.

My Ferredon staggers. I grip the reins with both hands and twist my neck to look back.

A mouth.

That’s all my brain processes.

A mouth the size of a shipping container, ringed with teeth like industrial needles, each one longer than my arm. The thing’s body is segmented, armored in plates of calcified coral that grind against each other as it rises—a sound like tectonic plates arguing.

It hangs in the air for one impossible second, suspended at the apex of its breach, sand cascading off its body in sheets.

Then gravity remembers it exists, and twenty tons of nightmare crashes back into the desert.

The impact shockwave knocks Oliver’s Ferredon sideways. Lola’s mount screams. The sand beneath us ripples like liquid.

Boris’s voice cuts through the chaos with the authority of a man who has named this thing before and knows exactly how many people it has eaten.

"TIDE WORM!"