Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 90: The Silence After

The antennae-teeth retract. The Worm’s head rotates—slow, mechanical, a turret locking onto a signal. It passes me. Passes Brendon.

Stops on Oliver.

Oliver’s Ferredon feels it first. The animal’s hind legs start to buckle, its muscles trembling in violent micro-spasms. Oliver is frozen in the saddle, his eyes locked on the mouth opening in front of him—a circular maw of inward-facing needles spreading wide enough to swallow a horse whole.

His body knows what’s happening. His mind hasn’t caught up.

The Worm compresses. Every segmented plate locks against the next, the entire body becoming a coiled spring of twenty tons.

Brendon moves.

No shout. No hesitation. He kicks his Ferredon with everything he has and drives the animal sideways into Oliver’s mount like a battering ram.

The collision is brutal. Both riders rip free from their saddles and tumble into the sand. Oliver rolls face-first, eats dirt, skids. His Ferredon staggers but stays upright.

Brendon doesn’t land.

He’s in the air. In the space Oliver occupied half a second ago. And the Worm doesn’t adjust. Doesn’t need to. The mouth was already closing.

The sound isn’t what I expected.

Not a clean snap. Not a quick bite. It’s wet. Heavy. A compression sound—like a sandbag being forced through a hydraulic press. The needle-teeth anchor first, puncturing and locking the body in place. Then the circular mandible rotates, grinding and swallowing simultaneously.

Brendon doesn’t scream. Or maybe he does and I can’t hear it over the sound of the Worm’s jaw mechanism.

I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

The Worm tosses what’s left upward—a dismissive, almost contemptuous flick, the way an animal discards the parts it doesn’t want. What falls back into the sand doesn’t look like a person anymore.

Oliver sees.

He’s on his knees in the sand, face caked in dust, and he sees every second of it. His eyes don’t blink. His mouth is open but nothing comes out. He’s standing on the border between shock and something worse, and the line between them is dissolving fast.

I can’t let him stay there.

I kick my Ferredon hard. The animal launches forward. As I pass Oliver, I lean down, grab the collar of his armor with one hand, and rip him off the ground.

The pull nearly tears my shoulder from its socket. He lands on my Ferredon’s hindquarters like a sack of wet sand—no resistance, no effort. Just dead weight that used to be a man with opinions.

With my free hand, I snag the reins of Oliver’s riderless mount and lash them to my saddle horn. I’m not leaving a valuable asset behind in a desert with a hungry Worm.

We run.

Behind us, the vibration fades. The Worm is diving. We’re leaving its hunting radius.

Oliver is sitting backward on my mount, facing the way we came. His eyes are fixed on the spot where Brendon fell.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move. Just watches the desert swallow the last trace of someone who never asked for a single thing and gave everything.

Something cracks inside me.

Not big. Not dramatic. A small, internal sound—like a single fiber snapping in a rope under tension. Quiet enough that nobody hears it. Not even me, until the echo settles.

Brendon was the dead weight I never bothered to look at twice. The nameless thug. The silence behind Oliver. The man without a class, without a rank, without a single moment that made me think he mattered.

And he did the one thing that matters in this world without thinking twice.

I wouldn’t have done the same. That’s the truth that sits in my chest like a stone I can’t swallow.

We reach the inselberg. Hard ground. Rock beneath the feet. The Worm doesn’t follow.

Everyone dismounts.

Lola is quiet—not her usual bored silence. The real kind. The kind that means she understood what happened and chose not to process it out loud.

Rhayne looks at me, searching for instructions, for structure, for anything solid to hold onto.

Jacob is gripping Max by the neck, murmuring something low into the animal’s ear. The Ferredon is still trembling.

Boris dismounts slowly. His face is closed. Carrying weight that has nothing to do with the Worm.

Oliver doesn’t dismount.

He slides off the hindquarters and walks straight toward Boris.

Not running. Not shouting. Each step deliberate, heavy, loaded with the kind of rage that doesn’t need speed because it already knows exactly what it’s going to say.

He stops in front of Boris. Looks up—Boris has almost a full head on him.

"If you know the tower is the answer," Oliver says, his voice cracked, raw, stripped to the bone, "then why the hell are you people still here?"

I wait for the explosion. The grizzly bear roaring, defending his city, his people, his decisions.

It doesn’t come.

Boris shoves him. Not violent. Firm. The kind of push a father gives a son who’s about to break something he can’t fix.

Oliver stumbles one step back.

Boris turns his back and walks away. Doesn’t say a word. His shoulders are curved. His stride is heavy. The posture of a man who has heard that question before—maybe from his own mouth, in the dark, when nobody was listening—and never found an answer that didn’t draw blood.

Oliver stands there. Fists clenched. Jaw locked. Watching Boris walk away.

I walk to him.

"Oliver."

He doesn’t look at me.

I slap him. Open palm. Across the face. Hard enough to turn his head.

His eyes snap wide. The rage changes targets instantly.

Good.

Rage I can work with. Whatever he was sinking into, I can’t.

"Wake up," I say. I don’t shout. Don’t need to. "This is Thirstfall. People die here. Good people die here. And if you want to walk out into that desert and join them, the door’s open. But I don’t have time to watch you destroy yourself."

I let the silence do the work.

Three seconds.

Five.

"Brendon didn’t throw himself in front of that Worm so you could die of grief in the sand. He did it so you could stay alive." I hold his gaze. "So do him the courtesy of staying alive."

Oliver looks at me. His eyes are red. The print of my hand is on his cheek.

He doesn’t respond.

But he doesn’t walk toward the dark either.

I step back. Look at my squad.

What I see worries me more than the Worm.

Boris is sitting on a rock at the edge of the outcrop, his back to the group, head bowed. Carrying a guilt I don’t fully understand yet, but it’s eating him alive—I can see it in the slope of his shoulders, the way his hands hang between his knees.

Oliver is standing, but hollow. The anger is keeping him upright. When it burns out, I don’t know what will be left.

Rhayne is holding Lola’s hand. Lola is letting her.

My squad is broken. Not physically—bones heal, OXI recharges. The fracture is somewhere else. In the kind of structure that doesn’t show up on any HUD.

And the mission isn’t over. The thorns still need collecting. Phase Two is still coming.

I breathe.

First, fix the pieces. Then, back to war.