The people in Bastion call this place the Searing Expanse. An honest name, but it lacks imagination. For me, it's home.
Every day, I walk on an ocean of gold that never truly sleeps. These dunes breathe, moving slowly while I'm asleep, reshaping my world without ever asking for permission. The two suns up there never tire of watching, sending down a heat that for others is a curse, but for me, feels like a constant hug. A hug that's a little too tight, maybe, but at least I never feel cold.
They call me the "Dune Scavenger." Probably because I'm the only one crazy enough to dance with death every day, looking for the remnants of a civilization that surrendered to the sand long ago.
"A name is just a label someone gives you so they can hate you more easily," I whisper to the wind. The wind doesn't answer, of course. It just throws stinging grains of sand against the part of my cheek my mask doesn't cover.
My only real conversation partner is more faithful than the wind. I call it the Sandsong. It's not a sound, not music. It's more like a frequency that only my soul can tune into. A symphony played by billions of grains of sand, each one whispering stories of the ages they have witnessed. A silence that is so crowded.
The Sandsong is my secret. It's what tells me where water is hiding. It guides me to the crystal cacti I can eat. And it warns me of the colossal sand-wyrms sleeping soundly beneath my feet.
But today, it's different.
"What is it?" I ask softly, stopping at the crest of a dune. I kneel, letting my hand sink into the warmth. "You sound panicked."
The hum that is usually calm now feels piercing. A dissonant note in a perfect harmony. The vibration feels sharp, alien. Like a shard of glass in a song that should be soft.
Something-out-there-is-wrong-dangerous-but-you-want-to-see-it.
The message doesn't come in words, but in feelings. Three conflicting feelings. I smile from behind my face covering. "Since when did you get so complicated?"
My curiosity is a compass that often points toward trouble. And today, that needle is spinning wildly. I slide down the dune, heading for a basin where the light from the twin suns seems to be playing tricks. The sand there isn't just reflecting the light; it's glowing from within with a soft, blue hue.
I approach slowly. "Okay, okay, I hear you," I mutter to the Sandsong, which is now screaming inside my soul. "No need to be so loud."
My boots feel a strange warmth as I step into the glowing area. I crouch down, brushing away the sand that feels alive beneath my gloved touch. A few inches below the surface, my fingers touch something impossible. Something cold and perfectly smooth.
"Well now... aren't you a pretty little secret?"
Slowly, I dig the object out. My heart is beating faster than usual, as if trying to match the rhythm of the pulsing blue light from the thing in my hand.
A crystal shaped like a teardrop.
It catches the sunlight and fractures it into a thousand tiny auroras dancing within its depths. Beautiful. So beautiful it feels wrong. This thing doesn't belong here. It doesn't have the song of the sand. It's just silent, cold, and full of a power I don't recognize.
That's when the Sandsong stops singing. It screams.
INTRUDER! ALIEN! UNMAKE!
"What—"
Before I can finish my question, the ground beneath me trembles violently. Not a normal quake. This is a tearing tremor. The dune behind me explodes upward as if a new volcano has just been born.
I'm thrown backward, and for the first time in a long time, I feel pure terror. From the fountain of sand, a head emerges. The head from every Xylosian's worst nightmare. Armored plates as hard as steel, and a mouth filled with crystalline teeth as large as my body.
A Dune-Maw.
"Gods... no," I hiss, my voice catching in my throat. The creature is a legend. A bedtime story to scare children from leaving the walls of Bastion. Turns out, it's real. And it's looking at me.
It roars, and the sound doesn't just enter my ears, it slams into my entire body. I'm paralyzed. My legs refuse to run. My mind is blank. The only thing I'm holding onto is the cold, blue crystal in my hand.
Then, it lunges.
Time slows to a painful stretch of eternity. In that split second, as its gaping mouth prepares to swallow me whole, two things happen at once.
The crystal in my hand explodes in a blinding white light.
And my desperation finally finds a voice. I no longer whisper to the sand. I scream at it. A plea torn from the core of my being.
"HELP ME!" I scream, hot tears soaking the cloth on my face. "PLEASE!"
And the sand... it answers.
Not with a whisper. Not with a song. But with a fury that matches my own.
The entire landscape rises. A wall of solid, compacted sand shoots up from the ground, forming a giant shield in front of me. It slams into the Dune-Maw's descending head with the sound of a world-shaking explosion.
The creature staggers back, shrieking in shock and pain. But it's not over. The impact, combined with the energy from the crystal in my hand, creates a resonance that tears a hole in the fabric of reality.
The white light from the crystal swallows everything. The sand, the monster, the sky.
I feel myself being pulled, stretched, torn through a thousand screaming dimensions. My consciousness thins. And the last thing I perceive before it all turns white is the Sandsong. It's no longer screaming. It's singing a single, clear, harmonious note.
A note that doesn't say goodbye, but welcome.