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From the far lands to the underwater ravines, there are always stories, words scrambling to purchase to those who allow them. To the ones who listen to the earth, to the code that makes everything up, they can hear the universe talk about love.
There is a folktale spread by Listeners about a desert stained to red. Where fourteen warriors all have fallen until the very last. Where something reawakens from the last one standing as they fell from a ledge. People say the revenant reawakened out of sorrow. Doomed to haunt no one, or make themself to the nuisance to the living.
The revenant of the Scarlet Desert broke through the borders as it travels in an empty world. Slowly the revenant was known by everything but its name. Made into folklore through word of mouth as it spreads through time and space.
Where a folk tale about love was heard through the universe. That the universe let the revenant of the Scarlet Desert to continue on, to walk away from death.
Names are dragged into dirt and buried beneath time. When those names have become the leash where even the most powerful can kneel down to the powerless if they know. That there are these little whispers of knowing the revenant’s name can let you be haunted. Fill with visions of what story went down that people whisper about.
The universe knows the revenant's name and let it be, let the names of their loved ones be the revenant's own to be forgotten except the universe itself. People talk and people listen and they speak about the Blood stained desert’s revenant, whispering of wings, of bones breaking when they made impact into the ground. Of theorizing, interpreting words that the universe has said, of the meaning of the slaughter in a world where red is a disease.
Where love becomes hunger, where acknowledgement and being known becomes disarming. That bones creak into a song of tethers being cut, that you love things so much that you want them to have some part of you.
The universe loves the revenant and so it consumes what it loves.
And isn't that such a beautiful thing?
That there are some things that are left unsaid or heard. This is one of them.
They don’t tell you about the hunger that claws in the revenant’s stomach, as the void became his stomach, eating away what humanity is tied to someone that came back wrong.
There is nothing holy, nothing sacred of coming back wrong with not having the voice to speak out his name.
He cannot speak his lover’s name. He cannot speak Scar’s name into the world, he cannot say the name of everyone he might have known in another life. Grian cannot speak them.
But the dead sometimes don’t lay, they don’t forget. The lover of the Scarlet Desert continues to walk.
There walked someone in the desert for whatever reason he had, with a llama that looked off, with stitches as if being held together. With dirt, sand and blood cling onto the traveler. Clothing torn and shredded as each of his steps on the sand turns to glass. The figure from what was seen had star shaped scars that was once the home of arrows. Where the void has dripped out and it tasted like everything and nothing.
The clicking of potions against each other as the traveler led his unsteady body out of the broken borders. Supporting himself with the llama, as he makes his way through the open wound of the world. Where code starts to break and the noise becomes too much.
The trail of steps and hooves are slowly falling apart by gravity, a cow floating on top of a tree, creepers getting faces full with sand. Muddy pigs dance so gracefully as they play with the mud that swim with them.
The patchwork llama’s eyes glow with an iridescent glow as it observes the world, humming with the world as the vocal cords of other animals learn to hum, a noise that they can never make before.
The opening of the crack has obsidian glass that somehow takes shapes of hands trying to claw out of the ground, a natural made portal that leads to the world’s code. The beating heart of a crumbling world where there are no players to inhabit.
There were no words spoken between the llama and traveler, just a nod of acknowledgement. As they descend into the rift.
Maybe they'll meet again someday.