starmark | Reference: Christmas Event Memory Regain

WARNING; THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS:
Violence, memory depictions of NPC suicide.

The desert is bright and hot beneath the afternoon sun. The sand is golden-brown, the sky is blue and filled with fluffy, cotton-ball clouds. Two figures are posed in its midst, still as stone, and only one of them is capable of enjoying the view, but both of them clearly appear have vastly more important things on their mind. For a little while, all they do is breathe; that's what makes this immediately apparent that whatever this little tableau is, it's left these two people in a Mexican standoff, waiting and hovering on the very verge of surface tension for something to snap and spill over into a fight. More easily missed on first glance is the third party to this scene: a dog cowering in the sand, watching the events unfold and looking more agitated by the second.

The man on the ground speaks, or at least his lips move, but for whatever reason, there's no sound in this memory. Instead, very slowly, his arm moves out and releases his cane, which begins to fall in a downward arc toward the sand. It is, for those few seconds, one of only two things moving. Gravity pulls the crook of the cane in a downward swing like the sweeping second hand of a clock; the dog trembles and shakes as it draws closer and closer to impact.

Eventually, the tension snaps, and the standoff resolves in the blink of an eye. The water pooling around the seated man's body leaps up in a violent arc, heading for the standing one's face; in the same instant, a massive purple phantom lunges out from behind the standing one's shoulder. They pass each other in the middle by a span of millimeters — it's a race to see which can impact first, because whichever one does is guaranteed to be a kill.

It's over in a flash; a fist connects, and the rising water hits the brim of the standing figure's hat, knocking it off and sending it rolling away. By the time the cane hits the ground, the seated man is sprawled in the sand, and the purple ghost has its head thrown back and is screaming a silent war cry to the heavens. His muscles pulse as raw emotion spills out of his body language, and when it's been spent, he disappears.

And that should be the end. Really it should. Except that then, for the first time, the memory makes a sound:

Don't worry; I held back. You aren't critically injured.

But the standing figure's quiet triumph abruptly turns to shock, as all of a sudden the forgotten stream of water comes lunging back — and leaps right past him, rising instead to strike its own user through the head. A spray of blood joins the otherwise clear liquid, and he collapses into the sand, now struck with a self-inflicted critical blow as his former opponent, horrified, looks on.

And they talk. Blood spills out onto the sand as, once again, the two men's lips move in silent conversation. The bleeding one trembles; the upright one continues to remain still as stone, watching with wide and disbelieving eyes, until at last more of his words become audible.

Why are you all so loyal? So loyal that you'd die...?

Discussion continues in silence, until at last the fallen man's voice — thin and raspy, oddly distant, as though the memory has gotten it a little wrong somehow — can at last be heard for the very first time.

He was...the first and only person to make me feel...from the bottom of my heart...

The words go silent again, though the fallen man clearly continues to speak; a few moments of lip movement later, it resumes again.

— the first in this world to acknowledge my worth. I waited so long to meet him.

The man laughs, an ugly wracking sound that makes his whole body shake with it; once more the memory goes quiet, until at last he speaks for what will prove to be the final time.

My name is N'doul.

Soon after, the conversation finishes. The pooled water nearby begins to evaporate, and the fallen man dies with a smile on his face, with the enemy who'd spared his life crouching at his side with still-wide eyes, still hanging on his every word as if afraid to miss a single one.

What follows next is long, and slow.

With no tools at his disposal save his hands and those of the purple specter he'd summoned, the one who survived buries his dead. By the time he finishes, and sets the fallen cane over the grave as a marker and testament to the man interred there, the sun is fast on its way toward setting, and the shadows are growing long where they're thrown across the sand.

He faces the cane one last time, then turns his back and begins to walk away.