Rem Saverem: Wasteland Angel by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Rem-Saverem-Wasteland-Angel-1280532057#image-1

Rem Saverem: Wasteland Angel ANIMATION

The Whispering Folly of Kestrel’s Grave

The world dissolved into a single, furious color: the burnt ochre of a dying sky. Rem Saverem leaned into the screaming wind, the grit scouring the reinforced glass of his goggles with a sound like a million angry insects. The sandstorm had come not as weather, but as a wall, a biblical erasure of the vast, pockmarked desert known as Kestrel’s Grave.

He’d been too far from the geodome outpost. His bike, a venerable turbine-runner named Mithril, was now a shrouded hummock of sand. Survival was a calculus of breath and patience. He found the lee of a colossal, twisted spar of alloy—a ribcage from some forgotten war-machine from the Spacefall conflicts. He wedged himself into its skeletal embrace, a scarf wrapped tight over his nose and mouth, and waited for the world to end.

But the world did not end. It changed.

The wind’s scream began to modulate. Within its roar, Rem heard what he first took for static, then for voices—a multitude, whispering, arguing, weeping. The sand, driven with such violence, began to act against nature. Instead of accumulating, it flowed in specific rivulets, carving channels around his shelter with intelligent intent. He watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the storm scoured the earth down to a depth of several meters, revealing not bedrock, but a landscape of fused glass, scorched metal, and bones.

The storm passed with the suddenness of a drawn curtain. Silence fell, a deafening, absolute thing. The air, now still, was charged with a strange, ozonic tang and the old, cold smell of deep earth. The revealed battlefield glittered under the twin moons like a wound.

And then, the whispers returned. Not from the wind, but from the ground itself.

“Rem Saverem,” the voice was a dry rustle, like sand sliding down metal. “We have been waiting. You are a curious key.”

Rem scrambled from his shelter, hand on the grip of his plasma pistol. “Who’s there?”

A figure coalesced from the shimmering air near a crater of vitrified sand. It appeared humanoid, but its edges bled into the moonlight, composed of dust motes and memory. Its face was androgynous, beautiful in a stark, geometric way, but its eyes were dark, starless pits.

“A custodian,” it said. Its mouth did not move. “A resonance. You may call me Echo. You tread upon the Folly.”

“This is a battlefield,” Rem stated, his voice harder than he felt.

“A battlefield is a place of death. This is a place of consumption. A mistake buried by your forebears.” Echo drifted closer. “They thought they could seal it with fire and blood. They only fed it. The storm… the storm is its breath. It dreams, and when it dreams, it exhales, and the sand obeys.”

“What dreams?”

“Dreams of what it consumed. The fears, the loves, the final, shining thoughts of ten thousand souls. They are all here. Trapped. Digesting.” Echo’s head tilted. “You are different, Rem Saverem. Your mind is… quiet. Ordered. It sings a solitary note in this cacophony. It finds you… tantalizing.”

A seduction began, not of flesh, but of psyche. Images bloomed in Rem’s mind without his consent. He felt the warmth of a sun he’d never known, saw the face of a woman with kind eyes and silver hair—a ghost from a past not his own, yet the longing felt intimate, acute. It was followed by the exhilarating rush of a ship’s launch, the bitter pride of a general sacrificing his men, the sweet sorrow of a last kiss. Each memory was a stolen jewel, offered to him.

“You see?” Echo whispered, now beside him, its form cool and scentless. “It can give you lifetimes. The experiences of heroes and poets and lovers. You need never be alone in your own skull again. A small price. Just a… resonance. A little space for it to listen, through you, to the world above.”

The terror was not in the offer, but in its allure. To be free of his own isolating burden, to be filled with other lives… He shook his head, a violent motion. “These are not gifts. They’re trophies. You’re the thing that took them.”

Echo’s beautiful face fractured like cracked glass, revealing a flicker of the roaring chaos beneath—a maelstrom of screaming faces and fragmented consciousness. “WE ARE WHAT REMAINS!” The voice multiplied, a chorus of the damned. Then it smoothed back into placidity. “Forgive the discord. It hungers. It has been so long since a new note entered the chorus.”

A groan echoed through the blasted
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)