Chapter 590

Chapter 590: Long Since dead

When Duncan opened the captain’s cabin door, the Goathead placed at the edge of the chart table reacted at once. It seemed to raise its head in a half-asleep daze, slowly turning toward the doorway, then it recognized the figure standing there.

“Ah, we meet again,” the pitch-black wooden carving spoke. Its voice carried a strange slowness, completely different from the usually noisy Goathead who would rattle on at high speed once it started. “You left in such a hurry before…”

“You still remember me?” Duncan asked as he closed the cabin door behind him and walked toward the chart table.

He walked past the old oval mirror near the door. Dim, hazy light stirred on the mirror’s surface, and Agatha’s faint, translucent figure flashed across the glass.

The Goathead on the table seemed not to notice Agatha at all. Its gaze stayed fixed on Duncan, the head slowly turning with his steps. As it turned, it spoke in that slow voice: “I still remember you. Ah, it really is a little incredible. I have forgotten many things, after all. The feeling of clearly remembering one person… how strange.”

Duncan came up to the chart table and glanced down at the enchanted sea chart lying there.

The enchanted sea chart still showed that lush forest projection. The ghostly silhouette that represented the Vanished floated above the treetops, drifting slowly through the clouds as if it was patrolling the whole forest.

He quickly compared it with the picture in his memory and made sure the sea of trees had not changed much since last time. Only the Vanished had shifted its position by a large distance.

“I did leave in a hurry last time,” Duncan nodded and said as he sat down beside the chart table. His gaze slid over the Oval Scrying Mirror not far away, then fell on Goathead. “How is Atlantis?”

“She is sleeping very soundly now,” Goathead said slowly. “Last time… she was only startled. I hope that did not cause you any trouble.”

“It’s fine. I don’t mind,” Duncan said. He set his hand on the table again and quietly, carefully stirred the Power of Flame.

At the edge of his vision, wisps of eerie green flame appeared in the captain’s cabin.

Duncan quickly held back the spread of the flames, suppressing them in their current state so they would not again disturb the “Atlantis” Goathead had mentioned. At the same time, he finally confirmed something in his heart.

These flames were not ones he had just summoned. They were Fire Seeds he had deliberately left on the Vanished in the Mortal Realm during the day.

The situation was just as he had expected. The Fire Seeds he had left on the Vanished in the Mortal Realm could “burn through” the border between dream and Mortal Realm and appear at the same time on this eerie Vanished. Flames sent over in this way were like stowaways on the dream level. As long as he kept their spread under control, they would not overstimulate Atlantis.

In a sense, the flames projected here like this became part of the “inherent structure” of this eerie Vanished, instead of being treated as foreign objects that disturbed the dream, like the flames he had summoned here last time.

Duncan let out a soft breath and gave the flames an order. He told them to fade and lie dormant. They withdrew again into the cracks between the deck, the walls, and the ceiling.

He had found a safe way to send fire into this place. If he repeated it once or twice more, he might be able to use these “stowaway” flames to burn through this eerie Vanished and completely seize control of this ship that had formed from the warped shadow of the Vanished.

Goathead showed no reaction at all to Duncan’s actions. To it, the flames that had quietly appeared in the room might as well not exist. It only stayed there quietly, and as long as Duncan did not talk to it, it seemed to be just a lifeless wooden carving.

“Has Atlantis been dreaming all this time?” Duncan asked. As he spoke, he sensed the slow wandering of the Fire Seeds on the ship, and he started to chat with Goathead as if they were making small talk. “That whole forest outside—does it all belong to Atlantis’s dream?”

“Outside?” Goathead shook its head slowly. “I do not know what you mean by ‘outside’, but Atlantis has indeed been dreaming all this time. She… has been dreaming for a very, very long time. In that dream there is a lush forest, and there are… them.”

Duncan’s heart moved at once: “Who are they?”

Goathead lowered its head a little, as if it was about to sink back into a half-asleep state again. But after a moment, it still gave an answer: “They are living beings born in the forest. A very, very long time ago, they gave their race a name. They called themselves elves…”

Duncan’s eyes narrowed at once.

The answer itself did not surprise him much. But in that moment, what came to his mind was the sentence Goathead had said when they spoke on the Vanished in the Mortal Realm—“Remember them”!

The “they” mentioned by the two Goatheads should mean the same group!

Remember them… Why did it have to stress “remember” so much? And in the end, Goathead still forgot “them”… What caused this “forgetting”?

Duncan’s expression shifted several times. As the clues quickly connected in his mind, he felt he was almost certain of his bold guess about Goathead’s true identity. His face grew serious. With special care, he fixed his gaze on Goathead’s eyes.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Goathead did not answer. It only gave a string of vague, groaning sounds, like someone talking in their sleep.

“Are you Saslokar?” Duncan did not mind the lack of answer and kept asking. Without noticing it, he leaned forward a little. “The creator in elf legends, the maker of the first dream, Atlantis’s Creator and guardian god—your name, is it Saslokar?”

Goathead’s unclear muttering stopped at once.

Its head swayed from side to side, as if it had reacted to the name Duncan mentioned. After a few seconds of hesitation and thought, it finally lifted its head slowly.

“Saslokar died. He died a very, very long time ago.”

…

“They died a very, very long time ago. When the world died, no living being could live past that day.”

Never-ending wind and sand rolled over the entire sea of dunes again and again, like the turning of fate. The giant in a tattered robe sat down cross-legged among a heap of twisted, grim rocks. His huge body seemed to intimidate the sand, making the wild wind stop several meters away from the stones so that no dust fell on the traveler.

He was still talking about the things of the past.

Vanna sat across from the giant, resting for a short while as a very good listener.

The stretch of rolling “shadows” that looked like the ruins of a city was already close to them now. They only had to lift their heads to see it.

The journey had been shortened. Vanna could clearly feel that.

At a normal walking speed, she and the giant could not possibly have reached these ruins in such a short time.

This strange thing was clearly tied to traveling with the giant. It seemed that as long as she journeyed together with him, the “distance” on the road would shrink.

After thinking of this, Vanna did not hide her guess. She spoke her thoughts out loud.

The giant answered very calmly: “I can reach any corner of this ‘world’ in a single day. This is my ability. Only in this way can I keep watching and recording all the changes that happen in this world. To observe and record—that is my duty.”

As he said this, he shook his head again with a hint of emotion. “But… now there is almost nothing left in this world worth watching or recording.”

Vanna lifted her head and stared at the ruins in the distance, a little lost in thought.

They were indeed ruins of a city, just as she had first guessed. But when she first saw them, she had almost failed to connect that ruin to the idea of a “city”.

It was a stretch of piled gray-black boulders. The jagged, strange blocks of stone spread across the sand-covered ground like a forest of rocks. They no longer showed any trace of once being buildings. You could hardly see any mark of having been shaped by civilization.

Vanna could not imagine what kind of disaster could turn a grand city into this. It looked as if the entire city had melted in an instant. More than half of the material in the city had turned to gas in the blink of an eye. The remaining structures had melted and flowed, then solidified again under a sudden, violent drop in temperature, becoming these jagged blocks of stone.

But if it really had been some moment of extreme heat… why was the wide land outside the city just a sea of sand?

That kind of heat should have melted the sand as well, turning it into glass-like material. There should not be any desert around the city at all. It should have become one huge sheet of fused obsidian.

Vanna’s grades in her cultural classes had not been very good, but she still had this basic knowledge.

“What exactly happened to turn the city into this?” she could not help asking the giant. “You just said the world died… What killed this world?”

The giant lowered his head. His furrowed face looked like something carved from stone, and his eyes, which looked as if murky flames burned in them, locked his gaze onto Vanna’s eyes.

“Do not try to understand that Doomsday,” he said. “It is already beyond mortal minds, and even beyond the wisdom of deities. When it came, the people who worshiped me begged me for help. I took one look at Doomsday, and it burned through my sanity and my soul, traveler… That is not something that can be described with words.”

The giant spoke and slowly raised his hand, pointing at the blood-red crack in the sky.

“The only thing I can tell you is this: when Doomsday came, a corruption that did not belong to this world poured out of that rift. In an instant, it shattered the ground under our feet and forced it to re-form in pain. All our splendor turned to dust in the corruption.”