They say water is the origin of all life.
On Earth, we proved that it is also the origin of all war.
It didn't happen overnight. It wasn't a nuclear winter or an alien invasion that broke us. It was the heat. The seasons blurred into one long, gray summer. The rivers shrank into muddy veins, then into dust. The oceans retreated, leaving behind salt flats and the skeletons of ships that had nowhere to sail.
By 2042, water was more valuable than gold. By 2043, it was worth more than blood.
We fought for it. Nations crumbled, borders were redrawn around aquifers, and neighbors killed each other for a gallon of dirty sludge.
And just when we thought humanity had hit rock bottom, nature decided to evict us properly.
The Black Thirst.
It appeared out of nowhere. A disease? A curse? An evolutionary middle finger? No one knew. It struck randomly. Rich, poor, young, old.
It started with a dry throat that no amount of water could soothe. Then came the fever. The dehydration that defied biology. Within days, victims withered into husks, their bodies shutting down as they slipped into a coma.
We thought they were dying. We prepared mass graves.
We were wrong.
They weren't dying. They were traveling.
While their bodies rotted in hospital beds on Earth, their minds were being pulled across the fabric of reality. They were waking up in a place that mocked our dying world. A dimension of endless, dark oceans, monolithic islands, and creatures born from nightmares.
Thirstfall.
A world governed by a cruel system: Ocean's Law.
We learned the truth the hard way. If you died there, your heart stopped here. But if you survived... if you fought, bled, and clawed your way through the horrors of the deep... you could bring something back.
Water Strands.
Filaments of energy that could summon rain in the real world.
Suddenly, the cursed weren't victims anymore. They were our lifeline. We built tanks to keep their bodies alive. We trained them. We sent them into the coma willingly.
We called them Divers. The world called them heroes.
But I know the truth. I was one of them for ten years.
We aren't heroes. We are just thirsty ghosts, drowning in one world so we can breathe in the other.
My name is Dryden Sands. And this is the story of how I died to save everyone... and how the world betrayed me for it.