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Two gods sit on the edge of eternity.
Their legs dangle over the side like children not yet grown. They’re not quite children, though, even if KirinDave would have you know that there’s still a lot left for them to learn. If it is a child’s job to learn, he says, then we are all made children, and experimentation is as our wont.
His companion agrees, idly kicking against the empty void. He rather likes the sound of that, he says. Of course, he’s more about the exploring the dark places and lightning them up, which is conceptually the same thing from a certain point of view. He’s got stars falling from his eyes which is really quite dangerous, but it’s just stardust in the end.
Or so he says.
We’re all stardust in the end.
Not us, says KirinDave. Never us.
They watch as innumerable threads of spacetime coil and twist through the darkened void. Uncountable colours flitting up and down their vein-like lengths as they struggle in some strange semblance of life.
There’s a misconception that there’s one true timeline with all the others coiling off and fading. It’s said that the world and the laws of physics enforce that one fated thread, with all the others doomed to die away.
There is something enforcing that.
DaveChaos lightly plucks at a thick piece of infinity and looks at it with the detatched curiosity of a scientist. It tries to wriggle away from him but he keeps a hold on it.
Isn’t that one of yours? KirinDave asks.
Yup.
Are you going to keep it?
DaveChaos says nothing. He stretches the coil out despite its subtle protests, lays it flat on the palm of his hand, and he prods it a few times.
Let’s see how this goes, shall we?
From the skies-
The desert is cold at night. It’s not an icy cold that bites like a snake, but it’s cool and life comes out at night. Here, the desert creepers with sandier skin than their grassland cousins scuttle across the dunes, softly hissing to each other.
There, the bones of long dead adventurers creak with renewed life. The less undead life forms jump and scurry away from them by order of instinct seared into their minds, making little noise lest the undead come after them. Small mice skitter under the sands and even the immobile cacti seem to lean away.
And over there, flashing into existence, a man stumbles into reality. He’s choking and he’s swearing, and for a moment he thinks he’s just going to fall over onto the sand and just die there. He’d rather not, though.
That’s why he’s here. Out of the kindness of the judge’s heart, although surely he had little to spare after seeing the holographic footage of the carnage. That was the trouble with his people - they were just too fucking kind for their own good.
It works to his advantage, though.
He tastes the bitter air of the cold desert night and laughs, and he is answered by nothing save his own regrets.
The judicators who had held him down and forced him to walk into the light of his doom had told him of a structure that he could stay in. It was an ancient relic with no supplies, but that was okay because they would supply him with a few day’s ration. He scoffed at their kindness, but he admitted to himself that he did appreciate it. You had to give your thanks where you could find it, or else you were uncivilised.
He found the temple after a few hours of walking. It seemed an organic thing despite being made of weathered stone, growing from the sand as if a part of it. The translator in his glasses failed at the intricate symbols engraved on the walls, offering absolute nonsense of utterly no use whatsoever. This language must have been too old or dead, or the markings too worn away by time’s careless blunderings.
The inside of the temple was clean. Sand had been swept away, or perhaps removed, and there was a friendly torch in the center. Oh, and the ground was of a far newer rock than the exterior.
With unrestrained anger, he marched up to the torch and knocked it away. It clattered off into a stray corner and the light is snuffed out.
He smiled in the darkness.
That’s a bit melodramatic, KirinDave says.
DaveChaos tells him to shut up, he’s watching. Go find your own timeline to comment on if you’re gonna be so rude!
Sheesh.
Call him late, call him lazy, call him brilliant-
all those words were true of the excellent inventor and CEO of the oh so modest startup Area 11-
Alexander Parvis.
Well, with the mysterious disappearances of the rest of the founding members, all the responsibilities now fell to him to take care of their legacy. He did miss them but hey, you had to keep moving forward, to leap into the future and to take any opportunity that was thrown at you-
especially if your humble company was, to be frank, struggling a little bit. Yeah, Parv was good at machines- no, he was apeshit bananas at anything technical, but matters of money tended to fly over his head and interacting with people in a friendly, normal way tended to take a whole lot out of him.
He didn’t like sitting in board meetings.
They were so boring.
So when a certain shrewd dwarf rings you up and says- oh, Alexander Parvis, Xephos tells me that apparently his asshole planet has decided to dump even more criminals on our planet- and you’re expenda uh good with people, I’ll support Area 11 if you welcome this uh guest and make sure he doesn’t end up being a menace to society please-
you accept it, because you do not refuse the most powerful dwarf in the myriad worlds.
So Parvis slipped on his jetpacks, got the coordinates of where his new friend was going to arrive, packed for an adventure and set off. He arrived at a nearby temple, and after marvelling at the pretty way the sun was setting behind the pyramid, began to get to work.
The temple was gross inside so he made it a tiny bit more homely. He did like cleaning up. The repetition of such a physical task was rather soothing, and he likened it to testing out machines and performing regular checkups on them. He also replaced the floor, because apparently the people who made this place had a great sense of humour.
It was pretty funny to see the floor crumble beneath your feet into a deep, yawning chasm. At least he had his jetpack on.
After he made the temple into a nicer place to live, Parvis decided that he would go explore the surrounding areas. He hadn’t brought any of his robots that could do the job for him, but that was okay because he liked doing things himself.
To an untrained eye, there wasn’t really a lot around. However, when Area 11 had first stumbled into a new world and gotten separated, Parv had found himself in a lonely desert. It had been ages since Sparkles had found him and his lonely jungle sapling, and in that time he had learned how to survive in this barren wasteland.
To Parv, deserts were a treasure trove.
He spent the night flying over the sandy expanse, marking out key points of interests and taunting mobs. It was so funny seeing them get so frustrated.
Finally, he had to return to the temple. He was pretty certain that the guy he was supposed to meet wouldn’t have shown up, and so he landed and with a jaunty whistle he entered the temple-
a knife was at his throat.
A bloody knife was at his throat, and it actually was fucking bloody because he could feel something warm drip down his neck and staining his crisp coat collar. He swallowed, very slowly.
“I like what you did with the place,” said his assailant. “Wasn’t expectin’ anybody to make it so homely. Especially not an intruder.”
Parv breathed in. “You should’ve seen what it was like before!” he said. “It was awful. Uh, please don’t kill me, please.” He tried to twist his head around, to see who it was, but it was dark and suddenly his shoulders were being grabbed and he was being thrown against a wall.
“Why not?” The knife dug into Parv’s throat. Small, fiery pinpricks could now be felt. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I-I’m friendly! I’m friendly! I’m Alex Parvis, and Honeydew sent me here to- to say hi and to- to show you around!” Parv would have thrown up his hands if he could. “I- you must be Will Strife, right? The guy who just arrived?”
“William Strife.” Yup, the knife was drawing blood now. His suit was going to be ruined at this rate.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, I- I should have known. Silly Parvy, not knowing things!” He grinned to hide just how terrified he was. “You- you must be such a swell guy, to have such a swell name. Mind if I call you Strife?”
The knife stopped.
“I’m here to help you,” Parv said. “I’m here to- to teach you our ways, here in Chaosville. How to be awesome!” He could feel himself really sweating now. “H-how to survive. ”
With the slowness of an eternity, the knife was withdrawn and Parv fell forwards onto the floor. He was panting, and with no small amount of embarrassment he realised he was tearing up slightly.
He looked up and saw a face full of utter contempt.
Illuminated by the rising sun outside, he could see that William Strife was a tall man, possibly only just shorter than Parv himself. He looked handsome enough with that short blond hair and that goatee and a nice, maroon dress shirt, but the whole effect was utterly ruined by the bloodstains.
Strife’s eyes were the most striking thing about him. They were glowing a brilliant green that cut through the dimness of the temple, and vaguely Parv recalled a similar bright blue in the eyes of the other ‘spaceman’ to come to Minecraftia. The sunglasses that sat atop Strife's forehead seemed rather ineffectual in their purpose, though.
“You look terrible,” Strife said. He was still holding his knife, but his hand was dangling loosely by his side and for the moment, it seemed that Parv would suit his purposes better alive.
Parv laughs-
I’m going to skip ahead.
KirinDave looks disappointed at this.
You’re not the one with the remote control.
It’s fine, KirinDave says. As long as you want to skip past all the interesting things. Don’t you enjoy watching the slow burn of a growing relationship? It’s like watching a soap opera.
But what I find interestin’, DaveChaos says, is what’s happening now.
There’s a certain kind of routine that comes with being in danger. It’s like living in a huge train tunnel, where every so often you have to get the dodge out of heck. If you’re mindful of the timetable, then you could eke out some sort of life for yourself in the gaps with the rats and the rubbish.
If you don’t, well, you don’t exactly get to live a long and happy life. You could if you were immaterial or something, but most people don't get to be immaterial.
Parv’s beginning to work out William Strife’s timetable.
He claims to be a loner, but no man is an island, even if Strife wasn’t a man. He’s got a sharp, scientific mind about the world around him, analysing and asking questions about the tiniest mobs. It’s a hunger for learning that Parv certainly appreciates, and it makes them something along the lines of kindred minds.
He’s sitting on top of the smelter that Parv’s just set down and complaining about the noise that the crusher makes, but he’s also asking about the mechanics and just how does crushing things down make more of an ore, you can’t break conservation of mass or can you.
The answer is yes, in this cuboid world. Yes, you can.
Strife looks like he’s interested, oh certainly, and he’s asking all the right questions, but there’s just something in his eyes that’s thinking of something else, and that just pisses Parv off.
Damnit, he should be the most interesting thing in the room! And, really, most rooms would be very much improved with the addition of a Parvis to the general decor. It might be hard to obtain, but that was just a testament to how interesting a Parvis was.
He asks.
He can't help it.
And Strife looks at him with lazy, predatory eyes and says-
"Don't you worry your pretty little head, Parvis."
Parvis fumes at this, although there's a not small part of him ecstatic at the fact that he's called pretty. He's sure Strife didn't mean it like that, though, and that stings.
Well, he's gonna make Strife mean it.
"I might be pretty," croons Parvis, "and smart and fucking awesome but you- are you those things? You could be, but I dunno if you are."
Strife stops. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“All I’m saying is that- really, we’ve spent all this time together, and I don’t even know your hobbies. That’s not a good thing in a blossoming relationship, you know.”
Strife looks rather taken aback for a few scant seconds, before those seconds fly past and he scowls. “We’re not in a relationship, Parvis,” he says.
“Tell me, Strifey.”
Strife’s eyes light up, almost burning up now, and he says with the softest voice that Parv has ever heard, something so utterly tender in its terribleness-
“Blood.”
and Parv flushes with newborn feelings of absolute jealousy. He’s not quite sure what he’s jealous of, though. How can you be jealous of the cardiovascular system? It’s just liquid, after all!
The words spill from his mouth, although he tries to keep them in. He’s not sure he wants to know. “I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t understand. Can you explain, Strife? Please?”
Strife jumps off the smelter and strides towards him. He flicks out that knife he always carries with him and he holds it in front of him like a guiding light, like a torch to show him the way. It catches the light this way and that, and Parv thinks that Strife must have cleaned it recently.
“There’s a reason I was exiled to this backwater planet,” says Strife. “Want me to show you?”
“Are you gonna kill me?”
Strife says nothing for the longest time, but he’s smiling and he’s almost laughing now. “Probably not,” he says.
And later-
And now, because the present slips into the past and our presence become histories and legends that can be so easily changed-
And now-
Parv is lying on his back. He dimly remembers someone carrying him with strong, firm hands, placing him down carefully onto the hard floor. He doesn’t remember how or why he’s horizontal, but he doesn’t really mind, not really.
There’s something humming in the air. Parv blinks and he can see the sounds dancing, a bit like the afterimages of bright lights in the sky. They’re bright green and there’s two of them, but Parv’s having issues tracking them.
His arm aches. The dull pain runs all the way up his arm and into his heart, throbbing and hot and sticky, but it’s the good kind of pain, the best kind of pain that follows something like a workout in the gym.
He tries to speak.
“I took too much from you,” someone says, cutting off his coughs. “Your blood- it’s great. It’s really, really good for this. I’m- wow, I thought you were going to be useless to me but hey, Parvis, I really think we can work together.”
Fuck you, Parv thinks. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want this. Please.
He grins.
“Hell yes,” he says, and then he throws up.
His suit is ruined, and he doesn’t even care.
The following days-weeks-months blur.
Parv knows that he’s addicted now, he’s becoming a fucking junkie and yet he doesn’t even care anymore. But he thinks about it as he kneels down at his machines and he fixes up wires and he automates the creation of dark things and he keeps thinking about it, and he knows that at any time, Strife can take it away.
With a quick twist of the knife, or just plain stubborn refusal. Yeah, Parv knows that he’s valuable now, but who says that Strife can’t find another willing blood battery to work on?
Strife’s muttering something over the blood altar now, holding dust that jump and spark as if it were actual flame. He doesn’t look up at Parv’s approach, clearly too engrossed in his work.
He doesn’t look up as Parv steps closer and closer, leans over his shoulder.
He certainly notices as Parv touches his face, turning it to face him instead of whatever boring alchemical thing he was poking at. His face curls into a mix of confusion and exasperation, and he says, “what is it, Parvis?”
“Oh, I’m just seeing what my favourite forsaken blood mage is up to. Whatcha doing, Strifey?’ Parv leans in, closer and closer, staring straight into the twin fires of Strife’s eye.
Strife looks uncomfortable now, although it’s hard to say whether that’s just the perpetual frown on his face or a genuine reaction. Something flickers in the depths of his expression, though. “I’m- I’m just makin’ some ignis vitae,” he says. “Nothing much, really.”
“Strife, it’s never just with you,” Parv purrs. Their faces are almost just touching. “I’m bored.” The word is dragged out, hissed into Strife’s face, and Parv places his other arm around Strife’s shoulders. He taps on the base of Strife’s neck onto his spine, rhythmically, a callback to the days before Area 11 ever knew of cubes and potentialities.
He’s forgotten how to play a guitar.
That’s fine.
He’s got different instruments now.
And Strife blushes and stammers and talks of a ritual they could try, maybe it could even interface with some of Parv’s machines- wouldn’t you like that, Parvis, the pure elegance of my magic with your soulless machines?
Hook, line and sinker.
KirinDave sits back against the eternity of the void, still watching the timeline caught in DaveChaos’ grasp. It’s still. fighting, still trying to live and breathe.
DaveChaos caresses it. I’d love to hang this up in my base, he says. I’ve never thought to collect a world before. Can you take worlds into other worlds? I’ve never tried.
Ridgedog might stop you there. KirinDave almost laughs as he says that.
They don’t have time for old gods who get themselves trapped in new worlds.
They’ve got the whole of eternity, and each other.
He doesn’t know what it is about stupid, stupid Parvis, but he wants to strangle him and taste his blood on his tongue, to shut him up for good even if he’d miss him.
He would miss him.
Strife’s done this before, repeated it over and over on his home planet. He’d like to think of himself as a purveyor of strange sights and experiences, selling the adrenaline rush for the low, low price of your blood.
They said he had a cult.
How insulting.
They called him narcissistic, psychopathic, and they brought celebrity psychologists onto their talkshows just to discuss the matter of him. They would gasp as new reports came in of the ‘atrocities’ he had committed and then they would mourn those who had fallen under his spell.
Parv was certainly there, his eyes widening as Strife dug into his veins, his breathing shallow and quick with every drop of blood. He lapped it up like a good little dog and it had been so easy compared to some others.
But-
there was a but, and Strife loathed it.
Parv was an idiot and Parv was a mess, but his words wormed into Strife’s psyche and cracked it open. His cloying praises were designed to attack- to support Strife’s ego, and then he would make a sarcastic remark and it would all fall apart. Strife was aware of just what the hell Parv was doing, and yet he fell for it every single time.
If he had addicted Parv to him physically-
then he, himself, was bound to Parv mentally-
and he hated being chained to anything.
Parv’s here now, watching him cut up a dead body, someone dressed like a surgeon, how ironic in this moment-
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody important.”
-and his sheer presence was infuriating. His words were utterly wrong.
Parv was coming up to him now, and Strife stopped. He couldn’t move, even as Parv smiled beautifully at him, even as Parv came in and
kissed him.
Strife leaned into the other man, a move he claimed to himself was pure fucking instinct and not anything else. He closed his eyes and tried to chase away the warmth and the love he was experiencing-
He bit Parv’s tongue, drawing blood, and he revelled in Parv’s jolt of pain. To his surprise, however, Parv didn’t break away as he had expected him to. Instead, Parv held him tighter and shuddered in what could have been laughter or fear.
Or both.
They were becoming one and
strife
hated
it.
He waits for his chance.
Is this where we come in?
Be patient.
The world was dying.
Around them, people were fleeing to better pastures elsewhere. Bases lay empty, plundered of their most valuable objects. Great building projects were doomed to an eternal state of uncompleted-ness, or at least until they rotted away.
Perhaps this was what happened to the desert temple, now left behind for Parv’s castle.
Strife did knew that some people hadn’t left, or at least not willingly. He hadn’t bothered hiding that fact from Parv, and the fact was that Parvis just didn’t care about that.
He did like using the bones as spooky decoration.
Decoration just didn’t work when there was no one to see it, though.
“We should follow them,” Parv said, says, keeps saying-
Time fails and falls in a broken world as this-
“There’s nobody for me to sell to, and nobody for you to intimidate.” Parv says that in a matter of fact tone, and of course he’s taking the corporate path even as he pretends to look so concerned. “I hear the next world’s better, anyway.”
“We’ll lose a lot of things,” Strife says. He isn’t concerned about that. What he says next stings him and he hates the fact that he’s saying it- “as long as we stick together.”
Parv beams at this. He turns away, says he’s going to go set up something, he’s been looking at the strange texts and talking to KirinDave and he’s going to set up a teleporter so that they could join all their friends in the next world.
He has his back turned, and Strife watches it.
Slowly, at a measured pace, he takes out his faithful knife. He steps forwards, after Parvis, and he’s telling himself that this way, they won’t ever be apart-
Parvis turns.
“Strife?” he asks. It was funny how one word could shake so much. “Wh-what are you doing?”
“Ending this,” Strife says, and he lunges.
Parv’s pushed onto the floor and he struggles, flails as Strife draws back and stabs him in the stomach. He’s calling Strife’s name, again and again and again, and each name is a blow to his head so Strife stumbles back and hisses and swears-
When he next looks up, he sees Parv with that glowing blue scythe, that ‘Atomic Disassembler’.
Parv looks down and he looks so hurt, but he says nothing. He brings down the scythe
and swiftly, Strife grabs a fleshy orb of blood and materialises his secret, something he had not chosen to show Parv, not ever
from the depths of hell, they forge weapons out of flesh, you know
and the weapon screams as it meets the blue blade.
Strife draws back, panting, his bound blade held out in front of him as he tries to catch his breath. Parv does the same thing, and alike they are mirrored in stance and in expression and in
they were
not
one
“Strife,” Parv says, his voice modulated and ever so calm. “Put it down. We can talk about this. Strife.”
“No,” he gasps out, “no we can’t. You- I need you, but I can’t and I don’t want you. Not you. Never you.”
“Strife,” Parv says, but Strife’s not hearing it as he rushes in, slashing and grunting and Parv’s pushing him against the wall now, dark eyes narrowed, yet the most tender expression on his face. The span of the Atomic Disassembler is against his throat, the humming blue blade just by his ear, loud and unnatural. “Strife,” he says again.
“Parv.”
The worst thing is, Parv looks like he cares. “I was- I was thinking of- I wanted this,” he says, stumbling through his words. “I wanted this addiction to you, but I was planning on ways to break out of it. I do like you, Strife. I do need you. You’re- you’re the best thing that happened to me.”
And at such a blatant lie, Strife laughs and spits in Parv’s face. “I’d prefer you do me the professional courtesy of not lying,” he says.
“Fine. Do you want to hear my real opinions on the great William Strife?”
“Yes,” Strife says.
And they’re kissing, and Strife falls into it-
even as Parv pulls at his atomic disassembler and cuts off Strife’s head.
His last thoughts are of love.
The world cracks open, and two gods step in.
They’re laughing and they’re chattering, and they continue to do so even as they enter the bloodsoaked room and find Alexander Parvis cradling the head of William Strife. It might not be the most appropriate thing to do, to laugh, but they’re gods and they don’t even care.
“Hey,” KirinDave says in his usual cheerful tone.
Parv doesn’t look up.
“That’s just rude,” says DaveChaos, and he’s looking at the blood altar. “Strife’s got a good setup here, hasn’t he? Can’t beat mine, though!”
KirinDave gives DaveChaos a dirty look. “If you would care to remember, I helped invent blood magic. I was standing next to the first blood mage, offering advice and suggestions.”
DaveChaos has finished walking around the altar, and now he comes to Parv just sitting on the floor, his Atomic Disassembler next to him. “Looks like Strife got ahead of himself,” he says.
And with barely restrained fury, Parv looks up and howls.
DaveChaos giggles at this, but stops himself. There’s only so far you can go with this. He walks over to a chest and begins to rummage through it, pocketing trinkets and items that he’d like to keep, to remember this world.
He can’t help it. It’s an explorer thing.
Parv’s stopped crying now, stopped making that awful racket, and he’s just deathly silent now. “Why are you here?” he asks. “What are you doing here?” He clutches Strife’s head to himself like a grisly teddy bear, as if someone was going to take it away from him.
KirinDave is in front of him now, and he kneels down to stare at the head. “We’re here,” he says, “to offer a deal.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You’ll be interested,” says DaveChaos, and he stands up, quite finished from his digression. He turns to Parv and he’s grinning widely as he talks. “What if we could offer the chance for your Strife to be alive?”
Parv sits up, straighter. “What?” He thinks that he can see strange energies flickering around the two gods.
“Well, not your Strife,” KirinDave says. “But- another Strife, in another world.”
“We could change the circumstances. Make it so that he never gets into blood magic, make it so that he lives- oh, and you’ll live too. Would be such a shame if you didn’t.”
“Oh, and in that world, you’d be tied to the Law of Respawning. But we need something to tie you there, and we need energy to do so.”
“What do you need?” Parv asks. “Whatever it is, I’ll give it to you. Whatever it is, I’ll-”
Both gods grin now, and it seems that the strange, colourful energies are resolving themselves into horns and hooves and all the signs of something long forgotten but still very dangerous.
Their teeth are sharp.
“Thank you,” KirinDave says.
Strife wakes up.
His head hurts.
He rolls out of bed and realises that he’s spent the night at Parv’s castle, a fact that he groans at. He was hoping to go and retrieve some asprin from the batch that he’s begun to synthesize, but now he’s not even sure if Parv has any asprin in that shoddy sorting system that he has.
Speaking of Parv, that idiot blood mage appears to be sleeping in the bed next to him. Strife looks at him with fondness, and recalls the time they had to share one bed with slightly less fondness.
Shit, what even is their relationship? Something dark and something dangerous, yeah, with Strife sticking around for no good reason and Parv probably not even needing Strife anymore in his dark descent, but somehow it was a thing that happened and it’s a thing that will keep happening as long as he has any say in it.
Maybe he just likes the way Parv plays to his ego, or maybe it’s something more.
His headache’s going away now, just a gentle throb compared to the howling hum of before, so he decides he’ll just go back to sleep and worry about it in the morning.
Two demons sit at the edge of death, each idly chewing on a piece of spacetime. With every bite, it sparks and flickers with unused potential, until at long last it disappears down their throats.
DaveChaos licks his lips.
Delicious.