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Techno didn’t have a lot.
When he had been born, he was on the lowest class of piglin. Zombified, living in a damp, flickering gray cave dug out the side of a cliff. It was moist and damp, sand sticking to his feet and lava dripping from the stalactites threatening to pierce his slowly beating heart.
It was hot. Really hot. Hot and lonely. His parents were never around, often working to find food or just keep other piglins or hoglins far away from their fuzzy, burning ‘home’.
It never had felt like home to Techno.
As he got older, he started becoming more independent. Wandering the vast, dark emptiness of the soul sand valley, occasionally alight with patches of wavering grey flames, licking at his skin and charring his exposed skull and ribs. He always liked soul fire. Liked the way it licked cold into the ever-prominent layer of sweat stuck to his flesh. Left pockets of freezing burns dug into his palms.
He always managed to return at night, when the heat cooled, the ghasts went to rest in their damp mushroom nests and the blazes became nothing more than a pile of flickering grey and orange bones and dying embers. When the air cooled in it’s humidity, and the sweat behind Techno’s ears dried up.
One early morning, the heat just beginning to build and the striders rising from the warming lava with an ear-piercing cry, he left for the final time.
He never returns after that morning. To this day, he’s not sure if anyone ever noticed. Not sure if his parents noticed his absence, if they even cared.
The nether can be cruel.
It's weird, seeing a piglin for the first time.
Of course, he's a piglin. But he's zombified, his flesh peeling and rotting at the ends and his bones, stretched thin with muscle and dried copper, exposed to the humid flames buried in the air.
Their village… is quaint. Stacked tall with black stone and red nether wart, the shops and houses towering over Techno. Their roofs thick and solid, bringing a relieving shadowed cool to Techno’s worn figure.
The village residents aren’t so relieving.
They take one look at Techno; at the black and purple rot of his flesh, the flickering beadiness in his remaining eye, the charred black of his bones; and shun him. Upturn their chins and glare down with soulless black and red eyes, worn and sharpened claws, and chase him out of the nylium and back into the damp, sinking sand.
Their ruler, a tall, broad-shouldered piglin with dark eyes and sharp, protruding tusks similar to Techno’s own, takes one look at him and lets out a simple grunt.
“Go.”
He does, walks till the village is just a blip in the dusky distance and takes shelter behind a cliff. Lights a fire using blaze rods on the sand, letting the colorless grey flames rise high and send black smoke to pile on the red roof, just adding density to the already suffocating atmosphere.
Villages come and go all the time, he thinks, as he watches grey lick the ceiling covering the village. Watches the black stone go even darker in a dusty powder, the crimson trees evaporate to flying embers and the weeping stems fall like spitty sobs onto the nylium.
The village isn’t even fully ash when the king finds him, drags him by the worn leather of his shirt to tall, suffocating purple, fizzing and popping in his ears.
And then there’s light.
“Charge!”
Tommy runs forward, a cardboard sword painted with brown and blue and messy ink in his hand. Wilbur follows, their arms brushing, as they charge toward an older blond, bandanna covering his eyes and knuckles white.
He instantly swings for Tommy. His flimsy cardboard sword hits Tommy’s head and he stumbles back, pressing the heel of his palm against the sore section of his scalp. Wilbur scowls and rushes forward, taking the taller by surprise and pushing him to the ground.
“Glory to L’manburg!”
The boy scowls from his position on the floor as Tommy rushes forward to take his shoddy excuse for a sword from the floor.
“The PPA isn’t going to give into your little revo-” He squints. “Revo-loo-shon?”
Wilbur rolls his eyes. “You should know how to say it, you’re older.”
“Oh piss off!”
“Language, Dream!” Tommy perks up from Wilbur's side, ducked behind the brunet's free arm.
“Be quiet, Tommy. You’re like, five.”
“I’m eight, you bas-”
“You three!” The three each whip their heads over to the source of the call. A tall lady, her hair graying and pulled back and her blouse old and worn. “Stop fooling around and get to the yard! I called you all there ten minutes ago.”
“Oka-”
“What you gonna do if we don’t, Ms. G-”
A harsh slap rings out through the room as Tommy stumbles back.
He raises his hand to gingerly hold his cheek, darkening a pale grey. Wilbur can only imagine what it looks like based on the gasp Dream lets out, a boy who can see everything. A boy who's met his links.
“Yard.”
The three scramble out to the backdoor, leaving their weapons behind on the dusty floor. Not even the old, painted cardboard can defend them.
They split, Dream running off and Wilbur getting quick to work, Tommy trailing behind.
It's minutes later when Tommy asks.
“Do you ever think we’ll leave?”
Wilbur looks up from the hole he’s digging in the dry, sandy earth. His eyes barely poke out over the surface.
“Of course. Kids get picked up from here all the time.”
“No, I don’t mean… get taken away. I mean leave.”
Wilbur blinks. Swallows the lump forming in his throat, unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth, dry and anxious like the sand flaking from his shovel.
“Maybe.”
Tommy doesn’t seem satisfied. He chews on the inside of his swollen cheek, contemplating.
“You better keep digging that hole of yours. It has to be ten feet before we’re allowed back inside, and it’s supposed to storm tonight.”
Tommy rolls his eyes but nods, moving to stand from his position dangling his feet to nearly hit Wilbur’s head and work on his own hole, only half as far as Wilbur’s.
"I'll never get used to what brown looks like."
Around them, the sky begins to burn with grey, the only colors visible to Wilbur's tired yet youthful eyes are a dull gold and blue.
It's all the more meaningful.
Phil sighs, aged and tired. He’s so fucking tired.
His head pounds with cold, bitter air, the backs of his eyes stinging like thumbtacks against organ. His fingers itch with freezing bite, dull and pale in the thin, breathless air.
From his left, Scott sighs, clearly hesitant. “Phil, are you sure you’ll be okay?”
Phil looks up from the rough green ground below them, tempting him with the rush of air and chirping of desperate, lonely cicadas.
Scott looks just as aged as Phil feels in that moment, even though his friend is barely half his age. Dark, shadowed eyes, grey branching out from the corners and pupils glistening with something Phil can’t decipher. His hair a wind-tousled mess, feathery white wings fluttering and shifting in on themselves behind him.
Phil's own feel heavy in their unforgiving black.
“I’m sorry. You know the rules. You break them, you have to leave.” Phil’s lips tighten into a line, and he looks back down to the ground below, bare feet just edging over the side of the cloud they’re stood on. “And there’s only one town, up here in the sky. There’s nowhere for me to go but down.”
“You’ll visit, yeah?”
Phil takes a quiet, solid breath. “Yeah.”
They both know it's a lie.
Rain begins to fall as Phil spreads his dark, withered wings. It filters in between the feathers, bones shifting under dense flesh and feather.
“Stay safe, yeah?”
He looks over at Scott, his colorless hair, damp with thin, cold sweat. His mouth tastes like smoke and dirt, dry and cold, layers of thick and flaky skin on the roof of his mouth.
He crouches down and twists up, up into a thin, airless atmosphere.
His face burns as he begins to fall into green and grays.