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Grian had never been good at letting the unknown stay undiscovered.
He was the kind of child who would open his presents a week before Christmas, seized by the need to break the barriers of wrapping paper and social expectation in order to know what was hidden within. Even if he already knew what it would be, even if he’d asked for it himself and the answer was obvious...there was something about just the mere idea of an unknown that made him unable to resist it. It was like an itch at the back of his mind, a constant wonder. It was a need.
That’s why the thing he was about to do wasn’t his fault, not really. Yes, Zed had specifically told him not to enter the Bumless Pit when they swapped bases, but what did he expect? Did he really think that he could present Grian with a mysterious opening to oblivion and expect him not to check it out?
He sighed and shook his head, staring thoughtfully at the contraption. Yes, that probably was what Zedaph thought when he left Grian in charge of his base. He’d probably assumed - foolishly - that the many warnings and hazard tape lines and big red buttons would dissuade anyone with common sense from messing with the thing...but Grian came equipped with another type of sense entirely. Grian sense.
And the Grian Sense was telling him to push the button.
“In and out, that’s all,” he whispered softly to himself. “I’ve got plenty of spare elytra if I lose this one. Which I’m not going to.” A grin of anticipation spread across his face. He was confident enough in his flying skills to be sure of his survival, but he’d discarded most of his gear anyway, just in case. Still, the thought of losing a set of wings added just enough risk to the expedition, just enough danger to make him feel the thrill. And that was what this was all about, wasn’t it. The thrill.
This wasn’t his first void hole. Logically, he knew what would be down there: void . Sure, Zed could be hiding something, or there could be a weird world generation mistake, or any amount of other excuses he could use to justify himself, but the truth was that Grian just needed to use the pit because it was there . He needed the satisfaction of knowing for sure what was behind the locked door, and he needed the challenge of getting out of it alive.
He pulled his elytra straps tight across his chest, the familiar motion as close to a good-luck ritual as he ever had. Taking a deep breath, he flipped the lever to open the first hatch and stepped down onto the second.
“Three, two, one….” He pressed the button without hesitation.
The walls of the shaft sped past him in a rush of cold air as the block beneath his feet was pulled away. The howl of wind competed with the rough thud and clatter of his limbs and elytra scraping against the sides. Flailing for balance, he managed to right himself and spread his wings just as the narrow passage gave way to the abyss below bedrock.
It was nothingness. Just as he expected.
Grian pushed down the little bit of disappointment that threatened to rise in his chest. Nothing special, just...void. He wasn’t sure why that made him feel so hollow. It was a void hole , what else did he think was going to happen? He chuckled softly to himself. He guessed the old saying was right: the grass was always greener on the other side of the fence. The void was always greener on the other side of the...bedrock...or something. Maybe that one wouldn’t quite catch on.
Oh, well. At least he could have a little fun before returning to more solid ground. He activated a rocket and glided through the darkness, careful not to lose track of the hole he’d emerged through. He swooped in a pattern of hills and valleys, his heart jumping as he ventured lower and lower each time. Firing another rocket, he spiralled into his deepest dive yet, holding his breath, brushing the threshold of where the abyss would start to hurt him - before banking and speeding upward again, laughing loudly. Yes, this was what he was looking for! This was the challenge, this was the thrill. The satisfaction of judging his path just right, and the inevitable question that came after, on the peak between one dive and the next:
Could he go farther?
He squared his shoulders, spread his arms wide, and dropped.
Every instinct within him screamed at him to pull up, that he was going too low and too fast, that he was going to die, but still he persisted. The most basic and fundamental aspect of a player from the day they first spawned, the need to survive, the fear of annihilation, pushed against him as he plummeted and spiralled and dove and fell and screamed, but he did not pull up, not now, not yet, not quite - NOW!
The buckles of the harness bruised his skin as he hauled his weight backwards, wings pushing hard against the air. His rapid descent turned into a smooth forward flight, the momentum redirected, and he took a moment to gasp for the breath that the wind had pushed from his lungs. Every nerve hummed with adrenaline. He guessed he was less than a second from falling too far. His timing had been perfect, and he had never felt so alive.
Slowly, haltingly, his laughter faded into the silence of the vacuum.
It was strange, being this deep under the world, riding the line between life and death. Eerie. He should definitely gain some altitude, he thought, just to be safe. He’d had his fun; he should go back. And he would. He did, in the end.
But first, he decided to look down.
Grian saw the void, as one might expect. That is typical, natural, predictable. If he had only seen the void, in all its cold and dark oblivion, all would be well; the order of the Universe upheld, the peace of human ignorance unbroken...but that was never meant to be.
No. Instead, Grian saw the void. And then he looked below.
The English language does not have enough words for size. That was the first numb and muffled thought that crossed the background of Grian’s mind. The air seemed to hum and warm around him as he stared at the thing beneath the end of the world, tracking its surface with his eyes, hopeless of ever finding an end or even a horison to its golden bulk... Attempting to assign as insignificant a word as big to this - this creature, this god, this living universe wrapped in a gossamer sheen of time and space made mere accessories to its overwhelming presence - trying to force it into the category of “big” made Grian feel as though his soul was being split in two. It wasn’t that he lost the ability to breathe, no - he lost the ability, the desire, the need, and the memory of how to breathe.
His hands were numb. Probably. It was hard to tell; his body no longer felt like it belonged to him. The fear of drifting too low and meeting his death was nothing but a faint tickle at the base of his neck, one he was unable to do anything but ignore. He was frozen by this thing, by the way it made him feel ...safe, invincible even, and filled with the joy of a thousand newly finished projects and a million precious moments with the people he loves most. He lost himself in tracing the multitudes of shimmering golden scales, fractals turning infinitely inward and backwards in branching spirals, a geometry he could never hope to replicate in mere blocks alone...but he would die trying, he was certain. He would die a million deaths just to bring this into being back in the Overworld, in a place where he could spend the rest of his living days just looking at it.
He had lost more than half his health before he even registered the pain. The tingling agony of the void destroying his nervous system forced him back into awareness inch by reluctant inch. He clumsily activated his rockets, desperately firing off as many as he could before he fell out of the world, seized by the knowledge that he had to survive this. Suddenly, everything was clear to him. He had seen this creature before. Every single time he fell into the void, he had seen it, any every single time he respawned, it had made him forget about itself. It was trying to protect him, he knew. It didn’t think he could handle the knowledge of it, the beauty of it, but now that he did know - ! He couldn’t let it slip away from him again - the thought of forgetting filled him with a panic like no other. The hole in the bedrock above seemed so close, yet so far to hands that could barely move and elytra torn apart by the friction of the void’s forces...G et out, you can make it! Live, LIVE!
Grian burst from the floor of Zedaph’s cave and ricocheted into the wall, collapsing into a shaking heap on the cold, damp stone.
He had made it. He was nearly dead, aching in every limb...but he had done it. He had survived. And more importantly, the image of the Thing Below still lived in his mind, a wondrous longing that he could not ignore.
He lay there until the pain subsided enough for him to sit up and catch his breath. Void injuries were never a pleasant thing to recover from, but he had a feeling that this time it was worth it, for what he’d just learned. How could it be that that had been down there since the beginning of this world, and he’d never realized it? Never managed to remember it after dying? It seemed too significant to be forgotten so easily, too central to the Universe itself...
He absentmindedly munched on a golden carrot as he healed, noticing how pathetic an excuse for “gold” it seemed after the colour he had seen. Were golden carrots always that dull-looking? Did they always taste this dry and flavourless? He forced it down anyway, knowing he needed to heal in order to...to what?
What was his next course of action? He paused between bites, considering. He certainly couldn’t just go back to his usual projects, right? The thought of decorating Zed’s cave or adding a new contraption made him feel almost sick with how insignificant an activity it was. He was sure that he’d been excited to start something after he got back from the void, but he couldn’t even recall what his next project was, never mind summon any inspiration for it.
A tiny seed of fear prickled at the bottom of his chest.
That wasn’t right. He never gave up on his projects that quickly. Surely he still had some motivation left. He’d just gotten...distracted, that’s all. He needed to focus, to get back to work.
Grian shakily hauled himself upright, still not quite fully healed. He stumbled over to the shulker box where he had left his blueprints jumbled in a disorganized heap. The drawings seemed to blur together into one greying, uninteresting blob, so he picked one off the top at random to examine. Careful not to wrinkle the sheet, he held it up to the light and stared at it. Logically, he could see where all the rooms and features of the building connected and envision how he might go about building it, but...he didn’t want to. Try as he might, he could not find a cell in his body that wanted to start this project, not a scrap of passion that remained.
He ruffled through the other plans, turning over drawing after mundane drawing, certain that they had been alive and calling to him not an hour earlier. He ran his gaze over every part of the things he had once loved and came up feeling entirely empty. His heart sank.
They were worthless. He didn’t know why he had even bothered to put them to paper.
He stuffed them all into the shulker box, not especially caring if they got folded or smudged. He would have to find a new project, one he could actually care about...like replicating the Thing Below. It was the only thing he could do, the only thing that had a chance of mattering.
He strode towards Zedaph’s storage system and started digging through chests. Oh come on, why does Zed have to be so poor - ! He barely had any gold or glowstone, the only blocks that would work even slightly...and he would need a lot of them, too. To do this project justice, it would need to cover at least an entire biome….
Maybe he was getting a bit too far ahead of himself. He should make a sketch first, see how many materials he would need. Right. He could do this. He had started so many projects before, so many on a scale so big that he thought he would never be able to finish them, and yet he had planned and worked until they were fully realized and complete. This was no different. He would start the same way he always started.
Grian took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He stood still in the middle of the room, just like he did every time he was about to bring a big idea to life. It always helped to take a moment to center himself, to envision the geometry of the build before he even tried to put it to paper. It brought his focus to the right places, prepared him to solve all the challenges the build would present. It calmed him.
But not today. He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut tight as he started over. It was just on the edge of his awareness, the memory of the shape he needed, but had the spines curled inward or outward? Were the multitudes of golden tendrils coiled, or straight? He couldn’t remember. Panic rose inside him, too strong to push down. Try as he might, he couldn’t picture the face of the thing, and he needed to, he needed that image for the build and he needed it so he could feel like he could breathe again and he needed to see it again so badly that he thought he might just burst -
His feet walked almost without his permission. He was sitting on the door to the Bumless Pit before he knew it, one hand on the lever, the other on the button. He barely had time to question himself before he activated both at once and dropped down into nothingness.
This time, he fell like a stone. He halfheartedly spread his wings, but they were too battered from his earlier close call, and besides, he wasn’t really focusing on keeping them steady. His eyes were wide open as he plummeted, hoping for just another glimpse of the Thing Below, just enough to refresh his memory...and there , there it was, in all its glorious expanse - ! If anything, it was even sweeter than he remembered it. The growing pain of void damage was nothing to him, and he died at the bottom of the world with a smile on his lips and tears of joy in his eyes.
He woke up in Zed’s bed contraption. He got out on the wrong side, but he didn’t care, nor did he care for the elytra that were no longer on his back after respawning. He remembered it. He had seen it and escaped and seen it again and died, and still he remembered it! Whatever was blocking his memory for all this time must not be strong enough to erase the amount of time he had spent staring at it on that first flight. He was so, so grateful. He raced for his blueprints, grabbed a page he couldn’t care less about, set a pencil to the back of the drawing...and sank to his knees as the images fled his mind once again.
No...no… Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and he scrambled back across the cave to the void hole. He would not give up. He couldn’t. One more time would be enough for him to capture it, enough for him to hold it in his heart forever, surely, just once more...he ached with how much he needed it. Nothing would ever bring him joy again unless he could accomplish this, unless he was able to bring the exquisite perfection of that being with him for the rest of his life.
One more time, then, and all would be well. Just one more time. Without hesitation, he pressed the button and plunged himself into the dark and cold again.
~
Over Xisuma’s many, many years as admin, he had gotten more and more skilled at guessing why he was being contacted and how involved the solution to the problem would be. There were many factors in a message that served as clues - tone, wording, time of day/night/way-too-early morning, but most importantly: who it was from. If it was an inquiry from Doc, the answer is usually “as long as you don’t break the universe while doing it”. If it was an apology from Mumbo, the response would typically be “please just fix it quickly, lag gives me a headache”. If it was an innocent-seeming and not at all terrified “hypothetical question” from Tango, the subsequent followup would be “is this a problem I can solve without worrying about being eaten by a ravager and/or exploded?”
He’s known these people for years. Life on the server follows a pattern - enough experience, and problems become easy to predict, if not simple to solve. There exists a certain set of people who Xisuma expects to hear from regularly about a given range of familiar issues.
Zedaph was not one of those people. And this issue was not one of those issues.
Xisuma waved a hand in front of his face, collecting the tangled spread of holographic screens into one clean folder and stowing it in the corner of his visor’s display. He turned his attention back to Zedaph, who was pacing the jungle pathway in front of X worriedly.
“I can’t access Grian’s code.”
Zed stopped abruptly. “What do you mean you ‘can’t access’ it? You can access everyone’s code!” He ran his hands across his hair jerkily, as though resisting the urge to pull on it out of frustration.
“I know. This hasn’t happened before.” Xisuma made an effort to keep his voice level, hoping it would calm his internal panic. When Zed had first come to speak with him, he had been certain that there was a reasonable explanation for the things he had seen, but now that the code was defying him….
He sat down on the edge of the pathway, gesturing for Zedaph to join him. “Alright. One more time - what was it exactly that you found when you went to your base?”
“Well, it’s Grian’s base now, I mean it used to be my base and it hopefully still will be after a little while but it’s Grian’s now…” Zed rambled. “And I wasn’t intruding or anything, I just wanted to see how it was doing, you know -”
“Yes, I know,” Xisuma soothed. “It doesn’t really matter why you were there. I know it’s hard, but try to focus on what you saw .”
Zed gulped. “Yes, well...Grian was there. Which is to be expected, I guess.” He wrung his hands.
“And?”
“I told you already…”
“I know, I’m just...having a hard time understanding.” X removed his helmet and massaged his temples. “I thought if you could run through it again, it might help us figure out why, and how to help.”
“Yes, of course.” Zedaph braced himself. “Well, Grian was there, but he wouldn’t speak to me. He wasn’t wearing any armour or anything, and he looked...rough, all thin and like he hadn’t slept. I tried to get his attention but he didn’t react at all - it’s like I wasn’t even there! And then he just…”
“Flushed himself down the void hole?” Xisuma finished.
Zed nodded. “Yeah. Just like that. No warning, not a single hello, just...gone.”
X shook his head. He had prioritized looking for some kind of glitch in the code before resorting to actually going to the cave, but it was starting to look like that was their only option. Truth be told...he would have tried that first if he wasn’t so unsettled by what Zedaph described. He had come up against many weird problems in his years of experience, and many hard ones, but never one like this, where he didn’t even have a guess about what to do. It sent a shiver up his spine.
He stood abruptly, clamping the bee-shaped helmet back down over his head. Trying to dispel the unease with urgency, he offered Zed a hand and pulled him to his feet.
“Let’s go see what we can do. I might be a little bee-fuddled at the moment, but I’m sure we can figure something out.” He grinned beneath the mask. Okay, maybe the bee pun had been a little ill-placed, but he couldn’t deny it helped him feel better.
The journey to Zed’s cave was short and uneventful. Nothing strange hung in the air, no unfamiliar feelings greeted them at the door...but the chill in Xisuma’s bones still crept back in, bit by bit.
He wasn’t afraid of what they would find in there. He wasn’t afraid of Grian. He was afraid of a problem he could not solve.
“You first,” Zedaph whispered, gesturing towards the door.
“It’s your house,” X reasoned back.
“Fine, we’ll go in together.” Zed pressed the stone button above the entryway, and the metal door swung inward with a conspicuously loud creak.
Xisuma flinched, but the resident of the cave seemed not to be startled by the noise. Grian sat hunched over on the floor, legs dangling over the edge of the Bumless Pit. His back was turned, but Xisuma could still see the many torn and unraveled holes in his sweater, the scuffs of dust and blood, the way it hung limply from his shoulders where it had once fit perfectly. He sat eerily still, transfixed by the gaping hole below, as though the rest of the world did not exist.
“Grian?” X stepped forward, slowly.
“He won’t answer you,” Zedaph whispered.
“Grian.” X thought he saw the other Hermit’s shoulder twitch, just the slightest bit.
Xisuma had an idea. He reached for his communicator and typed out a message.
<Xisuma> Grian, can you hear me?
The vibration of his own communicator made Grian jump, and he whipped his head around to face his visitors. His eyes were accusatory, set deep above dark smudges on a numbly exhausted face. X wondered how long it had been since he had slept or eaten, whether he even remembered he needed to...something was very, very wrong. He needed to know what was going on, now .
“Grian...goodness me, what happened -” He took another step forward.
Apparently, it was one step too many for Grian’s liking. Like a spooked animal, he jolted back into awareness and turned away again, pitching forward and into the abyss.
“No!” Zedaph lunged forward, Xisuma hot on his heels, but they were far too late. The collection of dust and smoke that was Grian had already dispersed, blown away in the depths of the nothingness below. X stared down the hole for a moment, shocked and unsure.
“Over here!” Zedaph grabbed his arm and pulled him over to the bed contraption, where Grian had newly respawned. They were there to meet him as he sat up, dazed, and attempted to march towards the void hole again.
Xisuma caught his arm. “What are you doing? ”
The man didn’t answer. He just kept staring at the hole, pulling at Xisuma’s hand with a weak, persistent longing. The chill from earlier gathered at the back of X’s neck as he realized that Grian’s eyes looked emptier than that of any zombie. He was single-minded, and Xisuma didn’t even know why.
“Zed -” he started, but it seemed his friend had already gotten the idea. He moved in front of Grian, blocking his view of the void hold.
“Hey, hey, what’s up, man…” Zedaph crouched down in front of him, reaching out an uncertain yet friendly hand. “Can you hear me?”
For a moment, it seemed like Grian would maintain his silence. When he finally decided to answer, his voice came out cracked and halting, as though he hadn’t used it in days.
“Yes.”
He returned to ineffectively trying to break free from Xisuma.
Zedaph circled around him, tracking his movements so he was always blocking the line of sight to the hole no matter which way Grian moved. “Okay, okay, that’s good - what are you doing?”
“Going back. Have to see it again.” His gaze was distant, as though he was looking right through both of them. A heavy stone of dread settled in Xisuma’s stomach.
“See what again?” he said.
Grian opened his mouth and closed it, falling deep into thought. Once more he tried to speak, but the words he was looking for seemed to evade him. He started struggling again, more and more panicked this time, fragmented nonsense words spilling over his lips as he kept trying and failing to communicate his need, bright and calm and gorgeous and terrible and pure all muddling together in a slew of fractured syllables -
“It’s alright, it’s alright!” Xisuma adjusted his grip, holding Grian secure. “You don’t have to explain what it is! Jeez, could you just sit down for a moment so we can talk this through -”
Zedaph started to come closer, ready to help Xisuma restrain him, but Grian suddenly went limp. Calm, perfectly still, looking up at X as though there had never been a struggle. Xisuma would have almost been fooled by the pleasant look on his face, if that same face wasn’t so deathly pale.
“Okay,” Grian said evenly. “Can you let go of me now?”
“No.” As much as he wanted to trust him...he needed more information first. He needed to know what the hell was going on.
“Alright.” Grian closed his eyes, as though he was just now allowing himself to feel the last however-many hours or days of heavy exhaustion. “Ask me whatever you want.”
Xisuma stared down at him. He didn’t even know where to begin. Thankfully, Zed took the lead.
“ Why are you flinging yourself down the Bumless Pit?” he demanded.
“To see it aga-”
“No! That’s not an answer!” Zed dragged a hand across his face in frustration. “Alright then, how long have you been doing this for?”
Grian shrugged.
“It doesn’t really matter anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter anymore.” X had a hunch that nothing Grian was about to say would be able to combat the sinking feeling in his chest.
He looked up at Xisuma, fixing him in another empty, distant gaze. A trickle of blood dribbled from his nose and across his lips, but he seemed to neither notice nor care, attention fixed far, far beyond anything as mundane as bleeding. Suddenly, his eyes took on the look of the Void: bottomless and cold. Xisuma’s breath caught, and he felt a sharp tightness in his chest as though he were on the edge of suffocation. His grip loosened involuntarily, and Grian tore his arm free of it.
“I mean, it’s not important.”
Grian darted for the void hole.
As thin and shaky as he was, he was lightning-quick. Xisuma lunged to stop him but only managed to tear away a stray red threat from his sweater as he dodged around Zedaph, skidding to his knees next to the open puncture in the ground and swinging his legs over the edge.
“No, wait!” Zedaph cried. “What are you - why do you want this so badly?” He stared at Grian with desperation in his eyes, knowing just as well as Xisuma that he would never be able to get to him in time. Knowing that whatever they did, Grian would fall again, and they would have to try to stop him anew once he respawned. Talking to him was the only way, their only chance at understanding.
And it was no use. Grian wasn’t listening. One look at his face, barely visible from where they were standing, and Xisuma understood.
They would never reach him. He didn’t want to be saved.
The look on his face was joy incarnate. It was the look of a traveller long kept from his home, seeing it again for the first time in decades, realizing that it was all as he remembered, perfect as the day he’d left, and that it was finally his again to love. It was the rising of a thousand suns, the happiness of a thousand lifetimes. Grian was a compass, the Below his lodestone. To keep it from him would be an unforgivable blow.
But Xisuma would do it anyway.
He could not let his friend obliterate himself in pursuit of whatever was down there, beautiful as it might be. He opened his many screens and started to type.
Grian leaned forward until he was poised on the edge of nothingness, a hair’s breadth away from falling.
“Don’t you see,” he breathed through chapped and bleeding lips. “My mansion, the wars, the shops and endless projects - none of it matters. It never mattered. It’s all just sound and light to fill the empty space, but it will never work.” He closed his eyes, letting the edges of his hair blow softly in the grim breeze from below. “None of it matters. This is the only thing that will ever matter again.”
Soundlessly, for the hundredth time, Grian tipped himself forward into darkness.
/teleport Grian Xisuma
Instead of falling to his death, Grian materialized out of thin air and collided with the ground directly in front of Xisuma. His cry of surprise was muffled as Xa grabbed hold of him, wrapping him tightly in his arms. Zedaph scrambled for blocks to plug the void hole as Grian thrashed and screamed, begging to go back, cursing them in every way imaginable for keeping him from the one true beauty in the world... it’s okay, I’ve got you , X repeated. Over and over and over, until Grian finally wore himself out and went limp, sliding to the floor. It’s okay, it’s okay, Xisuma continued to chant numbly, even after Grian stopped being able to hear him. Even after Zedaph asked him if he was alright, and he ignored him.
It’s okay. The sight of Grian’s eyes still burns in the back of Xisuma’s mind. The thing he saw reflected in those miniature voids, that golden false pupil: tiny but incomprehensibly, horribly large - still hums in the background of his every thought. But it’s okay. He feels the pull toward the void hole, fights the urge to tear away the blocks and fling himself down it, to see the vision Grian gave him played out in full...but it’s okay. He will resist it for as long as he can, and after that, he will give in. And it will be okay.
He reaches for a button on the side of his helmet, clicking his visor into its opaque setting. Ignoring Zedaph’s repeated and worried questions, coming to him faintly through his haze, as though he were underwater. He doesn’t want Zed to be able to see his eyes after this. As long as Zedaph is safe, it will be okay.
He will resist as long and as hard as he can. And then, he will fall.
He is at peace. His road leads to the Thing Below now - it cannot be anything but right.