Chapter Text
Look, Tommy is a big man. He is the biggest of men. If you took all the men in the world and put them in a room, Tommy would be the biggest by far. But he did not expect the ghast to blow his nether portal up, so you can hardly blame him for screaming in fear and frantically hiding in a hole.
It did not work, if you were wondering. The ghast disappeared, but once Tommy tried to tunnel out, he immediately ran into a pocket of lava, which only barely missed burning him to ashes, and got a decent amount of his stuff.
So, in essence, he is fucked.
Tommy sprints across the hard netherrack, heat searing into the soles of his feet as they plant on the ground just too short to get burnt. The warmth of the Nether cloaks his skin, sinking into his pores and making his breath come up short.
He is stuck, here, in literal hell, for the foreseeable future. The only way he could light the Nether portal is by invoking the wrath of a ghast and getting it to send a fire charge in the exact right place. Problem was, Tommy did not want to do that, because he was low on food due to the stupid forced vegetarianism, and one well-placed hit would certainly kill him.
His wings, (the pitiful half-grown things), are held stiffly away from his body, in a desperate attempt to cool them down just the slightest. It’s now that Tommy actually notices how much insulation the patches of feathers on his body provide, and curses being an Avian.
This is so stupid. Tommy shouldn’t have come here. He’d just wanted some netherrack to make a fire that wouldn’t put out, so he’d be warm through the night, but now he thinks he’s had enough warmth to last a lifetime.
And then, in the distance, he spots cyan. Giant warped fungi overhang a cliff, the edge of a massive forest that is his safe haven. That is the only place he will be able to survive.
Oh gods, he’s really stuck here. He’s going to be living in the Nether until he dies of starvation or lava or a piglin brute or a ghast, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
The warped forest approaches quickly, a layer of spongy nylium making itself known on top of the netherrack. The fungi are packed densely, and Tommy quickly finds himself in a sheltered grove, the nylium cool enough for him to finally stop running.
He dumps his inventory out into a pile, parsing through it to see what possessions he is going to die with.
A dented iron sword, a gold chestplate a couple hits away from shattering, a few crude wooden bowls he’d carved earlier, a quarter stack of bread, half a stack of dirt, seven torches, two spruce logs, a couple blocks of wool, and a shiny new iron pickaxe he’d made especially for this trip.
Tommy straps the chestplate to his body — better to have the extra protection than be lighter. He places the sword in its scabbard, resting at his hip in a familiar and comforting weight. The logs he makes into planks, making a crafting table and shoving it and the remaining wood into his inventory. His pickaxe slips into the strap on his belt, handle knocking against his thigh. The torches are placed in his off hand, a constant source of light because he doesn’t have enough to afford to place them. The bread, wool, and dirt fall into their places in his inventory, and Tommy turns his attention to the bowls.
There are the normal mushrooms in warped forests, right? He can’t remember, no matter how much he searches his memory. But if there are, Tommy can make mushroom stew.
That’s good, that’s good. Actually, he can see a tiny brown mushroom underneath that giant warped fungus, which is really good.
He picks up the bowls and gets to work punching down a couple of the huge fungi to get their stems. He can get warped planks from those, and then he can make a shelter.
This is okay. Everything is okay. At least the hunters won’t be after him anymore, right? Tommy is ignoring the existence of Nether hybrids, like the Blazeborne he’d seen sheltering from the rain that one time near his house. Those catch the eye of hunters far easier than any Overworld hybrid.
Tommy dusts his hands off and looks at his handiwork. A tiny hut looks back at him, roof slightly caving in and walls at an angle.
It’s perfect.
He crafts a door, throwing the other two outside before entering and placing a torch on the wall. The crafting table goes down in the corner, and Tommy crafts a carpet to place as a crude bed (even though beds couldn’t be used in the Nether, he still got tired, which personally, he thought, was a shit rule).
He slumps against the wall, letting out a breath.
What the fuck.
Yeah, that sums it up pretty well doesn’t it?
—
Tommy is officially out of food. He thinks it might have been a week or two, but there’s no daylight cycle in the Nether and time passes differently here than in the Overworld. So essentially, he has no fucking clue how long it’s been.
He really just had to live independently, didn’t he. Now, nobody will ever notice that he’s gone, and he’ll be stuck here until he dies.
Might as well prolong the time he has left.
Tommy hauls himself off of the ground, pausing for a moment as his head spins, and then shuffling out of the door and out to go look for mushrooms.
He probably should have done this earlier, when he had the energy. But it’s too late to go back now, and Tommy would rather be dizzy than starve.
He stumbles over to the one that he’d seen when making his house, and plucks it from the ground.
He misses the Overworld. Here, in the heat of the Nether, he finds himself missing things he hadn’t thought he would have missed. Water, most of all. He used to hate when it rained, the water making his feathers damp and bedraggled for hours, but now he thinks he’d rather it always rained than be stuck here.
He plucks another red mushroom and adds it to his inventory.
Mobs. The friendly ones of course, not like the ghasts and piglin brutes and magma cubes that inhabited the Nether, or even the zombies, skeletons, and creepers of the Overworld. The cows, pigs, sheep, chickens. Tommy misses the quiet din of their sounds at night, when he was trying to sleep. He misses Henry, his calf, who was probably still tied up on that fence outside his house and waiting for him. Tommy just hopes there was enough grass nearby for Henry to not starve.
He finds a couple more mushrooms growing on a fallen huge fungus and adds them to the growing pile.
Flowers. However stupid it may sound, Tommy had always kept a couple in his chest and dotted around his house. They reminded him of the bee hybrid he’d been friends with in early childhood, when he still had parents. Before his wings had grown in. And the allium that the traveling Enderian had gifted him. They spoke different tongues, yet Tommy had never felt closer to anyone.
He tears a final brown mushroom from the ground, and heads back to his shelter. On the way, he pauses at a stray fire to separate the mushrooms into bowls and properly cook the stew.
Tommy’s always hated mushrooms. Now, as he watches them melt into mush, he thinks he might abhor them.
Yet, there is nothing he can do about it. It’s either drink the mushroom stew or starve, and he knows which one of those he prefers.
He brings the bowl to his lips, and it’s both disgusting and amazing to be finally consuming something. He has to get used to this, though.
Great.
—
It must have been his birthday by now, right? He’d entered the Nether maybe two or three months before his birthday, he thinks. He doesn’t quite know, since knowing the date was only possible through precise counting of days, and nothing really differentiated one month from another other than the crop seasons. He’d left when the wheat was at its peak, so it was likely that his birthday was, if not past, soon. He was born when the wheat was waning and the earliest carrots were ready to be picked.
So Tommy is maybe-thirteen! He’s finally a big man. (Well, he was always a big man, but now at least he can claim the title of man without being questioned).
He had/is having his birthday in the Nether.
In hell.
Fun.
He is out on the borders of the warped forest, scouting out to see what is nearby, and if he can afford to leave the forest. His chestplate had broken after a hard fall, so it is a gamble if he lives or dies.
The vwoop of an enderman alerts him, and he glances down to see the lanky black-void body of one. Glowing purple eyes are visible in Tommy’s peripheral vision, and he carefully looks away. The enderman vwoops again, and then it is gone.
And that’s when he sees them. Trudging through the soul sand valley below, Tommy can see a person, bearing the large insignia on their back that marks them as a hunter.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
This is not good.
Tommy rises from his perch on top of the huge warped fungus and sprints, running along the tops of the fungi and just barely managing to not scream. There is a hunter here, and where there is one, there is many, and Tommy had only just been able to fight them off before but he certainly cannot here, in the Nether, where he is weak from only eating mushroom stew and has no armour.
Fuck.
He stumbles into his house, slamming the door behind him and curling up into a ball in the corner.
This is not good. He thought he’d at least be safe from them, but he’s not. They’re here, and if they find him they’re going to cut off his wings and pluck his feathers and torture him and-
It’s fine. They won’t find him. Blazeborne, the ones they value the most, tend to stay in the Nether fortresses where they are born. Creatures of the Nether stay away from the warped forests, because their miasma of wrong is wired instinctually within them, making the biomes a refuge for those of the Overworld and the End.
Still, Tommy’s breath comes in short gasps, and his heart is thrumming against his chest. Ghosts of hands grip his wrists, the sharp whisper of a blade on the base of his wing, the burning pain as they chopped off a finger trying to get him to shut up coming back with a vengeance.
He interlocks his fingers and presses them to his mouth, trying to hold back sobs as his eyes burn. The empty space where his left ring finger would be is smoldering with fire, even though the wound has long since healed.
Tommy hates the Nether. It’s hot and stuffy and empty and lonely and somehow just so dreadfully cold.
—
He’s changing, he’s noticed. Tommy’s feet no longer hurt when he stands on the netherrack, he’s accustomed to the harsh sounds of the lava lake below, he can see farther into the blue haze that falls over the warped forest, he’s less uncomfortable with the heat.
And maybe, he reasons, now he is strong enough to take the hit from the ghast if he must, to relight the portal. Tommy ignores the fear that settles in his bones whenever he even hears the screech of one of them.
So he sets off, heading towards where he remembers the portal is. The journey is a lot less perilous than he remembered, so he’s off to a good start. Maybe this will happen!
(Spoiler alert: it doesn’t).
The dark glassy obsidian finally becomes visible as Tommy crosses the crest of a hill, and he starts running.
And then he stops.
Because the portal frame is missing a block.
Someone broke the portal on purpose.
Fuck.
Tommy runs his hands through his hair, tugging at it. Of course. Of course, once he mustered up the courage to come back, he was too late.
And that also meant that somebody was at his house, because they had to have broken the portal from the Overworld.
Tommy hoped they made sure Henry was still alive. It must have been months, the calf could already be a bull now. His crops definitely needed tending to as well, Tommy didn’t want to deal with wilted plants. He left his bed unmade, he remembers, which is kind of awkward now.
And, there it was. The unmistakable squeal of a ghast, who seemed to have noticed Tommy.
Not good.
His breath starts to pick up as he runs, feet slamming into the ground. But of course, ghasts are creatures of horror, and once one of them spots you, it is kill or be killed.
And Tommy has been spotted.
Its scream echoes through his head as he is thrown forward from an explosion behind him, flames licking at the soles of his feet.
He collapses, terror flooding his mind as he weakly swings a fist at the fireball that approaches him.
Tommy’s knuckles sting but surprisingly connect, and the fireball just barely misses the ghast. He scrambles onto his feet, throwing a punch at the next one.
It’s a hit. The ghast makes one last, strangled shriek before disintegrating, dropping a pearly tear to the ground.
Tommy grabs it, fingers fumbling around it as he runs back to his home as fast as he can. Now that the adrenaline is wearing off, it is replaced by utter and primal fear.
He only barely makes it inside before his legs are giving out, and the ghast tear slips out of his grasp because his hands are trembling so violently that he can’t even begin to think of stilling them.
No.
No, he is not doing that again, he certainly cannot face another ghast, because Tommy may be a big man but big men do not fuck around with massive horrid beings who can shoot explosions out of their mouths and trap those very big men in the Nether for- maybe even half a year.
It takes a while, but finally, his breathing slows to an acceptable pace, and Tommy wipes tears off of his face that he didn’t notice falling; and he shoves the ghast tear in his chest, not to be looked at again.
It’s definitive now. He’s living in the Nether.
—
Tommy does not like living in the Nether. He can barely remember what flowers smell like, or how the stars looked, or the colours of the sunrise. He thinks, based on his shitty internal clock, that it’s been maybe three-quarters of a year since he got stuck here. The beetroots would be ready to pick soon.
He would like to pick the beetroots.
So, Tommy has taken it upon himself to find a fortress. If he remembers correctly, they can contain obsidian and flint and steel, and he thinks he can finally take the fire from the blazes, who spawn in the dozens in fortresses.
Might as well, anyways. There isn’t much for him to do around here, and he’d rather try to get out than stay holed up in that stupid warped forest for the rest of his life.
Maybe he’ll even meet a nice Blazeborne who’ll help him. He’s probably a little too old to pull the ‘pitiful lost child’ card, but he’s still far from an adult.
He hums as he walks, fragmented melodies from lullabies he remembers of years past. They swirl through his head, just out of reach if he tries to grab one, but he lets each memory flit into the air as it chooses. His parents had sung them to him, and he remembers their faces, hazy through time, smiling down on him as he falls asleep.
They told him stories, too. Stories of human heroes traveling through portals to different dimensions, slaying poison-breathing dragons, earning wings on their own. They called him the Crowfather, for his void-dark wings. Tommy thinks if it were real, he would quite like to do that. Sure, he had wings of his own, but they were stubby, flightless things, only able to slightly break his fall.
Everyone (including him) had been disappointed when they’d grown in. Tommy had kept expecting them to grow into their full size though, even when his parents and the rest of the flock had all left.
He’d stopped doing that, needless to say.
The dark pillars of nether bricks that jutted out of the lava make themselves visible, and Tommy pauses.
A fortress.
He is going to get out.
Tommy runs, sprinting until his feet hit the cold nether bricks, a strange contrast to the rough netherrack.
He brandishes his sword in front of him, even though it would probably snap in half at the first swing, and heads forward. There’s nothing to be found on the bridges except death.
And death he does find, before he even makes it to a room, in the form of a wither skeleton. The clattering of bones raised from their slumber sounds behind him, and Tommy spins around just to dodge the swing of a stone sword.
He yelps, bringing up his sword to block another strike, and runs, three more somehow appearing behind him. When he blindly swings at one, he thankfully hears the skeleton fall off and into the lava.
Another is stabbed enough that it dies, and then there are two. He slices through the skull of one and it disappears into dust, and dodges an attack from the other. He does not dodge the next, however.
The sword slices across his leg and Tommy yelps in pain, knocking the skeleton off of the bridge and hurrying back to the netherrack.
If he wasn’t able to deal with a couple wither skeletons, who must be in close proximity to hit him, he definitely can’t deal with blazes, who can shoot fire at will.
His leg sends spikes of pain through his body, but Tommy still limps through the Nether, ignoring it in favour of getting back home safe.
This is not going well.
—
Tommy is going to die here. Tommy is going to die in the Nether, at the ripe old age of probably-thirteen, to wither sickness.
He’d wrapped the wound with scraps of his shirt, but inky darkness still made its way through the veins surrounding the injury, and it stings with hot-cold-fire-ice pain that flares every time he jostles it. He is slowly running out of mushroom stew, and can’t stand up for long enough to even think about collecting any more. He’s propped up against the wall, resting on the worn carpet that he’d placed down when he’d first made the home.
It hurts. Tommy wants to whine, to chirp and call for flock so they can come and take the pain away. The sounds come out hoarse, grating against his throat and stealing what little breath he has. He curls in on himself, trying his best not to move his leg and just forget about the gash in his calf. If he stays still long enough, he can pretend that it’s gone numb and that he can’t feel it anymore.
Tommy is going to die here.
—
Everything hurts. Vaguely, Tommy can see black tendrils curling around his leg, pulsing in tune with his heartbeat, and he frowns. That isn’t right. Then again, nothing is right.
He can’t remember the sun. How bright it is, what colours it casts on the clouds at dawn and dusk, how big it is.
Sweat rolls down his forehead, and Tommy wonders how he got on the floor. His body is wracked with shudders, each jolt sending a stab of white-hot pain through his body.
Tommy does not like this. He gives it a one star review, would not recommend.
A cry tears itself from his throat, and Tommy flinches at the sound. It only serves to spend his energy, and it causes a fresh wave of hurt.
He hopes, at least, that he can fall asleep. He’s been stuck awake, horribly and awfully awake. He wants so desperately to fall asleep, lose the pain for even just an hour.
Tommy is so tired.
The creak of a door alerts him, and he looks up. Someone is standing in the doorway, face too shadowed to make out any details, but Tommy sees the dark wings tucked in behind them.
Maybe the Crowfather’s come to save him. He voices the thought, and the stranger approaches. Some sort of sound comes out of their mouth, he’s pretty sure, but Tommy doesn’t hear it. His leg is acting up, and it’s taking all of his effort not to scream out loud. The stranger glances to his leg, and then grabs a potion from their inventory; uncorking it and pouring it over his leg.
The pain subsides, and finally, thankfully, Tommy is able to sleep.
—
Philza had moved into the area surrounding the lake when the potatoes were in season. He’d brought along with him his flock (although none were Elytrians like him). They’d settled on the shore, apart from Niki (the Merling had made herself a grotto in the lake), figuring that nobody lived nearby, and resumed their lives just as they had been before the uprooting; Phil knew the dangers of hunters, and he knew to move whenever they were spotted.
They’d planted crops, started farms, built houses, and before long it felt like home again.
He’d been walking with Wilbur one late night, talking about the mundane things that both of them knew didn’t matter yet still enjoyed discussing, when they’d stumbled upon the house.
It was a quaint little thing, birch planks with a cobblestone roof laid slightly askew. Small fields of various crops and pens of animals surrounded it, with a young bull tied up at the door. Which was open.
Phil had frowned. He’d glanced at Wilbur and the phantom hybrid had nodded towards it silently. He’d peered inside to find an empty bed (still unmade, but the mess felt like it’d been there far more than just a day), a couple double chests, a crafting table and furnace, and a music disc lying on the floor.
Phil had picked it up to find a layer of dust so thick that a cloud billowed out when it left the floor, leaving dust on his fingertips (much to his dismay).
This place had been deserted for a while.
A Nether portal frame stood outside, and Phil had frowned as he broke a block. It would be best for there not to be any chance at all of things coming through, he knew. Best to cut off all methods of entry that they could not monitor, and they could restore it later if they really wanted. The picture of an empty portal was much more foreboding than even a lit one, because it meant that somebody was going to light it.
He’d come back the next morning (sans Wil, as his nature as a phantom made him burn in the daylight) and fed the bull, who seemed to have eaten all the grass he could reach. A tag hung from his ear reading Henry, so that’s what Phil had called him.
It’s a couple months before he works up the nerve to enter the Nether (if only to gather some warped stems so he can add on to a section of the Pub), restoring the portal and striking his flint and steel. The ominous sounds of the portal make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, yet he still steps in, gold armour strapped tightly to his body.
When he steps out, he sees a crater reminiscent of a ghast’s fireball at the foot of the portal, and Phil frowns. That seemed… awfully like the reason that it was there, yet unlit.
Regardless, he picks a direction and follows it, humming a tune that Wilbur had sung him the other day of his new song. More explosions litter the path, and Phil frowns, yet keeps going.
He’s painfully reminded that this horrid dimension, full of lava and fire and creatures that seek to kill you, is where Jack hails from. The heat clogs his lungs, and Phil wonders how Jack, the Blazeborne whom he often walks in on staring up at the sky in awe, survived here.
And then finally, he spots the blue fog and the massive fungi, nylium growing underneath his feet.
He’s a couple steps into the forest when he hears a faint cry, and every single one of his feathers fluffs up instinctually. The sound is familiar in an unfamiliar way, and Philza knows this is one of his own kind.
Phil narrows his eyes. That was the call of a child in pain. There is either a young child in the Nether, or something is imitating it and wants Phil to approach. He’s had far too much experience in his life with crude imitators, attempting to lure him into traps.
Though he knows, deep down, that he cannot ignore it.
Phil listens carefully, but the sound does not come again; its source seems to have been a tiny warped plank hut, nearly falling apart.
He opens the door, crossing his fingers that the walls do not collapse, and looks inside.
And there is, in fact, a child. A boy, who cannot be more than eleven years old, shudders on the ground, curled up on carpet worn to threads. His leg is wrapped with cloth, but Phil can see the telltale signs of withering creeping out from underneath, tracing his veins.
It’s never easy for him to stomach the frankly terrifying effects of wither sickness. Phil has seen the tired eyes, the ink invading blood, the endless pain far too many times for his liking (which is to say, more than zero).
Oh gods, Phil can count his ribs through his shirt. The boy looks up at him, and his eyes are dull and hazy. He murmurs something, but it’s incomprehensible.
“Hey mate. Why’re you in here all alone?” Phil crouches, trying to calm his nerves. The boy stares at him, no sign of recognition in his eyes.
He looks pained.
Fuck, that wither sickness must be worse than he thought. Phil grabs a healing potion, dumping it over the wound instead of bothering to dab it in. He knows it’s wasteful, and he knows that it probably would have been more effective if he’d applied it properly, but he can’t help to see this child in pain any longer.
The boy slumps, eyes fluttering shut, and Phil lets out a yell but he is already unconscious.
Phil stays there, leaning against the wall and checking up on the boy every few minutes to see if he is breathing, for a while. The boy’s wings flutter in his sleep, weakly beating. They’re quite small though, for his age.
Speaking of, what is a young boy like this doing in the Nether at all, let alone by himself? Phil wouldn’t even go alone unless it was necessary, but this boy has been in here long enough to make a shelter. He looks barely old enough to use a furnace safely. At this age, Phil was- Well, Phil was traveling, because his family couldn’t take the constant barrage of hunters. Still, he wouldn’t wish anything like that on even his worst enemy. And here this child was, shivering on a pitiful excuse of a bed in the Nether instead of enjoying the sun with friends.
Phil winces.
He also can’t help but consider that the boy had come through the portal that he’d broken, meaning Phil trapped him in here months ago.
The boy stirs, and Phil jolts to attention. The withering has retreated, so he should feel a little better.
And the first words he speaks, as he sits up and takes note of Phil and the bandages?
“What the fuck.”
Phil wheezes, and the boy frowns at him.
“I’d scold you for your language, but I’m just as bad,” he snickers.
“What the fuck,” The boy repeats, and Phil relents.
“Oh, right. Hey mate, I’m Philza, call me Phil. You seemed to be a little hurt, so I patched you up. What’s your name?” he smiles.
The boy raises an eyebrow, but responds with “Tommy.”
“So, Tommy, what’s a kid like you doing alone out in the Nether?” Phil asks, and Tommy goes perfectly still. “Mate?” he prods.
“I couldn’t get out.” He has to strain his ears to hear it, but when he does, Phil goes silent.
“You were stranded here?” Tommy nods, breath shaky.
Oh, he definitely trapped this child in the Nether for months. Amazing, lovely.
“Well, good thing I’m here now, because I’ve got a flint and steel and some obsidian, and I’m gonna help you get out of here, kay mate?” he holds out a hand, and Tommy takes it.
They both stand up, Tommy testing out his weight for a split second before just lifting the foot off of the ground and balancing on one leg.
“You want me to carry you?” Phil offers, and Tommy shakes his head.
“It’ll be too slow. I can hop fast enough.”
“Hey, I’m not worried about speed. We can go as fast as is comfortable for you.” Tommy shakes his head, digging through his chest and gathering everything.
“Need to go fast, cause ghasts’ll hear us.” And oh, isn’t that concerning. All of a sudden the explosions make sense, and Phil sucks in a breath as he thinks of this child having to deal with a ghast.
“I’ll fend them off, okay? You take your time, I’ll keep you safe.” Tommy looks confused at that, but nods, and Phil wraps an arm around his shoulders.
Tommy lurches back like he’s been burned, and Phil pulls his arm back with a murmured “Sorry.”
The boy shakes his head, limping out of the door and slamming it shut behind Phil.
“Can you go first?” he murmurs, and Phil’s heart melts.
“Yeah, of course mate.” he steps forward, bringing out a shield and his sword. He stands guard as Tommy moves, limping heavily. They travel decently fast, though, and they soon find themselves at the portal.
Tommy stares at the swirling purple magic, eyes wide.
“You ready to go?” Phil asks, and Tommy nods.
“It’s just… been a while.” he runs a hand through his hair. There is a moment of silence, and then he ruffles his feathers and shakes his head. “Yeah. I’m ready.”
Tommy hops into the portal, and Phil follows, and then they are out.