Work Text:
Your people are dying. It is by no fault of your own.
Your people are dying. It is your fault in part, because they have been hurt by others but you have not saved them.
Your people are dying. It is wholly your own fault. You have befriended the mad king, your walls are not high enough to keep out your enemies, you are hidden in your towers and ignoring their cries. You have brought this upon us, they call, you who has sworn to protect us.
You turn away from your windows. The mad king and his demon smile at you. You shatter a glass against their canvas grins and pretend the dripping wine is blood.
Your people are dying. It may be your fault, but you are going to correct it. Your towers are full of technologies to build up your armies and your walls, you have not slept in weeks, the phantoms dive into your spires as they come for your heart. The skies are filled with thundering clouds, echoing screams, broken hearts, storms like molten, boiling glass.
Your eyes cannot see and your hands cannot feel. All you taste is lightning and fire, iron and copper. The bitter dryness of charcoal and saltpetre fills your nose and coats the back of your throat, making you cough dust into your machines. Your water tastes like ammonia and sulphur, and you stopped drinking it days ago. You build and you create, unflinchingly. Not tirelessly, because every second is still a battle against the night, but constantly. Industriously. You cannot stop. The heavy weariness in your shoulders begs you to stop. You can no longer stand for the dizziness in your head, so you pull a chair to your worktable. You do not stop. You take the demon’s blood from its veins and you turn it into fuel. You turn its bones into your weapons. Its blood runs dry and your furnaces die, its bones crumble to sand in your hands and your blades fall, useless, to the ground, steel on stone echoing through your pounding skull. It comes back, and your people are dying. It is your fault, and you are reminded of the fact every time your boots slip on the pools of your blood that coat the cobbles of your floor. You are sure you have stained your carpets but you cannot bring yourself to care. Your curtains are torn and useless against the sun you do not know still shines. Your tools have long since broken, as have their replacements, and their replacements, but you still have your hands and the desperation in your soul makes them stronger than netherite. You pull copper ingots out into wire with the blistering heat of your fists and paint redstone lines with your bloody, corroded fingertips. The sparks travel in searing waves over your skin but never reach your heart, so you keep going. The taste in your mouth is still that of lightning and copper, but now it is joined by biting ice and acrid burnt metal blood. The blood is certainly no one else’s.
The Copper King visits. He takes your unfeeling hands in his own and guides you to a bed. He sits at your side until you rest.
My people are dying, you cry, my people are dying and I have not done enough.
He has pulled you from your duty and you cry without tears from your unseeing eyes.