Work Text:
You are not special.
You are born first into the First World, when souls were still new and the universe was brimming with potential. You are not special; the glory goes to your sister, the Queen of the ocean, who protected you long enough to found an empire before you emerged from that small, damaged egg. But you do not begrudge her this; you are content to be without godly powers, nor do you wish to be placed upon such a pedestal. She tries to lift you up with her, make you co-ruler, but you decline. You are not special, and you’re alright with that.
It’s nice, in that first life. You are not a ruler, but you are something close to one, the person who bridges the gap between the queen and the common folk. You visit your sister in the palace, but you live at the outskirts of the kingdom, close to the rivers that lead inland. You learn as many trades as you can; you mend clothing, repair buildings, cook adequate meals and bandage small wounds. You’re not the best at any of them, but that’s okay. The point isn’t really to be all that good at anything in particular, the point is to be able to keep wandering through the Ocean Empire finding things to do, and to talk to as many people as possible. You leave a trial of small favors in your wake, and when you see your sister every other week you tell her how a set of twins were born in the town near the swamp, and how the deep ocean settlements have invented new lanterns, and how your neighbor gave you a fish stuffed with berries grown on land.
Your sister is speaking to a king from the land, and you think they’ll make a good couple. But they never get the chance to marry; the stag gods are fighting, and the world crumbles in their wake. Your sister has no time to mourn when Mezalea falls; there is too much to do. People are evacuated from the shallow water to the deep ocean settlements, where Exor’s corruption and Aeor’s purification cannot reach. The palace, the only ocean settlement to stretch above the waves, falls soon after. You hide in the depths, making the rounds and lifting spirits as best as you can, waiting for the war to end.
End it does, and for one glorious year it seems that everything will go back to normal. You move back to the shallows near the swamp, and abandoned houses are repaired and repopulated. You do not expect illness to travel downstream from the river, and by the time you realize that blood seeping from your gills is much worse than a simple cold, it is too late.
You aren’t conscious for much of the rest of it. You just sink slowly into darkness, vaguely aware of the doctors around you, until this life ends.
You start again in the next life, in a new world, unburdened by memories of the past. You are reborn again and again, but you are always mortal. You are not special; you are a people person, always the center of gossip when things are peaceful, and the person to trust when peace seems like nothing more than a distant memory. You are a jack of all trades, or a carpenter, or a baker, or a blacksmith; you like doing things with your hands, the sort of things one can spend mindless hours working on while talking to the people that rotate through your shop.
In every lifetime, you notice the whispers. A quiet thank you when you plant flowers, or when you take the care to replant forests that have been razed to the ground. Guidance when you misstep, watch out when you’re caught out alone at night. You know it is the voice of the World, though no one tells you this. No one has to tell you. In every lifetime, you know.
You beat the game, once. You’re a medic in this life, and there are people seeking adventure, and somehow you get roped in. You don’t do much besides hide underground and treat injuries as they come, but eventually the dragon dies and you jump through the portal beside the rest of them.
And the universe says I love you as you fall.
You happen to be reborn a few years after the portals open, and by the time you are old enough to understand it seems impossible that the world could ever be different. You grow up used to an open universe, to traveling between servers and not-exactly-dying on a regular basis. You travel and make friends, and you play the games that they make, and you simply live. You pick up little skills along the way, and perhaps you take to them a bit too quickly, but that’s hardly anything in a world where even mortals live for centuries. There are humans, humans with no godly power, who can build the most incredible machines or work impossible feats of magic. It amazes you, particularly since so many of these people are your friends.
You start staying longer on servers, and you have fun. There’s Evo, which is fun until it ends in disaster, and there’s X Life, and then there’s the unplanned interruption of 3rd Life. You enjoy it, surprisingly, despite dying far too soon for your liking. You listen to the world as you always do, and it’s that much more vindicating when the chains are lifted as the gods admit defeat.
Then there’s Empires.
You enter the server one day late, and somehow the first steps through the jungle feel like home. You settle in the swamp and call yourself the Codfather, and you grow stronger from swimming every day. There’s something about this world that’s just brimming with magic, like X Life but less artificial, more real. You don’t need the world’s warnings to hate the salmon and never drink from the rivers and protect the cod at all costs. You don’t notice at first how the world seems to sing, how the earth and the sea hum with magic and potential, how the trees seem to bend out of your way and how paths open up before you in the dead of night. After all, you aren’t special.
But you are loved, the world says.
You become allies with the Ocean Empire, and Lizzie has always been a good friend, but it’s only in this world that something starts itching at the back of your head. You shrug it off, but it’s still there, that memory trying to break loose from the bonds of death.
You build up your empire, and citizens arrive from beyond the server, and you’ve never wanted to be a ruler but that’s what you agreed to, so you lead. Your empire is small, so you lead the way you want to, by living no higher than the people and by including everyone in major decisions. Really, you’re more of an organizer and ambassador than a king. You like it that way. You don’t want to be special. But the people love you, and so they stay.
It’s a chaotic world, to be sure, and wars are expected. You fight, and your allies get dragged in, and then there’s a demon on the server and things get a bit out of hand. Distantly, you remember that this is supposed to be a brand-new world, but it’s never really felt like that to you. This world feels ancient and powerful, and gentle in the way a human is with a kitten, afraid of breaking something so delicate. It doesn’t surprise you to find out that she is, in fact, the oldest world of them all.
She is hurt by the corruption, and there is only so much you can do. You talk to Lizzie, Joel, and Pix, but none of them have any solutions. Everyone seems content to bide their time and wait for someone else to do something about the demon, and you are not special, so there is nothing you can do on your own.
You do not need to be special, the world reminds you. You only have to be you.
You should be more surprised than you are when the fish start speaking to you. Or, more accurately, when you begin to understand them. Then Lizzie comes with a book, and you find a letter in your storage room, and everything makes so much more sense.
You may not be special, but you are loved. You are loved by your sister, by the World, and by the very Universe itself. You are loved, and that will always be enough, for you are too kind to ever loose that trust. So the trees will bend, and the people will laugh, and the path before you will always be clear. You will always plant flowers and repair creeper holes, and you will make little things that make the world brighter. You love the world, and the people in it, and so you are loved back.
All this is true, but perhaps one thing is not. You don’t think you are special, and you have never tried to be, but maybe you are anyway. You have always been mortal, always been human, but you have also always been kind.
Maybe you’re special because you are loved.