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Pixlriffs finds a mountain in the desert, jutting up out of the sand like a massive anthill. Its age is betrayed by the sand that has built up around the base and in the lower tunnels, but it stands stronger than the weathered hills just beyond it. Who could have built such a thing, he wonders, for it is clearly unnatural; the way it stands alone, far from any other mountains, how the stone (and he’s not even sure it is stone) contains meticulous layers in faint colors, as if it were built one paper-thin layer at a time.
He decides to build his empire at the base of the mountain.
Later, when he is more well-equipped, he ventures into the lower tunnels. The layout is undoubtedly organic and yet perfectly logical; he can see the remains of civilization here, each cavern built into the walls serving a purpose. Traces of bed frames in one room, a collapsed workbench in the next, residential interspersed with commercial in a way that screams of a planned settlement. The mountain is more hollow than he first assumed, every inch of space used in some way. The walls are thin but strong, somehow soundproof despite the echoes in the larger caverns. There are hardly any mobs, despite the darkness; it takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize that the floor is made up of half-slabs in almost the entirety of the mountain, and what mobs do spawn come from hidden ledges and unprotected corners.
With a few more lanterns and proper ventilation, this place could start to feel like home again.
The mountain wasn't yet complete the first time Pix died. He was a king in that first life, though he often denied his title. He was an academic first and foremost, someone seeking all the knowledge he could possibly possess. The desert had not been settled yet, and so he sought to do it himself, so he could find what secrets may lay hidden there. He didn’t expect it to grow as much as it did, but he would not abandon what he started. So he built up a strong system of government, put a competent council in charge, and went back to his research.
The mountain was his idea, and he designed the blueprints, but he never saw it fully completed. It was his best defense for the upcoming Stag Wars; though war did not break out for another decade after his death, the tension had been brewing for centuries, and everyone in Pixandria had known it was only a matter of time. So they built the mountain; an impenetrable settlement, safe from both the harsh desert and the upcoming magical storm, where the people could live on in safety.
Pix did not die dramatically. It was almost expected, really, that he would fall to one of his own experiments; and fall he did, to a single bolt of lightning.
That was the first time his soul passed through Death’s realm.
Kristin did not have a particular process when it came to choosing her angels.
Sometimes they fell into her life dramatically, a previously unremarkable soul suddenly determined to live on. Sometimes her interest grew over time, after seeing them pass through her realm time and again. Sometimes they were already minor gods, though more often than not she recruited mortals. But in the end, her methods were selfish; she kept her angels around because they fascinated her, and she didn’t dare let them slip away to be reborn again.
She had her eye on a few different mortals, at the moment. One in particular had caught her interest long before she started taking on angels, and it had been millenia since she so much as thought of him, but recently she had noticed his soul again. He lived longer than most, and when she met him in between each life and the next, he told her about wild experiments and advancements that were always a bit ahead of his time. He asked her questions about the gods and how the angels functioned and how people ascended, and for once she found herself answering.
Around when the gods started discussing ideas that would later lead to the creation of Admins, Pix came to her realm once again. He never remembered her, of course; no mortal soul ever did. But it seemed that he had as many questions as ever, and she answered them in full as she always did, and when she finally finished he fell silent.
Then, he turned to her and said with conviction, “I’m not ready to die yet.”
Kristin loved when mortals could surprise her.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Pix continued. “You’ve explained how souls get reincarnated and move on to the next life, and I’ve realized how my past selves must have done all of this research that I’ll never remember. And it seems so futile, to know that I’ll be starting all over again, especially since I won’t remember any of this.”
He goes on, rambling a bit. “And think of the good I could do- I’ve never really wanted to be a god or anything, but if I just had that knowledge, imagine the good I could do for humanity. Death is a natural thing, and I don’t intend to thwart it, but I feel as though I could ease so much suffering. I was so close to finally setting up an automatic blaze farm, and then we could brew enough healing potions to cure the sick, or at least let them be free of pain.”
She can’t make him an angel, can she? He cares too much for humanity, too much for his research. But she cannot let him go, cannot let a mind like this remain trapped in the chains of mortality.
“Perhaps,” she says slowly, “we can find a solution.”
He knows by now how her angels function, and she proposes to give him a similar power. Enough divinity to grant him strength in life, enough that he can distinguish gods from mortals and catch a glimpse of the inner workings of the world. But- and this is the crucial thing- he will not be immortal. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
“You’ll keep all your memories, when you respawn,” she explains. She’s certain she can do that; she’s done the same before, after all, just… more temporarily.
Pix accepts, and so he becomes… not an angel, but some relation to Death, a demigod perhaps. He stays another month or two, devouring her personal library, before he returns to the mortal world.
She’ll see him again, once every century or so, and she greatly looks forward to it.
Pix remembers his past lives in bits and pieces.
It starts with just the one, the life that ended with him making that deal with Death. He is reborn with all the memories and knowledge of an old man, and this world is new to him but the basic concepts that govern it are not. He throws himself into his research, and he prides himself on what he creates.
This life is fragmented, broken up by bits of memory resurfacing, slowly slotting into his past like puzzle pieces. In roughly reverse chronological order, he reconstructs his past selves, until the pieces finally come together again. It takes a full millenia, and many mortal lifetimes, but he has time now. No matter how many times he is reborn, he remembers, and in the end the final picture doesn’t feel all that different from the Pixlriffs of any individual life.
Of course, it cannot stop there. Once his memories are returned, the flashes don’t stop, though they do grow more predictable. At first he can’t comprehend the visions, can’t understand what they’re showing them, but as he experiences increasing cases of deja vu, he begins to understand. Just as he now remembers his past lives, he is seeing his future lives too.
He quickly realises the limitations on his visions. They show him death, be it his own or someone else’s that he will witness, and occasionally deaths that he won’t even be present for. He learns to pick out details in the vision, to figure out the location and the time of day and who’s involved, and sometimes he even prevents them. Death is not the end, of course, and some would say that he’s interfering with something sacred, but he learned long ago that Death is a kind woman just helping souls to pass on, and there is no destined time for someone to die. It just happens, independent of any fate or destiny, and Pix sees no reason why he should not interfere with it.
Only after 1500 years does Pix obtain his proper title: the Prophet of Death. Kristin loves it, when he finally suggests the title, and it sticks like glue among the angels and other gods he encounters. He likes it, and though he is a scientist first and foremost, he starts to like counting immortality as a part of his identity, too.
As always, time marches on, and Pix listens in on the Old Gods’ debates over adding Admins. He doesn’t care much for the debates; he’s just interested in what may happen next. It’s an unprecedented change, to be sure, to give mortals even a sliver of power without tying them to a particular god. The Old Gods seem to think, after long debates, that it won’t change too much besides making their lives easier.
Oh, how wrong they were.
Pix is lucky to be able to witness the shift in reality firsthand. First come communicators, then rudimentary portals, then an organized hub system and cross-server comms and, finally, respawn. It feels as though the universe has been turned on its head; mortals are immortal, new gods are popping up out of nowhere every other day, and all of a sudden the world is so much more free.
In a world suddenly made rich with abundance, Pix finds himself floundering for a moment, before he’s swept into the redstone communities and faced with the fact that he can create just about anything.
Pix likes this new universe.
Pix doesn’t recognise the world he’s in until he sees the mountain. Because this is his desert, that is the mountain he designed, and this is Pixandria, buried under thousands of years of shifting sand. This server is home, this desert is home, and how can he do anything but start rebuilding his kingdom at the base of the mountain?
He may only catch glimpses of future deaths (and there are a lot to come in this world), but some part of him knows that he was always meant to come back here, regardless of any visions guiding the way. Perhaps fate is at work, or perhaps it’s simply the natural instinct to return to one’s homeland, to settle in where it’s safe and never leave again. Or perhaps it’s because it’s this world in particular, the First World where all life originated, this world that still hums with magic and gives gifts to her people indiscriminately. Maybe it’s destiny, or maybe it’s chance, or maybe it’s just a lonely world calling her children home.
Either way, he’s home again, and he has a feeling that Empires will go on for a long, long time.