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The armies line up at sunrise. A glow, aglow, a row of numbness burning golden. Peaceful. Someone’s crying.
“This is the last day that counts.”
Wind breathes for the soldiers.
“Say goodbye to the sun.”
There are two men that stand behind their army, thousands before them, at their feet. Two men, like giants from the cliff, lifting their feet would crush a man, lifting their swords would crush a hundred. They stand only six feet tall, their shadows cast to heaven, time trailing behind them a cape millenia long.
They are the latter guard, any advance before them is for show, and they are the retreat guard, gods of the deserters. Someone caught behind them now is someone in void. They are beginning and end of the world, as since they have lived and for since will they reign.
And now they are men at sunrise, and they can hear someone crying.
The summer landscape is dry—bare earth and rocks are the lush carpet for these hills. Old paths left by rivulets of water come up dusty under their feet, under their fingers. Thank a god that the soil is so iron-filled, so red.
To focus on the pair behind: they are complete, they complement. Foes to friends, who have fought so many times on so many sides of so many battles. A completed set, the warriors who stand back until they decide upon doom.
He on the left has tusks and hog ears, his hair pink and braided roughly. He wears a plain white shirt, no cloak, no night chill will he feel. Breeches reach to the bare hooves of a pig. At his belt hangs a scabbard, leather, flaking, a quiver in the same state at his hip too. On his back is a bow, along with an axe. Some refer to him as Blood.
His companion is fair-haired but shorn shorter to the shoulders, and he too wears no cloak, only his natural wings upon his back. They are feathered black and midnight. He fights with a sword and a bow, and a chain looped about one arm. Some refer to him as an angel, some refer to him as Death.
The land is silent before the first drumbeat. Stillborn born a heartbeat.
Blood holds his breath. He’s seen these moments before.
Death bites his tongue. Life is more important than anything he may want to say.
At the general’s scream, the battle begins.
The clash of armies is waves against waves. A riptide. Hold on tight to your sword, run along the side of the battle, keep your head up, try not to drown.
Blood and Death have yet to enter the battlefield, yet the world is already carpeted with both.
The man on the right takes a knee and wipes dust off his boot. Once, twice, three times his finger passes over the leather toe. He jams his finger into the fabric and realizes he’s gouging the polish off with the pad of his finger. Blood kneels to join Death on the ground and rests a hand on his companion’s shoulder. They listen to the birdsong over the cries of soldiers doing their worst.
“Do you have your apples?”
Death looks up from his attack on his boot. “Enough. You?”
“Enough.”
The sun rises.
It’s sort of like a gap in the melody. A moment when a new instrument is called for, even to the ear of an audience who has never heard the piece. The song is empty and thinning. Too many have fallen out, too many missed notes.
Blood keeps his grip on Death’s shoulder. “Stay safe.”
Death lifts his face to smile. “Stay safe, old friend.”
It’s too short of a walk down the cliff. It’s too long. Blood treads the dusted path alone. His hooves catch more grime than boots would, though only an outside eye would notice now. He has no thought to spare for the world on this walk, only his feet know where he is in the world, stepping around rocks and over cracks without direction. His eyes are focused inward, mind’s eyes, twins.
When a person dies, their life is said to flash before their eyes.
When a person kills, the same rule applies.
And so Blood has seen many iterations of his own life. He’s seen his favorite memories from childhood, his short childhood, in relation to the rest of his life. He’s seen the day he met his companion, he’s seen his first battle hundreds of times. Blood knows his own life like the back of his hand, something a strangely small number of people can claim.
Blood watches his life in his mind to this moment as he picks his way down the cliff. He needs to get it all out of the way before a battle, he needs void in his mind when he kills. He drains his memories into a little glass bottle and hides it in a corner somewhere in the back of his mind and lets his focus arrive.
The slope evens out. Blood rolls his head and hears his joints crackle. The sword is loose in its scabbard, the bow is strung tight. In a pack at his heart, a point he will be sure to protect, are the shriveled golden apples Death entrusted him with so many centuries before.
One more breath, a breath for him and the world. Blood is composed. Blood has a place in the melody. He can drop or he can play, he can make them bleed.
Blood will choose blood.
The soldiers part before him and he enters the battle swinging.
He slashes his sword through a man who has forced his way through the lines of fighters. The neck bones crack when the blade hits them.
Blood sidesteps a charging soldier and slams his hilt into the base of his head. The soldier topples and the warrior grabs his body and tosses it at the oncoming foes one-handed. They crumple under his weight. One manages to stick their blade through the body’s chest but is still thrown to the ground by the weight on their sword.
He strides to the fallen struggling beneath and is careful to look each of them in the eye, although he doesn’t know it. Then he reaches out with his sword and tears through three pinned necks at once.
Void.
Vision to nothingness to the calmness beneath.
Blood breathes and lets the world see his empty void. He breathes and lets them come to fill it.
He rips his sword through swaths of people, their bones grating on the metal. His hands are soaked. He digs his hooves into the mud and kills.
Bodies pile, rank on the ground. A sludge of liquids coat their cooling skins, and Blood is using more of his footwork to avoid crushing ribcages than to avoid enemy strikes. At some point, he gives up, and the ground begins to snap and crackle when he steps.
The space he’s opened within himself is filling.
And as he’s wrenching his sword out of a skull, someone finally lands a blow.
Blood is tossed sideways by the slam to his shoulder, so unexpected. He whips around with the sword still embedded in the body’s head and bones shatter even further as the sword finally breaks out.
The soldier approaching is huge, a champion sent just for him. Before Blood can make his next move, the man slams his fist into him and sends him sprawling backwards.
Blood throws himself upright and charges the soldier, dodging wide swipes and blows aimed at his torso. Their swords slam together and the attacker leans his full weight upon Blood’s sword. The blades whine and grate against each other. Blood is slipping.
He’s filthy enough to play dirty. Blood catches his back leg on a dip in the earth and takes half a second to stomp with his full weight on the soldier’s foot.
The soldier winces and lets up just long enough for Blood to slip out from under the bearing weight and jam his sword into his attacker’s shoulder. The man screams, curdling. He drops his sword and clenches his fingers around his shoulder. So much for a champion.
Blood raises his sword for the final chopping blow and is struck to the mud by the man’s left fist. Red streams down his arm from his shoulder, Blood’s once-white shirt tattooed with curled crimson fingers.
“With your own damn blade,” the man wheezes. Blood more reads the words from the soldier’s lips than he hears the breathy words over the shriek of battle. He tries to stand, to grab his sword from where he’d dropped it by his side when he’d fallen so suddenly, but the man has a metal-clad foot to his stomach, and somewhere between when he’d been the one down and when Blood had hit the dirt, he’s stolen Blood’s sword from between his fingers.
“Blade to the Blade?” And in the soldier’s words, Blood realizes this man has no void. This is a memory playing out, a hope pre-imagined, a grudge. Vengeance for something Blood has forgotten.
“Strike, then,” Blood invites. He lays his arms back in surrender but his feet are braced on the ground, on bones on rocks, ready to flip his body from under the soldier’s weight at the last moment.
A wild light enters the soldier’s grin, starstruck in the full sunlight, half a god pinned under his boot. Blood smiles. No one ever comes up with anything new anymore. He can take this, he has before.
As long as the man doesn’t go for his heart, through the pouch of apples, he can take it. He’d miss the strike, he’s too fast, but the apples—precious, scattered to the armies, would be gone.
The man screams a war cry with Blood’s sword in his hands and ends up gurgling with an arrow sprouting from his throat.
Stained fingers clamp over the man’s shoulder and pull him backwards. The last spurt leaves his throat and his face darkens to lifeless. The gloom-filled figure behind him lifts the massive body by the collar and throws him to the side.
“They need you at the front lines.”
Blood takes the helping hand offered by Death and pries himself out of the mud. “On it.”
“Anything else you want to say?”
Death may hold his sword tightly but only Blood sees the man charging up behind him. He shoves his friend to the side and catches the soldier around the throat, crushing their windpipe. He drops the body. “We’re even. Good luck.”
With a nod, Death spreads his wings and takes off into the heavens.
Back on the ground, Blood opens his pouch for the first time and pulls out one of two apples he keeps there. He’s far more shaken by being so easily conquered by the large soldier than he let on to Death. He rips off a chunk and doesn’t bother chewing the tough fruit-meat. It takes a moment for the magic to disperse, but finally his veins flow with ichor again. He swallows the rest of the apple.
Blood grabs the axe the strangled body had been holding and weighs it in his hand. It fits well enough. He tries it out by carving away a swath of soldiers. It works well enough.
He sets his goal on a far away banner and kills his way towards it. He knows he should be more careful of who he’s killing, but even the red and green uniforms of the opposing sides are blurred with mud to two shades of brown, and he tries to pull his punches when he sees green peeking through, but it’s no easy task. A soldier in green steps before him and in error Blood slashes his arm with his sword. He stops before he does too much harm, he hopes, but there’s not much he can do about another person’s unintelligent actions.
He reaches the banner where finally the clashing seas meet. The valley runs with mud and gore, and this is where the rivers pool. This is Blood’s stand.
It’s the moment in the battle: take a knee or keep his head up, fighting. A path divergent. Blood flicks his weapons back into their steady places in his palms, dual wielding the axe and the sword. There’s two oceans pressuring him to fall but he thinks he'll keep his head up one more time.
***
Blood is drenched when the sun finally reaches its zenith—a time when the world would normally take a break, but not his world, not today, not in this valley. He ties his braid back up and keeps fighting.
A shadow swoops over the battlefield, so suddenly that Blood ducks to try to avoid it. He stabs the soldier he’s been working on and catches a glimpse of his friend dropping from above onto a group of soldiers in muddied red. Death whips his chain and the group falls as one, tangled and speared on their own weapons. Blood moves to fight at his friend’s side, but there’s something off in his face.
Something haunted.
Something so unlike the carefully trained void within himself that Blood finds himself slipping away from the manicured edge of his consciousness into emotion. Not void, not calm, nowhere to send the sights he sees if he uncovers emotion in battle.
“The apple,” Death whispers.
Blood doesn’t catch it the first time. “What?”
His face twists. “My apple, I—” He breaks off and slams someone over the head with the hilt of his sword.
“Your apple?”
“I killed someone.”
“You should have,” Blood grunts.
“No, no. One of the special ones.”
That’s when Blood realizes his friend is in earnest, when the special ones are mentioned. The ones they’ve sworn no harm against, the ones in battle, the ones True Death has taken a liking to. One of the ones her angel promised to keep from her for as long as he could.
“You used an apple?”
“I had to. I... had to.” Death is convincing himself more than Blood.
“I’ve used one, too. Where’s the one you saved now?”
“Fighting. Dead again.”
“Immortal?”
“Gods, he better not be.”
“But…how many apples did you bring?”
“One—how many did you?”
In their crisis, the world has frozen. The battle builds and they’ll have to return soon.
“How many are left?”
For the first time since sunrise, Blood sheaths his sword. Death defends their circle as he carefully reaches into the pocket so close to his heart for the last apple they brought to the battle.
The apple is dusted with sunshine, withered as a corpse, too ugly to look upon, too bright to look away. He scores the skin with a grimy fingernail and rips the apple in two.
“No more saving special ones,” he says as he gives half the apple to Death. “She’ll forgive you for it.”
Death takes the half apple and bows to Blood, then turns and vanishes into chaos once again, hidden from view by the few soldiers he doesn’t cut down as he leaves.
Blood pockets the final apple half. A waste of an apple earlier, he knows. He’d been at full health, only slipping and sliding in his mind.
This one will count, he’ll make sure of it.
As the whir of battle continues, Blood allows his vision to blur. Blur to red, blur to brown, blur to blue-white sky. His muscles are sore and it’s a blessing, his mind focused on unfocusing and retaining the nothingness that accepts his kills.
And just like that, the sun is falling. Blood shades his eyes with a dripping sword and surveys the massacre.
The battlefield is open, just as he likes it, thinned.
And at some point, the axe must stop swinging when there are no more trees to fell.
Blood catches an arrow from a far-away marksman and tracks down the cowering figure to the edge of the cliffs. He considers wading through the sludge that forms every battle’s foundation to the bowman, then decides his boots are too heavy for that. Instead, he grabs a bow from a corpse at his feet. Blood carefully slides it off the person’s shoulders and notches the arrow.
When it hits its target, Blood has already turned away. He knows what it looks like when someone falls.
For the first time in perhaps his millenia of life, Blood feels his void begin to fill.
He’d turned. He hadn’t seen the archer die. But it’s not the last pack that breaks the horse’s spine, it’s the time carried along in the weight.
Blood thinks of the half-apple in his pocket as he picks out his next target.
Rapidly, the thought becomes action, and before he knows it, he’s raised the golden flesh to his teeth and ripped a bite away. It catches on his molars, a reminder of times and battles. To force it down, he swallows the rest of the fruit.
And again, he regrets it. A battlefield is no place to waste time on state of mind—that’s the point of the void, of the nothing. A place for lives and souls to collect, somewhere he hides from, though he’s never admitted that to himself.
As the ichor hits his bloodstream and heals his physical wounds and aches, Blood is left unprotected from his mind and the time he stores there.
That’s a chasm for later, he decides. Later, later, he can explore that spilling mess. He forces himself away.
And yet…
The void is filling.
Most soldiers have fallen. The opposing side is mulch on the ground; how beautifully now the soil will bloom in spring. Blood’s side’s soldiers have fallen back. Wisely, they retreated before his blade, and let the warrior do his deeds.
Now the forest is wrought to timber, and Blood’s mind is growing before he can cap it. It makes his head heavy, a hurt from the inside, no healable wound by magic apple.
And the arrow stabs between Blood’s shoulder blades with a shriek. He gasps for breath and it rattles in. Hot liquid drips down his back and every arm movement makes him want to scream again.
He needs to cut the arrow out.
He flips his axe around in his hand and swings it behind him as fast and hard as his wound will allow, his entire torso screaming from the movement. The shaft splinters from the head.
Blood drops the axe and kicks a small knife from the ground into his hand. He squeezes his eyes closed and feels his way to the center of his upper back. The arrow isn’t buried deep, he could feel that when he cut the wood. Once his fingers are pricked by the shattered arrow shaft, he turns the knife around and gouges into his flesh.
Through the wider slit he’s now opened, Blood works the arrow head. Pain strikes his back with every movement, whether that of the arrow head or that of his arms. With his eyes closed, Blood sends thanks to the stars that so many have died already, that he can have this moment to save his own life.
The steel arrowhead slices his thumb as Blood twists back around and flicks it to the ground.
The remaining effects of the apple half work frantically to knit Blood’s back closed. The magic lasts for precious few minutes, and in a strange way, Blood is also thankful that he’d been shot at that moment so soon after he’d eaten it.
He crouches to the ground and lets the bloodied world of bodies hide him from view. After all, he blends in well now, the slash and red in his shirt so clearly what should have been a mortal wound.
So the archer hadn’t fallen.
So as Blood sets his mission and his mindset, a brilliant glow bursts from the battlefield. Death rises from the ashes in his unique way. So the last half-apple has been used, on what injury Blood knows not. He watches his friend in his peripheral vision as he spirals up in the golden light bestowed by True Death. Truly immortal, True Death’s courter.
Blood rolls his shoulders and winces, as Death soars across the sky. His eyes weave a pattern of swoops and clouds. The sunbeams brimming over the cliff tops stitch the tapestry together.
And in turning for the archer, Blood is pierced again.
His side ignites in fire. Flames tear through his torso until he feels the prick in his left arm. He’s astonished to see no charred flesh when he looks down on his mangled stomach, and chokes in a gasp.
Not a smoky breath, and not one of air. Something wet follows his attempt to breathe, a net closing in his lungs. Blood gasps again. The weapons crash to the ground.
”TECHNO!”
Prey and a predator. Techno’s fingers scramble for a knife, anything, but his fingers can’t move fast enough. His joints are unyielding.
The massive bird above him plummets to the ground and even through his foggy vision, Techno recognizes his friend.
And this time, of all the soldiers in his world, Techno is the one who falls.
The ground is soft from liquids rained from the battle, and the mud splashes when he lands. It seeps into his clothing. Techno tries to get his feet back under him, but his body won’t allow it. The arrow is still stuck right through, a priority, and a body isn’t just the mind that guides it.
“Stay with me!” his friend shouts.
Death grabs a spear out of a body and throws it through the air, back the way of the archer. It travels a hundred meters with deadly strength and Techno, his head lolling to the side, can tell by Death’s triumphant expression that it hit its mark.
“Hey, hey,” Death says, a murmur as he drops the bow and himself to the ground by Techno’s head. “Hey, mate.”
“Ha—hallo.” Techno feels the word slosh in his lungs. “Phil.”
Phil reaches out and taps on the arrow. The tiny movement sends battalions of pinpricks straight through Techno. There can’t be much left whole within him.
“You’re here,” Techno says.
“I’m right here. Right here. Where’s your apple?”
Techno never thought it could be so painful to breathe. Phil’s hands on his shoulder, accidentally compressing the little movement he can muster, aren’t helping. “Mm.”
“Your apple?”
“Gone.”
“Gone,” Phil echoes. “Gone.”
“So’s yours.” Techno bends his arm, his elbow pressed into a swath of mud, to try to feel the arrow point. It protrudes from below his lowest rib, and he can’t feel the blood on it for the wetness—muddy and red—already coating his fingers. “S’alright.”
“No. No. It’s not.”
“Stop it.” Techno shakily swats his companion’s hand away from the pockets it searches. “Artificially immortal.”
“What?”
“That was me.”
“We’ve got more apples. Just hang on, I can fly us—“
“Philza.”
The Angel of Death pulls his wings back from outstretched.
“It’s alright. All’s going to be alright.”
“I can save you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Give me time, give me time!”
“You don’t… we don’t… have that.”
“We’ve had so much already, all we need is a few hours.”
“Don’t have hours. ‘S alright.”
“I’ll fly, I can do it.”
“Just want you to sit with me.”
“I just want…” A breathy exhale.
Techno catches the moment when hope leaves his friend’s eyes. Then he loses the strength in his neck and his head drops to the mud.
Phil slides a hand under Techno’s head and cradles him there. “Alright. I’m here.”
There’s a beat of silence, and Techno realizes just how many soldiers have died today for a battlefield to be this quiet. And to everyone else, his life ending will be just one more.
There’s substance to anonymity. Infamy buzzes and dies and is ungraspable. If the legend of Technoblade ends on a body-laden field, perhaps the world won’t have to know. The legend can live on in untouchable infamy. He himself will be left to the solid earth.
It fits.
Philza was the godly one, laden with Death’s apples. And Techno had fallen in step with him and was offered lifetimes through golden fruit. That was all, and a millennia later, it fits that Philza continues.
Techno fights the mucus gathering in his throat and coughs out a question. “Do you remember?”
“Remember what?” Phil murmurs.
“The first night.”
It visibly jars Phil away from a deep part of his mind. And it takes him no time at all to understand where Techno’s train of thought has wandered on this final sunset, despite being the one man in the world who will have no last moment.
“I remember the stars,” he chokes.
Techno smiles, his lips pulled against his tusks. “The stars. I remember them too.”
Phil brushes a hand over Techno’s bloodied forehead. He combs his hair back over his head, working out matted and dripping red tangles. “You were so young then.”
“I remember you… trying to pass off as my father once or twice.”
“It’s the only way to travel sometimes, mate.”
Techno’s mouth tastes of copper. “I know.”
Philza’s eyes are watering. Techno has nothing left, no energy by which to cry. He can still feel the remnants of the first arrow shot in his back. And the ground around him has confirmed that his blood is back to being red, not godly golden.
It would be nice to be one more death that could enter his void. Though it’s overflowed, Techno’s eyes hold that sort of pain back. Perhaps that’s why he’s so numb—the void has lost its souls, and his own death has come to fill it.
“Hey, hey.” Phil shakes Techno’s head. “Open your eyes.”
Techno realizes he was drifting.
“Stay, alright?”
And he wants to make that promise.
Techno’s eyes slip closed again.
“Technoblade!”
He sucks in a breath and forces himself to focus on Phil’s face over him. “I’m alright…”
Phil’s hands are trembling.
“I’m alright,” he repeats. And he is. “It’ll be alright.”
“The damn apples. I could have survived, I should have saved it.”
“Don’t let me leave with you thinking that.”
“Leave…” Phil bows his head.
“‘M going to meet True Death.” Techno grabs onto the thought. He’ll drag it to the void with him.
“She’ll take care of you,” Phil whispers.
Techno pushes his lips to steady the smile. “‘S alright.” His eyes fall closed.
Phil shakes his shoulders. “Hey.”
Techno’s breathing dips and expression leaves his face.
“Hey, hey, wait.” He shakes him again.
All Techno can hear is his own heartbeat.
"Techno!"
And the last thing he feels are Death’s wings closing around him.
***
There’s one figure on the battlefield. He sits curled by a body, his wings outstretched over it and himself. If any soldiers had remained alive, their life force has since been drained in Death’s anguish.
***
The winged figure sits there still as the bodies all around turn rancid. His wings are pulled in when he gives in to his screaming muscles.
***
Death leaves the field in the night. The first movement he’s made in seasons, the sweep of his wings through the clouded darkness. The first snow has come, and it heaps around the littered soldiers.
***
It’s spring and there’s something growing out of the body in the center of the field.
***
And now it is many years after that battle, and no one knows who once lay where there is now dense greenery. A field has become a meadow. One man’s death is a plant’s treasure, and this meadow is fertilized with the best.
Now see, focus inward. Towards the middle of this meadow is a lone tree. Gaze upon its soft leaves, its grey-brown bark. The earthly scent of organic wax and growth fills the air. The bark on the branches is smooth, and the roots that dip into the rich soil send out minuscule veins. A ribcage lies shattered around the trunk.
Look up from the roots and see the one branch that bends down. See what adorns it:
A perfect apple, red as blood.