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The afterlife is dark and cold. Most of all, it’s lonely.
Tommy had told Ranboo once about how time moved differently in Limbo, two months passing when he was told after coming back that it was only two days.
Ranboo thinks it’s been years.
He never knows what to expect from a “day” in Limbo. There were a couple rules that stayed the same, of course, from day to day. The sun never rose, it was always dark. If he was anyone else, this might have been more of an issue, but as it was, endermen had amazing darkvision. (He thinks it must be something inherited from the End.) No matter what happened, he was always freezing cold. Months spent living in the snow couldn’t save him there. That, and no matter where he was, his own death found a way to make sure he was completely alone. Even if he saw others, they’d never acknowledge him.
Nothing else in his new world was ever stable.
Some days he’d wake up on a tiny island, surrounded on all sides by water nearing his feet. It would never reach him, but the fear of it would be enough to keep him in place the entire time. Occasionally the water level would rise slightly, leaving him scrambling back for more space. Water didn’t burn on first contact, but it itched and long exposure made it exponentially worse, so he avoided it any time he could.
Some days he was in L’manberg, abandoned and empty, before the obsidian grid went up and the bombs started falling. Nobody would ever be in the country, but sometimes he’d catch figures darting across the edges of his vision, never detailed. Rarely his pets would be in their usual places in his house, but they’d never be as warm and soft as they were in life. Usually houses were stripped bare of life, leaves dead where they sat on branches.
Some days there was nothing but void. He didn’t like those days.
Rarely, he follows his own ghost around, silent and invisible. Those are the only days where he sees other people, hears real voices that aren’t his own. They serve as a reminder for what he’s lost and how quickly everyone around him had already moved on with this new version of him. (It’s almost painful to see his own ghost talking so casually about everything he’d been trying so desperately to hide from the others.)
Exactly once, he ends up in a train station with an old friend. Ghostbur doesn’t speak through the tears. The board above the tracks lies dark and silent. No train ever arrives.
There are other days too, of course. Few are notable.
Few are notable, of course, until the woman.
~~~
It’s another L’manberg day when the woman appears.
Ranboo’s sitting on the wood pathway outside his own house, staring down into the water. Its surface is completely smooth. There’s nothing to disturb it other than him.
Sometimes he’ll spend a day finding tiny rocks along the crater’s edge and tossing them in, appreciating the splash of the water. Today is not one of those days.
He wonders if anything else is out there, how far this old version of his own world extends. If he tried, could he make it to where Snowchester would have stood? Could he make it into the Nether? Could he make it to Techno’s or beyond?
(He wonders this every time. He never tests it, always spending the day in the single area where he’ll never be able to stand again. Maybe some day in the future he will.)
That’s when the first ripple appears, accompanied by a soft sploosh in the distance.
It’s been a long time since Ranboo heard anything on a L’manberg day that he didn’t cause himself. He barely processes it at first, but quickly it becomes clear.
Something else is here.
He jerks his head up from where it had been held, scanning the area from which the ripple had originated. There doesn’t seem to be anything there, but he refuses to relax instantly. Ranboo’s world changes daily, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think that its core rules could change as well. Maybe for once he wasn’t alone.
He doesn’t know if he can die when he’s already dead, and he really doesn’t want to find out the hard way.
A silhouette flits across the edge of his vision, but he pays it no attention. Those are always there. They’re never there when he looks, though.
“Is anyone there?” he calls, voice croaky from…. how many days had it been since he last spoke, since there was a point to speaking other than just breaking the silence? “Hello?”
He has no weapons or armor, nothing for his own self defense in the just-in-case scenario where someone actually answers him. Still, he feels safer with his back to a wall, even if said wall happens to be his own closed doors. Months and years of fighting had taught him that if he could do nothing else, he could at least limit the amount of directions attackers could come from.
A single crow swoops down and lands on the railing across from him. Ranboo lets out a sigh. A crow. Just a single crow. That was all it was. His world had decided to add crows this time around, and it had probably accidentally knocked a rock into the water.
Crows always reminded Ranboo of Phil and his wings. He misses Phil. It would be nice to be able to just hear his voice again, talking to Ranboo, acknowledging his existence. It had been a while since he’d had a conversation with anyone but himself.
A second crow swoops in, landing on the wood planks next to the stairs. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth, more living creatures than he’d seen at once since his last ghost day-
There must be a whole murder of them in here. Maybe they’re just as contact starved as Ranboo is at this point. Maybe they’re just as happy to see him as he is to finally see them. He won’t complain, he’s come to like crows.
He crouches forward to take a better look at the little cluster of black that had formed, straightens up partially to move. As one, the cloud of black takes wing, scattering in a burst that leaves a dark spot in Ranboo’s vision.
When the dark spot is gone, there’s a woman in its place.
She’s dressed in black, a wide-brimmed hat with a veil resting on her head. Ranboo doesn’t recognize her. She feels familiar, somehow, in some way.
The woman smiles, and Ranboo startles back before freezing in place more than he had with the crows. How long had it been since he’d interacted with another person?
“Hello,” she says, voice distinctly American. It’s been a long time since he’d heard an American voice. Normally when he gets peeks into the outside world he’s stuck with Tubbo or Tommy or Phil.
Ranboo fumbles over words, trying to remember how to actually have a fluent conversation with a person, before remembering he barely actually knew how to do that before he’d died. Instead, what he blurts out is, “Who are you?
The woman in black laughs, short and nice. “I think you’d find you already know that if you think about it hard enough.”
He does, he finds. The crows, the familiarity…. “You’re her, aren’t you? The one who made the forest?”
“Among other things, yes, that’s me,” she says. A crow flies back down to land on her shoulder. She pays it no attention. “Most know me as Death.”
“Oh.” Lady Death herself. Stories of her were thrown around in the real world left and right, tossed back and forth and embellished until they seemed unreal. Descriptions of Death described her as a thirty-foot-tall winged woman who blocked out the sun and plunged the world into night. In front of Ranboo, she seemed short, and the wings were nowhere to be seen. That, and she wasn’t the one causing the darkness.
The thin veil over her face hides it partially, but he can still see that her smile has not fallen. “I could have the wings. I just choose not to, in this form.” If he looks closely he can see a faint outline behind her shoulders, dark as the sky above them, void of stars.
“...How did you know what I was thinking about?” he dares to ask. Could she…
She chuckles. “No, I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I’ve heard the stories too, you know. They all say the same. I could take many forms, I just choose this one. People seem to find me…. friendlier, like this. The full height tends to send people running.”
“I can…. I can understand that.” It’s so incredibly rare for Ranboo to actually find someone taller than he is. He knows how it feels. “It’s honestly very nice just to have someone to talk to, right now. I don’t mind who.”
“Of course it is.” Death looks around at the town surrounding them, dark, cold and devoid of all life but them and the crows. “Your own little corner of the universe can’t seem to decide how to torment you, can it? It’s not supposed to be changing like this. That wasn’t in Life’s plan. He just wanted a prison.”
A prison…. Like the cell he’d spent his final day in, like the box of the panic room he’d built himself that later felt like a trap, like the obsidian above the Egg that he’d nearly ended up stuck inside. A prison would have been much, much worse. Ranboo supposes that maybe the world granted him a final mercy. That, or the prison would have been metaphorical. That one wouldn’t have been great either.
Eternity in an ever changing world was one thing. Eternity locked in a single room was another story. He hopes it never comes to that.
Death looks him up and down, lingering on his eyes for just a moment. The brief eye contact still sends a chill down his spine, no matter how short. “And yet…. I can’t tell how it was you , when even my own son couldn’t. Part of him is trapped in there, but the same part of you… it has a way out of here that he never did.” She takes a step forward that has Ranboo instinctively wanting to move back, but he stays in place. “How are you the only one who could escape limbo?”
A part of Ranboo thinks he was right to be afraid of Lady Death. It’s a very large part, actually. The rest of him is desperately trying to remember how to navigate a social situation (and failing). “I- uh- I really don’t know, honestly? I’m just here, I didn’t do anything, and if I did it wasn’t on purpose-” Something she’d mentioned finally catches up to him, and he pauses. “Did you say your son?”
“Yes. I do believe you’ve met him actually, Wilbur?”
“I thought he was- Phil- Wait are you two-”
She laughs, and it’s almost like a little breath of fresh air in a frozen world. “We’re married. How else did you think he knew me?”
“I… really didn’t think about it, actually. Little bit, yknow, distracted.”
Phil had never even mentioned a marriage or a wife. He didn’t wear a ring. When asked about Wilbur’s mom (not that Ranboo had ever done this, of course) he would smile and reach for the heart on a chain around his neck before saying something vague about a smart fridge.
Ranboo notices now that the woman has a matching heart, dark purple like netherite instead of red like Phil’s. Their chains are matching gold. It’s surprisingly easy to spot once he knows what he’s looking for, once she reaches for hers just like Phil would do.
Death looks around, seemingly taking in Ranboo’s current world for the first time since she’d arrived. “You would get distracted in here, wouldn’t you?” She seems lost in thought, turning slowly to look at the water under them, turning her back on him for moments. The crow on her shoulder is gone. Ranboo didn’t notice it leaving. “This place made for you, yet so different than intended… somehow, you found a way around Life’s plans without even meaning to do it, and you don’t even know what happened. You’re stronger than you think, Ranboo.”
“I- Thank you?”
Despite the cold, Death never shivers. Despite the darkness, Death has no need to squint to see. Sometimes Ranboo wonders if all the rules of his limbo aren’t his limbo after all. Sometimes he wonders if they’re just him.
“I could get you out of here, you know. I’m not supposed to, I’d be interfering, but someone like you could be… helpful, to say the least.” Death looks Ranboo in the eyes through her veil and he finds the normal annoyance and anxiety from the contact aren’t exactly gone but they seem to be heavily muted, this time. It’s strange. There are only a handful of people Ranboo’s ever met who he can look in the eyes, and all of them either were close friends or didn’t have real eyes in the first place. “I could take you out of limbo. All you’d have to do is agree.”
He can’t exactly believe it. It just seems… a bit too good. Nothing that came that easy ever ended well, not when it was real. “You’d take me out of here? Bring me back to life?”
“Well, I never said the second part, did I?” says Death. “Bringing people back isn’t exactly in my job description, you know. I said I’d take you out of your limbo. You’re the only one I’ve ever seen who I think could actually handle it.” She offers him a wry smile, tilting her head. “I can’t be everywhere at once, you know, and Limbo needs a keeper of its own. It needs someone to look after it when Life gets his hands back on it.”
Ranboo’s breathing stutters, just for a moment. “And you want…. me?” Of all the options? Even your own son?
“Yes,” says Death herself. “I can watch in the real world, just a bit here and there. I’ve seen you out there. You’d be willing to do what is needed, especially if it’s for those you care about.” She looks away from him, turning in a small circle, taking in all of L’manberg around them. “Even now, long after you betrayed them and it was destroyed, you still come back, even in your own death. You’re touched by it all in a way few others will ever be. You died for your son, I did hear of that. You sacrificed your final life for his protection, and another for Tubbo’s. Would you be willing to do it again?” She reaches out a hand, then, within arm’s reach, and it sends a chill through Ranboo even with the existing cold. There’s a finality there if he takes it, a decision and a bond that he can never take back.
Does he want to do this? Does he want to form an eternal bond between himself and a goddess he’s rarely heard about outside of awed and fearful stories, the woman who controls death itself?
She’s Phil’s wife, though. She’s Phil’s wife and Wilbur is her son and so clearly Phil thinks she can be trusted. Phil’s been a good judge of people since they’ve met, Ranboo thinks. If Phil trusts Death, so can Ranboo.
Forcing the tension out of his shoulders, he lifts a hand.
When Ranboo’s palm finally meets Death’s, he expects her hand to be colder. He expects her to feel dead, almost. It’s the most pleasant surprise he’s had in his entire afterlife to shake Death’s hand and find warmth where for eternity he’d been cold.
He almost expects something extra to seal the deal. Maybe he’d be able to feel the entire thing, like some kind of static shock but far worse. Maybe there’d be blood or something. He really wasn’t sure.
Instead, there’s nothing. Ranboo simply takes Death’s hand, and as one the pair vanishes from Limbo.