Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

So, let’s get a few things straight.

1. Mumbo stole Grian’s soul in order to be human again.
2. Grian signed a contract giving him permission to do this, which was very silly of him for not reading the fine print–always read the fine print–and fair play on Mumbo’s part.
3. Grian no longer has a soul.
4. Or does he share one with Mumbo?
5. He doesn’t actually know, and, like, he should probably get on that.
6. Grian is not human, which means this was a very bad idea from the start.
7. Grian now has a problem. Mumbo has a bigger one.

In summary: Grian had made a mistake. Well, actually Mumbo had, but Grian knew that this would all have been avoidable if he’d just paid enough attention and flipped to the back of the book. He wasn’t really angry at getting his soul stolen–weirder things were already happening every day. Have you seen the moon lately? But he was angry at himself for not paying attention. Mumbo had been acting really strange. Grian shouldn’t have just written it off as normal Mumbo strangeness and looked closer.

After all, it’s his responsibility to know things like this. He’s supposed to be better than this, more observant. He’s supposed to see these things coming.

Grian hadn’t said anything yet. It was possibly the second mistake that he had made today, but he was hoping that Mumbo’s contraption hadn’t worked, or had worked differently than he expected. This was, surprisingly, new territory even for him. Did it actually steal his soul? Would Grian even know if it did? Did he even have a soul to steal? But he knew something had happened, because Mumbo looked normal again, and that sparked a heavy dread that had lodged itself deep in his chest and made it hard to breathe all day.

These were the questions that were keeping Grian up tonight. And it made him uneasy to think about what they’d just done, and what Mumbo might have just done to himself. There was a lot at play here, more than Mumbo even knew.

Grian snorted as some brief amusement temporarily alleviated his anxiety. It may be more than Mumbo knew, but his friend really should have known something. Grian hadn’t exactly done a good job of hiding the fact that he wasn’t human.

Of course, he didn’t just walk around flaunting his Watcher powers constantly but–he had wings for heaven’s sake. Did Mumbo just gloss over that? Did he think there were winged humans? Well, there might have been now that Grian thought about it–the universe is vast and weird and he’d long since given up any expectations of what he’d find in there–but Grian had the ability to shape and change his wings to suit the task he needed, and last he checked even winged humans don’t have minor shape-shifting powers. It was a mild taste of his powers compared to the ones he did hide, sure, but certainly enough to distinctly flavor him as non-human to anyone actually observant.

This was a spoon moment if he’d ever seen one.

“Maybe it didn’t work,” Grian said out loud. “Maybe what I think just happened didn’t actually happen and he’s actually just human now.” Nevermind how it worked. Grian used to be human, so maybe his soul was human-like too. It was a possibility.

But speak of the devil and he will arrive, in this case with a frantic but quiet knock on Grian’s door. It was like the person knocking desperately wanted help, but was just as happy to have an excuse to go back home if Grian had been asleep and unable to hear the knock. It was obviously Mumbo.

Grian knew he was right to have been worried the moment he opened the door. Mumbo looked frazzled, with pieces of normally-slicked-back hair falling in his face. He had redstone smudged on his suit, but in all fairness that was normal. He wrung his hands, and was doing that pacing thing he always did. The nervous energy was pouring off of him in waves.

“Are you going to come in?” Grian said after a moment of staring at him.

“Oh! Right,” Mumbo exclaimed, and stepped in quickly. Grian shut the door behind him, and took a moment to rub his eyes before turning back around.

“So . . .” he started, as if he didn’t already know, “what brings you here to my house at-” he checked his clock “-half-past one at night?”

“I need your help,” said Mumbo simply.

“Ah.” Grian grimaced, feeling that heavy dread settle over him once more. “Well, uh, come sit down I guess.” I have a feeling we’ll need it. He led him over to a table in the corner, and lit another lantern so they wouldn’t be so in the dark.

When he looked up again, Mumbo seemed about two seconds from bursting into tears. “Mumbo, calm down,” Grian said gently. “Whatever it is, we can . . .” What, fix it? How were they going to do that? “. . .figure it out.”

“Grian, please forgive me!” Mumbo cried. “I was so dumb, I definitely didn’t think it through, an–I should’ve asked you before trying to uh . . . take your soul. I don’t know why I was so secretive about it, but it was a bad idea, and now something is wrong and I really really don’t know what to do, or why, because clearly there’s a problem here and I should’ve just asked. I’m just so dumb and-”

“I know. And I forgive you.”

“What?” It seemed to bring Mumbo out of his spiral.

“Well, I know you’re dumb, but it’s nice to see you’ve already acknowledged that. And I forgive you. I also know what problem you’re having. I was hoping it wasn’t the case, but based on how you’ve come knocking on my door in the middle of night nearly in tears, I think I can guess.”

“I’m sorry.”

Me too.

“Mumbo, didn’t you know I’m not human?” Grian ran his hand through his hair, and adjusted his glasses. Well, it was time to explain this. Somehow.

He didn’t want to. He’d done his best to forget it the past few years. It was a buried piece of his past, and nobody on Hermitcraft ever asked about your past unless you told them first, so he’d been able to easily put it behind him. He used his wings every day, but those were simply a part of him now–they were associated with more than just being a Watcher for him, and frankly he couldn’t live without their convenience. He didn’t want to go back there, though. Not that anyone was making him, not physically, but . . . he knew Mumbo would have questions he would have to explain. And in order to do that, he’d need to grab a shovel and start digging up everything he’d so meticulously buried.

Mumbo deserved to go into this eyes-open, though. Grian hadn’t had that chance.

“I guess I should’ve known, huh?” Mumbo chuckled, but the humor wasn’t really there. “But I was desperate, which led to me doing a very stupid thing.”

“Yeah, I assumed I was making it a bit obvious but I guess not,” Grian replied. “I guess we should’ve had this conversation a lot earlier. You were desperate and did something dumb, but I should have seen something coming and stopped it. So you stole my soul, in order to . . . what, eat it? That’s a bit weird, so I’m just going to move on from that point, but you’ve been turning into different things all season. A potato, a carrot, a pig, so on. And you wanted to be human again. If you ever were, by the way, because most humans don’t turn into potatoes when they eat them, but that’s moot at this point. But you chose me of all people, for some reason, in order to become human again. And now I’m guessing you’re like me too. Do I have this all correct?”

“ . . .Yes.” Mumbo sounded miserable. “Grian, can I take my shirt off? I need to show you something.”

“At least take me to dinner first before you start stripping in my house.”

Mumbo rolled his eyes and began to unbutton his shirt after slinging his jacket over the back of the chair. He turned around, showing Grian his back. Two small wings were folded there, and Mumbo’s skin looked red and painful. They were still far too small to fly with and still easy to hide, but they’d grow. The feathers were smoky in color, soft grey and black with a slight blue tinge. They were beautiful, and would likely be more beautiful when they weren’t such a mismatched mix of downy baby feathers and newly grown flight feathers. Grian’s wings had grown in tawny gold-brown to match his hair, but he’d taken to changing their appearance to parrot’s wings lately; he liked their colors. Mumbo’s seemed to be dark to match his hair too, which suited him.

“Welcome to the Yes Wings Club,” Grian said. “Properly this time.”

“It hurts,” Mumbo whined, pulling his shirt back on hastily and fumbling with the buttons. “I had to take a regen potion earlier for the pain. What am I going to do with them?”

Grian bit his lip and sighed. “Yeah, it hurts,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. You can keep taking the potions though if they help.” I didn’t have anything to take. “They’re going to get bigger though--I mean, you’ll be able to fly with them eventually and they’re much too small right now. We’ll have to alter your clothes soon because keeping them folded like that will hurt you, not to mention that they’ll get too big to hide that way. I hope you aren’t too attached to your suits, because we will have to cut them.”

“I guess I don’t have much of a choice,” Mumbo said, raking a hand through his hair. It just mussed it up more than it already was, and Grian could picture him having done it many times already this evening. “What do I tell everyone else? When they notice I suddenly have wings?”

Grian shook his head. “Just don’t make a fuss about it. If you don’t act like it’s a big deal neither will anyone else. They may be curious, but nobody on the server will question you if you don’t want to–after all, you never questioned me, did you? That’s one of the best things about this group,” he said fondly, “nobody cares what you are.”

Mumbo was silent for a few moments, and Grian could almost hear him processing the information. “What are you, though?” he finally asked.

Ah. There it was. The penny dropped.

“I mean, do forgive me for asking,” Mumbo continued, “since I’m the one who put both of us in this situation, but I feel like I need to know. If things like suddenly growing wings are going to continue to happen to me.”

Grian took a deep breath, and began quietly. “Okay. I’ll explain everything to you. But I think you should know, starting off–I used to be human. Like you.” It seemed important that Mumbo knew that, for some reason. We’re kind of the same now.

“Oh,” Mumbo said, but waited for him to continue.

“Have you heard of the Watchers?” Grian asked carefully. Might as well gauge what he already knew. He’d confided in Mumbo before when he needed help, he just normally left out these parts or kept certain details vague. Grian never pretended to have good coping skills, but “bury it and never talk about it” had worked pretty well for him so far. Aside from the times it didn’t, like when he woke alone in his base from a nightmare (fewer these days!) or had to excuse himself from a situation that was making him anxious.

“Yes, I’ve heard of Watchers but . . . I thought they were a myth to scare people with,” Mumbo said. “Something tells me you’re about to correct me on that.”

“They’re not a myth, although they certainly like using that perception to their advantage. Makes it easier to stay in the shadows when nobody’s really looking back at them. No, they’re real. And I’m a Watcher. Or, well . . . a former one.”

“And now I’m–I’m a Watcher too?” Mumbo said.

“It appears so,” Grian said. “‘Cause you stole my soul, and I’m a Watcher, so the logic that follows dictates you’ve now got Watcher traits. Like those wings you just showed me.”

“Oh,” he said, eloquently. “You said you used to be human, though. And I don’t think you stole a soul like I did, so how did you become a Watcher?”

Grian pushed down any panic at the back of his throat and willed his hands not to shake. That was a big question, although he anticipated it. Anticipating it meant he could answer it. Mumbo didn’t really know what he was asking, but he deserved to be told the truth after all these times Grian danced around it.

“It was before I came to Hermitcraft. You know, I was the admin of a world called Evo. I told you that. But . . . it was a Watcher-controlled world. They were basically omnipresent in the world, always watching us. The name’s not hyperbole, you know–they really do watch. They liked to exercise judgement when we made them angry. They enjoyed toying with us and sending us on wild goose chases and different challenges. Maybe it was fun for them. They helped us move between updates in their portals, and they kept our world in balance. We were rightfully wary of them, but we didn’t really know what to think–it was simply a fact of the world that they existed, and sometimes they rewarded us too. Sometimes they were nice, which made it all the more confusing when they were cruel.” The words tumbled out of him quicker than he intended. “I always made them mad, though. Stole from them, defied them.”

“That sounds like you,” Mumbo said.

“I guess–I’ve never been able to quite rationalize it, I think, but I guess they found me interesting or something. Or maybe vulnerable, because I lived alone and far from spawn. They wanted us to reach the End, and kill the dragon. But when we did, we were all separated.” He stopped for a moment to breathe. “After I killed the dragon, they took me, and . . . made me into one of them. I didn’t have a choice, honestly, I just had to go with them.”

“I’m sorry,” Mumbo whispered.

“It’s-it’s okay. It’s in the past.”

“You refer to the Watchers as ‘them,’” Mumbo noted. “Never ‘we.’”

“I ran away,” Grian answered. “I took the first opportunity I had and I ran away and I ended up here and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’m a Watcher but not a Watcher.”

He hated being a Watcher. He was never very good at it, either. He never quite fit in with them, was never quite able to see the world the way they did, even after being trained and taught the ways he was supposed to act. They had rules to follow, and Grian had never been good at following rules–he defied the Watchers back on Evo, and had an unfortunate tendency to do the same when he was with them. One would maybe assume that with all his propensity for chaos and pranks that he’d have fun with it, but he didn’t. Those traits had made him interesting to them, and maybe he would've been a good Watcher if he’d gotten better at listening to directions and worse at being kind.

Even when he wasn’t human anymore he was still all-too human for their tastes, and all he could ever do was put himself in the shoes of the players he was assigned to. He’d been there once, like them. It was honestly something he was a little glad of–maybe he would have been less miserable if he’d managed to assimilate, but he would have lost himself somewhere along the way.

It was better to have run away, even though it had been dangerous. He’d looked for the Evolutionists first, but when he hadn’t found them, he tried to find an empty world and somehow ended up in Hermitcraft instead when Xisuma had created the new world. Grian didn’t even know if the Watchers were looking for him either, but when he’d met the hermits and they’d shown him so much kindness, he swore to never take any chances. As long as Hermitcraft ran smoothly, the Watchers wouldn’t have a reason to look at them. He knew they had other matters to deal with. Of course, there was the issue of the moon, but that didn’t seem too bad yet.

Grian blinked out of his thoughts, realizing Mumbo had gotten up out of his chair and walked over to him. “Wh-”

Mumbo hugged him, and Grian let himself melt into it, suddenly realizing he’d started to cry a little at some point during the whole explanation. “I’m glad you told me,” Mumbo said as he pulled away.

“You deserved to know,” Grian said. “Because well, now I’ve dragged you along with me.”

“I don’t think you can say that,” Mumbo replied, “considering I’m the one who stole your soul. You didn’t do anything, that was definitely all on me. I’m the one who lied and tricked you into signing it, and I’m the one who killed you, so please don’t somehow put this on yourself.”

Grian couldn’t find a way to argue that so he didn’t. He was, admittedly, still a little bitter about being murdered. He lost 97 levels! “Pearl knows too,” he said after a moment. “She was there. In Evo.”

“I’m glad you got to see her again,” said Mumbo. It was no secret that they’d known each other prior to Hermitcraft. Grian had been able to see his old friends from Evo a few times before at MCC, but had never really been able to spend a lot of time with anyone until Pearl joined the server. Her presence in Boatem was comforting, and Grian was decidedly not clingy about it. Definitely.

“Me too,” Grian said with a smile. “She’s not a Watcher though. She’s not . . . like us.”

Mumbo frowned. “I don’t think I’m used to that ‘us’ quite yet, buddy.”

“I don’t expect you to be.”

They sat in silence for what seemed like a few minutes. The lantern on the table flickered, sending faint dancing shadows around the room. He probably didn’t even need the lantern, to be honest; the moon was big enough now that true darkness was hard to come by since it was always full. Its blue silver light was bright enough to read a book outside.

Grian studied Mumbo’s face. He looked deeply tired in a way that betrayed long term stress. Not being human must have really been bothering him, and Grian felt a little guilty he hadn’t noticed up until the point where Mumbo resorted to building a death machine to harvest his soul. Mumbo normally acted weird, yes, but perhaps he had been acting more weird. Unfortunately, Grian had a feeling this was only the beginning of what was now their mutual stress.

“Why don’t you go to bed,” Grian suggested, “and we can look at this in the morning. Don’t worry about going back to Treeza, just stay here. I have a spare bed around here somewhere.” Grian didn’t know if he would be able to sleep, but if he could get Mumbo to that’d be a win in his book. Mumbo looked like he could sleep for a million years, but instead he’s here, sitting at Grian’s table in the middle of the night listening to him spill his past like some dark backstory in a novel.

“I guess that sounds okay,” Mumbo said. “Like a sleepover.”

“You’re stifling a yawn. It better sound okay. Go to bed or I’ll make you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It can be!” Grian replied cheerfully. “Now shoo. I need to go set up the bed.”

“Can you find it in your storage system?” Mumbo asked after him, and the amusement in his voice made Grian want to commit some small crime against him. Instead, he was just unfortunately very aware of every extra chest he opened trying to find what he needed.

“Yes,” he snapped. “Don’t make me regret letting you stay here.”

“You offered,” Mumbo pointed out.

“I know,” Grian said, trying to convey annoyance but landing just south of fondness.

Maybe this will all look better in the morning.

Grian hadn’t expected to sleep, but he woke with a start to the sun streaming into his windows. After Mumbo went to bed, he’d stayed up longer, just thinking. But he must’ve drifted off at some point, and had blessedly slept soundly for a few hours.

Unfortunately, he must have slept soundly in a crooked position, because his back was killing him when he woke up. And he didn’t even sleep on the couch or anything since Mumbo got a spare bed, so what was up with that?

Mumbo was still asleep, and had somehow managed to sprawl across the bed and knock one of the pillows on the floor. It was a little impressive, honestly. Grian decided to let him sleep a little longer before kicking him out of the bed. But he would, if necessary, very literally be kicking him out of bed.

I guess I should make some coffee, Grian thought, hazy and still half asleep himself. He hummed to himself as he put it together, not being particularly mindful of how much noise he made, since he planned to wake Mumbo up soon anyway. On a moment’s reflection, he dug a regen potion out of one of his chests and dumped it into Mumbo’s cup. His wings would probably be sore. Regen worked as a handy pain reliever when nothing else was available, lasting about two hours and healing you a little each time you needed it. None for himself, though; he could stand the pain. Don’t say I never did anything for you, Mumbo.

Lucky for Mumbo, Mumbo had already woken up by the time that Grian finished the coffee. “Grian . . .” he called out nervously. “Can you come here?”

Grian walked out of the kitchen, and set a mug of coffee in front of Mumbo. “Yes?”

Mumbo clutched the mug tightly, face pale. “Grian, the wings are bigger.”

Grian sipped his coffee, wincing at how hot it still was. He drank it anyway. “Yes, I expected that. They’re growing. At some point they’ll be the size of mine.”

Mumbo’s eyes were wide. “So quickly?”

“Um, yes. It’s magic.”

“It’s magic???”

“Mumbo, what do you think is happening right now?” Grian sighed. “It’s not going to be instant, but yeah, it won’t take too long. It didn’t for me, but it was also different for me. You won’t be able to fly for a while still–they’re still way too weak and your body hasn’t adapted to them yet. I can’t give you, like, a timeline or anything though, because believe it or not I don’t actually have experience with what happens when someone steals a Watcher soul.”

It felt . . . a little weird to refer to himself as a Watcher openly, but almost relieving.

Mumbo frowned petulantly. “You were nicer to me last night.”

“What happens in the middle of the night stays in the middle of the night,” Grian retorted. “You’re reaping what you sowed for deciding to steal my soul. Now can I see the wings again?”

“I guess,” Mumbo said and complied. The wings were definitely bigger overnight, and some of the down feathers had fallen out, which would be a fun surprise when he tried to wash the sheets later. Grian stroked one of the feathers, but Mumbo stiffened immediately at the touch so Grian quickly withdrew.

“Sorry buddy,” he said, “but I think we’re going to have to cut your suit now. It’ll probably feel better though, because they’ll hurt more if you try to keep them folded under your shirt and jacket.”

“Well, do what you need to do,” said Mumbo as he sipped his coffee. Grian thought he looked like he hadn’t fully processed it yet. Or he wasn’t awake yet–one of the two.

Grian found some scissors in one of his chests, and picked up Mumbo’s shirt and jacket. He eyeballed the measurements–he’d had to alter quite a few pieces of clothing for himself before, so he was fairly confident. “It’s not going to look pretty, sorry. You’ll have to do a better version of this yourself with hemming later.”

“What, Grian’s Tailor Service doesn’t include sewing?” Mumbo asked, watching him work.

“Well, maybe I’d throw it in, but you did steal my soul,” Grian replied, “so I think you can live with one ruined jacket. I’ve seen your closet, you have plenty of these things.”

“How many times are you going to bring up the soul-stealing thing in one morning?” Mumbo complained.

“Oh, I think I can get a lifetime’s worth of mileage out of this,” Grian said with a smile. “Alright, I’m done. Try it on?”

Mumbo put his shirt and jacket on, trying to guide the small wings through the new holes. He was struggling a little, since he didn’t have good control over them yet, but Grian didn’t say anything. He remembered the feeling.

“Oh, look at them!” Mumbo exclaimed. “Wow, I’ll have to get used to this.”

“Move them,” Grian said, and Mumbo did an experimental flap.

“Whoa!”

“There you go, you’ll be flying in no time,” said Grian with a grin.

While Mumbo marveled at his new wings, Grian sipped his coffee, wondering how on earth he was supposed to start tackling this problem. This problem of . . . teaching Mumbo to be a Watcher, or at least how to be safe about it. Mumbo deserved better than Grian had gotten, yes, but how was he supposed to do that? And where would he even start?

Chapter Text

“So, uh, what are we doing?” Mumbo asked. They were standing in Grian’s Midnight Alley, near one of the alleys at the back. Grian had brought them there to have some space to practice, but also some privacy from the rest of Boatem. Since his base was a cave, it seemed like a good option. And since it was unfinished, it could be easily fixed if Mumbo broke anything. Although, he hoped Mumbo wouldn’t find a way to break anything this time.

“We’re practicing,” Grian replied. “I . . . Watchers have powers. If you have wings, you probably have them too. You need to learn how to use them.”

Mumbo contemplated this. “Okay. What powers do you have?” he asked carefully. “Because, like, I feel like I should probably know that too.”

“Let’s do this one at a time instead,” Grian suggested. “But uh, the one I want to start with is shapeshifting. It’s kind of hard to use extensively so I normally use it as a useful shortcut.”

Mumbo opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. If Grian had to guess, it was about the existence of his shapeshifting powers. Which he had definitely used openly since joining Hermitcraft, but that Mumbo had apparently forgotten about or not noticed since he had thought Grian was human. At first, Grian had felt a little hurt about that, but had decided to take it in good faith–so long as he had the right to complain about this forever, of course.

The fact was, in their little group, having powers wasn’t particularly special. Neither was being non-human. In fact, Grian wasn’t actually sure how many people on the server were actually human, since he learned a long time ago that a lot of people were more than they seemed. Grian wasn’t even the only person on the server with wings, either! The normality of it was comforting to him. Mumbo had lived with the hermits since he was a teenager. Grian just supposed . . . well maybe, paired with being a spoon, it was just so normal to him that he didn’t think about it much.

That comforted him too. He’d spent a long time caring too much.

“So, to start-”

Mumbo raised his hand.

“This isn’t a classroom, Mumbo, we’re the only ones here. Just speak.”

Mumbo put down his hand. “Will I be able to shapeshift into another person? Or–an animal? Could I, say, be a pig or something?”

Grian sighed. “Didn’t you steal my soul because you were tired of being a pig?”

“Well, yes, but it sounds more fun if I have control over it,” Mumbo said sheepishly.

Grian shook his head. “Theoretically, yes, but it takes a lot of energy so you probably wouldn’t be able to do that often or right away. Also, you should probably wait until you’re experienced to try it since you could turn into something else and then be too tired to turn yourself back, which might cause you to panic. More experienced Watchers tend to use extensive shapeshifting, because it’s a really hard power to use. Something something about having to shift atoms and cells and alter reality. Might actually be more accurate to call it low level reality altering instead of shape-shifting, actually. I mostly know how to use it for minor superficial things.”

Mumbo frowned. “No, no, wait, if it’s so hard why did you start me on this? Aren’t you supposed to ease me up to these things?”

“Well, the minor stuff isn’t nearly as hard!” Grian said with a laugh. It was also the type of thing where if Mumbo was able to get this, it would be easier for him to grasp the rest. “It’s really useful. You should have a small effect on things close to your body, too. Like clothes, for example. Most of my clothes are just altered with magic to account for my wings, instead of sewing it.”

“So you cut holes in my suit for no reason?”

“No, I had a reason. First, you don’t know how to do this yet and you needed the holes. Second, it was funny.”

Mumbo crossed his arms and rolled his eyes, but Grian could tell he wasn’t actually mad. “Continue,” he said.

“So,” he started, “shapeshifting is just–well, why don’t I start with wings as an example. You have a sphere of influence that essentially just extends to your body, which is like your core self. It’s a “base” so to speak, something you can build off of or take away from. So before you stole my soul, you didn’t have wings. But now that you’re a Watcher, or at least Watcher-adjacent, you do have wings. Those are part of you now, part of that core self or base.

“It takes energy to alter this core, because when you shapeshift you’re basically altering reality a little. You’re creating something physical–creating matter–that wasn’t there before. Or, you’re removing it! All this takes effort.”

If Grian had been thinking more scientifically rather than magically, he might have brought up the Law of Conservation of Mass and specifically how they were breaking it, but that was a little beyond their conversation. He wasn’t that kind of teacher.

Mumbo looked confused. “I’m not sure if I follow,” he said.

“I’ll use hiding your wings as an example,” Grian said. “You have wings, it’s part of your core. You can use your powers to hide them, but it will take energy since you are erasing something that is supposed to exist. You’re changing your body and altering which parts of you move through reality. Vice versa, if there was a shapeshifter who did not have wings, but wanted them, they could give themselves wings but it would take energy to maintain them since they’re bringing in something that didn’t exist before and making it exist physically in the world.”

“I think I get it,” Mumbo said, looking like he only partially grasped it. “So I can hide these if I want?”

“Yep! In fact, that’s kind of the first thing I want you to try. It’s not something you can hold for a very long time though; it will sap your energy.”

Grian had hidden his wings, once. It was immediately after he joined the Hermits. He arrived in their world somewhat unannounced and unexpectedly, thinking it was empty when it wasn’t. That had been a stupid mistake on his part as a Watcher, since he should have been able to see that type of thing ahead of time, but it was a happy one. A life-altering one.

Grian didn’t really know the hermits, and didn’t want to attract bad attention to himself so soon after fleeing the Watchers. So he hid his wings, only taking the time to uncover and stretch them when he was alone at his base. Instead, he learned how to fly with an elytra. People found it funny he’d never used one, but when would he have? On Evo they hadn’t existed, and after he was taken from Evo he had his own wings to fly with, of which elytra were a poor replacement.

It changed when he realized that he was far from the only one on the world who wasn’t human. Seeing other hermits who were clearly non-human, mob hybrids, had powers, and had wings made it more than clear that nobody would care about him. So he just began using his wings again with no fanfare or announcement. To this day Grian was pretty sure that some members of the server had never even noticed the change. If they had, few commented on it.

“It’s a little hard to get,” Grian admitted. “More of a feeling than anything. I think the best way might be to start off with just . . .being aware of every part of your body. After all, you’re making alterations to your ‘core’ being, so you should be aware of every part of that before you start trying to manipulate it. Think of your feet, the tips of your ears, your shoulders, your fingers, and then your wings. Just concentrate on yourself–listen to your heart beat. Like, uh, meditating or something.”

Mumbo hummed in agreement and closed his eyes, clearly in concentration. After a while, he opened an eye and squinted at Grian. “How long do I have to do this?” he asked.

“Depends,” Grian said. “Do you feel any different? Can you feel your wings?”

“Well, I’m aware of my own breathing now,” said Mumbo, “so thanks for that. But yes, I do feel ‘more aware of myself’ or whatever now. I don’t think I could forget the wings if I tried though, at least with how sore that is.”

“Use that, then,” Grian suggested. “Focus on the pain and just . . . imagine it gone, along with your wings.”

They stood there for a moment. There was the sound of wind blowing across the front of the alley, but inside the mountain the air was still. It was pleasantly quiet, with just the sounds of the animals in the Magical Menagerie walking around in the distance. Grian hoped to fill the alley with life and sound by the end of the season, though. It wasn’t meant to be a ghost town, it was meant to feel lived in.

Mumbo had his eyes screwed shut, and Grian watched him bemusedly, careful not to laugh audibly at the sight even though Mumbo looked a little dumb. “Has anything happened yet?” Mumbo asked.

“Um, no.”

“Darn.”

“Try again!” Grian pressed.

“This is harder than I expected,” said Mumbo.

“Well, sorry for being a bad teacher. It’s a hard feeling to describe; I don’t really remember learning how to do it, I just do it instinctively,” Grian answered.

“Speaking of which, do you even know that I have the ability to do this?” Mumbo asked. “Because like maybe this soul business isn’t an all-or-nothing type of deal.”

“Ah,” Grian said. “No . . .”

“So what if I just stand here all day making a fool of myself trying to use a power I don’t even have?”

“Well,” Grian started defensively, “If you really took on Watcher traits when you took my soul, then you should have this power. I don’t know if it’s an all-or-nothing deal or not–shouldn’t the person who stole my soul know that one? But it’s worth a try, just to see. And if you do have the power, and you learn to use it now, you can apply some of the same energy towards other things.”

Mumbo shook his head, but it was a light-hearted gesture. He concentrated, his fingers absentmindedly counting as if he was repeating Grian’s instructions of feet, ears, shoulders, fingers, wings in his head. The wind whistled outside. Grian stared at a piece of hair that had fallen down on Mumbo’s forehead, making a mental note to shove the man into a shower at some point later today. The air had a metallic tang from building materials. A cat meowed in the distance.

And then, a flicker.

Phasing out of reality . . .

. . . then back in.

“You just did it!” Grian shouted gleefully.

Mumbo startled, and the effect was gone. “I did?” he exclaimed.

“Yeah, you did! Now do it again! Whatever you just felt, grab onto that and push it further.” Grian felt a little bad for not explaining it better, but it really was just an intrinsic feeling. There’s no technique to show Mumbo, just an internal feeling. It wasn’t like Grian could reach into Mumbo’s mind and tell him how to feel. That had to come from Mumbo himself.

“Okay,” Mumbo whispered, more to himself than to Grian, “I can do this. I can do it.”

We can do this. We can do it.

Mumbo concentrated again.

Two things hit Grian at once: an almost intoxicating feeling of relief, followed almost immediately by intense wrongness. He staggered, suddenly feeling off balance. Like his head had been clear but had suddenly started spinning again, and in a more pressing way, like his entire weight had shifted on the ground. He felt a little lost even though he was just standing there, and he latched onto Mumbo as a place to focus. Mumbo had succeeded in his task, Grian realized belatedly.

“Dude,” he said wearily, “what just happened?”

At nearly the same time, Mumbo yelled, “I did it! I made the wings disappear! Oh, that feels good. The pain was better today, but I didn’t realize how sore they were until they were gone.”

Grian wasn’t listening, though, distracted by the growing dread he was feeling. There was empty air behind him where there shouldn't be, and he could feel cold air on his back where there should have been feathers. Sure enough, Mumbo’s wings were gone too, but so were his.

Where did they go?!

He shoved down panic, feeling very empty and unbalanced suddenly. The wings normally were a heavy grounding presence on his back, and without them it felt like an anchor being lifted from a boat. Like his feet would float if he let them. He hated it.

“Mumbo,” Grian said slowly, “where are my wings?”

Mumbo paused his mini celebration, turning his attention to Grian. “Your wings? Were you demonstrating? I only messed with mine, dude. And I did it!”

Grian gave a nervous chuckle. “Uh, congrats. I know that was hard. But I didn’t do anything to my wings. I was just standing here.”

“Well, that’s a little freaky,” Mumbo said. “Did . . . did I do that? How could I have done that?”

Grian thought. By all means, Mumbo should not have been able to do that. Grian was his own person separate from Mumbo, and this version of the power only affected your personal space. It’s not like Grian could see in Mumbo’s head, and he sure hoped Mumbo couldn’t see in his–what a ride that would be. Grian was sure he hadn’t done anything to make his wings disappear, since doing so required conscious effort and energy expenditure.

Of course, Grian could fix it. Unlike Mumbo, it was easy and well-practiced for him–just a little thought and his wings were back in reality. It felt better. Grian liked being in control of himself. Especially his own body. It was the lack of control and unexpectedness that had freaked him out.

The more he thought, the more the puzzle pieces began to fit in place. And he didn’t like the picture it was creating.

Mumbo’s intense concentration. Was it more difficult for him than it should’ve been?

The sense of relief–like carrying something heavy and setting it down, or like getting a good night’s sleep after a strenuous hike the day before.

The sense of relief like . . . pain relief?

My back hurt this morning. I gave Mumbo regen in his coffee for his wings.

Was Grian still his own person separate from Mumbo if Mumbo stole his soul? Could Mumbo affect Grian with his powers? If Grian tried, could he affect Mumbo? Grian had wondered if Mumbo had taken his soul and left him without one. Could they in fact be sharing one instead?

He didn’t drink enough coffee this morning to be having the conversation he was about to have.

Chapter Text

Three days later, and Mumbo’s wings were gangly now. They were an annoying size: far too big to wear an elytra with, but still too small to fly with. They were, however, just the right size to be in the way of everything Mumbo tried to do. He kept whacking them on door frames and while Grian was sympathetic since he too had whacked a few door frames in his time, it was also really funny. Mumbo had refused to practice the shape-shifting since their day in the alley, claiming he’d rather like to know what was going on first before he caused any extra problems, thank you very much.

Which left them walking to Zedaph’s instead of flying. Or rather, Mumbo walking and Grian annoying him by flying circles around him and then landing up ahead to wait before repeating the process again when Mumbo got close enough. That’s what you do to your slow walking friends, right? Grian was really looking forward to teaching him to fly.

“So what did you tell Zedaph?” Mumbo asked, again.

“I just requested that he do an experiment on us since we wanted to learn something. He told me to bring you by today.”

“Oh, well, this should be fun.”

“I figured he could have some ideas about how to test our, ah, soul-sharing. Or hopefully lack of it,” Grian explained. “In return he gets some interesting data I guess.” Said as if Zedaph didn’t practically fall over at the chance for a dual study. Grian didn’t even have to pay him!

“I’m fairly sure he’s not actually a scientist, you know,” said Mumbo conspiratorially.

“Where’s the fun in it if he is?”

Eventually, they arrived at Zedaph’s base, the blue glass glinting in the morning sunlight. Some sheep baa’d from their place over on the sheep wall. Zedaph was an interesting fellow, Grian thought.

The man himself greeted them at the door wearing a lab coat and smiling wide with a twinkle in his eye that meant they were probably in for a wild ride. “Welcome!” he said. “I’m happy to see you here. I hope you’re ready! You know, I planned to pull Mumbo aside for a study soon but this works as well. Come in, come in.”

Mumbo shot Grian a glance while Zedaph chattered, but Grian just shrugged.

They entered the hall, but before they were allowed onward, Zedaph handed both of them clipboards. “Sign this,” he said.

Grian looked at his page. It read:

I, Grian, allow Zedaph to hereby conduct scientific experimentation on me. I understand it may be dangerous and Zedaph is not responsible for any soul-related shenanigans that may happen. You knew what you were getting into when you asked Zedaph to perform an experiment on you, and you will listen to his requests no matter how weird they appear. You approve Zedaph’s use of your data for the furtherment of scientific knowledge. Also, Zed is very smart. Have no fear.

“Yes, yes,” Grian said, “I’ll sign.”

After he collected the clipboards, Grian followed the man down the hall to what he assumed was an observation room. But before they got there, Zedaph opened a door on the side of the hall and led them in there. It was a basic room with stark white walls and harsh lighting. In it were just two chests and a bed.

“Set your spawn here,” Zedaph instructed brightly.

“Spawn?” Mumbo asked, alarmed. “Should we be worried about dying during this?”

“Worried? No!” Zedaph exclaimed. “But yes, you may die. Don’t worry, the highest level of ethical deliberation went into these experiments. I would never harm you . . . unnecessarily.”

Grian sighed. “Well, I guess it might be necessary to test what happens when we die. Since . . . you know. It may be connected.” God, he hoped he wouldn’t die whenever Mumbo did. At least this didn’t happen to him with Scar.

“Speaking of which,” Zedaph began, “can you tell me more about what you would like out of this experiment? What are your goals? I have to know what sort of notes to take.”

“The difference between messing around and doing science is writing it down,” Mumbo supplied seriously, and Zedaph nodded rigorously.

“The shortest explanation is that I suspect Mumbo and I may be sharing a soul,” Grian said. He kind of hoped that Zedaph wouldn’t ask about why. He didn’t really mind if Zedaph knew, since this was bound to become common knowledge at some point, but he just didn’t feel like telling the story. Thankfully, he seemed to accept the simple explanation. “Our goal is to test that and see if my suspicion is correct.”

“Of course,” replied Zedaph, “a hypothesis.” He wrote it down. Grian caught a glimpse of the paper, which just read: Soulmates?

“Not when you put it like that,” Grian muttered, too low for anyone else to hear.

He and Mumbo began putting their stuff in the chest while Zedaph studied something on his clipboard. Then they both set their spawn. When they were done, Zedaph spoke again.

“So I figure there's a few things we need to test. First, your reactions to each other’s pain. Can you feel it, or is it entirely separate? From there, I will test respawn. Then we should test how each of you think and feel, as well as your senses. Sounds good?”

“Sure,” said Mumbo.

“Fantastic! Follow me,” he replied, and led them back into the hallway. Grian was right, one of the rooms on the end was an observation room. It was filled with knick-knacks and seemingly random items. There was a second room beside it, though. “I built another observation chamber, which is why I had you wait a few days,” Zedaph said as they arrived. “Studying two people at once is such a great opportunity, I couldn’t pass it up. I will be able to see both of you now from my control room, but you won’t be able to see or hear each other.”

He shooed them into their rooms. The tinted glass made the control room look dim, but the lights were bright enough on the other side that Grian could still see Zedaph. He was about a meter above Grian, looking over him. Grian’s own room was pleasantly lit and a little cluttered. The air felt muffled and quiet.

Zedaph said something on the other side of the glass that Grian couldn’t hear, and gave a thumbs up. Grian hesitantly returned the gesture, not really knowing what he was agreeing with.

He . . . he wasn’t sure he really liked this. Being scrutinized. The urge to hide and bury any sort of feelings was strong, but somewhere along this journey he’d sort of committed himself to trying to be more open, if for nothing else but Mumbo’s sake. And, this was of course, his idea. So he stood and waited patiently for them to begin, trying to not feel like a mouse in the grass being stalked by an owl far above him.

A loudspeaker somewhere above him suddenly crackled, and Grian tried not to jump. “You can’t hear me unless I use this,” said Zedaph. “It seems like you’re both ready. Mumbo told me he’s been taking regen for the pain from his wings, so I told him to drink some milk to cancel it out before we began. So tell me if you feel anything.” Grian had a bad feeling he would.

The difference was sudden and unpleasant, like being drenched in a bucket of ice cold water but much less refreshing. “Ow,” he said eloquently. His back was sore again, feeling like he’d wrenched his wing and pulled the muscle. Or like a growing pain.

“Did you feel anything?” Zedaph asked.

“Yes,” Grian replied.

“Interesting!” He scribbled something on his paper. Grian kind of hoped he would be allowed to see the paper at the end.

Next, Zedaph instructed Grian to pull out and plant a berry bush in one of the chests. They were surprisingly well-stocked, and he had both dirt and bone meal to grow it with. When he was done, he told Grian to prick himself on the bush. “Ugh, this is the worst,” Grian complained, but did as he was told. Berry bushes had to be one of the most useless and annoying plants to deal with. After an agonizingly slow minute: “Can I please stop now?”

“Yes,” Zedaph said. He spoke again where Grian couldn’t hear him, and Grian realized that it was because he was probably speaking into the other chamber. “Mumbo told me he didn’t feel anything.”

Huh.

Grian was afraid that maybe the pain connection only went one way–with just Grian feeling Mumbo’s pain–but it was soon assuaged. Zedaph had Mumbo jump off the tallest thing in the room and report back about fall damage. Grian hadn’t felt it. The room was tall, but not tall enough to kill or seriously injure yourself from falling, so the pain must have been minor.

Their new working hypothesis was that yes, the two did share pain, but it was only bigger or more persistent pains. Grian really hoped this was the case–while he’d prefer to not be connected to Mumbo at all, that ship had already sailed a long time ago so it was all he could do to just hope that he didn’t have to feel every minor paper cut Mumbo ever got. Mumbo wasn’t nearly as clumsy as Scar, but he had an oblivousness about him that Grian just knew was probably the cause of all sorts of minor bruises and scrapes.

Grian, of course, never did stupid things like forgetting where he was midair and flying into the side of his mountain and dying of kinetic energy. He . . . he had gone through a few pairs of glasses since the season started.

They tested again with a pufferfish that Grian ate with only minor persuasion from Zedaph. The room spun sickeningly. He closed his eyes against the vertigo, but even just moving his head with his eyes closed made his stomach lurch. Against the darkness of his eyelids, it was disconcertingly difficult to discern up from down, even though he knew he was still standing up. He settled for staying as still as possible. If he didn’t move, maybe he could stop existing for a moment.

“Grian?” the loudspeaker crackled. “Are you doing okay?”

“Mm,” he replied.

“You can take the milk now,” Zedaph said, and Grian hastily drank it. He’d almost forgotten he was holding the bucket. Like a switch being flipped, the nausea vanished. Grian blinked, and shook his wings out.

“Please tell me there was a point to that,” he said.

“Mumbo told me that he felt sick too,” Zedaph said. “Although, to be frank, he looked a lot better than you do right now. He said it felt less severe than normal.”

“I think it’s like . . . muffled,” Grian suggested. “I can feel his pain and he can feel mine, but it seems like it’s not as strong.”

“Like an echo,” Zedaph mused, and wrote that down too.

Another test. This time, with a hunger effect on Mumbo. Grian had felt that too, a sudden gnawing ache where there hadn’t been any previously. He’d absentmindedly started to snack on a berry from the bush he planted earlier.

Next was a little more severe: a sword swipe. Actual blood spilled. Potion effects and fall damage and berry bushes were all different from the type of injuries that could be sustained in a PVP fight, so it was wise to test those too. Unfortunately, it was Grian’s turn–they’d been taking turns to test that the pain-sharing things were fully reciprocal. He wasn’t particularly afraid of being hurt or dying; living in a world with infinite respawn fostered a rather casual attitude toward death. Sometimes a little death was fun, like in death games like Demise or Cleo’s headgames. Or like dropping Scar into the void, or killing fellow Boatem members with a sneak end crystal attack.

Hermits as a whole were pretty casual toward death. If you killed someone, you replaced their items or lent them the use of a farm to get their levels back, but it wasn’t really a big deal. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to running himself through with a sword this time, though. If for nothing else than the temporary inconvenience of pain.

“Have you got a sword, Grian?” Zedaph asked.

“Yes,” Grian replied. “Just made one with the supplies in the chest.” He’d left his normal one in the chest in the respawn room. The new one was just iron, the shiny new blade glinting in the light. Although it was unenchanted, the blade was sure to be sharp without any past use to make it dull or chipped.

Bracing himself, he counted 1, 2 . . . surprising even himself when he shoved the sword into his own abdomen before he made it to the count of three. Best to make it a surprise when you try to hurt yourself, otherwise you may lose your nerve halfway through. Don’t ask where Grian learnt that. It didn’t hurt at first, just an uncomfortable sudden pressure. He gasped, feeling the pain beginning to rush in as he slipped the sword back out. Instinctively, he threw his hand across the wound, feeling the blood beginning to flow through his fingers despite the pressure he put on it.

That was a little more than he expected. The sword clattered to the floor, and he wrapped his other arm around the wound too. It felt hard to breathe, and he breathed shallower like it would stop the bleeding faster. It burned. His heart beat fast. He didn’t make a sound, didn’t have enough breath to.

His hand was wet. Blood dripped on the floor. The air tasted metallic, no–his mouth did, and he was just panting. Did he bite his tongue? He didn’t remember doing that.

“Grian!” Zedaph shouted, worry edging his voice. He sounded a bit fuzzy, further off than normal. Or was that just the intercom? “I only meant a small cut!”

Interesting. The room was colder. His abdomen was white-hot. His hand was wet.

“I think I may test the respawn now,” Grian mumbled, before blacking out.

“Do not do that again,” someone scolded Grian when he woke up. It sounded like Mumbo. Grian opened his eyes. It was Mumbo.

“I’m awake now,” he said as a reply. He looked around the room, which was still empty save the chests and the bed, but Zedaph was also here now. Or, was also here when he woke up. Grian wasn’t really sure–respawn was always a little disorienting for the first two seconds.

“You scared Zedaph,” Mumbo said.

“I wasn’t-”

“Zedaph told me to do that!” Grian defended.

“No, I just wanted you to cut yourself with the sword, not fully stab yourself in the stomach,” Zedaph said. “But we were going to test respawn anyway so you saved me the trouble.”

“So?” Grian prompted.

“I did not die when you did,” Mumbo replied.

“Good, so our deaths aren’t connected. I can sacrifice you to the Boatem hole anytime I want if that’s the case.”

“Hey-”

“Well, we still need to test Mumbo’s respawn,” Zedaph reminded him. “If you’re okay, we can go back to the observation room?”

“Of course I’m okay,” Grian said and they left the conversation.

Zedaph led the way back to the observation room, making notes on his clipboard in favor of actually looking where he was going. Grian’s room had a puddle of blood still in it, a little tacky and half-dry from the time that had passed. Grian’s sweater–and body–had mended itself upon respawn, but a little evidence normally remained. He uncomfortably cleaned it with a towel while Mumbo and Zedaph spoke through the intercom. Apparently, Mumbo had, in true Mumbo fashion, found the end crystals in the chest, and decided to simply blow himself up.

Well, if he’d stabbed himself like Grian did, or maybe shot himself, it might’ve shown up as a player kill, ruining his stats. Leave it to Mumbo to find the loopholes.

Grian didn’t know when he set up the crystals, but he knew it when they went off. Normally he couldn’t hear through the walls, but the explosion rattled the room and left a few small holes in the wall between them. He looked over into Mumbo’s chamber, seeing the broken blocks and item frames on the floor, and no Mumbo.

“Maybe I should’ve saved this part for last,” muttered Zedaph, with the look of a man who knew he was going to have to fix the room before they continued.

“I’ll help,” offered Grian, reading his mind.

Next on the agenda after they fixed the room was a little less deadly and a little less painful. Zedaph wanted to test how closely they thought, or something like that. Just in case they shared that. Grian was pretty sure already that they didn’t, since he probably would have noticed being able to read Mumbo’s mind by now. They tested regardless.

“Tell me how you would make a piston door,” Zedaph instructed.

“Uh . . .” Grian wracked his brain. He wasn’t totally inept at redstone–he’d built a storage system last season, thank you very much, no mind that he used a tutorial–but it definitely wasn’t something that occupied a place in his brain normally. Given time he could probably make a simple piston door, but off the top of his head? “Well you need sticky pistons, some redstone, maybe a repeater, and something to trip the system with like a lever? I, uh, don’t think this is the kind of answer you were looking for, Zed. There’s no magical Mumbo redstone knowledge in my head and I don’t think I’m going to find it if I keep going.”

“Hm,” Zedaph said cryptically, and left it at that.

Mumbo had improved tremendously at building recently, so Grian figured it wouldn’t be as effective to ask the question the other way around. He sniffed. If Mumbo was going to turn into a builder, while still being awesome at redstoning, then what would Grian have left? Mumbo was coming for his brand! (He was thrilled, personally, at his improvement.)

“Pick a number between one and one hundred,” Zedaph asked next, after taking a moment to speak with Mumbo.

“Uh,” Grian said. “37.”

“Hm.” Zedaph scribbled on his paper again. “You didn’t pick the same thing as Mumbo. He picked 82.”

“Was I supposed to?”

“Did you know what number he picked?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

Next, Zedaph put a book into the slot. Grian took it, flipping to the first page. It was an ink blot of some sorts. “What do you see in it?” Zedaph asked. “I’m going to compare your answer and Mumbo’s.”

Grian looked at it. It did indeed look like a blot, but maybe with a few holes that could be eyes and some legs sticking out. “It looks a little like an alien,” he replied. “Like one of the ones from Space Invaders.”

“Very good.” Zedaph nodded, and walked out of eye shot of Grian to ask the same thing of Mumbo.

“What did Mumbo see?” Grian said, when Zedaph walked back around.

“He said he saw a stag beetle. Like the-”

“The ones that push poo?”

“Yes, those. Tells me a lot about him, actually.”

Grian furrowed his brow. “Mumbo and I are clearly not on the same page here. I don’t know if this is supposed to see if we’re sharing thoughts, but I don’t think we are.”

“Well, one more chance to test that,” Zedaph said. “Next we’re going to play a little bit of a game. I’m going to ask Mumbo a question. He’s going to answer it, and then you’re going to tell me what his answer was. Sound good?”

“Sure,” Grian said.

Zedaph came back after getting Mumbo’s answer. “I asked him how old he was when he joined the server.”

“Seventeen,” Grian answered immediately. “But I didn’t know that because he just said that in the other room, I knew that from before. I think you need another question.”

Zedaph frowned, but came back with another question. “If Mumbo had a dog, what name would he give it?”

Grian paused. “I . . . don’t know that one. He doesn’t have many pets.”

Zedaph checked his clipboard. “He wrote ‘Kubo.’”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

Now it was Grian’s turn for questions Mumbo would have to answer correctly. He thought it was a bit of a waste of time at this point, but he wasn’t the scientist in charge.

“When did you meet Mumbo?” Zedaph asked.

“Just before I joined Evo–wait. Are you making us play the Newlywed Game?” Grian exclaimed.

Zedaph stared at Grian silently. “. . . No.”

“You totally are.”

“No! They’re totally different games. See, this one relies on seeing if you can know what the other person is saying because your thoughts are connected. The Newlywed Game relies on seeing how well you know each other.”

“All of these questions could be answered by us knowing each other well. I’m not answering any more of these.”

“. . . You have me there. Let’s move on to our final test.”

The final test was just to see if any of their senses matched. Sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch. Mumbo was apparently entirely disconnected to Grian in his chamber–none of the senses seemed to carry over. But it was important to study reciprocity, so Grian was questioned as well.

“You can’t hear anything that has happened in Mumbo’s chamber, right? The walls are designed so that under normal circumstances you can’t, but we are not testing normal circumstances with you two.”

“No, I can’t,” Grian replied.

“Can you smell, taste, or touch anything?”

“No.”

“Can you see into Mumbo’s chamber?”

And, well, that one gave Grian a pause. Because he could, if he wanted to. He could see into Mumbo’s chamber. He could also go see what Scar was doing back in Boatem, or see where TFC was in the mines, or see into Zedaph’s bedroom if he wanted. It’s what Watchers do. They see, and they’re extraordinarily good at it.

But Grian didn’t like to do that. It felt like spying, and spying felt wrong, and he’d hated that part of being a Watcher. He’d sworn to not use his Watching power except in times of necessity. It also activated a part of himself he had no problem admitting to hating–a version of himself that didn’t pass as human, or close to it. A version covered in eyes in all the wrong places and glowing skin that altogether moved in a slightly wrong way.

. . . Mumbo had only just learned to use the shapeshifting powers. He didn’t even know how to fly yet. He didn’t need to see that version of Grian, not yet.

Grian realized Zedaph was still waiting for him. It didn’t take a Watcher’s instinct to know he was being looked at. “No, I can’t see into Mumbo’s chamber,” he replied slowly. Not because of a soul connection. Not without activating something else.

Zedaph spent a few moments flipping through his papers. He buzzed the intercom again. “Okay, that concludes our tests. Thank you for your time! Please meet me outside the laboratory and I will discuss your preliminary results.”

About five minutes later, Mumbo and Grian were back in front of the sheep wall outside.

“So, did we pass?” Mumbo joked.

“I have a lot of interesting data,” Zedaph said. “Thank you for allowing me to study you. I can’t say you passed, since this wasn’t a pass or fail type of procedure. But I can say that, unfortunately–or fortunately, I can’t speak for you–that I think your hypothesis is correct.”

“Oh dear,” Mumbo said. “So we do share a soul?”

“In as scientific as I can test soul-sharing, I believe so,” Zedaph replied. “You both scored much higher on pain than you did on sharing thoughts, though. I believe that you both share significant pain or discomfort between you, but that you do not have access to each other’s thoughts or senses.”

“I don’t think I could survive a day in Mumbo’s head, to be honest,” Grian said, and Mumbo elbowed him. “Ow!”

“The only thing I was unable to test was strong emotion, as it is difficult to correctly evoke that within a lab setting, so watch out for that. May I ask . . . how did you two end up sharing a soul?”

“Accident,” Mumbo said. “Don’t mess with things you shouldn’t in order to get things you shouldn’t.”

“Oh, say no more,” replied Zedaph, and he looked like he actually did understand. Grian’s curiosity was piqued. “Could I ask that you update me with any new discoveries so that I can add them to my report?”

Mumbo looked at Grian, who just shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

Zedaph grinned. “Thank you! And good luck!”

Mumbo and Grian’s walk back to Boatem was long, and mostly silent as the two of them thought about their new discovery. It was odd how everything you knew could get upended in a day. It had happened several times to Grian. This time, though, he was still here to fight for it.

They shared a soul. It answered Grian’s question from the first day of their little adventure, but he didn’t really seem satisfied with the answer. They shared a soul. Was this forever? Was it caught between them, like a soul in limbo crossing between the overworld and the afterlife? Did they share the same powers? It seemed so big, and vast, and permanent, and unfixable.

Mumbo’s my best friend, but I don’t think I’m ready to be tethered to him from now on.

If they found a way to fix it, would one of them be left without a soul? Would they die? Grian had so many questions. There weren’t any answers.

And in the meantime, Mumbo was now most certainly a Watcher. Maybe they could learn to live like this, but it wasn’t a happy ending for him. This isn’t something Grian would have wished to share with anyone. Mumbo was now a Watcher, and as such a new private viewer to Grian’s personal little hell. He deserved better.

Grian wanted to give him better, but he didn’t know how.

Chapter Text

“That first night I came to you, you said that the hermits wouldn’t pry about all of this new stuff,” Mumbo said later when they got back to Boatem. “And, you’re right. They haven’t. But they’re still curious, and I can’t fault them for that at all because anyone would be. I see their looks and just . . . I don’t think it’s fair, necessarily, to not acknowledge it at all.” He looked down. “Especially since our souls are apparently connected now. Someone’s gonna notice that. We may even need someone to know that, if it causes any problems.”

Grian sighed, feeling a twinge of guilt knowing how much he’s hidden from the hermits before. The hermits would indeed not bring it up if they didn’t want to talk about it, but it was only natural for them to notice it. After a while they’d probably get over it and start ignoring it, but Grian knew the lack of communication was probably not the best way to handle it. But, he had a long track record of not choosing the best way to handle issues.

“So what do you think?” Grian asked, prodding Mumbo to continue.

“I just wanted your thoughts. This thing is as much yours as mine, because I just–I can’t talk about it to anyone else without revealing your secrets too. I can’t just reply to someone asking me why I have wings now with ‘I stole Grian’s soul and now I’m a Watcher like he is and we’re also literal soulmates’ now can I? Not when you never even told me you were a Watcher.”

Grian swallowed. “It’s not really my secret,” he said, “it’s more of an, ah, open secret? Most people are aware I’m not human, and I’ve used my powers some, probably enough for people to see it and realize I have them.” Except for Mumbo, apparently, but Grian had just accepted Mumbo was a spoon by now. “And I’m almost certain Xisuma knows, even though he’s never had a conversation with me about it. So it’s like . . . a little bit known already.”

Mumbo just stared. “An open secret?” he exclaimed. “I know I haven’t been the most observant, and I’m sorry for that, but I’m your best friend and I’ve learned so much more about you in the last week than in literal years of knowing you. I know why you didn’t want to talk about this and, I think that’s fine! I get it. But you don’t get to pretend like this is something you’ve been open about, something that everyone already knows. If I can’t read your mind when our souls are literally connected, neither can anyone else.”

Grian said nothing.

Mumbo continued, “I brought this up because I want to know where you are on this. I’ll keep your secrets if you want, you know I will. But it involves me now too, and I just need to know: what do you want me to say? How do you want me to explain it? Where’s the line, what information do you care if people know?”

“I don’t know,” Grian said truthfully. “I’ve never had to share this-” burden “-problem with anyone else before.”

“Maybe that’s your problem,” Mumbo said softly. “I need to know, though. You need to think about this and we need to be on the same page about it. What do you think is keeping you from talking about it?”

“I think I’m afraid.”

“What are you afraid of?”

So many things. He was afraid of being viewed differently with the knowledge he was a Watcher, because he didn’t run away immediately and he did things he was ashamed of and he even lost himself enjoying some of the chaos they brought until he snapped himself out of it. He was afraid of losing his place on the server that was now his home, afraid that people would be upset that he’s hidden things. He was afraid of the Watchers coming back, even though it had been years and logically they probably weren’t now. He was afraid of being vulnerable, and revealing things he’d so carefully kept hidden.

He was afraid of himself.

But, was this really Mumbo’s burden to handle? He seemed to want to, but Grian wasn’t sure. It was him who had gone through everything with the Watchers, and he didn’t want that weight on Mumbo too. Maybe if Mumbo wasn’t also a Watcher now, maybe if their souls weren’t connected. Grian didn’t want Mumbo to hate himself too.

“I don’t think you could understand it,” he finally said. The words were soft in the silence.

Mumbo’s face fell, and Grian regretted the words instantly. He hurt him. He tried to spare him but he hurt him anyway–

That’s why I always kept this to myself. So I can’t hurt anyone else.

“I just wanted to help you,” Mumbo said, and Grian almost flinched. The words didn’t hold pity, or sadness. Just tiredness and resignation.

Mumbo shook his head and walked away, ending their conversation without another word. Grian had been alone before, but he felt even more alone now. He felt cold.

Maybe he’d talk about it with Mumbo again tomorrow morning. Or maybe they’d let it lie between them and dance around it, like they always had.

Grian shifted his weight between his feet, feeling a bit nervous as he waited for some water to heat in his kettle. It was a silly feeling to be nervous of all things around Mumbo of all people, but he regretted the way their last conversation had gone. It had been two days where they hadn’t seen much of each other and he felt bad.

So, he invited Mumbo to the most intimate thing he knew: feather preening. It was a skill Mumbo desperately needed to learn, afterall. It was also a plea: trust me and I’m sorry.

Mumbo had suggested a sleepover, and from there the evening was planned.

Grian grabbed the cup of hot tea he was making and left the kitchen, walking back into the other room where Mumbo was sitting on the floor. “Here,” he said, handing the mug over to him.

“Thanks!” Mumbo said cheerily, and took a sip. It must have burnt his tongue a little because he made a face and then cautiously set it down beside him on the floor. “So, what are we doing tonight?”

“Preening,” Grian said, and presented Mumbo with a box. It was small and wooden with a plain latch. Something he’d crafted himself.

Mumbo opened it up. Inside were a few tools, carved from bone. There was a small pointed piece like a pick, a piece to attach to the pick to extend it, and two types of special combs–not quite the same as one would use on hair. “Wow, these are pretty,” he said.

“I made them for you,” Grian replied. “I have a set, too. It’s just tools to use on your feathers. You could probably buy some if you went off-server, but they’re very easy to carve. Oh! I also have a bottle of oil for you to use on them. It helps waterproof feathers, or else you’ll have a bad time trying to fly in rain.”

“Rain? On this server?” Mumbo joked while Grian went to fetch the bottle of oil.

Grian sat back down on the floor in front of him. “The combs are for fixing feathers that are all disjointed, with the two sizes to accomodate for larger and smaller feathers. They can be good for applying oil too. The most useful tool is the pick, though.”

“What is it for?”

“Well, unless you grow a beak, you’ll need it or some other pointed object to preen your feathers. You can use that to straighten out feathers as well as clean between them and remove dirt and stuff. It’s quite versatile.”

“Oh dear,” Mumbo said. “I hope I don’t grow a beak. I don’t know what I’d do with one. Aside from preening, I suppose.”

“Have I ever grown one? We aren’t actually avians, you know.”

“. . . Right.”

“The long piece in the box is to extend the pick, so that you could reach places on your back you couldn’t otherwise. But . . . you can also ask someone else to do it for you,” Grian said, ending the sentence in a voice quieter than he’d intended.

“Do you?”

“I used to do it by myself,” Grian said. It was just kind of a lot to ask of someone, he felt. It took time and vulnerability. He knew he could have asked any hermit and they’d have agreed to do it for him, but he’d just never asked. “Since Pearl joined though, she sometimes does it with me. I have to braid her hair in return, though,” he laughed. “And, I’m going to teach you how to do it tonight and now you can help.”

Mumbo smiled. “I’d be happy to, mate.”

Grian sat behind Mumbo, and worked his way through one of his wings, explaining as he went. They sipped tea. He made Mumbo take turns doing his own feathers, and made sure that he could do some of the harder to reach ones before Grian took over doing it for him. He told Mumbo how often to do it–doesn’t have to be every day since they weren’t birds fully covered in feathers, but probably two or three times a week to keep things nice–and offered to help if needed.

An earthquake rattled the house, forcing them to stop. No need to accidentally stab Mumbo with the pick. But it passed nearly as quickly as it started, and they continued. The lights in the house were bright enough for them to see what they were doing, but Grian thought they honestly could just as easily preen outside in the full moonlight since it was so bright. He’d installed some dark curtains just to sleep with. Maybe he should . . . look into this moon issue. He could build an observatory or something to track it.

He hummed as he worked through Mumbo’s feathers, mind wandering away from the moon and back into the present. Mumbo was talking. His feathers were still soft and newly grown, and the colors were stark and contrasting. Very pretty. Very Mumbo. He chatted about random things, like his ideas for the statue on top of his base or his theories on the earthquakes Boatem was experiencing. Grian mostly just listened.

It was nice. Grian had been taught to preen once too, but the atmosphere had been a lot different. The Watchers had left him to fend for himself in many regards, but they’d taught him how to preen and fly. But it had felt colder with them. Preening was supposed to be a social activity, but it had never felt like that with them; just necessity. Once he’d learned to do it himself, he was left to his own devices. Perhaps the saddest thing–or perhaps a blessing in disguise–was that he knew the other Watchers helped each other preen. But he’d never exactly fit into their rules let alone their social circles, so they’d left him alone.

“Do you want to try on mine?” Grian asked after they had finished Mumbo’s wings. “I can do one of my wings while you work on the ones I can’t reach on my back.”

Mumbo was quiet while he worked, likely determined to get it right. Grian could almost picture the concentrated look on his face. He sighed, trying not to lean too far back into Mumbo. It was a comforting feeling, satisfying like scratching an itch while being warm and soft at the same time.

“I’m sorry for what I said to you,” he said softly, fiddling with the feathers on his right wing and grateful Mumbo couldn’t see his face.

“That’s okay,” Mumbo said. “I shouldn’t have pushed the issue.”

“You were fine. You were reasonable.” Grian paused for a moment. “I’ve thought about the question. You can tell them about the soul thing, if you’re okay with that. You can say that’s why you have wings now–you got them from me. It’s not a lie. Anything they notice about you would be just what they could notice from me, anyway.”

“And about being a Watcher?”

“I’m not ready yet. One day.”

Mumbo hummed in acknowledgement. “That’s fine.”

One day, one day. Logically, Grian knew that nobody would have a problem with it. He knows he’s not the only person on the server with a past. Given Mumbo’s reaction, there was even a chance that some hermits didn’t know much about the Watchers to begin with. Grian should be okay with all of this. It’s been years. He’s safe now. The Watchers aren’t here and there’s no reason for them to come. He has lovely and supportive friends and security and a safe place to sleep at night.

Nobody would have a problem with it. But he might.

He should be okay. He’s not, though, and he doesn’t know why.

He thinks he was more okay before all of this happened with Mumbo–or maybe he had just pushed it aside, locked in a box he’d thrown away the key to. But keys can be molded again, and his carefully locked box was now dumped open in his head, cluttering every corner of his thoughts.

The repetitive motions of Mumbo preening his feathers was soothing to him. He had finished his back, and moved onto part of Grian’s left wing. He let the motions lull his racing heart.

“They hurt me,” he said suddenly, quietly. The motions on his wing froze, before returning in slightly more deliberate strokes. Mumbo was composing himself, then. That was fine, Grian needed a little composure himself.

“They hurt me,” he repeated again. “Kidnapped me from my home. I always wanted to go back and at least watch the server, but they wouldn’t let me. They must have thought I was too distracted about going back, because later they told me that everyone was dead. I think they hoped that if there wasn’t a chance of going back that I would move on more quickly. It definitely shut me up, but I don’t think it worked how they intended, because I just got depressed instead. They didn’t seem to really understand stuff like grief. I didn’t realize that all my old friends were alive until after I joined Hermitcraft and was able to reach out to them. Now Pearl’s on the server and I’m on MCC teams with them.”

“I’m sorry,” Mumbo whispered.

“Thanks. They’re idiots.”

“That, that does seem to be the sort of thing that would have the opposite intended effect, I would say.”

Grian giggled a little at the absurdity. “They were, like, so bad at human emotions. Like cheer up, your friends are gone so you don’t have to worry about them anymore! Or why are you crying, this is your home now! But it never was home and I never settled in. I don’t see why they thought I would–they weren’t my family, they were my captors. It didn’t matter if I looked like them now or had powers like them.” He paused for a moment, focusing on the tip of his wing and carefully going over the primaries. He continued, softly, “I didn’t like that either. They way they modified my body without permission. Stripping my humanity and giving me new wings and new powers and new sight. I guess you can actually relate to that now, though.”

“I did it to myself, though.”

“You didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to. It is a little scary,” Mumbo admitted and Grian felt like there was more to it than just those simple words. He understood. “But I know I’ve got you to help me,” Mumbo continued.

Grian smiled. “That you do indeed.”

The room felt lighter than it did a few hours ago.

Grian knocked on the door of Mumbo’s van, excitement radiating off him in waves. “Mumbo,” he said. Knocked again. “Mumbo, are you ready??” Knocked again. “Mumbooooooo.” Knocked aga- oh, the door was open now.

“Could you get any more annoying?” greeted Mumbo wearily.

“Yes.”

“Silly question, I suppose.”

“Very.” Grian grabbed Mumbo’s arm. “Come onnnn,” he said, “let’s go!”

Mumbo stumbled out of the door following him. “I’m not sure I’m ready yet . . .”

“You’ll be fine! Nothing bad will ever happen to you while you’re in my presence.”

“Last time you said that, Scar got killed.”

“Well, you’re not Scar, are you?” Grian winked.

Today was a good day. Today was FLYING day! Grian’s wings twitched in excitement. His memories of the Watchers were jumbled up in fear and pain, like a crumpled piece of paper he’d tried to lock away in a drawer that kept showing up on his desk again inexplicably. But, despite that, despite all of that, flying was a bright spot in the middle of it.

The true gift of the wings was actually freedom. Grian had been like a caged bird; one day, someone foolish left the door to his cage ajar and he’d simply flown away.

“Did you do what I told you to?” Grian asked, as they walked. He’d assigned him some exercises to do to strengthen his wings. Grian wasn’t, like, a physical therapist or anything, but it took a lot of effort to fly–more than gliding on an elytra–and he didn’t really want Mumbo to fall out of the sky on his first try. Mumbo was going to get really tired at first until he built up some tolerance to the motions, and Grian wanted to help him mitigate that.

“Yes,” Mumbo said proudly. He gave his wings an experimental flap, which nearly knocked Grian over, but Grian decided to just let that one slide. Learning curves, and all that.

They climbed Mumbo’s mountain, since Grian felt like starting from a high place was easiest. Mumbo rambled the whole time about what he was planning to add to the little village; Grian didn’t catch it all but he smiled anyway hearing his friend talk about something he was invested in. He was proud of how far he’d come in building this season.

Speaking of, Grian noticed that Mumbo had added the gradient to the trees like he had advised him too. He couldn’t help but remember the “judging” book he’d been given and Mumbo’s jumpy behavior leading up to his soul being stolen. Honestly though, Grian probably deserved all this if he got duped by that though–hiding a clause in the back of the book is literally the oldest trick in said book.

Besides, this was FLYING day!

“So what now?” Mumbo asked, peeking over the edge at the top of the mountain. There was a rather obvious answer, of course.

“You know how baby birds just sort of fall out of the nest, right?”

“I really don’t like where this is going.”

“Welcome to being a baby bird.” Grian shook out his wings from where they had been folded neatly on his back, and stretched them out a little more. “You’ll have an easier time learning to fly since you’re experienced with an elytra. You already know how to glide. Birds do that all the time, but you’ll find that you can more easily catch wind columns on the wings, and you won’t need rockets to go places. Unless you want some extra speed.”

Grian had, uh, been known to still set off rockets while flying, even though he definitely didn’t need them to fly like people who used elytra. He liked to go fast, okay? And he’s only gotten gunpowder and soot all over his wings a few times. Which was a pain to clean, but he can’t say he’s learned his lesson.

“You’re gonna have to jump,” Grian said softly. “Just flap your wings and then catch them on the wind like you’re wearing an elytra.”

“I know, I’m just–I don’t think I’m ready to do that yet, Grian, this is a very tall cliff if you haven’t noticed.” Grian bit back the urge to comment on how Mumbo had built this cliff to be exactly this tall so that was his fault. Mumbo kicked a rock that went hurtling over the edge.

“You probably just killed a fish with that rock,” Grian commented, kicking his own rock off the edge. “It’s okay, you’ve jumped off this mountain a thousand times in an elytra and it was no different. I’ll give you a countdown and we’ll jump together. There’s water down there so if you fall you won’t hurt yourself.” Or him, since they apparently shared pain now, a fact that Grian wasn’t looking forward to when it came to the myriad of ways one could die of kinetic energy from flying.

“I think I can do a countdown,” Mumbo said, lifting his head in mock confidence.

“I’ll go to three.” Mumbo nodded, and Grian began. “One, two-”

And he knew this was mean, but the urge was irresistible. Besides, if he had to wait for Mumbo to gather the nerve to jump, he’d be here all day. The man had no nerves to speak of!

Grian pushed him before making it to three.

“GRIAN!” Mumbo screeched, awkwardly stumbling off the edge. Grian, unbothered, immediately dove off after him. Mumbo fell at first, but instinct–Watcher instinct? Avian? Certainly not human–seemed to kick in after a few seconds of free fall, and he flapped his wings several times before settling into a glide. Grian figured that’s what would have happened, because with wings as big as theirs it was like falling with your own personal parachute. They were so bulky they just naturally caught the air and slowed your fall.

When he had dropped to the same height as Mumbo, Grian opened up his wings again, abruptly slowing his fall to just the right speed. He glided in next to Mumbo, who was pale faced but doing quite well.

“Grian, I hate you,” he sputtered.

“No you don’t!” he chirped.

“Check back in a few days after my heartrate has settled down,” Mumbo said. “I can’t believe you pushed me!”

“Oh, be honest, you knew I was going to do that from the moment you agreed to go flying with me.”

“ . . .Yeah, I did.”

The two of them flew over the ocean, no particular destination in mind. It was relaxing, with no real obstacles to speak of unless they ran into someone’s industrial farm. Grian lazily closed his eyes, enjoying the feeling. Gliding felt like a soft weightlessness, like being held in place by an invisible hand. He felt the wind on his face keeping his hair back out of his face, and could taste the fresh and sharp sea-salt tang. Mumbo, by contrast, was laser focused.

“Come on,” Grian said, “have some fun with me.” He let out a whoop and dove suddenly, before looping back around over Mumbo’s head in a circle.

Mumbo shook his head, laughing in disbelief.

Grian spun in place. “Do a trick!” he yelled.

Hesitantly, Mumbo began to fly up, before reaching a vertical height somewhere above Grian and tipping over backwards. “OH NO-” he yelled, suddenly finding himself right side up again but pointed in a nosedive at the ocean waves. He flung his wings out again in panic, the drag slowing him down instantly.

Grian lazily flew up next to him. “Wow, you went immediately for the backflip,” he said. “My respect for you? So high.”

Mumbo flushed. “I, well- It got away from me a little.”

“Practice makes perfect!” Grian said, zipping into a backflip of his own.

The two enjoyed the ocean breeze for a little while longer, before Grian began to guide Mumbo back toward Boatem. He took him in a circle of the Gigabase, starting up over Impulse’s factory, threading the smokestacks. He avoided the Octagon–as cool as he could admit the build was, he wasn’t totally certain a random lightning bolt wouldn’t appear to strike Mumbo out of the sky. Doc and Ren were odd ones, for sure–as if Boatem was any less odd.

Seeing Boatem clear, they decided to practice landing in the soft flat grass near their hourglasses. Maybe Mumbo wouldn’t hurt himself so much trying–something Grian had even more of a vested interest in, now being able to share his pain.

“Be gentle!” he cried, landing in front of Mumbo and holding up his arms. “Like an elytra! Just come in slowly.”

Mumbo flew down hesitantly, and Grian could immediately tell his timing was off. Luckily, Mumbo made the better of two mistakes: instead of coming in too fast and hitting the ground hard he came in too slow and just sort of fell in a decidedly not graceful fashion.

“Ouch,” he said eloquently, directed more toward the grass than at Grian.

“Let me help you up. You need to get better at your timing.”

“In my defense, you said it was just like an elytra and it is most certainly NOT like an elytra!”

“Well in my defense, elytra didn’t exist yet when I learned to fly.”

Mumbo dusted off his pants, which had grass stains on them. “This has been thrilling.”

“I hope you mean that in a positive way,” Grian said.

“It’s- it’s mostly positive, yeah. Bit terrifying, but also a bit freeing. I . . . I can see why you enjoy it so much.”

Grian smiled. “It’s a freedom like no other. Come on, let’s see if you can take off from the ground. I’ll meet you on top of your mountain again, just like where we started.”

“Only if you don’t push me off again.”

“Only if you don’t need to be pushed off again.”

It took Mumbo a few tries to get off the ground, but eventually he made it into the air. It took energy to move wings, especially from an inexperienced flier like Mumbo who was stationary on the ground. Grian knew he’d be tired a lot before he managed to build up any strength or resistance.

Mumbo’s second landing on the mountain went smoother, although Grian was afraid he’d overshoot and have to be saved from the edge of the cliff. That didn’t happen, though, with Mumbo instead landing about ankle deep in the water in front of his statue, much to his chagrin. “Nooo,” he whined, “now my socks are wet.”

“Well, you could sit here and let them dry,” Grian offered. “The sunset is pretty from here. Even with Impulse’s factory in front of it.”

“I’m more interested in the moonrise,” Mumbo said seriously. “Just look at it.”

It was rising over Pearl’s castle. No, “over” was the wrong word–it was rising around Pearl’s castle, so big that it took up the sky on either side and above the building. It made the castle look like a toy in the world’s oddest playset, and Pearl didn’t build small things.

It set Grian on edge. He puffed up his feathers.

There are some universal feelings of wrongness. The Watchers were one of them–they often fell into an uncanny valley that made people uncomfortable, and used it to their advantage. It’s hard to fit an eldritch incomprehensibleness into a human body, which is why they often weren’t found in human form. When they were, they moved a little wrong, had a few too many eyes, or looked straight through your soul. Grian was well practiced at seeming human–others never even tried at it.

There are some universal feelings of wrongness. The moon rising over Pearl’s base? Yeah, Grian could add this one to his list. Celestial bodies are revered for their predictability and constancy. But, as sure as the sun was setting, the moon that was rising was not right. And it hadn’t been for some time.

“I like the moon. Don’t you like the moon? Maybe it’s just being friendly. Big, friendly . . . menacing moon. Maybe it just wants to say hi. If we all like the moon then maybe it won’t hurt us,” Mumbo rambled. “Don’t you like the moon? I do.”

“I’d like it a lot better if it wasn’t so big,” muttered Grian.

“Well, that’s just rude. I think you need to apologize to the moon, it might have feelings.”

“It’s a moon!”

“I’ll tell Pearl you said that.”

Grian rolled his eyes playfully. “Don’t you dare.”

“Well, I love the moon,” Mumbo said. “I think it’s the less appreciated of the things in our solar system. Maybe this is its way of getting noticed. I think we’ve all been there–wanting to be noticed, I mean.”

“You flew well today,” Grian said, changing the subject. “You should try to practice it every day. Especially landings and takeoffs. Then later I could show you how to change your wing shape or do more complicated things.”

Mumbo nodded. “I’d like that.”

The moon lit up the dark ocean below, glittering and breaking with the waves. Grian looked away, feeling odd.

Chapter Text

The morning was sunny, as it nearly always was on Hermitcraft. Grian felt like it was a bit too bright. A little too cheery. But life was rarely a movie, and thus the weather did not always decide to match his emotions.

The paper folded in his pocket was barely noticeable, and yet it seemed to burn. He took it out and unfolded it. He’d taken some more measurements last night, in the observatory he’d built to study the moon. Its cyan copper roof gleamed in the sun, pretty and perfectly placed on the mountaintop.

The numbers on the paper were written with the sort of careful definition and finality of stroke one gives to important documents, but Grian could see the slight tremor on the letters that betrayed his anxiety. His pen had shaken as he’d written it. His hand shook a little now.

So. The moon was getting bigger. He’d known that for a while, just from observation, but now he had data to back it up. It was measurable. Measurement was a double edged sword–it was incontestable proof of what was happening, the type of thing one probably felt safer being in ignorance of, but it was also a chance to do something about it.

Grian just didn’t know what.

What can you do against a moon? An entire planetary satellite that’s misbehaving? It just seemed altogether so big. Big like he couldn’t wrap his mind around it, big like an object hung in his periphery that he was slowly turning his head to finally properly see. Oh.

He needed to do more research.

Grian rubbed the edge of his sweater, caught in the memory of another time his world had ended. He still remembers when the Watchers took him. Some people forget their trauma, their brain attempting to block it out to protect them. Grian remembered, though. There were some parts of being with the Watchers that were a blur, but never that day. He doesn’t know if he’s traumatized though, or just angry, because to this day he still feels the burning hot anger and smugness and contempt he felt toward them back on Evo, and his desire to defy the Watchers at every turn, even during his own kidnapping. And he still feels the dizzying drop of the moment he realized that no amount of snarky words or rule-breaking were going to let him leave the End and rejoin his friends.

He remembers the second time his world ended, too, on the day he was told that his friends were dead and he was never ever going back to Evo. That didn’t feel scorching. It just felt like cold and numb and breaking, but not shattered–breaking like a cracked glass that was marred but still useable. Quieter and unassuming, pretty much exactly what they wanted that Grian had never been.

Despite the pranks and spats and rivalries, the Evolutionists were all united by more than just friendship: they were united by the shared experience of living under the Watchers’ gaze. And maybe it was never normal, but they all came to expect things from living from under the Watchers. What consequences would happen if they took a certain action, or what they could get away with, or what was a genuine gift or what was a test of greed or what just simply a portal clue. Grian didn’t know if there were any signs leading up to him being taken. He’d never paid attention.

Was he not paying attention to the signs now? The moon was getting bigger. The earthquakes were getting longer and more frequent. Doc had reported seeing blocks float, though Grian himself hadn’t seen that yet. It was becoming exceedingly obvious, of the slap-in-your-face variety. How much time had they wasted not bothering to look up at the moon and keep track of this all?

He thought of his measurements again. Data was important. Data would give them knowledge, and with knowledge they could all bring the server back to normal. Or, maybe if they all died from this, someone in the future would at least find his papers and piece together the story here.

He didn’t want to die, though.

He didn’t want his friends to all die again, either.

He couldn’t have his world end a third time.

There was a new building in Boatem, a ring of crying statues with a large moon hung in the center next to Harmless Harvests. In the ring was a lectern and a book of “Mooner” ancient texts, which told of how the moon was angry at the hermits sleeping the night away, and suggested the hermits give up sleep to please the moon.

It sounded a bit like a cult, honestly. Which, given how long the hermits had inhabited this world, Grian supposed it was about that time in the season for someone to make a cult. And now Mumbo had, apparently. Mumbo’s name wasn’t on the build, but it was all over the concept and style. Grian’s anxiety clearly wasn’t alone.

He didn’t quite agree that the moon was angry, though. It’s a moon. But the idea of not sleeping was promising. He needed to be able to track the moon as it rose to full height, in order to keep studying it. Observatories weren’t built for daylight use, afterall. It was just making himself useful. Someone had to act as scientist for Boatem, why not him? This time, he’d be paying attention. Maybe he could get Scar to join as well. That’d be funny.

And when Grian destroyed his bed in front of the crying stone statue, he added a little TNT for flair.

He needed to do more research.

Grian’s boots were heavy. Well, they were always a bit heavy–sturdy shoes made for walking and climbing and working like the life of a builder demanded. But they seemed heavier now. For some reason. The other end of his alley was too far away.

He’d fly over there instead, but that seemed hard too. His wings dropped, dragging in the dust behind him. They were heavy too. He pulled them off the ground, and wrapped them around to inspect his wingtips. They weren’t meant to be on the ground, but it had been happening a lot lately. He frowned at the dirt on them, and the feathers looked scraggly. He’d have to preen them later to get them all properly sorted out. But that took a lot of effort too, that he didn’t want to give.

Well. He’d do it later, when he did have more energy.

Grian yawned. He’d been doing that quite a lot recently too, hadn’t he?

He blinked, slower than intended. Or maybe it was a mini nap of just a few seconds–he’d gotten really good at those. They didn’t count, by the way. As sleeping.

He blinked, and for a second the world was thrown into a kaleidoscope, a phenomena he regarded with subdued interest. His vision, shattered and crumbled like a tempered glass window.

He blinked again, and it went back to normal. He shook his head. No weirder than anything else that was happening right now, then. There were reports of blocks flying now, and Grian hadn’t been sure he’d believed them. For starters, it was Doc who first reported it, so Grian thought he had been teasing or had broken the server again. And when Grian finally saw it himself, he’d brushed it off as an effect of not sleeping. Strange things happened when you did that, like kaleidoscope vision or laughing phantoms.

But now . . . it seemed like something he’d better write down just in case. His pen wasn’t in his pocket though, and he didn’t know where in his chest monster it was hiding. The thought of looking made his wings droop again, and he left them there because it took less effort.

I’ll just remember it instead.

Grian stared at his alley, trying to remember what he needed to do. Right, blocks. He needed blocks. How many? Maybe a few stacks of crimson planks for one of the houses down the alley that was meant to be brighter in color. But he only had logs. How many stacks of planks could he get from a stack of logs? It was . . . four, right? And if he needed ten stacks of planks then that would be. . .

God, this was so much more confusing than it normally was. He gave up and just randomly chose an amount of logs. It wasn’t that important if he had excess or not.

The most annoying thing about trying to build wasn’t actually his exhaustion, or even the mental fog. It was the random floating that was happening to him now. At first, he’d thought it was simply his imagination. Or maybe a hallucination brought on by the lack of sleep. But after he’d started suffering fall damage a few times, he’d been forced to concede that it was probably not just all in his head. He waited for gravity to drop him again.

Grian picked up his shulker box and began the long trek back from one side of the alley to another, nearly tripping on the different levels of the floor. That had been meant to add a sort of worn-down ambience to the area, but it had lately just been causing him issues.

He wondered what Mumbo was up to, and in a blink his vision shattered again. Mumbo was in his shop restocking. He looked a little rough, but Grian knew he probably did too, so who was he to judge. He didn’t remember the last time he had showered. That seemed to take too much effort too.

Satisfied with knowing what Mumbo was up to, Grian turned back to begin the arduous task of block placing, but he froze when he saw his hand.

“That’s not my hand,” he said out loud, but when he tried to move the hand it obeyed, so maybe it was his hand. It didn’t look like a human hand anymore though–the skin glowed a soft purple and his fingertips had lengthened into black claws, the black staining up to his wrists. There was an eye on the back of his hand. He blinked. It blinked back.

It took a few moments for his sluggish mind to process that, before a wave of fear crashed over him. “Oh no no no no no,” he repeated. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

His back felt prickly, like he was being watched, and Grian shuddered as it dredged up a visceral feeling of all the other times he’d been watched. He hated it. He needed it to stop.

He pulled back his sleeve. An eye blinked back at him, and he pulled it down again. There were eyes on his wings too–something much more unsettling than the eyespots of a moth. They were scattered throughout, seemingly working independently–blinking at different times and giving his whole appearance an unnerving element of movement even as he stood still.

The kaleidoscope vision from earlier suddenly made sense, and Grian felt silly for not noticing it then, but . . . he just couldn’t seem to think. There was nothing in his brain, just panic and fuzziness and fog. He stared dumbly at his hand, and began trying to grasp control back over his powers. Humanity was like a cloak he’d slipped over his shoulders and pinned in the front, always showing others and keeping what was underneath hidden away. It was like a signature piece of clothing, and nobody would see him without it. Not even himself.

So what if it was a facade? It was him. He scrambled to claw it back, but it just . . . fell short. He couldn’t reach. He couldn’t do it. He was too tired.

“I’m not supposed to look like this anymore,” he said, voice breaking. “I’m supposed to look like me. I’m supposed to look human.”

He knew the picture wasn’t complete. He was still wearing his red sweater, not his Watcher robes. He had normal glasses on his face for his normal eyes. He almost hated that more: stuck in limbo–unable to be human anymore, and just playing dress-up as one.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the window of the alley shop across the street, all purple glow and wrong angles and eyes all over the place. His wings weren’t the blue and yellow and red that he chose anymore, he noticed, but a light purple. The primaries glowed white. They blinked, and wings weren’t supposed to have eyes. There was a halo of two rings on his head, off camber to each other but crossing at two points. He didn't feel holy. He just felt dirty.

He looked away, and then crouched down, burying his head in his knees and squeezing his eyes shut. He could still see, though–of course he could. There was a lump in his throat, and when it finally broke he drew in a deep, shuddering sob.

It just wasn’t fair. He didn’t want to be like this. He didn’t ask to be like this. Mumbo didn’t ask to be like this, to be catapulted into this nightmare form. But he couldn’t go back, because his former self was killed the day he was taken. Only this version of him remained, and he hated it. He hated that the version of him that his friends saw was never actually the real version, and he hated that he couldn’t even look at himself. He didn’t want to look at himself. But curled on the ground, head down between his knees, he could still see his own reflection in the window, along with the entrance to his alleyway, and his train, and the Pass’n’Gas down the road, and the lava bubbling in Cub’s rivers, and Jellie curled up on Scar’s bed, and the Spawn Egg, and False’s eagle, and the way the sail on Pearl’s starter home whipped around in the wind.

Grian sat like that a long time, crying until his body was too tired to do that too, and then sitting for a time beyond that. His eyelids were so heavy, but he couldn’t sleep now even if he’d wanted to, or been willing too. There wasn’t anyone around to come find him, but Grian didn’t know that he even wanted that if they had to see his Watcher form.

He still felt watched, ironically. He uncurled himself, slowly kneeling again in the dirt, ready to move if he needed to–if he had the energy to make it, but the edging uneasiness in the back of his mind was giving him a trickle of adrenaline.

Why did he feel watched? When he is the Watcher?

He took a deep breath, feeling a little calmer–not calm, that was the wrong word. Emotionally spent and numb, but with his head a little clearer than before. Like he’d burned through most of his emotions and could finally see around them a bit. He shuffled through his mind, leaning into the watcher powers for a moment. Spying, checking every perspective, looking for some kind of source. It was like a scent of magic and not being alone.

His chest tightened at that.

Grian once learned that dragonflies have the largest compound eyes of any insect, with up to 30,000 tiny facets. The multitude of lenses gives them exceptional color vision, better than any human. It’s said that 80% of their brains are dedicated to sight. Their compound eyes also give them a 360 degree field of vision.

In other words, they can see in all directions at once.

It’s not the same as having 30,000 eyes, though. Or having as many as you need. Or being able to see across incredible distances at any time and look at more than one thing at once. But Grian always found a strange kinship in them and their kaleidoscope faceted eyes.

He felt like one now, poised and ready to flee in swift take off, and viewing the world from all directions at once.

He skimmed through the server before landing on the source, like another frequency interfering with his own. And it was coming from remarkably close by: Mumbo’s.

Oh. Mumbo.

OH.

Grian put a hand up to his mouth, jerking it away upon feeling one of the claws trail his skin. If he’s feeling . . . like this, then was Mumbo too? Did Mumbo know how to even deal with it? Not that Grian could hardly be qualified as “dealing with it” right now, but he could at least process the amount of visual input that was coming in. He’d had practice, unfortunately enough.

Mumbo had not.

Chapter Text

“I have to go see if Mumbo’s okay,” he whispered.

The silver lining of wanting so badly to keep your Watcher form hidden, is that while you’re in your Watcher form you’re really good at deducing where other people are at all times. And, lucky for Grian, he could see that there was nobody out in the Boatem common area right now. He wouldn’t be seen. He would go even if he was seen though, because it was Mumbo who needed help and Grian couldn’t leave him.

He found Mumbo in the corner of his shop that he’d been restocking earlier. He was curled into one of the corners about as tightly as he could be, wedged by a chest, with his hands over his eyes. He was shaking, but otherwise still.

And, well . . . Mumbo looked a little like he did right now. Wing tips glowing. Eyes on his hands and black claws. The double halo. Grian’s breath caught in his throat, but he took a step forward anyway, and knelt in front of him. This wasn’t one of them, this was his friend and his friend needed his help.

“Grian,” Mumbo said, softly.

“Yeah, it’s me. Are you okay?” And he winced at the question, so obvious and hollow.

“My head–it feels like it’s splitting. It hurts. I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

He rested his hands on Mumbo’s shoulders. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Mumbo said again. He started to hyperventilate. “There’s too much, there’s too much, there’s too much, there’s too much . . .”

“Hey!” Grian said quickly. “Can you focus on just me?”

“I can’t see you, there’s too much-”

Grian reached out and gently pulled Mumbo’s hands from his eyes–his real eyes. They looked at him, but they glowed, and he knew there wasn’t any focus to them. “What about now? Am I here now?”

“You’re there but it’s–blurry,” he gasped. “Oh, now you’re not there again and . . . there’s too much, there’s just too much, I can’t focus, I can't see you, I see . . .”

Grian’s head spun, and he was beginning to feel a bit light-headed himself. His heart was racing, and he took a deep breath to try and steady himself, but it didn’t seem to help. He had to calm Mumbo down, because it was transferring to him too. He . . . didn’t think about what it must have been like earlier.

“Can you speak?” he asked. “Take your time. Breathe in between the words. What can you see?”

Tears dripped down Mumbo’s face. “Everything.”

“Can you pick out one thing, and look at just that one thing? Can you see me again?”

But Mumbo didn’t speak, he just shook harder.

Grian couldn’t breathe either. He felt dizzy all at once, suddenly grateful to be holding onto Mumbo’s shoulders even though Mumbo wasn’t much of an anchor at all. His breathing picked up pace, and he struggled to think.

Come on, come on. How can he help Mumbo? How can he fix it if he couldn’t fix himself, couldn’t use his own powers, couldn’t do anything correctly? He could at least control his own sight–he had practice–but how could he guide Mumbo through that when he couldn’t even breathe?

Mumbo’s eyes were shut again, and he’d shrunk back further into his corner away from Grian. He tried to not take it personally but he faltered. He just wasn’t helping him.

He should call Pearl. She always knew what to do. He could see she was in her base.

He dialed her on his communicator by memory, and she picked up on the second ring. “Hi!” she said brightly. “What’cha need?”

“Mumbo and I need help,” he said softly, hating how weak his voice sounded.

She was instantly serious. “Where are you?”

“Harmless Harvests.”

“I’ll be there.”

She must have left from her base immediately, because she appeared just a minute later. “Grian?” she called as she walked in the store. “What’s wrong?” She turned the bend and saw two of them, and her face went pale. She knew about Grian, because she’d been there and she’d seen it happen and he’d leaned on her once they finally reunited but–she didn’t know about Mumbo. And she’d never seen Grian’s Watcher form, just his parrot-winged facade he’d used the past few years. “Oh,” she said, but the word carried more meaning than that.

He glanced away at the ground, but it was a sort of futile gesture since at least a few of the eyes were still making eye contact with her. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said, and it was genuine. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not like them.”

“I know you’re not.” She knelt in front of them. “Please, what happened?”

Grian screwed his eyes shut again. “It’s a long story,” he forced out. “I can’t get Mumbo to calm down. Because I’m . . . sort of freaking out myself, actually, but I think I’ll be okay if we can get him okay.”

Pearl rubbed Mumbo’s shoulder. “I think he’s having a panic attack,” she said.

“Yeah I can–I can feel that.”

“Pearl,” Mumbo whispered, the first sign he’d even noticed her arrival. “I think I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying,” Pearl said. “You just have to breathe.”

“I can’t.”

“Just try. Even a little more than what you’re currently doing will help.”

For the second time that day, Grian just sat with his head on his knees, and let Pearl talk to Mumbo instead and guide him through breathing deeper. He tried to clear his mind and focus on more grounding things, but it was so difficult when your mind was so untethered from you. Hermitcraft was a lively server. There was something always going on. And, when you could see all of it at one point at one time, it was . . . a lot.

There were blocks being placed, trees swaying in the wind, redstone machines working, hermits shopping, hermits talking, horses running around, birds fluttering in the trees, hermits mining, a storm on the other side of the island forming, fish swimming in the ocean, flowers blooming, flags flying, TNT detonating, bees making honey, crops being harvested–a million mundane things all at once, never ending, fracturing your mind to focus on it all. It was loud.

Zedaph had told them that their thoughts weren’t connected, but Grian tried to do what little he could to project out–it was going to be okay. It was going to be manageable. Maybe Mumbo’d pick up on that and stop shaking, or maybe Grian was just taking the first step to sorting out his own head first.

After a time, he felt Mumbo’s breathing even out next to him. He wasn’t . . . calm by any means, but he seemed to just be exhausted now.

“I’m going to take you to my base,” Pearl said.

Pearl’s base was warm and cozy, but crisp in the way new houses normally were–seats lovingly chosen but never sat in before. She’d only just finished the interior decorating, and the air smelled vaguely of paint. They dropped Mumbo at one of the couches, and he sat down automatically, and didn’t move again. He looked . . . sort of shell shocked. For once, Grian actually did want to know what was happening in his head.

“Are you okay?” Grian asked him.

“I can’t see you,” Mumbo said, and Grian knew what he actually meant: he had so many images in his head he couldn’t know which was the right one that Grian was in. Like a house of mirrors, or a bunch of portals to another world. He could see Grian, but only if he could figure out which part of reality Grian was in to look at him.

“That’s okay-”

Mumbo grabbed Grian’s arm. “My head hurts, there’s just so many . . . can you make it stop? Please? Can you stop it?”

Grian blinked back a few tears. “I can’t–I’m too tired to fix it.”

“I can’t think,” Mumbo whimpered. “I can’t see, I can’t make it go away.”

Pearl looked at them both. “I think you both just need to sleep,” she said.

“But I’m a Mooner-” Grian said.

“And you’re too tired to control your powers,” Pearl said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Mumbo, but I can feel the exhaustion radiating from him. Either his body is going to tire itself out on his own, or I can save him some trouble and let him sleep.”

Mumbo looked at her, or maybe a bit past her. “Can you make it stop?”

Pearl smiled softly. “Yes, don’t worry.” She placed her hand on his forehead, and Grian watched as Mumbo’s body slowly went slack. Pearl positioned him into a more comfortable position on the couch.

Grian had . . . admittedly forgotten Pearl could do that. Put people to sleep like that. She was sort of a minor representative of the moon–or was it the nighttime?–and that apparently came with the ability to help people sleep. Actually, if he recalled, he seemed to remember her using that power for evil a couple times on Evo by making sure the person she planned on pranking didn’t wake up to catch her in the act.

Pearl fixed him with a look that was sterner than anything she’d given to Mumbo. “Now will you sleep on your own, or do we have to do this the hard way?”

Grian knew from experience that an argument with Pearl was not likely to be won, especially since she could talk circles around his sluggish brain right now. He wasn’t happy about it, though–a promise to join the Mooners was almost a promise to Mumbo, but then again Mumbo had broken that oath too by now. “Fine. I’ll sleep.”

Pearl smiled. “I’ll be here.”

Grian woke up slowly, feeling disoriented and like his throat had been stuffed with cotton. He didn’t feel refreshed so much as he felt like he’d been dragged from the depths of the ground and spat out onto the surface. He rubbed his eyes, and froze–he didn’t have claws anymore!

He examined his hand, and it looked normal. The eyes were gone. Grian sat up quickly, and caught his reflection from across the room. No eyes. No glowing. No halo. Parrot wings.

He looked like himself again. A deep sense of relief washed over him, but his chest was still hollow for some reason. It was a reminder that while his reflection might look right again, it was all just a mask anyway. The feeling was still raw, and Grian tried to shove it down like he always did, but it stubbornly remained.

Mumbo was asleep on the other couch to the side of Grian, but he looked . . . a little less like himself. He wasn’t quite so Watcher-y today, but instead of any total reversal he was just odd bits and pieces. An eye here and there, or a couple glowing feathers scattered in his wings. He didn’t revert back like Grian had overnight. His facade was still damaged.

He didn’t have time to contemplate because Pearl walked in. “Oh, you’re awake. I didn’t think you nuggets would ever wake up.”

Grian’s throat still felt dry. “How long were we out?” he said.

“About 18 hours. It’s the next day now. I didn’t think you’d even be able to sleep that long.” She looked him up and down. “I’ll put on some tea, okay?”

She came back, handed him a mug, and he took a sip, letting the warmth fill him up. She’d remembered how he liked it. He was grateful for the drink.

She settled into a chair opposite of him, and he watched her open her mouth, think better of it and close it, before opening it again. “May I . . . may I ask what happened?”

“Yeah. Of course you can.” He sighed. “It’s a long story.”

“I have plenty of time,” she said, “and plenty of tea.”

So he did. He let it all tumble out: about Mumbo stealing Grian’s soul, about their apparent soul connectivity, about Mumbo becoming a Watcher and Grian trying to teach Mumbo to use his powers. “I, um, hadn’t gotten to the actual Watching part yet. And Mumbo freaked out, because I was the one who was supposed to teach him about that, and I couldn’t even help him.”

“He’s okay now,” Pearl said gently.

“No he isn’t! He may be asleep, but look at him. He’s still not normal.”

“But you’re back to looking-” she broke off her sentence, gesturing vaguely at Grian.

“I lost control,” he said miserably. “I-I normally look a certain way, like this. But I just couldn’t yesterday. I guess I really did need some rest to fix it. Yesterday I couldn’t get it back and I was stuck like that, and now Mumbo still isn’t in control and it’s too much for him to comprehend, because he has not had the practice I’ve had! And it’s my fault he’s had no practice, because that was my one job and I failed it.”

He wasn’t ever able to be a Watcher right. He couldn’t be a human right anymore, either. He couldn’t even be a teacher right. And he couldn’t even be a friend right.

He took another sip of his drink, but the steam caused his glasses to fog up, and he couldn’t see because of it, and God, that really was going to be his last straw before he snapped wasn’t it-

He fumbled with his glasses, before finally just taking them off and roughly setting them on the table so he could drink in peace. His eyes teared up and he angrily blinked them away in embarrassment. Pearl just looked at him sympathetically.

“You weren’t ever supposed to see me like that,” Grian said finally.

“Pulling your glasses off because you got frustrated with them fogging them up?” Pearl asked lightheartedly and Grian flushed.

“No, the–you know what I mean,” he said with exasperation. The eyes. The wings. The glowing. The halo. The whole Watcher thing. The panic.

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“It does to me,” Grian muttered.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their respective mugs. Finally Pearl spoke: “It sounds to me like if you and Mumbo’s feelings are connected, that both of you not sleeping just compounded your exhaustion worse than before. You weren’t just feeling the tiredness of one person not sleeping, but two. Same with Mumbo freaking out with his powers–if he was never in control due to not knowing how to control it, how could you have ever fixed it on your own? It wasn’t just you who lost control, it was him too, and between the two of you it was hard to get it back.”

It made a stupid amount of sense.

“I hate it when you make sense,” he said.

“You’ll start making sense again now that you’ve actually slept.”

“Did you sleep too?” Grian asked.

“Of course not,” Pearl said, sipping her tea. “I’m actually a good Mooner.”

Grian sputtered. “I can’t believe you would say- wait, how are you not tired?” he asked.

“Me?” Pearl said. “Oh, I don’t need to sleep.”

“What.”

“I just sleep because I saw all of you do it back on Evo and it seemed like a fun human thing to do. So this is just a really fun sleepover for me, with my moon-cousin.”

Grian just stared at her and shook his head in disbelief. Learn something new everyday? He’d known her for literal years.

“Speaking of my moon cousin,” Pearl said, and slipped a piece of paper across the coffee table to him. “I took some measurements at the observatory for you last night, since I know how important that research was to you.”

And Grian didn’t know how to respond to that. Such a simple gesture of caring. She’d noticed why he’d joined the Mooners in the first place. She’d come to his call for help, and opened her home to him and Mumbo. She’d gone and made his measurements for him while he was asleep so that he didn’t miss anything. He felt his eyes begin to tear up again, but he failed to brush them away before they began to spill over.

Hermitcraft was about community.

Pearl stood up and gave him a hug. “I’m sorry,” Grian said into her shoulder, “My head’s all a mess and I’m-”

“It’s okay.”

“You didn’t have to do that for me.”

“I wanted to. You would do it for me. You have done it for me.”

He pulled away after a long moment and looked at the paper. The numbers blurred under his eyes, but he could see one thing: they weren’t good. “It’s getting bigger.” As if it hadn’t been for the past few weeks. “It’s getting bigger faster.”

“Yeah,” Pearl said, “it is.”

Grian thought. “Do you–with the moon being your cousin and all–know what’s happening?”

Pearl looked down, and fiddled with the edge of her hoodie. “The moon may be my cousin, but I’m not its keeper. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“I don’t like this,” Grian said, and the words felt like such an understatement.

“I don’t either. Look at me G,” Pearl said, and Grian obeyed. Her eyes were nearly glowing. They changed with the phase of the moon and, well, the moon was always full these days. “We’ll get through this. Like we always have.”

He felt a smile tug at the edge of his lips. “Yeah. Like we always have.”

Grian was still sitting on the couch when Mumbo woke up. He woke up slowly too, and generally looked the opposite of the put-togetherness Mumbo normally had: suit rumpled, hair sticking out, tie mostly untied. There was still an eye on the back of his hand, as well as another one under his right eye, but that was all Grian could see.

“How do you feel?” he asked, and Mumbo startled a little bit hearing his voice.

“Like I’ve got a migraine.” Mumbo winced.

“Looks like we’re both out of the Mooners, huh?” Grian said.

“Ugh, don’t bring it up.”

Grian handed him a mug of tea that Pearl had made for him a little earlier. “Here. It’s just warm, not really hot anymore, but this might help some.” Mumbo took it gratefully and Grian just let him drink it in silence for a bit until the cogs in his mind started turning again.

“Grian,” Mumbo said after a while.

“Yes?”

“What happened? I seem to remember you were all-” and he looked down at his hand, suddenly noticing the eye, “-oh God! What is that?”

“Don’t panic!” Grian cried. “You’re fine. It’s just a little . . . leftover.”

Mumbo’s eyes were wide and horrified. “Well, I guess I won’t panic, just because you said so, but I want you to know that I’m really close to panickin’ dude. Like really close.There is an EYE on my hand, I have an awful headache, my mouth feels like I’ve eaten sand, and the last several hours were literally a blur. I’d appreciate just a smidge of context, okay?”

Grian took a deep breath. It’s okay, he could do this. “Do you remember our first lesson?” he asked softly. “Where I taught you the shapeshifting? And I said that you could affect aspects of how you looked, such as wings?”

“Yes?” Mumbo said slowly.

“I’ve been using it to look like the way I am now. Um, taking away all the overt Watcher characteristics other than the wings, which I just keep. If I don’t do it then I look like–well, you probably remember at least a little of it.” He refused to meet Mumbo’s eyes. “I’ve been doing it so long I honestly forgot I was still doing it. It doesn’t take much energy for me anymore. It’s like a baseline effort. But I got too tired to do it anymore and . . . it just slipped I guess.”

Mumbo contemplated that. “Not really the strangest thing you’ve ever told me, buddy. But why am I like this? I was never consciously shapeshifting to look like myself. I just thought the wings were the only way it changed my appearance.”

Ah. Time for Grian’s new realization.

“I think,” Grian said, “that I was holding onto the mask so tightly that I was holding it up for you too. And I think that worked because I think we’re not only sharing the same soul, but the same set of powers. So when I lost control, so did you. Or vice-versa.”

Mumbo set his mug down on the table with a clink. “Oh. So if that’s true, then why am I, uh, still not back to ‘normal’?”

“I don’t know if I can consciously affect yours, since I’ve only unconsciously been doing it since the moment you stole my soul. But I taught you what you need to do already, so you should be able to do it yourself.” Make his own facade.

Mumbo screwed his eyes shut and concentrated, but nothing happened. “I’ll- I’ll work on it later,” he said quickly. “But, uh, what’s with my head? Does it always feel like someone shattered your mind like a piece of glass? I don’t understand what I was seeing.”

Grian smiled sardonically. “That’s the Watching power. Because Watchers, you know, can Watch. We can see everything at once in every direction across the server. That’s why it was hurting your head so much–you had no practice in being able to process that much information at once. There was just too much for you to see, and no way of comprehending it.”

“Oh.”

“I, ah, have more experience at it. I’ll teach you how. It’s not as bad if you’re expecting it, but you weren’t, so it was sort of a lot all at once.”

Mumbo chuckled, but it sounded dark. “Well, I guess I’ll have that to look forward to, huh? This is really a mess I’ve gotten us into.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what it’s worth, I am too. But I guess it’s alright that it was you.”

“Even after–everything?”

“Yeah,” said Mumbo, and Grian’s chest felt warm.

After a moment, he started speaking again. “When I met Pearl,” Grian said softly, "she was non-human. I mean, I'm sure she always was, ever since she was created or born or whatever. She's got connections to the moon. You can see it in her eyes or those starry freckles on her cheeks that are sometimes visible during the new moon."

"I noticed those," Mumbo said. "They're beautiful."

"She is," Grian agreed. "Anyway, I was human when I met her, but she took a liking to me. We had a similar sort of mischievous streak, I suppose, and immediately hit it off. We became close–really close, she's like a sister to me. She met my human friends. I invited her to Evo. She built beautiful things and settled into the life of the server. She'd joke sometimes that I was teaching her to be human."

"That's sweet," whispered Mumbo.

"But . . . then Evo went bad. I got taken. And the next time I ever saw Pearl, we weren't such a mismatched pair, because this time I wasn't human anymore either. It's not the sort of equal footing you ever expect to find. So she sort of returned my gesture–while I helped her learn how to be human, she helped me learn how to not be human."

Grian, who had previously been looking somewhere past Mumbo's shoulder, suddenly fixed him with an intense gaze. "And I guess now it's my turn to pass it on again and teach you how to not be human. But I’m doing an awful job of it, and I apologize. None of this should have ever happened, and that was all my fault."

“Don’t say that,” Mumbo said. “You’re the only teacher I’ve got, and for what it’s worth it sounds like you’re doing better than your teachers did.”

Grian’s breath caught in his throat, and it pinched in his chest. “I guess–I guess so.”

“I don’t know how to do it, but I don’t think you do either, so that’s okay.”

Mumbo looked . . .well, somewhat unreadable, but Grian could guess the kinds of mixed emotions swirling in his mind. Or maybe he could just feel it–he’d have to get used to that. Their circumstances were extenuating. Nobody's supposed to just up and lose their humanity in a day or two, it's not supposed to work that way. But it did, and it did twice, and here they are.

"It feels so strange," Mumbo finally said. "I want to say I still feel like myself. Which I do! I'm still me, definitely so. But it's different. It's like living in a different body. One that isn't mine anymore, or more like a new body that's supposedly mine but someone randomly just tossed me the keys to a new house that I've never stepped foot into before. But my name is on the deed and I paid for it and it's definitely mine, but also how did I get here and why?

“I have wings now, and it's nothing like strapping on an elytra. They need care, preening, they get in the way when I sleep and my house is a wreck since I keep knocking over things. And just when I get halfway used to that, now some of the feathers glow too. I'm unbalanced. It's like my entire perspective was shifted an inch to the left and then shattered with a baseball bat. There’s an eye on the back of my hand and yesterday I had a halo. That’s not me but it is, isn’t it?"

Mumbo stopped to take a breath. He'd picked up the pace as he talked, beginning to ramble with intensity that didn't leave room for deep breath. He whispered, “I still don’t know who I am.”

"It doesn't feel like you're you anymore," Grian said softly. "You are though. One day you'll wake up and it'll feel like home again. And maybe you feel the loss of your old home, but you can learn to live in the new one."

He just hoped it didn’t sound hollow when he said it. He hoped he didn’t sound like he was lying. It was true, it was just–Grian wanted to be able to believe it someday, too.

He’d been able to find that–waking up and feeling like himself–during his time on Hermitcraft, but as carefully as he had built it up it’d just gotten knocked down again. Was it ever true if he was only ever wearing a facade? Had he ever actually gotten better if he just buried it all away?

"The weirdest thing," Mumbo continued on, "is the power. The magic. It's thrumming all around me–and you, too. Funny how I never noticed that about you and now I do. I guess I couldn't. I was just tuned onto the wrong frequency and now the dial has been turned. And I don't know how to use the power very well, but it's there and it's a presence all of its own that's inexplicable. I still feel like old silly bumbling Mumbo, but with a potential for power I don't understand. And now I know that I really don’t understand it, but somehow I’ve got to learn how to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. It's scary."

"That's why it's so important I teach you," Grian said. “Because I can’t let this happen again. If you can’t control it, then it puts both of us in danger as well as others. But above all I don’t want you to get hurt by it like you just were.”

"I need that,” Mumbo said, before musing: “I didn't know how weak I used to be as a human."

"Humans aren't weak," Grian said sharply. "They're strong. Look at their persistence, defiance, resilience. A human's not such a weak thing when even Watchers are concerned with them." Why would they work so hard to keep players in line otherwise? If they weren’t threatened by their disobedience somehow?

"I think we're human," Mumbo said suddenly. "Despite it all, we're humans. I know it’s important to you. You told me on the very first night I came to your house, that before you explained anything to me that I should know you used to be human. And I’ve always remembered that. Because I was the same. I only ate your soul because I wanted to be human again so desperately, and that clearly didn’t work out, but what you said stuck in my mind because I got it.”

Mumbo met Grian’s gaze. “I don't think it's like a badge you can lose or some pedigree papers. Maybe we're not biologically humans anymore, but what else are we? Are we Watchers if we reject everything about them? If you could teach Pearl how to be human, then maybe being human isn't defined by any quantitative standard. Maybe it's just a way of living. I think we're human."

Grian let the thought settle into his brain and seep into all the cracks. The idea of it just not even mattering what he looked like, or what powers he had, or what he’d done in the past was unfathomable. Like he’d been chasing something this whole time that was right under his nose.

"The Watchers always told me I was too human,” Grian said after a moment. “It's why I could never do things right for them. I couldn't look at players without seeing a mirror and I couldn't learn how to accept my supposed superiority to them. The shoe never fit. But now that I’m here, it feels like I’m too much of a Watcher."

"I think you're human," Mumbo said. "You don't have to be Them anymore, if you don't want to. They're not here right now, but we are."

"I want to be human again," whispered Grian. "It's been too long."

Chapter Text

The next days passed in a blur, mostly filled with practicing Mumbo’s powers. The Incident, as he’d begun to describe it in his head, had pretty much smacked him in the face with how important it was for Mumbo to know what he was dealing with, and to more importantly get good at it. It was his stupid feelings that got them in that mess, his stupid brain that didn’t want to speak about this or show what he actually looked like or even look at his own reflection,and it was going to end up hurting Mumbo or the other hermits again. He didn’t know what he’d do if he hurt Mumbo again.

“I really must ask,” Mumbo had said to him later, pacing around and wringing his hands in that nervous-but-trying-to-be-polite way he did before he made a request to someone, “but can you please be a little more direct in what powers you–er, I–have? But only if you want to! You don’t have to tell me, I know it’s a lot for you, it’s just I’d really like to know, because the other day was quite startling, and-”

Grian raised his hand and cut Mumbo off. “No, you need to know. I’m sorry. I was being stupid about this.”

“It’s not stupid if you have a reason for it,” Mumbo said softly.

“If that were true then nothing we ever do on this server would be stupid, and I definitely have seen some very stupid things on Hermitcraft. Participated in several of them, in fact.”

“Are you calling your pranks stupid?”

“Taking several hours to build an enormous boat above the Big Eyes’ shops was definitely a stupid idea. I even had to help Tango take it down.”

“It was funny though. That’s a good reason.”

Grian grinned. “Sure was. Stupid ideas aren’t always bad ideas.”

Mumbo clapped. “There! So you admit that being stupid isn’t a bad thing.”

Grian stopped. The wheels in his brain turned slowly. “Did you just . . .” He squinted. “Are you trying to trap me in my own logic? While I was apologizing to YOU?”

Mumbo looked quite proud of himself. Grian wasn’t even sure his point made sense.

“It is stupid, though,” Grian said. “I told myself at the start of all this that I would be more open with you, and I’ve failed at every turn. You deserve better.”

“You deserve to not be scared,” Mumbo said. “I don’t know how to do that.”

“It’s not you.”

“I don’t know how to help,” Mumbo said. “But I need answers if I’m going to, and I need to know if I’m going to have these powers too, and I need to know if we have our souls connected.”

Grian took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll tell you everything.”

So he did. He told him about shapeshifting, how only the most powerful Watchers could fully change their form, but that most had a low level use of it. It could be used for glamor and disguise–like Grian putting up an image of how he used to be as a human to hide his more obvious Watcher traits. It could be used for cosmetics, such as how Grian changed the colors of his feathers to suit his mood or altered his clothing to fit a little better. It could be used to make flying easier, by using an eagle's wing shape for soaring or a falcon’s for quick maneuverability.

“If you can change the way you look, why are you always trying so hard to steal my mustache?”

“Because it’s funny, obviously.”

He told him about the Watching, and how you had to drop the glamor to let the eyes properly see. He could see anywhere in the server he liked, all at the same time. It could be like casting out your senses on a fishing line and reeling it back in, or a wall of televisions all showing different channels at the same time. Mumbo would have to learn how to tune out the noise so to speak–like putting blinders on a horse so it could only see straight ahead.

Grian didn’t like this one so much. It made him feel powerful, and it enabled him in his pranks, but the potential of invading his friends’ privacy was too high, and he didn’t like to have to wear the same eyes and halos as the people who hurt him.

There’s more to watching though than just seeing. It’s an observation on the players, setting a trap for their judgement. The Watchers didn’t Watch simply for the sake of it, they collected knowledge and they used it. But Grian wasn’t a Watcher anymore by title, and neither he nor Mumbo had to use it in that way.

“If you can see everything, why do you still need glasses?” Mumbo asked, and Grian simply smacked him.

He told him about server-hopping, which was the Watchers’ abilities to join different worlds at will. Most players needed an admin portal, or for an admin’s permission to make their own portals. But Watchers could go where they pleased, and could always see into a world, whether it was multiplayer, singleplayer, or whitelisted. It’s how Grian ended up on Hermitcraft initially. Although Xisuma could still handle anything they needed, Mumbo should still learn it in case he ever needed it.

“I think Xisuma knows I’m a Watcher because of this,” said Grian. “He didn’t whitelist me or properly invite me until I was already there, and there aren't any loopholes around it that I know of. It would have been a simple process of elimination for him to figure that out.”

“He never said anything.”

“No. He didn’t.”

He told him about flight, although there wasn’t much to tell that Mumbo didn’t already know since he already knew how to fly and preen his wings. He took the opportunity to dramatically stretch his out, though. For effect.

“All Watchers have wings?”

“Yes. Not all of them have bird’s wings, though, but both of us do.”

He told Mumbo about the Watchers’ most closely held power: that of creation. The Watchers didn’t destroy, they created–with exception of creating things with a purpose to destroy like TNT or a meteor on Evo’s mayor’s hall or-

Watchers created. They brought new items into the world. They facilitated updates. They created vast, grand towers and temples and left gifts and punishments but they did not dismantle worlds or destroy a player’s builds. They used blocks that regular players couldn’t access, and manipulated bedrock as easily as stone. It always struck Grian as weird, that it was them who held the title of creation instead of destruction.

And, well, Grian had always been a builder.

But he also liked his TNT a bit too much too, and had a destructive streak a mile long. The Watchers didn’t discourage that, though–they enjoyed the chaos, they just enabled it rather than created it.

“Aren’t you tempted to use that on your mega base?”

Grian thought for a moment. “It’s not really a casual ability,” he said finally. “And it’s not fair to the other hermits.”

He saved the most baffling one for last. He told Mumbo about the Watchers’ ability to time travel. They-

“Wait, no, stop,” Mumbo said. “Are you seriously bringing up time travel? And just dropping it on me like that?”

“Um,” Grian said.

“You’re just messing with me now.”

“I’m not,” said Grian. “But, uh, I don’t know how to do it, I’ve just heard of other Watchers doing it. Pearl told me, after they took me, that they dropped the rest of the Evolutionists in the future. To a version of spawn that had been destroyed by time.”

“Pearl’s time traveled?” Mumbo asked, his voice oddly high.

“I mean, I don’t think she had a choice. It sounded like it just kind of happened to all of them without them realizing when they woke up in the future.”

Grian left out that he had actually time traveled too, back in season six with Impulse and Ren and the whole Area 77 fiasco. But he wasn’t really sure if that one was because of him, or if his machine actually worked. He liked to think it was because of the machine, honestly, because actually scientifically inventing time travel was a lot cooler to him than accidentally discovering how to use the cheat codes written in his DNA.

Mumbo stared at him. “Do you have any other, like, truly strange things to tell me about our powers?”

“That was it, actually. I saved the best for last.”

“Oh dear,” Mumbo said. “I think I’ve developed a new fear. What if I accidentally time travel and I can’t get back, and I get stuck in the past or the future? NO! What if I accidentally start a time loop, and then get stuck in that?”

“Mumbo, calm down,” Grian said. “I’ll just come save you if that happens.”

“You literally just said that you didn’t know how to do it.”

“Well, I’d, uh, learn. Besides, you don’t know how to do it either.”

“Exactly. That’s my issue.”

“See, this is why I shouldn’t have told you,” Grian joked awkwardly.

“Well. Thank you for doing it,” Mumbo said stiffly, and Grian got the impression he’d said the wrong thing again.

“Anyway,” he said after a moment. “You probably need to practice some of these things. Like shape-shifting or flying. Or Watching. So that you won’t get caught off-guard by anything anymore.”

“I’d like that,” said Mumbo, and Grian began forming a plan. They could practice flying tonight, and then tomorrow when it was still too early for the server to be fully active start with the Watching. Then they’d work on the shapeshifting, and maybe Mumbo could even start changing his feathers if he wanted.

So they practiced. And every time Mumbo got a little better, or seemed particularly interested in Grian’s explanations, Grian felt his chest get just a little less tight.

Chapter Text

Grian stood outside the Evil Emporium, feeling a bit out of place next to the dramatic buildings. He wasn’t really a fan of Derp Coin, but he didn’t quite mind Xisuma, which was who his group was waiting for. It was time to go to MCC–he was with False, Ren, and his own teammate Gem.

“Are you ready?” Gem asked, bouncing up next to him. It was only her third MCC.

“Yep,” he said, “I think we have a good team.”

Xisuma walked out of the building, and their small little group of competing Hermits greeted him. “I suppose you’re waitin’ on me, huh?” he said. “Here, I can make your portal, I don’t wantcha to be late. You’re all fancy, what’s the theme this time?”

“Christmas,” Ren said, which didn’t explain his maid costume whatsoever.

“I see,” said Xisuma, entirely unphased, as he worked on opening the portal.

It was an Admin’s portal–quite a bit different from a nether portal or an end portal. Or even a Watcher’s portal. They were the primary means of server hopping for those who were, well, normal players unable to mess with the code of servers. Other players could be granted permission to use an Admin’s portal even if they weren’t an admin, especially for the frequent off-world trips that several hermits took. But for MCC, they all mostly just went to Xisuma. He liked to send them off–they were representing the Hermitcraft server, afterall.

The portal was light blue, and hovered just off the ground, and when Grian stepped into it there was the feeling of falling–like one of those dreams right as you fell asleep.

“Have fun and good luck!” Xisuma shouted after them, and his voice faded and Grian was there.

MCC was bright, loud, and colorful. There were tons of people already there, mostly dressed in matching costumes. People talked in the distance, clearly catching up since the last MCC. There was always a static excitement in the air and it was fun to see the people mixing and saying hi to each other and playfully trash talking before the competition. Today, the server was decorated for Christmas and was filled with trees and presents.

Grian’s first thought was, unexpectedly, that the gravity was normal here. His second thought was of horror, because one isn’t normally supposed to be able to tell that gravity is normal, because one isn’t supposed to have a frame of reference for it not being normal.

Grian’s third thought was that his chest inexplicably suddenly felt hollow, but he brushed it off as the usual pre-competition anxiety he got. Even though it didn’t really feel like anxiety, Grian was an anxious enough person that he probably would spontaneously develop new symptoms, wouldn’t he?

He should find his team. Gem had been next to him, but she’d run off to go talk to another player she knew somewhere nearby. The event still didn’t start for another 15 minutes.

There, across the room, he spotted a familiar man from behind. Hm. A chance to be annoying? He snuck up behind him, before tapping his shoulder and shouting, “Hi Tim!”

Jimmy jumped fully in the air. “Oh my lord,” he said, “You scared the life outta me!”

“No hello?”

Jimmy rolled his eyes. “Hello, Grian. You’re looking snazzy in your outfit today.”

“Thanks.” It was a gingerbread inspired outfit, paying homage to both their team name and the holiday theme this time around. Grian liked the red and green striped scarf.

“What about mine?” Jimmy asked.

“Eh.”

“Hey!” Jimmy cried. “I’m offended. You know we match.”

“Yeah,” said Grian, “I can’t believe I have to show up someplace in a matching outfit with you.”

Jimmy pouted. “Well, just remember that when we win today.”

“You think we will?”

“Positive,” Jimmy smiled. “Just like every MCC.”

Grian nodded, left without any sort of snarky comment to reply with. He didn’t know why, but he just felt really off today. Floaty, untethered, hollow. It was throwing him off now and he was hoping it would either get better or he’d stop focusing on it by the time they started the games. Then again, he had a bad track record in general of feeling off during MCCs. The server was nearly full now, so it would certainly be starting soon.

“Grian,” Jimmy said, interrupting his thoughts. “Are you doing alright, man? Pardon me but you’re looking a little rough. Like, you look bad, dude. Got some dark circles there.”

Grian sputtered. No, he wouldn’t ask that . . . he would, though. “Timmy, you’re the only person I know who’d be rude enough to actually ask that.”

“Oh.” Jimmy blushed. “Look I’m just tryin’ to be a good friend!”

Grian shook his head, trying and failing to not be a little endeared, no matter how much he tried to mess with Jimmy. “I haven't slept much recently,” he said finally.

Jimmy winced. “Sorry about that.”

“Do you ever think about Evo?” Grian asked suddenly. He didn’t know what really possessed him, but he was feeling a little more like talking recently, and Jimmy would get it. Maybe not all of it, but he’d get it in a way not many others did. They didn’t always talk about it, the other Evolutionists. It changed the trajectory of all of their lives, bonded them in a way few understood, and it mostly remained entirely unspoken.

Jimmy’s eyes widened, and his shoulders stiffened. Like he’d drawn himself inward a bit. He answered after a second, voice low. “Yes.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it.”

“I see,” Jimmy said softly. “What of?”

Grian didn’t answer. Of a lot of things. Of the obvious things–but of the less obvious things too, like how to navigate the new life he was leading with Mumbo. About being human, and not being human. About the moon, which wasn’t really related to Evo at all, but hung in the sky in the back of his mind reminding him another time his world had ended.

Jimmy, who for all accounts wasn’t a particularly observant person, seemed to pick up on this.

“It’s okay, I know,” Jimmy said. “I think about it too.” He looked tense, and Grian suddenly felt very, very bad about bringing up the subject at all since he’d been so much more upbeat before. The sights and sounds and colors of MCC seemed to be clashing with the downswing of their conversation’s mood.

Well, Timmy had been the one to ask. Grian looked at him and it all of a sudden struck him that he wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt on Evo. They all had been. Of course he had known that–he’d experienced things right alongside them–but what he needed was a moment someplace other than inside his own head. Jimmy’s eyes looked like he knew something Grian didn’t, and Grian ruffled his feathers and knew that he knew a lot that Jimmy didn’t, either. And they’d never talk, because Grian could never talk and Jimmy held his secrets so close to his chest that people never even knew he had them.

Suddenly, there was a ping on both of their communicators. Grian withdrew his and looked at the screen.

Is your team ready? >Yes >No

“Looks like it’s time to start,” Grian said, and just like that the little bubble of their moment popped. It wasn’t time to feel sorry for himself, it was time to play the game. He still felt detached, but he knew focusing on something like MCC would help center him. You could lose yourself in the games for a few hours.

“Are we ready?” Jimmy asked.

“We should probably find Gem and Pete first. I saw Gem run off to go talk to someone, but I haven’t seen Pete.”

“Oh, I saw him earlier. Let’s go find them and get this game on the road!”

Inside the decision dome was bright and noisy. Grian felt a little bit fuzzy. He wondered what Mumbo was up to right now. He’d wanted Mumbo to join the games once, but he hadn’t been interested. And spectating wasn’t given out lightly by Noxite, since the whitelist was very controlled. Maybe if Mumbo was here, he’d be cheering for him–though frankly that could be said for any hermits back at home, who were always supportive for each “hermit team” in the event.

The noise and the colors and the lights sort of canceled each other out, and Grian just felt distant. He had his egg; he should throw the chicken soon, but what did his team want for the first game. He should ask them? They were standing right next to him.

“Grian,” Pete said and placed a hand on Grian’s shoulder out of nowhere, and oh, he’d been speaking hadn’t he? They all had been. “Are you okay? Are you ready to vote?”

“You’re the second person who’s asked me that today,” he replied, and Jimmy blushed, “but you were nice about it. I’m fine, just a little . . . disconnected today, I guess. I hope it gets better as the event goes on.”

Gem squinted at him. “Did you feel fine when we left?”

“Uh, yes?”

Pete nodded. “It’s probably anxiety again,” he said, and, well. Pete was definitely familiar with Grian’s MCC anxiety to say the least. “Just have fun. This is the holiday one, let’s make sure we enjoy the event.”

Grian smiled. “Thanks, Pete.”

“Let us know if you feel bad, alright?” Jimmy said with concern, and Grian nodded.

“What are they voting for?” Gem asked, looking at the chickens. “Should we vote now? And see the best place to place our votes down?”

“It looks like Build Mart,” Pete said.

“Do we wanna do that now?” Gem said.

“That will be fine,” Grian said. “They probably want it out of the way early but it can give us a good starting lead.”

Pete put his hand on Grian’s shoulder. “You going to be our CEO again?” he asked.

“We need him to be!” Gem said.

“Of course,” Grian said, “but I’m gonna get bossy.”

The first game was chosen, and it was indeed Built Mart. Grian suddenly felt a lot more confident–that was a strong start to the games for him, and he immediately fell into a familiar routine of preparing. He normally liked to have the point multiplier advantage of the game further on in the event, but a first place lead right out of the gate? That sounded good to him. “Tim, you’re my floater,” he ordered as they were all teleported to the game.

“But I’ve never-” Jimmy cut himself off, looking at the others. “I can do it, I can do it.”

“I need you to start off by getting these wood types,” Grian said, and shared the list with Jimmy. “Can you do that?”

The key to a good build mart game was attention and delegation. If a gold build popped up, you finished that one first. Each team member helped the others out so nobody was left working on just one thing at a time. Clear communication was necessary. You needed to pay attention to all the details and memorize them. A floater helped in making sure that each person had the materials they needed, but nobody should ever be standing still. Someone to act as leader helped. And, it didn’t hurt to have a little block placing experience yourself–though the game emphasized team work, there was a certain advantage if you could, say, place trapdoors quickly and accurately.

Grian knew all these things. He furrowed his brow, examined the builds, and set to work. He was CEO of this game for a reason, after all, and he’d lose himself within it to ensure they won.

The time passed quickly as he focused, and it wasn’t long before the game was over. The placements began to be announced, and Grian was more than pleased to see their results: first place. The only placement he expected of himself in Build Mart. Perhaps that was cocky of him, but it was the only place in MCC he was truly confident in. He cheered. “Let’s go!”

“Yes!!” Gem cried, giving him a high five.

“We’re first!” Jimmy said.

“Great job,” Pete said, and they all made sure to catch a glimpse of their team on the leaderboard when they were teleported back to the lobby.

If Build Mart had gone well, then Hole in the Wall was not. It wasn’t Grian’s favorite game on his best day, and he wasn’t having his best day right now. He felt disoriented and dizzy in the space, his reaction times just a half-second too slow to save him.

“UGH!” he yelled and sort of half-sat half-fell onto the ground where he respawned after being completely knocked off the platform. “I just can’t do it!”

“You’re okay Grian,” Pete said, still in the event. Grian envied his movement. “You still get to try again.”

“Yellow wall,” Jimmy broke in, and oh yeah, he was actually observing the platform to help his remaining teammates while Grian was just laying on the floor feeling dizzy and sorry for himself. He stood up. Couldn’t be outshone by Tim.

“I just feel, like, floaty. I’m not with it,” he complained. It was a bad sort of floaty, unlike Pearl’s floatiness that actually helped her in this event.

Battle Box came next, and it wasn’t much better for Grian. They got a few wins, but the map was new and Grian kept getting killed before he could do the wool. He couldn’t help but feel like they’d have done better if Grian didn’t keep fumbling it, but he couldn’t make himself not keep fumbling it. He felt dizzy when he stood up.

Grid runners was worse. Objectively, their team came close to finishing when few others did, but the map was difficult at best and harder to complete when Grian felt so bad. They crossed the threshold and tried to sprint for the end, but the game ended abruptly and Grian felt that familiar feeling of falling as they were teleported away.

He was on the floor when he teleported back–presumably after stumbling the moment before he was whisked away. “We missed some coins by not finishing,” he heard Pete say, “but that was a tough map and we made it further than a lot of people.”

“We did alright,” Jimmy said. “It was hard though.”

Grian tried to stand up, but he stood up too quickly and suddenly there were black spots in his vision and his chest felt tight and-

He opened his eyes to a very concerned GeminiTay crouching over him. “Grian!” she cried. “Oh my goodness, are you alright? You passed out!”

The lights seemed to blur under his eyes. They were too bright. He screwed his eyes shut again. “Ugh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you dare apologize!” Gem said, and raised a hand to lightly smack him, before putting it down and apparently deciding against it while Grian was still, admittedly, laying on the ground. He probably looked pretty pathetic, he thought. “You’re sick!”

“How long was I out?”

“Just a few seconds,” Jimmy said. “I just turned around and you had fallen.”

He opened his eyes again, and was horrified to see a couple people in the lobby had started to come over to see what the fuss was about. Right, it was break time after the fourth game. He pushed himself up quickly, ignoring how his vision blurred. Nobody should see him like this. The embarrassment made his ears hot and his heart pounded harder.

“I’m okay,” he said, struggling a bit to stand but making it. “Don’t worry. Don’t know what happened there but I’m fine.”

“Grian, you are the least fine man I’ve ever seen. You should sit down,” Jimmy said.

“Thanks, Timmy,” Grian snapped, and almost felt a little bit bad for it when Jimmy actually looked a little hurt. “I’m fine, I really am.”

Pete just looked at them skeptically. “I asked for a pause to extend the break,” he said. “Until we make sure you’re fine or we’re able to find someone else to sub in.”

“I can play!” Grian said. “I just . . . need a little air. I’ll be alright.”

“I called a medic over,” Gem said. “They can check you over.”

Ugh, this was getting too out of hand. Grian wanted to hide his face away. Too many people were looking at him. They had some time for break, but he could still end up holding the entire event back because of his stupid sickness he should just be able fight through.

“No!” Grian said, trying to make his tone sound a bit gentler this time. “I just. Need to rest a bit.”

Before they could say anything else, he walked away, doing his best to weave into the crowd so they couldn’t follow him. Grian’s chest hurt. It was an unavoidable feeling now, not something he could ignore. The ache felt like someone was carving his heart out of his ribcage to offer it to someone else with bloody hands, and Grian could barely think around the overwhelming wrongness of it all.

He put his hand on his chest and when he pulled it back he felt like it should be red with his own blood, but it wasn’t; the feeling was wholly internal and tearing him apart.

The lobby was too loud, and filled with too many people and too many questions and a whole lot of unnecessary concern for him. He walked further out to the edges, footsteps slow and sure so he wouldn’t fall, and ended up choosing a secluded place in the shade next to a building faraway from the main lobby.

He closed his eyes, and took a moment to breathe, trying to calm his racing heart. His communicator vibrated in his pocket, and he didn’t really feel like looking at it considering how he’d basically just abandoned his well-meaning friends. He opened the message anyway, and was surprised to see it was from Mumbo instead coming through his off-world chat rather than the main server chat.

MumboJumbo > Grian: How is MCC going? :D

Grian’s first instinct was to simply reply he was doing fine and the games were going fine, as he always would have normally, but he’d sworn to try and not lie about his feelings to Mumbo anymore. Which left only the truth.

Grian > MumboJumbo: not well. i feel sick

Grian > MumboJumbo: and disconnected and it hurts. it’s been really distracting

Grian > MumboJumbo: i passed out for a little bit earlier and gem got really worried

MumboJumbo > Grian: Oh no! Are you feeling better?

Grian > MumboJumbo: i’m fine. just getting some air

MumboJumbo >Grian: You should rest, dude

MumboJumbo >Grian: I don’t feel good either :(

Grian smiled a bit at the messages, but something tickled the back of his mind. He typed out another message.

Grian > MumboJumbo: what do you feel like

MumboJumbo > Grian: I have an awful headache and my chest hurts. I actually went to go lay down to see if it got better but it didn’t

Hm. So, Mumbo felt the same way he did–he should really stop being surprised by their souls being connected, but it still happened every time. He’d felt floaty, disconnected, torn-apart and in pain . . . like half his soul was missing, elsewhere.

Maybe it wasn’t his heart being ripped out. Maybe it was his soul.

Grian > MumboJumbo: that’s how i feel

MumboJumbo > Grian: is this because of the soul thing?

Grian > MumboJumbo: i think so

Grian > MumboJumbo: it’s only been getting worse hasnt it

MumboJumbo > Grian: It has

Grian > MumboJumbo: did you feel fine before i left?

MumboJumbo > Grian: yes

Grian thought. Could it be the distance, with them being on separate servers? Or was one of them just sick? Or was it Grian’s own anxiety? They never tested distance with Zedaph, though. Would they even have noticed until now if distance affected them, when they lived right next to each other in Boatem?

Grian > MumboJumbo: i think it may be the distance

Grian > MumboJumbo: like the two halves of our souls are no longer on the same server anymore

Grian > MumboJumbo: so our bodies are freaking out

Grian > MumboJumbo: ?

MumboJumbo > Grian: Sounds romantic

Grian > MumboJumbo: WHAT? IT’S PAINFUL

MumboJumbo >Grian: We’re literally meant to be together

Grian > MumboJumbo: i think you should come onto the mcc server

Grian > MumboJumbo: i cant just drop out of the competition, it wouldnt be fair to my team

Grian > MumboJumbo: they’re already worried about me

MumboJumbo > Grian: Shouldn’t I be whitelisted?

Well, technically so, but a Watcher didn’t need a whitelist. He could surely get Scott to whitelist him for next time, but he didn’t have time for that today, nor the presence of mind to be quizzed by Noxite about it. Mumbo needed to be here now.

Grian > MumboJumbo: not if ur a watcher

MumboJumbo > Grian: Oh no

Grian > MumboJumbo: you can just join the server

MumboJumbo > Grian: Oh no

Grian > MumboJumbo: i’ll message Scott to give him a heads up

Grian explained how, although he’d already told Mumbo about the concept before. They’d just never practiced it. It wasn’t much different than server-hopping with an admin though, except that you were bypassing a lot of normal checkpoints. It was like having a key to the backdoor and entering through there. Knowing the address of the server, which Grian could provide to Mumbo, would make the path easy and direct. He just needed a bit of concentration to open the portal. He’d never done it before, but the feeling should be innate.

Finding a random server, like how Grian stumbled into Hermitcraft, tended to be filled with a lot more uncertainties. But at the time, he’d been desperate for simply anywhere to go, and without a fixed destination he’d ended up there.

Grian switched to the server-side chat and typed in Scott’s username.

Grian > Smajor1995: hi Scott

Grian > Smajor1995: just giving you a heads up that a friend of mine will be joining the server, don’t freak out since he’s not on the whitelist but he’s fine

Grian > Smajor1995: it’s mumbo, you know him

Scott replied nearly instantly.

Smajor1995 > Grian: omg are you feeling better? Pete told me you passed out. we can’t put off the games for very long but we could find someone to sub in if you need it?

Smajor1995 > Grian: wait what? Mumbo?

Grian > Smajor1995: mumbo will be fine, i need him here

Grian > Smajor1995: i just don’t want him to be banned by Noxite

Smajor1995 > Grian: Grian what is going on? are you okay?

Grian > Smajor1995: just trust me? i’ll be fine if Mumbo’s here and I can explain more later

Smajor1995 > Grian: you know it’s never a good idea to trust you

Grian > Smajor1995: okay FAIR. just once though

Smajor1995 > Grian: fine but you owe me

Then Grian just . . . sat and waited. He’d explained the process to Mumbo–like flipping through a filing cabinet in your mind and choosing the right folder, he’d illustrated–but he wasn’t actually there to witness his attempt. It was strange. All this time of guiding Mumbo’s hands, but he’d have to figure it out without him this time.

He hoped it was easy. He hoped Mumbo didn’t somehow get lost between servers, which would have been hard to do since there was a known and well-trodden path between Hermitcraft and MCC, but Mumbo seemed like the type of person who’d find a way to get lost. He tried not to worry but it just came naturally to him, so he sat and fiddled with the end of his scarf.

His team was probably looking for him. They were probably worried for him. He’d run off when they just wanted to help. He felt awful about that now–at the time he’d just wanted out, with too many people looking at him and fussing over him. Too many eyes watching him. But they’d just been worried for his safety and rightfully so.

Why was he always so bad at this? At communicating with people who just wanted the best for him? Why couldn’t he ever keep himself under control, why did he always freak out at these normal things? Why was he always so guilty? Why couldn’t he just act normal about things?

He took a deep breath instead. Mumbo was coming. He’d be fine.

The effect was immediate when Mumbo joined the server. Grian didn’t even have to check his communicator to know his problem had been fixed, though when he did he saw Mumbo’s welcome message. Several people in chat were a little surprised, but most people just said hi. Mumbo said hi back. Tommy asked if he could swap Mumbo for Phil on his team, and said something about “father figures” that gave Grian the impression that the people on their team were very likely to start yelling at each other. Grian didn’t check to see if Mumbo responded.

For the first time since the tournament had started, he felt like he could take a full breath. His chest didn’t feel hollow anymore. Of course it doesn’t, he thought, now my soul isn’t being effectively split in two anymore.

Grian > MumboJumbo: i’m in the corner over here

He shared his coordinates, and within a few minutes Mumbo had arrived. He sat down in the shade next to Grian and they both looked at the players in the distance.

“Welcome to MCC,” Grian said. “You made it!”

“Dude,” Mumbo said excitedly. “That was so cool! I didn’t think I’d be able to do it!”

“You did it without me, too.”

“You told me how, though. Wow, that made me powerful, almost. I just stepped around the whitelist.”

Grian smiled. “You did a great job.”

Mumbo squinted at him and looked him up and down. “Are you better now? Jimmy saw me when I joined and asked if you were okay. I guess he assumed you’d messaged me.”

“Yeah,” Grian said. “I feel fine now. Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mumbo said softly. “I guess joining the server fixed it.”

“So it really was the distance.”

“Seems like it.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Grian checked the clock on the communicator.

He scrambled up off the ground. He had many missed messages, ranging from his teammates to Scott, and more importantly: the time. They’d bypassed the break time but the games were paused still. Because of him. “Oh no,” Grian said. “We’ve got to go. They’re all waiting on me.”

“You’ll do fine,” Mumbo said. “Oh, this is exciting. I finally get to watch it!”

Grian frantically typed out a message to Scott.

Grian > Smajor1995: sorry i feel fine now we can unpause the game

Smajor1995 > Grian: are you okay?? We were wondering if we should replace you since you weren’t answering your messages

Grian felt terrible, guilt like daggers prickling him in the stomach, but he pushed it away and tried to focus. He needed to push past it for the sake of his team, not his own feelings.

Grian > Smajor1995: i’m sorry for the delay. I feel better now, i promise

Grian > Smajor1995: i owe you

Smajor1995 > Grian: it’s okay, as long as you’re fine

He and Mumbo walked back to the lobby, Grian looking at his feet. Gem bounced over immediately. “Grian!” she said. “There you are. Are you okay? What happened?”

“Hi Mumbo,” Pete said.

“Oh hello,” Mumbo said. “I’m honored to meet you! I’ve heard all about you.”

“I’m fine,” Grian said. “I’m sorry. I went to get some air and stopped looking at my communicator. I feel better now. I didn’t mean to hold the whole competition up.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Jimmy said. He smiled, and his eyes crinkled a bit at the edges. “Just glad you’re okay.”

“Hey Mumbo, what are you doing here?” Gem said.

“I got invited to spectate!” he said, and Grian was impressed at how smoothly he lied. Well, the invitation part was wrong–but Mumbo was definitely going to have fun spectating. It actually made Grian feel a bit more relieved about the competition, knowing at least one person was here who at least sort of knew the things in his head.

. . . maybe that was the point of telling people things all along, wasn’t it? To help you feel better? Grian shook the thought off. It was time to compete again. He took a deep breath again. Mumbo chatted with his teammates for a bit, until they were suddenly teleported back into the Decision Dome once more. Grian thought he caught a few people whispering about him, but then Jimmy distracted him with something stupid and he just couldn’t not make a snarky comment about it.

In the end, they still didn’t win, but that was probably inevitable with their string of unfortunate games, though when Grian looked back on it, they’d really just done average instead of terrible like he thought. Grian was forcing himself to realize that wasn’t entirely his fault either, that he wasn’t the only one who had issues with it. They came 5th overall, which was nothing to be ashamed of. It was the top half, after all. Finishing the competition at all was something to be proud of, honestly–Grian, for all his competitiveness, still aimed to play for fun.

He may not have made first overall, but at least he crushed it in TGTTOSAWAF and Sky Battle. And had fun, of course.

After the competition, and after all the hermits had greeted their returning competitors and socialized and then split back off for the night, Mumbo and Grian found themselves hanging around Mumbo's van. Grian had chosen to lay on his stomach on the van’s roof, wings splayed out and drooping to touch the ground. He stared at the sky out on the horizon. The moon was big.

“So we’re well and truly soulmates then, huh?” Mumbo asked suddenly, from somewhere below Grian. Perhaps he was sitting on the doorstep. The word soulmates didn’t grate on Grian’s ears as much as it had before when Zedaph used the word. Maybe it was because Mumbo was saying it.

“I mean, we knew that,” Grian answered.

“But we literally can’t even be apart from each other,” Mumbo said softly. “I’m not sure why, but that somehow makes it feel more real than just sharing powers.”

“You becoming a Watcher wasn’t the strangest thing about this?”

“You know what I mean,” Mumbo said. “This means . . . We basically have to spend the rest of our lives together, or at least on the same server as each other. Or else we’ll get sick. I don’t want to know what happens when it’s more than just a few hours, do you? The bad feeling just kept escalating the longer it went on. What if it can kill us?”

He was right, and it was this sort of big yawning idea that Grian hadn’t wanted to examine too closely, despite it being literally in front of him. The idea that without either of them knowing, the entire course of their lives had been changed for them. He’d been taking things one at a time, or trying to despite everything going on. He had been simply reacting to their soul problems rather than actively taking it into account. MCC had shown them they might actually need to plan around this.

But honestly–Grian could think of worse things. He couldn’t view the future. At one point in his life he hadn’t even really thought he had a future. But he couldn’t view a future without Hermitcraft, and he bet Mumbo couldn’t either.

“Well,” Grian said, “I guess it’s a good thing we tolerate each other then.”

Mumbo giggled. “Thanks buddy, glad that you ‘tolerate’ me.”

“Any time.”

Mumbo stared off into the distance, and they were silent for a moment. It was dark now, but never really that dark anymore under the moon. There were lights on at Scar’s swaggon, and Grian briefly wondered what he was up to tonight. Finally, Mumbo spoke: “Do you . . . do you think it’s fixable? Do you think we’ll ever go back?”

“I don’t know,” Grian said. “I was never very experienced in soul stealing, you know. Maybe someday we’ll find a way to split them back up again.” As for being a Watcher, Grian didn’t know. For him, it was a one-way street. It didn’t seem any different with Mumbo, but if it was his soul that gave him the powers, then taking it back might take them away. But would it even work that way?

The Watchers were nothing if not tenacious. He somehow knew they’d manage to cling on above all other traits, like a dominant allele. But the knowledge in the universe was vast, and it wasn’t too long ago that Grian hadn’t even known someone could steal his soul in the first place. Maybe he’d be surprised. Maybe he shouldn’t always look on the dark side.

Maybe if Mumbo could go back, then maybe he could too. The thought slammed into him, and he sucked in a breath. If they could find a way to reverse it for Mumbo, why not him at the same time? But he didn’t expect to feel so . . . empty at the thought. Did he want to change? If he had the option? His old self felt far off. He wasn’t that person anymore. He didn’t think he could be that person again. So why did he try so hard to pretend?

I don’t know who I am without this, he thought, that’s why.

Mumbo rambled. “Maybe they’ll just give it back to you. Oh, but then I wouldn’t have one, would I? Or would they split it, and I get half and you get half? Oh, but having half a soul sounds worse than just sharing one. I wonder what happened to my old soul. I really should have looked more into this soul eating thing . . .”

“What part of the soul makes us who we are, do you think?” Grian asked. “Why does my soul dictate I’m a Watcher, and now so are you? When did my soul change, if I used to be human? And can it change yours?”

“That’s a good question,” Mumbo said. “I, I don’t really know? I don’t know. I always thought, like, souls were connected to being a good person or whatever–like you could be a “good soul,” but I can see now that’s not really the case is it?”

“If it were goodness then it would have been defined by my own actions, but it isn’t. Why am I not in control of my own soul? I didn’t ask to become a Watcher, but it changed my soul just the same. And when you stole it, it changed yours, or got rid of yours, and now you’re a Watcher too and you didn’t ask to be.” The words were bitter in his teeth. If your soul was supposed to be your very being, should it not be Grian’s to control? How could someone just change who you are like that? And what control left did he have over himself, if that were true?

Grian was always stumbling into things he couldn’t understand. The world was so big, and he was so small, but he was always defiant and ready to fight. Always trying and failing and never quite grasping it. Why wasn’t he in control of his own soul? He was tired.

Mumbo was silent for a while and Grian’s head spun. “I don’t really know who I am,” Mumbo finally said quietly.

“You’re Mumbo Jumbo,” Grian said automatically, before adding, “My best friend.”

“Yes, I- I do know that, thank you. But I mean, I don’t really know who I was before I got here. On Hermitcraft, I mean.”

Grian peeked over the edge of the van roof at Mumbo sitting below him. “What do you mean?”

“I, uh, didn’t really have a place I was from? The hermits took me in.”

“You were only 17,” Grian supplied. He knew this story.

“Right! And I, like, didn’t have much of a home before them. I had several, I guess, because I moved around and did odd jobs, but I wasn’t from any place. And I never knew who I am–or, really, what I am. I always assumed I was human, but I never really did know.”

“Oh.” He thought about some of Mumbo’s strange tendencies. Turning into a potato, a pig–the very thing that had driven him to steal Grian’s soul in the first place because he wanted to be human again, or at least the form he recognized as human. He thought about Mumbo growing into his adult self in a server full of people of all varieties, both human and nonhuman. He thought about Mumbo seemingly not making much of Grian’s wings and strange abilities, because maybe Mumbo didn’t really know what humans were supposed to look like anyway.

“I still don’t,” Mumbo said. “But that’s okay, I guess. If anything I know I’m a Watcher now.”

“You told me earlier,” Grian mused, “that we didn’t have to be Watchers, we could just be human, because being human wasn’t something you could lose, it was just a way of living.”

“I must have been feeling awfully wise when I said that.”

“Well, you were still a bit groggy from waking up. That probably did something strange to your brain. Anyway, I think you’re right. I should get to choose who I am. Not the Watchers.”

There was another long pause. The nighttime air had a bite to it, being well into December, but Boatem had always been a warm place and tonight was a pleasant night. Grian could feel the chill starting to seep into his bones now, though.

“Neither of us know who we are,” he said finally.

“Oh?” Mumbo said. “Not you either, then?”

“I don’t know who I am without this.” Mumbo said nothing and Grian got the silent invitation to keep talking. Explain more. “If we find a way to separate our souls again, you could go back to being human or whatever-you-were. But if that’s true for you, could I also go back to being human?”

The question hung in the air. Mumbo seemed to understand, somehow, what he was getting at–but then, they were soulmates weren’t they? After a moment he replied, “You don’t want to, do you?”

“No! I mean yes! I don’t know,” Grian said, running a hand through his hair. “Because I don’t really know who I am without this as a part of me now.”

Would he give it up, if he could? Certainly. Would he go back in time and stop it from happening? If he could, he would. But also . . . no. Maybe he wouldn’t. The thought scared him. Because he didn’t know how to exist in a world where this hadn't happened, and he didn’t know the type of person he’d be right now, and he didn’t even know if he ever would have found the Hermits. And was that fear of uncertainty greater than the weight of his past experiences? If he went back to being human right now, he’d still carry that weight, but he didn’t know if he knew how to live as a human anymore. If he carried on the way he was, he didn’t know how to live like this either.

He was still caught in the middle, just as he’d always been.

“Grian,” Mumbo said, voice unusually clear and confident. “You’re not the sum of every bad thing that has happened to you. Someone needs to tell you that.”

Oh.

“What does that mean?” he whispered.

“Grian, you’re going to be who you are no matter what. Whether you are a human or a Watcher. You don’t have to be a Watcher if you don’t want to be–I’m just telling you what you already know, mate, because you already left them. You’re in Hermitcraft now, and you can make yourself look however you like, and you can go wherever you like, and you can build whatever you want and do whatever you want. It’s not up to anyone but you.”

“Says the person who tricked me into signing a contract to steal my soul because he couldn’t stand not being human. Didn’t matter to you back then?” Grian asked bitterly. “Whether you were human or not?”

Mumbo winced. “I never said I took my own advice. Or that anyone should take advice from me, in general. Except you, you should probably definitely take this advice. In my opinion.”

“I’m a different person because all of this happened,” Grian said. And I don’t know if I even like him, he thought. I can’t even look in the reflection at him and try to forget he exists.

“Sure you are. So am I. But you’re also not.”

“What?”

“I mean, I knew you during Evo, right? Everything about you I liked back then, that made us get along together, all that still exists. You still have the same sense of humor and the same personality. The Watchers couldn’t keep you from a TNT block if they tried. You’re still a builder. You’re still my friend. I don’t care if you have a bunch of extra eyes or a halo or some freaky powers, you’re still Grian. I don’t care if you have parrot wings now and leave colorful feathers all over my base that make me sneeze, because you’re my friend. You’re still Grian. That didn’t change. Maybe your soul did somewhere along the road, but that didn’t.”

There was a warm feeling in Grian’s chest, and some memories–of the way Mumbo had hugged him when they finally saw each other again for the first time on Hermitcraft. Of passing notes to each other through minecart messaging systems, or the stupid pranks they played on each other. Of the careful concentration Mumbo had when he’d preened Grian’s feathers. He just felt . . . noticed. If he had to share his soul with someone, it might as well be with someone who appreciated him for himself.

There’s a couple versions of Grian. There’s the Grian of before Evo, and the Grian of during Evo who defiantly stole and blew things up and caused mischief. There’s the Grian of the Watchers, who was miserable and missed home and missed his friends. There’s the Grian at the beginning of his stay in Hermitcraft, who just wanted to bury his entire past and make new friends who didn’t know about that and be normal again. There’s the Grian of the Architechs, the Grian of the G Team, the Grian of the jungle, and the Grian of the Mycelium Resistance. There’s the Grian of the desert. There’s the Grian of the South. There’s the Grian of Boatem. And finally, there’s this Grian–who’s progress in healing from the past few years seems shattered at his feet, who is broken and confused and still trying to learn how to move past the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

“Maybe I’m still myself, no matter what after all this time, but who is that? Who am I?”

“Maybe one day I’ll figure it out too,” Mumbo said.

They stared in silence for a moment. Tonight would be a good night for stargazing, but the moon’s size and light drowned them all out.

“Well,” Grian said. “I guess we make quite the pair, then.”

Chapter Text

Grian, in all honesty, had sort of given up on his measurements on the moon now, even after disastrously giving up sleep in order to collect them. It felt pointless. They’d reached the end, hadn’t they? No amount of data was going to tell him what happened next. He already knew it.

The moon was going to crash.

And he could either be here for it, or not. And frankly, he’d rather not be here for it. They needed to evacuate. He . . . didn’t know how he felt about that thought, but he tried to wrangle it away to the sentimental part of his brain while he focused on their situation.

The situation was pretty dire.

The earthquakes were lasting longer and longer. It startled Grian when he realized he’d gotten used to them and was barely flinching with the shaking. Now, though, they were strong enough that you needed to hold onto something or else you’d fall. Not that falling would hurt, though, because there was a distinct lack of gravity too. Flying was difficult, players floated at random times, and everyone had a permanent jump boost. It made life on the server . . . interesting, even at the best of times.

But it wasn’t just that. Nobody had noticed it at first, because it was subtle, but the day-night cycle had been thrown off as well. The days and nights were slightly longer, and that scared Grian more than the others. Even their sense of time was being wrecked by this, and he didn’t even know what was causing it other than the moon probably being involved. The other hermits had started to get a little jumpy, and Grian couldn’t blame them. Everyone was on edge and every lighthearted interaction felt a little forced.

The server had been flooding as well. That, Grian did know the cause of–the moon regulated the tides of the ocean, and with it being so much closer, the sea levels had risen. Boatem bordered an ocean, most of the hermits’ settlements did, and they’d lost a bit of land to it. Grian knew TFC had to relocate entirely from his little house on the beach. It was all underwater now.

Mumbo had told him a few days ago he’d “declared war on the moon,” to which Grian asked him if he’d been sleeping lately, which he unfortunately had been. Grian accompanied the mission anyway, and tried and failed not to laugh when his friend managed to miss the largest object in the sky. It only took up more than half the sky, but he’d still missed. But underneath the comedy of the situation was the reminder that they were running out of time, and there was nothing they could do to stop this from happening.

So Grian, in all his wisdom–none–had taken to making a new plan: one to get them off-world. He simply asked Scar to build a rocket for Boatem to all evacuate in, and he looked the other way when Scar attempted to fleece them for everything they had.

That left just one thing. His base.

Grian ran a hand slowly down the rough brick on the side of one of the buildings. The alley way was mostly complete, and he didn’t want to leave it unfinished. He could look down it and see in every corner the amount of missed potential and time lost. What he could have done if they’d had more time, and the ways in which he could have improved every detail until it was the picture-perfect of his vision.

Grian built because he liked to, but he also built because he had to. He left a piece of himself in everything he built. He wasn’t much of an artist when it came to drawing, but he could carve out an expertly detailed arch, and he could look at a space and find an interesting way to fill it.

He caught his reflection in a shop window. This time, it looked exactly how he expected it to: no extra eyes, no halo, no glowing, just him and his glasses and his red sweater and brightly colored feathers. That was all his own doing, of course–he could change the way he looked if he wanted and he chose to project that version of himself. He could also change the way this alley looked if he wanted, because he’d built it by hand in a painstaking determination to get the concept out of his head and into the real world. One was magic. Grian preferred the work of his own hands over it.

Now, in the real world, it wasn’t going to last much longer. He had plans in place to evacuate the server, because it seemed like against his best wishes his world was ending yet again. But this place? It still wasn’t done. It needed to be. It needed to be.

“I’m not going to leave until I finish this,” Grian said aloud, to himself, to nobody, to the creeper in the magical menagerie and the empty windows. It was an exercise in futility–quite nearly the dictionary definition. But he was a creator. And nothing could take that away, not even the moon. This alley would get finished. Not for anyone else’s eyes to see and certainly not for the sake of posterity, but for his own satisfaction. Finishing it was like proving a point to himself.

He could lose himself in building, and forget about the moon for a little bit. Building had always worked for him when nothing else did. Grinding was mindless and time consuming, and he needed a lot of materials for a mega-base. But Grian’s mega bases had always been big and empty, large dark rooms with haphazard torches placed around and astonishingly detailed exterior detailing. He didn’t intend to build shells, but something about delving into the interior of something reflects too close to him. Maybe he’s just good at perfectly crafted facades.

He doesn’t want the alley to be empty, this time. It needs to have life. He wants it to be full of himself, and of his friends–of beds he stole from server members, shops Scar and Bdubs built, of meowing cats and hissing creepers and the whisper of a dozen candles. The shops still won’t have full interiors–he doesn’t have time for that–but they’ll all be alive at least.

And maybe by the end of this, he’ll still be alive too.

He placed and opened a shulker box. He’d better get to work.

9:00 AM

Grian poked his head out of his base at mid-morning the next day, or at least what he thought was mid-morning. The days had been getting a little longer now, which they normally didn’t in December, and the clocks weren’t always right. The light was all wrong for it to be mid-morning though, but that probably has more to do with the fact that the moon interfered with the sunlight. It seemed like it was almost always present now, even during the day.

Boatem was mostly empty, and Grian could see why nobody wanted to be out and about. The gravity was taking chunks of the land now, and they weren’t being dropped back down. Small holes littered the grass, and Grian could just about see a block on the edge of his roof missing. “I don’t like that,” he muttered.

He spotted Pearl off in the distance though, and instantly felt a little reassured. “I should ask Scar how the rocket is coming,” he said to himself. “But first . . . I have to finish the alley.”

It was nearly done now after some frenzied work in the past few days–just a few more touches and it would be perfect. He took off to fly toward it, and it was difficult to land in the low gravity. His strong wingbeats clawed him closer to the ground until he was fully in the cavern of the alley.

Grian pulled a handful of candles out of his shulker box. The moon was out of sight out of mind for now, or at least as much as it possibly could be. Grian knew he could lose himself for a bit in building. Finishing this base was a special moment for him. And if he started floating again while he built, well, this time he had some ender pearls in his inventory. He opened a few more shulker boxes, taking stock of the materials he’d strew among them. It was time to finish it.

3:00PM

Grian predictably worked through lunch. He hadn’t wanted to stop until the base was done and . . . it was about as done as he could make it. He surveyed his work proudly. Nobody else might ever see this, and I will have to leave this behind soon, but I made my mark here.

His stomach growled, and it occurred to him that he probably should have stopped to eat, or for any break at all. He decided to walk back to base rather than face the annoying gravity associated with flying, and blinked against the light as he stepped outside of the alley. The light still held an odd quality, like on a cloudy day. The air was sort of blue. Hazey.

He dodged holes in the ground while walking to his base. There were more than there were earlier. “That’s not right,” he mumbled. “It’s like the world is disintegrating under my feet. And what happens if it starts taking blocks from the alley next? Or Pearl’s castle? Or even the Boatem Hole?” It occurred to him that worrying about their bases was probably not the right reaction to be having, but he almost felt numb to the horror of it at this point. He just needed food, not the world being ripped apart at its seams.

After eating, he decided to go to the Swagon next to talk to Scar. Where were they on the rocket? The space suits? Grian had seen Scar go into the wagon that held his room a little earlier, so he assumed he would still be there. If not, he’d just annoy Scar enough in his messages until he told Grian where he was.

In lieu of walking, he decided to fly over instead, this time doging pieces of building material flying through the air, but ran into a new issue: he couldn’t land on Scar’s windowsill like he normally did. He just floated agonizingly like he’d been hit with a slow falling potion. Frustrated, he pulled out a rocket and fired it off for some momentum, but nearly crashed into Scar’s window instead after receiving a little too much momentum for such a short trip. His wing just smacked the window hard, while his feet scrambled to get a little purchase on the edge.

“Oh noooo!” Scar cried, more startled than anything. Grian brushed himself off, a little upset he’d missed seeing Scar jump while he’d been picking himself up off of the window sill. That was normally a highlight of startling Scar. Sometimes Grian was even able to startle him hard enough it knocked his hat askew, and Grian considered those times the most successful. This time, he just got bruised pride and an unsatisfactory reaction.

“Your window’s not bird safe.”

“Well, I can’t just leave them open,” Scar said, opening the window and letting Grian come inside. “Not when there’s scary creatures about! Did you see Impulse’s phantom cage? I think they’re mean but he said they were friendly. I was just glad there was less of ‘em out in Boatem, I’m always dodging them.”

“Well,” said Grian while he shook his feathers out, “maybe I’d land better if I actually could land. There’s no gravity anymore to account for when landing. Actually, that’s what I came here to ask.” His voice dropped. “Do you have any estimate on when that rocket will be done?”

Scar’s eyes lit up, and oh, Grian was going to get the whole spiel. “Well, well, well, am I glad you asked. It is nearly done, and I am putting the final touches on our suits. Nothing but the best for my fellow Boatem members. I predict I can finish it today, even.” He leaned closer. “In fact, I can also accept the rest of our agreed payment now–half up front, and half upon delivery of the finished product.”

Grian raised an eyebrow. “Scar, we never split the payment. You just took all our diamonds up front and emptied the hourglasses.”

Scar deflated. “Oh. I was hoping you’d forgotten and had something else to give me.”

Grian rolled his eyes, but placed down his ender chest and retrieved the last 10 diamonds he had on him. “Nobody’s buying right now,” he said. “I’m broke! This is all I’ve got left.”

“I’ll be taking that,” Scar said, and snatched them out of Grian’s hand. Grian wondered, not for the first time, how Scar always ended up with so much of his stuff. He also wondered why he’d made the error of opening his ender chest in the first place. “You, sir, have just earned yourself a rush order.”

“With 10 measly diamonds? You know that amount can’t buy anything anymore. I literally paid you in blocks up front.”

“Do you want to pay more?” Scar asked, and then looked at the ground. It was times like these where Grian got a look at his serious side, with his air of showmanship temporarily cast aside. “Well, G, I kind of want to rush the order anyway. We might need it.”

The room’s lighting was strange again. Gloomy and muddled. Diffuse with no rays of light like there normally might have been in the late afternoon. In their silence, Grian could hear more rumbling, though the epicenter seemed to be further away from where they were both standing.

“I think the faster the better,” Grian whispered.

“I agree.”

Scar held the diamond up in the air and examined it with a trained eye. It felt like maybe the stone should have been duller, just like the world outside looked dull, and just like Grian himself felt numb. But it was as glossy as ever. Scar’s face refracted in its reflection. He didn’t look happy to see it. He just looked tired. It wasn’t a look Grian liked to see on him–Scar just didn’t look right without the mischief in his eyes and askew grin.

“I should get to work,” he said.

“You should get to work,” Grian said.

7:00 PM

How do you plan for the apocalypse? Grian had never had that chance any of the other times his world had ended. It’d just been gone. He was getting the chance to now, though, but he feared they might be too late.

Sometimes, when people evacuate from disasters or dangerous situations, they describe a moment where they just knew they had to leave. A moment where, consciously or often subconsciously, they knew that it was time to go. People prepare for that moment. Grian prepared too, always looking over his shoulder, but there wasn’t really a handbook for what to do when the moon seemed like it was going to crash.

It wasn’t quite that simple to just up and leave, he found. The fact is that he didn’t want to leave this server behind. He didn’t want to leave Boatem behind, with its scattered chest monsters and beaten paths through the grass and beautiful trees and shadowy mountains. He hadn’t wanted to put the finishing touches on his base, only to leave it behind mere hours later. He’d made his home here, and it hurt him deep in his chest to tear himself away. They all left things behind on previous servers; he didn’t know why this time was so different. But they chose to end those seasons and weren’t forced to flee because of something out of their hands.

Some people stay behind for hurricanes–by choice or through circumstances out of their hands–sticking it out in a place they call home with the people they call home. Some people stand on the porch and watch tornadoes, a morbid fascination with a dance that can and will kill them. Some people chased storms for the thrill of it.

Grian wasn’t exactly a stranger to chasing danger for the fun of it, but he didn’t find this very thrilling to experience.

Have the hermits waited too late? Are they sitting on their porches, watching something that can and will kill them get closer and closer? If Scar had the rockets done right this second, would Grian even have time to cross the grass to board it before the moon fell?

It had been getting bigger for weeks. Grian had documentation of it. And yet, here they were, only planning evacuations when the ground started to rip itself apart under their feet.

The moon had risen already, but then it never really did set did it? Another earthquake rocked the ground, and Grian almost missed his communicator buzzing in his pocket. He turned it on. The screen was still cracked from a time last week where the earth had shaken so hard he accidentally dropped it off the roof of one of his alley buildings. Fortunately, the device was tough.

Xisuma > @everyone: server meeting at spawn egg asap

He should go find Mumbo.

8:00 PM

It was a bit late for a server-wide meeting, but unconventional times call for desperate measures. Not every hermit could make it. Grian figured they were already packing. But most of them were here, and the spawn area was filled with nervous chatter. He stuck close to Boatem and didn’t speak.

Later, he wouldn’t really remember the conversation they all had. Just that there was a mutual agreement to leave, while the moon loomed high over their conversation. They didn’t leave together. At the end, it was every group for themselves arranging different modes of escape. They all left a promise hanging in the air: that they’d all meet again, they’d get out safe and see each other again under a normal sized moon on a server not trying to kill them all.

Grian squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He just hoped their promise to find each other again was a feasible one. Mumbo placed a hand on his shoulder and Grian let the warmth sink into his bones. He hadn’t realized he’d felt so cold.

The hermits dispersed. Grian flew back home in a rush, and began to pack his things.

9:00PM

“Can we leave?!?!” Grian cried, rushing up to the Boatem Hole where they’d all agreed to meet. They were all here, minus Scar.

He hadn’t packed much. He’d mostly ended up with just the things he already had on him, because when he went back to his base it just became clear he didn’t know what he would need. He wasn’t being useful, he couldn’t figure out what needed to be done, he didn’t know what to pack and what to leave, he couldn’t think, he didn’t-

Scar would have packed the rocket, right? He . . . wasn’t sure he should trust Scar with that, honestly. But it was too late now. The mountain had holes in it and so did his base and so did Pearl’s and the ground in Boatem. They definitely needed to leave now. It couldn’t wait another night: this, this was the point of no return.

“I spent all night working on the rocket,” Scar said. He looked at Grian. “And all afternoon. It’s time to get suited up now!”

“Scar, why are we crash dummies?” Grian asked after putting on his suit. They were clearly custom made, with different matching helmet colors for each Boatem member. Grian’s had extra space in the back to allow for his folded wings. It wasn’t quite enough, but Scar couldn’t have known that, so Grian just quietly used his shapeshifting to put his wings away for the time being. It was the thought that counted. He made eye contact with Mumbo, who had apparently done the same.

However, custom made or not, they rather clearly resembled crash test dummies. Grian didn’t know what to think of that, to be perfectly honest. He wasn’t a particularly superstitious person but this had to be a bad omen of some sort.

“Wait a minute-” Mumbo said.

“These are not space suits!” Grian cried. “Scar, you’re making me a bit nervous with this!”

“Griannnn,” Scar said in a mock-disappointed tone, dragging out the end of Grian’s name. “You don’t trust me?”

“Not as far as I can throw you.”

“Well, good thing you don’t have a choice then!” Scar said cheerily. “I made those just for you, you know. A perfectly safe Scar-certified–no, Jellie-certified design, she slept on the nylon while I was making them! That’s how safe they are, even Jellie likes them. Come on, let’s go to the rocket.”

Grian just rolled his eyes at Scar’s tangent, knowing Jellie would sleep on a crinkly piece of paper if they let her, and followed him up to the rocket. Scar walked them through the design, and let Grian place the egg on the floor. When they reached the cockpit, however, it suddenly dawned on him why the rocket had been pointed the wrong way.

They weren’t going up. Scar had never planned for them to be going up.

They were going down.

Scar’s escape route was through the Boatem Hole and into the void. The very thing that had claimed so many of their lives–Scar’s in particular–throughout the season. And that they were to hopefully be protected within the void by the not-so-reassuring suits Scar had made for them.

You know, Grian really should have checked with him more thoroughly when he commissioned this rocket.

As they floated gracefully–as graceful as they could be while being interrupted by rising back up again under the funky gravity–into the Boatem Hole, Grian reflected on what he knew about the void.

1. The void is deadly. An obvious one, but important considering Scar’s plan.
2. The void is not air. There is a distinct absence of air, in fact.
3. The void is not like space. It’s thick and smothering.
4. The void is not like water, either. You don’t drown in it–there is nothing incidental about not being able to breathe in the void. It’s consuming you.
5. The void is not its own dimension like the Nether or the End, but seems to be endless in all directions. No one really knows, because it tends to kill those who study it. Some even say that the same void exists in all worlds.
6. The void wants YOU. It wants to gnaw on the edges of you and run tendrils up through your nasal passages and dig its fingers into your lungs until you burn up from the inside out and die, leaving you body and all your possessions as a gift to the unknown.
7. Scar’s plan was for them to drift in the void, past the point of return and normal death, in order to escape the moon.
8. Grian’s not sure he wants to trust the same guy who’s died to the void a million times this season with the decision to get them all trapped in it, but he’s doing it anyway.

Chapter Text

It’s odd how reality started to drip away from you as you floated in the void. Grian was accustomed to falling into the Boatem Hole and dying after a few seconds, but the moon’s gravity was stronger now and none of them had truly felt gravity in a long time. As such, he found himself sort of floating next to Mumbo, going downwards at a nearly imperceptible pace.

The light from the Boatem Hole was still visible–the hole itself was still visible. Grian thought he could see a torch flicker way up above, but then it suddenly vanished from view. The whole view of their world seemed to be warping and fading as they fell deeper, and the bedrock seemed to move under his gaze. It made him dizzy.

He looked up anyway, because this was the last time he’ll ever see their home.

The void was dark and full of inky blackness right up until it wasn't. There were little lights on the horizon, like purple and blue stars, though they seemed to move and blink when Grian moved his head. Scar, Impulse, and Pearl were below him and Mumbo–the two of them had fallen a bit slower than the others after Scar failed to include the correct amount of escape hatches for them.

“Grian! Mumbo!” Scar shouted, snapping Grian out of his thoughts.

“Yeah?” he replied.

“You’re too far away. We should be tethered together.”

“Oh,” Mumbo muttered. “Does that mean we’re gonna float off, then? I really don’t fancy floating off into the void alone. Or with you, no offense.”

“No, they’re saying they’re gonna toss us a tether,” Grian replied. “Look, Impulse is holding it right now. Get ready.”

Impulse tossed them the tether. It missed the first time, with the void being difficult to account for since it behaved differently than air. The second time, though, Mumbo caught it.

“I caught it!” he said.

“Tie my suit onto yours,” Grian said.

“Oh, how should I . . .”

Grian rolled his eyes and took the tether from Mumbo, and slid the tether through one of the metal rings on his suit before clipping the carabiner on the other end to a ring on Mumbo’s suit and locking it. “Now we’re both attached to each other.”

“I could have tied that tether, you know. I’m good with tying knots, I just didn’t know which one to choose for this.”

“I’d rather see your knots when our lives aren’t on the line. Using the clip is easier. It’s made for this, you know.”

Impulse reeled them back down until everyone was at the same level together, and then they all took turns attaching the tether to one another until they floated in a line. There was enough slack to move around if they wanted, but nobody was going to drift away from the group. Grian gave it about five minutes before they were all tangled up in each other like a dog accidentally wrapping a leash around its leg.

“Now we won’t float off!” Scar said, triumphantly. “This is so cool, it’s like a spacewalk. I’ve always wanted to do one of those, you know.”

“Wish it was in better circumstances,” Impulse said.

“Or, you know, actually in space,” said Grian. The group sort of uncomfortably agreed with that, and fell silent for a bit. Boatem, on most days, were never silent when all put in a room together at once. There was always something going wrong, someone teasing someone, someone making a joke, someone accidentally (or purposefully) killing another, someone scamming, someone planning, or someone arguing. But it didn’t feel like there was a lot to say right now.

Mumbo finally broke the silence. “So, er, Scar, where exactly are we going?”

“Yeah,” Pearl added. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Um,” Scar said.

“Scar,” Grian said, not liking that tone.

“Um, well you see, I, uh, didn’t plan that far?” Scar explained hastily, hands thrown up placatingly. “I just built the rocket, you know! And the suits! I did those too. And, I got us out of there, but I didn’t really make a plan for how we’re getting out of here. I didn’t have time for that.”

“You made us go in here without a way to get us out?” Pearl exclaimed, at the same time Mumbo started making distressed noises and stumbled over some comment about how they were all trapped here and going to die.

“Well what was your plan to get us out of there?” Scar asked defensively.

“I was going to blow up the moon,” Mumbo said.

“Yeah, and how did that work out for you?” Grian said sarcastically.

“It’s not my fault you all distracted me so I couldn’t detonate it in time!”

“Oh, blame it on me-”

Pearl cut in. “Mumbo, wasn’t it also your idea to start a cult around not sleeping so that we’d appease the moon god or whatever?”

“YOU joined it! If it was such a bad idea, then why did everyone here join it?” Mumbo cried. “Besides, that was all a lie. How could any of you believe that? It was so silly, I can’t believe you fell for it.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Pearl said. “It doesn’t matter if I joined it because it had no effect on me.”

“You were dead serious about the Mooners. Don’t lie, I saw it,” Grian said at the same time. “You roped me into it.”

“You wouldn’t sleep because you wanted to measure the moon!” Mumbo exclaimed. “I didn’t rope you in because you never even believed me.”

“Maybe I’d have believed you if you hadn’t tricked me into giving my soul away earlier this season,” Grian said, and actually enjoyed the hurt look on Mumbo’s face for a moment. “And yeah, I measured the moon. I wanted to actually do something about it!”

“Did you?” Mumbo asked, quietly. “Did you do something about it?”

Grian stopped. Because, well, he hadn’t. Not really. All he had was a book of numbers carefully scratched out proving the moon was getting bigger. Which was something he already had empirical evidence of every time he stepped outside at night.

“I asked Scar,” he said, “to build us a rocket.”

“I never slept,” Scar said mildly. “Except when I needed to. That whole Mooner business was funny, though. And I built the rocket, didn’t I? I did what you asked!”

“You’re like talking to a genie, Scar, I swear. Ask you for one thing and you better be specific or else you’re gettin’ something else. I asked for the rocket so we could go to space,” Grian shouted. “Not the void! You know, because rockets are for space. I thought you were supposed to be the space-person on the server, you talk about it all the time!”

“Scar-X has never had an unsuccessful space mission,” he defended.

“That’s because you’ve never had a space mission,” Mumbo muttered. “And this still isn’t one.”

“Why didn’t you build a rocket, Grian?” Scar asked.

“Because I don’t know how! That’s why I asked you!”

“I still got us out of there.”

“Yeah,” Pearl said. “Into the void where we might all die.”

“Well, that’s just a little pessimistic,” Scar pointed out. “Lighten up, Pearl! We’re all here, aren’t we?”

“I don’t even know where here is,” Mumbo said. “Are we sure this is better than before? I mean, really. Couldn’t we have just left the server? Wouldn’t some place, like, I dunno, Empires take us all in for a bit?”

“The moon made the server unstable. The server instability was making portals unsafe to use, at the end,” Pearl said. “We wouldn’t have been able to properly escape to someone else’s world without risking it too with the instability. So our best bet is finding a new blank world, so if the portal fails then we don’t risk anyone else. That’s what Xisuma said during the meeting.”

“Oh thank God,” Scar said. “Someone who actually listened during that.”

“Guys,” Impulse said. The others bickered over him.

“Maybe you should listen harder,” Grian commented, “because then you’d remember I commissioned a spaceship, not a device to drop us all in the void.”

“Oh, ‘cause you have a great track record of listening to everything people tell you, don’t you, Grian?” Pearl scoffed.

“Guys,” Impulse said again.

“Are you gonna start now too, Pearl?” Grian said. “Because I don’t remember you doing much about the moon either!”

“I couldn’t hurt my moon cousin!”

“You literally watched when Mumbo tried to blow it up.”

“Well, it sure looks like it was coming to hurt us,” Mumbo said. “Also, did we ever set a place to meet back at? Pearl said Xisuma said we’re supposed to find a blank world, but did anyone ever get where we’re going?”

“I imagine that’s what our communicators are for,” Scar said.

“Guys,” Impulse said a third time, finally breaking into their argument. “Somethin’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” said Pearl. “We’re stuck here and nobody agreed on a way to get us out of here.”

Scar opened his mouth, ready to defend himself once again, but Mumbo cut him off. “No, uh–I think Impulse is right. Something’s wrong.” He drifted over in front of Impulse, and squinted. “Are you okay buddy?”

Impulse blinked. He wasn’t really looking directly at Mumbo, and instead appeared to be watching some point just above his shoulder. “I don’ think so,” he mumbled.

Grian, Pearl and Scar drifted closer. Impulse was breathing fast, quick sharp breaths that fogged up his helmet a little. “Guys, give him space,” Pearl said. “Let him breathe. You’ll freak him out some more and if he’s panicking then that’ll just make it worse.”

“He’s slurring his words,” Scar noted. “What’s going on? Impulse? Can you tell us?”

“My head hurts,” he said.

“Try to take deeper breaths,” Pearl said. “You’re gonna be alright.”

“I can’t,” Impulse said. He slowly lifted his arm, like maybe he was going to grab onto Pearl for support, but instead he did the one thing Grian didn’t expect: he started to remove his helmet.

They exploded into action–really, too many people in such a small space, with Mumbo shouting Don’t! while Pearl grabbed one of Impulse’s arms and Grian grabbed the other and yanked it downwards. Impulse’s fingers had moved too clumsily to keep up with his friends’, and Grian let out a hot breath when he realized that the helmet was still securely on.

Or was it?

“Why did he do that?” Pearl shouted, at the same time Grian gave the all clear that the helmet was still attached properly. “Impulse, that would have killed you!”

“Impulse?” Mumbo said. “What happened?”

Impulse looked at Mumbo almost like he’d forgotten he was there, despite Mumbo having been next to him this whole time. “Can’ breathe,” he said. “I need . . .” He reached for his helmet again, but Grian held down his arm. It didn’t take a lot of effort.

“He thinks he needs to take the helmet off,” Grian said. “He can’t breathe and he thinks that it’s obstructing him.”

“He’s confused,” Scar said. “He’s not getting enough oxygen. That’s why he’s not speaking right, why his head hurts, and why he’s not focusing on us properly.” He paused for a long second and took a deep breath. “I don’t have to tell you guys that this isn’t good.”

“Did you pack enough?” Mumbo said. “Oxygen, I mean? Our suits don’t have–they don’t have tanks. Oh my god,” he muttered, “we don’t have tanks . . .”

Scar frowned. “We don’t need them. The suit recycles the air. I know a thing or two about that and used it to make the design more compact.”

“How- It recycles carbon dioxide to air? Like a plant? In the void?” Grian asked, puzzled. He shook his head stiffly. “Doesn’t matter. It doesn't matter! He’s not getting enough oxygen. Is it broken? Is your weird device broken?”

“I don’t think it’s broken,” Pearl said, examining him. “I don’t think his exhaling is the problem. I think it’s the void. I think there’s a leak.”

“My suits don’t have leaks,” Scar answered immediately.

“Well maybe they do,” Grian said. “Clearly they do.” It came out harsher than he expected, and Scar flinched, eyes wide.

“Is it–a slow leak?” Mumbo said. “We've been down here an awfully long while.”

Grian remembered his rules of the void uneasily. While they’d been arguing earlier, they all drifted well beyond the normal point of no return. There was no more slow falling from the moon’s gravity, because they were no longer in any realm the moon could affect. They were in a part of the void nobody had ever seen except the creatures that lived here, because it killed everyone who passed through it. And as far as Grian knew, nobody in Boatem was a voidwalker.

There’s not many things with a 100% mortality rate. People survive falls with feather falling. People survive lava with potions of fire resistance. People survive viruses with medicine and vaccines. People survive drowning through water breathing potions and making pockets of air. But the void? It didn’t matter if you had wings or an elytra or potions or armor, if you fell too deep and passed that gradient to the point of no return, it killed you every time.

And death didn’t like to be cheated.

The void wants YOU. It wants to gnaw on the edges of you and run tendrils up through your nasal passages and dig its fingers into your lungs until you burn up from the inside out and die, leaving you body and all your possessions as a gift to the unknown.

“There must be a hole in his suit,” Grian said. “He’s being choked by the void. That’s what it does to you. It chokes you and suffocates you and burns you up on the inside.”

Scar looked horrified. “Check the seal of his helmet!” he cried. “It might be a bad seal.”

“You don’t think he managed to get it loose earlier?” Mumbo asked.

“No,” Grian said. “He didn’t. I think he’s been losing air for a while, letting the void in instead.”

Pearl was examining Impulse’s helmet, running her gloved fingers across the seal. Scar started rummaging through his pockets on the suit. “I think I . . . I think I have something to fix the seals,” he muttered. “If I can find it.”

“Please find it,” Mumbo said. He wrung his hands.

“Impulse?” Grian said. “Are you alright?”

There was a long pause and Grian almost thought he wasn’t going to respond at all. “I don’ wanna die,” he said after a moment.

“You’re not gonna die!” all the other Boatem members shouted at once.

“Can you keep talking to me?” Grian said.

Nothing.

“Impulse?” He peered through Impulse’s helmet, but Impulse didn’t make eye contact. The quick breaths had stopped and there was no more fog on the inside of his helmet. He just looked sleepy. They needed to work fast.

“Ugh!” Pearl said, and made some other noise Grian couldn’t have translated if he tried. “I can’t find anything! I thought I might be able to but I can’t feel a thing in these gloves.”

They all looked at Scar. He was quiet. “I can’t find the material to fix the seal,” he said softly, staring at the not-ground below them and refusing to look them in the eye. “I don’t know if it wouldn’t have worked in the void either. For all I know it would react somehow and dry up the moment it left the tube.”

Impulse’s side of the tether started to pull taut a little, and he suddenly sunk down.

“He’s not supporting his own weight anymore,” Grian said, feeling ice drip down his veins.

Pearl was supporting the back of his head from where she’d been trying to feel the edge of the seal. “He’s unconscious.” The words were loud and then fizzled, consumed in the thickness of the void. There was no echo here. It was just for the four of them to hear.

“I don’t have the material to fix the seal. We don’t know where the leak is. I made the suits faulty. I trapped us here,” Scar said vacantly.

“Is he going to die?!” Mumbo shouted hysterically.

“If he can’t breathe,” Pearl said. “We have to fix it.”

“He can just respawn, won’t he? Right? He can still respawn, right?”

“I don’t think he can,” Grian said quietly. “The void is shared in all worlds, right? We’ve fallen beyond our world’s void. We don’t belong to any world right now, we’re in the void’s realm. I don’t know what happens when you respawn out here. You don’t have a world to go back to. And if he did, who’s to say that our server is still intact and the moon hasn’t crashed by now?”

Where can you go, if there’s no place to go back to? Where do you go if you die in between worlds?

“He’s going to perma-die,” Scar said.

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. I hope not,” Grian said, but the uncertainty wasn’t hopeful. It just dragged them further down like an anchor chained to his feet.

“We don’t have time to talk about this!” Pearl said. “We have to work fast! Even if we can save him, we can’t wait too long or it’ll cause brain damage.” Pearl pulled Impulse closer, clutching onto him. Maybe if she held tight enough, he’d stay. “If you have any ideas, please, we need them now.”

“I don’t- I don’t,” Scar repeated. Mumbo spun in place, like he’d find something other than the endless void around them to use and save the day.

Grian was frozen, like the ice that had dripped through his veins had finally rooted him to the spot and he couldn’t move. He couldn’t lose another friend. Not again, not again, not again.

Scar laid a hand on Grian’s arm and he was violently snapped back to the present. They were all on thin ice, and it was getting thinner and thinner as time moved forward. Cracking, ready to plunge Impulse into the icy depths where he’d drown. But Impulse was still here for now. He was going to die if he couldn’t get more oxygen. But he wasn’t dead yet.

He couldn’t lose him. And–maybe, for once, Grian could do something about it.

He reached deep within himself, and tried to pull out a power he’d nearly forgotten. Nearly, because for once the soul-sharing with Mumbo had paid off–he’d been forced to pull it out of dormancy, brush it off, and practice it just so Mumbo would know what Watchers were capable of. It was like a little tendril in his core, difficult to grasp but in clear focus now.

Watchers were creative beings, perhaps second only to their stated purpose of watching. They blessed the world with materials, and facilitated updates. They created towers and things and gave players items, be they good or bad. They had access to blocks normal players didn’t, and placed them as easily as they could manipulate the rest of the world’s building blocks.

And Grian had always been a builder, even before he’d been blessed with the Watchers’ creative ability and then rejected it once more. Maybe that’s why they liked him. It was a better reasoning than anything else he’d come up with.

But Grian wasn’t making a house right now, or an obelisk or a maze or trap like the Watchers would have. He had one simple goal in mind: create something, anything, to keep his friends safe in the void.

The answer came inelegantly in the strongest material his panicked mind could think of: a plain bedrock box. 5x5, for 5 people.

A thunk echoed through the small space as the last block slid in place, punctuated only by his own gasping breaths. Just like mining out a space underwater, there was a small pocket of air in here. Grian didn’t know how long it would last, but he wasn’t worried about the future. The sound of his friend breathing would be enough.

Pearl sank to the newly-present floor along with Impulse. With shaky hands, she yanked on the helmet clasp, pulling it free. There was no sound–for some reason, he thought that taking the helmet off should have made a hissing sound, but it didn’t. There wasn’t a proper seal to break, he supposed.

“Is he breathing?” Grian said.

“Yeah,” Pearl said. “He is.” She rested the front of her helmet on the top of Impulse’s head. The lighting in the room was dim and murky, throwing glare on the helmets and leaving the corners in thick shadows, but Grian thought her cheeks looked wet.

The lighting in the room was dim and murky. Grian realized abruptly that there was no light. No proper lighting. It was just him glowing–his eyes, his skin, the power glowing at his palms and still shining under the gloves.

Oh. He probably didn’t look human anymore. That’s alright though, wasn’t it? Because his friends were all here, in this box, and he could see them all and reach out and touch them if he wanted, and he could listen to them breathe because they were all alive.

He dropped to his knees, suddenly feeling very tired, and tried to put his head between his knees the best he could in his helmet.

Scar removed his helmet with a click and a hiss and–yeah, it probably wasn’t necessary anymore since they had air in this little box. “Is he okay?” he asked.

“I think he will be,” Pearl said. “He didn’t spend very long unconscious. He should wake up in a few moments.”

“And what if he-” isn’t, Scar started, before stopping. “Yeah. He’s going to be okay.”

Grian felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Mumbo asked. And then, softly, “Thank you.”

“You’re safe now,” Grian whispered. He took in a shaky breath. “Can you . . . can you take some of it?” he asked. “The shelter. It’s hard to keep in place. You have half my powers now too; I’m not working at the capacity I could be. We have to share now.”

“Do you trust me?” Mumbo said. “What if I can’t hold it? What if I get us all killed?”

Grian chuckled and lifted his head to look Mumbo in the eye. Mumbo held his gaze. “It would be hard for you to do any worse than how we all almost got killed just then,” he said. He didn’t draw the distinction that only Impulse was in danger of death, because losing any member of Boatem might as well be the same as killing them all anyway. “Yeah. I do trust you.”

“How do I do it? You taught me, but this . . . this is different.”

Grian reached out and put his hand on Mumbo’s chest. The suits were thick, but he could still feel Mumbo’s heart hammering. He smiled, a little, at that. Proof of life. “Just . . . you should be able to feel my powers. We share it, yeah? It’s like a web, interconnected. Just add your own energy. I already made the blueprint, I just need some support.”

He felt Mumbo’s heart speed up, and then steady into a normal rhythm. Then it was like a weight was listed off him, but not quite–maybe it was a sense of being strengthened, or like someone taking your hand and helping you up off the ground. He’d never shared his powers with Mumbo before. He taught him, he demonstrated, Mumbo had used them, but they’d never actually been in sync with each other.

Mumbo’s eyes glowed a little too as he activated his powers. Purple. Grian didn’t think the color really suited either of them.

“Careful,” he murmured. “It’s harder than it looks to make this stupid little box. The void is . . . it wants to consume us. This bedrock doesn’t actually exist in our reality. I just created it out of nothing and it can just as easily vanish into nothing. And it’s really not supposed to be in the void. The void, er, knows that. So don’t drop it.”

“And if we do, then we die?”

“Then we die.”

“Well,” Mumbo said. “At least it’d be all five of us together, then.”

Across the tiny room, there was a sharp gasp. “He’s awake!” Pearl cried.

Impulse!

Mumbo and Grian scrambled to the other side of the room and crouched next to Impulse, Pearl, and Scar. Impulse eyes fluttered open, and then he screwed them back shut.

“Ugh,” he groaned.

“How do you feel?” Pearl asked.

“Like my head is split in two,” Impulse said. He opened his eyes again and coughed a few times. “Ouch, that hurts.”

“Nearly dying does that to you.”

Impulse sat up slowly, eyes shut again against the pain. “What happened?” he asked.

“You nearly suffocated,” Grian said. “Your suit had a slow leak and was letting the void in.”

Impulse opened his eyes and stared at the opposite wall for a moment, and then looked back at Grian. All his movements were slow. He squinted as they made eye contact, Grian’s eyes still glowing. “And then somehow . . . I’m here?”

“Grian saved us,” Pearl said, and then turned to Grian and threw her arms around his neck, helmet clonking his as she pulled him in for the hug. “Thank you,” she whispered.

When they pulled apart, Grian noticed Scar was staring at him and Mumbo. He was suddenly aware that neither Scar nor Impulse had ever seen him in any Watcher form. Immediately, that familiar anxiety stabbed him, but instead of bleeding out into a thick and all-consuming panic, it just stayed on the back of his neck, prickling him slightly. He normally might have cared more than this, but now Grian just felt like a wrung-out dish rag, drained and exhausted. If rain had existed in the void, he’d have been drenched from standing out in a downpour and dead on his feet.

“Dude,” Scar blurted out. “That was SO COOL!”

Grian blinked. “Uh.”

“I had no idea you could do that! And now you’re all glowing? And you created bedrock? And you saved Impulse’s life? That was amazing!”

“. . . Thanks?”

“This was you?” Impulse said.

Grian nodded.

Impulse rolled his eyes and shook his head, wincing as it exacerbated the pain. He punched Grian weekly in the shoulder. “Dude, I can’t believe you,” he said.

“Sorry-” Grian started automatically, but Impulse cut him off.

He continued: “I can’t believe you had the ability to manipulate bedrock this entire time and yet you always make me do it at the start of every season!”

Oh.

“That’s just because he’s lazy,” Pearl said confidently. “Why break it yourself when you can make someone else, eh Griba?”

“And I did it for free this season since we were all in Boatem together!” Impulse said. “Wow, I can’t believe this. You’ve just been scamming for bedrock breaking services this whole time.”

“It’s not just me doing this bedrock right now,” Grian defended feebly. “Mumbo’s helping.”

“Er, I suppose I kind of am, aren’t I?” Mumbo said.

“Yeah, what’s up with you two?” Scar asked. “I know you’re weird but you’re normally not this weird.”

“Hey-” Mumbo started.

“He stole my soul!” Grian said. “He tricked me into signing away my soul, and then he ATE it, and now he’s like this. Because I’m like this.”

“You’re not going to ever let me live that down, will you?”

“Nope.”

“Um, I’m out of the loop,” Impulse said. “What is ‘this’?”

“And what is soul eating?” Scar asked, eyes sharp and glinting with something unknown. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to tell Scar it was possible to steal people’s souls.

Grian took a deep breath. He was getting pretty good at explaining things now, wasn’t he? It was beginning to feel like a routine. Lay out what a Watcher is and what a Watcher does. Lay out why he’s one of them, and why he’s here instead of doing what they do. Perhaps lay out why Mumbo’s here too, and how that works. And avoid the question that inevitably gets asked, of why didn’t you say anything sooner?

“It’s-”

“‘This’ is something that is saving us right now,” Mumbo said. “And this is just Grian.”

“Yeah,” Grian said softly. “I’m just me.”

Chapter Text

Grian gave them a short explanation anyway. Not of the trauma or the bad things about the Watchers or his history with them just . . . what they were. Mumbo stared at him with a look that said you don’t have to do this, you know that right? and Grian was grateful, but he just needed them to know something. Because of what he was going to do next.

They’d all discarded their helmets at this point. No point in wearing them in the room. Pearl worked quietly with Impulse’s the whole time, looking for that pesky leak in the event that they might need to wear the helmets again. Or maybe she just wanted something to do with her hands to distract her. With her brow furrowed and tongue stuck partially out, one might make this mistake of thinking she wasn’t listening, but Grian knew better. She simply knew this story already.

“Can you get us out?” Impulse asked.

Grian looked up, and met eyes with Mumbo. “I think so,” he said. “I have a plan, but I’ve never done it with more than one person.”

“What is it?” Scar asked, and Grian knew he wouldn’t have to worry about Scar’s faith wavering in him at all. Scar, who didn’t know a thing about the Watchers but thought Grian was now officially the coolest person he’d ever seen–Grian was sure this idea of his coolness would vanish the moment he made another stupid joke or pranked Scar again, but for now it just made him feel warm.

“Watchers can walk between worlds,” he started.

“That’s where we are, yeah?” Pearl asked, not looking up from her work. “You said the void was between worlds.”

“It is, yeah,” said Grian. “In fact, many Watchers utilize the void a lot. Some even live out here, but I don’t really know how they do that, ‘cause it always just seems to want to kill me.”

“You know,” Mumbo said with amusement, “whenever you tell me about the Watchers, it’s always about how you don’t know how to do something the others could.” Grian huffed and crossed his arms. “Watchers train for, like, forever. I didn’t have time for that, obviously. I ran away before I got a chance to figure all of that stuff out!”

“You were in training,” Scar said. “Oh my god, you were their intern! Hey, can you do that glowy thing with your hands and Watcher-me-up some coffee?”

“I saved you from this void, and I can put you back in it, Scar.” Grian fixed him with a glare. “I was not their intern, they let me do things by myself. I know how to use all my powers. I just wasn’t practiced enough to do all the super complicated things.”

“So you were an entry-level employee,” Impulse said.

“. . . Sure. Yeah, whatever. If Watcher society was an office I guess.”

“We were discussing ways to leave this place?” Pearl prompted.

“Right,” Grian said. “Watchers can server hop without admin approval by walking between worlds. It uh . . . helps them watch all the places they need to. So maybe I could . . . server hop with all of us into a new world.”

“Would it work?” Scar asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Grian. “I’ve only used it on myself. It’s how Watchers move from server to server. It’s how I found Hermitcraft, actually, but that’s a story for another day. I, uh–taught Mumbo how, recently, but he also used it on just himself. I don’t know if it’s even possible to open a path for more than one person. If it is, I don’t know if it’s possible for someone who isn’t a Watcher to traverse that path.” He gave Mumbo a look. “I need your help on this.”

“Oh! Right, erm . . .” Mumbo said. “Just like with MCC, yeah? That went well, I guess, I wouldn't call myself an expert at it by any means, but I only had one major mishap on the way, and well I am actually a little scared of it, but . . .”

“Mumbo,” Grian said, cutting him off. “We don’t have a choice. We have to try or else we’ll just die out here in the void. We need a new world. And we share a power, so I need you to try for me.”

We have to try, because we can’t stay here. We could run out of air in this stupid bedrock box if whatever’s filling it stops. The void could prove to be infinite, and we could be falling forever. I could get too tired and my grip on this sanctuary could slip, because that’s happened before and you were hurt then, Mumbo, and I can’t let that happen again.

Mumbo nodded. His eyes were wide but his jaw was set in determination.

“I think it’s worth a shot,” Impulse said. He glanced at the rest of them, with a nervous smile. “Call me petty, but I almost died here once and I don’t plan on dying here again.”

“Do we agree?” asked Grian, looking around at his friends. “Are we trying this? I can’t guarantee your safety. But it’s a chance.”

One by one, the rest of Boatem nodded.

“Well,” he said, “Let’s go.”

Server-hopping, especially to an unknown or random location, took a great deal more creativity than one may assume. You were opening a doorway between worlds, but if an admin’s portal was the grand front doors on a mansion, a Watcher’s portal was the disused staff entrance in the back that led to a maze of rooms and hallways. Dusty, confusing, and with the perpetual chance that the door might be rusted shut and you’d have to climb in a window or something.

Just like all navigation, it was easiest if you had a map or an address. Mumbo had been able to find MCC quite easily since Grian had provided the address; Grian, when assigned places by the Watchers, had also normally known where his destination was. But nobody back on Hermitcraft had agreed upon a meeting place before they all scattered to the winds fleeing the moon. So now? They were striking off into the unknown.

Grian had done that once before–when he’d run from the Watchers, he had been too panicked to put any care into his routes. He knew his destination: Evo. Home. And when he arrived and found it empty, he disappeared back into those pathways between worlds and opened doors at random. He didn’t have anywhere else left to go back to. He didn’t care where he went either, just so long as it was away from the Watchers.

It’d been sheer luck that he found a place as good as Hermitcraft, that he’d found the server Mumbo was from, that he’d found a place that let him stay.

He hoped they’d get so lucky this time around too.

Grian quietly briefed Mumbo on their plans while the others gathered their things. It wasn’t like they had much to gather, though–they planned on leaving the helmets behind because they were too clunky to carry and wouldn’t save their lives anyway. It was mostly an exercise in self preparation, but pretending to make sure everyone had their supplies made it feel more important and less personal.

As for Mumbo, he’d been given an important task: keep the pathway stable. “Are you sure I can do that?” he asked. “That seems, well, rather important.”

“I have to be able to focus energy into connecting our pathway to a new world, and choosing the world. You have half my powers–you’re not experienced in it, sure, but you have the innate ability.”

Mumbo sighed. “You know, I can’t help but think we got the short end of the stick with this whole sharing thing. Why couldn’t the stupid soul stealing thing have just duplicated the souls instead of making us share one? Then we’d have double the power. It’s a bit pants, innit?”

“Mumbo,” Grian said, “the only thing scarier than you casually walking around with Watcher powers would be you walking around with double the amount of Watcher powers.”

“Yeah, but I’d be able to make a pretty sweet pathway with it all, wouldn’t I?”

“Just keep it from collapsing, please.”

He took a deep breath and tried to steady his heart, which beat a little too rapidly and loudly inside his ears. He wanted to say he was confident in his abilities, that he was well practiced and knew that he wasn’t just leading his friends off into potential death. But these powers, despite belonging to him, had never truly felt like they were his, and he questioned the control he had over them.

Too human to be a Watcher. Too Watcher to be a human.

“Hey,” Scar said, as they all gathered by the entrance. “So maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, since carrying five people through the void is apparently a pretty big deal, but uh . . . there’s six of us? I hope you can accommodate that.”

“What.” Pearl’s voice was deadpan.

From somewhere, as if summoned by Scar’s voice, a cat meowed. Scar unzipped the top part of his suit, revealing two little grey striped triangle ears, and a round oval face that swiveled around to look at them with slightly bored and judgemental green eyes.

“You brought JELLIE?” Impulse exclaimed. “Has she been in there this whole time? Where on earth were you even keeping her?”

“Oh, she was sleeping against my chest,” Scar said. “I made my suit so it had a little spot for her. She normally wouldn’t like being trapped like that–she’s a bit of a free spirit, you know–but she was more than willing to stay put in order to evacuate. Animals are great at sensing when something is wrong, I’ve heard.”

“Scar,” Impulse said, “the moon took up half the sky. Everyone knew something was wrong, not just your cat.”

Grian just stared, speechless. Scar and that cat, always. Even when left behind on another world, she somehow always found her way back to Scar each and every time. Nobody really understood how, except that Jellie was possibly more than just a cat, and Scar was her person, and she’d cross different worlds to find her way back to him. It was really quite sweet.

Grian’s incredulousness gradually morphed into absurdity, and then into hilarity. Scar gave him a concerned look, and Jellie somehow matched the exact same look in a grumpier way, and it was like a dam in Grian broke and let out a rush of emotion that swept him off his feet. He started hysterically laughing.

“Are you alright there, G?” Pearl asked.

He wiped tears from his eyes. “It’s just- the cat, and Scar, and . . .” He couldn’t finish his sentence before another fit of laughter overtook him. It was just so Scar. And it was all of them, and it was the danger they were in, and it was how they were standing in a circle where Grian could reach out and touch any one of them right now if he needed to, and it was how they could all lose each other forever in the next few minutes, and it was about how preposterous it sounded that the moon fell out of the sky and they fell into the void and now Scar’s brought his cat along for the ride.

Mumbo started laughing too. Did he feel it too, because Grian was feeling it? The worry? The nerves? The love?

“Scar’s been carrying a cat in a swaddle like a baby for, like, a few hours now,” Mumbo snickered.

“Jellie is definitely smarter than some baby,” Scar pouted. “I just wanted to make sure she wouldn’t cause problems for our void-walking thing!”

Grian took a deep breath and steadied himself. “It’ll be fine, Scar. If a cat was going to cause us to fail we’d probably have failed anyway.” He gave Jellie a serious look. She yawned. “You better behave, though. No distractions.”

“Jellie is an angel,” Scar said, with the air of a man who was lying through his teeth about a lifetime of knocked over vases and scratched up curtains and mysteriously missing pesky birds, “she will be perfect.”

Grian threw his hands up. “Alright, alright. Does anyone else have any other random pets hiding in their clothing?”

Pearl raised her hand.

“Pearl???” Impulse cried.

She lowered it and started giggling. “No, no, I’m just joking,” she said. “I don’t have anything. I’m ready.” She winked at Grian. “You know I could have been hiding something though, don’t lie.”

“So then . . . are we ready?” Mumbo asked. He was quiet, standing next to Grian, wearing an expression of concentration on his face normally only reserved for particularly difficult redstone builds.

“I think we are,” Pearl said.

Summoning the path was predictably hard, splitting his attention between holding the room they were presently in, and making the portal. He found himself pushing most of the weight of the bedrock room off onto Mumbo, who took the burden gladly.

A door swung open in the corner, made of dark oak.

Pathways could resemble whatever you wanted–a void, a tunnel, a rift. A standard purple portal was the most basic default option. But Grian was trying to take them all home, and thus the door beckoned.

“That’s our exit,” he said, before sizing the rest of them up. “I will go in first, and make sure it’s stable, and then I’ll lead the way. Pearl, Scar, Impulse–please follow. Mumbo, I need you to follow behind. It’s very important. You need to keep the room in place until we’re all out.” Mumbo nodded, eyes solemn.

Grian stepped through the door, testing the waters. In these back alleys between worlds, the path wasn’t totally clear. His boots met ground that he couldn’t see, sinking a bit like mud. He recalled the void rooms that he had so much fun making back in season six. The pathway was a bit like those, but instead of blank white walls there was just endless blackness. Unlike the void, however, which was populated with a myriad of twinkling little purple and teal lights, this place held nothing. Just total darkness.

“It’s safe,” he said. “Follow me in.”

The other trailed quietly behind him, eyes serious and footsteps careful. Grian didn’t say anything, but he was happy to see that they all seemed to be able to breathe in here just fine. Mumbo stepped in last, closing the door behind them with a decisive click. For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the soft purple glow from Mumbo and Grian that was their only illumination.

“I’m letting the void room go,” said Mumbo. “We don’t need it anymore.” Instantly, Grian felt the difference in their shared burden. Mumbo picked up the slack on the pathway immediately after. He was getting good at following Grian’s cues; this power, unlike the flying or watching, was incredibly mental and required a lot of strength. The soul connection was helping them, allowing Mumbo to copy Grian’s actions as they went.

“Where did the void room go?” Impulse said.

“It never really existed in the first place,” Grian replied. “It wasn’t made of real objects. Just the thought of them.” He took a deep breath. “Alright, let’s go. No need to waste our time here. Follow me exactly.”

They walked from some time, Grian occasionally turning or guiding their paths gently. He didn’t really know how he knew where to go, but there were places he instinctively knew to avoid, where they needed to turn or else risk stepping off the edge into the abyss.

“There’s a door up there,” Scar said. “Is that where we’re going?”

“No,” Grian said.

“Why not?”

“There’s many worlds to pick from. 2^64, actually, which is like 18 quintillion. We shouldn’t go to all of them, though we might stumble across their doors. Some might be corrupted like ours was, or stuck in the past on an unstable version of reality. Some might be occupied, and if our arrival doesn’t cause any instability in the server, we might not be welcome anyway. Some worlds might be hostile. We’d do best to choose one that’s empty.”

Scar eyed the door as they passed it. Its paint, once a deep blue with gold accents, was now chipped. Its hinges were rusty, but it seemed well used. “And is this one . . . hostile?” he asked.

“I just don’t think we belong in there,” Grian said darkly. “Let’s keep going.”

They kept moving, past more doors and openings to servers. None of them satisfied Grian. He moved quickly–they couldn’t afford to be in here longer than necessary, especially as with each step he could feel exhaustion weighing down on him more and more–but he also moved carefully. What’s that saying? “Measure twice, cut once”? They didn’t have room for error if Grian chose badly.

He thought about the last time he’d used these passageways when running from the Watchers. He hadn’t moved so carefully or so purposefully. He’d been a total wreck, paranoid that around every turn he’d get caught. He chose the server he planned to flee to recklessly.

He might never have met some of the people behind him, if that didn’t happen. Oh, Pearl and Mumbo he had known, but Scar? Impulse? He thought about Hermitcraft and his heart twisted. They’d escaped with their own, Boatem, but when they split up they left so many others behind.

They weren’t any less his friends than Boatem was. He missed them fiercely, and the feeling settled in the back of his throat, nearly choking him. He just hoped that from a stable server, they could begin the process of trying to contact everyone else again.

He first became aware of trouble as they rounded a corner and he felt a slipping feeling in his mind. Though he kept his footing on the physical plane, it felt like wearing socks on a polished floor, just a moment of instability before Grian pulled them back up with no small amount of exertion.

“Mumbo,” he said. “How are you doing?”

He was tired. And if he knew he was, he knew Mumbo was.

“I’m fine,” Mumbo said, at the exact moment his foot slipped and he fell flat on his face.

Pearl rushed to help him up, asking if he was alright. “I’m fi-” he started to repeat, before cutting himself off. “My foot’s stuck,” he said, pulling at it. The floor, which had seemed featureless just a moment ago, was sticky, pulling onto Mumbo’s feet and holding them there.

“Is it just me,” Impulse started, “or does it seem harder to walk now?”

“The tunnel,” Grian realized. “It’s becoming more unstable. We need to go fast.” It was too much. They had too many people in here, and Grian didn’t know if he and Mumbo were strong enough to hold them all safely.

“I’m sorry,” Mumbo said, “I’m trying, I’m just tired, I feel like there’s this big weight on me. Like I’m pushing something back but the weight of it is crushing me.”

“Let me help you,” Pearl said, and with a momentous effort, yanked Mumbo by the arms until he became unstuck. “Lean on me.” She wrapped his arm around her shoulders and helped him move on.

The path felt more hazardous now. Some of the doors they passed seemed to flicker in and out, tenuously connected to their reality. This wasn’t a good sign. Grian needed to find them a place immediately. He could already feel the bone deep exhaustion wearing on him, how every step felt harder than the last. It felt like they’d been wandering this maze for hours, but it was likely only a few minutes.

“Grian,” Mumbo murmured, “I don’t think I can keep going.”

Grian reached for the next door he saw, pulling it closer and firmly rooting it in reality. It was made of birch, smooth and new. It was a blank world with no inhabitants. He couldn’t see what it looked like, or what its address was, but they’d officially run out of time to look.

“Is this it?” Scar said.

“We have to get out of here,” Grian said. “This will do.” He opened it, persuading that reality to line up with theirs. Like stepping from a boat to a dock, they were temporarily tied in.

The sky was, rather alarmingly, blue. Grian supposed he should be grateful for that, or perhaps even comforted, but after hours of adjusting to dim lighting and the endless blackness that surrounded him, it just felt garish and assaulting.

“I need to stay here to keep the door open,” Grian said. “You all go. I’ll go last.”

The Boatem members all glanced at each other. This was just another step into the unknown, but they’d made many of those in the past day. This one signaled safety though.

Scar went first, stepping through with his head held high and an arm on his chest supporting Jellie. Impulse followed, and then Pearl. Then it was just him and Mumbo.

“Are you ready?” he asked, and Mumbo nodded, arm slung around his shoulders.

“Let’s go,” Mumbo said.

Together, they stepped through into the brightness, and as soon as they stepped beyond the threshold of the door, they released their claim on the passageway between worlds.

The next thing he remembers is falling and falling, tangled up with Mumbo, and then landing roughly in a path of gravel. It felt hot from the sun and he scrunched up his eyes at where it was poking him in the face. His feet were tangled in someone else’s and he could hear somebody talking, but they sounded far away.

He breathed in deeply, smelling the sharp fresh scent of water and tree sap, and felt the harsh sun beating down on his back. He wasn’t in the void anywhere. He was on land. Stable land, unmoving below his body, and not at the risk of disintegrating underneath him. Exhaustion slammed into Grian like a sledgehammer and he nearly felt like he was falling again, precipitously. An adrenaline crash. He couldn’t focus on the voices speaking anymore.

They were safe now. He could rest.

He closed his eyes, and gave himself over to the exhaustion.

When he awoke, the sun was lower in the sky and he was in the shade. Someone had built a canopy over his head out of plain planks. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, taking stock of himself. Someone had also taken him out of his crash test dummy suit, and his wings were back out again, resting. There was not, however, a bed.

“I’m sorry,” Impulse said from somewhere behind him. “I couldn’t find any wool.”

Grian nodded silently. Honestly, the gravel hadn’t been half bad, except for the marks it left on his face. One doesn’t know how much they take solid ground for granted until it’s taken from you. Even sleeping on rocks felt like a luxury.

“How long has it been?” Grian asked, voice scratchy. Impulse handed him a water bottle, which he took gratefully.

“Just a few hours. Mumbo was asleep too, but he woke up about half an hour ago and went off to explore the woods. You two seemed pretty tired. Honestly, Scar was afraid you might be dead, but once we realized you were just asleep we decided to let you. We don’t have much of anything so far, we just collected some wood and necessities.”

Grian stretched out his wings, feeling the joints ache. Thinking he might be dead probably explained why he was out of his suit; they’d have wanted to make sure he wasn’t injured when he didn’t wake up. “Where are we?”

“Some new world,” Impulse said. “Whatever you and Mumbo did, it worked.”

Grian stood up, and wandered to the edge of the small little canopy. They were on the edge of a wide river with a stone and gravel bank. A birch forest surrounded them. But what really caught his eye were the mountains surrounding them, towering higher than he thought possible.

“It’s gorgeous isn’t it?” Impulse said. “You sure picked a good one.”

“I picked it blindly,” he said. “We just needed to get out of there.”

Impulse put a hand on Grian’s shoulder. “You did good.” Withdrawing his hand, he went over to some furnaces a little further away and began fiddling with them.

Grian sat on the edge of the riverbank for a while, watching how the water rippled at the edge of the stones. He felt like maybe he should be helping, or doing much of anything, but he couldn’t bring himself to stand up to do so. So he just sat, and stared.

He heard voices behind him after a bit. Must be Pearl, Scar, and Mumbo returning from wherever they had been off too. “Oh, Grian’s awake!” Scar called.

The other dropped some things off haphazardly into a few chests that were lying around. It was mostly wood, saplings, and other odds and ends. Mumbo dropped a handful of apples in the corner for them. Pearl dropped a stack of logs. “I figured we could build a fire tonight,” she said. “Keep mobs away.”

“Griannnnnnn,” Scar whined, “Mumbo tried to kill me earlier!”

“Did not!” Mumbo defended. “That, my friend, was an accident.”

“You literally said it would be ‘so easy to push me off the edge’, and then you pushed me off the edge into a cave.”

“Well, it’s not my fault you’re so pushable. Have you tried that, Scar? Not being so pushable?”

“I found a woodland mansion,” Pearl said, breaking in between Scar and Mumbo. “Not very far from here. I didn’t venture inside, though. But that could be the source of some early supplies if we ever want to make an effort to clear it.”

“Let’s at least get some weapons before we try that,” Impulse said.

They began to get to work, preparing for the evening. They didn’t have shelter yet, but the little stone beach felt oddly protected. Someone handed Grian some coal and sticks, and he got to work crafting torches to be placed in the area to light it up.

As the sun began to set, Pearl stirred the small campfire she had made for them. They’d eaten fish from the lake and grilled it over the fire and then huddled around the fire. It wasn’t that cold outside, but the fire was warm and satisfying and tangible in a way the void hadn’t been.

They chatted, about how cute Jellie looked curled up on one of the crash test suits, or about the massive cave Scar had found semi-accidentally when Mumbo pushed him into a hole. Laced through the conversation was a feeling of unease. It didn’t take a genius to piece together what it was. Grian felt it. Everyone else felt it. Nobody said anything; they just redirected the conversation.

Slowly, as they spoke, the moon rose over the valley, pretty white light reflecting on the river. It was full. Grian wished it was a new moon so he didn’t have to look at it.

“It’s small,” Pearl said finally, quietly.

“It feels too small,” Mumbo said. “Like, this doesn’t feel normal either. Obviously it was too big before, but now it’s just . . . small.”

“It looks fake,” Grian said. “Like a toy someone threw up into the sky and left there.”

“Moon’s a scam,” Scar said. “It’s not real. Who needs the moon? Not us.”

“Did you just decide that?” Mumbo asked.

“Yep. Moon’s a scam.”

“What if it gets bigger again?” Impulse asked quietly. “I don’t trust it.”

“Then I’ll just . . . I’ll keep an eye on it,” Grian said. He could keep measuring it.

“Well, you sure have enough of those,” Pearl said amusedly.

“Yeah,” Scar said. “Speaking of, where’s all your . . . “ he trailed off, gesturing around his head.

“I choose to look like this instead,” Grian said simply.

“We don’t use the Watching powers all the time,” Mumbo said. “It’s like, an on/off switch? Grian told me that using certain powers will make us always look like that, but when we aren’t actively using it we have a degree of control for what we appear like.”

Grian’s mind flickered over the words Mumbo used. We. Us.

He didn’t mind it.

Scar nodded, looking satisfied. “That’s really cool.”

They all stared at the moon once more. The firelight flickered across their faces. They looked tired, Grian noted. They all looked tired. How long had they been awake? It was nighttime when they evacuated and now it’s nighttime again. Only Grian and Mumbo had slept at all, and it had been more of a crash than a restful night’s sleep. The night was pleasantly warm, with a light breeze that blew the crisp smell of the nearby forest to him.

It seemed like a nice world, one that wasn’t trying to actively kill them. The ground hadn’t shaken once since they’d arrived. The moon was small like it was supposed to be. No blocks were floating randomly, and gravity had remained normal the entire time.Grian felt like his standards for a world these days were pretty low–you mean the ground isn’t tearing itself apart below his feet? Wow, just like paradise!

Its beauty was still breathtaking though, with the white-capped peaks and huge river. Grian was numb to it; the beauty seemed like a farce, and if he let his guard down for even just a moment it might all come tumbling down on them again.

If it was such a nice world, why did he feel so bad?

It was just too empty.

“We have to find the others,” Impulse said, staring into the fire and reading Grian’s mind. “We have to find a way to contact them all again. Do we have a meeting spot? Where do we go? Did they all get out?”

Nobody really wanted to answer that last question. Nobody wanted to think about the implications that maybe they lost anyone. That in splitting up, some of them hadn’t made it out. Not everyone had even been present during the last meeting they held on the server, but for the life of Grian he couldn’t remember who all was missing. He’d never got to say a proper goodbye.

And if . . . Boatem were the only ones who made it out, what then?

There was a knot in his throat. He swallowed against it.

“We’ll find them,” Grian said. “We can use this world as a meeting place if there isn’t another one.” I’ll open it to everyone who needs it. I’ll walk through worlds again if I need to. I’ll use my Watcher sight to find them if they’re lost. I’ll do anything.

“I’ll help save them if they need it,” Pearl said, “even if it kills me.”

The others murmured in agreement.

“We need rest first,” Grian said. “We can start making a plan in the morning. But you are all exhausted.”

Impulse poked a stick he was holding into the fire, twisting it around aimlessly. His back was against the moon. “I don’t know if- I don’t know if I feel like sleeping,” he said.

Grian heard the words he left unspoken. It just didn’t feel safe.

“What if we took turns?” Pearl said. “Some of us could sleep and somebody could stay awake. We could rotate. It’ll be better anyway to make sure the mobs in the forest don’t try to wander into our area.”

He knew that if they couldn’t sleep, Pearl could guide them into it with her powers.

Impulse nodded, a very small gesture.

“I’ll go first,” Grian said. He just needed to.

It was a little cute how they’d all piled together to sleep. They didn’t have any beds yet, so they’d been forced to sleep on the ground under the built shade. Sleeping together provided warmth. But, Grian suspected, it provided an even more valuable commodity: closeness. A sort of hey-I’m-here-and-I’m-not-leaving.

They were all each other had now. Grian was used to the busyness of a full Hermitcraft server, where at any given moment day or night, someone was likely to be awake and doing things. Peace and quiet did exist on the server, but not in any of the main areas. In this world, it was just the five of them, and the silence was deafening.

Grian sat on a rock and watched the river rippled around the stones, trying to perfect the art of thinking just enough to stay awake, and not thinking just enough to guide his mind away from the heavy parts of the last few hours.

It was working about as well as everything else had worked out for him these past two months.

There was a rustling behind him, and Grian whirled around, sword in hand ready to fight whatever mobs may have moved into their camp. Instead, he came face to face with a very flustered looking Mumbo with his hands up.

“Whoa,” Mumbo said. “It’s just me.”

Grian lowered the sword, and wordlessly patted the spot next to him on the rock for Mumbo to sit in. “You should be sleeping,” he said.

“Couldn’t. Besides, you looked lonely.” Mumbo stared out at the water. They didn’t look at each other. “It’s too quiet, isn't it?” he said, echoing Grian’s thoughts.

“Aside from Pearl snoring over there?” Grian said, forcing his strained voice to be lighthearted. “Yes. Very.” On another day Mumbo might have chuckled at that, but on another day Grian might have actually been able to deliver it in a way that actually found some humor in their situation. Tonight, they just sat and stared.

Mumbo put his head in his hands, doubled over. He sucked in a deep breath. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nothing like this is ever supposed to happen. I, I mean we’ve all had strange things, or, or questionable things happen on the server, but it’s never– I mean, we never . . . Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

Grian placed a hand on Mumbo’s back, feeling it shudder as he began to cry.

He thought about Mumbo and the only home he’d ever really had, the only place he’d ever really been from. It wasn’t the server–they changed worlds so frequently–but the people on it who made it home. He thought about how Mumbo didn’t really have anyplace else.

He thought about the day that he was told he wasn’t going to see any of the Evolutionists again. He thought about returning to the server to find them and finding it empty instead. He thought about how Pearl had told him what it was like to wake back up after the dragon fight, be given the information that he was gone, and have to find a way to keep moving. He thought about Jimmy’s face when he’d quietly said I think about it too.

He thought about the Hermits who welcomed him and made him one of their own. He thought about how happy he’d been with them, when he could set his disquieting thoughts aside and be someone else who hadn’t gone through what he had. He thought about how they’d welcomed Gem and Pearl the same way they welcomed him, and had an idea that their same story had played out over and over again with each new member of the server long before him.

This wasn’t about him or Mumbo being Watchers or soulmates. This wasn’t about his identity as a human or a Watcher. This was his identity as a hermit. They were his community now–his family. And he was missing all but four of them.

“You did good today,” Grian whispered to Mumbo, rubbing circles on his back. “I didn’t get a chance to say that but you did.”

“It was scary,” he said. “I don’t know how you . . .” he trailed off. “I don’t know how you did that. Ever.”

“We would’ve died if not for you,” Grian said. “Don’t sell yourself short. I need you.”

Mumbo was silent, but he’d seemingly stopped crying and his breath had evened out. Grian fumbled through his pockets, trying to find an object he’d put in there earlier after they let the fire die down and tried to get some sleep. He pulled it out, and its stark whiteness nearly seemed to glow in the dark night. It was a piece of a fish bone, pointed on one end and clearly hastily whittled into a tool.

“Where did you get that?” Mumbo asked.

“I made it earlier. It’s one of the preening tools.” He squinted at it in the dim light. “It’s not really perfect but it’ll do for now. Come on,” he said softly, “you’re a mess. Let me fix your feathers.”

Mumbo sat stock still as Grian positioned himself behind him, and gently began working on the feathers. He was tense, and Grian wondered if he didn’t really feel like being touched at all in that moment, but his tension began to melt as Grian straightened and cleaned his feathers. The light was almost too little to work by, but the full moon was bright, and Grian would not be complaining about it not being any bigger or any brighter. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because even a haphazard preening job in the middle of the night was something that Mumbo needed right now.

“I’m sorry again,” Mumbo said into the night. “I know I–I keep apologizing but. I’m sorry. I didn’t think the soul thing would turn out like this. And I can’t help but feel like it was the beginning of the end.”

“You couldn’t have predicted the moon. You couldn’t have caused the moon,” Grian said. “I mean, your timing kind of sucked, but you didn’t cause the apocalypse by making a mistake. And besides, I already forgave you for that. I forgave you the night you knocked on my door.”

“Even after this? All of this?”

The side of Grian’s mouth turned up in a not-quite smile, the bittersweet kind. “I . . . guess I needed someone else to know,” he said. “Not that you really signed up for all of this, of course.”

Mumbo was quiet for a long moment, and there was just the scratching of Grian’s tool and the gentle lapping of the water. A gently smoldering fire and a pile of sleeping Boatem members. An owl hooting in the distance and the distant clank of a skeleton. The ground was stable beneath their feet.

Mumbo spoke. “I don’t regret picking you.”

Grian smoothed one of the feathers out. It was black, soaking in the light like the void had before, but it was warmer in hue. It picked up the faint embers of the dying fire, and the cool light of the too-small moon.

“I don’t regret it either,” he said. “I’m glad it was you.”