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It begins with an ending, and the ending begins like this: Technoblade is covered in blood.
The blood on his feet is his, drawn by rocks and burrs that catch easily on his exposed skin. He had to abandon his shoes when he crossed the four hundredth mile of his journey, the clasps broken and soles worn off. He discarded them on the side of a dirt road, wrapped his feet as best he could in fabric torn from his shirt, and pressed on. The once-white cloth is now black and red and fraying, and Techno suspects it won’t be long before it comes undone, too.
There is a pain unique to walking the length of a small nation with minimal rest tugging on his heels. He’s grown accustomed to it these past sixteen days, but he is eager for the day it becomes numb. Mortal men were not designed to travel such a distance.
As the mountains that surround him grow ever higher and the trees begin to thicken into a forest, solace appears in the form of rushing water. A brook flowing from the woods through a tall grass field. Techno sits on the bank (his first time resting in hours) and lets the cool water run over his feet. It does little to ease the pain, and even less to clean the fabric, but it is an oasis nonetheless.
His hands itch under thick worker’s gloves. The rough material is uncomfortable on its own, but the way it rubs against the dry stains hidden underneath is even more off-putting. It won’t do him any good to try washing his hands, he knows; not when his previous attempts had been unsuccessful. He takes the gloves off anyway. They hit the ground and reveal the red sin that cakes his skin like Alabama clay.
The blood on his hands is not his. It belongs to the corpse he’d left lying in the dust four hundred miles south.
Techno is no stranger to taking lives. In fact, some would consider him to be a professional, although the term mercenary holds too negative a connotation for his liking. Those who know his face know of his skills, what he can do with a knife or a rifle or even just his bare hands. He thinks that must be what prompted his challenger to approach him— the tempting prize of beating him at what he does best. They were a fool to challenge him at all, even more so to aim to kill where Techno only aimed to spar. It was him or them. In the end, his finely tuned reflexes had made the decision.
While killing in the name of self-defense is arguably a better circumstance than Techno typically finds himself in, this was no ordinary crime. It was not a human’s blood that coated his hands, but a demigod’s ichor. His crime was one against the gods themselves.
Techno has never considered himself a religious man, but when faced with damnation, what else could he do except run?
An old saying comes to mind when Techno takes his first step past the town limits, one that preachers would proclaim from the pulpit every Sunday. Repent, cleanse yourself of your sins, and be forgiven. He washes in every creek that crosses his path, scrubs at the gore until his skin is raw, baptizes himself in green ponds and gray rivers. The stains will not be erased.
Now, he once again plunges into the depths, and the immortal blood stubbornly remains. He falls to the ground with a scowl and returns the gloves to his hands.
First, Techno prays for sleep. He has learned in his time of isolation that rest is a luxury gifted to those with simple lives and simple worries. For him, it’s a bolt of lightning— sudden, swift, and short-lived. Only when his legs refuse to support him any longer does that blissful emptiness envelop him.
Sleep remains firmly out of his grasp, so he prays instead for death. It’s a miracle that he has managed to stay alive for this long in his ragged state, with only the occasional campfire-roasted game and creek water to sustain him. By all accounts, he should have collapsed days ago, and yet somehow he is slow to die.
Perhaps this is his punishment: to forever live on the precipice of death, standing on a rickety rope bridge suspended by a few flimsy stakes in the ground, staring into the void but never falling. He wishes the rotting wood beneath his feet would hurry up and snap and grant him eternal rest. Then again, the sooner he meets his end, the sooner he has to face judgement from the gods. He wonders which is worse; standing before the jury or delaying the verdict?
Still, he prays— sleep or death, it doesn’t matter. Whichever finds him first.
“Excuse me?”
Techno lifts his head at the sound of the voice. A woman stands on the other side of the stream, dark hair cascading down her shoulders like the water that separates them. He does not know how long she’s been standing there, or how she snuck up on him in the middle of an open field. Did she watch him wash his hands in the brook? Did she see him pick at the red flakes sticking to his skin? If she had, she doesn’t give any indication.
She turns her head and peers down at him through dark eyes, like a bird inspecting a hurt chick. “Are you alright?”
“Uh, yes,” he stammers, pushing himself up into a sitting position. He glances behind her. There is no town or house she could have come from, not even a path. She seemed to have simply appeared out of thin air.
The woman takes in his torn clothes, the knots in his hair, the gaunt features of his face, and offers a small smile. “You’ve been traveling a long time, haven’t you? Here.” She reaches into the pocket of her black skirt and produces something wrapped in gingham cloth. Water circles her boots as she steps into the stream, holding out the package for him to take.
Techno accepts it gingerly, as if it might be a newborn baby or a high-grade explosive. It is neither. Underneath the purple fabric is a bread roll, hot and fresh like it had just come out of the oven. Once upon a time, his parents had warned him against taking food from strangers. He thinks they would make an exception for the fact that he has not eaten in days.
“Do you always carry bread in your pockets?” he asks.
She chuckles. “It’s for the crows. I’m sure they don’t mind sharing.” She backs up a bit and sits on the bank opposite him, paying no mind to the stream as it tugs on the hem of her skirt.
Techno tears out a chunk from the roll, releasing a golden warm aroma that floats through the air and into his lungs. The taste is exactly as he expects— sweet and salty and buttery. But there is more than fresh bread swirling on his tongue. It’s the flavor of honey and milk, the scent of lavender and wheat, a combination of a million things that should not go together but do. It’s bread that puts the ambrosia of heaven to shame.
The woman observes him with all the caution of a child befriending a stray animal. She waits patiently for him to have his fill before speaking. “Are you lost?”
“You have to know where you’re going to be lost,” Techno answers.
“Why don't you know where you’re going? Are you running from something?”
This gives him pause. If he had been asked that a day, two days after he began his journey, he would have said yes (although running implies that there is someone chasing, and Techno has not been caught yet). But running had quickly turned to walking, walking to wandering. And now? He shrugs. “I’m just going.”
“When will you stop?”
“When death finds me.”
The woman laughs like he’d told the punchline to a joke he’s not privy to. It’s not unkind, but Techno’s face flushes all the same. “Oh, I wouldn’t count on that,” she says. “Death only comes for those who have run out of time, and you have time left yet, Techno.”
She stands and pulls her skirt out of the water. “Well, I’m off to bake another loaf. The crows get antsy if I don’t bring them something before sundown.” She winks at him and the weariness lifts from Techno’s shoulders in a sudden burst of energy. “I hope you figure out where you’re going.”
And she vanishes. He catches a glimpse of her black dress fluttering into the woods, the trees and shadows reaching out to her in an embrace, then she’s gone. The only trace of her presence is the purple gingham cloth left in Techno’s lap and the lingering smell of fresh bread.
For a moment, he can only stare at the treeline where she’d disappeared, questioning if anything that had just happened was real or not. A hallucination, perhaps? His weeks of walking without sleep makes it an easy explanation. Though it’s more likely that he had been dreaming, considering the newfound wakefulness that runs through his limbs when he stands.
No matter what it was, Techno feels as if he’s caught up on years of missed rest. He turns to the forest and the great hills beyond, no longer obstructed by the need for sleep, and sets off on the next leg of his journey. There are still mountains left to climb.
It isn’t until hours later, when the sun is tucked below the horizon and the buzzing of the wild softens to a quiet chirping, that he wonders how the woman knew his name.