Chapter Text
It starts with a song.
It’s a simple song, of gentle ups and downs and delicate melodies. There aren’t any lyrics, but They like to pretend that there are - lets the words float in Their head and dance on Their tongue like ghosts, never to be spoken aloud, a pretty little secret for the God of this world.
They look across Sanctium, across the scattered heaps of books and discarded pages and They think, wow, I should really get someone to help me. The Creator continues to hum Its tune as it grabs some empty pages, glittering with potential, and crumples them into a square, watching as paper turned to glass and dangling shreds formed arms and legs. They grinned as Its counterpart blinked owlishly back at him, eyes flickering on the old TV monitor, before returning the sentiment with a bright smile of her own.
"Hello!" She had said, voice bright and chipper and everything The Creator needed in The Destructor. "Who are you?"
"I'm The Creator," It responded, shuffling from side to side in joy. "What's your name?"
"I don't have one, I don't think. Well, I know I'm the destructor, but that's lame - no offense - could I come up with my own?"
The creator hummed. "Go ahead," They said after a short pause.
The Destructor reached towards the empty papers and grabbed a spare pen, plucking the ink from the pages and watching as the clothes flickered into reality. She beamed as she put them on, then, with gloved hands on the hips of her miniskirt, she hummed. It sounded like the song, and The Creator tried not to cry.
"How about Knothypt?"
"With all due respect, Destructor, that's such a shit name."
The Destructor gaped, flinging her arms down the side, "What the hell! That's so rude!"
She gasps and complains, throwing her arms around in an overdramatic huff that leaves the Creator smiling. After a few more seconds of ranting and raving, during which The Creator grinned more and more, The Destructor finally huffed with a crossing of arms over her chest and stares Them in the eyes. "Fine then, what do you recommend?"
The Creator grinned. "Well, you know how I'M The Creator, and YOU'RE The Destructor?"
"Yeah?" The Destructor drawled. They had to refrain from giggling in return.
"You could be called Echo, considering I came first and technically you're just a reflection of me."
The Creator expected Their equal to curse them out, to swear and flap and grin as they called Them out on Their narcissism and ego. It expected her to huff and call Their suggestion shit in the same way It did hers, to recommend something equally absurd and continue their back and forth game of terrible names. Instead, when They searched her face for a reaction, It only found a quiet sort of joy.
"You know what? That doesn't sound too bad, actually."
The Creator grins.
When Derman looks up at The Creator for the first time, they are filled with nothing but a pure and primal fear. And then it fades away as fast as they were plunged into the Folds, and the rage in his chest burns bright and as furious as the new scars on his skin.
He remembers the manic and yet pained look on the mirror of him in the abandoned house, wielding an axe with eyes far too white and ears hearing far too many voices;
He remembers squinting against the sun of the mesa, the ache in his legs burning as he screamed for breath in an attempt to escape the man with brass prosthetics, who aimed at his back with a crossbow that gleamed a deadly purple, staring with too-bright eyes;
He remembers the bright and excited static from the fox hybrid, face amalgamated with static beyond recognition as they protected him from the inevitable crumbling of the world by shoving him through a portal;
And he remembers the scarred face of a man betrayed by his country, how he had aimed an axe at those who tried to hunt him and lunged out with a hand too late as he fell from the snowy peak.
They point their claws towards the towering figure and curse It to the nether and back; for all It had caused, how each and every version of his own soul, his own breathing life, was cursed to fall. Was cursed to never live a happy ending.
The God does nothing but laugh, and grants them the mercy of a pen and a promise.
The BookKeeper doesn’t use the pen for much. He doesn’t use it to save the life of his pets, no matter how his cursed blessed hands cause an untimely death, nor does he use it to give him the small fortunes needed to complete his futile little projects. The promise, however, looms over Derman constantly. His child sees it in the hunch of his shoulders, the glaze over his eyes, how he flinches when their feathers brush against his right side, but they never ask for answers. He never offers them. Both understand.
The God hums the song, watching how its notes vibrate off of the golden walls like shimmering static with a small smile tugging at Their lips. It’s almost time to collect the small one, They think. The Destroyer acknowledges their departure with a questioning hum, but pauses at the sound of the vibrating tune still whispering through the air as The God leaves.
Echo smiles.
His world is collapsing, he can feel the ink vanishing from the borders and he isn’t fucking ready for it to go yet. He throws himself around Wintergate, sobbing, hoping desperately for it to stop. That he can do something to prevent the inevitable. That he has that sort of power. Instead, when ink on pages does nothing for the way he feels himself dying from the inside out, he runs. He disappears in a flurry of purple particles, buzzing with terror, and ends up on a small floating island. Here, no blocks are vanishing. Here, people still exist. But not for long.
The winged child comes out of a stone tower adorned with beautiful ivy, mask comfortably on their face, and Derman wraps his long arms around his kin and tries not to sob into their feathers. Patch pauses and carefully latches onto their father, feeling the way he shakes in their slowly tightening grip.
“ What’s wrong, father, what’s happening?” They ask. Derman tries to breathe.
“ I have to leave. I’m going to have to leave soon.”
Patch ignores the sobbing breaths their father takes between every sound, instead clutching onto his words like a lifeline. Maybe because it is. The winged child takes a beat, then another to answer.
“Where are you going?” They ask instead of anything else.
“ Far. Impossibly far.”
“ How long will you be gone for?”
The BookKeeper can feel it worse now, the degradation. Wintergate is gone by now, and the Sanctuary doesn’t have too long left either. He pretends he has all the time in the world to say goodbye. All the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to say goodbye to his child.
“Forever, I think.” He chokes out. He’s not sure if he can’t breathe because of his own written existence being plucked from this world, or because of his grief. Derman thinks it might be both.
Silence, for one second, two, three, four-
And then-
“ Can I come with you?”
Derman falls.
The God is there to catch him, surrounded by golden lights and tingling melodies and They whisper Oh little poem, you were terrific, you did so well, I’m so proud as They wipe away the thick, hot tears from The new BookKeeper’s face with all the gentleness of a feather. His child’s mask is clutched in his taloned hands, like it’s all he has left because it is and sobs into the small porcelain thing, all whilst The God is humming the song in his ears as a soothing rhythm.
Things in Sanctium aren’t bad, but it hurts all the same. It hurts as he watches the calm pixelated features of his best friend’s face on a RC TV turn black and leak with a colour darker than the void; hurts when comfortable conversations late into the nonexistent night turns from three guardians sat around a table to two; hurts when insults from a once-kind hearted person are flung into his heart like shrapnel in the ugly explosion that was Error.
The BookKeeper cries in his golden library sometimes, and The Creator is always there with a large hand on the small of his back, the other rubbing against his ears as a form of comfort that couldn’t be enough for the ever expanding hole of grief in his chest.
He moves past it. Sanctium consists of The Creator in Their Sunroom, The BookKeeper in his golden library, and an empty computer lounge.
They pretend like they don’t come in a group of three.
When The BookKeeper sees his child again, his face carries many teartrack scars from bright golden eyes and the mask is cracked. When Patch sees their father again, they are no longer carrying wings but stars and nebulas, and they look towards him with an expression he can recognise and says,
“Oh! There’s the guy!”
Derman thinks he hears something break in him.
The cursed child looks upon The BookKeeper with a mix of wariness and glee, and he’s not sure how to feel. How much did the Fox tell his child? She speaks of Gods and Deities like they are nothing but fairytale, and for her, they just may be. The BookKeeper wonders what exactly the Fox did when they ran.
Derman was there to pick him from the ground, to give him reason to live, to watch him adopt the most beautiful cursed little girl, to see the Fox’s reputation and influence and care and happiness grow with every passing day - and yet, he wasn’t there to watch as it was all ripped away with every tail, to watch as every Deity turned on one another for or against the Fox’s sake, to watch as he escaped on a manifestation of the Dead with a child too young to understand and cradled to his chest. Had the Fox erased his own child’s memories, just so she wouldn’t mourn the life they had before the same way he was mourning for himself?
Something is wrong with the world, The BookKeeper thinks later, acknowledging the missing pages of people that should be present on the grounds and yet aren’t. He frowns, and steps down from his lectern into the letters, squinting against the sudden autumn sun. He sees the Fox sat on the edge of the roof of his library, pawed legs dangling over the circular edge. Derman does not join him. The two empty spaces next to him are not reserved for them.
“Where are your partners?” The BookKeeper asks. The Fox hardly turns around to acknowledge him, before returning to his original position, staring blankly at the starless horizon. Two gold rings sit dully across his neck on a cord snapped too many times.
“ I don’t know.” he hums, and it’s not a lie.
“ Where’s your child?”
His ears twitch. “ Don’t you mean children?” He spits like venom, unbandaged tail flicking dangerously behind him. Derman pretends the crack in his chest doesn’t ache. “ I would say they’re fine, but- But I don’t know.”
The BookKeeper pauses. “ You don’t know where they are?”
“No.” The Fox responds, and he thinks there’s thousands of unshed tears behind that word. Derman doesn’t question the man, and Kit is thankful for it.
“I spent so long on things here, you know. I built homes. I befriended animals, and people, and Gods, and nothings. I made farms-” Derman forgets how to breathe- “ -and I made monuments. I broke through the unbreakable for the sake of a scrap of the same care I used to hold. I slaved over stone and over wood for the loves of my life, and tell me traveller, where are they now? Where are my children? Where is anyone?” He laughs. It cracks horribly, and Derman winces.
“ Everything I’ve ever done has all been for nothing, so don’t you dare try to convince me that I still have someone to wait downstairs for anymore.”
The BookKeeper doesn’t respond.
Both are silent for the next few minutes, staring as the pale red and orange hues of the sun begin to show on the edge.
“Hey, Traveller.” The Fox finally asks, his voice a husk of the honey-sweet thing it used to be.
“ Yes?” Derman responds.
“ When will I go home?”
The BookKeeper pauses. He knows the answer to this - they both do. Maybe it’s a thing of comfort, to have it confirmed, but Derman doesn’t think that’s the reason at all. The Promise was never a comfort to him, after all.
“ You can’t, Fox.”
“ Not even if I help that bastard with the pen?”
He suppresses a laugh. It would be devoid of emotion, anyway. “ No. I can’t let you.”
Both are quiet, again, but the silence is different. It’s suffocating. It’s miserable. It’s a thousand words unsaid, a hundred arguments never had, tens of times they forgot to say “I love you” and one moment of inevitability.
The Fox scoffs.
“Some benevolent God you are.”