Archive of Our Own

So the thing about the Entity is: Grian has everything under control.

He knows how that sounds. No one would believe it if Mumbo said he had everything under control. Depending on how Pearl said it, no one would believe her either. If Scar said it he was scamming you. If Xisuma said he had things under control, hahahahaha. Oh Xisuma. Grian would at least believe Doc, insofar as the world would probably be ending, it would probably be Doc’s fault, and it would probably be on purpose.

None of this is surprising, or even particularly worrisome. It’s just Hermitcraft.

But the thing about the Entity is, Grian actually has everything under control. Actually really. Yes it does speak to him in the dead of night, in incomprehensible whispers that echo in the shadowy places of his mind, nudging him this way or that as he builds out his base. No, it doesn’t have a mouth or voice so much as a dense, cloudy intent that vibrates in his molars. What of it? Pearl says the moon speaks to her sometimes, and it doesn’t have a mouth. Heck, Grian only has a mouth when he remembers to. Does it seem benign, with its intense eyeless stare and pulpy red insides? Not particularly, but neither does it seem particularly malicious. Mostly it’s just weird, and more mostly than that, it’s annoying, like a yappy dog nipping at his heels for attention, or Scar. Once the annoyance outlives the curiosity Grian will wash his hands of this self-important rock and walk away. Because everything is under control.

But he knows how that sounds. So he doesn’t tell anyone about it.

The Rift is also something Grian has under control. Probably. It’s hard to tell. The Rift is rather inscrutable, at the best of times.

It bears unmistakable resemblance to Nether and End portals, though there are some key differences. The size, for one. The Rift is massive, and frameless, stretching along the whole length of the cavern. He’s pretty sure it’s growing. Just when he thinks he’s found the creeping root-like end, he’ll come back the next day and find that it’s wormed its way even deeper into the earth. It doesn’t pulse or spit particles, and it doesn’t whisper in Grian’s mind, or compel him to and fro. It does sing, though. Voicelessly, longingly, whenever Grian stands too close. Almost like a tuning fork, or a ringing glass. Sometimes he thinks he can see shadows inside it. Sometimes the shadows look familiar.

His experiments thus far have been inconclusive, or at least inconsistent. He’ll send something through—a book, a flower, a chunk of ore—and when it comes back, it’s changed in some way, dented or dirty or cold to the touch and creeping with frost. There’s no rhyme or reason as far as Grian can tell. No way to control the outcome. Once he sent through one of his own feathers, and it came back tipped with a pulsing eye.

And yes, alright, that was a little weird, especially the part where he tossed it back into the Rift and it flitted off into the void like a fish. But this is Hermitcraft. Stranger things have happened. It’s a problem he’ll deal with when it becomes one, just like the Entity.

The Entity grumbles at that thought, and Grian rolls his eyes. “Hush,” he tells it, and to keep it from pouting, he bends at the knees and launches into the air, up up up toward the ceiling (roof? top of the cavern) where the Entity wants him to go. Today is an excavation day, not an experiment day. His talons find purchase in the rickety scaffolding he’s set up, and once he’s found his footing, he runs rough fingers along rough stone, tapping his talons sharply and listening for hollow gaps. The Entity is patient for all of two seconds before it urges him to begin. It feels like a deep buzz behind his nose, and kind of makes him want to sneeze. He ignores it. Death is negligible, but being crushed in a cave-in due to a poorly placed pickaxe swing doesn’t sound fun.

Unfathomable singing gateway and enigmatic eldritch rock motives notwithstanding, Grian is having a great time. The mystique of it all really fits his scientific aesthetic this season. (Or alchemical. Or archeological. He’s still figuring it out.) Whether for the pursuit of science, history, or knowledge, this project with the Rift sates his curiosity, which has always been one of the more… unpredictable aspects of his personality. This is for the better of everyone, honestly, who might otherwise suffer the consequences of his boredom. Buttons must be pushed, what can he say. When he’s satisfied with his starting block, he draws his pickaxe and lays down flat, wings folded carefully beneath him. He starts to chip away with precise, deliberate little taps.

Let’s go already, the Entity doesn’t say.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Grian says, and then he takes one big swing.

The change is instant. A small shower of dirt and pebbles rain down on him, revealing a thick vein of violet. The Rift brightens all at once and the whitenoise in his brain resolves into words, like a radio tuning a station. It’s incomprehensible. It’s deafening. He cries out; dust gets in the mouth he suddenly has. He rolls over, and his stomach keep rolling after him, flopping and plummeting off the edge of the scaffolding. He tries to rise to his knees but his wings are off balance, the weight all wrong, as though there are more of them. For one disorienting moment, he’s sure he can see himself from above, and behind, and below, wings flapping pathetically, unbearably small against the enormous maw of the Rift.

The Entity chatters, relentless.

Grian sucks air into his lungs in fish-like gulps. He drags himself to the edge of the scaffolding. Death is never pleasant, but he needs a hard reset. He needs to think. He needs to be away from here. He looks down: the distance is dizzying.

He doesn’t jump so much as he falls. His wings, on instinct, try to catch him, snapping open and cramping hard as they slam against the air. It won’t be enough to save him. He braces for impact that doesn’t come.

From one second to the next he’s on the ground, disoriented and very distinctly not dead. The Rift takes up all of his vision, painfully fluorescent. He can see it through his eyelids. A hundred thousand voices swell to a crescendo, and Grian’s skull feels like it’s splitting, and—

The radio tunes in to a station. Cascading, kaleidoscoping voices collapse in on each other until only one remains, crisp and cheerful and familiar.

Grian puffs for breath. His head rings with quiet.

“Everything is under control,” he says.

And the Entity says, Landscaping Your Mind: Chapter One.

That night, Grian has a dream.

Grian does not think about the dream the next day. He does not think about it because he does not want to, and because he is very good at not doing things he doesn’t want to do. Instead he spends the day with Mumbo, failing to break into his vault. He does not think about the dream. He does not visit the Rift. He does not visit Scar, to see with his own eyes that his skin is flush and his eyes are green. Because Scar is fine. Scar is alive.

He builds out his base. He pulls pranks on his friends. He dreams.

The Entity says, You are sitting in a field, surrounded by grass blades, ebbing and flowing, through the gusts of your imagination.

Grian dreams of a desert.

The Entity says, Each of those blades represent a past life.

Grian dreams of red eyes and gray skin.

The Entity says, Memories, desires, dreams, and past loves.

Grian dreams of blood in his knuckles.

The Entity says, By plucking one, you shall reveal—

Grian wakes. His heart is a bruised, hungry, breaking thing.

“Reveal what?” he whispers, and hates himself for asking.

Grian is spending time with Scar. Of course Grian is spending time with Scar. What is he supposed to do, not spend time with Scar, indefinitely, just because of some annoying dreams and annoying messages broadcast directly into his brain on loop? They’re just dreams. He has things under control. Having things under control means not letting the Entity’s spot-on Scar impression dictate whether or not he gets to see his friend.

They’re lounging in Scar’s tree, Grian perched and Scar standing. Scar is chattering away about his building plans, occasionally drawing his bow and aiming for a distant target below. He’s going to outdo himself on his base this season, Grian has no doubt. Just look at his starter. Grian plucks a leaf and twirls it between forefinger and thumb, content, mostly, to let Scar’s real voice drown out the fake one.

He’s thought about asking him. Only idly, though. What is he supposed to say? Hey Scar, by any chance have you ever dreamed about a life we didn’t live, on a server that doesn’t exist, where you were a killer and I was too? There was a desert. Your eyes were red. I think you died. I think I killed you. Also you never wore a shirt for some reason.

Scar nocks another arrow. Seamlessly, between breath and release, Scar says, “You look tired.”

The arrow whistles. Grian grimaces. He lets the leaf go, and doesn’t see where it lands. He is tired. Scar’s not the only one who’s noticed. Pearl has been eyeing him, honing in on his baggy eyes and his shifty nerves, asking if he felt that weird pulse of energy a few days ago. It felt familiar, she said, gave her goosebumps all over, like she was being watched. She had a feeling Grian had something to do with it.

“You look like you did in season eight,” she said, gaze critical, “you were proper weird in season eight.”

“Everyone was weird in season eight,” Grian reminded her, but he’s not sure how convincing he was. The Entity had been babbling in his ear the whole time, Landscaping Your Mind: Chapter One. It would be nice if it ever did anything original. Landscaping Your Mind chapter two, off the top of his head. Maybe even chapter three.

For lack of anything cleverer, Grian parrots back to Scar, “You look tired. So there.”

Scar snorts. “Okay, now I know something is wrong. That was a terrible comeback.”

Ebbing and flowing through the gusts of your imagination, the Entity agrees.

Grian just grumbles, and Scar grins at him, eyes squinted at the corners. He looks good here, framed by the sunlight and the leaves. His tapered ears and his flowing robes and his smile, perfectly alive. He looks natural. At ease. The tree is a very impressive build. Very high up. Scar is not going to fall out of it. Grian is not worried Scar is going to fall out of it. Scar dies all the time; on another day Grian wouldn’t hesitate to push him. This is Hermitcraft. Death means nothing.

Each of those blades represents a past life, the Entity refutes. It feels coy and knowing. Grian’s good mood threatens to sour.

A breeze blows through. The branch they’re on groans and sways, leaves whispering, sunlight winking. Scar remains secure and steady.

“You’re going to fall and die,” Grian says anyway. He laughs, to show that he’s joking. He is. He’s trying for joking.

Scar laughs too. “I’m an elf, Grian! I’m not going to fall out of my own tree. Frankly I’m insulted you think so little of me. You’d get it if you were as one with nature as I am.” He flips his hair over one shoulder. “I could help you with that, actually. I’ve got elven magics that would do just the thing. I bet I’ve also got something to help you sleep, for the right price.”

This time Grian’s mirth feels genuine. Trust Scar to turn anything into a business venture. “I don’t know. I mean, since when have matadors been known to commune with nature?”

“I am an elf!”

The breeze picks up again, stronger this time, and Scar shivers. No wonder; they’re not in the desert, and he’s still refusing to put on a shirt.

“If you just dressed properly, you wouldn’t be cold all the time,” Grian chides. They’re coming up on the Crastle. If all goes to plan, Bdubs and Cleo will be knocked down a peg, and Grian’s heart will still pump as merrily green as ever. “What was the point of scamming everyone out of their clothes if you’re not even going to wear them?”

“I didn’t scam them,” Scar says, because he’s a liar. He’s even a very good liar, or at least a charming one. “They all received bonafide reputation points, fair and square. Those are very valuable on Monopoly Mountain.” His expression narrows with something a little darker than mischief. “And I’m not cold. How could I be cold when all this red, red blood is pumping through my veins?”

Grian can’t quite muster it up to be intimidated. It’s not that he doesn’t believe him. The violence in Scar’s body language is subtle but very real; the violence in his voice when he says you’re right, I will kill them all, is less subtle and no less real. Scar’s eyes are chips of garnet, his gums bared with every smile. Grian has no way of knowing how long Scar’s affection will outlast his bloodlust. He should cut and run, vow of loyalty be damned. He should look out for himself.

But Grian has seen Scar chase rabbits and stumble into canyons and shiver in the cold because he refuses to dress appropriately. For better or worse, this is the man he’s chosen to follow. There’s no point in fearing him now, so Grian doesn’t. He’s not sure he ever could.

He scoffs, and says to no one in particular, “This is the guy I’ve tied my life to.”

Scar laughs. His face lights up with it, like the shadows had never been there at all.

“You know,” and he nods at the Crastle, “I liked it better when it looked like a toilet s—”

He interrupts himself with a sneeze. Grian slaps a hand over his face. “Put your clothes back on!”

“My clothes?”

Grian blinks behind his hand.

Through his fingers he sees Scar, his ears pointed, his hair long, his smile quizzical and friendly. “But I’m wearing my clothes. You mean like a jacket? The breeze isn’t that strong.”

Grian did not mean like a jacket. Grian is shaking.

Grian does not count the days. This is a deliberate choice, driven by spite. Still, when he returns to the Rift, he knows it can’t have been too long. A month at most.

Memories, desires, dreams, says the Entity smugly.

“I’m not doing this for you,” Grian grumbles. “This is just another experiment. I’m doing this for science. Or something. Shut up.”

If the Entity could whistle innocently, it would. Ugh.

The Rift looms as large and bright as it ever has. It would be a lie to say he hasn’t missed it, just a little. He wishes he didn’t. When he steps close, he can hear strange music, familiar like a memory, or a dream. Shadows ripple beneath the surface, just out of sight.

The dreams have given him an idea. He goes into his inventory and withdraws a bucket, and a coil of rope. He ties the bucket to one end and anchors the other to a boulder. He gives the bucket a few test swings.

It’s just a test. One small experiment. It probably won’t even work. Nothing has worked before.

And past loves, says the Entity. What it means is: you didn’t have a map before.

He casts the bucket into the Rift like a fishing line. It dips in without a sound. He thinks of the desert. He thinks of the heat. He thinks of red eyes and red gums and red blood, hot on his hands, hot on the sand. Grief tears into him. He centers himself on the pain, focuses on nothing else.

Hot sand. Hot blood. Hot hands, shaking. Scar’s body, cold.

In the back of his throat, the Entity buzzes with anticipation. A dial turns in his head. By plucking one, Scar’s voice booms, vibrating the small bones within his ear, you shall reveal—

The bucket meets resistance. It drags and drags. The rope pulls taut, weighed down, and when he finally reels it back, it pops like a cork from a bottle. Grian goes tumbling.

Upside down, he says, “No one saw that, because it didn’t happen.”

He expects the Entity, for all that it doesn’t have eyes, to look away. That would be the polite thing, and however much Grian may not trust it, there are certain behaviors he’s come to expect. Politeness is one of them.

The Entity doesn’t look away. The Entity stares and stares.

He rights himself and shakes out his wings. The bucket lays at his feet, tipped over, overflowing with hot sand.

“Everything is under control,” Grian says, as he ties the rope around his waist. Truth is relative, really, and if he chooses to believe it’s true then it’s true. That’s definitely how things work and he refuses to not believe it. “I have everything under control. All of this is exactly within my calculations. This was always the plan. Definitely.”

His whole body is trembling. He doesn’t know if that’s him or the Entity. There’s a tug under his breastbone like the rope has been tied to his sternum, the other end reeling him into the Rift. Grian follows where it leads. Almost as an afterthought, he closes his eyes.

It’s like getting swallowed by static. It’s like the static has eyes. It’s like getting swallowed by a hundred thousand eyes, and swallowing a hundred thousand thousand eyes, like being watched from without and within. His wings open to shield him from their sight, and they keep opening, and opening, more and more and more. He feels borderless, formless, amorphous. There is no ground beneath him. He has no feet to touch a bottom that isn’t there. The voices are all around him, inside him, coring him out like insects in a corpse. They whisper terrible, wondrous things. They tell him to open his eyes. He doesn’t.

He throws his hands out into the abyss. He thinks of Scar. Red eyes. Red smile. Grief.

In this blind, nowhere place, the memories rise up like a body from dark water. Blurry and distant, then bloated and unfamiliar, until suddenly he can see the horrible rotting scope of it: all of his friends, dead and staying dead. A game he took part in. A viciousness. A bloodlust. Scar on his knees. Scar’s blood in the cracks of his knuckles.

A dry sob catches in the back of his throat. His eyes are screwed so tight his temples ache. It’s important he keeps them closed, and he doesn’t know why.

Hands grab his. Dry, rough and calloused, roped with scars. One hard heave and a body tumbles into his arms. With one hand he hooks his talons into bare flesh, and with the other he yanks on the rope.

He hadn’t thought about the return trip. It turns out he doesn’t need to. Time seems to pass and it doesn’t, and suddenly the Rift returns him just like any normal portal would. Grian’s feet are real and the ground is real and he’s back, in Hermitcraft, his mouth open and panting. His head feels cracked open. The Entity pulses like a migraine in every one of his bones. He can see himself, from the outside, from every angle, like he did before. He can see his own hand, his talons pincushioned into warm flesh. Beads of blood start to well up. He waits for the visions to pass. They don’t.

His eyes open, lid pried from lid, and immediately his vision crowds on top of all the others like an imperfect overlay. His stomach protests with a nauseating roll. He wants to pull back, wants to look at his face. Wants to know that he’s alive. He can barely see, and he can see too much.

He pulls back. Tries to focus on what’s in front of him.

Scar is smiling. “Well, hello there!”

It’s not actually the worst, having a second Scar around. Everyone was surprised, sure, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Grian thought it might be. The general attitude people seem to be taking is that it’s not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened. Sometimes Xisuma has Evil X. Sometimes Welsknight has Helsknight. Sometimes the moon’s big and a cult or three pop up in response. Sometimes the Guppy Geyser launches dead fish hundreds of feet in the air. Sometimes changelings with their faces hatch out of dozens of eggs. Those last few are still active Situations, and at least one of them is weirder than a couple Scars running around. This Scar’s signature salesman’s grin is a little too sharp and his skin is a little too gray and his eyes are a little too red and his pecs a little too out, but in the end, he’s still Scar. Still charming, wheedling, annoying, endearing. Still ridiculously accident-prone. Still wholly, fiercely beloved, despite it all.

Some of the hermits don’t even ask why there’s a second Scar at all. When they do, Grian says he just popped out of the Rift during some routine experiments, which is close enough to true that they don’t question it.

Pearl doesn’t ask. Pearl frowns, and seems to know.

Scar asks, of course, and accepts Grian’s explanation at face value. Maybe he’d have had more questions if he wasn’t so clearly enamored with himself.

“Scar, meet Scar,” Grian had said, fighting not to cringe as the same face in different color palettes stared at itself in shock. In retrospect he thinks it was very silly to worry so much about Scar’s reaction, because it ended up being thoroughly typical.

The shock passed, and one Scar gave the other an appraising, appreciative look. “I look quite dashing, if I do say so myself. I love the hair.”

“Why thank you,” Scar preened. “I like the abs.”

“Everybody does,” said the second Scar, at the same time Grian said, “Put on a shirt!”

The Scars laughed in stereo. Grian groaned, and the groan meant, “You’re safe, you’re safe, I saved you. Finally.”

Scar is alive. That’s all that matters.

Scar is alive, so Grian doesn’t care about any other consequences that he should or should not have seen coming. He doesn’t care that the Entity can speak now. Properly. In words. It often chooses not to, but it can, and knowing that it’s just sitting there, settled low in the bowl of Grian’s skull like a pleased cat, is almost as bad as hearing it. It almost makes him miss Landscaping Your Mind: Chapter One. Almost! Not quite.

He doesn’t care that the doubled vision—or tripled, or quadrupled, or whatever—never really goes away. He can just sort of see himself from every angle now, like switching cameras on a security feed. If not for the headaches it brings on it’s actually kind of useful, from a building perspective. With painstaking concentration, he can even see others, if he shuts his eyes and opens his…Eyes…and just. Pushes his awareness out. He can see Bdubs and Ren conspiring in the definitely-not-a-joint tower. He can see Tango down in the deep dark, creeping around the warden. He can see Gem and Impulse and Pearl on a break for some soup. But that feels a little creepy, and also hurts a lot, and also is maybe kind of alarming, so he doesn’t do that. He prefers to be involved more than standing on the sidelines, anyway.

He doesn’t care that no matter where he is on the server, he can feel the Rift calling to him, like a compass pulling true north. He doesn’t care that the memory of static and eyes is becoming more compelling than disturbing. He doesn’t care that he can now remember, or maybe just know, everything about the world where Scar comes from. The violence and the death and the fun of it. As though it happened to him, even though he knows it didn’t. It’s not just another server—Grian knows other servers. The hermits all moved here from various servers, or at least most of them did, and some take vacations to see family or friends. Mumbo is on an off-server sabbatical right now, Mumboing it up, doing whatever Mumbos do wherever Mumbos do them. But it’s just now occurred to Grian that he doesn’t really. Well, he can’t really.

He doesn’t remember where he was before Hermitcraft, is the thing.

It feels like he’s always been here. He hasn’t. He joined in season six. Hermitcraft is his home; he can’t imagine another, and he doesn’t want to. It’s just a little strange, maybe, that he can’t remember before, and that it never occurred to him as strange until now.

Along the same lines—he thinks it’s along the same lines—there seem to be gaps in some of the other hermits’ memories. Blank spaces. Maybe it’s more accurate to call them little spells of deja vu. The first time Ren saw the new Scar, his hair bristled and he started growling, before he shook it off like it never happened. He thinks Impulse may have mentioned reputation points. He’s sure Bdubs has mentioned the Crastle, before even the second Scar’s arrival. As though all of them have been tapping into these other memories of this other life and not even knowing it. Was Grian doing the same thing? Has he been making inside jokes with Scar—his Scar, Hermitcraft Scar—about the desert, Monopoly Mountain, red lives, blissfully unaware?

And if he did. If he did, what other lives are barely skimming the surface of his consciousness? Does it matter?

It doesn’t, he decides. None of it does. Scar is alive. Scar is safe.

That’s enough.

A few weeks later, he has another dream.

Mumbo’s base is empty.

It’s the middle of the night, and Grian’s head is a star, imploding with the weight of his dreams. With the weight of a sword in his hand. With the weight of his vision pushing outward and outward and outward, all over the server, as far as he can. Mumbo isn’t anywhere. He’s on sabbatical and he’s doing whatever Mumbos do wherever Mumbos do them. Grian knows that. He knows that, except why isn’t he here? Mumbo’s base is empty. Grian’s hands are empty, except that they aren’t, except that there’s a sword in them, and on the end of that sword is—

Grian’s hands are red again. Are they ever not red?

He stops searching when the throbbing pressure of his migraine bursts into ultraviolet light behind his eyes. The thought of returning home to sleep is unfathomable. Instead he crosses the bridge and hangs a right, where he’s greeted by a manufactured desert and a mini Monopoly Mountain, bleached bone white by the moon.

Scar hasn’t drifted far from Grian’s side since he arrived. Despite adapting remarkably well to the whole yoinked-into-a-new-world-to-save-his-life thing, Grian is still the only one he knows, and the only one who knows him. Reconstructing a little piece of home right outside Grian’s base was only natural. He doesn’t mind it, even if it’s fun to pretend that he does.

Scar sleeps like a child, limbs akimbo and face lax. It belies the speed with which he finds his feet, arrow to Grian’s throat, at the first creak of a floorboard.

Scar blinks, the eerie glow to his eyes turning warm. “Grian! Welcome, welcome. What brings you to my humble little mountain?”

“You woke me up with your snoring,” Grian says bluntly. He clacks a talon against the shaft of the arrow still resting against his clavicle. “Where’d you get the bow?”

“Scar gave it to me. He’s really good with a bow and arrow.”

He beams like he’s the one receiving the compliment. He kind of is.

Scar disappears the bow and sits on the bed, patting the space beside him. His pallor doesn’t look as unnatural here; the whole world is muted into moonlight grays and blues, and Scar matches the palette perfectly. Except for the eyes.

In his dreams, Mumbo’s eyes were red.

Grian clambers onto the bed, folding up his legs and resting his chin on his knees. The snoring excuse was a weak one. It doesn’t explain why he’s still here, or why he’s not talking. He could talk to Scar, probably. There hadn’t been a Mumbo in his world—what a terribly strange thought, a world where Grian existed with a Mumbo shaped hole at his side—but the violence and the fear were just the same. Scar is probably the only one he can talk to, especially given the whole. Well. Murdered at Grian’s hands thing.

It’s fine. Grian saved him this time, so it’s fine. Scar doesn’t seem to blame him.

Why doesn’t Scar seem to blame him?

Would Mumbo blame him?

“Sooo,” Scar says, prompting.

He can’t do it. “Good night.”

And with that he flops onto the bed, spreading his wings and taking up as much space as he possibly can. He shuts his eyes and starts to snore.

“What—hey! At least make room for me!”

There’s shoving and snickering, and eventually they settle side by side. Grian feels better, less manic, than he did before. Mumbo still isn’t in his base, but he’ll be back. Of course he will be, he always is. Grian doesn’t need to go down to the Rift. He doesn’t need to reach inside.

“Can I start a war with Ren tomorrow?” Scar asks in the quiet, and Grian snorts.

“No. I don’t want the hassle. And people like the server quests. Besides, the other you is on Ren’s side.”

“Ooh, then we can fight each other! Light and dark, Jedi and Sith.”

“No.”

“But Grian,” Scar whines. “Red Winter part two, electric boogaloo!”

Grian tames his laugh into a put upon sigh. “I’ll think about it. Go to sleep.”

Scar squeals with delight, and then he’s asleep, just like that. Grian rolls his eyes and shuffles closer, reassured by the living warmth of him. He shuts his eyes. Ignores the pull of the Rift. Ignores the urge to push outside himself and cast around for Mumbo one more time.

Mumbo is back from sabbatical.

Only for a little while. Only a hello and then he’s off again. Grian divebombs him hard enough to flatline half of both their hearts.

“Oh gosh.” Mumbo spits out some feathers. “Um. Hello to you too, then?”

“I am being completely normal,” Grian informs him. He pulls back to look Mumbo in the face. The mustache is exactly where he left it, good. “This is how I greet everyone. You must have forgotten since you’ve been gone so long. On an unrelated note, you’re not allowed to leave again ever.”

“Oh. Well then,” says Mumbo.

Eventually Grian lets him get to his feet. They head off for a try at his vault, and Mumbo pulls out a chunk of redstone as he updates Grian on his travels, munching away on it like a radioactive apple. It always turns his eyes red, does redstone. Very red. His eyes are very, very red just now.

“Grian?” Mumbo says crunchily. “You alright?”

“I’m fine. Peachy.” He strangles it out. His hands are shaking.

He doesn’t crack the vault.

“You’re going to do it again.”

Pearl’s arms are crossed over her chest, her elytra restless and rattling behind her. Grian, deliberately mouthless, keeps his expression schooled. The second Scar is Grian’s responsibility, and seeing as the second Scar likes spending time with the first Scar, and seeing as the first Scar is still employing Pearl’s cleaning services, this confrontation was inevitable. Grian hates to think of it as a confrontation, and hates to think of it as something he was avoiding. He doesn’t want to avoid Pearl. He misses her.

Still, he’s a bit unsettled. He knew that she’d suspect. He didn’t think she’d know. Grian doesn’t even know, not for sure. He’s been thinking about it, but he hasn’t decided. He tells himself he hasn’t decided.

Scar One is giving Scar Two a tour of his theme park. They turn and wave, and Grian waves back. It feels a little like chaperoning a playdate.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

Pearl snorts. “Well, that’s just not true. You’re not as good a liar as you think you are, especially when you’re sleep deprived.”

Grian gasps, scandalized. “Pearl. If I were a liar, I’d at least be a good one.”

“You would be. If you weren’t sleep deprived.”

She’s too shrewd by half, is Pearl. And she doesn’t even have that head-splitting knowing behind her eyes to excuse it. Grian doesn’t scowl, but only because he doesn’t have the mouth for it. “Even if I was going to do it again—and I’m not saying I am—” Pearl rolls her eyes, rude, “how on earth did you know?”

“I have my sources,” she says, airily. Her eyes flick up with a little smile. “The moon sees all.”

She chuckles, and then tucks her hair behind her ears with one quick swipe. An agitated tick she’s had as long as he’s known her. It strikes him suddenly that he doesn’t know how long that is. Longer than Hermitcraft, surely. But how long? Does Pearl know?

“I’m just worried,” she says, fast like the admission pains her. It probably does. She doesn’t keep her emotions as close to the chest as Grian does, but it’s a near thing. “I don’t like it, that rock and that gate thing. They’re not right.”

“The Entity and the Rift.” The correction slips out before Grian can catch it. Pearl gives him a look like that proves her point, which it doesn’t. “I don’t see the big deal. Look how well Scar Two turned out. And aren’t you making a big gate thing too?”

Pearl frowns. “You know that’s not the same thing.”

He knows it’s not the same. But doesn’t him knowing mean anything at all? He knows the risks. He’s not jumping into it blindly. He doesn’t think he could jump into anything blindly anymore. Doesn’t that count for something?

“Look, you don’t have to worry. I—” I’ve got everything under control, he doesn’t say. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you?”

Pearl watches him. He struggles not to squirm. It feels wrong, being watched. He’s the one supposed to do the watching.

That thought haunts him for the rest of the day. He has no idea where it came from.

Mumbo stands before him, golden-eyed and wary, at the end of a platform high, high above the ground. Grian’s knuckles are white around his pickaxe. He yearns. He rages and he mourns and he yearns, his insides beat red with it.

“We can still be friends, Mumbo,” he says. His voice curdles at the edges with desperation. He raises his pickaxe.

Except it’s not a pickaxe. It’s a sword. And Mumbo’s eyes aren’t gold, they’re red, and then they’re nothing at all, the light snuffed out—

Grian wakes under the glare of the moon. His head feels cracked open. His heart feels raw. Scar snores softly beside him, and Grian rolls into him and shuts his eyes tight. Outside himself, he looks small, shivering under the canopy of his wings.

Scar is here. Scar is safe. That’s enough.

That. That should be enough. That must be enough. Mustn’t it?

Why should it be? the Entity says.

And really, Grian thinks, some endless, sleepless, Mumboless days later. Why should it be?

Bringing a second Mumbo through the Rift can’t possibly go wrong, Grian tells himself, as he ties a line around his waist and casts himself through the tear in the universe. He shuts his eyes very tight. The more Mumbo the merrier, is definitely how the saying goes!

As absolutely no one could have predicted, bringing a second Mumbo through the Rift goes wrong.

He’s nowhere near as grateful as he should be. In fact, when he catches sight of Grian, still bowled over where the Rift spat him out, Grian begins to suspect that he isn’t grateful at all. His eyes go radioactive, and then he goes and pulls an end crystal from his inventory.

“You,” he says, in a voice that scoops Grian’s guts out of his body. He’s never heard Mumbo sound like that before. “You—you just killed me! I’m supposed to be dead!”

“But you aren’t,” Grian points out. His hands are placating, one eye fixed on the end crystal, even as both are fixed on Mumbo. His familiar charcoal suit is battered and torn, his mustache frayed and his hair askew. His shoulders are heaving, his spine curled, his whole frame warped by violence. His eyes are red and—and hateful.

“So no harm done, really,” Grian says. “You’re welcome.”

“You’re welcome? You’re welcome?” Mumbo’s voice climbs several octaves in record time. His whole body is shaking. The end crystal shakes with him. “Am I supposed to say oh, Grian, I know you killed me, but at least you also kidnapped me! Gee, thanks for that! Is that what I’m supposed to say!”

“Well,” says Grian. It is admittedly not the most well-advised well he’s ever said. The air cracks. Mumbo’s mustache bristles.

“Where am I?” he shrieks. “I’m still red, aren’t I? What happens if I die now? What have you done? What have you done?”

The end crystal explodes in Grian’s face before he can offer an answer. He kind of doubts Mumbo was expecting one, anyway.

He wakes in his bed, with the ghosts of burnt flesh and fabric and hair clinging to him like the dregs of a nightmare. It’s—it’s not one of his best wake ups, to be sure. For a second he is sure he is somewhere else, and he is sure he is red, and a wave of violence boils up and overcomes him, drags him down in the undertow. He wants to find Mumbo and he wants to take him apart, even though he doesn’t even though he does, and it’s drowning him, he’s drowning—

His eyes open. Then his Eyes open, and he Sees, and he remembers. He shuts his eyes and he shuts his Eyes. He is Grian, and he lives in Hermitcraft. He is only Grian and there is only Hermitcraft. That’s all.

By the time he gets back to the Rift Mumbo is gone, as are all his things. He’ll need to start from scratch. Unharmed, the Rift pulses on, and the entity murmurs.

“Oh, shut up,” Grian says. In the distance, an explosion vibrates the earth.

So having a second Mumbo around is. Hm.

Well, it’s not terrible. Not as smooth a transition as Scar’s, but definitely not terrible. He’s not as amicable as his counterpart, twice as anxious, and so much angrier. His raging trust issues and unchecked bloodlust make for a dangerously unpredictable combination. But it could be worse. Hermits can put up with a lot, but wanton destruction of dearly crafted builds is a bridge too far, and for the most part Mumbo does not cross it. Or, he does, but he usually comes back to help rebuild, less out of guilt or duty than the fact that all Mumbos across all universes are builders. This instinct seems to take precedence over even the red.

It helps that the Mumbo-drought has left the entire server jonesing for some Mumbo, and thus that much more willing to forgive all Mumbo-based offenses. Helpful for Mumbo, too; though he was suspicious of the hermits’ unfailing patience and good-natured pranks at first, they’ve been wearing him down, slow and steady. He smiles more. Laughs more. His guard stays up, but his hackles aren’t so quick to rise. Cautiously, painstakingly, tender like something green and new, Mumbo is putting down roots. Making connections. It seems that his relationship with every single hermit has in some way improved.

Except for Grian, of course.

And that’s fine! That’s fine. Of course it’s fine. Understandable, given the memories they share. Even if Grian saved him this time. Even if Mumbo never seems to be satisfied, no matter how many times he blows Grian up. Even if Grian always refrains from retaliation, which Mumbo doesn’t seem to appreciate at all. It’s fine that he’s getting along with everyone else. It’s great! So great, in fact, that Grian acquiesces to Mumbo’s desire to be alone. He keeps an Eye on him at all times and uses that to steer clear of his path.

And keeping an Eye on him is something he can do now without consequence. If there’s any bright side to be had, it’s that. Ever since he returned from the Rift his splitting headaches have died down. So that’s good.

Except. Except he’s not sure it is good, actually? Because it feels less like the weird Knowing has ebbed at all and more like his body has just adapted to it. Changed, in some irrevocable, indefinable way. And it’s less like the weird Seeing and Knowing is even weird anymore and more like it’s natural and comfortable and correct, in Grian’s skull and under Grian’s skin and behind his eyes. It feels right. Which feels wrong. Or it should feel wrong, and Grian is maybe a little itty bitty tiny bit worried that it doesn’t.

“This is your fault, Scar,” Grian decides.

“What’s who’s fault now?” Scar asks, distracted. He looks like a hound, stalking around the Entity’s spindly legs, teeth bared in what could generously be called a smile, head jerking sharply by the nose like he’s sniffing for blood on the wind. Or redstone. Mumbo has taken to setting redstone traps, recently, to compensate for Grian’s avoidance. Grian has to give him points for proactivity. The traps themselves are blatantly obvious, baited with transparent attempts at reverse psychology that Grian nevertheless falls for because, in the end, Mumbo is Mumbo and he knows Grian too well. It might be comforting if each trap weren’t so sincere in its malintent. Grian’s lost his life to silly Mumbo shenanigans before, and vice versa. It was only last season that Mumbo juiced Grain’s soul from his body and ate it.

But Mumbo has never wanted to hurt him before. Not really.

In response, Scar sticks closer to Grian than ever, hyper-protective in a vicious, lovable way. He’s just about the only one on the server who hasn’t warmed up to Mumbo, which Mumbo, still very much red, doesn’t mind at all. And in response to that, Grian has been forced to out his own vicious hyper-protectiveness to keep Scar safe from all the traps. He still doesn’t know what would happen if one of them died here. He’s tried asking the Entity, but now that it’s got them here it doesn’t seem to care. It’s all very dumb and very much Scar’s fault.

“The Mumbo Situation,” Grian explains, emphasizing the capital letters. He rolls his talons against one metallic, insect-like leg. They’re safe for now: Mumbo is busy trapping Monopoly Mountain, despite knowing exactly where they are. He doesn’t seem to like standing next to the Entity, or the Rift. In fact Grian Knows he doesn’t. Scar doesn't either, but he endures to stand near Grian.

“It isn’t Pearl’s fault.” Pearl warned him against it all. She frowns whenever she sees him now, but she doesn’t say I told you so. Somehow that’s worse. “It’s absolutely not my fault.” Mostly because he doesn’t want it to be. Maybe it could be Mumbo’s fault, for insisting on dying at his hands in another world and thereby forcing himself to be dragged through the Rift in the first place, but blaming it on him is too cruel even for Grian. It’s all around more comfortable and reliable to blame Scar when things go wrong.

“So obviously it’s your fault,” he concludes. “And now there are two of them, all the easier to split the blame.”

“Oh, well, obviously.” Scar rolls his eyes. “Well, allow me to offer a remedy to this problem I so obviously created. You could let me kill him.”

“Scar.”

“Or, you could talk to him.” This said much too knowingly. Not Knowingly, just knowingly; knowingly the way that Scar knows Grian. “Though I’d rather you just let us kill each other. I’m sure we’ll be fine. I’ve been practicing my Hawkeye!”

He fires a quick shot right past Grian’s ear, and Grian rolls his eyes, and his Eyes, for good measure. He hasn’t told Scar why he can’t just talk to Mumbo. Given the things that they don’t talk about, it’s probably not hard to guess.

The things they don’t talk about.

“Did you let me kill you, Scar?” he asks, just like that.

In the process of knocking another arrow, Scar goes still. Before, Grian had been too guilty to bring it up. He still is, but the question has been bubbling up in him, gnawing at him. It could be that Mumbo’s wrath has brought it back to the forefront of Grian’s mind. It could be that the growing desire to see and know have finally outweighed his natural inclination to avoid the painful and sincere. A little of both, probably. Grian’s palms are dripping in red. He always sees it, even if he can’t See it.

“No,” Scar says. Red eyes meet Grian’s steadily. “I tried to, but you refused. You said it had to be fair. Which, come on, I always am. I mean, they don’t call me Unfair Cheating Bad Times With Scar, do they? They call me Fair and Reasonable Good Times With Scar.”

He’s such a good liar. He always has been, every version of him. If Grian’s smile is wobbly, if his eyes are tight and damp at the corners, Scar doesn’t mention it. “Fair and Reasonable Good Times With Scar doesn’t really roll off the tongue.”

Scar spreads out his hands, very reasonably. “The Fair and Reasonable is silent.”

Grian laughs. Later, when his back is turned, Scar fires another arrow with a triumphant shout of Hawkeye! Grian lets it find its mark, even though he Sees it coming.

Grian does not talk to Mumbo. Ultimately, what happened in the other world with Scar was different from what happened in the other other world with Mumbo. No matter what Scar says, Grian knows that their ending, terrible and red as it was, was a choice. There was something like loyalty there. Something like understanding, something like love. If Grian feels guilt, then he feels guilt alone; Scar offered a life and Grian took it. Scar regrets nothing so simple as that, and holds nothing against him.

There was no loyalty with Mumbo. That’s the problem.

Graciously, considerately, and purely for Mumbo’s sake and not because Grian is afraid to confront him, he continues to give Mumbo his space. Since Mumbo is spending more and more of his time with other hermits, this means giving them space too. Not ideal, but fine; he hasn’t felt compelled to be as involved as he used to, content instead to keep tabs on everyone in the way only he can.

He knows it should upset him that he’s crossed this line he set for himself. It upsets him more that it doesn’t.

The Entity whispers to him, a familiar and tempting lull that he’s grown more than used to by now. It wants him to go back to the Rift. He wants to go back to the Rift. He resists. First of all because the Entity wants him to so badly, and Grian is a spiteful creature by nature, intent on proving that he’s in control no matter the evidence to the contrary. Secondly because whenever he considers it, he sees the crescent-moon frown of Pearl’s mouth, and his resolve sours. Thirdly—most concerningly, maybe—because with the complete, fulfilling sense of knowing, comes the knowledge that something is coming. Something more. Something different.

You could be different, the Entity whispers. You could be more.

And he could be. He feels it all inside him, a seed waiting to burst. A button waiting to be pressed. A doorway—a gate—a rift—waiting to be crossed, and he would be…he doesn’t know what he would be. More. So much more.

But not at Hermitcraft’s expense. Not at the expense of his friends.

As though you haven’t done things at the expense of your friends before, and again he sees it, a sharp heel turn, Mumbo and a bloody sword. He doesn’t even think that traitorous little thought was the Entity—it was just him.

He distracts himself from the Entity and the Rift and the foreboding unknowable thing he senses on the horizon by exploring the server instead. Hermitcraft unfurls before his Eyes, sprawling and beautiful, a monument to love and creation. The Wonder Park. Decked Out Two. Impulse’s mall. Gem’s fortress. Jevin’s mountainside clocktower. He spends hours and hours and hours just watching it all bloom. The biomes and his friends and the mobs, who always seem to feel his Eyes on them, living their lives. It’s home. It’s lovely. Hermitcraft is lovely, and he loves it dearly.

That love has never felt so small.

Grian has a third dream. He wishes he was surprised.

He stumbles to the Rift as soon as he wakes. The mouth of the cave gapes open, dark and hungry. The Entity whispers, hungrier.

He steps forward. Pearl drops in front of him.

Grian squawks. He stumbles back to see Pearl laughing, snorting and pitiless, and even through the hot flush of humiliation and annoyance he feels himself grinning. Pearl’s laughter is infectious that way.

“Pearl. What brings you here this time of night?” He’s trying for friendly instead of accusatory, but he doesn’t think he succeeds. Pearl, unoffended, does not back down.

“Oh, you know. Stroll by moonlight. And yourself?”

“The Rift,” Grian says. It’s not like he can lie, caught standing at the mouth of the cavern. “Routine maintenance. Just checking to see that everything is on the up and up.”

Pearl hums, her smile fixed on her face. Then she says, “Who is it this time?”

Grian’s teeth clench. His name is BigB. In a world where fate leashed two people together without consent, BigB was a choice. Someone secret and kind and his. He died in a moment of Grian’s thoughtless anger. Don’t they always?

“No one you know,” he says, and that—that is a lie. He’s sure of it. It doesn’t matter. He tries to step past her and she steps with him. “Always great to see you, Pearl, but I’m on a bit of a tight schedule.”

“Don’t do it.”

It’s not an order and it’s not a plea. Grian glances past her into the dark, following the tunnel with his Eyes to the Rift’s glow.

“Why not?” he challenges, losing patience. “Do you not like the shiny new Scar and Mumbo I brought?”

“Of course I do. They’re fun, and they certainly make good business for me.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “But you’ve changed ever since they came. Something about this whole thing is off, and I don’t like that you’re refusing to acknowledge it.”

Grian says, “I have everything under control.”

It’s out before he can stop it. He doesn’t even believe himself.

“Grian,” Pearl says, disappointment heavy in her voice. And pity. All of Grian’s feathers bristle.

“I do,” he snaps. “Just because you have a cleaning service doesn’t mean you have to mop up after everyone’s messes that—that only you perceive. Honestly, it’s getting kind of annoying.”

He knows he’s being unfair. He knows he’s being cruel. But he finds it difficult to care when BigB is waiting for him and this argument seems so small.

Pearl’s face pinches with resentment. “I’m sorry, do you think I enjoy this? You think I want to be the only voice of reason holding you back from—from I don’t know what? Because I don’t! I don’t like to be the responsible one, Grian, I like fun and mischief and chaos just as much as you.”

“Then stop!” Grian snaps. “I don’t need you to, I don’t want you to, you don’t want you to, so why don’t you just let it go?”

“Because I’m your friend.” Pearl ducks to meet his eyes, but even then Grian barely sees her. There’s so much more to focus on, so many places he’d rather be than here in this moment. He’s got an eye on Scar, an eye on Mumbo, a dozen eyes on the Entity with its restless scuttly legs and a hundred eyes on the Rift, calling him. From half a world away, he sees Pearl frown, right in front of him.

“Grian. Grian. You’re not even—look at me!”

So Grian looks. “What?”

Pearl startles under his Eyes, visibly unnerved. Vicious, detached satisfaction purrs along Grian’s spine, and Pearl’s disquiet passes. Indignance rushes up over her face, and hurt, like moonrise.

“Are you still my friend?” she asks.

All of Grian’s Eyes fall shut.

“Of course I am,” he says. There is just Pearl and Grian. No eyes, no Entity. He feels winded. “Of course I am.”

Pearl nods shortly. “Then be my friend. Will you listen to me?”

Grian swallows hard. He does not open his Eyes. He nods.

“You’re different. You don’t sleep. You haven’t spent any time on your builds, or your shop. You don’t hang out with us anymore, you don’t pull pranks. All you do is stare at us.”

“Everyone is different,” Grian protests, even as his talons puncture neat little holes into the elbows of his sweater. “Impulse is a dwarf. Cleo is a gorgon. Xisuma is bones.”

“That’s not the same. You know it isn’t. For them it was a choice, it was harmless, it was, just— Hermitcraft. This isn’t Hermitcraft. This is, is…”

She casts around for the right word. Grian thinks to offer one: Different. Other. Insidious. Evil. Evil may be a bit strong, actually, but the truth of it—that the Entity is coldly apathetic to the server and its inhabitants, and that Grian may be following suit—is just as frightening. Maybe more so.

“Familiar,” Pearl says, at last, and—

A sea of static rushes in where Grian’s thoughts should be. The Entity sits at the bottom of it all, cold and silent and heavy like a stone. Familiar. Familiar.

“Familiar,” he echoes.

Pearl nods, and they stand there in the silence of that. The shadow of the cavern seems bigger and darker upon them. Grian wants to step back into the moonlight and he doesn’t. He wants to step past Pearl to the Rift and he doesn’t. Familiar. Like a button he’s already pressed. Like a Rift he’s already crossed. Like a door he already opened, and closed, and locked tight himself.

“Grian,” Pearl says, “did you know you haven’t blinked once in this entire conversation?”

He didn’t. He tries to. Just shut his eyes once for a second. Less than a second. Just a blink. He can’t do it.

“He’s waiting for me,” he says, a final wasted effort. “I keep dreaming of him. I hurt him. I have to—he’s waiting for me.”

“I think there’s someone else waiting for you,” Pearl says, gentle and firm. “Shouldn’t you go see him first?”

And when Grian can’t think of an answer that doesn’t fill him with shame, she steps close, closes her hands around his elbows. She pries his talons from the fabric with care. Her touch is warm and grounding.

“Take some time away, really away. Let me help. Come see me when you have those dreams. I’ll take you on jobs, reacquaint you with the rest of the server. I could use an assistant at the cleaning service.”

“I’d be a poor assistant,” Grian warns.

“You absolutely would.” And she grins. “That’s half the fun, isn’t it?”

She walks them backwards, out into the moonlight. With every step the Entity’s voice grows louder in its displeasure, until it’s clamoring over itself and all of Grian’s fine hairs and feathers have been raised.

He is waiting for you, it says, over and over. We are waiting for you.

But Pearl says, “Come on. We need sleep. I get even weirder than you without it, trust me.”

And Grian is here. He is on Hermitcraft. He is with his friend, and he is nowhere else, and he is no one else. The voices swell inside him until he’s squeezing her hand so hard he’s sure his talons are pricking her flesh, but she never complains.

She leads him back to her base. He steers her to avoid the mobs. They hold each other close.

It gets worse before it gets better. Grian figured as much.

He dreams of it through his eyes, and then he dreams of it through BigB’s, and then Ren’s—Ren, his friend, who he never even gave a second thought. He hears his own howling laughter. Over and over again he hears it, first when he sleeps, and then when he doesn’t. Over and over again he sees it. Over and over again he feels it, which is the worst, a red tide of bloodlust and glee drowning out the guilt and horror.

He visits Pearl a few times. Then he visits Pearl a lot. Sometimes he brings Scar Two along, when he can’t bear the thought of leaving him distant and defenseless. Pearl definitely wasn’t expecting that, but she rolls with it gamely. They have big slumber parties, complete with much too violent pillow fights, and talk about inviting Mumbo and Impulse and Scar One for a proper Boatem sleepover. Their Mumbo isn’t back yet, and this Mumbo wants nothing to do with it if Grian’s there, but Impulse says yes.

In the day Pearl makes good on her promise to bring Grian along on jobs, and Grian makes good on his warning to be more of a nuisance than a help. She makes an effort to get him involved again, which is…harder than it should be. The part of him that is purely Hermitcraft Grian—a smaller, more atrophied part than he’d like to admit—wants to. He misses his friends, if only distantly. The rest of him rails against the idea of action over observation. The Entity, a constant, clanging presence that lives in his whole body now instead of just his mind, echoes this sentiment. It’s so loud and so insistent and so displeased that Grian feels like his body shouldn’t be able to pen it all in; he should be having migraines, he should be bleeding from the eyes and nose and mouth, he should be bursting apart. Whatever the Rift did to his physiology doesn’t let him. There’s no pain, just discomfort. It goes on so long that it becomes less intimidating than droning.

Once, Grian makes the mistake of a bitter, half-thought-through comment: “You know, I liked you better when you had Scar’s voice. This doesn’t make me want to do what you want! It just makes me think you’re creepy!”

The Entity takes this to heart, and starts channeling its voice through a filter of different friends, known by Grian from this world and others.

In the voice of a friend, again and again: You were never meant to be here. You were only ever meant to ∴ᔑℸ ̣ ᓵ⍑.

That alone might be bearable if not for the condensed pit of dread in his stomach, a black hole, only ever growing darker and denser. Something terrible is coming, still. With each day Grain becomes more certain that whatever it is would have already happened if Pearl hadn’t stopped him that night.

So when she tries to involve him, he makes an effort. Through gritted teeth and spite, he forces himself into a proper poor citizen in Ren’s kingdom. The Soup Group commits to villainy, and Grian commits to retaliation. He pulls shulker-based pranks, and then warden-based. He plays Total Chaos with Cub. He bops around in Joe’s pinball machine.

It’s exhausting. It’s a slog. Draining in a way it’s never been before, unnatural and uncomfortable.

But it’s fun, too. And time passes. And it gets easier.

On Mumbo’s next visit, Grian feels altogether calm and much more normal. He only takes out three hearts with his gliding tackle, squeezing so hard he hears an audible and perfectly Mumbo oof!

“I guess this is just a thing now,” Mumbo grunts, struggling to his feet. Grian scrabbles up his torso to perch on his shoulders, talons curling carefully into Mumbo’s suit. The fabric is singed in places; Grian doesn’t question it. Mumbo takes a stumbling step forward and Grian tuts at his shaky knees.

They go and say hi to the other hermits, acting as though nothing is amiss. To their credit, the hermits match Grian and Mumbo’s energy, refusing to acknowledge the looming avian on Mumbo’s shoulders. It’s fun and silly. Speaking to them is starting to feel normal again, his affection for them acute rather than distant.

As they’re crossing from Impulse’s base to Gem’s, Mumbo finally brings it up. “So what’s this about a second me, then?”

Grian carefully does not grimace. He does knead his talons into Mumbo’s suit. “You’ve heard about that, huh.”

“I’ve met him, actually. First person I saw when I got back, nearly jumped clean out of my skin. Then I thought, well, that’s very strange, but not the strangest thing to have happened. Neither of us knew what to do. It was getting pretty awkward, so I said how do, and he tried to melt me in lava. Up and vanished by the time I put myself out.”

Grian knew as much. He Saw it, just after he Knew of Mumbo’s return. “That sounds like him.”

“So. What’s, uh, what’s the reason for that? For another me with a less groomed mustache? The others said you know the most about it.”

“He came from the Rift.” Grian scuttles down from Mumbo’s shoulders and says nothing more about it. “The server likes him.”

“You know, I noticed that? Felt a bit replaced, honestly.”

“If you don’t want to be replaced, then you shouldn’t go on holiday,” Grian says matter of factly. His mood picks up like a light breeze. “I support you and everything that makes you happy, but you have to accept that there are consequences to your actions, Mumbo.”

Mumbo sighs. “Of course. How silly of me to take a break for the first time in ten years.”

“Exactly. I don’t know what else you were expecting.”

He grins, and all the noise quiets in his head when Mumbo grins back. For just a moment he is entirely, wholly present. Here with his Mumbo. His friend.

“Everyone really does seem to like him,” Mumbo muses, turning to squint at Gem’s elven castle, shimmering brilliantly under the sun. “I think he’s rather rude.”

“Thank you!” Grian throws his arms up. “He is rude. He won’t stop trying to blow me up, Mumbo, and he’s so creative about it! So much redstone! The last one was like a Rube Goldberg machine of death. The fact that I always see it coming makes no difference at all because he knows I can’t resist a trap that says THIS IS A TRAP YOU WILL NEVER ESCAPE, ALSO I HATE YOU on it.”

“Hate you?” Mumbo says, focusing on entirely the wrong thing. Or the right one. “What do you mean, hate you?”

“He just doesn’t like me, is all.” He turns from Mumbo’s gaze to see that Gem has emerged from her castle, waving both arms high above her head, auburn hair shining just as brightly as her build. Grian waves back, and tries to remember the last time he visited her. “Where he came from, we weren’t really friends.”

“Oh. Well that’s offputting.”

Grian hums. Tries to recapture that elusive feeling of being one person in one moment, here with the Mumbo who trusts him and not the one who is constructing another elaborate way to kill him at his base as they speak.

“Have you tried talking to him?” Mumbo asks.

“He doesn’t want to talk to me. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.” He doesn’t need to Know this to know it.

“Well, clearly he wants something to do with you if he keeps leaving traps for you. If he really wanted nothing to do with you, he’d just have nothing to do with you. But that doesn’t sound like me. Or, er, him. Us?” He thinks about it for a second, then suggests, “Just annoy him into forgiving you. You’re good at that.”

Grian makes an affronted noise, flapping a wing into Mumbo’s face until he’s spitting out feathers. He thinks of Scar’s advice. He thinks of Pearl’s.

Gem is rushing down to meet them now. Grian conjures a mouth to smile at her.

“If it makes you feel better,” Mumbo says, knocking their shoulders, “I don’t think there’s any version of me that could hate you. Not really.”

“I beg to differ,” Grian grumbles.

It does make him feel better, though. Just a little bit.

Suddenly Mumbo is pressed uncomfortably close, flush from shoulder to hip. His head drops on top of Grian’s as Grian struggles not to overbalance.

“What. What’s happening. What are you doing.”

“Hm,” says Mumbo, a content little hum. “That was my hug noise.”

Grian laughs so hard he trips and falls flat on his face. Mumbo is chuckling above him.

“Oh no,” Grian yelps into the grass, “oh no, you’re right, that was so uncomfortable! I hated that!”

“Now you see how it feels,” Mumbo says primly.

Gem reaches them, full of concern. They have trouble explaining what’s happening, interrupting themselves with giggles, but soon enough she’s laughing too, just because her friends are.

Grian dreams again about BigB and Ren. Instead of finding his way to the Rift, or to Scar, or to Pearl, he finds his way to a red-eyed Mumbo Jumbo.

He’s mining deep in the earth, though it’s not clear for what. He could be gathering resources for a build, or for his next trap. He could be excising the crimson hunger for violence inside him in the simplest and most efficient way possible. Grian folds himself into cramped tunnels and follows dead end after dead, which quickly becomes unbearable. He bears it. He’s been trying to distance himself from his Eyes lately. Every time he wants to open them and be done with it, he thinks of Pearl instead, and then he takes a deep breath and tries another tunnel.

Eventually he hears the pickaxe ringing, and follows that sound all the way to a familiar dusty suit. He stares at Mumbo’s back for half a minute, before he gives up on a tactful greeting and just says, “Hi.”

Mumbo jumps so high his head bonks the top of his tunnel. He spins around, pickaxe raised, and pauses. Scowls.

“Oh. You.”

“Me,” says Grian, with a smile that he hopes is more cheeky than sheepish. Mumbo ignores him. Grian can see the flash of his inventory, and he has to clench his Eyes shut to keep from glaring. Nothing happens. Either Mumbo doesn’t have what he was looking for or he does, and has thought better of using it in a narrow tunnel liable to collapse on them both. The inventory disappears. The pickaxe is back in his hand, brandished at Grain’s chest.

“What do you want? I’m busy, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I have,” says Grian. “I thought we could…have a chat. Or something.”

“I don’t want to chat with you. Go away.”

He turns to resume mining, pointedly, only to whip around again, a glint of paranoia in his eye. Grian can’t say he’s surprised that Mumbo doesn’t want to leave his back exposed.

“Well? I told you to leave.”

“You did. And I will.” Grian draws a pickaxe of his own, and ignores the way Mumbo tenses all over. “But I need some resources too, so I’ll just leave by mining in…this direction.”

He mines in the same direction, only a few blocks over. Grian can feel Mumbo’s scandalized rage through the earth, and has the feeling he’d have a pickaxe through his ribs by now if he were any closer.

Through the meager wall separating them: “Well—well! These are my tunnels, and I’m not going to stop mining just because you’re being deliberately obtuse, I’ll tell you that!”

The ringing resumes, much more aggressively than before. Grian keeps a quiet parallel pace. After twenty minutes, he ventures, “This is nice.”

“No it isn’t,” Mumbo grunts, muffled.

“Maybe not for you, but I think it is. It’s nice spending time together.”

The block just ahead of him bursts into rubble, and suddenly Mumbo is there, the gloom illuminated by furious red.

“It is not nice spending time together,” he seethes. “What are you doing here? Are you taunting me? Threatening me? Is this some kind of trap? What do you want?”

Grian breathes through his nose. He squares his shoulders and forces a mouth that wants to hide into existence. “I want to know if we can be friends again.”

The pickaxe goes slack in Mumbo’s grip. Grian can hear his own warped, desperate echo, we can still be friends, we can still be friends. He wonders if Mumbo can hear it too. He’s just staring, all the hatred surprised right out of him. Then he scoffs. Then he laughs.

It’s a mean, hurting laugh. Wholly Mumbo, and nothing like Mumbo at all. Grian wishes he’d just thrown an end crystal. “Friends? Is that all? No, Grian. No, we can’t be friends.”

Stung, Grian asks, “Why not? We were friends before.”

“Before?” The laughter cuts out like an axe falling. “Before what, Grian? Before you killed me? Turned on me and drove a sword through my chest, when you weren’t even red? I didn’t do that to you. When our positions were reversed, I didn’t do that to you. You had us believing the Southlands were a team, that you and I were a team, but we weren’t. It was all just you, doing whatever you had to to win your game, as always. Just you, pulling me into a new world without my permission. Just you asking to be friends again, even though you still haven’t apologized for any of it!”

Grian feels that like a kick to the gut. He opens his mouth, but Mumbo isn’t done.

“And! And even if I could get past all that, even if I wanted to, which I very much do not, mind you, how could I? How could I ever trust you again? I’m like this because of you, and like this I can’t trust anyone!”

“Bdubs trusted Etho,” Grian says, and knows it’s a misstep as soon as it comes out.

“He did! He did, and look where that got him! Killed, by you!”

Grian wracks his brain. His other brain, with the memories of a life that isn’t his. “Uh—Scott and Pearl, they trusted each other. And Scott won!”

“Pish,” says Mumbo, harshly, flapping his hands. It makes the pickaxe wheel dangerously, and Grian has to duck out of the way. “You can’t go around naming outliers until one of them fits your argument. The point is, I can’t trust you, now can I?”

“I mean,” Grian starts, more meekly than he intends, “I did save you. That deserves some trust points, I think.”

Mumbo shriek-laughs. “Oh, do you! Do you think! After you kidnapped me from my world with no way back, do you think you deserve some trust points?”

“Why would you want to go back?” Grian demands, guilt bubbling over into frustration. His wings rattle and resettle. There’s no space for it in the tunnel. “You’d have died!”

“Only because you killed me! And you didn’t even feel bad about it, is the thing! I watched you!”

Grian winces at that word, watched. The voices inside him swell and subside. Mumbo doesn’t seem to notice. He throws up his hands, his anger frothing, his eyes desperate.

“I watched you, after, we all did, and you didn’t—you didn’t even think about me, did you? You murdered me, and you said “not my fault, Mumbo started it!” and you moved right along.”

Mumbo heaves for breath, his shoulders hitching, his face twisted up with hurt. He looks wretched and terribly small. Grian wants to reach out and touch him, steady a hand against his chest and tell him to breathe. He thinks that if he did, he’d get a pickaxe through his throat. He wants to anyway.

Slowly, Mumbo’s hitching breath evens out. Exhaustion comes in alongside the anger. He says, “You just—” and then he says nothing else, the rest lost in one heavy sigh, and a halfhearted wave of the hand.

Grian stares at the ground. He scratches the inside of his ankle with his other foot. He opens his mouth and closes it. He opens his mouth and tries again.

“I did feel bad about it, you know,” he says. It feels anticlimactic, and antithetical, being this forthright. He feels exposed. “I thought about you all the time. I missed you.”

Mumbo scuffs his pickaxe into the ground. “...I don’t believe you.”

Grian exhales. Nods. Raises up his pickaxe and starts to mine.

“...What are you even looking for?” Mumbo clutches his pickaxe close and narrows his eyes. “I’m mining here. You should mine someplace else.”

Grian ignores him. “You said this might be a trap earlier. Sorry to say it, Mumbo, but you were right.” Mumbo goes very still. Grian keeps mining. “Well, less of a trap and more of a trick. Coming down here to talk to you, I wasn’t actually trying to mend bridges. I was trying to distract you from finding my diamond stash.”

“Diamond stash?” Mumbo looks intrigued, despite himself. “You’re tweaking my ear.”

“I’m not. I hid them down here ages ago, can’t let you go and become the richest Hermit twice over. I’ll show you, look at this.”

He mines. He keeps mining. Mumbo stares, his eyes blinking wider and wider.

“You best be looking,” Grian huffs. He changes direction. No diamonds appear, and he changes direction again. “You want to know where they are, Mumbo, I’ll tell you, they’re right— here!”

He decimates a chunk of dirt with a triumphant cry. This reveals more dirt.

Mumbo stares. Grian stares. Mumbo snorts.

He smothers it right away, but Grian heard it. He did. “Did you just laugh, Mumbo?”

“I didn’t,” Mumbo says. “Actually I did, but only because I actually hid my diamonds right here.”

He whacks a couple blocks. He whacks a couple more. A giddiness expands in Grian’s chest.

“Funny you should say that, Mumbo, because while you were busy joking around, I actually stored my diamonds right here!”

“Oh did you, did you Grian, well we’ll see who has the last laugh when I reveal my diamonds right here!”

Grian guffaws through his next declaration. Mumbo giggles through his. They continue mining in random directions, shouting right here! right here! until Mumbo’s pickaxe sings against gemstone in the breathless moments between speech.

They stare, dumbfounded, at the cheery bluish glow of diamonds.

Grian’s laughter shrieks out of him. “You didn’t say it! Oh my god! You didn’t say it!”

“I didn’t say it! It happened again!”

Grian drops back onto his rear, clutching at his stomach with one arm and pointing at Mumbo with the other. Mumbo laughs so hard he folds in half, pickaxe wedged between two diamonds, forgotten.

The mirth persists for a few seconds longer than the laughter does, like the afterimage of a photograph, before it fades too. Grian sits, catching his breath. Mumbo crouches. He smooths his fingers beneath his eyes, then his mustache. It’s still bristly like the end of a broom, and Grian’s chest floods with fondness and grief.

“I’m sorry, Mumbo,” he says. “I’m really really sorry.”

Mumbo’s whole face pinches up. The hand still hovering over his mouth returns to his eyes, rubbing harshly, before dropping between his knees. He turns his face to the side. Takes a shuddering breath.

“I don’t forgive you.”

Grian swallows. Nods. Swallows and nods again.

“But,” Mumbo adds. He stands, brushes off his knees, and goes to retrieve his pickaxe. “I suppose you can keep mining here for the resources you need, if there ever were any. I doubt I could chase you off anyway. As long as you don’t bother me. Or try to kill me.”

Grian’s breath catches high in his throat. “I can absolutely guarantee I will not try to kill you. I can’t say the same about being a bother. You’re asking for my bread and butter here.”

“Grian.”

“Yes, yes, fine.” He mimes zipping his lips. For good measure, he disappears his mouth. Mumbo smirks and pretends he didn’t.

For the rest of the day they mine in silence, only broken by the scrape of their pickaxes and their softly muttered, softly laughed whispers of right here.

Time passes. Things get better.

With Mumbo, with the other hermits, with the Entity. He still hears it but the longer he stays away the quieter it grows, like a volume dial slowly clicking down. The longing for the Rift dilutes and dissolves. The dread never fades, but without the constant murmuring pressure behind his eyes it becomes bearable.

And then one morning he wakes up, still in the dark, still under the moon, from a sleep that was utterly dreamless.

The whole day, the Entity is silent. Not even a whisper. Not even a hint of static.

“I guess that could be a good thing?” Pearl says, when he tells her. The strain in her smile says otherwise.

Still, he says, “Could be,” and smiles back.

It happens the next day. Like a hand reaching into the black pit in his stomach, or out of it, closing around his spine and yanking. He’s flying at the time. The pull is so sharp and so sudden it sends him plummeting into Jevin’s clocktower.

The respawn dumps him back in his bed, and all he hears is static. His vision is blurred and his balance skewed, and he has to rely on his Eyes to lead him back to the Rift. It feels like the fist around his spine is pulling him there.

He meets Pearl, Scar, and Mumbo at the cavern. The static rises and swells and he stumbles; Scar catches him. “Whoa, there! Steady, steady, I gotcha.”

“Something—” He grits his teeth against a crashing wave of static. “Something’s happening.”

“Something happened.” Mumbo rocks forward a step, hands half raised. His expression is torn between bitterness and concern. “What did you do?”

Grian shakes his head to clear it. It feels like moving through syrup. His Eyes go haywire before settling restlessly. “Nothing. The Rift did this all on its own.”

“I felt it,” Pearl says, clutching at her arms, eyes wide. “How did I feel it? You lot, it makes sense, but why me?”

“You said it felt familiar, didn’t you?” It’s more of a question than an answer, but Grian’s head is too full to think of another one. He steadies himself on Scar’s shoulder. “Come on. We need to see what we’re up against.”

Pearl’s mouth tightens, but she doesn’t protest. The four of them descend, sticking close, as the song of the Rift grows louder. Grian wonders if they can hear it. He wonders if they can hear the deafening, deafening static, if they can feel the embrace of the eyes.

“I hate this place,” Mumbo whispers, just as the Rift comes into view.

It’s larger than the last time Grian saw it, and far more menacing. Standing in front of it, so small by comparison, is Etho.

All of Grian’s eyes blink at once. The static recedes. “Etho?”

Etho is leaning his weight on one leg, turning his head this way and that to take in his surroundings. He doesn’t answer at first, and the silence is edging on uncomfortable when he finally says, “Hey, guys. Neat place.”

Grian doesn’t understand. As suddenly as they came all the voices are gone, leaving nothing but that marble of dread inside him, just as before. But it’s only Etho. Only Etho standing very still. Only Etho bathed in the light of the Rift, the mask over his mouth a void, the silver of his hair painted a lurid violet.

“Etho,” Grian says, slow and cautious, “are you alright? Should I call Iskall? Or Bdubs?”

Etho doesn’t answer. Cautiously, Grian opens his Eyes, and he Sees—

Oh. Oh no.

“Etho,” Grian says again, more urgently. He does not see the piano wire tension of Etho’s body pull taut, but he Sees it. At once he’s acutely aware of Mumbo and Scar beside him, vulnerable.

Etho reaches into his inventory. He pulls out a musicbox, and a record. Spins it in his hand.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” Scar says, head jerking from Etho to Grian. “What’s going on?”

“Bdubs is dead,” Etho says, perfectly casual. “But that was a good try, Grian. I appreciate the effort.”

Bdubs’ back, running for the hills and growing smaller. The feather fletching soft against the corner of Grian’s mouth.

Etho kneels down to fiddle with the musicbox, and Grian cannot think of a single thing to say.

“Bdubs isn’t dead, Etho,” Pearl says, but she doesn’t sound so sure. Is she grappling with deja vu? Is she dizzy with it, is she breathless? Are Scar and Mumbo? Grian is. Grian is choking on it.

Eerie, discordant music sputters to life. It crawls through the cavern and claws its way back on the echo. It hooks into Grian’s spine. Beside him, Mumbo stiffens, and Grian shifts a step in front of him. Etho’s eye pins him in place like an insect to a corkboard. His eyes are red. Etho’s eyes are always red. Etho’s eyes are red.

“He is,” Etho says. “Grian killed him.”

He unfolds to his full height, a fishing rod slung over his shoulder.

Grian runs.

Etho is—Etho is.

Etho happens. Etho happens to the server like the vacuum of space happens to a soft body undefended.

Grian knows Etho. He’s calm, and quiet. He says oh snappers, and he likes ladders, and he wheedles his way into other hermits’ wallets. He’s a survivor, and not above fleeing if the situation calls for it. His reputation precedes him. It’s easy to make him into more than he is.

It’s easy to make him less.

Etho is the longest lived hermit by far. Etho is the void given shape. Etho is endless. Etho will never stop, unless he is made to stop.

Grian runs because has no other choice. His fight crashes up against his flight, and the part of him that is of that world, Mumbo and Etho’s world, is snarling and bloodsick and cannot be trusted. He still doesn’t know what would happen if Etho died here. He can’t allow himself to find out.

He runs in and out of the Nether, in and out of the End, and Etho follows, steadily, patiently, blind to all else. He swipes skulls from Jevin’s beacon farm and soon withers are carving through the server. Grian stops trying to hide; Etho doesn’t care to spare artistry or architecture. Buildings are razed and earth is scorched. Reasoning with him is pointless, and anyone who tries to stop him is just caught in the crossfire, even Xisuma. Grian’s Eyes can only do so much. Seeing death on the horizon doesn’t stop it from coming.

Etho never says a word.

Grian dies, and he runs, and he dies, and he runs.

“Do you think, maybe,” Grian pants, as he revives to find Etho waiting in his base, “that this is a bit overkill?”

Etho doesn’t answer. He already has an altar built, and two skulls waiting. What does that make now? Three withers? Four?

The wither screams to life, and Grian wakes up back at worldspawn.

He tries to take a step and his knees buckle. Grian has died before. Grian has died a lot. Respawn magic isn’t meant to hurt, but die too often in too short a time and the magic lingers, leaves you hyperaware and oversensitive. Just now it feels like claws to his every nerve. He curls his wings around himself, all his eyes winched shut against the nausea. He refuses to have a mouth, but a groan vibrates in his throat all the same.

“Grian!”

It’s Scar, and Mumbo just behind him. Mumbo’s suit is burned, as is Scar’s entire unclothed torso, but they’re alive. They’re alive.

“Heyyy, guys,” Grian says. His voice feels detached from his body, loopy and off-kilter. “Mumbo, your mustache is singed.”

“Who’s fault is that?” He’s distracted, his eyes darting, his hands twitching.

“Etho’s,” says Scar, lips peeled back in a smile. He catches Grian around the shoulders, helps him to his feet. His warmth is oppressive, at once soothing and too much against Grian’s magic-jittery skin. He leans into him anyway.

“Yes, but who’s fault is it Etho came through the Rift in the first place?” says Mumbo. Scar’s barely pinned smile threatens to drop into a snarl.

“Etho’s. You heard what Grian said, he didn’t bring him here. Grian, you’ve gotta let me Hot Guy him, if anyone ever deserves it—”

“No. You’ve got to get out of here. He’ll be here soon and he won’t care if he kills you.”

Mumbo looks torn. Scar stands his ground. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Don’t be stupid, you’re being stupid—” Grian tastes the change in air pressure before he hears the music. He glances behind him. Fear spikes in his stomach and he whips back around, snapping open every eye, every wing. “Go. Go, now. I will not be the cause of your death again, do you understand me? Leave!”

Under his gaze, both Scar and Mumbo are pinned. They look afraid. That’s not what he meant to happen. That’s not what he—

Etho is upon them.

An explosion throws Grian to the ground. His vision and hearing blink out, leaving him only with a mute outside perspective of Scar and Mumbo being blown off their feet. The world returns in smoke-smeared splotches. Grian is at one and a half hearts. Mumbo and Scar are still alive, but they can’t be much better. If he can just get to his feet—if he can just run, lead Etho the other way—

He only stumbles a few steps before a hook in his flesh is reeling him back. He cries out, all of his wings flapping uselessly, and lands winded at Etho’s feet.

“I didn’t notice it before,” Etho says—the first thing he’s said since the cavern. “But that Mumbo is from the same place I am, isn’t he? He feels the same. You feel the same, too, but you keep coming back no matter how many times I kill you. Will he?”

He sounds exactly as before. Idle and curious, like he’s talking about redstone or a shopping trip. Grian curls his hand around his ankle, talons digging in.

“Help them,” he wheezes to the Entity. “Help them. You brought them here. You brought them here, you can’t just let them die.”

Along his spine the Entity perches, silent and staring. Etho doesn’t ask who he’s talking to. He doesn’t say anything more. He brandished his fishing rod and takes aim, and outside himself Grian can see Mumbo on two knees and one hand, bleeding from his temple and his mouth. His inventory is open and his eyes are vicious. Grian prays he’s going for a totem instead of a weapon. Etho takes a step forward, shakes off Grian’s hand like an afterthought.

“Don’t,” Grian says, “don’t—”

“Hey!”

Etho stops.

“Will you guys keep it down out here? Some of us are sleepin’!”

Scruffed with sleep and frowning with his whole face, Bdubs comes shuffling over the nearest hill, mossy cloak clutched around his shoulders like a blanket. A second Etho—first?—hovers at his shoulder, burnt around the edges and looking simultaneously guarded and unnerved.

Bdubs squints heavily, taking in the scene, before his eyes blow wide. “Etho!”

He bounds over, towing a bewildered Etho behind him. “I was napping, and all these dang explosions woke me up! That was you, huh?” He mashes his face into Etho’s shoulder without question or hesitation. His big, dark eyes fall on Grian. “’Cha doin’ down there, Grian?”

Grian is just kind of. Sitting there awkwardly. He doesn’t know what to do with his limbs or his wings or his eyes or his Eyes. A few feet away, Mumbo’s bafflement is palpable. A few feet further, Scar starts to whistle along with the record.

Grian stammers, “Oh. You know. Just being murdered by Etho ad nauseum.”

Etho one makes a disgruntled sound. Etho two doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t breathe.

“Huh,” says Bdubs. “Did you drop any heads? Your head probably wouldn’t sell as well as my head, but I bet I could make it work.” He puffs up with pride, seeming to swell twice his size. “My head shop is doin’ real well, Etho. And they said it wouldn’t work! You should come see it!”

The air pressure evens out. Etho’s shoulders drop. All at once he is a man again. “Hey, Bdubs.”

Grian flops back onto the grass with a groan, and closes all his eyes.

All told, Etho’s warpath lasted less than a day. A few hours at most. Hardly any time at all, and no one who died stayed dead. Death is negligible on Hermitcraft.

The aftermath is devastating all the same. Impulse’s shopping mall has been reduced to rubble. False’s fortress and steampunk factoryland escape relatively unscathed, but her railroad is decimated. Progress on Decked Out Two is set back months. Hundreds of hours of labor and love, just…gone.

The server is unnaturally quiet as everyone assesses the damage. Grian opens his Eyes to see it all.

“Hey.”

Pearl finds him, hidden away in an unclaimed plot of forest. The last time he saw her he was running from Etho, and she had fallen behind to put out fires at Gem’s base. She looks…completely drained.

“How’s it going?” he asks, as though he doesn’t know.

She sits heavily beside him, scrubbing her hands through her hair and pushing back her hood. “It’s…alright. Xisuma is delegating roles for the rebuilding process and Ren is coming up with quests. Joe is talking about pooling resources.”

“He’s good at that.”

“Yeah. But proper rebuilding is gonna start tomorrow, I think. For now I think everyone is just…processing. Lots of tidying for me, though. Soon I’ll beat out Mumbo for richest hermit.”

She laughs, and the sound falls flat. Grian laughs too, in solidarity.

“And Etho?”

Pearl blows out a hard breath that flaps her lips. “Well, people aren’t pleased with him, obviously. But most of them recognize the problem isn’t really him so much as how he got in. He’s staying in Bdubs’ basement, now that our Etho has moved out.”

Grian nods. He hears what she isn’t saying. “They want to close the Rift.”

“They think it’s too dangerous to be left open, yeah. I agree.”

She doesn’t sound sorry so much as she sounds sorry for him. He exhales slowly through his nose. Listens to the silence in the back of his head. “I agree too.”

“Good. It’s the kind of project Zed and Doc would like. They’ll have it closed in no time.”

“They don’t think I should do it?”

“No.” She’s blunt and honest with her concern. Her eyes are heavy on him, her brows drawn together. “They didn’t ask for you. They thought it would be kinder not to.”

Grian tries to give her his full attention, but he can’t quite tear his Eyes away from the destruction. The defeat bending his friends’ backs. The deafening, damning silence of the Entity. “I think I’m the only one who can close it.”

“I think you’re the only one who shouldn’t. Grian.” Pearl puts her hands on either side of his face. He’s forced to look at her, her dear, familiar face, known through so many lifetimes. “Don’t.”

“I won’t,” Grian says. He thinks he could Know if she believed him. He could open his Eyes and See. He doesn’t, because he’s afraid of what he’ll find.
Pearl’s mouth tightens, and he knows anyway.

“Everything is under control,” Grian says. The words taste bitter in his mouth. “I have everything under control.”

He doesn’t. He knows he doesn’t. But he will. If he just closes the Rift, then he will. Crawling down into the cavern feels like crawling into his own grave. Standing in front of the Rift feels like coming home. He thinks the second feeling is worse.

“You know what you are?” He points a finger at the Rift and thinks swear words very hard. “So there.”

The most straightforward option doesn’t seem very likely to work, but he can’t think of much else. He’s a builder. He builds. Block after obsidian block he entombs the Rift. He’s slow and methodical. He listens for the Entity in the back of his mind, and tries not to worry that all he can hear is the Rift singing.

He says, “I never really thought we were friends, or partners. I knew we were using each other.”

He’s talking to the Entity, but mostly he’s talking to himself, trying to drown out the Rift’s song. He’d hoped after all his time away that it wouldn’t sound so sweet and comforting, but it still creeps into his bones, gut-achingly familiar. He places down another block and another square of glowing light disappears.

“I didn’t think you were good, but I thought maybe you cared, when you helped me bring Scar through. And then I thought you were pure evil. But neither of those things are true, are they? Because actually, you just wanted to know what would happen. You just wanted to see it. You wanted to ∴ᔑℸ ̣ ᓵ⍑.”

He stops.

What did he just say?

What did he just…

He just…

When he comes back to himself, he’s humming along to a song he doesn’t know, and he’s reaching for the Rift.

Terror rises like tar in his throat. Dread, boiling up from the center of his chest, where that ink drop of Knowing never went away, no matter how hard he hoped it would with Etho. He opens all his wings and flaps backward, landing twenty feet away and scrabbling farther until his shoulders collide with rock. Eyes stare at him and his Eyes stare back. He tries to shut them and he can’t. That’s not good.

“Not good. Very not good. Very very very very not good.”

That hand from before is back, reaching out from the inside, but instead of yanking on his spine it feels like it’s knocking on his ribs. Knocking on his skull. Knocking on a door, waiting for him to open it, and see its face. It terrifies him that he wants to.

He thinks to run, and Knows he wouldn’t make it. He has to try. He flips over onto his knees, and sees that the rock he crashed against is the boulder he used as an anchor when he fished out Scar and Mumbo. The rope brushing his wing.

He grabs for it. Loops it around his ankle and tries to tie a knot, but his hands are shaking too badly.

“Not good not good not good not good. Oh, Pearl is going to say the biggest I told you so, this is very very very not good.”

He pulls the rope free and tries again, and the Entity says, /ᒷꖎᑑ⚍ᔑ.

And Grian—

Grian—

He’s staring at his hands. He’s staring at a length of rope. He’s staring at the Rift behind him and he’s thinking, huh. The Entity doesn’t sound like any of his friends. It doesn’t sound like Scar, or Mumbo, or Martyn, or Pearl, or Joel, or Timmy. So many lives and so many people and it doesn’t sound like a single one of them. And he…

Grian’s not thinking of his friends just now. Just now, they don’t feel very important. They feel very small.

He’s thinking of his name. Grian. Has it always sounded so wrong?

It is time.

He stands up. The rope slips from his fingers.

Come home, ̇/ᒷꖎᑑ⚍ᔑ.

Rifts are like gates are like doors are like buttons. A button needs to be pressed. A door needs to be opened. Even if the door was closed for a reason. Even if he thinks he’s the one who closed it.

We have waited, the Entity says. We are waiting. We are ∴ᔑℸ ̣ ᓵ⍑╎リ⊣.

The Rift sings before him. He can hear it clearly, now. He can see those shadows and he knows that if he reached he would touch them. See them and know them. For better or worse, Grian needs to know. Grian needs to see. Grian needs to—

Grian needs to Watch.

Pearl wakes with the feeling of being watched.

The moon is an eye above her, smaller than it is in her memories and dreams. Right now it looks round and worried, like a warning. She blinks up at it. Scratches a hand through her hair and sighs.

“Alright,” she says. “What’s he done this time?”

The eye of the moon stares down at her in concern. And then it stares elsewhere. Pearl pulls on her armor and follows its gaze, unsurprised and unsettled to find milky light falling on the Entity. The Entity, which has moved again and come to rest, with all of its spindly limbs retracted like it really is some innocuous rock. Right next to the cavern that leads to the Rift.

Scar, Mumbo, and Etho are already there. They turn when they hear her, faces grim, their hunted and hunting eyes brighter than ever.

“He didn’t,” she says, and knows that he has.

“They took him,” Mumbo says, very tight. His eyes are fixed on the Entity looming monolithic above them. “Those… things with eyes. I felt them in the Rift.”

Scar claps his hands sharply. His smile is a knife in his mouth. “Well! Always nice to see you all, except you, Etho, I kind of want to kill you right now, but I’m going after him. Okay? Okay. Bye!”

He spins on his heel and stalks toward the cavern.

“You—wait!” Mumbo grabs his shoulder, and instead of saying something reasonable, which was maybe silly of Pearl to expect, he says, “I’m coming too.”

“You?” Scar raises an eyebrow. “You don’t even like him.”

“I certainly don’t,” Mumbo sniffs. “I’m still angry with him. In fact, you could say I’m jealous Etho got to blow him up so often. But I can’t blow him up if some weird eldritch monsters with way too many eyes have him, now can I?”

“Can’t argue with that logic,” says Etho. Mumbo and Scar’s heads snap to him, and he holds up his hands. “Go for it, really. I only came because I felt like something was happening. Now that I know what it is, I’m going back to sleep. You two can risk your lives for him but count me out.”

“No one is risking their lives,” Pearl shouts. “No one is going anywhere!”

They all turn to her, and maybe she should be scared, but she isn’t. She’s angry. She’s exhausted and worried and confused and so, so angry—angry that Grian let it get this bad, angry that he didn’t listen to her, angry that he didn’t ask for help, angry that she saw it all coming and trusted him anyway. Angry at that terrible, familiar thing that thought it could just take her friend as though it had any claim to him at all.

“Grian got into this mess because he was frankly being stupid about it,” she says. “He thought he could handle it all on his own and he couldn’t. We can’t make the same mistake.” She takes a short breath. “We’re going to have Xisuma call a server-wide meeting. We’re going to figure out what to do.”

The muscles in Scar’s jaw jumps. “You want us to wait for a meeting with the whole server? Thanks but no thanks. You guys can waffle around all you want, I’m going.”

“And what do you expect to accomplish?” Pearl demands. “You, alone, what do you think you can do? How do you intend to find him? What if that portal just spits you out somewhere else? What if it sends you back to wherever you came from and you die? We’ll have no way of knowing that you didn’t get to Grian, and by the time we figure it out, we’ll have two people to rescue and he’ll have been wherever he is that much longer. Think.”

“I’m going. You can try to stop me, Pearl, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

That’s a threat, clear as day, and oh, absolutely not.

“Don’t even try it, Scar.” The sword is in her hand and at Scar’s throat in the same moment. “I am tired and stressed and I’m trying very hard to be reasonable, but go ahead and push me! See how that works out for you. I’d love to stop being reasonable for a minute, because it really really sucks!”

Scar’s shoulders rise and fall. Mumbo’s mustache bristles. Etho doesn’t bother to look at any of them. But none of them move.

Pearl vanishes her sword. She shuts her eyes tight, and focuses on the gentle fall of moonlight over her shoulders. Takes a deep breath. Tucks her hair behind her ears.

“We need help. You have to trust me on this. I know we’re hermits, but we’re still a community. And we are not going to sit by and let that thing,” she jabs a finger up at the Entity, “take one of our own.”

Scar’s smile grows rictus, and for a second, Pearl is sure he’s going to cut her down and leave. Then it cracks. She thinks it’s the first time she’s seen him frown.

“Okay,” he says, “fine. We’ll do it your way. But we’re waking up Xisuma now.”

“Obviously,” says Pearl. She feels liable to collapse under the weight of her own relief. “If I’m not getting my full eight hours, he certainly isn’t.”

Mobs aren’t a problem; the other three are happy to take out any lingering frustration on the poor spiders and creepers they come upon. Pearl still feels watched, eyes upon eyes on her back as they walk away. Well, she refuses to look back. She refuses to play its game. She’s done sitting on the sidelines watching things unfold; she’s going to do something. She’s going to get her friend back.

She leads the way to Xisuma. The moon lights her path.

: