Work Text:
There, on a disused, dusty, long-forgotten shelf in Scott's base, he saw it. Not his deepslate emerald ore—though once he found it, the revenge he would inflict would make the glass box around Joel's base look like a simple fall trap—but a decrepit trident.
There was a copper plating around its handle, though it was heavily oxidized, and large parts of the coating had flaked off, revealing dull, grey metal underneath. A faint sheen of enchantment still clung to the metal, though Pix doubted enough was left to be usable. The state of it clearly showed the Mending on it, if it had existed in the first place, had long since worn off. There were char marks on the tips, possible remnants of Channeling or some ancient fire. Though worn by age, it still felt familiar.
It was his.
The thought stuck in his head, as ridiculous as it sounded. The trident belonged to Scott, and until Pix found actual proof otherwise, it would remain with him. He didn't just barge in and take things from people's houses. (Taking the houses themselves was a different matter.)
A spark, possibly the remnant of some long-decayed Channeling enchantment, flashed across the surface of the trident, making Pix flinch.
He opened his eyes and was met with a spray of sand. A hot, dry wind blew around him, ruffling what he was only now realizing was not his normal blue shirt.
Pix wiped off his eyes, looking down at his new clothing. He was in a tan robe, trimmed with thin ribbons of copper, and his sturdy boots had been replaced by sandals.
He looked up, and surveyed the place he had landed in. It was a city carved out of a desert, one that looked so much like the one that had haunted his dreams as far back as he could remember, with copper roofs and intricately carved sandstone buildings. Villagers milled about, seemingly oblivious to the dark grey clouds that were gathering above their heads.
A thunderstorm. One that he had caused. But how?
In his hands was a trident, not tarnished and degraded as he had seen it before, but new. It felt familiar in his hands, even though to Pix's recollection, he hadn't wielded them much before. Swords were convenient, and didn't require getting stabbed over and over by Drowned (something that happened to him enough without going looking for trouble). And though he could imagine someone getting a certain primal joy out of using one to call down lightning from the sky, in practice thunderstorms were so rare, it seemed more trouble than it was worth.
The trident was still his. And, he realized, it was the same as the rusted trident in Scott's base. How did you get that, he thought. Probably the same way as the man got his deepslate emerald, even if he denied it.
But the trident wasn't important now. There would be plenty of time to study it, or at least its future self, once he got back home. Hopefully he had enough froglights to trade for it, because the Ancient Capital was at least several hundred years past when it could've started a war.
He looked up again, eager to find out more about where he had landed. Pix's only hypothesis for what had happened was that whatever was up with Sausage was contagious. Though he was confident in his ability to get home (he'd had more than enough practice in his years of traveling back and forth to the Recap dimension), Pix wanted to stay for now. If his guess was right from the architecture and his clothing, this was the past, or a version of it, and any archaeologist would've given their left arm to be in his position.
Though that still left the important question of where in the past he was. (Was it even his past? Some of Sausage's visions were of events that had never happened in this world—No, he couldn't think about that now. Try to focus on the details, then make sense of them later.)
The buildings were old. If he had to guess, they had been old even before the Rapture that had hit the continent a thousand years ago. Though they held no signs of damage, unlike what the majority of the buildings of that era looked like in the present day. Which put when he was at least a thousand years ago. But despite that, he could understand the chatter of the people around him, though he could not name what language they spoke.
The walkway was made of patchy dirt and stone and lined with a varied array of flowering cacti, and if Pix had to guess from the volume of people walking down it and the height of the buildings, he was probably not far away from the center of the city.
Despite the age of the city, he could see the telltale signs of redstone around him (and were those conduits that were lighting the place? What kind of resources did this city even have?). Narrows it down, he thought. Narrows it down. The layout felt familiar too, and he yet again felt that strange sensation that he had been there before.
Pix turned around to face the main square of the city, and what he saw removed any doubts as to where he had landed. A tall sandstone spire rose before him, reaching almost into the dark, angry clouds, with smaller spires off to the side circling around it. In the dim light of the near thunderstorm, thousands of candles glittered around it, and glowing lanterns of all colors hung motionless in the air above.
The Vigil.
Pixandria, it seemed, was following him.
And as he stared at the candles flickering in the night, Pix remembered. It was slow at first, brief flashes of the deaths each candle represented. Pearl, a look of betrayal frozen on her face as Sausage killed her in the arena. fWhip, blown up by yet another failed gunpowder experiment. Joel, over and over and over again.
The Copper King, exploded by Lord Sausage's trapped embassy. The last second when he opened the door and saw the TNT minecart, and the sinking dread in his stomach as he realized there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. A thunderous boom, and then a silence that weighed heavier than any sound could have. Then waking up again, far away, but the explosion still ringing in his ears.
Why was that death so vivid? Why had it seemed almost as if he, himself, had died?
Pix looked down at his ever more familiar clothing, and ran to the nearest pool of water surrounding the Vigil.
The face that stared back was the Copper King. He knew that from both surviving portraits and tapestries, and some intangible feeling deep in his chest.
The face that stared back was his own.
A lifetime's worth of memories, mismatched feelings, and unresolved loose ends clicked into place, and Pix was confronted with the truth of who he was.
A thousand years ago, shortly after the disappearance he was infamous for, the Copper King had died. He had died with many regrets. And, somehow, the Vigil itself listened to them, and had offered a second chance.
A whispered "why" escaped Pix's mouth, laden down with the weight of his new memories. He hadn't deserved that second chance, not when he had abandoned his people. Which, he now knew with the thousand years of historical context being a historian provided, he had indeed done. At the time, he had thought it the only thing to do to leave to let someone more worthy take his place. But nobody had come, and both times, the land he loved was forced to face horrible danger without anyone to protect it.
Running away was his legacy. And after that, he had no right to be given the chance to make a new one.
The Vigil, of course, acted like the frustratingly cryptic block of stone it was. The god of death the Pixandrians worshipped stood apart from humanity, watching, but never touching until a person's last moments. It was fair, impartial, there to remember but not to interfere. Which made his being brought back to life even more surprising.
What could you possibly need me for, Pix thought. Whatever danger was undoubtably coming to the server in his time needed someone who acted, and thought before acting. Not someone who destroyed one of the last things keeping the server safe, and then didn't even stick around to clean up the mess he had created. In his exile, he had found the storm temple, sure, but when the red nether tentacles had come up to claim the city, he had been nowhere to be found.
Too cowardly, he supposed, to stand in the light that was now judging him.
Pix closed his eyes, both to shut out the judging lanterns and to focus on getting home. Gem traveled between realities through going to sleep and dreaming of the world she was trying to go to. With him, it was a bit different. There were dreams, certainly, and having a bed on hand certainly did help (the gates between worlds had something to do with the subconscious, the space between worlds that was usually only glimpsed when logging off or sleeping), but daydreams could do in a pinch.
He thought of the cool, damp air of the catacombs, the smooth feel of stone, the feeling of so many stories waiting to be told. Pix held that picture in his mind, and pushed himself there.
When he opened his eyes, he was not, in fact, in the Ancient Capital like he was imagining, but back in Scott's base.
"You okay there?" Scott stared at him, and something in the way his golden eye twitched told Pix that he was looking at him on more than a physical level.
Pix frozen, then shook himself, trying to get the image of the ancient Pixandrian desert out of his head. "Yes," he said. "I'm just pondering exactly where you could've put my deepslate emerald."
"Pix, I'm telling you. It's my perfume."
Pix looked directly at Scott and narrowed his eyes. "We'll see."
He turned to leave, and the question of his deepslate emerald ore joined the new memories swirling in his head on his list of things to deal with later.