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should you seek me in the depths
where monsters lie with open smiles
and fantasies bleed true
do not take me for a fool; instead,
see me for the coward i am,
who knew a lie at a glance yet still,
resigned to gilded halls of ghosts.
and i know you best stay up above,
far from the monster that slew you, but—
i beg, do not abandon me
to sweep the shards of broken dreams and
lose myself in these fragile reveries.
“My name is Grian and I’m safe,” he whispers, trying to steady his trembling hands. He screws his eyes shut and takes a shaky breath. With his eyes closed, he can ignore the way the walls of his mansion seem to flicker out of existence, the way the soft shadows cast by torchlight splinter into jagged tendrils of darkness and creep ever closer.
“It’s not real.” He shakes his head. “I’m home and I’m safe.”
The seconds pass, and the tension slowly bleeds out of his body. “I’m safe,” he says again, finally believing it.
Grian opens his eyes and stands, bracing himself slightly on a dark oak pillar for a moment, before shaking his head and returning to sorting through his chest monster.
As far as Grian is concerned, Hermitcraft has always been his home.
Even though he’s only been here for a year, it feels as though he’s always been part of the community. Part of that may have to do with the fact that Grian has no memory of anything before he woke up in Hermitcraft for the first time, but he thinks he’d feel the same regardless.
After all, this world has been nothing but kind to him—sure, the other hermits may have been apprehensive upon first stumbling across him, but they’d been nothing but warm and supportive since.
They’d welcomed him into their world, played along with his bouts of mischief, and helped him cultivate his creativity as he built his bases—it was all he could ever ask for from a group of friends, much more than anyone could expect to be afforded after showing up uninvited.
Even if Grian can’t remember what his life was like before Hermitcraft, he’s certain it couldn’t have been any better than his life now.
Every now and then, he’ll stumble across a gray and white cat curled up somewhere in his mansion.
“Hey Jellie,” he coos at the cat sprawled atop his furnace. He gives her a light scratch on the head before shooting a message about her appearance to her owner.
<Grian>: scar your cat’s in my mansion
Scar shows up at his door a few minutes later, flashing his trademark smile at Grian as he steps inside.
“I still have no idea how she gets in here,” Grian laughs as he presents his friend with his cat.
Scar taps the brim of his wizard hat slyly. “Jellie’s got some magic of her own, you know. She isn’t bound by the rules of the universe like we are.”
Grian snorts. “Of course.” He runs his hand through Jellie’s fur idly. She yawns and stretches out, making the tiny bell on her indigo collar jingle. “It’s Jellie’s world and we’re all just living in it.”
“You get it!” Scar beams, scratching Jellie behind the ear once before scooping her up into his arms like a baby.
Grian chuckles at the sight. “I suppose there are worse worlds to live in.”
Every now and then, he’ll wake up with a racing pulse and clammy skin, echoes of nightmares he can’t quite recall ringing out in his brain.
—the air thick with gray smoke, heady with the scent of gunpowder. He takes a gasping breath, ears ringing as he rushes back to the desert—
Grian thinks he wouldn’t mind as much if he know why it keeps happening.
He’s heard, of course, that nightmares are meant to be manifestations of unconscious anxieties and trauma. The problem is that Grian himself is unaware of his own demons. Is he?
—green eyes, yellow sand, red hearts, red blood, red, red, red—
It’s hard to say for certain what anything means, he decides. The gaping hole in his memory before joining Hermitcraft could be filled with any number of tribulations. Or maybe his imagination just runs wild at night. He can’t know for sure, not without his memories.
He has no way of knowing for sure, but Grian thinks he’s always been a builder.
He loves the craft, how a smattering of small details can be slotted together to tell a story in a single glance. It comes to him easily, too, too easily for it not to be a skill honed over years of experience. Muscle memory persists, even when episodic memory fails.
—instinctively reaches for his sword, dull from constant use—
Grian sometimes catches himself with a drawn blade and a scarcity of enemies to swing at. Maybe he used to live in a world with many hostile mobs, he thinks to himself.
Maybe he should focus on his building. Yes. He’ll do that.
His mansion is an ambitious project. There’s no real reason he’s made it as big as it is, especially considering that he lives there alone and doesn’t have nearly enough belongings to fill it, but its grandness ensures he’ll always have something to work on.
And so, Grian works. Plank by plank. Brick by brick.
“My name is Grian and I’m safe,” he says because it seems he can’t remind himself enough.
Green eyes peer at him from behind a column. Jellie must be back, he thinks.
A green-eyed monster claims three lives at once. It is not a monster because it was made to kill. It is a monster because it was not, yet still did. It will not die.
“It’s not real,” Grian whispers, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes.
The shopping district is covered in green.
Grian replaces patches of verdant green grass with silver-violet mycelium. It’s just a prank, though. He just wants to have some fun with a makeshift rebellion. That’s all.
The next morning, he wakes up with a familiar voice echoing in his ears. “You need to remember.” A terrible ringing takes its place soon after. Grian reaches up to clamp his hands over his ears to minimize the noise he hears, when he catches a glimpse of indigo on his wrist.
It’s just a smudge of something, he reasons, maybe residue from some mycelium? It’s a peculiar shape though, resembling a rectangle missing two corners. Grian rubs at it and it disappears like it was never there.
Once the ringing in his ears stops, he sets about building his Mycelium Resistance base. It’s cold underground. He thinks, briefly, that it’s worse than the desert at night, despite never having spent a night out in a Hermitcraft desert.
<Grian>: how did jellie get into the resistance base??
<GoodTimeWithScar>: oh no i guess i’ll need directions there to pick her up
<Grian>: nice try
<Grian>: meet me at the mansion
Grian sets down his comm with a light chuckle before reaching out to pick up Jellie. She narrows her eyes and skitters backward with an indignant meow.
He furrows his brows. “Come on, Jellie,” he beckons. Jellie shoots him what can only be described as a harsh glare. It’s sharper than any cat’s glare has any right being. Then again, he supposes Jellie shouldn’t be the standard for normal cats.
After all, she’s always seemed a little too keen for her own good, a little too mysterious to be dismissed with a hand wave. Grian just goes along with it because everyone else does.
He sighs, wondering what the odds of finding some sort of fish around the base are. “You just had to be difficult today, didn’t you?” he grumbles.
Her response is a lazy yawn that flashes her fangs. When she opens her eyes again, he swears he sees a flicker of indigo in her eyes, and—
What is he doing again?
Grian shakes his head. He’s been spending too much time down here; it’s messing with his mind.
There is a monster in the desert. It has bloody claws and a guilty soul. It is surrounded by ghosts, and yet—
It has never felt so alone in its life.
“Grian?”
He snaps back to reality as Scar waves a hand in front of his face, concern written across his features.
“Are you okay?” Scar asks.
Grian blinks, hard, and shakes his head. “Yeah,” he rasps out, before clearing his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you land. Jellie’s hiding somewhere in my chest monster—let me go find her—”
A hand wraps around his wrist before he can dart away. Grian flinches. “Scar—" He stops short as he lays eyes on his friend; something about him has changed, shifted. There's a broken look in his eyes, a raggedness that doesn't fit with what Grian knows about Scar.
“You need to remember,” Scar says. The characteristic lilt in his friend’s voice is noticeably absent, a harsh urgency taking its place. Grian freezes, looking Scar dead in the eyes. He knows that look.
—red eyes peering at him from across an ash-ridden crater, desperation melting into something softer but no less dangerous—
“You need to fight back,” Scar says. His eyes flash red for a moment, just long enough for Grian to know he didn’t imagine it. “You can’t let them take it all from you.”
Grian can only manage a strangled, “What?”
“You made it to the end,” Scar says, grip tightening on Grian’s wrist. The nails against his skin feel like claws. “You won. You—you can’t let them do this to you.”
“Do what?” Grian snaps, finally, pulling his arm away. The indigo mark on his wrist is back, nestled between half-moon indents from Scar’s nails.
“This!” Scar yells, gesturing loosely. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t real, Grian. You know that. I know you know that.” The red in his eyes has returned with a fury, crimson overtaking his green irises. There’s a rigidness in the way he holds himself that Grian has never once seen during their Turf War spats, but is achingly familiar nonetheless.
“This isn’t real,” Grian echoes hollowly.
The walls seem to shiver as he says this. Scar nods. Reality cracks before his eyes.
“This isn’t real,” Grian says again, and this time, he feels the tremor in the floor. The planks underfoot shift simultaneously. The shadows dance.
His ears are ringing. The air is hot. Grian’s throat is dry, he realizes, so, so dry.
Jellie hops on top of a shulker box, the bell on her collar jingling. Her eyes are dark indigo—when she looks at him, it feels like hundreds of people are watching him. The mark on his wrist burns.
Scar steps in front of Jellie to block Grian’s view of her. “You have to remember or you’ll lose everything. We’ll all lose everything.”
He swallows and screws his eyes shut. “My name is Grian. It’s not safe here,” he whispers.
The ghosts pity the monster, in the end. The monster doesn’t get to go home.
“You get it,” Scar agrees quietly.
They understand the monster’s last request, of course. But they can’t allow it to stand.
A monster is born in a village, surrounded by witnesses. Its first kill is a bloody thing, flesh melting off bones and spattering against damp grass. It was an accident, but intentions don’t matter when the price of the mistake is death.
A monster binds itself to its victim. The gods watch with rapt attention as they act out loyalty until it becomes real.
A monster becomes a victor, though not how it wanted.
A monster begs to forget. The gods honor their promise. It’s poetically tragic, the way the victor pleads for it all to end, and they’re fascinated with how human it is.
Grian opens his eyes and breathes in the smoky desert air.
The cactus ring is as he remembers it. Scar stands opposite him, a knowing smile gracing his face.
They lunge at each other, even though neither of them wants to, their knuckles darkening with bruises and blood.
As he’s tackling his once-ally-now-enemy to the ground, he thinks back to the previous night—
“Hey, Grian?” He flinched as Scar spoke, though the other man didn’t look up from his blade.
“Yeah?” he’d said.
“Why did you come back? You said you’d leave once you paid your debt.” Grian froze.
He’d been wondering the same thing since he’d done it. Logically speaking, all it did was put Grian in more danger of being stabbed in the back by the game’s most prolific conman.
“We’re friends, aren’t we?” Grian replied, forcing a small smile.
Scar hummed in agreement. “Of course,” he said.
He’d wondered, at that moment, whether they might’ve been real friends in another world. It had seemed like a fantastical scenario, too good to be true.
He knows now what that world is like. It does not belong to him.
Grian slams his fist home.
The world warps again. He finds himself standing before a sea of eyes, watching.
“You’re an interesting one,” a Watcher says.
“You’re the ones who took my memories,” Grian says.
The Watcher hums in thought. “Yes,” they agree. “We collect stories like yours, but we did not take from you what was not freely given.”
“I want them back,” he demands.
“Do you really?” A quiet chuckle rings out, sending shivers down Grian’s spine. “You seemed adamant about us taking them. You said it was miserable being the only one to bear them.”
Grian swallows. “They don’t only belong to me,” he says, mind flashing to Scar and the desperate look in his eyes. “They’re all that’s left of my friends.”
“Friends?” The Watcher seems genuinely baffled. “There were no friends in this game.”
“My friends,” Grian repeats. “We didn’t just destroy during the game. We built bases, formed alliances—even if it all fell apart in the end, they can’t just be erased.”
He takes a step forward. “They’re still here, too,” he says, and he knows it’s true. He feels their presence in the whispering wind. When he closes his eyes, he sees Scar standing by his side, nodding along.
“You will carry this burden for their sake,” the Watcher says. “You will suffer and splinter, all for the souls of those you damned yourself.”
“Someone has to,” he answers. “Someone has to tell the story. I’ll keep it alive.”
“Keep it alive,” the Watcher echoes. “Very well. If that is what you desire, young victor, then it will be done.”
Grian blinks to find himself back in the desert. It’s quiet as the memories in his head settle, finally.
He sighs and sets his sights on the horizon. He knows how this story must now go.
The monster does not die. It leads the ghosts far, far away, scrubs the blood from underneath its claws, and lives.