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The astral library is a world inside a world. Tango shaped it so. A compelling argument especially, the stars in the walls.
It’s a shame he can’t belong to it.
The chairs don’t resolve for him. The shelves reject his efforts to browse. He knows the void under the world as a friend of a friend, and he knows the void above as a dream. The library’s false infinity, though, is a joke he has to fight to be in on.
He dives down into it, again and again. His hands on every piece, its corners meet at absolute angles.
The tunnels’ facades fade out too soon, break down into the wider nether wastes. Tango, tour guide to nowhere: “We’d give you anything you need, y’know. Just gotta ask.”
Etho blinks sidelong at him like a ghost-quick smile. “But then I’d have to ask,” he chuckles.
“Well.” And to our left, the inscrutability of parts unknown…
“Nah,” Etho continues. “Better if I get the stuff myself. I want to know the story of each tool I use.”
“Huh. Didn’t know you cared.” Netherrack, netherrack, netherrack… Piglin!
“No?” In certain laughing moods, Etho sounds as though all the world’s a stage.
“I’m… thinking,” Tango admits.
“Of?” Impulse asks. The way his eyebrows are raised makes the joke for him.
“Doing another world. You remember, I went off and did Create stuff for a while that one time?”
Impulse shrugs, hefting shulkers. “I… don’t, actually. I believe you, though.”
“I wanna do that again. It’ll be fun, I think! Just messing around, trying new things. No shops, no moon… ”
“Right.” Impulse’s eyebrows stay where they are. “Because you don’t do enough of that machinery stuff on Hermitcraft.”
“Exactly!” Tango says distractedly, gazing into the dwarven keep’s dimly lit halls. “It’ll be good.”
“I was worried,” Tango confesses. “I know we’ve all got our own things going, but with you not being here earlier and the way the last world ended…”
“Which one was that?” Etho hums. Tango stops short in the middle of the path. “No, I’m joking, I’m joking. My bees died back there! Couldn’t forget them.”
“Right.” Couldn’t forget them. The wastes close back in, carmine. “So how did you… escape?”
“The world ends basically every other day, Tango. How do you escape any of them?”
“…You don’t?”
Etho shrugs. “You can try, or you can forget.”
Tango swallows, bitter.
Five months later, Tango has the scent of new grass in his lungs and four clever friends in his back pocket. The restlessness is old hat; the moon might’ve sped things up but he didn’t change, he doesn’t think. So. Onward and upward! The high heat of nether-summer-fire has passed, and Tango’s in the mood for blank canvases.
The world unrolls before him like an inviting hand, custom-built for forgetting. Pipes, steam engines, and honey-covered apples. It’s all a game here. He’ll play it, laugh at it. He’ll go home at the end and never even notice the memory fade.
“Not that I want to be away from the Hermits or anything—” Etho is saying. He’s a true Hermit’s Hermit; watching him shrug sheepishly still feels unbelievable sometimes. (Self-conscious? Etho? )
“Yeah, yeah, of course, this is just starter! You’ll rejoin us.” Double check your math before take-off. “Right?”
“Yep,” Etho says.
Because maybe the numbers don’t align. The knowledge is set like scar tissue: even if Tango doesn’t know how they each got out, he remembers the Hermits’ unsteady terror winding up, the lump in his throat. The way the night glowed like any second it would pop, imploding overhead—
Tango scalds his hands on dried kelp from the furnace, on the copper walls of overheated boilers, on brass still hot from the mixer. It’s the kind of fire that’s easy to walk away from, though. Grass crumples. Trains scream. Nothing moves without a push from Tango’s hands.
More than once, he winds up in the Nether again. Etho’s right, isn’t he? They’ve told the story of portals and lava and red desolation so many times they hardly know it anymore. His trips layer over one another, forgotten before they end. He unlearns what is and isn’t meant to burn.
Mostly, they knew Etho by the signs he left behind. You blinked and there was a misshapen block of moss over your river. You checked your shop and there were diamonds where there had been shulker shells. You heard rarely, whispered to you by the world itself, that he escaped a pool of lava the harder way.
It was months before the signs stopped, longer before anyone noticed. Tango mutters over factory blueprints in a world that doesn’t have the history to betray him. He left no signs either. He doesn’t understand why the memories won’t unstick from him too.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Bdubs says, leading Tango into his deepslate-dark basement. “Ol’ Bdubs can do enough schreeping for both of us.”
Tango takes in the craft and clutter of Bdubs’s build. The air smells like nothing; the stone feels like nothing. He’d asked offhandedly if Bdubs had trouble sleeping too, surrounded by nothing. “I wasn’t worried, but thanks, man.”
“Well, someone’s worrying,” Bdubs mutters. He rummages through his barrels, organized according to his private, inexplicable Bdubs systems. “Always has to be someone, after that dang moon.”
Tango glances upward, where there is nothing but the black ceiling above.
Tango splashes idly at the water pouring down the sides of Zed’s base. “We just started planning this and I already have so many ideas! I think I might explode if I have to keep waiting.”
“Oh, Tango,” Zed sighs dramatically. “So eager to desert our fellow Hermits.”
“I’m not!” Tango protests. “I just—” He pauses to poke Zed’s nose. “You know what the last few seasons have been like. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just— A break might be nice.”
“A break!” Zed laughs, sound spiralling up to the vast sky, the basin’s edges above. “Really, you?”
Tango’s familiar enough with letting things go slow. If he looks too carefully, he might prick a finger on a splintered memory: soft suffocation set to the sibilant song of his singed and failing life support. Moon rabbits!
Doesn’t he have just the gift for idiotic deaths? There’s a permanent mark for the record. Clumsy as a broken suit. Playacting at star-sailing.
Is it any wonder Etho let the end of the world slip away from him like dropped stone, there and gone in six thousand ticks or less? Tango can’t judge. He didn’t say goodbye either, before he went.
The portal whispers hauntedly when Tango ignites it. The purple hums over Etho’s face. The ceiling is so low, Tango worries someone is going to hit their head.
He laughs nervously to break the silence. “Why does it feel like I’m sending you off to another world?”
Etho shrugs, careless, easy. “I’ll be back. I just need to have my—” he chuckles to himself “—my training arc.”
“Learn how to do it all again, yeah, yeah,” Tango says. He lifts his hand in a mock salute. “Good luck!”
Etho goes. After a minute, Tango goes too, the other way, home.