Chapter Text
But I have this against you,
that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
Revelation 2:4
There is something about semiconsciousness that is simultaneously enlightening and bewildering. You discover all the secrets of the universe; you conflate them all together; you wake, vaguely disoriented and feeling like you’ve seen something terrible yet also lost something important.
Metaphysical scenarios are different. They use the form of dreams and visions, but they are not the same. I don’t know what Tommy saw there on the edge, teetering between hope and the path to eternal damnation. Cal’s tried to explain it to me, but I’m not sure I can ever truly understand, removed as I am from servers and ghosts and all the rest. From what I’m told, it’s a feeling you never forget, even if the details fade.
TommyInnit will not speak of it. I can’t say I blame him. He has told me about what happened after, though, and I shall recount it as best I can. Perhaps it will shed some light on why he did what he did.
He didn’t really know who he was for a bit. Visions of the void no longer yawned before him, threatening to swallow him whole, but he wasn’t really grounded in reality, either.
He . . . floated.
Somewhere, distantly, he was aware of being carried, the firm grip of someone holding him, that odd warmth of alive-ness fending off the freezing grip of the void and anchoring him to . . . something. To life? He wasn’t sure if he was grateful or not. He didn’t dwell on it much.
Everything ached, like he’d been torn apart and put together all wrong. There was a hole in his chest; he’d lost something. Had it taken from him. He missed it, and yet paradoxically, he was so so relieved because he knew with a terrible certainty that had it stayed, it would have killed him. No, worse. He had glimpsed his fate, and it was so much worse than death.
He didn’t dwell on that now, though. He was exhausted, and for the first time in ages, he felt safe. He subsisted on the gentle rhythm of someone’s footsteps, a steady, swaying gait and the comforting certainty that came with it. Wherever he was being taken, he knew he would be safe.
Slowly, he drifted back into awareness. He was lying on the ground now; in the grass, he thought, although the texture was funny. Dry and stiff. There was light above him, but something was in the way, shading him from the glare.
A hand brushed his forehead, and he shuddered both from its warmth and the way the pain in his body flared up as if in protest. Oh, everything hurt so so bad. He swore he felt something shift inside him, and then it was like everything clicked into place.
He was Tommy. He had been in exile, and he was fairly sure that the psychotic ghost masquerading as his brother had tried to kill him. The . . . the rest had probably been a hallucination. Yeah.
He sat up shakily, caught a glimpse of the strangest player he had ever seen, then immediately doubled over and was violently sick in the grass. Tommy heaved a breath and retched again and again, as if his body was ridding itself of every impurity of the past few nightmares he’d lived through.
He gasped for breath. Gentle hands gripped his shoulders and kept him from collapsing into the unnatural blue substance oozing onto the ground.
“Better now?” said Dream’s voice, and Tommy nodded shakily, even though the player he’d glimpsed a moment ago was definitely not Dream.
Not-Dream helped him to his feet and guided him gently away from the puddle of sick. Tommy managed a few steps before he had to sink to his knees and catch his breath.
Thankfully, it was grass this time and not snow as in exile. The grass was dead, he realized. Brown and shriveled up, as if it had been scorched by a sudden heat wave. But it wasn’t hot outside; more like that vague chill in the air just to the side of lukewarm that was somehow worse than when it was freezing cold.
Tommy frowned and looked around. This place . . . It was familiar, but something felt wrong. Off, somehow, and yet, the resemblance was undeniable.
“Church Prime?” he managed finally.
“You . . . know it?” asked Not-Dream, sitting next to Tommy on the ground. His voice was odd because he sounded like Dream, if a little hoarse, but he had a different cadence. Slow, almost uncertain. The guy’s hand on his shoulder had been steady, though, and Tommy didn’t get the impression that he was actually nervous or anything.
“Yeah,” Tommy muttered. “It was a joke, really. Dream and I built it a while back. You know, before he went crazy.”
Actually, did he know? How long had this guy actually been around? Tommy glanced over at Not-Dream. The player was strange, to say the least; surely Tommy would remember having seen him before. He was a bit shorter than Tommy, simple brown clothes, shaggy brown hair with a massive set of antlers atop his head—kind of amazing that he hadn’t nicked Tommy with them while helping him, but the guy held his head comfortably and seemed familiar with how to maneuver them without them getting in the way.
His head tilted askew to meet Tommy’s gaze, and Tommy saw that the strangeness didn’t end there. His face was blue. The upper part of it, anyway. It was a different shade than the cursed stuff Tommy had been dealing with, and a neat letter A was centered on his forehead. Tommy genuinely couldn’t tell if it was a tattoo or one of those weird you-look-like-the-world-you-live-in effects. What kind of server created an effect like that?
Well, he’d seen what this server was capable of, he supposed, so maybe it wasn’t that far fetched.
The eyes were the last thing he noticed but also the most captivating. They were a strange shade of grey that was a bit unsettling. Piercing, like they could see through you. Empty, like there wasn’t a player behind them. Ancient, like they’d seen more than Tommy could ever comprehend. Captured by that gaze, Tommy swore he felt himself unmade all over again, and somehow, he had no doubt that this player was fully capable of it.
“W-who are you?” he stammered.
Not-Dream blinked, and the spell was broken. “Callahan,” he stated, and he cast his gaze back out to the world around them. “You are TommyInnit.”
“Uh, y-yeah.” Tommy followed his gaze, and now that he had a moment to look around, something was very off.
It was definitely Church Prime. Tommy would know that purple building anywhere, with its glass windows and the thing Dream called a steeple and the little lake on its border. Even the boundary he and Dream had made with stones and jokingly declared these lands holy, whatever that meant. But there was something wrong about this place, too, Tommy realized. It wasn’t just the thick mist obscuring everything beyond the border, though that in and of itself would be more than enough cause for alarm. The grass was dead. The lake water looked to be an unnatural grey.
The sky was the most unsettling part. The lighting was dim, and he’d thought it was twilight, but it wasn’t. It was around noon; the sun was high in the sky, which still looked a normal blue. There were no clouds directly above them, but . . . the lighting. Everything looked dimmer and a bit yellowish, like an old faded photo or an aging film Tommy had seen years ago in a server library.
Even the air felt wrong. It had been midwinter in exile, so the freezing cold had made sense, hallucinations notwithstanding. Here, though, there was no snow. It looked like fall, maybe, with everything green dying and that awkward half-chill in the air that could make one shiver worse than when it was actually cold.
Tommy didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, but he was pretty sure it hadn’t been seven months. Paired with the weird lighting, it all felt . . . He couldn’t say why, but he suddenly knew with a terrible certainty: “This isn’t Dream SMP anymore, is it?”
“No,” said Callahan solemnly, but there was a forlorn edge to it.
“It’s dying,” Tommy persevered, a sick feeling forming in his gut. “We have to bring it back somehow—“
“Then it will die faster,” said Callahan, “and so will we.”
Tommy digested that. “Then the whole server is dying?” he asked.
Callahan examined him with those unsettling grey eyes. “Does Dream seem sane to you?” he asked after a moment.
Tommy thought of the last time he’d seen the admin. Dream’s low growls of fury had shaken him, but . . .
“I know I made him pretty mad—“
“Quite mad,” muttered Callahan. “It wasn’t—I should have seen.”
Tommy frowned. It felt like he was missing something big in the flow of this conversation. “Dream isn’t the server, though?”
Callahan laughed. It wasn’t in a nice way, more hoarse and bitter than anything. “You don’t know much about servers, do you, TommyInnit?”
“Uh, no?”
Tommy waited for the explanation that was sure to come, but it didn’t. Instead, there was a long, awkward pause.
“You should rest,” said Callahan. He stood, offering Tommy a hand.
“What—you’re just going to make ominous comments and not explain yourself?” Tommy demanded, reluctantly accepting the gesture. He didn’t really have the energy to struggle with the guy, and he didn’t really want to be left alone out here.
“I’ll explain,” Callahan promised, “but not now. You need your strength. Come in, rest.” He gestured toward the church.
Tommy grimaced. He’d heard adults use that tone before. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“I don’t—it’s not—“ Callahan groaned. “Words are hard, TommyInnit. I don’t know how to . . . Need to gather thoughts.”
Tommy snorted. “Yeah, you sound like you haven’t had a real conversation in a thousand years.”
“Probably longer,” Callahan stated matter-of-factly, and Tommy honestly wasn’t sure if he was serious or not.
“Sure, big man,” he said, reluctantly accepting Callahan’s guiding arm around his shoulders after he tripped and nearly collapsed again. “Whatever you say.”