Chapter Text
.
.
.
Something got in.
He feels it underneath the code, underneath each block and behind his own eyelids, even. Something got in.
And someone needs to tell Xisuma. They don't have time — they don't have nearly enough time for everything that needs doing, everything Grian needs to say — this kind of thing, this is a world-ending kind of thing. This is what rips a server apart — you hear these stories the way you hear about Watchers. It's a far-off fear. You know it could happen, but it hardly feels real — some people think they're urban myths, maybe.
And more often, Grian has long suspected, more often you don't hear about it — a server gone, crashed, all its backups chewed through, its admin broken to pieces and chewed and swallowed up — ? That's not the kind of thing anyone survives. There's nowhere to go, after that, no more tricks up sleeves and no cavalry coming over the hill. There are no hills left, by then. There's only the void, and then the ending.
It's the kind of thing that obliterates, is what he’s getting at, something that takes you off the map then eats the map. A server gone — all its players, gone — and neighbors soon to follow, maybe, and entire networks can vanish that way and who would even know? It's a big universe.
And something got in.
It's here, now — it's on Hermitcraft, burrowing through, and who knows how much it's already consumed.
He rakes his gaze over the hermits present — Cub and Joe, and Ren across the room, and Scar beside him — they're already good as dead, maybe. All of them. It could already be over. If he's fast enough, if he tells Xisuma, if he acts quickly and does everything he can — it might not matter. He doesn't know how much is already gone.
All these thoughts in the space of a second — half a second — as he types, firing a message to Xisuma that is hopefully explanatory enough — Scar is still laughing at the joke Grian's just told, the stupid joke he can't even remember now. That was a second ago. Two seconds ago. But Grian feels the presence in the code now like a sound from underwater, feels it chewing, feels something else break to its teeth. He’s not laughing anymore.
And Scar notices, almost right away, his eyes crinkling with concern — "G, what's wrong?" — and Grian shakes his head minutely, and his face must show the horror setting in. His mouth hangs open for a moment as he tries to find the words. "Scar," he says, and he nearly says more — nearly says you're one of my best friends and I love you and you have to know that. You know that, right? but the words don't get all the way out. Grian shakes his head again.
"Scar and — all of you. Listen to me very carefully," he says, and something about his voice sucks all the air out of the room, and he has everyone's attention. He feels their fear, and for a moment, for one wonderful moment he lets himself feed on it, coaxes it to grow, sinking hooks right into it. Oh, they’re listening now. (Grian shouldn't be able to do that, and he knows Cub notices, at least, and that'll need explaining, but there'll be time for that later — assuming there's time for anything later.)
"It got in," he manages, breathless, and he doesn't know if that means anything. Words, words, he needs more words — "Cub, something got in. Get Doc, Etho — Tango — anyone. You have to stave it off — fix — something, get everyone out. If anyone can do that it's you — it's — you'll know what I mean, you'll see it, it's in the code. We don't have time."
And then Cub's gone, because Grian's done something else he shouldn't have; there'll be time later, he tells himself, time to explain why he can suddenly call admin commands and launch players wherever he wants them. There'll be time to tell his friends he loves them. Later.
"Ren. Joe," he says, and they're staring at him. (His hooks are still in them, and he tries to pull them out and finds to his horror that he can't .) They're not the right hermits for this job. Are they? Ren can be as severe as he likes and everyone will think it's just performance; Joe, on the other hand — well, Joe can tell Cleo, and of course Cleo will believe Joe, and everyone will listen if Cleo gets serious. That'll have to work. "Find Cleo," he says, and it comes out sounding strangled. "Find her right now, don't stop for anything and tell her — everyone needs to gather at spawn. Everyone." Somewhere he can find them all, somewhere no one could be left behind — if the server starts to break, it's the safest place. Things get scarier the further out you go.
And if he's right, things are about to get very — very scary.
Joe doesn't look particularly pleased to be ordered around but Grian does not care . He can't afford to care, right now. Joe's gone, then, with a burst of energy that Grian can hardly afford, and he has to hope that he's got the location right — and that Cleo's home now, or at least close by. She'll know what to say to the rest of the hermits, he tells himself, and he tries to find comfort in it.
“Ren,” he says, breath coming heavier now, “find Xisuma. I’ve messaged him already, he — he’ll know what you can do. How to help. Find him.”
“Grian, what is going on —”
“ Go ,” he says, and he’s doing something he shouldn’t; there is a fear in Ren’s eyes unlike anything Grian has seen, because Grian is putting it there. It’s nothing on what’s coming, he tells himself in some vain attempt at justification — it’s an appropriate fear because Ren doesn’t understand yet, and they need to move very quickly , and there aren’t enough words to explain. But when Ren goes, Grian knows the real reason he did it — because Ren takes off flying, and once he’s flown far enough the hook snaps, slithering back to its source. Something gapes inside the Watcher, something old, something carnal — a hunger that’s just tasted relief. It wants Ren to come back.
“Grian,” says Scar, hesitant, and Grian whips his head to face him — Scar startles back a little — “ Grian ,” he repeats, uncharacteristically firm. “Tell me — tell me what I should do.”
Scar’s green eyes are bright and watery — anxious, afraid, so afraid — and Grian tears his own gaze away. He forces himself to speak, giving in to the plan that first popped into his mind, that’s formed almost fully now. It’s a good plan. It’s a horribly, horribly good plan.
“You need to stay with me,” Grian whispers, and he is a monster for it.
He's noticing things, now — flying low through the shopping district, he finds empty item frames that should be full. He sees blocks flickering and twitching. He flies on, Scar following high above him.
He meets the rest of Hermitcraft at the center of the world. Blocks are twitching here, too. He sees Cleo, heading the crowd — she keeps glancing at Joe, who's still visibly terrified — and when Grian comes to land, his feet hit the ground just to the left of where he'd aimed them.
There aren't clouds in the sky anymore.
Scar lands nearby, stumbling to a halt, then scrambling closer to him — he's started trembling, fear amplifying, and he reaches for Grian's hand. Grian reaches back, wondering who it's meant to comfort.
Quietly, very quietly Grian says, “There's something eating the world.” Scar, at least, deserves an explanation. “We'll all be dead if we don't get away — somewhere it can't reach. The server's already breaking apart — you can see it, can't you?”
There's a long pause. Scar looks down at his feet. “When I landed,” he says, and he sounds so scared.
“Yep,” says Grian. “It's all coming down.”
Xisuma arrives, boots landing hard on the stone. Ren is close behind him, and Xisuma speaks quietly first to Cub, who gestures toward Grian — Xisuma nods, and they keep talking, though Cub’s gaze lingers on him.
Slowly the hermits fall quiet, listening to what Xisuma is saying. He sounds pretty stressed. Understandable. This is stressful. “The logic’s falling apart,” Xisuma is saying. “No, it’s — that’s not right, is it. It’s not falling apart. It’s —”
“Being torn apart,” Cub finishes. “X, it’s —”
“I know,” Xisuma says. “I know. It’s in the code. It’s — yes, that’s exactly what it is.” At this point, several of the hermits know what he means by this, and Grian can feel their fear buzzing just on the surface, a thin film to color everything.
“Fuck,” says Tango. “ Fuck. Have you ever, has anyone ever — ever survived this?”
“That’s not the question that matters,” says Cub.
“We have to get out,” says Etho, but Xisuma is already shaking his head, and Grian can feel something terrible dawning on him, how his throat closes up as he says —
“There is no… way out. Anymore. Not — not after — you have to see this,” he says, shaking his head, and Grian blinks as commands pop up in chat — Cub, then Zed, then Doc, then — he’s giving them admin perms. “Broken logic — it’s everywhere, see, and there are enough checks and failsafes to keep it from shutting the server down for good, but —”
“Not for long. Not if it keeps going,” Cub finishes, and Tango swears again.
“If we’re getting out of here, we need to write it ourselves,” Doc realizes, staring at one of many chunks of broken code. “It’s — this is unusable. There is no way off the server.”
No way off the server. Because it isn’t just the void, is it — it’s what lives there, and it’s all of the dangers between here and there, the half-functioning firewalls that Xisuma is pointing to. Those can fuck you up in ways you don’t come back from. Call it undefined behavior if you want to get clinically scary about it.
No safe way off — not for a player, Grian thinks distantly, even one with admin training — not for anyone whose body operates within the rules of a world, who needs things like proper comms and hard lines between blocks, who’s real and whole and bound by that — not for anyone who's anything other than starving.
“Exactly,” Xisuma says to Doc.
The plan in Grian's mind solidifies, crystallizes, clear and structured. The hermits will write a safe way off the server for every player, a tunnel through the firewall or a glamour it won’t catch — and a Watcher will do anything it pleases, so long as it’s fed.
The fear’s set in for everyone else, too, now that it’s been put in plain language. “We don’t have time for that,” Tango’s whispering frantically, a hand in his hair, “at the rate this is going — writing that much, testing it, something safe enough — ” and Impulse says something, pulls him into a hug — and other hermits are talking, now, a low and frightened murmur.
“I’ll hold it off,” says Grian, louder than he means to, and they fall quiet. He shrinks back under the weight of more than twenty gazes. Ironic, isn’t that — Watcher, uncomfortable being watched. “I can — I can hold it off,” he repeats.
“You can what?” says Etho, dubiously — probably dubiously — it’s hard to tell sometimes with Etho — “Grian, you’re not really… I mean, no offense, but this isn’t exactly one of your strong suits —”
Do they remember he was an admin, once? Granted, not a very good one, but Evo was his. Of course they don’t remember what else he’s made, and Grian has no interest in reminding them now, of all times, that he’s spent several months intermittently exploiting all their fuzzy feelings for secret dream-state death games. It did involve some coding, is the thing, and their confidence would be nice right about now.
Grian doesn’t say any of that. Instead he says, “I can. I can buy us time. I can buy us — I don’t know. An hour?” That sounds right.
“ Grian ,” says Gem, and she sounds almost exasperated — she sounds scared, too, and that makes him flinch. He knows he isn’t the most trustworthy guy, but —
They have to believe him. Right now, so they can get to work, so that every technically-minded hermit can stay focused on scrabbling together enough broken functions to make a feasible escape.
“Don’t — don’t ask questions,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut. Cub must be looking at him, still, must be looking at him quizzically , like a problem to solve. Cub does that. It’s why Grian doesn’t like Cub. (He’ll never tell Scar that.) “ Please . I’ll answer everything after, I swear.” He only has to keep that promise if they make it out of this alive. “Just — we do not have time for me to explain. I can hold it off. Let me hold it off.”
And Grian does something he shouldn’t. He looks at Mumbo, who has always trusted Grian, always believed in him, and something inside him shudders, ravenous , reaching out hooks to feed.
Mumbo blinks a few times, and Grian’s not sure if he imagines his eyes glazing over — then he jerks forward, raising one hand, like he’s suddenly, inexplicably desperate to speak up. “We trust you, Grian,” he says, “do — do what you need to do, we’ll —”
He falters, turns, shoulders hunched around his ears as he looks to the other hermits for approval. A few of them are nodding now. Grian’s breath is coming faster, nausea rolling in his stomach, and he can’t meet Mumbo’s eyes anymore. “We’ll work on a way out,” Mumbo says, sounding terrified but perfectly devoted. Xisuma nods toward Grian, signaling approval.
Alright, then — alright. Moving along.
A long time ago, before anything terrible gets into any servers Grian knows — except for Grian himself, anyway — there’s a castle on a mountain, towers and spires stretching up toward the sky, and a half-moon portal hangs suspended beside it. And there is Grian, nestled in the curve of that portal, bathed in its purple glow as he crouches to examine two stone blocks. He scrapes moss aside with one hand and squints.
Is the gradient too sharp, he’s thinking, forcing blurry eyes to focus.
“Well, hello there,” says a voice from nowhere, and Grian startles so badly he nearly just tumbles off the edge. “ Whoa there, buddy — ” A set of strong arms catches him, tugging him back.
“Scar,” Grian snaps, “I have — do you even know how many levels I have right now —”
“Hey, hey,” Scar says, throwing his hands up, “I’m sorry — really, I’m sorry. I thought you heard me coming, honestly, you always hear me coming. Sometimes I swear you’re impossible to sneak up on!”
Grian huffs, shaky hands fumbling for his pickaxe. The gradient is too sharp, he’s decided. He’ll replace the left stone with tuff. “Well, you can — you can write it in your diary, I don’t know. Snuck up on Grian. Nearly lost him four hundred levels. Congratulations.”
He fixes the gradient and sits down hard, practically throwing his pickaxe down beside him. He shouldn’t be acting like this, he knows; Scar has been nothing but kind to him these last few days, as Grian’s body has opened up inside, the hunger a yawning black chasm. It’s getting bad again. (He wonders if it's bad enough to kill him this time — lately there’s an urgency in it, a sound like a death knell, rising, impending — there is, too, the hazy drunken memory of a game that tasted better than anything's tasted in years. Maybe he will die in his sleep tonight. Maybe before he dies he’ll do something terrible. Grian doesn’t feel like he decides these things anymore.)
He’s hungry, and it’s killing him, and he’s had so little patience, but Scar’s only had more and more to give — it almost makes Grian wonder if Scar has noticed. That’d be a first.
Then Scar says, “I just came to check on you. You’ve been up here buildin’ awhile — how long has it been since you’ve eaten? ” and Grian nearly chokes.
Scar stares at him, eyebrows raised, until Grian’s brain catches up with what Scar actually means and he manages to answer, “Of course I’ve eaten. Ate earlier, actually. Brought snacks. Up here.”
“And where are these snacks?” Scar asks.
“I — ate them all already. Literally just — just said that, Scar, keep up.” Drop it, he’s thinking, frustrated.
“And what were these snacks that you ate all of already?”
“I had a stack of bread,” Grian snaps. “Alright? Is that good enough for you? It’s the — it’s the stupid apology bread that you gave me after you stole — sorry, after Mumbo’s redstone ‘lagged into your inventory’ and you literally forgot who you were meant to apologize to — and really, Scar, a chest of bread for a stack of redstone blocks? Even you can’t make that sound fair. Well, I had some, and it was terrible as far as bread’s concerned, I hope you know.”
Scar keeps staring at him.
“ Well? ” Grian says — practically explodes, actually, and Scar’s eyebrows just raise further and Grian is going to murder him if he doesn’t leave him alone.
“Grian,” Scar says finally, and oh, Grian knows that tone. “Okay, alright, so — Grian. My good friend. My very dear friend. I — you know how I messed up Tango’s little project last week? Right, so, a man’s gotta apologize for that kind of thing! I really set him back there! And I was fresh out of apology bread, and I noticed that you hadn’t really, ah — hadn’t really taken an interest in yours?” He clears his throat. “So, uh — my point being. That. That chest hasn’t had any bread in it for like six days now. Grian, buddy. You are lying to me.”
Grian opens his mouth, then closes it.
Well, that’s —
That’s inconvenient. Alright. He’s talked himself into a corner now.
He’s caught out, unsure what to say, and he ends up just sighing, and he must deflate a little bit when he does, because Scar’s tone gentles.
“Don’t wanna starve to death up here, do ya, G?” he says, and Grian almost laughs. “I don’t want that either. Just have somethin’, alright? I’ve got stuff on me. I know how you can get caught up. Worries me sometimes, if I’m honest.”
"Worries you — Scar, I could literally starve to death five times over and be fine," says Grian, scowling, "minus four hundred levels, but this isn't —"
— a life game, he nearly says, and he's left dizzy with the implication of almost not catching himself. Well — well, he's also just dizzy, by now. Just regular old dizzy. Dizzy from hunger, because he is so… so hungry.
" — death doesn't matter here, Scar," he finishes lamely, and he doesn't know why he has to say it. Scar should know that death doesn't matter here, should know it all the way down to his bones, because death has never mattered for Scar. Grian knows a lot about Scar's past, the worlds that he came from before this one, and a hardcore world is not among them. Scar's never been afraid of death in a way that — in a way that he can remember. So Grian shouldn't have to say it.
(Paranoia creeps in closer at the edges of his mind. Scar doesn't remember, he reminds himself, Scar can't remember.
It's another life, just this side of their reality, and everyone was different there — and Grian was not all the way there, and he tells himself that none of them were — and they don't even remember it. How could they? It isn't real for them. It isn't this Scar that Grian had to —
It isn't real for them.)
Scar sits down beside him and reaches out, brushing over Grian's cheek with the back of his hand.
"No," he agrees, "it sure doesn't. But pain still does. Come on, G, eat something. I can cook, do you want me to cook? We can head down to your kitchen, yeah, I can whip something up?" He wiggles his eyebrows up and down, and Grian can't help but snort.
"No," he says, when he can finally manage to speak, "I'd like something — something — edible, thanks."
Scar presses a hand to his chest in mock offense. "You wound me!" But he's still speaking softly. Like Grian is a fragile thing. "Alright, look, I've got some fruit. How does that sound? Think you can manage a liiiittle piece of fruit? We've got berries. We've got melons. We've got apples."
And fruit does sound... inoffensive, at the least. Grian sighs. If he is careful, he can get Scar off his back. "Alright. I'll have an apple."
"Yes!" Scar whoops much less softly, pumping his fist in the air, and Grian winces at the volume. "Oh — sorry, sorry, my bad. Yes!"
A whispered cheer, complete with a tinier fist pump. Grian snorts again. Scar holds out the apple, and reluctantly he takes it, and more reluctantly he eats it — though by the time he's halfway through, it's a little less reluctant, as an old instinct rears up in him to devour it. Food. It should be food. There existed a Grian who could eat apples. (He imagines it dissolving under his teeth, under his tongue, and in the back of his throat, so that nothing of substance can reach his stomach — he doesn’t really know what the apple does when he eats it, but it is not food for a Watcher, that much is obvious. It’s almost nauseating, how the apple bursts with flavor on his tongue and never makes it any further. He is so hungry.)
Grian finishes the first apple and Scar holds out a second, and Grian takes it, offering a smile that could pass for grateful. The second apple is just as empty as the first. He imagines — he imagines . For appearances, he imagines. It’s almost worse this way.
"Okay," he says when he's done. He puts on reluctance, he puts on embarrassment. "So I might have been hungry."
Who says that Scar’s the better liar of the two of them?
"Uh huh," says Scar, raising his eyebrows. God, Grian hates giving him a reason to be smug. "Sleep deprived, too, don't think that I didn’t hear those phantoms."
" Scar — "
Eventually Scar does manage to wheedle him to bed, playing tricks to get him back at ground level and then coaxing him indoors “just to come out of the dark, Grian, come on, look — that skeleton’s bow is enchanted, you don’t want me to die, do you?” And death doesn’t matter here, has never mattered here, but some part of him can’t bring himself to argue. Not when Scar says it like that. He goes to bed, that second apple still sweet on his tongue.
Grian doesn’t die in his sleep that night. He meets something called a secret keeper, something that looks and speaks just like him, and from memory he builds a world he knows by heart for a fifth, and final, game.
He doesn’t remember much of the rest, but he remembers how it tastes.
“Where — where are we going?” asks Scar. His voice breaks on nearly every word, which Grian determinedly ignores.
“Somewhere quieter,” Grian mutters. “Not far. Not out of range. Just somewhere I can — focus.” He didn’t ask Scar to come — he hasn’t had to ask again since the first time. There are hooks in every hermit, and most of all there are hooks in Scar, wrapping around his feelings and sinking in, drinking down the force of his emotion — his fear, and his love, and probably whatever emotion it is that makes him follow people around like a lost puppy, but mostly his fear.
Fear’s real easy to feed on.
They don’t go far. Grian’s still hungry, after all, and besides that, distance is a risk that he’s not willing to take. The hermits are so little, really — just players, and they hardly mean a thing, can hardly do a damn thing outside the firm constraint of a world made for their bodies. Can’t even code without a comm. They were nothing, up against something like Grian. They were easier prey than he could have imagined.
“Here is fine,” he says, around the corner of a building. Scar’s breath hitches, and he stumbles to a stop beside him. It’s quieter. That’s all he needs — some quiet, and a minute to focus. The rest will be easy; his knees have nearly buckled, now, with the pleasure of feeding freely. For the first time in a long time, Grian feels much larger and much stronger than the world he’s standing in.
“Scar,” he says, and he tries to be gentle. He does. “You won’t be able to… see what I’m doing, exactly. But you need to stay right here — and I mean right next to me. Do you understand? You can’t leave my side for anything.”
Scar nods, one hand pressed to his mouth as the other clutches his stomach. There are tears in his eyes — his wide, wild, unseeing eyes. Grian pulls harder, a hook sinking deeper, tasting bliss. Scar was perfect for this, some distant part of him thinks.
Then he steps into the space behind the blocks.
It bends around him so easily, making room for him and each one of his eyes. Not even Xisuma — with all of his skill, administrator, “voidwalker” that he is — could get this view of a server. It was beautiful, probably, when it was whole. He looks up into the face of the thing in the code, and he bares all of his teeth, dragging more strength from Scar than Scar can probably give; if Grian didn’t have other hermits to draw from too, he’s sure they’d both be dead.
He's sure he’s never taken so much from just one person.
The thing’s own teeth close around him, and Grian doesn’t break. Something like a scream’s torn out of him, and through that scream he grapples with its face, reaches up into its cavity, wrestles to find its soft and necessary parts.
A Watcher does what it pleases, so long as it’s fed.
Some things are different, in this version of the story. No one remembers — at least they don’t mostly remember, they don’t really remember — how scared they can be when they think they’re dying. Scar doesn’t remember the desert.
Grian thinks about writing the desert out of his own fucking memories, sometimes.
He never does it though. He visits whatever giant project Scar is working on and bugs him endlessly and steals from him and teases him. It’s a long time ago, long enough that he still tries to pretend this Scar is his own Scar, the one he got to keep and call his — and it is not difficult, because this Scar still takes his clothes off and dies in stupid accidents and says stuff that makes Grian’s whole face and chest flush red. Stupid stuff, and he acts like he doesn’t know what he’s saying, but Grian literally cannot believe that. He refuses to. Scar is ruining his day on purpose and enjoying it.
“You are the worst,” he says, and Scar’s face does something funny.
“You love me though,” he says. It sounds familiar, the way he says it. A few days ago they were soulmates (because Grian is a selfish man) and Scar doesn’t remember that, anymore than he remembers the desert.
“I don’t know,” Grian says. “You are on thin ice. You’d better watch it.”
The days just after a game ends are always strange — Grian is glutted, wading through molasses, heady with power that’ll fade in time as the hunger returns. No one really knows what happened. No one talks about it — like an amnesia cold, they gloss over the confusion and the mismatched stories — and Grian wonders if they sense that something’s gone terribly wrong inside them.
He tells himself that it will never happen again. He’s wrong this time, like he’s been wrong before.
The thing in the code is faster than him.
He slips in and out. He’s next to Scar one moment, bleeding heavily from mouth and nose while his broken lungs try to process oxygen — and Scar actually cries out at that, reaching for him, cradling his bloody face. It doesn’t matter. Grian’s already most of the way better. “ Grian ,” he says, horrified, and Grian just grins.
But a moment to heal and gasp for air is a moment for the thing to progress through the code. “Stay here,” Grian repeats for the dozenth time, as though he needs to say it — as though Scar’s not already fixed to this spot, waiting right here until the moment he dies and his entire world ends. It’s a reassurance to himself, really, a reminder that Scar will do anything — absolutely anything Grian asks him to right now. Grian says stay here and Scar stays. That’s comfort. Grian is a selfish man.
He says stay here and then he’s darting between spaces in the between-space, dodging and distracting, taking the thing apart wherever he can reach. He tries to fix stuff, too, as he moves, little patches on the fly, as he finds bits of the server’s code, mangled and useless —
Scar’s hand is a comfort on his arm, offering one reassuring squeeze, then pulling back to let him work. “Stay here,” Grian wheezes, and the words come out staticky this time as he struggles for breath, and then he turns to stare into the face of the thing in the code, teeth bared; he doesn’t look at anything else. He’s gone. He’s moving. He doesn’t look at how Scar trembles , doesn’t think about what’s fueling this, where his hooks have sunken in and what that does to a person. There is a hunger in his bones, and in his skull, pounding just behind his eyes, an agony that rises over the terror. It’s stronger than he’s ever felt it — but then he thinks that every time, doesn’t he — he has to ignore it. Just a little more strength, just for a little longer. (Scar can keep him going just a little longer.)
He screams again, and he rips his way into a place that makes the thing scream, too. Maybe it’s like a stomach. Shouldn’t it have a stomach? Grian doesn’t have a stomach, so maybe not. The place his stomach should be is in pieces now, and that’s a little frightening, even as the hermits’ desperate, delicious panic patches up the damage. He hasn’t been able to heal like this in god knows how long. Good as new and ready to be ripped apart again.
“Can’t eat me, can you,” Grian taunts, in a language it won’t understand. “Aren’t I just the worst? Pesky bird’s inedible. Not unkillable, though, and you’ve sure come close. You should try again — ”
Either way this ends, it'll end soon. They can’t have long now.
That's a comfort, too, and maybe it shouldn't be.
An even longer time ago, there’s only one Scar, with only one set of memories. He probably wouldn’t follow Grian to the ends of the universe or to certain death, but then, Grian’s never asked. Maybe he always would have. Maybe that’s just what Scar is like.
Grian doesn’t know how simple things are. There have been no death games, no red-eyed curses, and nothing has tasted good in weeks. He’s exhausted. There’s a hole with a lot of boats stacked on top of it, and there’s a meeting at the bottom of the hole, and just the thought of going down there makes him even more tired, but Scar is shouting up from the bottom and he can’t bring himself to ditch. This is a good memory. He will ache for this, in every version of the story.
He slips in and out. And it goes on like this, but it can’t go on forever — the thing in the code faster than him. He bought them an hour — was that enough?
Grian blinks, and he can’t see the code anymore. He stumbles into daylight, turning back to face the thing in the code, and finds he can’t. He can’t see anything — and that’s not right.
Something isn’t right. A lot of somethings aren’t right, one on top of the next — something isn’t right about the space that Grian’s body occupies, the distance from his shoulder to his hand, or from one block to the next —
“It’s collapsing,” he whispers. “It’s done, it’s — gone.”
Grian turns, and Scar’s beside him with that pallid face, trembling hand outstretched — “Grian,” he says, voice strained, “I don’t — I don’t feel very good. Grian. I think —”
Say it, something screams inside of Grian, say it right now, before — !
Everything’s falling in on itself, and Scar is two blocks away but too far to even reach, and Grian turns to see the other hermits far too close. Feeding range, but there was a wall here before, and now he’s not sure where “here” is, exactly. No wall. He could touch them, he thinks, if he just leaned forward a little. He could speak and they’d hear. He could even just whisper. Mumbo sits alone, wringing his hands, and his eyes are red-rimmed and puffy — from crying, obviously — that’ll be Grian’s doing. He’s going to die scared. They all are.
“We’re close,” says Cub. His voice is shaking. Grian’s never heard it do that.
“We’re close,” echoes Tango, and he sounds so angry — near tears, he’s so angry — “not now, not now, we’re so close —” His voice cracks, one hand slipping as he works, reaching for something that’s not there anymore, and he swears out loud. “No, no —”
But they are out of time.
Very quickly there is nothing at all — twenty-five-odd hermits in a vast emptiness, and something else, sucked toward them with an open mouth and teeth outstretched like fingers, swallowing the universe. Hungry. Grian knows what it is to be hungry like that. Grian is hungry like that, right now.
God, maybe all this was only comeuppance. He knows what he’s going to do — know it’s over, now. Grian can do things he shouldn’t be able to do, can plant his feet into the void and make something of nothing if he just has enough strength, if he just gathers up the rest of himself and channels it right — a Watcher does what it pleases, so long as it’s fed — and there is a world he knows so well, one he’s remade and remade, for game after game. It’s all there, in his mind. He might not have all the time and infrastructure that he’s had before for server-making, but honestly, it won’t be hard, for something like Grian. If it uses the very last of him, if he can unravel his memory code, weave it into the remains of the server —
That’s doable.
More time. It’s just a little more time. And it’s one last violation — maybe they’ll forgive him for it, if it saves their lives — though it doesn’t matter, does it, because he’ll be gone. Grian sinks his hooks into every hermit he can reach, and he pulls. He feeds.
From memory, he builds a world he knows by heart.
He comes back to himself gasping, shaking practically apart, eyes fixed on the sun. The horizon. The almost-world — barely functioning, actually — better than the void. Not instant death like the void. It’ll have to be good enough. It’s all of him.
It’s a beautiful place to die, at least.
It’s got a sunset. It’s got trees. It’s gotta be poetic , right? There are a hundred and one places he would rather be dying, but this must be what he’s earned himself; some kind of justice. Here is the circle that fourteen players stood round, when this started. When Grian — when the Watcher — started this. There’s something on the horizon, rising against a red backdrop — a castle — it’s blurry, he realizes, as blurry as his memories are — and all of the things shift when he looks at them too long. Well, that’s not right.
He can only look for a few moments, though, before he’s doubling over, and he thinks things shift again around him — the same circle, another world, ghosts of new players and returnees for a new game. Has he done it, or is this just a memory? (A dying brain’s churlish vision? Because Grian’s dying brain would be churlish. It’d be properly passive aggressive at him. That’s believable.) No, he tells himself, feeling hermits start to spawn — no, he’s done it, somehow. He’s at least half done it. It’s a real enough world, a buffer against obliteration, and they’re all here.
And obliteration is still very much creeping in at its edges — the void and what lives in it, ready to swallow them whole — but Grian knows he has bought the rest of them enough time. (Paid with his own, so it has to be worth something. It has to.) Cub had said they were close . He feels them out there, every other hermit, drawing closer — scattered a bit further than he’d meant them to be —
(They’re realizing now. They must be. He’s brought them back here — they’ll remember, because they know this place.)
Pearl is right next to him.
She’s standing — she’s turning circles, slowly. “Where are we?” she says, softly. “Grian —”
He shakes his head, moaning, hands over his ears, keeled in half because his head hurts and his stomach hurts and he can’t, he can’t, he cannot do this. “I-I tried,” he whimpers. He means a lot of things by it.
“Where are we,” Pearl says. Her voice is sharper this time. She’s starting to understand. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t tell her, because if Pearl thinks about it long enough, if he can’t drag his hooks out of her, she’ll figure it out.
“I tried,” he says again, babbling uselessly, voice growing thick with useless tears — an apology, almost, an attempt at one, for everything he did to her and never told her — “I tried, Pearl, I tried. I tried not to. Being — a good Watcher — like your Grian, like a normal Grian. It was so — I was so hungry.”
He still is. He is so hungry. It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t ever enough and that’s why — he kept — doing it.
“I can’t,” he gasps, as the pieces of him shutter in on themselves, creaking and splintering in one final collapse — his knees hit the ground, then his shoulder and his head, and it’ll be over soon, he’s so close — “I didn’t mean to. Pearl, Pearl. I’m sorry. Pearl.”
He didn’t tell Scar. He didn’t tell Mumbo. He has to say something, and he has to say it right now. “Pearl — I love you. Pearl,” he says. “I love — Scar, and Mumbo, everyone , I — tell them, will you tell them — Tim and Joel and — you have to tell them.” He’s dying. He’s really dying, now — it was always coming, he’s just gotten it to come a little faster. “Tell them I never wanted to .” Something like blood bubbles at his lips, but it isn’t blood; it’s realer than that. It’s more necessary than that.
“Grian, what are you talking about ,” Pearl says (— he hears the tears in her own voice and he’s sorry , he is, she has to believe that he’s sorry —) but he knows she must be catching on by now. She’s back here, in this world. Maybe somewhere there’s a Tilly. She’s about to realize he’s dying, too, because he is starting to hear it: the low, angry interference, and the awful pixelated splintering, a shrill white noise growing from within him — sounds that aren’t like anything a player makes, even when it dies — the sound of something incompatible with life. Grian is breaking.
It’s over, now. At least he won’t be hungry anymore.
He opens his mouth to say something else, anything else — it hits him, now, that he’ll never say anything again, and he realizes he didn’t get enough time. There’s more he has to say. There’s too much, welling up in him, that’ll never come out now.
It’s louder. It’s louder, and Pearl can surely hear it now, and he struggles to open his eyes — the pain is blinding, but he gets to see her, one last time. (Horrified, hands coming up to her ears — she hears it now. She’ll know it is wrong even if she doesn’t understand it.) You were good to me , he wants to say, do you know that — you were always good. A good builder, player, friend. Gooder than he deserved. He sees a stack of boats in his mind’s eye, a row of hourglasses, a train — a door that doesn’t open right — a spaceship. Another skyline. It was all he could’ve wanted.
His vision’s going. His mouth is open, still trying to form last words. Her eyes look almost red, like this. “Grian,” she’s crying, reaching for him, but her hands pass through him, and she screams.
For a moment he hears nothing at all. Then there are footsteps — and Pearl is still screaming, and someone is at Grian’s side. More than one someone. They’ll have figured it out now, they’ll have remembered.
One game, then two, then five — three lives, then four or five or six, then secrets and soulmates and ticking clocks — they’re here, in a memory or a blueprint or something in between, barely real and painfully familiar — another episode of chaos in a box, he thinks, delirious, and it’s almost funny.
They’ll want him dead now.
“ Grian ,” Xisuma’s voice says — almost snarls — and there is a hand on him, then, pressed against his chest and reaching into it. There is something holding him together, something that loves him so much, something gentle and strong, deft as the fingers of an experienced coder — something which feels just like Xisuma does.
It’s a little late for that, though. Grian sees white.
.
.
.