Chapter Text
It's cold.
He'd figured death would be cold, but this is- it's so cold. Like the-
"There you are."
Like the tundra.
"I thought I'd be seeing you soon."
Wilbur Soot- or the creature that had been Wilbur Soot- turns on feet that make no marking in the snow because Wilbur Soot is dead. He had asked for death and Death had taken him in a father's embrace and oh god what has he done?
"No time for that, Wilbur." says a voice that is one voice and hundreds and thousands of voices all at once. "You need to get your legs under you. So to speak."
Wilbur looks around but doesn't see who is speaking, at first. "Where-" he starts.
Then he stops.
It stands in the middle of the snowy path. It's tall, and broad, in form a piglin with a thick fur-lined cloak that keeps off the falling snow. It wears a mask of yellow white bone, and it is bleeding.
It is bleeding from the eyes of its mask, from the snout. Blood dribbles from its mouth and tusks to turn into fine red mist and vanish. Blood is caked into its fur and crusted to its ears, the both of them turning ever so slightly to face Wilbur, as though to catch something he had just said.
There is a trail of red behind it in the snow, dragged by that warm fur lined cloak.
It stomps a gore-smeared hoof and huffs.
Wilbur Soot would probably be having a panic attack, if dead men could manage that sort of thing.
"Technoblade?"
"In the flesh." That mouth twists in a wry smile Wilbur knows and wishes he didn't. "As it were. You see me now. Don't you?" Every word it speaks has that echoing backdrop, that sense that the monster is not one but many, words unspoken hanging in the air like impossible snowflakes blood, blood, blood for the blood god.
The Blood God.
"Y-you- how?"
"Let's not worry about me, Wilbur. We need to worry about you. It's been almost seven months, you know. The rest of you's probably still under the rubble, if they didn't just pave over you. So we have a- schedule to keep. Depending on a few little factors."
Wilbur feels his stomach roll over and that's something, he has a stomach that can roll over. He's not certain other dead men get that.
"I'm dead," Wilbur says. "I'm dead and this is- wherever I went. You're not real."
Wilbur can almost see Technoblade's eyes rolling with his short, piggy huff of air. "You're not dead, Wilbur. Not what counts, anyway. Or did you really think that you could escape by asking Phil for death?"
Techno laughs, the sound echoing with a thousand whispering chuckles. "Not that one, Wilbur, no. He didn't do it on purpose, though. I can promise you that. You're just- built different."
"What does that even mean?!" Wilbur shouts and when he shouts, the panic welling up into something like rage and fear and also a roll of bile after too many drinks, his words push the snow and the trees and Technoblade.
The environment bends. The snow is blasted off of poplar and spruce, the storm parting for just a second in a moment of perfect clarity.
Wilbur screams and falls back. The snowfall continues. The trees seem nonplussed at their denuding.
Technoblade (the monster that claims to be Technoblade) turns his head to the right, then the left. The bones threaded into the thicker fur of his mane click.
"Newborn gods don't survive very long after they meet me, Wilbur." he says, and it's spoken kindly and it makes Wilbur hate him. "But," he continues, "you're Phil's boy. My Phil. So I can probably make an exception."
"God?" Wilbur whispers. "That's- no. NO."
There are rules about Gods. There are rules! He would have known!
Wouldn't he?
"No. No you're wrong. I'm dead I'm not I'm dead I'm NOT-"
Technoblade laughs again and there is no humor in it. The world around them goes dark. The snow disappears and everything is hot and close. They are surrounded by red rock and corpses and before him is a piglin whose back looks like the firing line of an archery field, all those arrows stuffed in the dirt. His armor is torn and charred and he is coughing scarlet. His shield arm is hanging uselessly, hoof split to white bone.
"Do you think," the piglin manages between great, hacking coughs, "that gods choose to be born?" He swings his sword at Wilbur. There is no grace or artistry, no deadly dance (wrong, wrong it's wrong, Technoblade in motion is like a hurricane, a landslide, a perfect note on an instrument divine) and it barely comes close.
Then the snow is back, and the demon with a boar skull face is mere inches from Wilbur Soot. Behind that mask Wilbur can see Techno's white and gray eyes shining with a mad golden fire he almost recognizes. The realization fills him with a bone-deep terror.
"Stop!" Wilbur shouts and this time the word is enough to push the Blood God back, to force him off the white snow and into the oozing red trail. "Go away!"
Technoblade laughs in the voices of the slain, in his neverending Chorus of voices. "Are you sure?"
"GO!"
And then Wilbur is alone in an endless black void. No wind. No snow. No poplar or spruce. No Technoblade.
Wilbur can hear his own blood pounding in his ears. He looks left. He looks right. He looks up and down and there is still nothing. There's supposed to be a light, isn't there? Or a- a tunnel? It can't be this. Not nightmares and nothingness.
Then he sees the blood trail.
It's so starkly red he wonders how he missed it. Then he wonders if it's really there. He kneels, reaches out to touch it. Tacky, but not wet. Wilbur looks up to see it slowly meander away.
He looks around one more time, then follows.
The void is still void for a long time. Then it begins to change. Gray moves in as light colors shadows, giving things definition. Shading becomes lines which become trees and rocks and piles of snow and cold comes back all at once but Wilbur says, "I'm warm," and he is.
He knows where he's going now and when he comes upon the house, surrounded by paddocks, he is resigned.
He follows the blood up to the front door and knocks.
When it opens, a piglin stands there. In shape and form he looks much like the man Wilbur had known- tall and powerful, a menacing force of nature when he wants you to remember. Unusually pink fur, gold-capped tusks, an everpresent sword.
Yet what has been seen cannot be unseen, not entirely. Technoblade knows it, too, because when he smiles and says, "Hello, God of Unfinished Symphonies," he is speaking with more than one voice.
"Hello, Blood God," Wilbur whispers. "I'm so tired."
"Yes. I know."
The Blood God steps aside, and the newly born God of Unfinished Symphonies all but collapses onto the floor. The door is closed; let the storm bury them all.
There are more pressing matters to attend to.