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The water is only a few blocks deep, not nearly enough to simulate the crushing pressure at the bottom of a ravine, and the walls are grey concrete instead of jagged stone. It doesn’t matter. Silverr’s focus is on the magma glowing beneath the water—two-by-one, lava bubbling one block beneath—and he forges the obsidian frame with movements repeated enough to be calcified into his bones.
He strikes the flint and steel, and is back at the edge of the pool. Again, and again, until the dizziness of bubbles rushing by his eyes has his hands trembling and his inhales coming ragged when he doesn’t pause for more than a full breath before diving back in.
By this point, he relents and pulls himself to the edge of the water in a few laboured strokes, averting his gaze from the timer that counts up and up and up across the screen of his communicator. He tastes salt on his tongue and a coppery tang at the back of his throat, but the bone-deep satisfaction that pools through his body casts it all in the optimistic light of accomplishment. Practice means predictability, and predictability means precious moments of calm when missteps in a run so easily pile into a deluge.
He throws the snowball and the room resets. The build is a labour of love. Meticulous, complex circuits of redstone run it all behind the scenes, linking command blocks that teleport him and rearrange his inventory, but Silverr doesn’t concern himself with the how and why.
It’s easier to carve out a life in the shadows of others’ creations and jump through worlds in the blink of an eye, and that’s expected of their ilk, isn’t it? Permanence culled down to practice maps and repetition and maybe a test world where haphazard block setups tower up to y-256 in spiralling patterns. No time to breathe, to linger and cherish...
Silverr recoils from the idea of somehow being an anomaly otherwise, not when he’s sure that what compels him to run and never settle flows in the lines of his code, and he can’t be the only one with the itch beneath his skin that means he moves through life like a fight; with bruised limbs and bloodied palms.
He is—runners are—built with a mechanical heartbeat pulsing with the regularity of seconds whiling away. Patterns are hammered throughout their memory because the world’s temperamental generation turns from enthralling to a challenge: when to craft iron tools or gold; wrangling pigs in bastions; constructing towers for zero-cycles with enough practiced ease as to appear unconsidered. Without this unrelenting edge to their movements—like an axe’s swing clean through a tree trunk—they are left behind or swept beneath the world’s immensity.
Players with creation coded into their being create a friend and a partner out of the world over weeks-months-years, dealing in arms stained to the elbow with redstone dust and in grandiose structures built up from its own resources. In tangible, perpetual things—their lifeblood singing with a languid, fluidic timbre nothing like the metallic tick that courses beneath his skin.
Ranked sands down some of their ruthlessness with its guaranteed iron pickaxe overworlds and five-obsidian-bastions and worst case six-for-twenty chances of blaze rods being recovered intact. But it’s all for the sake of the game and demands raw, unfaltering speed in return.
So, the portals. Simulated portals and bastions and chest looting, preparing for every moment of control he can grapple onto amid the million things he can’t.
The room resets again. Silverr is braced against the pool’s edge, saltwater lapping against his shoes and dripping from his clothes. A dull burn pulses through his muscles in time with his pounding heartbeat, protesting the position, and it’s reliable, constant, human. Things like this, he can still fall back on. He just isn’t built for stillness and that’s fine.
His communicator chimes with an incoming message before he can move, playing the little jingle set for one person. Silverr drops the tension coiled through his body without a second thought, crossing the room in a few quick strides. He sinks against the wall as he flicks open the chat logs.
still up for tonight? Reignex asks through the little text box, a world away.
obviously, Silverr replies, because he couldn't fathom anything else.
There is a trigger on Silverr’s communicator, central on the home screen, that resets the world and generates another in half a second. Par for the course for any runner.
It sees a lot of use when he and Reign run duos. If their immediate chunks don’t show an ocean or a ruined portal. If it’s a village or a desert, even, because the world won’t guarantee them a Nether entry. Plus, the temples often yield nothing but useless pinches of gunpowder and tomes of enchanted books. Then they’re relegated to rotten flesh that more often leaves hunger clawing at his insides, and, in a show of occasional kindness, a golden apple squirrelled away for emergencies. And villages are too slow to navigate, too variable in their offerings.
None of their worlds have brought anything promising yet. Even so he hasn’t descended into frustration at the endless resets—worlds created, scanned and inevitably discarded—and that’s all owed to Reign’s voice in his ear. He talks about everything and nothing at all with his brimming enthusiasm while the resets pile up, and it’s a steadying, constant undercurrent while he scans flickering pie charts and coordinates.
Then, finally—
It’s practically a perfect overworld. They’re deposited on a flat stretch of beach, white sand dipping into cold, deep ocean. Reign spots what he thinks is broken kelp floating to the surface as he squints into the rising sun, and Silverr finds a buried treasure not a few chunks off from spawn.
He pulls out salmon and cod and iron ingots enough for two pickaxes; a few bits of TNT, even two diamonds glimmering beneath the grime. That means a sword and that’ll go to Reign when he’s in the fortress practically unprotected.
The thought pricks a note of anxiety in Silverr’s mind, but he settles to assuage it by pressing salmon and iron and the diamonds into Reign’s hands along with the two TNT he needs.
Reign takes off towards the ravine while Silverr collects wood and blocks in the forest just beyond the beach, a thick patchwork of oak and birch. It’s a pretty sight, he thinks, as he plants explosives by a tangle of trees. As explosions ring through the air, Silverr crafts his tools and hazards a glance at the timer. They’re on great pace, he notes with a spark of hope. And relief, like stretching out a cramped muscle, floods through him at the prospect of finally playing a world.
The comms line in his ear is open but silent, delivering only a staticky hum. Reign must be underwater, diving for the magma ravine. It’s when Silverr pushes his boat into the water and swings himself aboard that the game logs light up with the advancement We Need To Go Deeper, and when he’s rowing above the entry ravine a few moments later that Reign speaks.
“The terrain sucks,” he says, voice crackling from the dimension difference and the Nether’s heat. “It’s also empty. No structures for, like, thirty chunks.”
Silverr lets the oars fall. “Reset?”
“Reset.”
A vague, hollow disappointment only just begins to set in when the world goes black, but it’s brushed aside as quickly as it comes as he readies himself for the next spawn.
Beneath their feet, the ground tears away and reforms, and he registers high plains and cliffs dotted with snow-white birch. Then it’s gone. Rolling meadows alight with colour from flowers blooming amongst the tall grass follow. The crystalline green waters and vibrant reefs of a warm ocean, with the gleam of iridescent scales beneath the water’s surface. They blur together, these picturesque landscapes—they’re easy on the eyes, but useless. And that sort of tarnishes their beauty.
It’s an unsuccessful day: every run is reset or exceptionally mediocre.
The final seed they play is on a solid pace shattered by a labyrinthine stronghold that has a ravine cutting it clean in two, turning navigation frustrating and rendering preemptive scans effectively useless. It takes Silverr eight explosives to scrape through the zero cycle after, and both of them step into the End fountain with a mutual sense of thank-god-that’s-over.
The sun is setting in this new world when the sandy shore of their spawn materialises around them, revealing a sky streaked with red and reflected onto the ocean in a dazzling, fiery display. Neither of them make a move to leave.
Reign has already stretched back onto the beach, eyes slipping closed. His hands are splayed loosely by his sides, tracing loops in the sand and drumming rhythms with his fingertips. Silverr had found himself fixated on the deftness of those fingers crushing blaze rods into powder and coming away burnished gold, or curled around the rough-carven handles of his tools. He’s captured no less now by their idle movements as Reign drifts off, tension sliding easily, naturally, from his frame.
Silverr grows acutely aware of soft sun-warmed sand beneath his fingers, and draws a slow breath of salty ocean breeze, lingering fresh and sharp on his tongue. He watches the full rise and fall of his chest, feeling the pressure against his diaphragm on the inhale; atop the rumble of the tide, he hears the in-and-out of air through his lungs.
Time slows to an unhurried stroll. As though a gosammery veil has been thrown over his vision, the world seems cast in a dreamlike veneer, softened around the edges and a little unmoored from reality. Silverr feels loosened, like a rope fallen slack. Distantly, and with a strange pang of understanding, he thinks that he wants to take this moment and stretch it out spider-silk-thin; live in it as long as he’s allowed. If he has the right to want it.
Just like this, the sun slips beneath the horizon. Shadows stretch and deepen. Silverr chances another glance towards Reign and his heart jumps when their eyes meet instead—Reign is awake and watching him and has been for a minute, or two, or ten. Or maybe something compelled the both of them to turn to each other, perfectly in sync.
The planes of his face are awash in shadow but the last vestiges of golden sunlight reflect as a startling intensity in the dark of his irises. A smile curls at the very edge of his lip.
The rustle of shifting sand reaches Silverr’s ears before fingers thread between his own. Silverr startles but settles into the warmth, a point of brightness against his own chilled skin. Beneath the sand that clings to their hands is the firm press of Reign’s fingertips against Silverr’s knuckles and the thrum of sureness he brings to everything he does. He’s gentle. He smooths down Silverr’s jagged edges bold and uncaring, answering a plea Silverr didn’t know he was making.
Silverr will find a name for the twisting ache in his chest in time. But in the present, he is occupied with the unyielding adoration emanating from Reign’s expression and the dim awareness that he wants to tuck it close and forever to his heart. Silverr cannot be Reign’s and he is not Silverr’s, and that means he can slip between his fingers like the powdery-fine sand they lie on.
For patching together a life from foundations of ruthless pragmatism, the thought of that crashes over Silverr like ice. He’s not built for permanence but he thinks losing Reign would be carving his heart from its cage. It would be his untethering from anything the universe can proffer and it would scrape him hollow.
A ghost town, is what Silverr calls the server as he and Reign take a slow lap around it.
Their names, and many more, are still marked in the whitelist and the world still pulls back the firewall for them easily enough, but now ivy twists into the rough cobblestone of buildings and support beams creak dangerously in the wind. Chests have items left stacked in them, though crops have rotted and shrivelled and iron tools are dulled with a dark layer of rust. Over everything hangs the unsettling feeling of once being fiercely loved then forgotten in quick succession.
Silverr can scrounge up memories of time he’s spent here. He could never call it home, though he’s sure he tried. Nothing anchored him to the quiet persistence of maintaining a home world more than his nature called him to run. He’s unconvinced anything can change the second time around.
But last time he didn’t have someone by his side he wants desperately to keep there. It’s maybe not so much a new venture as it is a natural extension of what they already have: the knowing that Silverr can enter a room and Reign will turn to him like a compass to north, the reassurance that Reign is Silverr’s guide and destination both. It’s simply committing their instinctive understanding to the physical world.
They don’t linger by spawn, and they don’t touch anything left in the crumbling houses. The world sprawls out to infinity—or something close to it—in every direction; there’s space enough for them. Thick oak forest that forms the spawn soon gives way to rolling plains to taiga and podzol underfoot.
Reign says he likes the warmth of spruce wood, so that’s where they linger. Green foothills that nestle about the base of a snowy peak and dark pines rising to staggering heights all around. A river that runs cold and rapid at the tree line where forest drops away to the open expanse of a grassy meadow.
There is no iron and nowhere yet to mine it, so they fell trees with rough stone axes. Silverr plants saplings for each one they cut down, pressing down loose dirt: it catches beneath his fingernails and clings to his clothes, and stains his palms dark and earthy. Reign finds a cave nearby and lights it up with torches that will burn long and slow for future visits, and he chisels out stacks of iron ore but also collects stone for building.
A base of sorts rises from shaky origins. Neither of them are builders, but they stumble through it.
They make the foundation of their house stone brick rather than cobble even though it needs more smelting and more painstaking work. Reign huffs that they need pickaxes with silk touch, and that means an enchanting setup or a village, so either way it’s a long-term consideration. Silverr tells him so and Reign fixes him with a wide-eyed, considering look, but acquiesces.
Nearby, salmon swim through the river, scales flashing beneath the sun as they dart through the currents. Reign sits by the bank with a fishing rod. When they don’t take the bait he sweeps in with his sword instead, bringing back fish with water still glimmering on their bodies.
He smokes them over a campfire until they’re golden and the skin crisps and flakes. Silverr can’t quite stomach the taste of salmon, thinking of cold buried treasure chests inundated with seawater and sand, but he obligingly agrees they’re better fresh.
They build a farm. Silverr tends it because it’s tedious, demanding work that occupies his thoughts, and because coaxing plants to grow beneath his hand brings warm satisfaction, like sunlight seeping into his skin. The farm gradually unfurls golden and green and splashed with colour. Juvenile spruce trees with spindle-thin trunks and tender needles stretch hopefully to the sky where the saplings were planted. Reign leaves that to him, but finds chickens in the bordering meadow for eggs and lures them back two hundred blocks with a handful of wheat seeds.
Routine comes easy as breathing, natural as curling together beneath the blankets when night falls.
It’s to stave off the cold—bitter, frigid gusts roll off the snowy mountain in droves—and they slot together like lock-and-key. The hollow between Reign’s collarbones and the length of his neck for Silverr to press his nose to, and the perfect fit of Reign’s hand settled on his nape in response. Like they were made to find each other this way.
One day Reign tells him, “You’re getting brighter.” They’re sitting opposite each other, blanketed in comfortable silence. Morning sun spills in from the window, its rays slipping between golden stalks of wheat bordered by peonies and lilacs. Smaller blooms, white-petaled daisies and alliums, press up between their tangled stems.
“I think it’s just the sun,” Silverr replies absently. Long hours outside have let colour seep back into his skin, once deathly translucent and tinged a pale blue from the veins curling beneath its surface. He pulls his mask down enough that sunburn spreads across the bridge of his nose, red and dry, and at some point he swapped his cardigan for a flowing jacket that wasn't so impossible to scrub its stitching clean.
Reign furrows his brows. Leans bodily across the table so they’re face-to-face, noses a hair's breadth from touching. “Look at your eyes.”
He drags Silverr out the door and down the path laid to the river; leans him over a stream of water where his reflection stares back at him. Silverr sees—gold. Brilliant gold and the orange of a sunset, asymmetrical, shimmering and rippling across his irises in the water’s image, swallowing up the old mismatched blue as though vibrancy has caught and germinated and bloomed within him.
Silverr sits back on his heels, wordless. Reign twists a poppy between his fingers, snagged from the flowerbeds on their way down. “Told you,” he says, but there’s only cheerful amusement to his voice. He sinks to the ground in front of Silverr and brushes a lock of hair from his face.
Reign makes even tucking the flower behind his ear a fragile, precious thing. Silverr’s breath catches in his throat. The forest around them falls silent, enraptured, watching. Reign slides the flower into place with reverent gentleness, red petals glowing against its silver backdrop. His thumb ghosts over Silverr’s cheek and sends sparks juddering down his spine. Silverr’s eyes slip shut, unbidden.
“Matches your eyes,” Reign breathes out, so quiet it’s almost stolen by the wind.
Then he pulls back, turns, darts into the forest like a spooked animal. The world jerks back to normal speed. Snapping alert, Silverr calls after him, “Wait!”, but he’s alone with the breeze even as his surroundings come into focus.
“Thank you,” he whispers. The only response comes from the woods, a trilling whistle through the trees.
Reign won’t mention it again and Silverr would never ask, but a poppy becomes a permanent fixture in his hair from then on.
At their core, they’re still runners. Sometimes the world lies untouched for days or weeks, not forgotten so much as pushed to the wayside. Weeds start sprouting between the wheat stalks; thick layers of dust settle undisturbed on windowsills. There are rankings to climb and leaderboards to top, and nothing can replicate the thrill of a run.
Silverr has come to expect his interactions like perpendicular lines: a singular point of intersection journeying to different infinities. But this world is—he and Reign are—two sine waves, constantly diverging but always, always finding each other again.
It’s one of the nights Silverr stumbles through their home portal and finds the house empty and shadowed under ghost-blue moonlight, arms feeling like lead by his sides and unable to scrape together the effort to keep his eyelids from pulling shut. Ranked throws his perception of the day-night cycle to the curb, when in every game the sun rises anew. Time seems to rush by faster in those worlds, too, and he doesn’t recognise the exhaustion until it all crashes in at once.
He's submerged in the silence, and it’s like he’s back in his test world snatching scraps of rest when he remembers to and lying exposed to the stars circling overhead. Loneliness is a perpetual sensation prowling the corners of his mind, but here—it can never encroach far.
Reign leaves things unfinished. A book lying open on the table, a messy string of daisies surrounded by loose flowers. All this, Silverr notes through bleary vision and a fog obscuring his thoughts, but recognises it for what it means: an announcement of his presence, a reassurance of his place here.
The comfort in that drapes around him like a cloak and coaxes his mind to settle. Silverr has the wherewithal to realise he’ll get the bedsheets stained with ash and seawater and falls asleep curled on a seat instead.
Reign is still away when Silverr wakes. The book is gone, though, and his jacket is slung over the back of a chair even though he distinctly remembers the damp weight of it over his shoulders last night. A blanket that he hadn’t noticed was pooled in his lap slides to the ground as he stands.
Sitting in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen table he finds a loaf of bread—still warm beneath his fingers. The crust crumples satisfyingly when he presses against it, delicate whorls of rising steam glistening from the puncture. Beneath the loaf is weighed a scrap of paper.
Still going for WR, Reign’s sprawling handwriting tells him. By the way, just use the bed next time.
Every room in their home carries the faint note of ozone, the tell-tale presence of the End that trails them so constantly it’s become unremarkable—pleasant, even, in small doses. Like a seaward breeze.
But right now, the sharp concentration of it curls through the room like it has a mind of its own, stinging Silverr’s nose behind the mask. The air seems to hum with static, like the potential of a thunderstorm contained within their living room, an artefact of the dragon’s magic still roiling beneath Reign’s skin.
This situation isn’t new, but familiarity doesn’t abate the twist in Silverr’s gut seeing the injuries. Reign is laid on his stomach, because the worst of the damage is slashed across his back. His head is pillowed on his arms and Silverr wishes he’d drop the facade of nonchalance—his discomfort has long been betrayed by the lines of strain winding through his muscles.
Regen potions brew in the corner of the room, pearlescent ghast tears dripped through the burette tap into vials of awkward potions. Far too slowly for Silverr’s liking. He casts surreptitious glances towards it, clasps his hands together to stop his fingers fidgeting. Reign notices anyway.
“It’s not gonna brew any quicker if you stare at it,” Reign says. He’s trying for a teasing smile but it comes out closer to a grimace.
“Stop talking,” Silverr says. Drip. The potion shimmers pink.
Reign tilts his head so his cheek is laid against his forearm, facing Silverr. “Seriously," he says, "it’s fine.”
Silverr levels a pointed look at the wounds burned raw and angry into his back, even now, a world away from its source. The hue of purple marring his skin shudders and pulses like a disembodied heartbeat, shifting from deep indigo to sickly grey. Dragon’s breath chips unrelentingly at their health and etches stubborn scars like a warning after the tick damage fades, but often the End fight is over so quickly they forget its danger. And otherwise, respawn clears essentially every traces from the Player, so—
“Why didn’t you just death reset?” Silverr tears his eyes from the burns, unsettled. He’s never seen the effects develop so far—the poison seems to be burrowing into his blood, tracing the network of capillaries through his back.
“Why should I?” Reign tries to shrug, but he’s resting his weight on his upper body. “It’s not fun.”
“Yes, but—” Silverr cuts himself off. ‘It’s necessary’ is caught at the tip of his tongue, stayed by a phantom prickle down his arms, a shadow of the bone-deep chill he can never get used to from a split-second death and respawn. “Okay. Fair enough.”
A rush of bubbles from the brewing stand catches Silverr’s attention. He leans over and pulls a potion from its clasp, tipping the bottle forward so a thin stream of it runs over the worst of the burns. Beneath where it pools, deep purple smoulders and hisses, crumbling away until only a faint sheen of pink remains. Tension visibly bleeds from Reign’s shoulders.
“Much easier this way,” comes the sighed-out response. “And, I have you.” A grin tugs the corners of his mouth up, unhurried and satisfied. “I couldn’t choose anything else.”
His words shiver in the air like a confession and they sink in sweet and slow as honey. Silverr swallows and empties the rest of the bottle. Reign might already be slipping into sleep as Silverr says, punctuating his words with the soft clink of glass against wood, “I wouldn’t either.”
The softer, sweeter smile playing at Reign’s lips says he heard every word.
Their newest acquisition, and a luxurious one at that, is a jukebox.
Reign unearths a disc from a dungeon he finds while mining and displays it proudly on the wall. Silverr stumbles on one off-world, hoping for food in the stronghold chests, and pockets it with the image of Reign’s delighted surprise behind his eyes. They were purely decorative at first, but diamonds were—inconceivably—in excess.
So, the jukebox. It's extra. Strains of a jazzy tune filter to the farm through the open back door, the song from the stronghold with its green and blue disc. Reign’s voice floats atop the instrumental, endearingly off-key. It's worth it.
Beneath the midday sun, sweat beads at Silverr’s temple, and dry, dusty earth crusts over his skin. He traipses back to the house with carrots bunched in one hand and a bundle of potatoes in the other. They are things grown under the encouraging sprinkle of bonemeal and his own hand tilling and watering the soil, but what to do with them is left to Reign. He heaps the vegetables on the counter. There’s a covered wooden bowl already there, wafting the sharp, distinctly sour scent of rising dough to his nose. Silverr passes it by and goes in search of his partner.
Reign’s expression lights like a beacon seeing Silverr approach. A book and quill lies forgotten on the table he’s sitting at. “I thought you were going to be stuck out there all day.”
“It’s too hot,” Silverr says. He leans over Reign’s shoulder to catch a glimpse of what he’s writing. Half the double-page spread is distinctive sketches of ten obsidian pillars in all number of arrangements. Arrows drawn in sharp flourishes trace paths in the network the island forms, the pillars as its vertices. Silverr overlooks it and taps something on the other page, pressed flush to Reign’s shoulder. “Is that a redstone thing?”
“An item sorter,” Reign responds, sounding unsure himself. “I dunno. It probably won’t work.”
They do fine, mostly, sorting and storing their items by hand. Silverr isn’t thinking of that: his mind flashes to practice maps ticking with mechanisms like arcane magic. “Try it.”
If his insistence surprises Reign, he doesn’t make it known. “Okay,” he says easily.
The music fills the quiet around them as Reign catches Silverr by the wrist and pulls him down to the chair beside his. He leans in close, talking in a low stream about all the quartz and gold he still has to collect, and the roles of every component, and the intricacies of wiring the system together.
“Here, look at this,” he says, tracing the diagrams, and he asks, “Do you think that’s good?”, even though Silverr’s contributions will be useless at best and more probably detrimental.
Silverr tells him so. “I’ll break it more,” he says warningly.
“Stay anyway,” Reign replies without pause, his quill scratching at at blueprints for his build—for their world. Their shoulders are pressed together. Eyes still fixed to the paper, Reign’s free hand trails up and rests loosely at the crook of Silverr’s elbow as though to keep him from leaving.
As though he could. As though shaping a home isn’t something he loves so fiercely his chest aches—because love is its name—and their two lives aren’t tangled so inextricably down to the root that he’s lost on where one begins and the other ends.
Silverr doesn’t say this. He sidles closer, aligning them so a firm line of warm contact spreads down their upper arms. Reign’s hold tightens for a split-second. I know, the touch says. I have you.