Chapter Text
It's a warm, quiet night on Hermitcraft. There's no rain, the wind is mild; the sky is a riot of stars.
One star in particular is shining very brightly .
Too brightly.
So brightly, in fact, it could almost be getting closer.
And closer.
And then it is not coming closer it is here, streaking through the sky with a roar that is so loud it is almost silent, a ball of light extending out into a tail that starts blue and turns orange as it cools.
As the ball hurtles down towards the earth of Hermitcraft it gains definition and anyone who might have seen it (though no one does) would know immediately that this is not a meteor, not a chunk of debris or rock or iron from some distant space, no.
This is a thing with feathers.
This is- impossibly- a person.
A person who slams down into the dirt and rock only a handful of blocks behind the Hermit Permit office, an impact so jarring he should be dead.
He is not. He is made of far sterner stuff.
He lays in the crater his landing has made, panting as his body cools, steam and smoke hissing off of worn diamond armor.
Slowly, he tries to rise. The few mobs in the area- chickens- are treated to a handsome scarred face marked with five o'clock shadow, long black hair shot through with silver. They don't appreciate it, but then they are chickens. They have important chicken business that does not include craters or men falling from space.
He cries out in pain, buckling back down to the rock, and in reaction his wings extend and flap, seeking purchase.
There are six- three sets, getting smaller down his back. There is blood in the feathers but remarkably they appear otherwise unharmed. They flap uselessly a few more times before dropping down, covering their owner.
The angel tries again, forcing himself to his elbows, then his knees.
He begins, softly, to cry.
The angel gropes desperately at his arms, seeking something, finding it- a blade built into the gauntlet of his diamond armor.
The angel grips it in a professional fashion and then in a very unprofessional fashion begins hacking violently at the back of his neck, beneath the fall of his hair, tied in a loose ponytail.
He screams, though whether it is in pain or fear or anguish is hard to tell. As he slashes at his neck his hair comes away in jagged locks and clumps, darkening with blood.
Finally with a whimper the angel drops the bloody knife, too weak to continue. He collapses back into the crater, eyes sliding shut.
-
Doc is no stranger to late night calls. They're never good news, or at least they are good news so rarely that statistically it's easier to assume a catastrophe has occurred.
This one is no different.
Xisuma meets him at the edge of the permit office parking lot, and even through his everpresent helmet Doc can see that he looks grim.
"What happened?" Doc asks.
"Follow me," Xisuma says. As they walk around the side of the building, he continues, "sorry for being vague, I was checking our security protocols."
"Again?" Doc asks. "You finished your last round two days ago."
"Something broke through the coding."
Doc inhales, sharp. "Something?"
"I got the ping fifteen minutes ago. I left all the debugs running, started the trawler, and tracked the signal. It didn't go through spawn."
"Didn't go through-?!" Doc starts, but then they round the corner of the permit office, and he stops asking questions.
There is a hole in the earth, one big enough to have been blown by a charged creeper.
There has not been a thunderstorm on the server for a week.
"I found him just before I messaged you." Xisuma says.
"Him?"
Xisuma leads Doc to the edge of the crater and when he looks down, the splicer swears a round and bloody oath in german.
"Tell me what I'm looking at, Doc." Xisuma says.
Doc- the oldest naturally aging member of Hermitcraft, who had been nothing but a boy during the height of the currently ice-cold conflict known as the Server Wars- says, his robotic eye whirring, "Xisuma. Why is there a Beacon Angel on our server?"
In the crater, the bleeding angel in question has nothing to say in his own defense. He won't wake up for another three days.