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I.
About a week into his Exile and with the TNT (mostly) fizzling out, Skizz knocks hesitantly on Jevin's tent door. "Jev? Can we talk, buddy?"
"I don't talk to you alone!"
"You're not alone and that's the issue?" Skizz offers.
There's a moment of quiet and then the door creaks open. Two stalks of slime with the darker striations that indicate Jevin's eyes creep through the tiny crack to glare at Skizz. "What?"
"We gotta talk about Sal, dude," Skizz says.
"You will stay away from Sal-"
"Jev if you let this go on much longer you're gonna have a rogue god on the server and trust me, man, if you're not prepared for that it's gonna break bad!"
The eyestalks lengthen, then shorten, then disappear. Jevin opens the door fully, thankfully all in one piece, and squints. "What?"
Skizz inhales and exhales slow. "Sal's not rotting, right? Real Sal, not his doubles."
"...no."
"And when you left the gold block in the hideaway you said you came back and it was diamond."
"Cleo did that."
Skizz snorts. "No they didn't and you know it. Sal did. Sal did, because you believe he can, because given enough belief anything can become a god."
Jevin blinks. He blinks again. "You...believe in Sal."
"Believe in- I've been around the BLOCK before, dude, I know what a god birthing looks like.: Skizz shakes his head. You're becoming the Prophet of Sal, Jev, and if you don't come up with some rules and regulations he's gonna tread all over you."
"This isn't like what happened to you." Jevin says.
"This is EXACTLY like what happened to me," the fallen angel pleas. "Jev, look, all I'm asking you to do is like. Do some commandment brainstorming. Ask Clebert she seems like she'd have ideas. Get a handle on the Scripture of Sal before he writes it for you. Turning gold into diamond? That's avarice. That's sin number one. If he keeps going without you guiding him he'll tumble right down into the dark places."
"Guide?"
"Yeah. You made him, dude. You created a God. Now you gotta teach him how to be a person."
"And what if I don't?" Jevin asks curiously. "What if I let him do what he wants?"
For a moment Skizz is somewhere else. He looks pale and haunted and older than he should, somehow shriveled despite his great height and breadth. Jevin feels dread creep in.
"Whatever you do, Jevin," Skizz says quietly, "you let me know if that's what you choose. Because I don't wanna be here for it. Not again."
One broken, gnarled gray wing twitches on his back.
"Once was enough."
II.
Doc isn't sure what's more surprising in the moment.
That Skizz is sitting on a (stolen, from HIS shop-!) shulker box, that he's smoking, or that for the first time in- well, at least since he's come to the server- both mangled gray wings are on display, shifting ever so slightly with the breeze.
"Hey, Doc." Skizz says absently when the Goat lands. "How you doin'?"
"Better than you if Impulse catches you," Doc says."You, sir, are meant to have quit."
Skizz snorts, takes another long, professional drag and says, through the smoke like a dragon, "Impulse is thirty million blocks away, Doc."
A pause.
"Good fucking place for him." Skizz whispers. "You should get, Doc. While the getting's good."
"What are you doing out here?" Doc asks. He'd been exploring the area, moving beyond the world border and its Exile, curious about the potential for more redstone experiments this far out from most of the bases and the shopping district. He'd found the little desert BECAUSE of the spot of color that was Skizz, settled on the edge on a sandstone outcropping. The angel is facing New Hermiton, or would be if the settlement was in the proper render distance.
"Watching. Bearing witness, maybe." Another drag. "Ren built Sal a shrine."
Doc blinks. He remembers seeing the giant salmon, the floating heads.
"Oh." He says. "Oh no."
Skizz laughs and it's unlike any laugh Doc has heard from their witty, wise angel. It is broken glass ground over a concrete floor. It is full of blood and phlegm. It is the softest step in a ruin you are supposed to be alone in.
"It'll take a bit for him to figure out land travel. Sun'll slow him down, so will the lack of water. If Jevin slimes him up maybe he'll make the edge of the sand."
"And if he does?" Doc asks carefully. His cyborg arm tingles.
Skizz shrugs. "I've killed a God before, Doc." His wings twitch in unison. "Who knows, maybe it'll be easier the second time around. Worst case I slow him down down enough for X to pull the trigger."
If he can, is unsaid. If Jevin's faith alone is not enough fuel to save a God from a /Kill command direct from an Admin.
"Skizz," Doc says, "Are you SURE?"
In response Skizz grinds out the last of the cigarette, pulls a new one from a pocket, crumbled. He lights it with a sliver of magma charge balanced on a split thumbnail. He takes another deep drag.
"It's only a matter of time now, Doc." Skizz says, the ember catching the back of his eyes as the sun sinks, lighting them up a vibrant near-resin orange. "Only a matter of time."
III.
Isthmus Amadeus Jevin- who had spent most of his life lackadaisically avoiding any greater destiny which might perhaps be attached to such a name- sits on a block of diamond in the center of a vast patch of salmon carcasses in what once was a desert.
It is not a pretty sight to see or to smell, and if Jevin had a real nose at the moment he'd probably have a lot to say about that but that's the beauty of being a slime; noses (and most other body parts) are optional.
There is the small problem of matter, though, which cannot be created or destroyed but which can be scooped up into buckets by a fallen angel who calls, "I got it!" and comes trotting back through the fishy carnage, stopping in front of Jevin. "Pretty sure this is the last of you, bud. Hold still."
Jevin does as he's ordered, remaining still as Skizz- who is covered head to toe in fish guts, ichor, and blood- sets up both the bucket he has brought over, full of a suspiciously familiar jiggling blue substance, and a bucket of fresh water from his inventory.
He first pours a measure of water into the blue substance, which soaks it up like a jelly sponge. Then he wets a rag and wrings it out over the stump of Jevin's shoulder before lifting the bucket of blue goo and pouring it down.
It slurps and schlorps and forms an arm, which is immediately encased in the ABSOLUTELY-seen-better-days diamond armor that had been previously held inside of Jevin's body.
"There. All in one piece again." Skizz says, beginning to rifle through the plain shulker next to Jevin's diamond block, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a handkerchief holding crumbled magma charge slivers. "Don't suppose you smoke? Nah I bet the mess would be awful."
"You're not supposed to, right?" Jevin asks. His voice sounds strange in his own ears.
"I mean no," Skizz says, "but I'm in Exile. No rules, remember?"
He lights up, pulls in a lungful of smoke, says, "So. Welcome to the club."
"The club?"
"The shittiest club in the multiverse. S'got a real elite membership, you should be proud. Not the first slime, though, sorry. Charlie beat you by a couple years."
Jevin blinks at Skizz and then at the mess all around them.
"Why am I so calm?" He asks.
"Eh, it'll take some time to hit you." Skizz says. "When it does it's- gonna be bad. And there's nothing I can do about that. I'm sorry."
"He just wanted to make things better," Jevin says. "that's all."
Skizz sighs. "That's all they ever want to do, Jev. It's not their fault. It would be like- like faulting a gravel block for falling, or TNT for exploding. A God's a simple thing. The problem is they want the world to be simple too, and no world is simple enough for a newborn God."
"He didn't deserve it," Jevin says suddenly, and he has no water to waste but he can feel his eyes welling up and he almost gets rid of them but then Skizz is hugging him tight and as all the jelly of his body tenses to allow the contact Skizz says, "I know, buddy. I know."
Skizz is hoarse and he's crying too and Jevin remembers that it's okay to feel things around Skizz, because Skizz is Different in a way that Jevin thought he understood when he and all the other Hermits agreed to let him join but is only now really able to quantify.
Jevin cries for Sal, and sitting in the remnants of that same God's first and last rampage Skizz lets him.
Jevin is feeling wrung out and too dry when he's done. The sun is low in the sky and Skizz reluctantly leaves him to stick some torches around the area, pushing aside dead fish with his feet to find purchase.
When Skizz comes back he returns to the water bucket, and quietly wets another cloth before he starts washing Jevin's face like a father would a child, letting the water absorb into him.
"What was yours named?" Jevin asks suddenly, caught with a horrible need to know, to question the one thing Impulse had told them all they weren't allowed to bring up.
No one asks Skizz why he is a Fallen Angel.
No one asks Skizz about being a God Slayer.
Ever.
Got it?
Skizz settles back down on his shulker.
"You're going to laugh." He says.
"Maybe."
"Dugan."
"Dugan?"
"Dugan. God of Lesser Things." Skizz watches the sun set, listens to Jevin continue wringing the wet cloth out to get his liquids back. "That was my job. Look after the small things, Skizznyal. All the little ones, the weak ones. Look after the rabbits and the fireflies, the newborn and the late. I didn't even know I was doing it until he was sapient. I molded him out of clouds- the clouds on my world were handy that way."
Skizz sucks in a breath. "A few other angels, they thought it was neat, making a God with no schematic. My direct boss gave me a reward for it. Only then the Big Boss decided it was time for the annual wipeout."
He smiles bleakly. "You wanna know how many lesser things die in a Flood?"
Jevin winces.
"You build a God off a client specification there's rules. There's a contract and cascading plans. No one had a plan for an untethered God. I tried to talk him down. Tried to explain that looking after Lesser Things means sometimes seeing them off."
A pause.
"He didn't like that. So, to make a long story very, very short, I got into a grappling contest with a living shard of my own belief, got a few angels killed, got an entire section of the server so polluted it's probably still cordoned off and got myself fired. Basically in that order."
Jevin frowns. "Wait. Killing Dugan didn't..?" he gives a little shoulder shimmy.
Skizz laughs. Like the laugh Doc had heard about forty eight hours prior, there is no humor in it. "Angels don't Fall for killing lesser Gods. They fall for making a mess no one else wants to clean up."
Jevin is quiet. What can he say?
They sit and watch the moon move for an hour or two before he says, "I can't even make him a grave, can I?"
"You are his grave now, Jev." Skizz says.
Jevin knows he's right.