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Martyn steps through the stars, and falls into them.
“-Oh no!”
He falls, and falls, and they don’t get any closer.
“Oh my go-”
Nothing gets closer. Everything’s getting further away. The surface. The screams. The stars. Below the End is endlessness, and endlessness is every point and person pulling away from him until everything that’s ever existed is an infinite distance away and all that remains is the movement of his clothes as he’s falling forever through the void and-
-and he’s been here before.
He hasn’t. There’s never been an End in a Life Series, ever.
“There was no stronghold, there was no portal, so you couldn't have meant that End."
"AND SO?”
“Unless…”
“HE’S LEARNING.”
There’s been no end, and this won’t be his end, insists his right arm as it throws an ender pearl at a target it’ll never reach, and at least he’s not alone falling anymore except oh wait it doesn’t matter since he’ll never see it again anyway. It won’t be his end, insists his tongue as it tastes a golden apple, the tingling warmth bathing his body only sharpening the chill of the void. THIS WON’T MATTER, insists the rest of his body, frozen in the ice-cold air but not by it. THE MORE YOU HAVE, THE MORE YOU LOSE.
this really is forever, insists his heart. aren’t you supposed to be asleep for this bit?
The ice-cold air grows fingers. It grows claws. They snake their way around his chest and grip it tight.
he’s been here before
A grip, a trap. With every heartbeat, another heart is seized.
that’s really not the scariest part
And when they all run out, he’ll die. The falling will end. There are only 30 grains of sand in his hourglass.
how is it not the scariest part?
He’s startled at the part of his brain relieved at that.
it’s quite tame, actually
He’s dying from a stupid, split-second misstep, cold and alone and losing an entire life’s worth of hearts, and a part of him is relieved at that.
how is it not the scariest part?? how has he been here before, how-
…
..
.
He wakes in Baxter. Inside Baxter, in a space with walls, cracked and cream and countable. Seven blocks across. Just seven blocks across. The dusty mesa air flowing in through the open door is hot and dry on his tongue, not shivering and sinking and so, so sparse; it catches in his throat, and the cough he makes sounds almost like a laugh. His hands clutch the sheets of the bed, trembling as they grasp something that won’t fall away.
His heart keeps pounding.
He’s awake. He can move. Somehow, these two facts provide him more relief than they should.
Because why should he be relieved? They’re inevitable. Even as a spectator, he can move around the server – more than he can as a player, even! He’s zooming around!
He’s awake, and he can move, and he can prove it. In a moment he’s off the bed and out of the door; maybe his muscles tense up every footstep as they wait for an endless fall, and maybe they don’t, who’s to say? All he knows is that the sky he greets is bright and blue and always above him, and the sandstone is solid enough to stand on hot enough to feel through his sandals.
The red sandstone.
A slightly larger part of him wonders if that’s the reason for relief, strange as it is. Red’s not an obstacle anymore: not after he won the last game, not after he won nothing for his efforts. Red’s almost freedom, now – an excuse to shed all pretences of peace and play the game as what it is. A death match.
With no reason.
Best start preparing for it, then. Cash in the task, get some good items – Void …Jeb knows he needs some of those. He heads over to Baxter’s landing pool, and-
-Stops. Says something to himself about having been too excited. It’s a long fall.
Stars stars, endless stars, why is he so shaken by this?
He’s guaranteed to fall in water. He’s guaranteed to lose no hearts. It’s a drop he’s made countless times, and he’s always landed(.) it. There’s no reason to fear it this time, surely.
Just as there’s no reason to feel the void is familiar.
There’s none.
So he keeps his eyes wide open, stares at the pool, and jumps. Every frame, he sees his destination getting closer; soon, his feet have reached the water, then his torso, then his head. The water’s cool, too, but there’s substance there, pixels dragging on pixels rushing past skin. His sandals brush the bottom — the pool’s only two blocks deep.
There. That wasn’t so bad, was i-
>SolidarityGaming was doomed to fall by Ender Dragon<
Not bad, but certainly pointless, because now he has to head up the mountain all over again! Martyn laughs partly out of incredulity, and partly out of good humour — what were the chances of both Big Dogs falling forever to Red while fighting the Ender Dragon? Far too large, clearly. What an awful idea! If you asked him if he also laughed out of desperate relief in company, at not being the only one to die to a fall in the end, he’d say no.
(And he’d be right, because it isn’t company, not really. Jimmy fell somewhere. Martyn just fell.)
He’s still laughing as he reaches Baxter’s door, sees Timmy sporting that perfected unamused expression of his. “Oh, dude,” Martyn says as he enters the house. “What has happened?”
“Bleurgh! Bleurgh!” Jimmy mimes, before falling fo- into laughter too. “What have we done? What have we done, Martyn?”
“Oh, no…” The laughter’s turned into giggles now, and Martyn braces himself against a wall — even now, that memory of just how lightheaded he got at the A-ha jokes is still fresh in his mind, especially after whatever Etho was doing this session. Distracted, his mouth says the next few words on autopilot. “I don’t know, I just walked in and walked straight off!”
There. Said normally. It really isn’t so bad.
Really.