Work Text:
The church is decayed, dead, dying, vines twisted, tangled around crumbled stonework and trees growing out of the cracks. Water drips through the ceiling, running in rivulets down the bricks, pooling on the floor. Blood stains the stonework by the altar, still.
There’s a grave outside. It is well-tended, well-loved. People still visit.
“Oh, I’ve been - wandering, and I’ve found the church,” you say randomly, glancing up at the stone visage.
Cog, from your communicator, laughs - “We’re in the same area.”
The pair of you meet by the altar. There’s still blood on the floor. You talk - some of it’s inane, some of it less so. There are secrets you can’t say but wish you could - Cog could make much better use of them than you.
You’re talking about talking, weirdly enough - why people are scared to reach out, fear of death -
“I think it’s like - bad manners to jump someone at a scheduled talk, unless it’s been provoked.” It seems rude, you think to yourself.
“Yeah like - in some cases it makes sense. And if I started jumping you right now it’d make sense,” Cog says.
He’s holding your life in his hands here, you realise. But he’s also sitting on the altar, kicking his legs back and forth as the two of you talk. It’s painfully normal, relaxed. You’re not scared. Maybe you should be.
So you laugh. “Yeah!”
In a highway in a cave, at the edge of the world:
“I’m not god,” Cog says. He repeats those words often, if you think about it.
He used to be. He has been, before - earlier, you’d commented on seeing Cog play god, in another world, a kinder world.
“I do love playing god,” Cog had said. “But I can’t right now. Maybe in other ways.”
And he speaks of different worlds, of a Rapture, of creative mode and command blocks and other strange things.
On Skyblock, you called him God - a lot of you did. Sin’s plan, from the start - I want to kill God.
It should have made it more impersonal. An explicit difference, gods and mortals - you spent your final days on the server with only 2.5 hearts because of him.
You’d never felt that way.
“It was meant to be - personal,” Cog says, and there’s awkwardness to the words. But when you still can’t talk about the final days without a lot of pauses and hand gestures because the emotions there are too big and tangled and confused to put into words - you think you understand.
Those who were there at the end of Skyblock learned lessons others didn’t.
You learnt something. You’re not sure you’d call it a lesson. On the penultimate day, after bridging thousands of blocks across the void, walking across an invisible platform, evading mobs at Evi’s island, you learnt something. Reading the sign and the book Cog left for you, you learnt something.
You’re not sure what, or even if you want to put it into words. But it’s something.
“When I think about god, divinity, all that, what I often think of is -” You pause your pacing across the overgrown floor of the Heartline base to start tapping at your communicator. “There’s a quote Cog used in his Skyblock webweave, I’ll try to find it. But it’s - about how god is in connection, to other people, to our world. Connection. I think that’s - how I look at it, personally.” There are moments that are special. Places that are special. You, personally, don’t believe in any sort of higher being, you don’t think, but - you believe in something. It’s difficult to put into words.
There’s power in action, too. In that spark of an idea, that moment of connection - you look across at your teammate and you think she feels it too. The pair of you have something with this, here, right now.
When the two of you started talking, you’d been sitting atop a bookshelf, tapping your foot against the shelves anxiously, and Paddy had been leant against the desk, nervous eyes and drawn up shoulders - it’s striking now, the difference in both of you, walking around the central room and gesturing wildly as you talk.
When you look at the floor, unfinished deepslate, for a moment you can see the pattern you need to carve into it. It’s been a while since you’ve felt motivated to build anything.
“I feel like I can’t move forwards because it’s still - unfinished,” you say, staring at Cog across a black concrete highway. “I feel - haunted.”
The choice of words is pointed - Cog wants movement, and here you are stuck. Stuck thinking about a crater that used to be a home, a ghost that flickers in your mind every time you close your eyes.
“It’s haunting me too, bro,” Cog replies, voice pained, and for a moment all you can do is laugh.
“It hurts to see it like this,” Ace says, and her voice is so small.
You can’t really respond, just look up at the crater walls and try not to start crying again.
You invited her here. It was Ace’s home too. It was -
It was yours, but it was hers too.
“The waypoint is so high up,” she says, staring up at the sky.
You follow her gaze, though you can’t see anything. Why would you need a marker on a map to lead you home?
Cog tells Ace that destroying your home was creative. You listen to her recording and you think you understand what he means.
The pain twists in your chest. There’s value in the ache, in the emptiness.
You don’t like it.
But there’s value to it. It’s sharp and bitter but it has weight, this emptiness, lack of space, lack of anything.
It reminds you again of Skyblock. The emptiness is a part of it.
It was cruel and it was unnecessary and it hurts and you wish it hadn’t happened, but - it did and this is what’s left.
There’s something close to divinity in destruction. There’s something divine in machinery, moving parts and sparking electricity and something that’s almost like life. The machine rests in the sky where your house used to be as you return to your home for the first time since -
“It’s terrifying,” you say. The crater is unfinished. The crater is immense.
What more words are there to say?
But you keep going anyway. You circumnavigate the crater, listen to Nara steal from the machine then - explosion roar, not so far from you. You turn back, hear Nara yelp - you watch the machine start to move away from you. Towards the ocean.
You follow the machine to the world border, a trail of destruction in its wake. The ocean is warmer than it should be, stinging your skin, but there’s a thrill to it, occasionally swimming a little too close to the path of the explosions and sinking underwater when the rush of air hits you.
It’s something you don’t want to admit, but you can understand the appeal of machines like this. There’s something intoxicating about the damage it causes.
Still. You could never.
The closest you get is:
You spiral a little after leaving the conversation with Paddy and Cog and Void. You’ve never dealt well with isolation, least of all when -
You walk to the crater.
It’s a long walk. It’s been a long day.
How has it only been a day since your date with Cog, when you told him with such confidence that you would never give up?
It’s a long walk.
You hesitate a long, long time before shaping the wither-shape in the soil. You hold the final skull in your hand and think - you’d expected you would have talked yourself out of this by now. Instead, the skull feels lighter the more you think.
You were going to blow this place up anyway. It’s yours.
You place the final skull, then turn and run.
The explosion behind you sounds like something powerful.
Divinity isn’t always about that, though.
You and Paddy meet Void in the church, and you give him an offer.
In the grand scheme of things, it isn’t important - a business deal, an agreement, a book signed with your three signatures.
But for you, it feels like a first step. Yesterday was the idea, this is them putting it into motion.
They’re not playing God, they’re not shaping the server to their vision. But they’re acting.
“It’s not about infrastructure or bases or the size of the world border, it’s - about small moments, interactions, making an effort -” you’d said, the other day. You were talking about connection, community, but - it applies to a lot of things.
You can’t change the world, but you can act. You can move forward.
The church is dead and dying, a remnant of a long gone time. The first time you visited, Emma had to drag you to sit down on one of the pews, a faintness in your head making it hard to move. It was sick and wrong and hopeless.
Now, when you visit, you know differently.
It’s a memory, broken and battered by the elements, but it is loved and it was a place of love from the very start.
There’s ivy twisting down the walls, trees growing in the cracked stonework, a forest outside the windows, the ocean nowhere in sight. The church is living, moss in between the bricks, green and vibrant and alive. A dog barks somewhere near the altar. There’s a grave by the door - entrance, exit, who knows - the church is backwards, which way is right? It’s hard to tell.
It’s a place of death and a place of life and it’s hard to tell the difference. It’s a place of worship and it’s a place of connection, and that’s the closest thing to godhood you can find.