Work Text:
Pix had been in this particular ruin dozens of times. He had mapped and catalogued every mosaic, every pottery sherd, every scrap of textile left by the people who once lived here. All meticulously recorded in his notebooks and filed away. He had paid close attention to the details, to the bigger picture.
The rope and the trapdoor above his head had not been there before. He wracked his memory reagrdless, but he knew. On the surface, there wasn't anything special or noteworthy about this ruin. A shop of some kind, though its merchandise was long gone. One of the many buildings on the main street, along the stretch leading to the frozen, rusted doors of the gatehouse separating the Greatbridge from the capital.
Pix frowned and stood on the tips of his toes, stretching up and willing his hand to become solid. His fingers grazed the rope once, then twice, and he planted a foot on a jutted out portion of the wall to give himself an extra boost. The trapdoor snapped open with a deafening crack, allowing the rest of the rope ladder to tumble down with a shower of dirt and dust. Pix let the air settle and squinted up into the darkness.
Outside of the faint trace of cobwebs, outlined by the glow of his lantern, he couldn't hear the shuffling steps of any monsters that may have spawned in the darkness. He would've heard mobs sooner if there had been any, yet the attic remained silent, nothing but a gaping maw above his head.
Notebook. He needed a notebook to record whatever was up there.
His work didn't stop just because he was dead.
Kneeling against the road outside, Pix rifled through the bag he had brought with him, pushing aside brushes and tarps and wool covers until he found what he was looking for, along with a pencil from an outer pocket.
Darkness prickled in the corner of his eye. Pix glanced over his shoulder, back to the empty ruin.
"Is- is someone there?" Pix called. "Scott, I swear if that's you, there's nothing to steal."
The wind whistled with a spray of dust through the empty street.
Pix slipped back into the ruin, grabbing his lantern and making sure all his limbs remained solid on his way up the ladder. He reached above him and pushed the light onto the floor of the attic, wrapping his arm around the ladder to steady himself while he listened. In event anything up there reacted to the light or to his presence, he'd hear it beyond the faint rustle of dry grass outside.
When silence remained, Pix hauled himself up the rest of the way.
The attic was empty.
A pair of dust-coated cobwebs hung above the trapdoor ladder, while the copper and prismarine roof, while intact, was dulled even in the light. The air reeked of stagnant dirt and trapped heat, of bone-dry air that had no escape in the last few thousand years. Pix tentatively stretched a hand out, and a fine, dark powder smudged over his finger to reveal corroded copper patina underneath. Sticky, yet dry at the same time. It crumbled to the floor when his hand shifted back into its incoporeal state, falling like snow to the darkened boards beneath his feet. Footprints smeared through the dust. Two of his own, from the ladder to where he stood now.
And streaks leading from the corner to the ladder, like something dragged through the dust.
Pix froze. He snatched the lantern off the floor and drew his sword— the one that had become a ghost with him— and forced the blade to become solid. "Is- is anyone- anything there? Show yourself!" he barked to the corner.
He shifted the lantern closer, and took another careful, tentative step. Metal flashed, dulled by the fine layer of dark dust coating the rest of the attic. A box. Shoved into the corner, carved out of wood that Pix couldn't tell what colour it actually was under the dust. Nor could he make out exactly what the carvings along the sides and the lid were. From a distance, it looked like a sun radiating out on the inside of the lid. An oddly shaped, uneven sun, like a fractal branching out from a central point.
Like lightning.
The smell hit him next. Like copper and ozone, with an undertone of something sweet and slightly burnt. All sickeningly familiar. Hypnotic, his eyes snared by the dark fractals laced across the box. To the inside, to the dusty books and folded parchment letters with broken crimson-red wax seals. Candles dyed a range of hues with untouched wicks. A flint, with no steel to light it.
Another glimmer from inside the box. Something red catching in the lantern light.
"Now, how did you get here-" Pix murmured. He wasn't going to touch it— he knew better than that, and something wasn't right— but he still remembered the burning static of the deepslate redstone ore from so long ago. From the stories that had reached him, he thought this particular variation of the ore, the one laced in the rocks beneath the Grimlands, had all been blown up. Yet, a piece of it remained here, in Pix's own old letter box that had last been in his home in Pixandria. Nothing else the box could've been, with the letters and the carved conduits and camels around the side, as the patterns revealed themselves on closer inspection. His box. His letters from fWhip. The Count of the Grimlands, not the Ruler of Gobland. If he reached inside, he could read the familiar words again. Feel the paper beneath his fingers, shake them free from their coat of dark powdery dust—
Pix gasped and tore his eyes away. To the streaks dragged through the dust, how the flickers of lantern light slid over the raised edges and ridges around the edge, and dotted through the middle.
Wrong.
He could easily reach in and grab the letters. Reread the words fWhip had written him so long ago, trace the broken wax seals he knew were stamped with the insignia of the Grimlands, and feel the prickle of the static sparks off the deepslate redstone ore against his fingertips.
He wouldn't.
He couldn't ignore the feeling of wrong. A box that should've been buried in sand and certainly not here in an attic of a shop.
Pix curled his fingers into a fist, and left the attic and the box behind. Taking the unopened notebook with him, and fully intending to sit down and record every observation under the sunlight. Only, there was no sunlight.
Thick clouds had gathered in what couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes at the most. Pix quickly shuffled his belongings into the ruin before they could get damaged by the rain threatening to fall, even with the charged, bone-dry air. He squinted into the sky at a crack of thunder and lightning snaking through the darkness. An inverse of the box, where the blackened fractals against wood had become blinding light against churning storm clouds. Both burned branching points into his eyes, the patterns shifting, surging and retreating in light and dark flashes with every blink.
The sky roared, and rain began to fall. The drops passed straight through him, as they always did, but Pix stumbled at a howl of wind tearing through the street. He could feel it, though a glance at his hand proved he was transparent as ever. The wind grew barbs and claws, tearing at his skin, his clothes, the threads of him that remained as a ghost. Trying to tear him apart and away, to drag him with the dust and the wind until he sank into a grave of sediment beneath the Greatbridge.
His head snapped up at prickle snapping up his spine, like lightning arcing from one copper rod to the next. Shadows ate at the edges of his vision. Pulsing and branching. The wind at his back nudged him to the Greatbridge, to the darkness beyond the half-open gate.
Pillars. Houses. Shops. Ruins. His silent footsteps against the road and the bite of the wind. Prickling over his back, numbing his fingertips as the ruined stones beneath his feet turned to bricks and chiselled rock, with the edges neater and cared for over a much longer period of time. Rain lashed through him. Roaring as it pounded against the ancient bridge, and a silent fog gathered around the pillars of each empire.
Lightning forked through the haze, illuminating a single, inhuman figure stood at the centre. Limbs and appendages stretched out in all directions, a mishapen head and too-long neck flashed in the gloom. Pix recoiled, yet with a blink, the figure returned to human.
"-stand being out in the rain, you idiot."
Lizzie's voice drifted from the fog ahead.
"We're not all as bothered by water as you are, Lizzie," another voice laughed. Scott. Also somewhere from the fog and hidden by the shadows eating into Pix's vision.
"I don't know what you mean. No perfectly normal human likes standing out in the rain. And I don't see you out there with him!" Lizzie snipped back.
"Yeah, because I don't want to get hit by lightning," Scott responded with another laugh.
"Nothing to worry about, Scott."
Pix stopped at the new voice. Smooth and… wrong. It was wrong. It sounded human, but with a sort of echoing, gutteral hum underneath the words.
The figure at the centre of the bridge turned. Slow, deliberate movements. Joints shifted in ways they shouldn't. The face that turned to the base of Scott's Chromia llama statue wasn't one Pix knew, as it materialized from the fog. As Scott and Lizzie appeared, huddled underneath and out of the pounding rain. Brown eyes and a scraggly beard with a crooked nose, and a smile that looked as if it would sharpen into fangs. What he suspected was pale brown hair had been darkened and plastered the person's forehead, and water soaked the loose brown clothes they wore.
"Pix, you're going to get sick!" Lizzie exclaimed, and Pix may as well have phased through the bridge with how his stomach dropped. She looked to the stranger and called it by his name, with a comfortable, familiar smile and laugh. Scott wore a similar expression, the sculk-scarred skin by his right eye crinkling with a smile. Yet, his eyes watched this man that Pix didn't know. That his friends shouldn't know.
Pix forced his legs forward, feeling like each step fought against the wind. His words trapped in his throat. Locked away and burning like acid. Neither Scott nor Lizzie paid him any mind as they spoke like this stranger was an old friend, even as he waved a hand in front of their faces.
"Oh no, I'll be fine. Sometimes it just takes a bit of rain to wash away the dust," the stranger replied. Its words prickled up his back, and when Pix turned, it watched him back. Dark, inhuman eyes coated in dust bored into his, and darted down to his arms.
Pix lifted a shaking hand. Tugging down his sleeve, the same dark dust from the attic clung to his skin, shimmering and transparent like the rest of him as it spread over his hand.