Chapter Text
Wemmbu has always been a tiny, weak thing.
He’s young; a small purple creature with budding horns that peak through short, messy amethyst hair. The horns are dull obsidian, not yet matured into any elegant, twisted shape. At his back sits a tail that he doesn’t yet have the strength to control, which flicks, beats, and breaks whatever is around him and brings more trouble than it could possibly be worth. His small leather wings drag across the ground, his body too weak to prop them against his back.
Yet there was a time he was less than this (more than this?), when he was a creature of the void, nothing more than a ball of energy, cradled within the code that he knew should have attacked his existence.
His memories aren’t vivid, but they’re present enough to remind him that they’re real. The present, confusing, and comforting hum beneath his skin serves to portray his lineage.
He’s not sure what something like him is called, but he does know that he is all alone in this world. He was created alone with his name already etched into his skull, gifted to him by the code that once cradled him, and purple skin so unlike any creature he’s ever seen before. His appearance is a thin mockery of the imps he passes by on the streets, but even they are not his own, stocky and deep reds instead of a lean, purple build. He’s never crawled the world as an infant; he’s been four, five, six, and now seven, but he’s never been a toddler.
He knows he’s different enough to wager disgust from passerbies; not that the nether is a very friendly place to begin with.
He cannot run from this disgust even in the calm of the central Netheria park as a mother demon ushers her child away from Wemmbu who sits across the park, perched underneath an old warped tree. He sighs, picking at a small collection of fungus to the right of his foot. An uncomfortable feeling of disgust clenches his stomach at the sight of his purple skin and black talons. There’s grime covering his skin, dust of netherrack coating pale purple.
It is hard to find reflective surfaces in the nether, so the only glimpses he gets of his appearance are distorted by the potions at the marketplace or the windows he passes by in the rich areas.
He sighs as he sinks further into his knees, one arm raised to wrap around his legs and the other coming to work out an irritating knot that has been tugging at his scalp for days now.
He’s halfway through the tangle when a pig-like snort startles him out of his own head, looking to his side reveals a group of three teenage piglins. Two of them bear the average piglin build— short, yet stocky and packed full of muscle—, but the third is an absolute beast, easily towering over the other two. Wemmbu’s only saving grace in this confrontation is the fact that the brute looks the most nervous, even when the other two carry vicious smirks.
It is a little irritating, Wemmbu tries to wear whatever pure gold he can scavenge from the streets for protection from piglins, but the smarter ones are able to work through their own instincts. They attack anything that moves simply to be dicks.
Not that being a “smart” pigling is a feat to be celebrated, considering every pigling he has ever met is dumber than rocks. But they are beasts, able to break the bones of any other species with startling ease.
The girl in the middle flicks one pigish tail, and Wemmbu swears under his breath, lowering his hands until they hover at his side. His muscles coil as he prepares for a fight. Compared to others, he is easy pickings— most solitary creatures are in the Nether. This dimension is a hellish landscape that produces a dog-eat-dog environment, and the heat pools violence in the stomachs of anyone who is exposed to it. Strength in numbers has been this dimension’s lifestyle for millennials.
“What do you want?” He spits sharply, blackened talons biting into his palms.
“Woah, calm down there, buddy,” the fem-piglin in the middle snorts. He hates her. “We just wanna talk.”
“I don’t have anything for you.”
The shorter boy to her left snorts, pointing a hooved hand accusingly at the purple devil, “No one’s believing ‘ya, bud. Under your bummy clothes, you’ve got some shiny shit, and you’re better fed than damn well ninety percent of the kids on the streets.”
“I’ve gotta steal like the rest of you,” Wemmbu hisses, moving one hand back to rest over the bundle attached to his right hip which houses his dagger. “Go pick on rich guys who actually have something to share.”
“Stop being so difficult, just give us some money, and we’ll leave you alone,” The girl grumbles, squaring her shoulders.
He’d feel bad, maybe even sympathetic for these three, if they weren’t obviously middle-class “rebels.” Except he lied, and he probably wouldn’t feel bad at all even if they were street rats like him. He hunches forward, looking for an out before a fight can start. He’s in real shit if he gets caught in an altercation with these three. He likely has more experience in fights than any of these three, and he could take one or even two of them in a fight. But there’s three of them, they’re at least double his age, height, and weight— not to mention the brute that still hovers behind the other two.
“I don’t have anything for you,” He repeats, grinding all of the syllables between sharp teeth.
The male piglin shifts his weight with a puff, and Wemmbu’s heart sinks as he drops into a fighting position. The leading piglin follows not even a second leader. They both lunge at him in tandem. Wemmbu is on his feet in a second, taking quick steps back and whipping his netherite dagger out with a spitting hiss. The unenchanted metal gleams dangerously. He nimbly side-steps the piglins, bringing the dagger up to cut along the arm of one of the piglins.
The attacker shreeks in pain and rage, and Wemmbu sees the exact moment the brute is overtaken by his instincts to protect his drove. Wemmbu takes in the scene; two piglins to his right and one angry brute to his left. His instincts kick into overdrive, the smell of iron fills his lungs and his heart beats like it has become a bird caged within the steel bars of his chest. Adrenaline and border-line mania kicks in, originating from the gem that imbeds itself into the bone of his skull. It is warm and familiar; it drives him to turn tail and run hard.
He’s out of the park in seconds, barely hearing the angry shrills of the piglins behind him as they kick into a chase. Wind rushes past sensitive ears and cools him of the uncomfortable heat of the Nether. He locates the closest alleyway and rushes towards the narrow and shadowed pathway.
He gets about halfway down the alleyway before he’s colliding with something solid that sends him sprawling back onto hard bricks, scraping wings and palms against the floor with a grunt. He is just regaining his bearings as a solid arm comes to wrap around his middle, yanking him up aggressively before throwing him into an artificial corner produced by one wall of the alley and a large garbage bin. His back collides with the metal in a dull thud.
Standing tall above him is a piglin, slightly older than the other three, and there’s a disgusted scowl on his face, as if he wasn’t the one to go out of his way to make contact with Wemmbu. It is typical Wemmbu luck for there not only to be a fourth piglin, but for him to run into said piglin in his escape route. Or maybe this piglin is not associated with the others at all, and just wants to see a street kid get beat on. He wouldn’t be the first to purposefully trip homeless kids as they ran, and he would be far from the last.
He doesn’t know which one would be worse.
Wemmbu jeers, panting as he struggles to catch his footing. He flashes his dagger dangerously at the other, but it is too late. He can hear the heavy footfall of the piglins as their hooves clatter down the alleyway.
“Motherfucker!”
Wemmbu turns on the oldest piglin: a stupid, split-second decision fueled by fear and adrenaline. It is easy to take him out of the fight when he obviously hadn’t been expecting the dagger that was thrust towards him, embedding itself into the soft of his stomach before Wemmbu lurches it out once again. He ignores the squealing pig as he turns to confront the other three as they circle slightly around him. They looked positively pissed.
Wemmbu puts up a valiant fight, dodging and striking as much as he possibly can, and, when his dagger gets thrown from his hands somewhere in the fight, he starts using his talons instead. But his cuts fall almost entirely onto the tough skin of the brute and leave only shallow cuts instead of biting wounds. In the end, it is a three versus one fight, and Wemmbu is down for the count when the brute grabs him by the back of his head and smashes his skull hard against the nether brick of a wall. The gem on his head rings dangerously against dark maroon.
The three piglins trade blows on him, hard hooved fingers and feet meet whatever part of his body they can reach. At some point, iron fills his mouth. Its either from the wound on his head or a bite to his tongue.
Wemmbu is proud to say that he had stayed relatively quiet through the whole endeavor, occasional grunts or yelps as opposed to the piglin that lay groaning on the other end of the alley, cursing the little demon that was currently getting pummeled right in front of him. Quietness is a skill that keeps other attackers away. Once these piglins get sick of him, they’ll probably strip him for all of his gold and then leave him in this alleyway.
His quietness escapes him as one of the piglin’s starts to tug on the gem on his forehead. He isn’t sure who it was, but he finds he doesn’t care, not over the sharp, body-numbing pain that sends his vision into a cloud of white.
He yowls and sobs, tearing savagely at the arm yanking with his talons. He feels drool and tears mix at the point of his chin, but the piglins above him just laugh. He’s never felt anything like it, never a pain this searing that leaves his body convulsing in on itself.
He doesn’t notice that it is over until the piglins have already left, and a tall figure hovers at the end of the alleyway, barely visible through his blurred vision.