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Wemmbu dies.
This, in itself, is not surprising. He’s a fighter; fighters die all the time, it’s only natural that the fittest must succeed. And for a long time, Wemmbu assumed that he was, in fact, the fittest – the most adaptable. That, he thought in low moments he preferred not to recall, if he were to die it would be something cool. Something that exuded aura. And as long as Egg, his maces, and his other (very few, he claimed) sentimentals were safe – then he would be fine with dying.
However, Wemmbu finds himself not in battle, not protecting anything, but in a rusty cauldron. It’s clearly been used, blood caking the inside and outer rim. Either an example, a foreboding of what’s to come– or just that the LAW are lazy bums. He doubts the latter, looking at the guards stationed around the stage of the northern council, he notes that every single piece of diamond armour on them looks so goddamn polished that he could probably see his own reflection in them.
So. How did he get here?
Weeks ago, Wemmbu and the three dunderheads that were Fantst, Baablu, and Zam were caught trying to escape the LAW prison. They were thrown into solitary, a guard now constantly watching his cell. Lettuce had promised that he would execute Wemmbu soon, that this was justice – whatever form of dumb-ass justice that Lettuce thought would finally save the server from its own nature – and that there was no chance for Wemmbu to escape now. He said nothing. He just laughed. He heard Spoke’s voice, proposing a deal – inevitable as it was – he heard the weighted footsteps of netherite boots crossing down the hall. He heard the sound draw closer.
Then he blinked, and it was gone. All sound that was left was Zam’s ragged breathing from the cell across from him.
The days passed, or rather what he assumed were days. The lights simply turned on and flickered off, but he found that solitary confinement was shrouded in darkness more often than not. In simpler moments, Deputy Ace would come by and throw two pieces of stale bread through the gaps of the iron bars. Zam, who had grown used to solitary in the four months they had been imprisoned, had quietly appreciated it. Baablu huffed loudly from the other end of the hall, Fantst just made a small noise in acknowledgement. And Wemmbu said nothing. Sometimes he stared at the Deputy, who makes a point not to look at Wemmbu at all.
Then, the Deputy would leave, and the lights flickered off, and he could only hear Zam’s breathing across from him.
At some point, he stops believing that Spoke would come back to get him out. There’s nowhere else to go, and he’s running out of time. He doesn't do anything about this, though, and he knows it’s too late when Lettuce walks into solitary confinement.
Netherite boots echoed throughout the hall. Wemmbu sensed the other prisoners perking up, the nosy freaks they are, to see what was going on.
He doesn't realise he had held his breath until the Warden stopped right in front of his cell. Through the bars, Lettuce was grinning – an exuberant display of animalistic joy deeply ingrained into his features. A golden crown sat on top of the Warden’s head; the caracal's voice could only be discerned as enthusiastic as he spoke: “Wemmbu! It’s your lucky day.”
That’s total bullshit, he thought.
“My lucky day,” he disdainfully repeated. Lettuce's expression shifted, brows furrowed, face tightened; the air seemed to shift around him as he willed.
“Yup,” the caracal said cheerfully, “Now get going.”
And that’s how he’s here.
So, when Wemmbu fails to escape the LAW prison, one of his last thoughts as an anvil is dropped onto his head and subsequently crushes it into a million tiny bits of flesh are: This is a really stupid way to go.
You're really going to go like this, bro? A voice, suspiciously sounding like Egg asked him. He almost lied, almost forced his features into a smirk— but that wouldn't do anything, Egg is not here. There is no one to reassure.
So, if he could, he'd agree: Yep. I'm dead now. They beat me. Woo hoo.
And then there was nothing. His consciousness, his ego, separated from his body and dissolved into the great big nothing that contained us all. As you can assume, there was nothing at all. Except Wemmbu, or now rather the concept of ‘Wemmbu’, his thoughts, and the void.
See, on the Unstable SMP, a six year old chungus lawman who, too hated his life, was scraping Wemmbu’s remains off the stone flooring of the Northern Council; which clearly meant turning back was very much physically impossible. If this was what death was like, then he’d rather die again. Though, he doubts that it’d put him in a different place. The void seemed final, so entirely sure of itself, a buzzing that practically told those who had now inhabited it that this was it. Your time is over.
For a long time, nothing happened. He spends more time thinking up hypotheticals than his actual life until everything glazes over into a jumble of disorganised lines of thought. He doesn't try to make sense of it, it just exists – almost some sort of new quirk to him. He should show it off at a party. If.. if he does make it to the after party. You still need icebreakers in hell.
At some point, another day or a thousand years, he feels the void open its maw around the protons and neutrons that contained his soul. It felt comforting, like a warm blanket, but disturbing at the same time— he found that he was torn in the face of blatant ambivalence.
God, their breath stinks like shit. Is the only single thought his consciousness seems to place in the spotlight amongst the rest. It always seemed to pick on the incomprehensible, the ones that didn't need to make sense. Egg had once told him that the brain can find strange ways to cope in new situations, it's just how it is, dude, and that's how people survive on this server. He remembers scoffing at it. Yet, it reasonably made more sense now than ever.
So as the void envelopes his soul into the folds of spacetime, he only thinks of how he never had told Egg that he was totally right about that. But then again, he never really got to tell Egg that he was right about a lot of other things either.
And then he was distinctly somewhere else, the party he had always seemed to dream of now right before him, the silence being broken by hums of voices. It filled up the space, and they certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves – if they had, well, faces, of course. But in that fraction of a moment, it all stops like a record screech when he arrives. Everyone goes quiet, all staring at him beadily — he instinctively senses — like he was a stranger.
Technically, he was a stranger. However, from the pure kindness that had spontaneously sprouted out of his heart, he did not blame them for their prejudices, as holding grudges in the afterlife was not only stupid, but impossible. You can't track someone down if they all look like atoms. That's illogical, bro, a certain Eggchan sounding voice in his head tells him.
Looking around, he feels like he's about to get the first beatdown of his afterlife.
So he tries to take a step back, because, well, he's not particularly excited to get his ass beat by equally dead if not deader players, but he feels himself go nowhere. Right. This is the void, and in the void we are all brethren.
"So what's it going to be?" A loud voice coming from everywhere and nowhere commanded to him. It was a cacophonous echo of every voice that ever existed, which was to say that it violently murdered him with every word like a dozen violins screeching out of tune.
The rest of the party turns away.
"Hello? I said what's it going to be," after a deliberate beat, the voice added, "am I muted?"
The space around him silences.
"You!" The voice booms across the void, loud and quiet all at once.
He slowly points– more so tries to point– to himself. "Me?" he asks, the confusion in his voice betraying any sort of nonchalance. The emptiness bristles around him.
"Me?" It mocks, "Yes, you! Are there any other quarks here?"
The aforementioned quarks in the room shuffle away into the nothingness. This guy's actually a chud, bro.
"I can name a few." The voice only groans, its exasperation rumbling against the confines of his soul, making him twitch uncomfortably, "Why are you talking to me again?"
Thousands of muffled screams cry out, and he finds himself halfway between a wince and a laugh– which situates itself inappropriately into the conversation as a wheeze, the phantom sensation of breath tightening itself around the absence of lungs.
"Have you considered why you're here?" The voice asked him.
He racks his consciousness for some sort of explanation, an answer that was certain, that made sense.
He shrugs.
"Expected," the voice states, "I'll tell you what, walk with me here." And he does.
"Is there anywhere to go?" He asks, the pitch darkness enclosed around them becomes crystal clear to his senses.
The voice replies: "There isn't. Not here, but there's places for you to go, if you allow it," at his noise of confusion, it clarifies, "You can leave here and be reborn. Be someone else, or something else for that matter: famous players from the past, unique mobs that have ceased to exist, maybe even a thousand withers. All simultaneously."
He sort of gets it, "Uh-huh."
"What I'm saying is: the world is your oyster."
He falls silent.
"What's it going to be?" the voice asks him, "Where will you move on to now?"
He thinks, he sees flashes of fragments from his past life, and how terribly ambitious his goals used to be; he thinks about the people he left behind.
Egg, his best friend, both shared a quiet, mutual devotion towards each other; one of his earliest memories was them huddled under crystal windows of red, yellow, green lights streaking in, underneath marble statues and knees pressed against cold tiles. Egg was the smartest out of the two, the boy would stumble and trip over the tips of his shoes on the road to the library and would beg the other to carry his extra books for him. He always did, no matter how loudly he complained all the way back home, no matter how many stern looks the mentors gave Egg when they saw him carrying a thick stack of books through the entrance of the church.
"We have books here," one of them offhandedly mentioned not on any particular day, Egg just kept reading on his bed, legs kicking upwards, "Especially ones that don't promote harmful thinking." The mentor's eyes snapped towards the books: The Origin of Craft, The Ender, Thus Mined Gough, The Build of War. Oh surely, the pinnacle of heretic conspiracy, he snidely commented to the mentor. Egg lightly snickered under the pages.
Egg was proficient in science and social studies, by the age of twelve he could well handle a full church. The way Egg spoke to others was perfectly concise, vocabulary that he had never even heard before in his life coming out of his friend's mouth. Funnily enough, instead of being praised as intelligent, the mentors called Eggchan a ticking time bomb. Then, they would look at him and slightly ruffle his hair. Maybe even tell him that they expect him at group this Wednesday, and he'd still every twitching bone in his body to not punch them right then and there.
In the end, it was him that was the ticking bomb.
The memories melt away, and that singular thought, too, fades into the dark.
Minute, strong and resilient. He thinks of purple light filtering into the void skies of the End; Minutetech was a great companion in battle, an ever greater friend inside the walls of the End base. Farming the dimension for resources, stealing all the elytras in the first ring radius, was one thing; protecting it was another. He still hears the thunk and whooshing of air as he defied the End's gravity, it moved upward when he shot himself into the inky black skies and shifted towards the ground when he used that same momentum to slam right into one of the little ants skittering aimlessly on the endstone. The blood is as fresh in his mind as it was on his hands, calloused and scarred by the constant rubbing of skin against the handle of his mace.
He remembers when Minute noticed that his skin was rubbed raw.
"You don't wear gloves?" Minute asked, concerned. Technically, no. Truthfully, he used to; back when the Zam Empire still stood. Embarrassingly, he didn't have the mace for long— so he had no further use for gloves. They ended up getting scorched by the flames that had erupted from the explosion of his colony; he didn't think about it the next time he received the mace, and every other time that he had used it. Which was all the time.
He's not telling Minute that.
He made a strange, strangled noise at the question. The other just nodded at him in some sort of understanding.
A few days he found out that Minute had sown a new pair of gloves for in, presented to him in the form of a gift box. It was fine crafted, edges stitched delicately; they were elegant, but not flashy. The gloves were a perfect fit on his hands, and gripped onto Gambit's handle just as efficiently as before. After days of caving people's heads in, he found that he had gained no further injuries– he did not feel the pads of his fingertips splitting apart, nor the skin of his palms furiously burning long after he stored the mace away into his inventory. His chest felt warm.
The next time he found Minutetech, it was in his End base; he found himself in the doorway to a small library. The sound of flipping pages were the only constant to break the quiet; he remembers a flash of multicoloured armour in the corner of his eyes.
'Hey bro,' he probably started with, 'thanks.'
Minute told him that it was okay, that he really needed it. The fabric of the gloves felt cool underneath his touch.
The sound of Minute's voice slips away into the dark.
It all comes back to him in parts; rings of dynamite blooming across the skies, totems popping as the soul rewound itself, the subtle honey scent of sunflowers blowing in the wind, the metallic bitterness of golden apples and gleaming carrots and the warmth that came with another human's touch. Frankly, those memories were unremarkable then and now, as they vanish out of his mind as soon as they appeared.
He felt his mind be stripped of emotion, of time, of religious teachings he had long forgotten and passages from books he had no further interest in, of love until there was only him and the voice.
The afterlife is quiet, perhaps it was always quiet. The voice was no longer a voice, for it did not speak, but closely identified as a stream of words in his consciousness. However, he was aware that it spoke– at least, to him– but he did not attempt to imagine the voice with specific tone to it no more.
He did not say anything for a long time, but the void waited for him. He thinks about who he was, the one who died in a rusty cauldron, and who he now wants to be.
"Could you–" he begins, "could you bring me back as myself?"
"What?" The voice says, incredulous.
"I think I want to go back as myself." He's dimly aware that he was a bad person; it's not like he expects himself to be a good person, either, but he feels a certain incentive to do things another way this time.
"I think I'd do things my way," he tells it, certain and final in his conclusion, "I would be able to build the base of my dreams, be able to have all of the power underneath my fingertips, maybe even travel the Great Sea without being hunted down. I'd just be me."
The voice tells him: "Are you aware of what you're saying? You can be anyone, anything! You don't have to be you ever again."
When you say it like that, he thinks, somehow, all I ever want to be is me.
"I think I'm alright. Send me back."
The voice is hesitant at first, "Are you sure?"
At no response, it resigns, "Fine."
The last of his memories, of the afterlife, of the voice, fade away. He feels the bits of his soul tingle as the void engulfs his very being, wrapping around and seeping into the cracks he never seemed to notice. It's harsh and cold and unforgiving; he doesn't expect it to be any other way, really.
But then he becomes the void, and the void becomes him.
Wemmbu wakes up in the ruins of his first kingdom. He does not remember anything but the previous events, of the scent of gunpowder and blood permeating the air. Eggchan hovers above where he lies, face still round with fat and eyes still gleamed with an innocent naivety behind them; it was entirely unbefitting for a server like this. Wemmbu asks, in a rough voice, what just happened; Egg tells him that FlameFrags came by and left. That Prince Zam's best guard 'lowkey wrecked the place'.
He just closes his eyes, feeling a headache pulsate behind his eyelids. For now, he does not understand why he is being attacked by the Zam Empire, especially when he's on their side. Egg, still crouched down near him, asks if he wants water.
Wemmbu becomes aware that his throat is parched, lips shrivelled and dried up. He rubs at his mouth with the back of his sleeve, clearly not alleviating his lack of hydration.
Egg nods solemnly, strands of ivory hair falling over his eyes, and stands up; he dusts off his suit. Wemmbu silently watches his back grow smaller as he moves further away, until he's a speck crossing over the threshold of the hill and disappears. He inhales, the air is crisper than yesterday.
Like a silent reminder, a unexplainable force makes him jolt up, the movement feeling heavy on his tired limbs. He crawls on the grass, dirt and shit staining the pants he received from Zam a week ago, but he doesn't really mind. Or care. He subconsciously tracks the coordinates in his mind, until he's certain that he's in the right spot.
Wemmbu visualises the obsidian vault below him. His fingers twitch. He begins to dig in with his hands, mud quickly caking the spaces underneath his nails; sweat rolls down the temple of his head in beads. The vault is only a few blocks deep, hidden exactly in plain sight.
He feels the tip of his nail scrape against hard obsidian.
For that one exact moment, Wemmbu knew exactly what to do. Certainly, things would be different this time. He was completely sure of it.
He breathes in the fresh air and slowly takes his pickaxe out of his inventory.