Work Text:
A lord always works under a king.
...
This is the first thing Derek Hutchins remembers as he stares into this indescribable sight, void and everything, something impossible yet tangible yet abstract. Living contradiction, the whole of everything, trapped and reaching. Crown and fingers (everyone’s hands, everyone who has ever lived) and yellow and gold.
It’s too much.
The universe bursts outward, The Earth is born 4.54 billion years before the present moment, lightning and ocean and turbulent lifelessness (his brain is lightning and ocean and it aches behind his eyes). Protobionts form, miniscule shapes, the children of the world learning how to be alive, mimicry of the modern cell. Plants and animals and fungi and everything else, everything else, everything blooms. Humans crawl from somewhere within the chaos. He knows their names. He knows their faces.
The world grows up. Industrial gray fogs over the edges, frosted in pollution, baking in destruction. People swarm like ants across sand, all busy, minds occupied by their own lives. D3rlord3—Derek—he experiences every single point of view at once (he is a six-year-old girl on the swings at a playground in Germany; a no-longer-teenage boy sitting with legs propped up in the passenger seat of his best friend’s car, whizzing down Canada’s highways; an old man hiking in the mountains of Japan). A trillion years pass.
He sees himself grow older, infant to toddler to child to adolescent, then past where he is now and far, far into the future. He sees himself, dead on his desk by New Year’s, a fading smile pressed into the lines of his face even as he rots in the darkness. He doesn’t understand.
And then he does, and he can’t stop, can’t stop anything, everything just extends on forever, extends beyond him, strains his body. Another million, billion years pass. How long has it been? Forever. No, it’s been seventeen seconds and three hundred ninety-two milliseconds (he wants it to stop) and an uncountable number of years all at once.
And Derek Hutchins lives a thousand lives.
A player by the name of TheMostMayo has signed up / is signing up / will sign up for a Minecraft account. He is the chosen vessel for the king. He must (not) become the vessel. He must (not). He will (not).
In every universe Derek does not interfere, in every timeline, Avery has perished / is perishing / will perish. In every universe Derek does, the timeline splits (as water splits around rock, as air shapes around fusiform airplane bodies, fibrous strands split from plant stems and leak sticky blood) and everything changes in a million (1,385,297) directions.
Though Derek knows everything (not everything, not about the king, not about this world), the only thing he can truly (98%) latch onto is Avery. Avery must not become a victim. Avery must not turn. Avery is better off staying as far as he can, and though Derek knows it’s impossible he has to try anyway, because in nearly every timeline he does so (74%) it matters. His message matters.
It’s better than nothing.
...
A lord (n. in the feudal system, a wealthy and powerful landowner who pays loyalty to the reigning monarch) always works under a king (n. the male ruler of an independent state, especially one who inherits the position by right of birth).