Chapter Text
NOW
Grian wakes up slowly, in aching stages. Something is wrong with his back—a deep, throbbing pain that won’t quit. Something is wrong with his head—it’s empty and echoing and not right. Something is wrong with his wings—
And he’s fully awake all at once, shuddering with silent sobs that jostle the raw-ended stumps on his shoulders and send waves of pain down his nerves. His wings are gone, they’re gone they’re gone, and it had felt like the only option when he cut them off, but now—
Voices. Hands grabbing at him. He struggles hazily, but they force him to still.
“Grian.” It’s Xisuma, he finally recognizes. “You’re going to be all right. But we need you to drink some potions.”
His stomach turns. He submits to choking down the potions—regen and weakness mixed together—and then sits up, shivering and trying not to vomit as somebody rubs at the small of his back.
Pearl. It’s Pearl sitting next to him on the narrow bed and muttering, “C’mon, mate, deep breaths. Don’t waste my brewing.”
Grian nods. He can feel the weight of the weakness potion dragging at his body—it’s meant to calm him and soothe the pain, and his back is going numb but his heart is pounding anxiously inside his chest.
They’re going to ask him what happened. He has to think of an excuse—some reason for why the Watchers had him in their dungeon, why his wings are gone—anything, anything but the truth—
Except he doesn’t remember how they found him. So he doesn’t know how much they already know.
“Feeling better?” Pearl asks finally.
“Yeah,” Grian croaks out, even though he’s really not. They’ll want to ask questions now.
He can do this, he tells himself. He’s lied to his friends often enough before.
“Right,” says Xisuma. He sits down on the little chair opposite Grian’s bed. “How much do you remember?”
His brain goes terrifyingly blank for a moment.
“It was dark,” Grian says finally. “The—the Watchers were angry with me.”
He’s not even lying! He really doesn’t remember much else about the very end of things: just darkness, sneering voices, the awful pain in his back, and the slow drumbeat of his own self-hatred.
Don’t ask me how I got there, he thinks desperately. Please don’t ask me.
“Do you remember—ah—what happened to your wings?” Xisuma asks delicately.
A shudder goes down his spine.
“No,” Grian lies.
Pearl and Xisuma exchange a look.
“We heard from one of the Watcher commanders that you cut them off,” says Xisuma.
“Why would I do that?” Grian demands instantly, desperately.
“Because you’re a Watcher,” Pearl says matter-of-factly, “and the wings were your link to the collective. That fella was pretty talkative.”
And just like that, his whole world shatters.
It’s like sinking into powdered snow, numb and cold and burning all at once, and the regular shudder of damage ticking.
They know. They know. They know.
“I stopped,” he blurts out. “I was trying to stop, that’s why I cut off my wings, so I wouldn’t be able to—”
The words make his stomach roil with disgust even as he says them. He’s already gorged himself on their suffering five times over, and now he wants credit for stopping?
But if he can’t convince Pearl and Xisuma that he’s changed, he’s going to get banned from Hermitcraft. And even though it’s what he deserves, the thought of being alone forever is too horrible to bear.
“I’ll never Watch anyone again, Pearl, I promise,” he says. “Xisuma, you can look at my code. As much as you like.”
Grian shudders a little as he says the words—he’s always hated having anyone examine his code, even before he got tangled up with the Watchers—but he still flips his hands over and spreads his palms, letting the lines of code glow visibly before Pearl and Xisuma, so they can see the red-lettered error messages where his link to the Watchers has been torn apart.
He realizes too late that they can also see how the code for his Wings and his Eyes is twisted and wrenched but still there. He could heal himself if he really tried, regrow those subroutines and start Watching all over again—and as soon as he thinks that, he’s shaking with the hope that maybe he can have it back, maybe this time it won’t go horribly wrong—
They can never trust him again, he realizes bleakly. Nobody can.
Xisuma takes his hands. “It’s all right, Grian. We’ll help you.”
That should be good news. It’s better than what he used to imagine, waking up in the middle of the night panicking that maybe someone figured it out. But there’s still dread twisting at the bottom of his stomach.
“Please,” he begs, “I’ll do anything you want, anything at all, just—just please don’t tell the others I’m a—”
He can’t spit out the word Watcher.
Pearl looks at him with a gentle, scalping sort of pity.
“Grian,” she says, “everyone already knows.”
Everyone.
The word swallows him up like the Void, a bottomless darkness that he’ll never escape.
“Oh,” he says numbly.
“You missed a lot,” Pearl goes on. “We had a whole war. There was an inter-server alliance.” Her mouth twists a little, as she adds grudgingly, “Scott really came through.”
Of course. They’d all want revenge on the Watchers—they’d all want a way to make the Games stop.
There must have been a whole Hermitcraft meeting and a vote. Somebody made an announcement: By the way, this is all Grian’s fault. He’s the reason you keep getting kidnapped for death games. And now he’ll never be able to look any of them in the eye again.
Xisuma squeezes his hands a little and then releases them. “I need to take a look at your back, Grian.”
He obeys silently, turning around and rolling up the ragged remains of his red jumper. It’s not like he’s got the right to ever tell anyone no, ever again.
But his skin crawls under Xisuma’s gaze. It’s almost as bad as showing them his code—he knows that that to an admin’s eyes, the wounds on his back are seething with severed tendrils of the Watchers’ power.
Xisuma’s fingers are deft and gentle as he pokes at the skin around the stumps of Grians’ wings. A soothing coolness starts to spread across the ragged ends of his nerves; then Xisuma says, “Pearl, hand me that if you please,” and a moment later Grian is being firmly wrapped with bandages.
He drifts. He’d been alone for what felt like ages in the Watchers’ dungeon, and even knowing how much Xisuma has to despise him now—any kind of touch is soothing. The weakness potion has already made his head a little fuzzy, so now Grian slips away easily.
When he comes back to himself, Xisuma is gone. Pearl is still sitting at his bedside, one knee pulled up under her chin as she watchers him.
The silence stretches out between them. Everything Grian can think of to say fizzles out and dies on his tongue.
“How’s Timmy?” he asks at last.
“Well, I don’t know,” says Pearl. “He just found out that his older brother threw him into a death game five times. How do you think he’s doing?”
Grian flinches. He knows he deserves that.
“I mean,” he says hollowly, “you said there was a war. Is he—”
“He’s fine,” says Pearl. “Everyone’s fine. The only Watcher that could ever kill any of us was you.”
The words hang between them for another long, painful pause.
“Is there anything else you want to say?” Pearl asks finally.
“. . . No?” Grian ventures.
There’s nothing he can say. Nothing that will ever make this better.
“Because,” Pearl continues, “you’ve spent a lot of time asking me and Xisuma to keep your secrets, but you haven’t even said you’re sorry.”
How can he? It’s not a word that means anything close to this cavernous remorse in his chest, eating him up from the inside.
Sorry is what you say when you expect to be forgiven. It’s for oopsies and accidents and pranks that have gone too far. Or it’s for when your friend is letting you beat him to death in a cactus ring, because he’s too soft to win the Game himself and he doesn’t understand that this is all your fault.
Sorry is for people who stopped when it still would have made a difference. Grian doesn’t have any right to say it now.
But how can he refuse her?
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Pearl stares at him for a few moments, her mouth a flat line.
“Grian,” she says finally, her voice shaking a little, “I am really, really glad we got you back. But I am so fucking angry with you right now.”
And. Well.
That’s fair.
THEN
You didn’t mean to become a monster.
This is how it starts: you slay the Ender Dragon with nothing but spare beds and spite, and you jump into the portal, and the whole Universe unfurls beneath you as the Watchers whisper in your ears, It’s about time.
They scoop you up as easily as if you’re dropped blocks going into their inventory, and they place you down in a courtyard of their glittering city that spans the Void in tessellated strands.
Tall figures ring you, their wings mantled, and for a moment you’re terrified. But the Watchers are solemn and respectful as they introduce themselves. They explain their purpose, the reason they have haunted your every step on Evo: to provide an audience for every joke and prank and escapade. To delight in you the same way that the Universe does. To Watch you play the Game.
The fears that have nagged at you since the beginning of the server melt away. It feels indefinably right that you’ve always had an audience. That someone has always laughed, every time that you set off a pile of TNT.
And then they make their offer: to recreate you as one of them.
It is a powerful thing, to have a conversation with us, they say. You’ve come so far already. We can take you further.
It’s flattering, of course, but—
“I’d rather keep on playing,” you tell them. “I’m no good at sitting out games.”
Oh, you’d still play! they assure you. You’d just get the Watch as well.
And we would Watch with you.
They explain that it’s hard for them to see into some worlds. But if they can forge a link with you, then you will always have an audience, and they will always have a game to watch.
Let us give you Eyes and Wings, they say, and that’s what clinches it. You’ve always envied the wings that your siblings have: Jimmy’s bright yellow feathers, and Pearl’s soft moth wings. You hate to stumble slowly along the ground while they soar overhead.
So you say yes. And it hurts, more than you thought possible, but it’s utterly worth it when they drop you into a singleplayer server, and you unfurl wings with red-gold-blue feathers, and for the very first time your life—you fly.
The Watchers have warned you not to tell other players about them, so you explain your wings as a glitch from Evo’s turbulent code. Pearl is worried about side-effects and Jimmy is jealous that your plumage is brighter than his, but they both accept the story without question. It wouldn’t be the first time that a player has been permanently changed by a server.
They both agree that you shouldn’t go back to Evo, in case it further messes with your code. And that’s perfect, because Mumbo just sent you an official invitation to Hermitcraft, and the Watchers are humming with excitement in your ears. It’s one of the worlds they can’t Watch on their own.
So you join Hermitcraft. It’s a little scary at first: the server is legendary for both its builders and its redstoners. It’s got a Voidwalker for an admin, and EthosLab himself as one of its players.
But you’re Grian. You never back down, and you can make anyone laugh—and now you have wings. You soar through the skies of Hermitcraft, and you can’t believe that until now, you spent your entire life on the ground.
You throw yourself into playing the new game. You build and you prank and it’s even better than Evo, because anytime you get bored or sad, you’re not stuck with those feelings anymore. You can just be somewhere else! You can open up your Eyes and Watch new chunks loading, or Mumbo puttering around with his redstone, or Doc’s latest world-breaking invention.
You start building a mansion bigger than anything you’re ever created before, and for the first time in your life, you don’t get stuck on the boring bits. You just open up an Eye on something interesting, and you keep placing blocks. It’s brilliant.
At first you worry a little about the way that the Watchers sometimes mutter in your ears, and the times you can feel their Eyes opening in the back of your skull. But it’s okay! They don’t get in the way. You do feel it sometimes, the weight of their yearning to watch games—but that just drives you to be an even better player.
You start Demise, and everybody loves it. The Hermits are thrilled to play, and the Watchers are delighted to Watch, and you are giddy with the feeling that you’ve cracked the code of the Universe itself. You are playing the game well, and everybody loves you for it.
NOW
A week crawls by, agonizingly slow.
Every day, Xisuma gently asks to look at Grian’s code and the wounds on his back. Every day, Grian clenches his teeth and obeys, acutely aware of Pearl watching silently from the corner of the room.
It’s humiliating, having his inner workings spread open before both of them. But he knows why they have to check. The Watchers are defeated, but not completely eradicated. Some of them could still reach out to Grian, across the Void between servers, and sink their claws into him again.
And he can’t be trusted to say no. He cannot ever, ever be trusted again. So Xisuma has laid delicate seals over the over the the bloody gaps in Grian’s code, like bandages made of cobweb, and ever day he inspects them while Grian stares at the floor and tries to pretend this isn’t happening.
He’s not on Hermitcraft anymore. Right now, there is no Hermitcraft. Pearl explained to him that during the last part of the war, the Watchers deployed code-eaters. Season 9 is no more, and Season 10 isn’t quite ready yet.
Until then, the Hermits are scattered among server hubs and singleplayer worlds and other SMPs. They’ve stashed Grian on a small private server, with just Pearl and Xisuma for company.
A week after he wakes up, Mumbo comes to see him.
There’s no warning, just the chime of his communicator and Mumbo joined the game. Grian sees the message and bolts outside to spawn.
MumboMumboMumbo, is all he can think. Mumbo came back to him, Mumbo wants to see him, if Mumbo’s here then everything can be okay again.
He slams into Mumbo without hesitation and wraps his arms around him in a hug, the same way he’s done a thousand times before.
Only, Mumbo’s supposed to hug him back. He’s supposed to lock his hands under Grian’s shoulders and rest his chin on top of Grian’s head.
Instead, it’s like hugging a fence post.
There’s a cold pang in Grian’s stomach as he draws back.
“Mumbo,” he says, his voice cracking a little
“Hello, Grian.” Mumbo’s voice is stiff and awkward.
He’s doing it again, Grian realizes with a wave of self-loathing. Just like with Pearl on that first day, he’s being so selfish, not even trying to apologize.
Mumbo isn’t here to comfort him. Mumbo’s here to find out what he has to say for himself.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts out. “I’m so sorry, Mumbo. I should have stopped this years ago, but I didn’t and—and you didn’t deserve that.”
“No,” says Mumbo, his voice half-choked, “I didn’t deserve it.”
Grian’s shoulders hunch, the stumps on his back twitching as he tries to wrap himself up in wings that don’t exist anymore.
“I trusted you,” Mumbo goes on, “I told all the Hermits they could trust you. I begged them to let you join Hermitcraft. And then you—you dragged us into those games. Why? What could the Watchers have possibly done to make you help them? Did they threaten you?”
“No,” he croaks.
“Then why?”
Grian’s been asking himself that all week. Why was he so stupid? Why did he believe the Watchers, even for a second?
“I was bored,” he says miserably. “They said they could make it better.”
That’s what it comes down to, in the end. That is all the reason he had. He kept telling himself he could control it, that this time he wouldn’t let the Watchers pull them into another game—this time he’d bend the game to be kinder, gentler—because he couldn’t face losing his Wings and Eyes.
He couldn’t face being the way he is now, shackled to the ground and locked up inside his head and never, ever able to escape being bored.
Mumbo’s stiff expression cracks right down the center. “I killed people, Grian!” he bursts out. “You know how I am on red, and you kept doing it to me! And then you killed me for it. So now I’m afraid of myself and afraid of you, and this is all your fault, Grian! It’s all your fault!”
“I’m sorry,” Grian whispers helplessly, sick of the words, knowing they don’t help.
“We had a vote,” Mumbo tells him. “About letting you into Season 10.”
Grian’s stomach drops.
“Oh,” he says.
“I voted yes,” Mumbo ploughs on. “We all did. We all want you to get better, Grian. But I can’t—” His gaze flickers over Grian and then away, almost like he’s ashamed. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be your friend. Every time I look at you, I see— Just leave me alone. Please.”
He feels like he’s falling into the Boatem Hole, the cold emptiness of the Void pressing into him at every angle, relentlessly eating away at him until Grian fell out of the world. Mumbo’s up top in the world of sunshine and friendship, and Grian’s falling into the dark, and he’s. He’s not ever getting out, is he?
“Okay,” he says finally.
Mumbo startles a little. He shuffles his feet, and opens his mouth, and closes it again. For a wrenching moment, Grian almost thinks that he’s reconsidering.
Then Mumbo nods sharply and says, “Good. Glad we cleared that up.” His mustache twitches. “Bye, Grian.”
And he logs off.
Grian’s alone. Really, truly alone.
He wraps his arms around himself in a useless hug and sinks to the ground. He wants to cry, but the tears are locked away somehow, and all he can do is shake.
It feels almost like a betrayal, this wrenching discovery that even Mumbo’s love has limits.
(But you can’t blame him. You don’t love yourself anymore, either.)
THEN
Third Life—alone of all the games—is truly an accident.
The idea is all yours. (It feels like it’s all yours. But one day when you’ve learned how much of a liar you are, you’ll look back and wonder.) Season 7 has been going for a long time, and things have gotten quiet. The base swap is over. The G-Mansion is basically finished, and so is the Grian Emporium.
You’ve started to dread building.
Each morning you wake up, and there’s a weight on your chest. You just have a short list of tasks that you need to complete before the end of the season, but it feels impossible to get started. You spend hours each day Watching the server, and that’s always been enough to get you out of your head and give you that little spark of Grian back, but now it just leaves you tired and even more lazy than before
Until one day you think, Time for a prank.
Just a quick minigame. A vacation, of sorts. An excuse to leave the daily grind behind.
You make your player list carefully, selecting only the friends that you think would appreciate a little lighthearted kidnapping right now. You craft them a tiny jewel of a world, and custom-code some Demise-like rules to give zest to the endgame.
All your creative energy that had seeped away comes roaring back, and phantoms screech overhead as you stay up five nights in a row, perfecting Third Life. You can’t wait to see your friends’ reactions, the moment they realize you’re the culprit. Bdubs will shriek AH-HAH! and Scar will say, Grian, you rapscallion, and Etho will give you his sly grin that no one’s ever seen, but shines so clearly in his voice.
The time comes, the code is ready, you type the trigger into your comm—
And Third Life swallows you up.
Almost at once, you know something’s wrong. The world is too bright, too sharp. You take a couple hearts of fall damage, and the pain knocks your breath away.
But you tell yourself it’s fine. So Third Life is a little more like hardcore than you expected: that’s exciting! Your friends will still have fun. When you find them, they’ll be laughing over this new adventure.
And they are laughing, fighting over the remains of a village. So it’s not until your prank on Scar goes wrong that you figure it out.
They don’t remember Hermitcraft. They don’t know anything exists outside of this world, and they don’t think they’ll survive losing their third lives. They build Scar a tomb because they think the creeper has left him two accidents away from permadeath.
When you try to explain, the words slide right off their brains and leave them blinking at you in confusion.
Don’t worry, the Watchers whisper to you. This is just part of the game. It’s going to be fun!
It’s the first time their whispers haven’t been comforting. You’re not sure they understand how scary this is, for you or your friends.
You don’t know what to do. You follow Scar into the desert, and you spend night after night sitting up in your tower, staring at the code of Third Life and trying to fix it. The only reason you don’t turn into a walking phantom spawner is that Scar forces you to sleep sometimes.
War comes to the server, and you’re an old hand at this kind of thing except not. The G-Team and the Mycelium Resistance were both just games in the end. You all had a good time and went home laughing. Here on Third Life, people die screaming and respawn with true hatred burning in their eyes.
I don’t like this, you tell the Watchers.
Yes, you do, they reply.
And they are—quite horribly—right. You keep opening up your Eyes, and at first it’s to keep tabs on Dogwarts and the Crastle, and then because it’s the only way you feel a little less scared and miserable. You can feel the glee of the other Watchers radiating through the bases of your wings, and you can see Third Life as they do: a delicious bloodsport, a peerless drama. It still hurts, but in the same addictive way as scratching a rash bloody.
(You can feel them Watching you too, licking up the pain and fear from the corners of your brain like the last bits of honey from a comb. You don’t begrudge it.)
Finally it’s you and Scar alone on Monopoly Mountain, with the weight of a thousand Eyes pressing down upon you. The only way out is to finish the game, and Scar won’t kill you a second time.
You have to end it. But you’re not strong enough to stay in your own head while you do it.
So you Watch yourself beat Scar to death and you like it, and then you hold him and cry until his body is cold, and then you walk off the cliff hoping that your friends were right, and this death will be the end of you.
NOW
Grian joins Season 10 feeling like he’s headed to his own execution.
All the Hermits will be there. Are they going to speak to him one by one, so he can hear how much he’s hurt each of them? Or is Xisuma going to read out a list of his crimes while they all stare at him?
Or, even worse—what if they just all ignore him? Mumbo said they all wanted him to “get better,” but maybe that only means giving him a place to stay, not pretending to still be friends with a traitor. They’d have every right to turn their backs and refuse to speak with him.
Grian imagines trying to exist as the server’s ghost, unseen and unacknowledged, building a tiny base that no one will ever visit and farms that nobody but him will ever use. It would be like the start of Secret Life, except a hundred times worse. He’d go mad. He’d rather die.
But when Xisuma messages him that it’s time, he still logs on.
The Hermits are gathered around a big pool of lava. Like at the start of every season, they’re buzzing with excitement, greeting each other and chattering about building plans. For a brief, dreamlike moment, Grian feels like he’s slipped into another timeline where nothing went wrong.
Then he notices Mumbo, standing at the opposite corner of the lava pool. His suit is rumpled, which should only happen when he’s been crawling around a redstone machine, and there’s a slump to his shoulders that’s all wrong. It’s the start of a new season! Mumbo should be excited!
Instead he’s miserable.
And one tiny, selfish part of Grian is happy to see it. Because if Mumbo is sad, maybe that means he misses him. Maybe he’s changed his mind. He’s going to come running in a moment, throw his arms around Grian, and say, I can’t live without you, mate. And then things will be all right. Grian can survive anything, if he can just have Mumbo back.
But then Mumbo glances in his direction. Their eyes catch for a moment, and Mumbo—
Flinches.
He looks sick, and he shudders, and then he’s turning his back on Grian.
(Nothing will ever be all right again.)
Grian is suddenly, horribly conscious of how all the other Hermits are looking past him. They’re all very carefully pretending that things are normal, and that means not acknowledging Grian, because nothing about him can ever be normal again.
Except Cub. The scary half of Convex is standing back from the other Hermits, hands in the pockets of his white lab coat, sunlight glinting off his glasses, and he’s staring at Grian with a terrifying, expressionless intensity.
Something shrivels up inside Grian. Scar isn’t here yet, but if Cub hates him that much, it can only mean—
He doesn’t know which would be worse: if Scar has finally decided to hate him, or if he still impossibly does not.
He sidles over to where Pearl is standing. Like Mumbo, she looks too tired and unhappy for the start of a new season.
“Hey, Grian,” she says wearily—disgustedly, he’s sure. There’s nothing else she can feel after a week of watching Xisuma pick through his code every day. But he still takes the words as permission to hide behind the pale green sweep of her delicate moth wings.
From his hiding spot, he listens to Gem try to start a conversation, and Pearl shut it down with stiff, one-word answers. They were inseparable in Season 9. How many things has he ruined?
A few minutes later, the last cluster of arrival messages lights up Grian’s commn.
Xisuma joined the game
Skizzleman joined the game
impulseSV joined the game
SmallishBeans joined the game
GoodTimeWithScar joined the game
As much as he wants to keep hiding, Grian can’t help peeking around Pearl’s shoulder.
Scar looks better than the last time Grian saw him. That’s not saying much, because last time was in the ruins of Secret Life. Scar is cleaned up now, all the dirt and blood gone, his fingers no longer a ruined mess from digging graves barehanded. He’s wearing a safari outfit with a broad-brimmed hat, and he’s smiling, but there’s still a dullness to his eyes that shouldn’t be there.
Then Scar turns to look at Grian.
Instantly Grian dodges back behind Pearl’s wings, heart pounding. He hunches over, hugging himself and fighting the urge to simply log off Hermitcraft and go hurtling through the Void forever.
He’s not ready for this. He can’t face it.
Through the fog of his panic, he hears Mumbo start speaking.
“Oh, um, ah—welcome to Hermitcraft, Season 10. It’s really good to have you all here, and we have some new people on the server. Let’s all look at them!”
“And?” Xisuma prompts.
“And we have a—a new game to announce,” Mumbo says, stumbling a little. “Cub, ah, take it away.”
“Thank you, thank you,” says Cub. “We’re going to start a new round of Demise in a few days. Participation is voluntary—” Grian flinches, sure that Cub is looking right at him “—so put your name in the chest at spawn if you want to play. There is a special prize, though, for the winner.”
“A very, very special prize,” Mumbo agrees with a nervous laugh. “That I won’t even try to win.”
“And that’s it, my friends,” Cub finishes up. “Any questions can go to me or Tango.”
There’s a shameful knot of resentment in Grian’s stomach, even though he knows he doesn’t deserve to feel it. Demise is his game, something he invented all by himself and everybody loved—and now Cub and Tango are claiming it?
(But who would ever trust him to run that game again? Who would ever want to trust him, after the way he’s poisoned everything?)
Xisuma wishes them all a happy start to the season, and the meeting begins to break up, everyone heading out into the new world to explore.
He stays rooted in his spot, unable to imagine where he can possibly go from here. It seems like he’s probably going to be the server ghost, and he’s not ready to face it.
“Do you have a moment?” Xisuma asks quietly.
“Yes,” Grian croaks, and turns to face his admin. Most of the other Hermits besides Pearl have cleared out, so it’s not as bad as it could be, but his face still heats with shame as he brings his hands up and spreads them wide to expose his code.
Expect Xisuma stops him halfway, one gloved hand catching his wrist.
“That’s all right,” he says. “I just wanted to say—you seem to be healing nicely, Grian. I think we can can move these check-ups to once a week.”
“I’ll still be there,” says Pearl, her voice unreadable.
“Okay,” Grian agrees meekly.
He never used to be meek. He hates it, but this is what he deserves now.
Xisuma pats his shoulder. “Go on! Enjoy the new season.”
That is objectively hilarious, given everything, but Grian just nods and shuffles on his way. He doesn’t ask Pearl where she’s headed, because—she’s got to be sick of him, right? And she still has to see him and his filthy code every week.
On his way out, he pauses and looks at the chest with a sign by it that says, Death games but fun this time! :)
It’s an act of reclamation, he thinks. Of defiance. They’re showing that they can still enjoy playing together, even after everything that Grian has done to him.
No, he’s definitely not putting his name in.
He keeps walking. Crawling, really. It’s so slow, try ing to get anywhere without wings, and the newborn sun of the server is mercilessly bright. Within minutes, there’s sweat dripping down his back.
A hundred blocks out, he starts hearing the sounds of a village, and then he runs into Impulse and Scar.
“Hey Grian!” Scar calls out, and Grian—
For a moment he can’t breathe. He smells freshly exploded gunpowder, feels the echo of a Warden’s scream in his bones, hears himself say, It’s the ultimate betrayal.
He wants to throw himself at Scar’s feet, to bare his throat and offer up his life again. But that won’t fix things. It wasn’t enough back on Third Life, when he’d barely done anything wrong yet. It can’t possibly make a difference now. (You can’t pay a debt with broken, unlovable coins.)
“You might not want to be around us,” Scar goes on, laughing. “We’re in trouble.”
He starts explaining how he broke the village bell that Doc needed. It’s so Scar—so much like the start of Third Life—that for a moment Grian feels like he’s back in the past. It gives him the courage to play along and suggest they tunnel under the village to hear Doc’s reaction.
But when they’re crouched together in the stifling darkness of the dirt tunnel, all Grian can think about is how much he wants his Eyes back. Just to check on where Doc is, and why it’s taking him so long to notice the broken bell. He can’t stand waiting like this.
He wonders if he could break Xisuma’s seals on his code, just for a moment. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, really, and he could say at his next check-up that it was an accident—
He wants it so badly, the whole structure of his code is aching.
Then they hear the clang of a bell from above, and realize there was a second one the whole time. Doc makes fun of them, so Scar retaliates by stealing the second bell, and runs away laughing.
As Grian and Impulse follow after him, he realizes that Impulse hasn’t said a word to him this whole time. It’s only Scar that called him over.
Maybe there’s a reason for that.
“Are you—um—should I go?” he asks softly.
“Hey, I am never gonna forgive you, bro.” Impulse’s voice is brutally cheerful. “But we can still hang out, I guess.”
It’s not the same as losing Mumbo. But there’s still a cold gap opening behind Grian’s ribs as he imagines a future where Impulse’s smile always has that same edge behind it, instead of the warmth he remembers from Boatem.
“Of course, if you hurt Scar again, I’m gonna kill you,” Impulse adds. Which is fair.
A long, long time ago, under a desert sun, Grian got to be the one who threatened anyone that could hurt Scar. But he gave up that right a long time ago.
They run into Joel and Gem. Joel is more than a little manic, as usual.
“Grian!” he calls out, throwing his arms wide. “Love the new look. The wings were boring anyway.”
And Grian catches it, the way Scar’s smile slips for a moment, and something like disgust flickers across Gem’s face. Of course they don’t want to be reminded of what he is—used to be—will always be. Grian doesn’t want to be reminded either, but he doesn’t have the right to complain.
“Thanks,” he mutters, looking at the ground.
A moment later Joel is at his side. He starts to move like he’s going to sling an arm over the raw wounds on Grian’s shoulders, and Grian can’t help flinching—but then Joel clearly remembers that he doesn’t want to touch poison, and drops his hand.
“So give me the tour!” he says. “Show me around Hermitcraft.”
“Well. This is our grass,” Grian says after a painful pause.
He’s trying not to look at the others. Joel is new, so maybe he wasn’t part of the vote to let him back in. Maybe he doesn’t realize that Grian has no right to give a tour, that he’s barely even a guest—just somebody they pitied too much to drop into the Void.
“Nice,” says Joel, sounding like he’s about to laugh. “Is it greener than normal grass?”
Yes, thank you, Joel, I know that’s the stupidest thing I could have said.
“It is so much greener,” Scar says, swooping in. “Come with me, Mr. Smallbeans, and let me show you—over here is our sand, it’s more silky than normal sand—”
Suddenly Scar is the center of attention, and Grian almost melts in relief.
Then they discover that Gem has acquired the glitch of being allergic to falling blocks. She’ll need to see Xisuma to get it fixed. The others are laughing while Gem threatens to murder them, but all Grian can think about is how she’ll be able to get it fixed. Unlike Grian, who had to keep making excuses for why he wouldn’t ask his admin to take a quick look at his code.
Were Scar and Mumbo suspicious, back then? Grian had thought his excuses were pretty good, but—well, he’s been learning just how many lies he told himself.
He remembers Pearl’s voice as she said, Everyone already knows, and for a moment he wants to just log off Hermitcraft and drop into the Void forever.
They find an enormous mountain crowned with cherry-blossom trees. It’s beautiful, and in another life, Grian would try to claim it for himself. Instead he lags at the back as the others race for the top.
He looks up at Scar, who’s still carrying the bell as he clambers up the side of the mountain, and he realizes that he can never apologize. He can never ask Scar to forgive him. Because if Scar says no—the way Pearl and Mumbo and Impulse all did, the way anyone with a single brain cell would do—
Grian can’t survive that.
As long as he doesn’t hear the words, he can still hang around. He can bear Impulse’s edged smiles and Joel’s mockery, and he can dissociate his way through Xisuma inspecting his code every week, and he can pretend that he’s still able to enjoy Hermitcraft.
But he can’t hear Scar tell him to leave.
And if he doesn’t want to hear that, he’d better be careful. Grian has already inflicted himself on his former friends for quite long enough today. As Scar hangs the bell from a cherry wood post, Grian slips away down the opposite side of the mountain.
At the bottom, there’s a narrow strip of grass running down to a sandy shore, and then a shallow sea dotted with islands. The sky is wide and blue overhead, but the area still feels . . . small. Sheltered. Like a place where Grian can hide away and be forgotten.
Slowly, he starts building a small dirt hut.