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Something was haunting his world.
Fluixon only wanted to be alone for the week. He’d gotten tired of playing in multiple other servers back-to-back without any breaks, and he wasn’t exactly known for his high social battery, so he created his own world in hopes of relaxing and getting some alone time. His friends all understood, allowing him to have some space, which he was grateful for, and they all agreed to vouch for him if anyone asked why he wasn’t in the other servers.
He didn’t have much he wanted to do, other than building and maybe exploring the world a little. He planned on building a small castle, just to test out his abilities, nothing too complex. When he joined, he started to get some resources, cutting down trees and raiding villages for iron and food, before heading down into the caves to start mining for diamond tools. That was the first time he noticed something was off.
He was carefully scaling down walls of rock, a lantern in one hand and his iron pickaxe in the other, making sure not to drop the items or himself while making his way down. Near the bottom, a glint of bright blue caught his eye, a clear sign of diamonds in that area, sparking excitement in his chest. Dashing down to mine the ore without further thought of his life, he failed to notice the missing ledge on the edge of the small cliff that stuck out of the cave, and before he could stop himself, half of his right foot was already off of the rock. Just as he expected to tumble down, die, and lose all of his progress, he felt something pull at him from behind, making him fall backwards unceremoniously and back onto the ledge where he had just been standing on.
He blinked for five seconds. What just happened? He was sure he was about to die and fall off the cliff due to his idiocy, but instead ended back onto the place he swore he was about to fall off of. He turned his head around so quickly that he could hear his neck crack slightly, only to be met with nothing but the air and the cave wall. Surely he just imagined it, maybe he tripped at the edge and fell backwards due to his body weight leaning backwards rather than towards the edge, he thought, but he knew that it made no sense. His mind searched for the endless possibilities, ending up at a dead end each time he analysed the potential situations properly, before giving up. This was definitely a one time thing, he told himself, everyone experiences weird shit when they first make their world. The problem was that this was not, in fact, a one time thing.
The next time he experienced something strange like this was when he was in the nether gathering materials for his castle. He had to find either a bastion or a basalt delta to get some blackstone, then mine some more for quartz. The thing is, bastions are dangerous, and Fluixon knew that, which is why he was reluctant to find one, instead opting to search for a basalt delta. Despite searching for hours on end though, he hadn’t been able to find a single one, which meant he had to fight millions of mobs just to get some stupid blackstone.
He grumbled as he made his way to a bastion he found earlier, already mentally preparing himself for the mobs he’d have to deal with. Talk about relaxing. He couldn’t even give up and decide to build something else, considering he was genuinely desperate to have the castle built, and he didn’t want to waste two weeks of planning just because he didn’t want to fight, so he just sucked it up.
Finally arriving at the bastion, he carefully bridged across a small ocean of lava, making sure not to misstep like he did in the caves, before entering, expecting a dozen mobs to immediately start cornering him since he didn’t have any gold on him. That was not what he got, though.
The bastion was eerily empty and quiet, almost like every single mob had just disappeared without any explanation, and now that Fluixon noticed it, the entire nether was desolate. Not a single ghast had shrieked at him since he came in, and the striders that would usually swim across the lava were nowhere to be seen. Scanning the area for even a single piglin, he noticed a few golden swords, crossbows, and gold nuggets scattered across the whole structure, which meant that something had killed them, and recently too.
A chill instantly ran down Fluixon’s spine as questions flooded his mind. What the hell was wrong with his world? Why did every mob just die so suddenly? Was something trying to help him? Was this all just a prank from his friends? Was he genuinely hallucinating from the lack of sleep he had gotten? Was it all just a dream?
His mind raced as he tried to answer all the questions as well as he could, but nothing seemed to add up. It was all too coincidental for it to be a glitch, and even if it was, the mobs would have just disappeared, not died. It couldn’t have been a prank either, since all of his friends knew better than to mess with Fluixon especially if he needed space. It couldn’t have been a hacker either, since he had the best firewalls and anti-hacking systems implemented in his world for the sole reason that nobody would be able to enter. So if it wasn’t that, then what the fuck was wrong with his world?
Suddenly, a conversation he had a week ago with his best friend, Thomas, replayed in his head.
“Dude, I’m telling you, it was creepy as shit. Blocks would get moved, things in my chests were getting reordered to make weird messages, and there were signs with strange cryptic shit on them.” Thomas explained, gesturing frantically. Honestly, Fluixon was having a hard time believing Thomas. He had never been one to believe in things like ghosts or entities in worlds or servers, considering it all just sounded like bullshit anyway.
“Mhm. And you said that you kept dying in strange ways too?” Fluixon mused.
“Bro, I swear it’s true.” Thomas frowned. “Whatever. I hope you get haunted by something like that. Then, you’ll believe me.”
“Sure I will, bud.” Fluixon replied. There was no way he was actually going to be harrassed by a random glitch or entity.
Fluixon shook his head. No way he was being haunted. There hadn’t been any of the telltale signs that Thomas had explained. No weird signs written in ciphers, no messages hidden in reordered items in his chests, nothing. With the lack of evidence, he wasn’t willing believe it was that. Despite it though, something lingered in his chest as he grew more cautious, something he refused to admit was most likely fear.
He mined down the structure while making sure that he wouldn’t fall into the lava, trying to distract himself, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what Thomas said. Maybe there was something in his world. Distantly, he wondered whether it would hurt him, whether it would attack him, whether it would let him see it. The description Thomas gave was mildly disturbing, but there was no way all entities were like that, right?
After he finally got out of the nether and commenced his building, the thought of something haunting his world and watching him at every given moment lingered in the deepest corner of his mind.
The next time something paranormal happened was when Fluixon was out at night, trying to get back to the safety of his castle. The building was nearly finished, with only a few towers and some interior materials missing that he was determined to complete by the end of the day. Unfortunately for him though, he had forgotten his clock at the castle, so he had to rely on his sense of time to get home before the sun set to avoid getting chased down and mauled by zombies, skeletons, and creepers. To say that his sense of time was good was too much of an overstatement.
The sun had started to set before he realised, and once he did notice that the sky was far dimmer than earlier, he was already too late. He immediately set foot and started to dash back home, but it didn’t matter.
Not even halfway there, he’d gotten slashed by an enderman’s claws, shot by a skeleton’s arrows, and narrowly avoided a creeper’s attack. His outfit, usually clean and kept neat, was now disheveled, dirt staining his dark coat, his purple vest not faring better either. A mixture of dirt and gravel dirtied his face, and his hair stuck up in unnatural ways. An arrow was embedded into the back of his thigh, which made it hurt just to run, but he still rushed to get to safety.
After what felt like forever, he finally managed to get back home, his head aching and blood seeping through his clothes. Making his way into the castle lethargically, he walked up the stairs sluggishly and into his medical room where he kept all of his potions and medical supplies, alongside a double chest full of golden apples and carrots. He vaguely remembered eating half of a golden apple, but afterwards, his mind went completely blank.
It wasn’t what happened that night that was odd though—it was what happened after.
See, Fluixon didn’t recall bandaging his wounds or using any health potions to dull the ache of the injuries. However, when he woke up, he was lying down on a bed in the medical room he definitely did not place, with his wounds covered in bandages he definitely did not wrap his injuries in, and with said injuries dulled down to a simple ache rather than an excruciating, burning sensation.
Slowly sitting up, he tried to process the fact that he was patched up, healed, and very much alive rather than dead due to blood loss. His mind racked up the different possibilities on what could’ve happened—maybe he did patch himself up last night, and was too delirious to remember.
That couldn’t have been true though, because when he checked, his entire chest was full with regeneration potions, healing potions, bandages, the whole thing. He had counted the amount of medical resources he had the night before—he always did, it was a habit of his considering he’d often worry about running out of resources unexpectedly. He considered two possibilities—either his world was bugging badly for some reason or he was being haunted. A shiver ran down his spine at the thought of the latter being true. There was no way Thomas was right.
Desperate to stop thinking about the possible entity in his world, he shook his head and made his way to the top of his castle—still unfinished, the roof and two walls missing—to continue building. He already had shulkers full of blackstone and other building materials in his inventory from the expedition for materials the night before, so he didn’t stop at any other place to collect anything, save for the small storage room on the floor below his destination to get some lanterns. Then, when he arrived, he started to work on one of the walls, patching up holes in some areas and lighting up the area.
The thing that made him freeze was the sight of a figure completely dressed in white, four pairs of wings enveloping the body like a crisp clean blanket, two attached to the head, one on the back, and one near the waist. Long white hair cascaded around the figure’s shoulders like a waterfall, sleek and elegant. A golden halo floated above their head, spiked at some areas, and white roses and thorns curved around their biceps, the stems a dark and brooding green. The pairs of wings on their head shielded their eyes, covering their face completely, which only made them look more like an angel.
Just as Fluixon was about to approach the figure, wanting to ask why they were here or how they even managed to get in his world, they dipped backwards, falling off the ledge they stood on previously. Fluixon immediately rushed forward to try and catch them, but almost like fog, they disappeared. He glanced down, only to see a perfect view of the trees from above with absolutely no mysterious angel-like person (Were they even a person? What if they were an entity, like Thomas had experienced?)
If he was scared, that was between him and whatever thing had just appeared.
Fluixon couldn’t focus for the rest of the day. Each hit against mobs came late and inaccurate, he kept misplacing things while building, he couldn’t even take out the right thing from his inventory sometimes. When he was in a dark cave out to gather more ores for a new diamond pickaxe, he swore he could see a speck or two of white that glowed brightly, a stark contrast to the deepslate walls of the cave he was mining in. The light instantly caught his attention, making him turn his head so fast that he nearly got whiplash. The pattern continued each time he was somewhere that was a potential danger to him—he’d see the glimmer of white, and the second he looked around it to try and find the mysterious figure, it would vanish before he’d get a glimpse.
It was so irritating, being so close yet so far, so he decided to take action. After all, if he wanted something, he would get it. That’s how it’s always been.
Before he slept that night, he placed a pale oak sign on the highest floor of his castle—the same place he first saw the figure. What he wrote was plain, simple, and straight to the point.
“I can see you. I’m not blind or stupid. What are you?” His handwriting was as elegant as it always was, easy to read, the dark ink standing out from the nearly white sign.
When he came back to the sign the next day, he found that it had been destroyed, beside where it used to stand a chest that he definitely didn’t place. When he opened it, it was nearly overflowing with diamonds, steaks, enchanted golden apples, and other trinkets. On the top of the pile was a leather book that glowed slightly, meaning it had been signed. He checked the scrawled engraved writing at the bottom of the cover and read the name “Saparata”. At least he knew they had a name now. Inside the book was just as cryptic as the entity’s actions, only a few numbers inside which Fluixon deducted were coordinates.
While on his way to the place that was written in the book, he stopped to collect a few sunflowers. He was still unsure of how dangerous the entity was, and what their intentions were, so he wanted to bring an offering, just in case. When he arrived, he saw the very same thing he’d been chasing standing in front of a lake, four wings still covering their face and shielding their eyes. The setting sun made them look far more ethereal than they had the first time he saw them on the top of his castle, a golden halo wrapped around the crown of his head as a result of the light reflecting off of their sleek hair.
“Who—what are you?” Fluixon questioned, sunflowers tied up neatly in a bouquet in one hand as he slowly approached the entity, so cautiously as if they’d run off again if he got too close like he had before.
“I suppose you deserve to know.” The entity’s voice was soft, yet somewhat glitchy, but still comprehensible. The wings covering their eyes shifted slightly, enough to show a sliver of golden eyes staring straight at him like he was the only thing in the entire world that mattered. “I’m an entity, as I assume you’ve found out. I’ve been following you for a while now—even off of this world. You really are unique, you know? In a way, I’m like a guardian angel.”
That explained the amount of near-death experiences Fluixon barely dodged.
“You’ve been following me…? Creep.” He muttered, earning an amused chuckle from Saparata. “Are you gonna keep following me?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.” Saparata replied.
“I wouldn’t.” The words left him without his permission, voice breathy, still enamoured by their beauty.
“Then I’ll be happy to help you. You’re not exactly the most cautious person I’ve met.”
Fluixon heard a door creak open behind him, so slow and attempting to be quiet that it was almost entertaining to him that the other thought he was being subtle.
“I know you’re there.” He called out dryly. A simultaneous sigh and giggle resounded at his words.
“Can’t even pretend to not notice me?” Saparata whined playfully, moving to hug his lover from behind.
“You’re not as sneaky as you think you are.” Fluixon murmured, shifting as he felt Saparata’s feathers ruffle against his skin when the other lightly kissed him on his shoulder.
“Whatever. Go out tonight?”
“Mhm.”
Fluixon relaxed into the other’s arms as he felt Saparata smile against his shoulder, relishing the way his lover’s wings encased them, almost like a warm blanket. Saparata merely continued pressing kisses wherever he could reach from behind Fluixon, satisfied with the situation, and more importantly, the fact that he managed to get the one person that caught his eye.