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Spoke had always liked a good story. He liked Theseus and Pegasus and Zeus, marble-carved monsters who fall from the sky; he liked pilgrimages and prophets and the little gods of plenty who live in mountains and rivers; he liked cross-carrying martyrs and saints and sneaky, silver-tongued protagonists who always got what they wanted. Mapicc didn’t really understand. He didn’t know what Spoke was talking about when he pointed out the rabbit in the moon or the chariot in the sun, or when Spoke leaned over the side of a boat and dipped his fingers in the river water and told Mapicc about the flood, and the muskrat with a handful of soil, and the turtle who carries the world, and Mapicc just raised a bushy black eyebrow at him and laughed and pushed him into the water.
But Mapicc also never spliced reality with his bare hands, so of course he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know about the spirit of the mountain; about father sun and mother moon, ancestral spirits, animal spirits, jinn, ghosts, the green man, gods, demons, angels, poltergeists, aliens, extraterrestrials, leptons, quarks. The two voices that talk to you at the end of time, like parents chatting idly over a cradle.
He wouldn’t know. Mapicc has never held a command block in his hands.
Mapicc has soft hands. They’re calloused and dry and Mapicc likes to run them through his hair like Spoke runs his hand through the current of the river and untangle all the knots Spoke is unable to untangle himself. They are killing hands but they’re clean; not spliced apart like Spoke’s are; fractured around the fabric of his original sin.
One of his stories says something about that. He doesn’t remember it exactly. There’s a garden, he remembers that much—a garden and an apple.
He explained it once to Mapicc like this:
“It’s like a dream.”
“A dream?” Mapicc asks. He’s sharpening his sword; sliding the grindstone down the blade over and over again while Spoke, sprawled across his lap, rants and raves about the archers and amphoras in the stars, the two of them sequestered away in this little cave—this tiny hole in an outcropping of jungle life; dripping vivid green vines over the cave’s mouth. Through the greenery peaks little poked holes of pale starlight, and one white horn of a crescent moon, and the vast swath of warm black night-blanket that stretches across the sky. Inside there is a little fire flickering away in the center, welling with heat in the belly of the cavern and warming its light limestone walls. There’s this fire, and two bedrolls nudged together, and there is Mapicc.
It was—when was it… back in the days when they were on the run from Leo, maybe; before Mapicc vanished, before Purgatory, before the games and before the mistakes. Back when it was just Mapicc and Spoke; a hunting dog at their heels and the horizon peeling open in front of them. Mapicc’s calloused hands untangling river-water; Spoke reeling off his stories of other-worlds and other-myths and other-stars in the sleepy hour between dinner and bedtime.
“Yes,” Spoke sighs. He drags his finger across the long steel spine of Mapicc’s sword; catches the glint of his own luminescent eyes reflected back at himself. “Like a dream. Dreams are the mind’s way of processing memories. You dream and it helps you understand what happened. So, if you dream about—what do you dream about?”
“Your mother,” says Mapicc, with a snort. He easily dodges Spoke’s smack. His hand makes a long thin flickering shadow on the wall, which is interesting only because sometimes Spoke feels so intangible that to cast a shadow is a surprise.
“Oh-kayyyy,” Spoke drawls, poking Mapicc in the gut. That’s nice. It’s good to poke Mapicc. No matter how intangible he feels, Mapicc is always pokable. His ticklish best friend drops his little handheld grindstone to bat at Spoke’s hands.
“Well,” Spoke says, with great gravitas. “Maybe if you’re dreaming about my mother it means your brain is processing how you’re a loser.”
“Talking a lot of shit for a guy within stabbing distance,” Mapicc snips. The fire catches in his eyes and does a little dance. Spoke really understands the fire. He, too, does a happy little dance when he catches his own reflection in Mapicc’s eyes. His best friend gives his sword a threatening little wave. It, too, catches the firelight.
It’s not that threatening, though, not really; in fact, Spoke tests his fingerprint against the sharpened edge of the blade, and Mapicc stills. The skin doesn’t break; that’s how he knows it’s not sharp enough yet.
Maybe Mapicc knows it’s too dull, yet, maybe he doesn’t. He draws the blade away from Spoke’s finger, gingerly, and then curls over Spoke-in-his-lap. His wavy black hair falls over his face; frames his furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips, like he’s trying to figure out a puzzle. His friend braces a forearm over Spoke’s chest like prison bars and brings that too-dull glinting edge to rest gently against Spoke’s throat.
“I could test it on you,” Mapicc says, beloved face falling into a familiar beloved smirk. The firelight catches in his eyes; glinting red and playfully vicious, like the fresh blood that drips from a skinned knee. The arc of his shoulders hunched over Spoke makes a hulking black monster dancing in shades over the plain limestone behind them. It’s strange; there’s Mapicc and there’s his shadows, and the shadows are so much darker and bigger and wild; but Spoke doesn’t want the shadows on the cave wall. He wants the sharp side of Mapicc’s sword.
Spoke smiles wide and white and sharp. He tilts his chin back and bares his neck and watches Mapicc flinch his blade back ever-so-slightly.
“Really?” he chirps, to the real Mapicc and not to his shadow. “You promise?”
Then they stare at each other for just a little too long and Mapicc sighs, and leans back, and draws his sword away, and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“You’re so weird, Spoke,” he just says.
“Sorry,” he lies.
“Whatever.” Mapicc sets his sword down beside him. “Say the thing again. About dreams.”
“They’re dreams,” Spoke says. He settles back into his friend’s lap, smug with satisfaction. “Stories are just big dreams. Dreams that large groups of people have.”
Mapicc fixes him with an annoyed glare. He doesn’t get it, and that just makes Spoke sad instead of smug.
“Like if there’s a big war,” he elaborates. “And a bunch of players get banned. Or, like, there’s a massive storm and your house is destroyed. Or you lose somebody you love. Then you say—oh, actually, there’s a god in charge of wars, and storms, and death, and we just pissed them off. And that’s why that happened to us.”
“And if you just do it right next time, you won't make ‘em mad,” finishes Mapicc. He’s got a kinda far-off look. “Just don’t piss off the god.”
“Just don’t piss off the god,” Spoke agrees. “And nothing bad will happen to you. That’s the deal.”
Mapicc puts a hand on his chin; lets his spine roll back against the cave wall. “And so what does that have to do with your archers in the sky?”
Spoke sighs. “You don’t get it.”
It’s really not Mapicc’s fault. He just doesn’t understand. Not like Spoke does. Even though those stories weren’t his stories—or maybe they were? How different, really, were the people and gods and animals in them from him? He wants to ask Mapicc if he’d be willing to do it too; splice a portal and splice his mind and maybe understand things like Spoke understands things, just so that he wouldn’t be quite so lonely anymore. But Spoke’s not that selfish.
“What do you actually dream about?” he asks, instead.
Mapicc sets his sword down; the blade digs into sand.
“Flying,” says Mapicc. “I guess I dream about flying. What about you?”
“Nothing, really,” Spoke lies. “Really cool and exciting things, bro. You know what—flying. Let’s just say flying, too.”
“You can’t steal mine,” snips Mapicc.
“Too late, already did. Flying. I dream about flying. You snooze, you lose,” says Spoke, and then laughs at his own joke. “You see what I did there? You snooze, you—”
Mapicc drives an elbow into his gut; Spoke is unfairly silenced. In the space between Spoke wheezing comically and Mapicc’s comfortable silence, the shadows on the wall make the shape of a tiger circling a house at night in the rainforest or maybe a steel-driving man racing a steam engine, or a bird lifting up a turtle in its talons to the heavens.
“What do you think happens when we die?” Spoke asks, after the shapes fade and coalesce and become shadows again.
“We?” says Mapicc, with a scoff.
“Yes, we,” enunciates Spoke. “This is a team effort, bro.”
Mapicc rolls his eyes. “Sure, bro. I dunno. What do your stories say?”
“Um,” says Spoke. “Well. There’s Heaven. That’s the good one. It’s all singing all the time. And Hell. That’s the bad one. I don’t like that one. There’s pitchforks."
Mapicc scrunches up his eyebrows. “I woulda thought you’d like the pitchforks.”
“Well, I would, but they poke you with them.”
“Ouch,” winces Mapicc. “I don’t wanna be poked.”
“Yeah, right?” he says. “And then there’s, like, reincarnation. And spectators. And I know in some of them there’s like, a scale involved.”
“A scale?”
“A scale.”
Mapicc puts his thumb on his chin. “What does it measure in…?”
“Don’t look at me,” says Spoke. “How would I know?”
“I dunno,” Mapicc says. “You know, like, all sorts of weird shit.”
Spoke just nods. He does know all sorts of weird shit. It’s true. It’s silent for a moment. He thinks about all the stories in which you die and meet your beloved people in different ways in different lives and hopes that is the one that he will get. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a mosquito crushed to death while trying to drink Mapicc’s blood? Wouldn’t it be lovely to be the vulture tugging the flesh off his roadkill friend’s bones? Wouldn’t it be really really really nice to just be two friends on a couch talking about video games and gas and the state of the world, with whole minds and unspliced hands and repaired souls—to not be a story at all?
It would be so beautiful to be simple—but he and Mapicc were never built for that kind of life.
There’s another story he likes; in it there's a bear and cave.
The bear wants to be a person. So she goes to the voices in the long dream and she asks them to make her human—and they give her garlic and mugwort and they say survive in here for a hundred days and we will make you human. And she did; and she was made human.
Mapicc’s lap is soft and kinda warm—Mapicc always runs warm—and he’s back to sharpening his sword again, absently, some thoughtless nervous habit. He smells like smoke. Maybe they both do. He cooked them both up some dried meat and mushroom stew for dinner in a dented old tin pot. If Spoke survived on dried meat and mushroom stew and the sound of Mapicc's heartbeat for a hundred days, in this gem-green little cave, would he be made human?
“What do you want to happen when you die?” asks Mapicc, strangely earnest. He breaks the even silence-that-isn’t-silence—the flickering pops of the fire and the insect roar of crickets and hunting and living and dying in the night jungle outside.
Spoke thinks about it for a second.
“I want to die in an explosion,” he says, slowly. Mapicc blinks at him.
“Spoke?”
“Lemme—” he starts. “Lemme just… an explosion. And if I’m dying I want you to die with me. And it's gonna blow us and all our atoms all to bits. And they’re never gonna be able to tell what was you and what was me.”
He closes his eyes as he imagines it; the world spared, for just one moment, the white bright moonlight spilling from within.
It would be some kind of last stand. Some brave, brilliant plan gone awry—some last-minute revolt against the world. And he would look at Mapicc and nod, and Mapicc would nod back—shaking slightly—anger or adrenaline or terror but with that same raving, wild urge to take as many out with him as possible, and Spoke would set off the first redstone spark, and when the hissing started, their enemies would drop their mouths in shock, and Spoke would laugh and laugh and laugh, even as Mapicc would pull him into his arms to shield them both from the blast, foolishly, helplessly, even though it would do nothing, he would shield Spoke anyway, and it would destroy them both in-and-out, and in the fire they would all become smoke, Spoke and Mapicc and all their enemies, a smeared buzz of atoms all over the place, all mixed up and dancing around, and no God or scale or system could figure out which ones where the Mapicc-bits or the Spoke-bits or the enemy-bits—it would all just be one great big cloud of used-to-be, and in being unmade Spoke might find something like innocence again.
He digs his clawed fingers into Mapicc’s soft hoodie. The fabric doesn’t tear. What a gift.
Mapicc tilts his head, considering.
“That’s actually kinda sweet,” he says, and Spoke sighs; melts into Mapicc’s side, boneless.
“You think so?”
“In like, a fucked-up way,” his best friend says. “But yeah. Sweet. I’d never die with you, though.”
“No?”
Mapicc shakes his head. “Nah. I’d never let you die. So they’d have to kill me first.”
Spoke stares at him for a moment. Mapicc never seems upset or perturbed by the light that comes from Spoke’s eyes. He never seems bothered. It’s strange.
“That’s so corny,” Spoke tells him. Mapicc just pushes him out of his lap and into a chokehold.
And in the tangle of limbs Spoke digs his sharp unbroken teeth into Mapicc’s forearm and feels a flood of copper all throughout his mouth. His best friend smile-snarls; fists his hand in Spoke’s charcoal-black hair and drags him off of his arm and then smashes his face down in the soft cushion of their bedrolls. Mapicc’s knee digs into his back; pins right through all the vertebrae in his spine. Spoke can’t breathe; it feels great.
There are two more ways he wouldn’t mind dying.
Like a martyr. Like the drowned muskrat and its handful of soil; like the four winds who spread that little spot of soil across turtle island; who made of one sacrifice a continent. Like Icarus—to burn out so brightly and beautifully that anybody who saw would never be able to rub the sunspots out of their eyes. To die for something bigger than himself and live on forever in name—that would be enough for Spoke. All along the server, in ones and zeros, up and down the coasts of the Great Sea and whispered among the merchants of the Capital City and sung by the sailors pulling into the ports of Highwater; a player never dies as long as their name is spoken aloud.
The second is right here. Anywhere here. With Mapicc’s dull blade against his throat or his knee in his spine; the tangle of their shadows morphing into one dark writhing monster on the offwhite stone of the cave wall. As long as Mapicc’s here, he could die happy; he could die loved.
“What are you thinking about?” asks Mapicc, one hand still curled in Spoke’s hair. His nails scrape against the edges of Spoke’s mind; his knee digs into Spoke’s spine.
“Explosions,” says Spoke, with a happy sigh. “I’m thinking about explosions.”
“Yeah, sure,” sighs Mapicc. Spoke can imagine him rolling his eyes. That’s what he usually does when his voice sounds like that. “You wish, buddy.”
Then the pressure on his spine lets up, and Mapicc flops down beside him, on what used to be Spoke’s bedroll but will now probably be his, and draws Spoke into a loose hug; his best friend’s arms around his shoulders; his head resting against Mapicc’s collarbone. His best friend’s faithful heart beats sense into Spoke’s head.
"Mm..." Spoke hums. "I'm also thinking about being, like, sleepy."
“Okay, smart guy,” says Mapicc, softly. His thumb rubs reincarnation circles into Spoke’s shoulderblade. “Tell me a story, then.”