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On the Unstable Universe Server, death was not dramatic.
There were no respawns. No beds. No soft reset at sunrise.
You died, your inventory exploded across the ground in a scatter of enchanted netherite and shulker boxes, and then the server removed you from the whitelist forever. Your name remained in chat history, in old books, in abandoned faction claims. Sometimes people built graves. More often, they stripped your base for parts before the chunks even cooled.
So when Wemmbu coughed a white petal into his hand during a council meeting, his first thought was not Oh no.
It was well. Guess I’m dying.
He folded his fingers around it before anyone saw.
Parrot was at the head of the conference table, laying out maps of the eastern part of spawn with the grim satisfaction of a man who had discovered three separate problems with bandits and was deciding which one offended him most. Egg sat beside him, silent for once. Spoke had somehow gotten a minecart stuck halfway through the ceiling and was trying to retrieve it with a fishing rod.
Flame stood on the far side of the room.
He always stood too far away.
Wemmbu had noticed that months ago, then hated himself for noticing, then noticed it every day after.
“—which means,” Parrot said, tapping the map, “if the Merchant City gets overrun by bandits we all lose our resources.”
Spoke yanked the fishing rod.
The minecart came loose, dropped directly onto his head, and dealt half a heart of damage.
“Worth it,” Spoke announced.
Nobody laughed.
Spoke’s smile faded.
Wemmbu swallowed against the burning in his throat. It felt like there was a stem caught behind his ribs. It had been there for three days now: a pressure, a scratch, something green and impossible growing where lungs were supposed to be.
He had assumed it was a potion effect at first. Some lingering consequence of the raid in the Deep Dark, maybe. Spoke had triggered an ancient-city trap involving suspicious stew, a screaming goat, and approximately sixteen wardens. It had seemed plausible.
Then he found a petal on his pillow.
Then another in the shower.
Then one in his inventory, nestled between an ender pearl and a stack of golden carrots as if it belonged there.
Now there was a flower blooming in his chest because apparently the universe had decided ordinary trauma was too subtle.
“Wemmbu?” Parrot asked.
He looked up.
Parrot’s eyes were sharp. Always sharp. He could calculate siege paths from a half-rendered map. He could hear a lie in the pause before somebody spoke. Wemmbu had once watched him dismantle an enemy faction’s entire defense plan because one player had placed a torch on the wrong side of a staircase.
“You still with us?” Parrot said.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
The flower in his lungs shifted.
Wemmbu smiled.
It was easy. He had practiced this one.
“Sure.”
Across the table, Flame’s gaze flicked to him.
Wemmbu looked away first.
The petals were a light orange at the beginning.
Small. Harmless-looking. The kind of soft little things that got caught in the corners of old gardens, in abandoned flower farms, in the pockets of players who had accidentally walked through a field biome. He could hide those.
He could cough into his sleeve. He could sweep one off the floor before Egg entered a room. He could bury them in composters, because if there was one thing the server had taught him, it was that anything could be disposed of if you had enough bone meal and a convincing lie.
The first person to find one was Egg.
Of course it was Egg.
Wemmbu had just returned from another stupid meeting with Parrot. His elytra had three durability left, his rockets were gone, and he had spent the last ten minutes flying low through a wheat field because his lungs had decided that breathing was now a luxury product.
He entered the storage room, shut the door, and coughed.
A petal drifted onto the polished deepslate floor.
Then another.
Then six.
Wemmbu stared at them.
The petals stared back, which was unfair because petals did not technically have eyes, but he felt judged anyway.
The door clicked open behind him.
Egg stopped.
There was a long silence.
Wemmbu quickly put his boot over the nearest petal. Not a subtle move. It was perhaps the least subtle move possible, aside from shouting, I am definitely not hiding mysterious floral lung failure.
Egg looked down.
Then at the petal near Wemmbu’s boot.
Then at Wemmbu.
“…Of course,” Egg said.
Wemmbu blinked. “What?”
Egg rubbed both hands down his face and exhaled through his fingers. “Of course this would happen. Of course. We just finished a server-wide war against Lettuce, Spoke is currently trying to convince people TNT minecarts are a diplomatic solution, and now you have a romance disease.”
“It’s not a romance disease.”
Egg stared at the flowers.
Wemmbu stared at the ceiling.
“…Probably.”
“Is it Flame?”
“…”
Egg’s expression became very still.
“…”
“Maybe.”
“Wemmbu.”
“Fine. Yes.”
Egg sat down on a nearby shulker box.
For a moment, he looked less like Egg the absolute nonchalant aurafarmer he tried to convince everyone he was when in reality he’s just a chungy and more like someone who had just realised the floor beneath him was made of powdered snow.
“You need to tell him.”
“No.”
“You’re coughing up flowers.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“You could die.”
Wemmbu shrugged.
Egg’s mouth opened. Closed.
“Do you actually want to die?” he asked quietly.
Wemmbu’s first instinct was to make a joke. Something about hardcore players being emotionally allergic to medical attention. Something about dying in a storage room being embarrassing because at least the loot recovery would be convenient.
Nothing came out.
“No,” he said.
“So why?”
Wemmbu looked at the petals.
They were impossibly clean against the dark floor.
“…Because this is what happens.”
“What?”
“When you love someone after they already proved you weren’t enough.”
Egg went silent.
Then, very softly, “That’s not what happened.”
“It is to me.”
That was the end of the conversation.
Wemmbu left before Egg could say anything else.
He told himself the pressure in his chest was from the disease.
Not from the way Egg had looked at him.
Not from the possibility that someone might understand and still be unable to fix it.
Flame had betrayed him after fighting a thousand people with him. After for once he thought maybe they could be more…
Two against a thousand.
Flame and Wemmbu on a broken statue above the carters they made together, armor shattered and dented, totems gone, everything on fire. They had fought for days side by side protecting each other and sharing potions. He watched as Flame temporarily gave up on his honor to equip the elytra mace Wemmbu gave him, to use his fighting style by his side.
They had been winning. They had won t̶o̶g̶e̶t̶h̶e̶r̶..
But that had been impossible, a foolish dream that Wemmbu so desperately wanted to believe in.
Then admiring the view of the destruction a flint and steal could be heard. Wemmbu couldn’t be bothered to look back to see what Flame was doing b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶u̶s̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶ a foolish mistake really. W̶e̶m̶m̶b̶u̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶n̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶f̶u̶e̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶i̶c̶ ̶h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶.̶.̶.̶ ̶F̶l̶a̶m̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶.̶.̶.̶
But it mattered because the server had made it matter. Because factions followed strength. Because alliances cracked when someone else seemed more dangerous. Because Flame had held the title for so long that people treated it like part of his username. Until Wemmbu had taken it from him.
So when he finally felt Fragger inevitably stabbing him in the back Wemmbu had looked at him in surprise. H̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶p̶r̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶k̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶i̶n̶g̶.
Flame had looked back.
For one second, surrounded by nothing but their own desires, Wemmbu had believed Flame would laugh tell him it was a joke, maybe take him back to his base where they would bask in their glory together and yell at each other about what they could’ve done better.
Then he fell.
Wemmbu realised Flame would never care for him more than he cared about his reputation.
The fight that followed was brutal and fast. Flame knew him too well. Knew the rhythm of his mace attacks, the exact moment he preferred to pearl away, how he always held one totem in his hotbar but never two and how he was obviously running low on resources. He forced Wemmbu backward, disarmed him, shattered his last totem and left.
Wemmbu didn’t die.
That would have been simpler.
He was captured by Lettuce instead.
And Flame regained his title.
Afterward, Wemmbu escaped with help from Spoke with the promise of owing him a ‘favor’ he ran, restocked and eventually they regrouped. They burned Law to the ground. Parrot became king of the server now that Lettuce was imprisoned for an unknown amount of time.
Wemmbu helped take the server back.
He fought beside Flame again.
He did not trust him with anything softer than that.
Because when it mattered, Flame had chosen to be the strongest.
He had not chosen Wemmbu.
Flame had never said anything about it after.
Wemmbu had never asked.
The silence had grown roots.
At first, Flame thought Wemmbu was avoiding him.
Which, to be fair, he was.
Then he thought Wemmbu was punishing him.
Which was worse, because Flame could understand that. He could survive that. He deserved that.
What he could not survive was noticing all the small things disappearing.
Wemmbu stopped drinking coffee.
Flame had made it exactly the way he liked it once, too much sugar, too much milk, enough caffeine to make any normal person see through walls. Wemmbu had taken one sip, made a face, and said, “This tastes terrible.”
Then he drank all of it.
After that, Flame made it for him whenever they had late-night planning sessions because apparently running a server was much harder then anyone made it out to be and Parrot did need help. He never mentioned it. He simply placed a mug near Wemmbu’s chair before meetings.
One day, the mug stayed untouched.
Then another.
Wemmbu stopped eating spicy food.
He stopped stealing the crispy potatoes from Flame’s plate.
He stopped laughing during Spoke’s worst jokes. Which was notable, because Wemmbu used to laugh at Spoke’s jokes specifically because they were terrible. He used to laugh so hard it would break the sound barrier as Parrot said.
Now, when Spoke tried to reenact an enemy ’s speech using a carved pumpkin as a helmet, Wemmbu smiled.
But the smile was wrong.
It said: We are pretending everything is okay.
Flame saw it.
He didn’t understand it.
That hurt enough.
He started making food anyway.
Baked potatoes with the right amount of salt. Rabbit stew, because Wemmbu had once mentioned it was underrated. Golden carrots for emergencies. Suspicious stew without the suspicious part, which Spoke complained was “a coward’s stew.”
He repaired Wemmbu’s weapons when they were left in the communal grinder.
He replaced mending books in his shulker boxes.
He restocked the exact rocket duration Wemmbu preferred.
He waited outside meetings for him.
Wemmbu always left through another door.
Flame told himself he was being respectful.
If Wemmbu wanted him to know something, he would say it.
If Wemmbu wanted him near, he would let him near.
So Flame waited.
Forever, if that was what it took.
It never occurred to him that Wemmbu might be waiting for the same impossible thing: proof that Flame would choose him without being asked.
The first full flower came up in a bathroom.
Wemmbu locked the door.
There was no dignified way to cough up a flower.
He had tried. He had stood over the sink with one hand braced against the stone counter, shoulders shaking, refusing to make a sound because this was his base, his meeting room was ten blocks away, and he was still technically the person people looked at when plans went sideways.
The flower got stuck.
It was something pale and red-veined, too large to be inside him and yet undeniably inside him. Every cough tore at his ribs. Blood dotted the sink. His eyes watered. His vision dimmed at the edges.
This is ridiculous, he thought desperately. ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶b̶u̶l̶l̶s̶h̶i̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶i̶e̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶.
He coughed again.
The flower came free.
It landed in the sink with a wet, terrible sound.
Wemmbu stared at it.
Then he washed everything away.
He scrubbed the blood from the counter. He rinsed petals down the drain. He put on fresh gloves. By the time he entered the meeting room five minutes late, he had his armor on and his expression blank.
“Sorry,” he said.
Nobody questioned it.
Except Flame.
Flame looked at him for a long time.
Wemmbu took the chair furthest away.
Egg started lying.
He hated it.
Egg could lie. Everyone could. But he couldn’t do it a lot due to being an angle something about being a holy being and not being able to sin hence why he opted to not fight and instead write lore books about the server or go fishing.
But promises were different, he basically can’t break a promise so when Flame pressed him...\
“Has he eaten today?” Flame asked one afternoon.
Egg looked at the untouched rabbit stew in Wemmbu’s room.
“…Yeah.”
Lie.
“Is he sleeping?”
Wemmbu had spent most of the night in the storage hall, sitting against a wall and trying to breathe quietly enough that nobody noticed.
“…Mostly.”
Lie.
“Is something wrong?”
Egg’s stomach twisted.
“…No.”
Lie.
Every one felt like helping kill his best friend.
But Wemmbu had asked.
No, not asked. That would imply vulnerability, and neither of them were apparently capable of that.
Wemmbu had said, “Don’t tell him.”
Egg had said, “You’re dying.”
Wemmbu had said, “Don’t tell him.”
And Egg had promised.
So he lied.
Then Parrot cornered him in the map room.
It was past midnight. The castle was quiet except for redstone clicking behind the walls and Spoke snoring somewhere loudly enough to qualify as an environmental hazard.
Parrot shut the door.
“You know what’s happening.”
Egg froze.
Parrot didn’t need confirmation. He had already noticed. Of course he had. He noticed the Wemmbu slowly weakening, the missing food, the way Wemmbu stopped volunteering for combat and started avoiding sparring altogether.
He had simply waited until he had enough evidence.
Egg looked away.
“You are watching him die,” Parrot said.
“I know.”
“So tell Flame.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he asked me not to.”
Parrot’s face changed.
Not anger, exactly.
Horror.
“…You’re seriously going to keep that promise?”
Egg’s voice cracked. “I can't break it.”
Parrot turned away. Put both hands on the map table. For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he said, “He’s not asking you to keep a secret. He’s asking you to help him disappear.”
Egg flinched.
“That isn’t fair,” he whispered.
“No,” Parrot said. “It isn’t.”
Spoke did not understand what was happening.
This was deeply upsetting to him.
Normally, he understood things by breaking them until the truth fell out. Redstone mechanics. Faction treaties. The server economy. One time, he had understood an entire enemy base’s defense system by setting himself on fire and running through it screaming.
But there was nothing obvious to break here.
Egg looked exhausted.
Parrot had become irritable in the dangerous, quiet way that meant somebody should probably hide the TNT.
Flame barely slept. He stood outside Wemmbu’s door sometimes, then left without knocking.
Wemmbu kept disappearing.
Nobody laughed anymore.
Even when Spoke made jokes.
This was how he knew something was really wrong.
So he did what he always did when the server made no sense.
He started poking around.
He found Wemmbu’s hidden route first: a crawlspace behind the potion room, down through a water elevator, then through a tunnel concealed by a painting. It led to an old mineshaft overlooking the ravine beneath their base.
Wemmbu sat there sometimes.
Not doing anything.
Just watching lava move.
Spoke found him there one night, knees drawn up, helmet beside him.
“You know,” Spoke said, sitting down at a careful distance, “if you jump in, you will die.”
Wemmbu glanced at him. “Insightful.”
“I’m serious. Hardcore.”
“Thank you, Spoke.”
“I just feel like people forget that sometimes.”
Wemmbu looked back at the lava.
Spoke hesitated.
He was not good at serious conversations. Serious conversations did not have levers. You could not put serious conversations in a boat and push them into a nether portal to see what happened.
Still.
“Are you sick?” he asked.
Wemmbu went very still.
Spoke immediately regretted everything. Excellent work, he thought. You have used your social skills to recreate stepping on a rake.
“No,” Wemmbu said.
“Okay.”
A petal fell from Wemmbu’s sleeve.
Spoke watched it drift down.
“Oh,” he said.
Wemmbu closed his eyes.
“Oh,” Spoke repeated, quieter.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Then Spoke said, “Is it because of Flame?”
Wemmbu made a sound that might have been a laugh. Might have been a cough.
“You all are terrible at subtlety.”
“I don’t think subtlety is the problem here.”
Wemmbu looked at him.
Spoke swallowed.
“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “But I know I don’t want you gone.”
For a moment, Wemmbu’s face almost broke.
Then he put his helmet back on.
“Go to bed, Spoke.”
Spoke did.
But he did not stop watching.
Flame found blood after a meeting.
Not petals.
Blood.
Just enough that someone had tried to clean it, a dark red stain caught in the seam between two deepslate tiles. Wemmbu’s gloves lay nearby, forgotten beneath the table.
Flame picked them up.
One fingertip was stained dark red.
His stomach dropped so fast it felt like falling through the void.
He stood there with the gloves in his hands, the room suddenly too quiet.
Then he remembered.
The coffee untouched.
The food untouched.
The way Wemmbu never laughed all the way anymore.
The five-minute absences.
Every piece clicked into place so hard it hurt.
Flame found Egg in the storage room.
Egg took one look at his face and knew.
“Tell me,” Flame said.
Egg shook his head.
“Tell me.”
“He made me promise.”
Flame’s voice went dangerously soft. “Is he sick?”
Egg said nothing.
Flame stepped closer. Not threatening. Not yet. But desperate in a way Egg had not seen from him since being kidnapped by him.
“Is he dying?”
Egg’s eyes filled.
That was answer enough.
For a few seconds, Flame did not move.
Then he sat down on the floor among stacks of ender pearls and iron blocks.
He looked at Wemmbu’s glove in his hand.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
Egg almost laughed. It came out broken.
“That’s the problem.”
Flame closed his eyes.
The silence stretched.
Finally, Egg said, “He thinks you chose the title over him.”
“I did.”
Egg stared.
Flame’s jaw tightened.
Egg’s expression crumpled.
“You didn’t tell him.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Flame let out a breath that shuddered.
“Because after he escaped, he looked at me like I was a stranger. And I thought…” He stopped. Swallowed. “I thought any explanation would sound like an excuse.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“I know.”
Flame looked at the glove again.
“I know.”
Egg found the letter by accident.
It was tucked into an empty shulker box beneath stacks of building materials, beneath spare rockets and an old diamond axe that had somehow survived three wars. The label said (✿◠‿◠).
It contained letters.
Not goodbye letters.
That somehow made them worse.
Instructions.
Parrot gets the armour, he can give it to his guards if he wants.
Spoke gets the orbitals, but someone has to make sure he does not use all of it in one project.
Egg gets Crucible.
A list of secret stashes.
A list of unfinished builds.
Names of players who needed watching out for.
One letter addressed to Flame.
Egg did not mean to read it.
He read one sentence.
You always fixed the things I broke. I’m sorry I became one of them.
He could not finish.
The next morning, he put the letters back exactly where he found them.
Then he went looking for Parrot.
“We’re out of time,” Egg said.
Parrot nodded once.
“What do we do?”
Parrot looked toward the door.
“For once,” he said, “we stop letting them decide alone.”
Wemmbu’s last little quest was supposed to be simple.
Fly towards Merchant City trying to ensure the bandits haven’t gotten too comfortable.
Simple.
If only that was true.
Apparently bandits have gotten that comfortable in the passing time.
Wemmbu had an elytra, a trident, and enough ender pearls to escape anything.
Normally he would have with ease.
But his lungs were full.
He launched himself into the air anyway.
An arrow struck his shoulder. Another hit his wing. His elytra durability flashed red.
He veered through a ravine, rockets hissing behind him. Players chased on foot and horses below, shouting through proximity chat. One of them had a crossbow loaded with fireworks.
Wemmbu hit the ground hard beside a river.
He ran.
Of course he ran.
He had escaped impossible situations before. He had escaped prison cells and traps and entire factions. He knew how to survive. He knew every trick: water buckets, pearl stasis, chorus fruit, boats on ice, powdered snow, panic.
He vaulted a ravine.
Coughing started.
Not now.
He stumbled behind a spruce tree, hand over his mouth.
The flower that came up this time was red.
It was huge.
Pain ripped through him. He fell to one knee, blood staining the snow beneath him. The enemy voices grew closer.
He tried to stand.
His vision swam.
Then a sword cut through the first pursuer before Wemmbu even saw who held it.
Flame.
Of course it was Flame.
Flame moved like a disaster. Shield up, axe down, perfectly timed crits. He killed two players, forced another into the river, and used an ender pearl to close the gap on the last one before they could fire their rocket crossbow.
Then silence.
Flame turned.
Wemmbu was still on the ground.
For one stupid second, all Wemmbu could think was: Great. Dying in front of him. Really preserving the mystery here.
Flame approached slowly.
“Don’t,” Wemmbu said.
Flame stopped.
Snow drifted between them.
“You’re sick,” Flame said.
Wemmbu laughed once, bitterly. It ended in a cough. “Excellent detective work.”
“I know about the flowers.”
Wemmbu froze.
Egg.
Of course Egg had told him.
The betrayal of it hurt, sharp and immediate, and then shame followed because Egg had been trying to keep him alive. Because everyone had been trying to keep him alive, probably. Because apparently he had become a problem they solved behind his back.
“Egg told you,” Wemmbu said.
“No. I found blood.”
That was worse somehow.
Flame took another step. “Please.”
Wemmbu looked away.
The red flower trembled in his hand.
“I’m not doing this.”
“You’re dying.”
“Yeah.”
“Wemmbu.”
“What?” The word cracked out of him. “What do you want me to say?”
Flame flinched.
Wemmbu hated that he noticed.
“I want you to let me help.”
“You had that chance.”
Flame went still.
The players’ items glinted in the snow around them. Netherite armor. Rockets. Golden apples. Loot from another battle, another almost-death, another day on a server built around pretending survival was all that mattered.
“You chose to be the strongest,” Wemmbu said.
“I know.”
“You chose a title.”
“I know.”
“You looked at me and decided I was the thing you could lose.”
Flame’s face twisted.
“No.”
“That’s what happened.”
“That’s what it felt like,” Flame said. “And I have no right to tell you it didn’t.”
Wemmbu looked at him then.
Flame’s armor was scratched. There was blood on his sleeve that was probably not his. His hair was damp from rain. His expression had none of the confidence people feared, none of the legendary PvP player who could dismantle a squad alone.
Just regret...