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The amputation hurt so much more than Grian had expected. The first attempt had been agonizing, sure, in the moments before the punctured arteries bled him back to respawn, and the second had been bad, because the fire had sloughed off most of the skin on his back–
But this was beyond agony. Agony was a trident impaling your body, the breathlessness of being strangled to death, but it ended. You respawned and the damage disappeared. You woke up in bed and groaned because your things were on the other side of the server, or because you were on your yellow life now and had to be careful, but there was always a light at the end of the tunnel, the welcome touch of death while the universe fixed you up.
This torment stretched out of sight. It split time into a sequence of moments, each one rushing into the next in a nauseous plummet, impressions scattering like dropped gems: there was a bed at the other end of the stone chamber, dug one block down so the mattress was level with the floor. There was a sword with flame aspect at Grian’s knees where he had dropped it. There were signs on the wall that said words he couldn’t make out, and behind him on the ground were two bloody bedraggled shapes that had used to be attached to his back– behind him was the rest of him, severed at the root, exposed nerve endings screaming into nothingness or burrowing desperately into the flesh they could still reach–
He would have thrown up again if he had the energy. Instead he dragged himself to the bed, settling trembling on the soft surface and digging his fists into his forehead, and tried very hard not to scream. Sobbing was allowed, expected even, but screaming would be undignified. Someone could still be watching, after all, or mining close by where even the layer of wool insulation wouldn’t be enough to block the sound from the chamber. They might come to investigate, and if they came to investigate, they would kill him without missing a beat.
He’d have to do all of this over again if he died, the separation and the gradual yanking-apart of ripping meat from meat, the agony of severed bone, so he couldn’t die, and he couldn’t take potions to heal his back until he was sure the amputation had taken. He couldn’t let anybody know he was doing this, either, because they wouldn’t understand. They’d see senseless mutilation, self-harm taken to an extreme, and Grian wouldn’t be able to tell them otherwise.
His explanations just wouldn’t stick. Anyone who’d participated in the games would vaguely acknowledge their existence and let it slip their mind a second later, as reliable in their forgetfulness as a goldfish faced with a new object in the bowl, and trying to tell someone outside of them was always, inevitably interrupted by some kind of mishap.
A creeper explosion. Server lag. Two hundred entity crammed sheep bursting out of a pen and infesting the landscape and ruining six months of careful meadow planning, a convenient gust of wind tearing away a written statement, a person just not being where they said they’d be – Grian knew why reality was twisting around to ensure that he couldn’t stop the fun, but it was incredibly inconvenient. Even when nothing else intervened, he couldn’t make himself say a single word about the issue.
Grian’s thoughts muddled together like running watercolors. His wings spasmed weakly from their place across the room, feathers shifting from red to gray to a blunt metallic purple, sharpening and softening in random chunks. He bit back a whimper, tried to imagine the eye-shapes under his shoulder blades burning away and leaving him clean. Letting him go, so reality would act for him like it did for everyone else.
He focused on seconds. Count to three. Count to ten. Count to one hundred, no matter how many times he lost track of the numbers, and surely the time would pass eventually.
It had to. God, it really, really had to. The pain was already making it so hard to think.
*
Coming back to consciousness on the bed was terrifying, but the flinch that followed sent lightning arching down his back, so he knew he hadn’t died overnight. The room stank of burning meat, some rot now that his wings had been laying there unattended for several hours; Grian’s head swam, tear ducts too exhausted to let him cry again. He could string concepts together, though, and read the signs, and the signs were clear.
DRINK WATER! EAT THE FOOD IN THE CHEST! DO NOT DIE!
Yeah, thanks a lot, past Grian. Really know how to make a guy feel encouraged about do-it-yourself amputation.
His limbs– his remaining limbs, he had four limbs now– refused to obey him, but Grian managed to grit his teeth and flop down on one side, at the expense of spending the next several minutes blinded by pain. The slightest jostling worsened it, but he had to get to the chest, because his inventory had next to nothing in it. He hadn’t expected to flunk out of self-mutilation class the first two times, and too much of his stuff had despawned before he could force himself to sit up again. No armor, because he’d needed the crit to take off his wings, but he’d lost bread, sugarcane, other supplies he’d picked up by habit on his way to his secret chamber. The food and water he needed was in the chest, and his throat was so dry, and he wasn’t hungry but he’d broken out all over with sweat, like his body was turning up the heat to dispel the pain.
“Do not die,” Grian ordered himself in a harsh whisper, and tried to lever himself up again. This time he got onto his knees, wobbling and shaking all over, and his vision cleared after less than a minute. Right. Right, he could do this. “Do you want games? Because that’s how you get games, if– don’t die. We are not dying, we are getting soup.”
He almost sobbed with relief when he reached the chest, even though it had only been a few steps away, and then he nearly dropped the mushroom soup when he took it out.
His palms cupped the bowl nicely. It was a little warm, but not scalding, so he could choke it down without his stomach rebelling just after.
The rest of him was on the other side of the room in a pool of dried blood. The wings he’d painstakingly grown over the first half of Season 6, the limbs he’d learned to control and angle for the perfect dive through an obstacle course, the feathers he could sharpen or change at will– the sparking delighted brightness in the forefront of his thoughts, rose-colored glasses that tinted the world in his favor–
The thing he’d called the Watchers had been a single gigantic organism, a drifting leviathan beneath the levels of reality that the universe cradled close. It had played with Evolution SMP like a child obstructing a line of ants, indulgently gentle when Grian asked it for help shifting his server from version to version, and when the instability had finally claimed a victim, it had been gentle with him, too. Like a giant picking up a gnat by its legs, trying its hardest to do as little damage as it could to something so fragile and uncomprehending.
It had told him, in a way that didn’t exactly translate to words, that it could put him back where he belonged if he took a piece of it with him. It had asked him if he wanted to have more fun, because all it ever wanted was to experience mirth and triumph however it could.
And he’d wanted to survive the End portal misfire, after he’d beaten the dragon. He’d agreed, because the thing he’d called the Watchers had never been anything but fair with him, and it had so badly wanted to keep watching him have fun. To make sure he always had fun.
Which had been weird, at first, but he’d gotten used to it eventually. Thinking through the haze of his hitchhiker had been like being drugged, fighting through a cloying pink fog to speak or complete boring tasks, but it had settled into a giddy confidence as he learned to fly, and then it had become unremarkable. By Season 7, it had been the simplest thing in the world to forget he ever hadn’t had wings in the first place.
The facet that the Watchers had left with him hadn’t meant to hurt people. It just sought excitement like its greater body did, warping reality to draw it closer, and whenever Grian hit a boring patch– whenever he honed in on a build or relaxed for a week– it reached out and pulled some in.
Sometimes it pulled in other people with it.
CLEAN YOUR WOUNDS! DO NOT USE POTIONS! DO NOT CALL ANYONE!
There was alcohol in the chest, next to a bucket of salt water. Grian drank down the rest of the mushroom soup, savoring the respite while he could, and set the bowl down on the floor, breathing shallow so he wouldn’t upset his wounds. Sickness swelled in him like a bloated whale.
Disinfection, god. Whatever he felt now was about to ratchet up about a hundred times.
Losing a body part permanently was really hard to do, was the problem . Doc had lost his in a fight with a god, and Iskall had lost their eye away from Hermitcraft, but nobody else had body modifications last more than a season unless they really put in the effort. A server with infinite respawn would do everything possible to return a player to the healthiest state they’d been in, so a severed limb would come back on respawn, even if the wound had partially healed. Worse yet, taking regen or healing potions for a disfiguring wound would make your body try to grow the limb back, with variable levels of success.
So Grian couldn’t take potions, and he couldn’t let himself die. And he had to cut off his wings, even though he loved flying as much as he loved building, loved how he could fluff his feathers or jump off a railing or smack Scar with an extra limb or change his feather colors each season, because they were a problem, when it came down to it. They were the source of most of their problems. He still wasn’t sure if they’d made the moon crash into the server back in Season 8.
“I don’t want to– to– I don’t want to do this,” he complained, shocked at how hard it was to twist his mouth into the right shape; his voice sounded foreign to his ears, like a recording from years back. The coiled reaching nerves attached to his wings had been severed, though the server was surely prepared to reattach them at the slightest provocation, and their remnants screamed in his body, alarmed and mindless.
Cleaning his wounds didn’t just mean disinfecting them. It meant digging out the rest of what the thing he’d called the Watchers had left with him, and that meant he needed the rest of the items in the chest: a knife, drawn through a lit torch to clean it, and a mirror.
His wings shivered, phantom pain shooting through his sawn-off muscles. Grian had gone as close to the skin as he could, but when he propped up the mirror he saw that he’d left gnarled weeping stumps behind, living bone exposed to the air. Fleshy gossamer strands seethed around them, just under the blackened skin from the burns– he was so glad those were intense enough to deaden some nerves, even if the rest of him was wailing– and struggled up to cover the open marrow, coating it with a thin film.
Their color was impossible to describe. Grian twisted an arm around with some difficulty to prod at a strand with a finger, and nearly whited out from the sensation: pain so intense it registered as an unbearable need to get away, and on top of that a hot sugary anguish, shocking him into abstraction. He wasn’t in a body– he wasn’t in a chamber he’d carved himself– he was lightcolorsound, the shifting scales of probability, a scream that rose to a shatterpoint and broke against his ears.
Clean your wounds. He could see the facet struggling to reform, maybe even to reach for its wings to reattach them. If he slowed down, even with the wings disconnected, it might yank probability back into its own favor, cause something statistically unlikely that would lead to Grian’s death and respawn. He could feel it reaching for that slim hope, an ache under his breastbone like dread or hopeless betrayal: this was such a horrible thing to do to something that had saved him, but he couldn’t let it stay. It was escalating. His friends were waking up with nightmares, gaining new scars in the exact shape of what they’d acquired in the life games, flinching at triggers they couldn’t have named if they tried. Xisuma had started asking other players’ help combing the server for a virus.
The knife was long, so sharp it could cut before you felt it. Grian pressed his jumper between his teeth and reached back to slice the first strand, drawing the blade along–
He reached and–
And–
And the knife–
The floor was sticky with blood, cooled from crimson to a deep forbidding brown. Grian stared at it emptily, transfixed by the weeping cut on his palm where he’d yanked the knife away from himself by the blade, by the overstretched ache in his shoulder joints, and his brain howled at him like a blizzard.
His wings were over there. The rest of him was over there, he had to get there, had to get back to the perfect knowing rightness of what he’d agreed to be, the thing that had helped him survive. All this horror would stop if he went and curled up with his feathers and let them cradle him.
He could soften until his feathers were silkier than a scarf, wrap around his body until the hollowed bones and dexterous limbs were shielded from the rest of the universe. The strands would reconnect. The universe’s love would pour cool and clean over his head and anoint him, assure him he’d been brave and good, that he’d tried his best and it just hadn’t been enough.
It had been so simple, learning to think through the haze. At first it had been a rerouting , synapses firing signals in a new direction, fighting the piece left to him for control of the informational highways, but like learning a new skill, it had settled in.
Sadness had sloughed off his thoughts when it tried to sink in hooks. Love for his friends had blossomed like wildflowers in fertile soil, his new facets accepting the requirements so easily, twisting reality so things were never too horrible, never irreparable or cruel and certainly never boring.
His wings had grown out and fledged so beautifully. They’d waxed into a riot of primary colors, waned into steely blue or camouflaged red-brown when he needed them to, hardened into steel blades that could cut off a mob before it was in range to hurt him.
He wanted that back. As urgently as survival, he wanted that back, wanted to be whole and safe again– wanted to emerge into sunlight without leaving the rest of himself to shrivel in the dark– but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He would have told himself that out loud if he could’ve controlled the sounds coming out of his mouth.
It had gone too far. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost the plot, had forgotten to monitor the progression– he was sure he’d monitored the progression back in Season 6, when the occasional giggle fits had been cause for concern and he hadn’t been sure the thing he’d called the Watchers had been friendly, except of course it had been friendly, it had tried to be so gentle but it hadn’t understood , even now Grian barely understood– and now his deal was bleeding over. Now it had splash damage, a body count: the Season 8 server and three games that had left real scars, a rift tearing open that spat out artificial intelligences from other realities.
No one else had agreed to it. Regardless of how wonderful and right it was to have a body and wings attached to it, how great it was to wake up every day knowing it would be fun, they hadn’t agreed, and they were scared and hurt. Making people scared and hurt for real, not just as a bit, was unacceptable.
He wanted to sob just thinking about the knife, and now his hands wouldn’t obey him enough to close their fingers around it: they just twitched uselessly, patterns he couldn’t follow. He could pick up the disinfectant between his wrists, though, fumble with it until the cap came off and pour it over his back. It was two very simple motions, the pain of flexing his shoulders aside, and yet he couldn’t make himself do even that . Tearing himself apart had turned out to be about as easy as swimming upstream during a flood.
Grian shut his eyes, phantom wings trembling behind him. He thought about Bdubs avoiding Etho for weeks, Mumbo babbling that he didn’t know why he’d panicked at the sight of Grian with a pickaxe.
He thought of Scar, bags under his eyes as deep as bedrock and a lonely wildness to his gaze that hadn’t abated even after Double Life, and then he dunked himself in disinfectant just so he could stop. It scattered his thoughts like frightened birds.
*
It felt like taffy pulling away from his neurons, a consistent pressure going away, a tendon stretched to snapping. Grian hugged himself, curled sideways where his burnt not-really-stumps wouldn’t rub the bedsheets, and tried to remember what he was doing this for.
Because of the games, obviously, and a level of cruelty that broke the rules, that nobody had earned, but– but it hurt. It hurt so incredibly badly, a kind of suffering that dug in teeth and worsened with each breath. His fingers moved on a delay, synapses firing incorrectly. He was doing this for–
For the Hermits, and fond exasperation, and an innocent grin behind jail bars as someone insisted they had been judged unfairly– for a splash of joyful accomplishment that lit his emotions like fireworks– the details washed away like sidewalk chalk. They drifted out of reach like a balloon he’d noticed escaping too late, going up and up and up until it was a tiny pastel dot in the sky, helium lifting it beyond where he could catch it. Out where the air was so thin you couldn’t think.
He attempted to stand and stumbled, pulling away from the confusion with a shake of his head. His body was a collection of habits juddering together and trying to stay in sync: the habit of breathing in and out to fill his lungs. The habit of a heartbeat, oxygenating blood and carrying that essential molecule to the cells that needed it. The habit of digestion, of utilization of nutrients, of hormones and sparking livewire nerves and muscles, a person-shape struggling to continue doing person-shape things.
He wanted to talk, but his lips wouldn’t cooperate. He wanted to get up, but his limbs refused to wait for permission to move. They struggled under him and gave out before he was halfway across the room, so he had to land hard on his knees and scream when it jostled his wounds.
White vision. Radio silence. His hands twitched, clenched, unclenched. Those weren’t his fingers on his hands. They wouldn’t move when he asked them to move.
His wings ached. He didn’t have wings anymore, so it had to be a phantom pain, but they shrieked, a mindless dying-animal panic that shot through him like adrenaline. His feathers rippled and shivered. If he healed from this completely, he would never feel them again.
DRINK WATER! EAT THE FOOD IN THE CHEST! DO NOT DIE!
Do not die. That was the first rule, and it came before committing to the bit, or cleaning up after his own pranks, or earning his victories. It even came before owing Scar his green life, which made sense because they weren’t in that game anymore, they were out. The moon had crashed into the server since then. Mumbo had thrown up his arms like he thought Grian would hit him since then. Pearl had looked at him like she thought he’d throw her out of his base.
He wanted things to be fun again. They weren’t fun anymore, and that was an almost incomprehensible horror, as unreal as a sky turning itself inside out. Games were fun. Playing around with players was fun, it was in the name, everybody enjoyed it so much–
He’d enjoyed it so much. He couldn’t remember why he’d stopped being happy playing his games. The memories should have been easy to catch and examine, but they danced out of his reach, written on a board too far away to read. They blurred. All of him blurred. His feathers were– his feathers–
*
His routine let him know that time was passing, and it was about the only thing that did. Sunlight was a foreign concept, divorced from the heat running under his skin and the flushed unwellness that had nestled inside of him. He ran on a program of eating when he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, drinking water when he felt faint with thirst, and disinfecting whenever he remembered to do it, and he put his wings on his bed, because that way they’d be more comfortable.
He did all that and he drifted, sometimes thinking he was in the desert sick from contaminated water, other times certain he was in the Southlands passing around a life, a tugging-away at his breastbone that he stretched after but couldn’t catch.
The signs were important, so he followed them as best he could: clean your wounds meant disinfectant that kept him from thinking hardly at all, and the others were just instructions for maintaining his body. He could manage those, because rules were important for games. Everybody felt better when there were rules to follow, problems to solve, and the problem he was solving was how to move around with a body that wouldn’t listen to him except on a delay.
Like he was shouting instructions into a tunnel. Like they echoed back malformed, twisted beyond understanding by a collection of organs and microorganisms that tossed up consciousness as an emergent trait.
Over and over, he followed the routine. His comm buzzed occasionally, server chat exploding intermittently with jokes or requests for help, but his sight was too fuzzed out to read it. Fever had overtaken him like a chasing wolf, and he couldn’t cool himself down.
Eventually his body stopped echoing back his instructions and crawled upright on its own, retching at the pull of shifting muscles on its wounds. It made a confused, wounded noise, staring down at its cut-up hand with bewildered pain, and froze completely when it realized its wings were across the room, laid on the bed where it hurt less than the floor. Terror washed through it like cold water dumped over its head.
It stood up on shaky legs, fell and cried out again at the flash of agony. Fumbled for the comm and dialed someone, waited for the call to be picked up and swore when it wasn’t– tried a second person and canceled it almost immediately, because its hands were shaking too hard to press the buttons.
The body sat there for a long moment after that, holding its injured hand close to its chest and breathing as shallowly as Grian had been. It was crying a little, but it sniffled and glowered at the ground, picked up the comm a third time and chose another name with deliberate care.
This time someone answered.
“Oh, hey, Grian, not sure this is the best time,” Scar blurted over the comm, sounding distracted, and the screech of a phantom assaulted their ears. Grian jolted, heartache twisting like a screw under his breastbone; the body choked out a gasp, muffled it with its hand a second later. Scar cut off whatever he was saying and amended, “But– hold on, you know what, it is as good a time as any! Let me just build a barrier real fast.”
Noise over the connection. The body kept staring at the signs on the walls, then back at its severed wings.
“Okay, that should be sort of safe,” Scar said, background sounds dying away. “Mildly safe, at least, within acceptable tolerances, and really, isn’t that all we need from a dirt barrier? I appreciate my dirt barriers for what they can give me. What’s up?”
The body licked its lips and rasped, voice so worn it could’ve been sanded down: “Scar?”
“Y-yeah?”
“Scar,” the body repeated, almost like a reminder. Grian wanted to wrap his wings around himself to hide, ruffle them up for warmth, but of course the body didn’t react to that at all. It didn’t have wings. They weren’t playing games anymore, because that was against Grian’s rules, the rules he’d had in his head before he’d ever met the thing he’d called the Watchers. “Right, um, do you ever feel like– like you’ve been dreaming, and you’re not sure if it’s still a dream?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Scar said slowly, clearly lying. He had nightmares. Grian knew he had nightmares, because he’d seen him stay up night after night, too harried and anxious to sleep. It had gotten a little better after Double Life, but not by much. “Is that something you’re feeling right now? ‘Cause I gotta say, it is very late at night, and sometimes these things fix themselves in the morning! Or they don’t, but I’m being optimistic here. I can also come talk in person, if that’s easier.”
“I don’t know where I am,” the body said after a long pause. Grian tried to flex his fingers again and it flinched, breath catching like a chill had gone down its spine. “I’m in– I don’t know. It hurts. Mumbo wouldn’t answer his comm.”
“Is this an injury a respawn would fix?” Scar asked. “Or potions, those would work. Do you have any healing items on you, Grian?”
“I don’t,” the body interrupted, painfully bewildered. It wasn’t Grian. It wasn’t– it wasn’t Grian, because if it was Grian then Grian was– “I can’t take potions, I don’t know who wrote these signs but it says I shouldn’t. Someone cut off my wings, I think, or I– I’m underground, it really hurts– yours was the first name on my comm. That’s why I called you. I don’t know why yours was first.”
“Someone cut off your wings,” Scar repeated hoarsely. “Grian, where are you? You’re still on the server, right?”
“On– on Hermitcraft? I think so, at least,” the body said, and swallowed hard, nausea bursting through it like pop rocks, clammy with fever. Its lungs expanded and contracted in the shelter of its ribs, which were bones Grian hadn’t snapped open like glowsticks. “I liked my wings. I was just learning– I just got them. I don’t know how I got here.”
It was hard to think. He was a passenger in his body and he couldn’t think. He was across the room and he couldn’t think, and the games were bad so he couldn’t try to fix any of those problems at all–
“You don’t have to know that yet,” Scar said, businesslike. “We’re gonna figure that out once you’re back at spawn, okay? Do you see a bed anywhere?”
“My wings are on the bed,” the body said blankly, and Scar audibly sucked in a breath. “I should– I should destroy it, right? That's the strategy?"
“Yeah, do that, and if you see any light sources, get rid of them. It’ll hurt, G, but you’ll respawn with your wings again. It’s not healed yet, is it?”
The body shook its head. Scar repeated the question, and it said out loud, “No. No, not yet. Just burned.”
“Good,” Scar said, strained. “Then we’re just gonna break the bed. Break the bed and turn out the lights, easy peasy melon squeezy.”
“You made that phrase up just now,” the body accused, levering itself slowly upright. It moved toward the bed where its wings had gone limp with exhaustion, aching in the tip of every feather, and managed to break it.
Then it touched the wings for a second, dazed with horror– all of Grian was dazed with horror, though maybe not for the same reason– and pulled down the torches, plunging the chamber into darkness.
“I did it,” the body said, and Grian couldn’t think enough to know what he felt about that, whether he was furious or terrified or desperately relieved. “I’ll just– I’ll see you at spawn?”
“Yeah,” Scar said, and added, more encouraging, “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll– we’re gonna figure this out. Whatever happened, I’m sure someone has information that can help.”
The body closed its eyes, hugged itself so tight it opened the cut on its palm again. It didn’t move from that position until a creeper exploded and killed them both, and then Grian was himself again, kneeling on the stony shore with his wings pressed tight to his back.
His fingers obeyed him when he curled them in the gravel, unblemished by anything worse than a callous. His heart pounded in his chest, louder than a redstone engine, and his face felt like his face, his short hair, his joints and tendons– his wings, held as close as he could hold them and bristling all over. Gone as gray as the stone around him, like that would help him hide.
The giddy confidence trickled back, rightness filling the gaps he’d torn to mend them. The night sky was bright with stars above him, but he already knew nothing would attack him before he was ready for it, not as shaken as he was now– not until he felt like he could handle things, which at this point was seeming more and more unlikely to happen.
He didn’t know how he was going to solve the problem. He didn’t know what he was going to tell Scar, especially since his body had been so– since he, Grian, had been so distressed about the situation.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. His heart beat too fast. He had a feeling that something incredibly distracting would occur before he had the chance to tell Scar anything at all.