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It starts as a joke, much like everything else in this cyclical death-game Grian’s been thrown into (mostly) (kind of) (okay, not really) against his will. They’re the Villains! So, even though none of them are the boogeyman, he and Gem pepper the sand dunes in front of their house with pitfalls.
“It makes sense,” Gem justifies to a wary Pearl. “We’re allowed to defend our base! Especially with all those boogeymen out there.” She shudders theatrically.
Their first almost-victim is Scar, who doesn’t even notice the ground opening up underneath him. Not even after the TNT explodes.
(So really, Grian will insist later when he’s recounting the whole sordid affair to the rest of the server, it’s all Scar’s fault for not dying.)
The hole, clearly, needs to be bigger. It needs to be… whatever the opposite of Scar-safe is. Scar-dangerous. Scar-guaranteed-death.
Grian and Gem are expanding the hole (for the first time) when it happens. He falls, skins his knees something fierce on the landing, and his blood splatters across the sharp stone edges carved out by Gem's pickaxe—and something brushes up against him. Not literally, or in the physical sense. No, it's something quiet, something whispering, something that wisps past his mind like the wind and says, More.
It’s gone just as quickly, except for something in the air that feels… foreboding, almost. Which is ridiculous, because Grian and Gem are the only scary things around here. And Pearl, he amends. Sometimes. When she’s not too busy complaining about their lighthouse to contribute to the evil plans.
“Did you hear that?” he asks Gem. His voice is almost a whisper—it dies, swallowed by the tall stone walls towering around them. Is it just him, or is it warmer down here than it should be, for a hole this deep and hidden from the desert sun?
Slowly, she nods, frowning. “It… could’ve been nothing?”
“...Yeah,” he rationalizes. “Probably nothing.”
The Square Hole (that’s its name now. Capitalized, as feels appropriate) fails to kill Joel, too. Just like Scar, he just… walks right over it. Grian’s starting to get pissed about all of these false starts. And, well, also the effort it takes to expand the Hole and cover it up again.
Thankfully, Gem brings Bdubs next, and it’s not long before he’s walking aimlessly right over the Hole. Grian watches, waits—he imagines this is what lions must feel like, stalking their prey from tall grass. Or maybe it’s what spiders must feel like, watching flies wander right into their webs. That’s probably more apt, except his web is a massive hole in the ground, and he’s just got the four limbs and the two totally-normal eyes.
Either way, Bdubs’ foot hits the pressure plate that triggers the trap. In a flash, he’s disappearing below the horizon line. Grian darts forward to watch, but Bdubs’ scream cuts off by the time he reaches the side of the hole, skidding to a halt just before the edge. A couple grains of sand, displaced by Grian’s footsteps, go flying over the edge and into the dark to join the crumpled figure at the bottom. As he watches, Bdubs’ body flakes away into the magic that means he’s respawning elsewhere.
“Yes!” he cheers, spinning away to celebrate with Gem. “We did it!”
She laughs, clapping him on the shoulder. “The Square Hole claims a victim!”
A thought strikes him then, flashing into his mind abruptly. “You know what this means,” he grins. “We have to expand it even more.”
“Oh my goodness,” she says, giggling.
“Surely nobody would fall for it again.”
So they get back to work. Pickaxes in hand, they go back underground. For as dull and uninteresting as the work itself is, the joy and adrenaline of the trap working manages to carry Grian’s motivation to dig pretty far, even as sweat springs up on his forehead from the effort, even as their torches (annoyingly) fail to cast nearly enough light for him to see properly.
It’s as they near the bottom that things get weird again.
“...Grian,” Gem says. Something in her voice sounds odd, almost like she’s upset. “Look at this.”
There, in the wall, is. Something. He inches towards it, past Gem and her uneasy stance. Even that close, he has to squint to properly see what’s happening in front of him. It’s so dark down here, dark and oddly warm. And humid, too.
…What he sees yanks the breath right out of his lungs. It’s… a carved impression of a face, mouth wrenched open in a silent scream, eyes wide and bulging. Worse, he finds that he recognizes this face. It’s Bdubs, with one stone hand stretched upwards to the sky, like there’s anyone there to save him from falling. Grian knows he’s falling too, even though the stone holds nothing but a static image. Or is it static? He swears, the longer he looks, that he can hear the wind rushing in his ears, that he can see the sunlight fading above him. That he can hear Bdubs yelling once again, loud and shrill, cut off only by a dull and wet crunch.
When he can finally tear his eyes away from it, he looks back at Gem. She’s shifting foot to foot, clearly nervous. It’s odd and uncharacteristic to see her this way, unsure of herself for once.
“That wasn’t you who put that there, was it?” she asks. Distantly, Grian shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “No, I… I don’t know how this is here.”
They sit there in that uneasy silence for a long moment, until Grian shudders, trying his hardest to shake off the feeling that the carving has given him.
“Well. This hole isn’t gonna dig itself,” he says. It comes out a lot… grimmer, more serious, than he meant it to. He turns his back wholly on Bdubs’ terrified face, hefting his pickaxe over his shoulder once again.
Their next victim comes so quickly after Bdubs—quickly enough that the high of the first one hasn’t faded. The joy still clings to his veins; the brief (metaphorical) taste of blood Grian had gotten from it still satiates him.
It’s so, so easy to find a new group of victims (although ‘finding’ implies they actually did any work). They just wander right up! And stand there to have a conversation!
Out of all of them, perhaps the most predictably, it’s Skizz who walks right up to the edge of the little field of pressure plates haphazardly dotted around. Grian, of course, watches as Skizz gets closer and closer and closer…
His heart is pounding in double-time in his chest, nearly threatening to crawl up his throat. Time seems to slow down around him, the world narrowing until it’s just him and Skizz and that pressure plate.
Skizz looks down. Skizz considers the ground in front of him. For a heartbreaking moment, Grian thinks he might not do it.
…And then Skizz takes a single step forward, and the ground crumbles under his feet. This time, unlike with Bdubs, Grian has an excellent view of Skizz plummeting to his death, of the shocked expression on his face. Of the collision, of his body… flattening, in ways that it shouldn’t.
Everyone starts yelling. Grian doubles over and cackles.
“Did you, did you see that,” he hiccups. Bdubs is shouting something incomprehensible at him, or maybe just at the world in general. “Oh my God. He really thought about it, and then still went for it.”
Gem, across the Hole, is also laughing, high and ecstatic. He watches, though, as she abruptly sobers, straightening back up—although still with a wide grin across her face.
“Grian,” she says, giggling, wiping a tear from her eyes. “We have to make it bigger now.”
That just sets him off again.
There’s a screaming Skizz effigy at the bottom, now. Unlike Bdubs, who’s looking up, Skizz seems to be staring right into Grian’s eyes when he goes down there to widen the hole. As if he knows something Grian doesn’t.
Grian does his best to ignore it, and warns Gem of the development in hushed tones.
After Skizz, they have a bit of a drought. Impulse falls in, but doesn’t die; Grian feels a sharp pang of disappointment at the missed opportunity. It’s really his fault, his and Gem’s and Pearl’s, for not making the hole deep enough.
Grian finds himself awfully hungry in the morning a couple of days afterwards. He scarfs down a couple bowls of stew uncharacteristically quickly, fast enough that Pearl even pauses and comments on it. The stew doesn’t do anything except slide thick down his throat. It’s as if he ate nothing at all.
Gem, too, looks… not physically leaner, but there’s a predator’s gait to her walk when she comes to join them for breakfast. Even Pearl, who is by all accounts very well fed and cared for this season, comments on how she’s starving and takes an extra piece of bread.
He doesn’t connect the dots until later. For now, his stomach just aches and growls, protesting. The Square Hole sits untriggered. And then the whispers start, and he forgets all about it.
The Secret Society is immediately far more successful than Grian ever thought it would be. Gem and Etho manage to find him so quickly. Better yet, it’s Gem and Etho. He already knows he can trust Gem (his sister-in-arms, his fellow Square Holer, if you will), and Etho’s an ally of theirs as well. It takes almost no time for them to meet up, and before long, they’re already in the Nether fortress together, huddled around an eternal Netherrack-fire in one of the rooms. Just like a real and proper cult! Plotting people’s deaths and everything!
“Could we just rely on the Square Hole?” Gem’s asks. “It’s already gotten like three people.”
It’s as she speaks that an odd feeling strikes Grian in the chest. He flinches, a hand flying over his heart. Something’s off about the way it’s beating, frantic and arrhythmic. The air is so, so, so hot, so hot the sweat that’s suddenly pouring down his back is immediately burnt away. Every gasp of air he takes in singes his lungs and sears the top of his mouth. His chest hurts; his head hurts worse. Something in the pit of his stomach drops.
Then it clears again. Or, most of it clears, except for the humming, satisfied fullness that clings to the lining of his guts. He feels… sated. Even though he hasn’t touched the mushroom stew in his inventory. Even though he’d been famished not even an hour prior.
He looks up. Across the room, Gem’s already meeting his gaze.
“The Square Hole,” she says. Grian knows she’s right immediately, like a puzzle piece clicking into the right spot in his brain. “Someone just died to the Square Hole.”
Etho blinks. “How do you know?”
“I just do.” After a long moment Gem tears her eyes away from Grian’s, looking over to Etho. “Did you have any ideas for a trap, Etho?”
Grian is, as always, very grateful for Gem’s ability to pretend like nothing’s happened at all.
“I did, actually!” Etho perks up, and starts explaining his plan. It sounds rather good, actually, nice and simple with the potential to get a lot of people.
He’s still talking when that horrible wave washes over Grian once again. It’s so much worse this time, sending him straight to his knees before he can even realize what’s happening. His veins are burning. There’s a horrible pressure crushing him, threatening to make his eyes pop out of his skull and grind his bones into dust. Or maybe into sand, like the falling sand he’s watched again and again as it capsizes into the Hole. A swooping wave of dizziness nearly sends him all the way to the ground, but he manages to catch himself at the last second with one hand. The fullness is almost too much now. He has the distinct urge to curl up and take a nice, long food nap. It’s an odd contrast to the agony.
“It’s happened again!” Gem coughs, taking the words right out of his mouth. She’s also half-crumpled on the floor. “If that counts, then we’re already off the hook for killing people.”
Etho is now properly side-eyeing them. “Is that, uh, normal for you guys?” he laughs awkwardly. “To collapse like that?”
“No,” Grian hums lowly, and does not elaborate. He staggers to his feet. In his pocket, something buzzes; he fishes out his communicator, turning on the screen. There in the global world-chat is a death message, just as he expected. The name, though, gives him pause.
Pearlescentmoon hit the ground too hard.
He shoots off a quick text—it’s just her name, although hopefully she takes it for the half-hearted reprimand that it is—and then tucks his communicator away again.
“Sorry, Etho,” he says. “What were you saying about those ladders?”
Etho looks at him, then at Gem, then back at Grian again, an odd expression in his eyes. He doesn’t press the matter, which Grian is extremely grateful for. (He couldn’t explain the Square Hole to Etho if he tried—not its walls like a hug or a warm blanket, not the way it hungers. It’s so hungry, all the time, except for the brief moments after a kill.)
(He shakes those thoughts away, ignoring them as best he can.)
Sure enough, when Grian and Gem come back out of their Nether portal, the Square Hole is wide open, a yawning maw of exposed stone and upturned earth. It’s exactly what he’d expected. (It’s still off-putting, that… whatever that had been, in the Nether, was accurate. That it meant something.)
“Pearl,” Gem says, a teasing note to her voice, “did you die to our hole?”
Pearl looks… haunted, is probably the best word for the expression clinging to her face. “Yeah,” she says. “Listen—”
Grian cuts her off. “You’re supposed to get other people to fall in, Pearl.”
“Well—”
“You know what time it is!” Gem chirps. “We gotta make it wider again.”
Pearl makes a frustrated noise. “Listen to me!” Grian stops in his tracks from where he’s already walking towards the Hole. Brow furrowed, hands hovering in front of her like she’s not sure what to do with them, Pearl says hesitantly, “I don't think we should keep making it bigger.”
“What!?” Gem grabs Pearl’s shoulders, and looks like she's ready to shake her. “Pearl, it's the Square Hole. We gotta keep expanding it.”
“How else are we gonna get more people to fall in?” Grian chimes in. “You gotta think of the team, Pearl, c’mon. I thought your emo phase was over.”
Pearl’s mouth opens, and closes, and opens again. “...it ate me,” she nearly whispers. “It ate me, and… Gem, it was so scary.”
Just don’t fall again, Grian thinks. Seems easy enough. And… yes, the hole is… eerie, perhaps, with its odd darkness and the hot air that wheezes out of it almost like an animal’s labored breathing, but it’s not that bad. He’s been in its depths before, and it’s been fine.
She’s not done speaking. “I’m sorry, Gem. I can't do it. I'll do anything else, just… don't make me go back down there again.”
“Ugh!” Gem exclaims, throwing her hands up in the air. “Fine. Suit yourself. We’re gonna get digging, though.”
“...Sorry,” Pearl murmurs, ducking her head.
“You can get wood for signs or something, right?” Grian chips in.
“Yeah… Yeah, I can do that.”
She runs off awfully quick, after that. Grian and Gem watch her go—and Grian’s almost glad. If she can’t get it, if she can’t understand the Square Hole, then he’s not sure he wants her present at all. What is there to be afraid of? The Square Hole is the center of everything, the core of their whole team. Without it, they’re nothing at all.
Grian and Gem get started on the expansion almost immediately. Grian digs, while Gem sets the cover.
Sure enough, all the way at the bottom, Pearl and Martyn have joined the rest of the frozen faces in the wall. It’s quite a good collection they’ve formed, at this point, Grian thinks. Maybe one day they’ll have the whole server down here. The thought tickles him, and he laughs out loud for a moment, the sound swallowed by the endless stone.
He’s climbing out for a new pickaxe when he notices the position Gem’s in. She’s leaning over the edge, fingers outstretched to place her signs. It would be so easy… it would be so easy to give the Square Hole another victim…
He shakes the thought off, although not all the way. It still haunts him as he digs through his chest for iron, as he crafts his new pickaxe… and it lingers even as he returns to the edge of the Hole, and sees that she’s still there, balanced precariously.
It would be so easy. That’s why he does it, he thinks. That must be why he does it. (That, and the soft whisper at the back of his mind, telling him expand, expand, expand.)
All it takes is his hand on her back. She barely has the time to look back at him, eyes wide in shock and betrayal, before she’s plummeting. Her yell echoes up from the pits of the Hole—and then, just like Bdubs and Skizz and Martyn and Pearl before her, it cuts off abruptly. There’s his ally, one more life gone.
Worst of all is the tiny, writhing part of him that feels good about it all. Or maybe that’s best of all? He can’t quite seem to decide. Gone is the earlier fiery pain of Pearl’s death—instead all he feels is a churning in his gut, a pleased hum at the back of his throat that he’s not sure he’s responsible for.
As Gem comes stumbling out of the lighthouse, back into the daylight once again, he meets her with a wide grin. That was great. And, best of all, it means: “It claims another. We gotta expand it again.”
Gem, though… she doesn’t seem nearly as enthusiastic. “I'm not doing any more work on the Hole, Grian,” she says sharply, although not sharp enough to distract Grian from the way her hands tremble at her sides. “I'm done. I should've listened to Pearl.”
Grian regards her coolly. He'd expected hesitance from Pearl, to some extent: as much as her reputation called her a wolf, hungry and mean and ready to attack at a moment’s notice, she's never shared that bubbling boiling feeling that he has inside of him, that little voice in the back of his head that strays his hands towards TNT and dripstone.
From Gem, though? It's a betrayal.
“What, really? Come on, Gem! It’s gotta grow!” The words spill out of his mouth almost against his will. “It needs more victims. More blood.”
Gem looks at him oddly, very similarly to how Etho looked at the both of them just earlier this same day. “…There’s something going on here, G,” she finally tells him. “Something’s wrong.”
He doesn’t have to listen to this! She’s just jealous.
He says as much: “You never loved the Square Hole like I did.”
“God, can you even hear yourself?” Gem scoffs. “It's got you. Come on.”
“I don't know what you're talking about. I'm fine.” He's only distantly aware of what he’s saying. Maybe that is a cause for concern, like Gem seems to think… no, though. No. He really is fine.
Gem pinches the bridge of her nose with those still-shaking fingers. “Sure,” she says. “Sure, yeah. I totally believe you.” He doesn’t appreciate her tone. “Whatever. Figure it out on your own, at this point. I’m gonna go find Pearl and apologize to her.”
Grian watches her retreating back, just as he’d watched Pearl, as she stalks off towards the lava-covered pyramid in the distance. The Square Hole yawns, wide and open and ready for more, behind him.
Maybe this is a good thing, a blessing in disguise. Now the Square Hole is his, and his alone.
(And what a beautiful Hole it is. So deep he can’t see the bottom, so wide he has to skirt a solid twenty blocks around it to avoid falling in himself. Not that it would be so bad, if he fell in… the only thing stopping him is that his servitude doesn’t work so well if he’s at its bottom, rather than up here to lure in more people. More souls. More meat and blood to splatter at the bottom, gray matter coating the floor, bones shattered on impact.)
(Down there, in the wet, pulsing dark, he knows without looking that there’s a new effigy trapped in the stone. Her ears are pinned back against her head, her curly hair flying about her in an illusion of wind, her stone eyes wide with terror.)
Yes, he’s quite glad he has the Square Hole all to himself.
When he breaks that cobblestone, when he watches eight people’s death messages flash across his communicator’s screen, all he can think is that those lives would’ve been better served for the Square Hole. If only Etho could’ve been in on it… if only Gem hadn’t abandoned him.
He darts through his escape tunnel. The rough stone walls are awfully cold against his fingers. There’s not even the slightest breeze. Why would there be? He’s underground, and not within the Square Hole’s domain. This mineshaft tunnel has no lungs, no tongue, no teeth. It does not eat or breathe, it does not tug on his thoughts like a cat’s cradle. Not like the Square Hole. Not at all like the Square Hole.
He wakes up sweating, tangled in his blanket. In the window, the sky is pitch-black.
His dreams slip through his fingers like sand even as he sits up. All that remains of them is the welcoming dark. The dampness clinging to his legs and torso feels awfully like a warm hug, like being born. He wants to go back to sleep. He never wants to wake up again.
Something is tugging on him from outside.
Dreamily, he stands, shuffling past Pearl’s bed towards the door. She snuffles in her sleep, turning over; he doesn’t wait to see if she wakes up. Behind them both is Gem, dead-silent except for the soft whooshing of her breath. Neither of them matter, anymore. Nothing matters, anymore, except…
He pushes the door open, and nearly falls to his knees in joy at the sight that awaits him. There it is, the Square Hole, uncovered and waiting. He can’t, though. He has somewhere important to be.
Standing there with his toes over the edge, he watches as a clod of dirt dislodged by his feet goes tumbling down, down, down. He doesn’t see it hit the bottom. How could he? The Square Hole is far too impressive, far too deep, for that.
Come, It beckons. Come, my loyal servant. My most faithful disciple.
At least, that’s what he thinks It says; it’s hard to derive any meaning at all from the jumbled mess of noise-taste-sensation It shoves into his skull all at once. His head throbs; he welcomes the feeling.
And, well, what else is there to do but obey? He takes one step, lets his foot dangle over the edge for a long moment—and then he pitches forward.
Even as the hot wind smacks him in the face, he does not shut his eyes. He has to see his God. The dirt turns to stone turns to something warm, wet, beating, pulsing. It’s hard to make out anything beyond the vaguest shapes, all enveloped in shadows. The entire outside world doesn’t matter in the slightest, anymore; it’s just him and the Endless Pit, the Square Hole, Its hot and rancid breath washing over him.
He’s not sure how long he falls for. It’s hard to know, when he’s relishing every second of It, arms spread wide to welcome the dark. However long it is, it’s certainly longer than is physically possible in this world with its shallow bedrock layer. Such is the power of the Square Hole.
Then, distantly, a shape forms before him. He squints and, slowly, it comes into focus—and he realizes it’s the horrible amalgamation of all his friends, all the Square Hole’s victims. Gem melts into Pearl melts into Bdubs. Skizz and Martyn blend together, almost indecipherable from each other.
Their voices layer together just as their bodies do; he can hardly pick them out from each other. Not that he needs to—they don’t speak so much as they moan wordlessly, occasionally pitching into screams.
They must be at the bottom, howling and writhing and waiting for him, hands outstretched. He realizes suddenly they were never begging for help from above. No, they were waiting for fresh meat, for someone to drag down with them . Wistfully, he hopes they were waiting for him.
Grian, whatever is left of him, shuts his eyes and lets them take and take and take. Anything to stay here. He is screaming, his body is cracking open like an egg, he is the Square Hole and the Square Hole is him—they are One, they are One, they are One.
He jolts awake, and it takes him a long moment to realize that, despite the spinning vertigo his head is caught in, he’s laying flat on his bed.
“Grian! Are you okay?” That’s Pearl, standing over him. “Grian?”
His communicator confirms his worst thinking: Grian hit the ground too hard. He buries his face in his sweaty hands, ignores Pearl’s frantic begging for a moment.
“Pearl?” he finally says. She shuts up immediately. “...We gotta fill in that hole.”