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The hymn begins as such: There is a girl in the prison.
There is a girl in the prison, and the warden did not permit her entry. She smells of sunlight and morning dew and velvet-coat fawns, delicate and innocent things that have no place in hell. Her crown is her horns, her eyes like a doe’s. Her feet do not touch the blackstone as she sails down the groaning halls. She is haloed by four wings. She will grow her third pair soon; as of yet, she is a godling.
God does not want this girl here. God keeps her busy with other trinkets, worlds unsullied by players and their countless dreams of hunting and being hunted. God is patient, but he is not all-seeing; he is powerful, but not omnipotent, and as every young thing is, godlings are stubborn and bullheaded, with a penchant for chasing thrills.
This is not a thrill, the girl tells herself. This is not an adventure. This is a knife in the heart because no one else will do it - the players would call it “mercy.”
God does not know mercy, because God does not seek revenge.
Godlings do, and godlings can.
Her player - perhaps not her favorite, but still her player, because this player with the horns and freckles and green, green eyes shares her brother’s face - is a pile of glassy limbs in the corner of his birdcage. He is a collapsed angle, kaleidoscoped into himself, all odds and ends. One of those legs that carried him like the wind is stumped at the knee. A raging scar tears him nearly in twain from the fraying skin of his collarbone to the jut of his hip; one of those beautiful eyes, once starry with hope as he shaped earth and stone from Void, is shattered into moldy white.
When she folds herself from the cramped box, the spiral of her great horns just barely scraping the violet, weeping ceiling, her player stirs. Every waking moment must be piercing agony, but her desperately loyal player stirs nonetheless.
She knew she chose right.
“…’sta,” her player mumbles, then arches his back as a hack wracks his feeble body; the godling watches as blood, thick and scarlet, cascades from his mouth, his nose, his chest and nimble fingers and graceful leg. Something bubbles, languid, lurid, in her chest, simmering between her many hearts and many lungs and the suspension of Void-space that sits cold and curious in the narrow cavity; the beautiful and featherless world her player has created has damaged him beyond repair.
Godlings cannot patronize. Their power has not yet coalesced, their forms not yet fully realized; they are half within and half without the sear and stars from whence they step, and without the power of their matured counterparts at their little fingertips, any player they choose will fail.
This godling thought she was different. Her brother is God. In the end, she was not so different after all.
But God does not make mistakes.
This godling chooses not to, either.
You were brave, my dreamer, she tells him, as she crouches in the blood and bones forming a shallow sea around her. The skirts of her silken dress pool, dye scarlet. The dainty feathers of her quartz-white wings sink into her player’s viscera. She does not make mistakes . You fought so long.
“I…” strains her player. She can see his heart faltering between his splintered ribs. The blood pours faster as he tries to reach for his patroness, his to-be-God, the last thing half-alive that has ever believed in his capacity to be. “My - ”
The godling cannot hurt, but she allows her hand to be taken anyway. Yes, she croons, smoothing her fingers through her player’s coarse hair. Yours.
Something focuses, razor-fine through the haze of aeons spent only knowing suffering, in her player’s one cognizant eye. It flits up, up, past the obsidian chains and netherite weapons lined meticulously against the wall, past the starving maw of lava to his right, to meet her unintelligible eyes behind the masked crest of her brother’s protection.
No mortal meets God’s gaze and lives. He knows this.
“Please,” begs her player.
And even though she is not God -
Elsewhere, the hymn hums on.
The girl leaves the prison, and she takes her player’s ravaged heart with her.
{…}
<Dream was killed by [Intentional Game
<Dream fell out of the
<Dream was slain by
<Dream
<Dream died.>
{…}
A player comes in the morning. At first, he doesn’t recognize her.
“Hey, are you okay?” he asks, gentle; in this, as in everything, he sees only that which he wishes to see. There is a girl outside of his prison, her bare feet and skirt hem stark as his redstone, and so he approaches with abandon, his trident holstered at his hip. He shimmers with the water he just clambered out of. “Hey,” he says again, and then his eyes drop to the thing in her hands, and the Warden’s Will fizzles to his fingertips in the space of a breath as his expression shudders, shutters.
“What,” says the warden, his eyes on the shrivelled heart the girl is clutching, “have you done.”
Insolence. There is not even a hint of reverence in this pathetic prisonkeeper’s voice; only fear, not even for his life but for the world that awaits him without the maintenance of a meaningless husk. She finds him unenviable, an object of pity, an object of disgrace. It’s painted all over his paling face when he recognizes the lump cupped in her palms: there is nothing for him beyond this. No godling chose the warden, because not even a godling is that stupid, but here he is, white as the little ghost that putters around the ruins of his wasteland; the warden dug his own grave with his own two bloody, bloody hands.
“What have you done,” pesters the warden doggedly, and the godling should smite him then and there for his presumption. Nothing so juvenile as human rage, that ridiculous flickering thing that burns out in a matter of murder and misery, but the godling untucks her feathers from the folds of her skirts and licks her teeth behind God’s double-crossed shield and runs achingly soft fingers over the heart in her hand.
I did what I must, she responds, after a moment; God owes no one, and neither does the girl, but the warden is a droning mayfly with his empty threats and implorations, and though God is impartial, she is not quite God, more his judge and jury; she thinks that this player deserves to suffer.
Sure enough, his eyes widen; the godling fancies he looks a little ill, as he reels backward, away from her. She must make a picture, a girl in her white dress and red heart. She watches the warden through low eyelids.
The warden makes a strange choking noise. It sounds like the noise her player made when she scooped his heart from his chest. “I don’t have - ” he begins, then bites his tongue. He acts like the godling can’t tell he had been about to admit, childish, needless, I don’t have anything left. She doesn’t need an altar for confessions to be made; she does not compel in the way God compels, but her ears are always pricked for the wayward slips of tongue players are so wont to make.
It’s an unfathomable turn of phrase. You are a ruin, she tells him critically, watching as he slings the Warden’s Helm from his head and hurls it aside with a hoarse, thin cry, because he is. It becomes obvious to the godling now, watching the warden methodically strip himself of his impenetrable armor and unbeatable weaponry, looking like he might as well be stripping himself of his skin, that he was never anything but the warden for an epoch of time she doesn’t care to measure. It may have been weeks, it may have been years - for the godling, that time is over, and it is evident that for the warden, too, that time is over. Whether that is cause for jubilation of devastation remains to be seen.
The warden’s gaze ricochets up to her mask, incredulous. “I’m a ruin?” he demands, standing to his full height so that he looms over her, only the Will Breaker left trembling under his knuckles. “I’m not the one who - who - !”
Divine impulse floods her mouth. Say it, the girl says, eyes fever-bright, a fervor in her shoulders. The heart lolls gracelessly in her fingers as she rolls it between her hands. The warden’s stricken eyes follow her slow, deliberate movements. She lifts her wings. Make it true. Say it.
The warden clamps a half-gauntleted hand over his mouth. The godling’s neck prickles. No one is watching save the thousand eyes and hungry Void she one day will become.
If he will not say it, she will.
I killed him, she says, because no one else would.
It should not baffle her when the warden crumbles like a monolith under a meteor; the silent, salient agony on his face, a cacophony catastrophic in the glaze of his eyes. He spills to his knees amongst the armor and grass, distraught, and he whispers something over and over.
But it does.
{…}
The girl knew something like humanity, looking at the warden.
Staring at the cold-eyed player in his wood-panelled office with its cream walls, polished spruce desk, and chestfuls of diamonds, she knows only contempt.
The gambler is a world away from the warden, in some ways. He wears no armor because this is his castle, keeps no sword because his human hounds will have her head at a moment’s notice. He does not avoid what sliver of her gaze he can bear to hold. Perhaps that is the biggest departure from the stone-faced warden: the gambler does not know to avoid the line of her sight. Standing barefoot in the gambler’s office, her wings neatly gilding her sides, her hands clasped behind her back, she looks like a child.
A child with God’s handprint on her face.
The gambler shifts.
“Hi there,” he says, voice syrup-sweet. He is speaking down to her. “What’s up, kiddo? Can I help you with something? The, uh - my secretary… Charlie… didn’t he say anything about visiting hours? I’m - a little busy, as you can probably tell,” and he gestures with an unimpressive flourish toward the neat towers of colorful chips arranged painstakingly on his desk, the buffed-leather briefcase of polished diamonds on his desk. Avarice lines the corners of his leaden smile.
The girl bares her beautiful teeth back.
When is your appointment? she asks. It’s a foreign, fumbling word to fit on her tongue - ah-point-meant - but the unfamiliarity is worth the wordless something that flashes darkly over the gambler’s wan face.
He recovers from the break with some grace. “Oh, I have a ton of appointments, kid,” he says dismissively, waving his hand at her. “You gotta - you gotta be more specific, y’know?”
The gambler has silvered his tongue. He’s a far cry from the player the godling remembers kissing rings, tweaking her player’s hair. Raising a country on his own sweat and suffering for a haven; she knows he wanted a beacon, a place to rest. The world was not safe for him and the players he loved, and so the gambler built roofs and hunted game, coaxed guards to his side and coerced a thing learning to be a player to learn from his empty motions. And once his skeleton palace was complete, with its electric fireplaces and colorful lights -
The godling clenches her hands tighter. Your meetings with the prisoner, she says, and watches as the gambler’s expression sours faster than the blistering touch of a wither.
The gambler leans back in his scarlet chair and laces his fingers together, mouth set. “What are you talking about,” he says flatly. “Who the fuck sent you? Who are you?”
What a question. No one sends me.
“Sorry not sorry, I’m calling fuckin’ bullshit on that one. Come on, tell me already, I’m dying here. Is it Sam? I knew he’d pussy out on me soon, he doesn’t have a fuckin’ spine, I swear, you’d think the fuckin’ warden of the goddamn prison would have a stronger stomach than he does - ”
There is no need for your meeting today.
The gambler chokes on his incessant, fork-tongued babble. His foggy eye, pronged by a jagged scar, looks so much like her player’s, suspended forever in its split-second waterfall of terror as a blade was laid lovingly over their foreheads to their chins. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
The girl steps forth. Her feet stick to the varnished floor. She presents the gambler with her cupped hands.
The gambler falls out of his chair.
“What the f-fuck,” he sputters, pale as the soft innards of a geode, sprawled onto the garnet carpet that frames his desk. “What the fuck is that - ”
You know. Because he does - to deny it now would make a mockery out of the gambler. The godling watched him do it, herself: watched, God at her side, as the gambler ripped his nails from their beds clawing up the loam from his tyrant’s grave and buried his hands in the corpse’s yawning ribcage and from the half-decomposed gore of a man who died as he lived pulled a slick, scarlet core.
The epitaph, scrawled over by dozens of bitter hands, read, J. Schlatt. Former President of Manberg. A man who heralded change.
The gambler sobbed as he swallowed his tyrant’s heart.
“I - I - I don’t - ” stammers the gambler now, one frantic eye trained on the dark heart in the girl’s grasp. “What the fuck, what the fuck, who are you, what are you - ”
The godling steps closer. She fans open her wings, one by one, feather by red-tipped feather. She is pristine. She is irrevocably filthy.
I saw you, she says. I always see. But this was my player. She holds out the heart, and ignores the flinch of the gambler. You met him every day. To task him with agony. To slough your sins off. You want to control. So you controlled my player.
“Your ‘player’ - he’s a fucking monster,” the gambler spits back at her; his foolhardy bravery, it seems, has not entirely abandoned him.
The godling presses the heart to the forehead of her brother’s mask. Was.
The gambler’s string of expletives breaks under her correction. “Wait,” he says slowly, his grotesque brow pinching in. Something is dawning on his expression as he eyes the lump the girl cups with kind fingers. It looks poisonous, looks murderous; it’s the thing that twisted his face, vicious, when her player did something the gambler did not like.
The godling looks back.
The gambler stands with a furious cry. “How - why,” he howls, shoving his desk and its myriad meaningless trinkets aside; it shrieks against the wood floor. The girl does not blink. “That was - that bitch was - he had everything, you stupid fuck, why would you kill him, I still haven’t - ” The gambler slams his fist into the wall, and every picture-perfect photo shudders in its frame. None of them have players in them. The gambler deals in humanity, not humans. “I need the - the fucking book.” And the gambler freezes. A dangerous glaze - the veneer that glasses over the empty gazes of creepers, arachnids, their venomous cousins - sheens his eye.
He steps closer. “You have it, don’t you? The knowledge. The book. That’s why you killed him,” he purrs, all that furious bluster swept away; all he is now is keenly cold, with a smile that shows off the golden glint in the gash of his upper lip. He could be charming if he weren’t using his height, his status, his surroundings to his advantage; the gambler knows that this land is his palace, and this office is his throne room.
He holds out a hand, expectant, his fingers crooked. They’re uncalloused. “Give it here, please.”
Greed, wondrous greed.
What is a king to God?
Stay, says the godling to the gambler.
The gambler stays. Or collapses, rather, because his legs will not hold him like this. He is a skew of limbs, cowed into the corner of his own kingdom, and his crumpled yellow wings, fit for a prey bird, are nothing to the myriad bloodstained feathers of an avenging godling, a falling star, a divine hand holding a human heart.
Know your place, the girl says. Her voice does not fit in her mouth. God is not here. Blood, thicker than water, clings to her fingers, a portent, proof of concept undone, and she is everything, in this moment, indisputable, undefinable. God is not here.
A wronged godling is.
The gambler shrinks back into his own shadow, gaping, eyes stretched wide, as the girl stands in the center of the room, what’s left of her player held aloft before her. She says, You are a blight. Do not presume to speak against me. Player. Human. Heretic, even. Recognize this crest. She shifts the heart to one hand, draws the gambler’s eye to the gouges in the disc over her face. My brother’s name. Do you know the face of God, gambler?
“I - what?” He sounds terrified.
You did not ruin my player, she tells him, to raise the dead. You did not ruin my player to avenge the firebrand. You did not ruin my player out of nobility. You did not even pretend.
“He - ”
You ruined him, says the girl, because you wanted to. And again, the flicker of lava under her aching, empty lungs: What would your phantom think?
The gambler shudders. Jerks his arms to his face, as if to brace for a blow. A useless motion; he assumes she would resort to physical violence to make a point. I am not you, she says, and he cringes. Do not challenge me only to avoid my gaze now.
“…What are you,” repeats the gambler, throat raw. “How do you know about…” His hand finds his chest, then his stomach, crumples the fine silk in his crooked fingers beyond repair. “…Him. And… that - motherfucker. How…”
The girl smooths her thumb over the heart. I asked, she says, if you know the face of God.
Her dress drips on the carpet.
The gambler leaves the room.
{…}
There is a player the girl must meet. She is a means to an end, forever deliberate; the cooling heart in her hand is a reminder. God does not make mistakes. She detours briefly -
(You could have seen him, she accuses the no-eyed king.
“I know,” ae replies simply.)
(What is the exchange of diamonds in the face of an end? she asks the mercenary.
“There was no world in which I would have come late,” they snap back.)
(You do not know loyalty, she muses to the captain.
“He was never my son,” she grits out.)
(Make your peace, she tells the firebrand.
“Wha - what the fuck? What the shit does that mean - hey - Dr—”)
- but in the time of a falling sun she finds her way to the sun-striped grove of trees through which lies a stretch of land claiming itself to be a kingdom, shaded by spotted caps and gardens limned by wind chimes and crystalline creeks, twinkling sweetly in the somnolent dusk.
It is a beautiful place, in the right light.
The girl looks at it through the vanes of her red, red fingers.
She finds the player she seeks at the edge of a brook just beyond the tallest mushroom in the city, his hunting boots laced up neat beside him and his feet dangling in the babbling water. The girl doesn’t recognize the scar that snakes from his neck to his shoulder, imperceptible under the shadow of his shirt. She doesn’t recognize him.
The deserter hums, “Hi, Drista.”
You.
He inclines his head. “What’s up? You don’t come around so much anymore.”
The gall of the deserter - to address her so casually, as though she were - as though he knew her. As though - as though -
You swore to end his life, she says, and the deserter tenses.
“Yeah, I did,” he admits, and something splinters at the back of the girl’s tongue, but he continues before she can interject, running roughshod over a godling’s words, “but I knew exactly what I was doing, okay? Don’t lecture me about some bullshit on how he’s innocent or whatever! He did bad shit, Dris, he’s a bad person.” The deserter’s voice grows louder, as it always does when he gets angry, not so much at a person as at circumstance. It does nothing to redeem his relentlessly low standing in the godling’s eyes when he spits, “He deserves to be in there.”
God does not rage. The wrath of God would rain hailstorms endlessly upon the earth, wreaths of fire and thunder; the grounds would flood with his despair. If God rages, the world perishes, and so: God persists. God endures. Behind his crest, God remains unmoved.
Godlings do not have that luxury.
He did not deserve cruelty, the girl echoes, earthquakes, razes. The deserter’s dock trembles on its supports, and he fumbles with his shoes as he bolts to his feet. His hand gropes in vain for the handle of a lithe axe that is not there, and somehow, this only fuels the flamestorm bubbling out of her throat. You are a fool.
“Don’t try this with me, Dris,” says the deserter, voice just this side of sharp that lifts the godling’s lips to show her teeth, her burgeoning wings, her Void-spun mouth. “You don’t know all the shit he did. You’re friends with Tommy, aren’t you? Did you know what he fucking did to him?”
I did. I watched, the girl reminds the deserter, and does not relish in the way he bites his lip. It would behoove you to remember that I am not what you thought I was.
“Then you should know why - ”
He did not deserve cruelty. He was cruel. I understand this. But he did not deserve to be destroyed.
The deserter falters. “What - what do you mean, ‘destroyed,’” he says, uncertain, dropping his boots to the coral-crusted planks. “That’s not what - he’s - he’s just in prison, kid. It’s not like - ‘s not like he’s being, like, tortured or something.”
Petty human words fail the girl.
“…Drista?” The deserter takes her silence to be pensive. He inches closer, cautious still (a vast improvement from his schismatic… acquaintance. It’s a stretch to consider the gambler a lover of the deserter’s now, with the lines drawn as they are), a hand still slung loosely at his hip where an axe should hang, his eyes upturned in searching concern. “Is… something wrong?”
God does not rage. It will spell the beginning of the end of the world they sewed together, their teeth sharpened on the bones of their acolytes.
This godling has chewed apart her prayers.
How dare you, she snarls, nearly dislodging her brother’s shield in her fervent fury, all four brilliant wings bursting open in a flurry of blood-flecked feathers. She can see the deserter’s mild eyes widen at the sight of the ribbons of red, hisses, Indeed. Indeed. You are blind, player. You saw only what you wished. Tread carefully. You swore him dead. You deserted him.
The deserter visibly attempts to gather his bearings under her haunting voice; she is this world’s godling, the girl under the sun and moon, the sister of God, and so she and her many-present voice are, from the fractals of ancient tree bark to shards of wave-softened seaglass on the riverbanks. Her variegated omnipresence, on its wobbly first steps, thunders under its own desperate depth. Only God could bear the weight of her words now. She knows this. She does not care.
Your gambler, she says, because he will know exactly whom it is she speaks of and she is done with niceties, done with divinity, done with suffering and the suffering of those she chose, he tortured my player. Your Dream. My dreamer. For nothing. He gained nothing. He did nothing but break. My. Player.
The deserter pales violently. “That - Drista, you’re lying,” he says, sweat beading on his pallid brow. His tone wavers, utterly unconvincing. “There’s no way…”
Have you seen him. It’s not a question, because she knows it is fact: the deserter has not seen the gambler in months. Last visited her player to offer him a slit throat. The realization breaks like a tidal wave over the shores of the deserter’s face. Your gambler has gambled wrong. He has lost that which makes him human. You were too busy chasing one beast. To watch your lover become another.
“He wouldn’t,” protests the deserter, his legs shaking. “Quackity’s - he’s kind, Dris. I don’t know what you saw, but - it couldn’t be him, he’s a good guy, he just gets wrapped up in his own head sometimes.”
Well.
Cruelty, at least, is not beyond the reach of God.
If needs must.
My player’s leg was gone. The deserter makes a horrible, gutted sound. It’s nothing to the sounds her player would make under the gambler’s tools. Below the knee. He would never walk. Or run. Or hunt. He was chained to the wall. Like a dog. Like a thing that bites. Even though they broke his arms. And his will. He was cut open. Across his chest. I could count every bloody rib. Under his skin. Burned by the lava. Perhaps by a sword. And to match the gambler. His eye was split. He could not see. Not like he could before. The deserter is gagging, doubled over on the dock, a hand clamped over his mouth. The girl feels nothing at all. Is this kind, deserter? Is this what human kindness looks like?
“Drista,” whispers the deserter, the word mangled through his fingers.
Do not take this name in vain, rumbles the godling, and the deserter staggers back as she lifts into the air with a single snap of her wings, the final gleam of sun ricocheting off of her hair, the scarlet of her feathers, the scarlet in her hand. The deserter catches sight of it, and what weak pallor had sunk into his face drains right back out.
“‘Was,’” he repeats, strained. “Dris. You didn’t.”
Everything is turning. Without me, without this, she says, bringing the heart to her chest, nothing would have saved him.
The deserter claps his other hand to his mouth. It does not stifle the dry sob that heaves from his lungs to lollop in the oak at her feet, and his - his presumption - that he thinks he has the right to grieve - that he assumes he has any right to shed a single tear - that he is allowed to spare even a bare second’s thought for her player, her player, who hurt and was hurt and who’d been hurting all along -
You left him. God’s crest trembles finely. And you shed crocodile tears. I am no audience, deserter. I watch. I know. You never loved him.
The deserter clutches his face in his hands, shaking. His hair tangles in his tears. He does not answer. The godling holds the broken heart tight.
I know, deserter. Truth is my beacon. Amends are a kindness you never offered. And will never have. Ozone lifts light off of the girl’s tongue, and every voice parrots her harmony. Human hymns mean nothing. This, her hymn, the girl’s long watch and the blood in her chalice and the heart in her hands that she drew gently from her player’s stilled chest, her lullaby, her vengeance. She is above airs. God does not make mistakes. Love does not do this. Love. Does not do this . Is love abandonment? Is love a knife in the back? All this world you take as if your own. That he made for you. And you dare. DARE presume. To LOVE him - ?
“SAPNAP!” comes a shrill, familiar cry.
The godling pauses. The veined earth shivers to a standstill, its quaking suspended in time. The garish mushroom forest and its low-hanging willows settle in their beds as her song eases, dolce, a honey-slow simmer. The deserter cowers on his dock. The heels of his palms dig into his eyes, and tears shimmer down the fragile skin of his wrists. His bootlaces are undone.
…Brother, the girl says. It is not a question.
God unfurls from the patch of moon-soaked grass just behind the deserter. His many horns and many wings and many voices peer back at her, spring-green, potion-bright. He towers over every last one of them, this world, the universe; the Void cuts its hungry teeth on his hollow bedrock bones. He is all swirling fabric and seething air, and in his incomprehensible hands is -
“Sapnap - Sapnap, get up!” The sleeper, blue as the brisk dawn with his red cloak and red cap, leaps from God’s palm and lands in the cracked earth of his forestland. His eyes are shaded by dark glass, tinted with what the girl recognizes as God’s touch; he will never be unravelled by God’s adoring gaze. He skids to a stop on the dock, half-unhinged from its grip on the gravelly banks, and throws a pale arm over the shivering shoulders of the deserter. “Sapnap! Snap out of it!” And then, with a pointed hiss at the godling when the deserter does not respond: “What did you do to him?”
Only the truth. The girl cages the heart to her chest again, hiding it from the accusatory gaze of the sleeper. Addressing God, she adds, Leash your pet, brother.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” The sleeper raises his voice, righteous, his eyes never straying from her mask. “Answer me, Drista . What did you do to him?”
Of course her brother’s favored player can bear the burn of her very presence. He doesn’t even flinch as she fractures the air with a brash flap of her wings.
She could be kind. Merciful, she thinks, is the word that humans use. Is the word she has been thinking of all this time, as divinity crackles between her teeth, as her ichor runneth over like the blood in her player’s lungs, as she alights upon the piteous little things running amok in her player’s blown-glass world and reminds them that cruelty is not without consequence. That they are being watched by a being without context. That brutality needs no translation.
I have this, she says instead, and presents the sleeper with the heart of her player.
The sleeper recoils, his hand darting to his mouth. “Oh,” he says, soft. “Oh - Drista, is that…”
The girl swallows the extra shards that jump to her lips. The heart in her hand feels heavy. All she can do is nod under the sudden weight of the sleeper’s wide, unblinking eyes.
A low, mournful sound, then, as the sleeper slips his hand under his glasses and grieves. It’s a sight to see. He does not bother with denial, because in the same way the deserter does not know the godling, the sleeper sees her, comprehends her, as only the companion of God can. He knows she would do it. That she has done it.
“Dream,” he mouths, and then reaches out blindly for her brother. From any other player the impudence would be unbelievable, but the girl has long learned to bite her tongue in the face of the sleeper and his patron; she keeps her eyes on the deserter, who’s trembling, face paper-white, his fingers dug into his hair, as the sleeper puts a hand on her brother’s and weeps silently.
“I - Drista, why did you do that?” he finally asks, after God has swept his tears from his face. “He - he - I know that - that he was suffering in there - ”
And despite knowing you did not lift a finger, she retorts on the heels of the sleeper’s words, bristles her bloodstained feathers when God holds up a palm to stem her words. He’s unbearably caught in the sleeper’s noose; the player with the red cap and a divine gift has God wrapped around his finger, and he does nothing with all that power by his heel. Though the sleeper sees through her, she cannot stand to look at the sleeper for longer than minutes at a time. He is an anomaly, a contradiction in every sense of the word: He loves his Dream, and yet substitutes him for a soulless facsimile. He understands the strings of the server, and yet does not bother to pull them. He feels so fundamentally, and slumbers it all away. The godling bares her teeth.
The sleeper sighs in the back of his throat. “I know… that I didn’t do anything… to help him,” he murmurs, like the words are being torn from the walls of his mouth. Something winks alive in his eyes, gleaned from the guttering flame there that the girl couldn’t see through a different face of her brother’s shield, and she’s - she’s taken aback, a godling, an immortal and flighty and heartless thing, as the sleeper says, firm, “…But I could. I had - have - the power to. He - he deserved help, Drista. He was - he was rotting away in there, and he - ” The sleeper makes a frustrated noise. “ - Fuck. Drista, he was still in there. Him. Dream, he - I know you thought you helped him away from here, this - this hell - his personal hell, but he was still in there, and I thought - ” The sleeper puts his hand over his mouth. God croons. “I thought he could be saved.”
The godling stares. I. I saved him. Her red hands, the pleats of her red skirt. Her player’s lifeblood in the strands of her white feathers. I saved him. Her player’s heart cold in her hands. I did.
The sleeper sounds exhausted. “Drista. You killed him. He didn’t get the chance.”
And the girl -
God does not feel. He is a husk, in some aspects. He is a reflection of the players he creates and watches over, a mirror of their fleeting feelings. Being God - it is about trying not to feel. God’s shield covers the face to this end. The scars are a warning and a prayer and a vow; God does not hear evil and he does not see evil and he does not speak evil because he cannot be understood. God does not feel and God does not rage and God does not make mistakes.
The girl is tired.
I thought I did the right thing, says the godling.
The deserter moans. The sleeper reaches for him again.
God spreads his wings.
Drista. Come here, he says softly. It’s the first time in days and days and days that the godling has heard the voice of her brother, who watches and does not intervene, who spends his days in flower fields with the player he bestows countless favors upon, and so the godling, numb, does. He envelopes her hands in his own, brings the heart to his mouth that is not. For a nonsensical moment, the girl thinks her brother will mimic the gambler, make a meal out of the life of the player who shares his face, but God does anything but that; he gently, gently takes the lump from her. The girl doesn’t know how her hands feel without the weight of her player’s heart in them, holds them before her wordlessly as God nods to the heart.
Hello. Dream, he says, careful, quiet. The sleeper’s bright eyes skitter up to his patron’s at the sound of his ever-seeking voice. Hello. Player. You. You. Dream.
You were alive.
The deserter gasps sharply. The sleeper steps forth, his gaze fixed on his God; gratitude suffuses the blue flecks of his eyes.
The godling sits into her bloody heels, and leans her masked face forth onto her knees, and mantles her great red wings.
Sometimes. You dreamt of a hunt. Forever and ever, into the volcanic glass of a hungry pit, into the many-eyed portal of your end, the End, the mother Void blistering below as you slew the dragoness and began again, your companions at your heels.
Sometimes. You dreamt of war. Of children soldiers who lined your walls and claimed your land and slaughtered your livestock, who painted beautiful flags and sang beautiful songs, who drove their awls into the heart of your earth and named it as their own, and you dreamt of indisputable hurt, and you dreamt of irrevocable wrath.
Sometimes. You dreamt of family. Spring-sprung antlers heavy with flowers, or masks designed to filter away the grit of redstone; red eyes and black eyes and brown eyes and blue eyes, your thumb skimming over their careworn knuckles, a world built on your heart and your soul and the ashes in your mouth.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
I loved you.
You played the game well.
Everything you needed was within you.
You were stronger than you knew.
You were the daylight. And the night. And the darkness you fought was within you. And the light you sought was within you.
You were not alone. You were not separate from every other thing. You were the universe, talking to itself, reading its own code.
And I loved you. Because you were love.
God presses his double-scored crest to the heart. Sighs deep from the depths of his Void-drowned lungs, space dust and searching eyes, and the girl watches as the heart of the player she killed to spare condenses into constellations, shatters into a glistening sheath in the chilling night air, is carried away by the half-summer wind.
There, says XD.
“‘And cut him out in little stars,’” whispers George.
“You’re such a simp,” sobs Sapnap.
Drista watches the stardust of her only dreamer collapse into the sky.