“You wanna help us blow up spawn?”
No, he doesn’t – what kind of f*cking question is that – he forces himself to inhale and exhale slowly. He controls his voice carefully. It doesn’t crack or waver as he prepares supplies to leave the base he’s in and meet them there. “I don’t. Can we not do that?”
“No, can we,” another voice says, much more cheery than the last. This voice doesn’t have any ties to Zam. The voice likes Flame, likes the way he has an affinity for his own element. That’s why they’re here, anyways. To blow up spawn and set fire to anything that can carry it. Zam hurriedly throws potions and food and building materials into shulkers and packs them in his ender chest, opening the hatch with a wind charge and climbing out. He’s a lot more panicked now; what the hell is this for?
He slides his elytra over his shoulder and knocks fireworks together to set off, the voices in his communicator still chatting animatedly about what’s happening. Faintly, Zam can hear explosions, little muffled things crackled to oblivion by the quality of the transmission. It twists his organs until they’re braided together, sickening threads of dulled pink and disgusting tan. Blood strains to run through them.
“Why are we doing this?” he asks, and his voice cracks, though he bites his tongue to stop it abruptly. There’s a part of him that thinks he knows why this is happening. Flame hasn’t had his way with something he wants. Flame hates not getting his way.
It was something that happened after Flame’s status of immortality was revoked. That was its own eruption in and of itself – he was restless the following days, killing anyone he could, letting heaps of foreign hearts seep into his blood flow. Because he’s immortal; the immortal demon; Leowook had tried to kill him for weeks on end; it only worked once. And if he’s not immortal, he needs another title. He needs to be feared.
He’s planned an incredibly unfair fight, one versus eight, in an attempt to garner more fear. At least that’s what Zam thinks. Since Flame’s stopped drinking up the attention he garnered from being called immortal he’s moved to injecting others’ fear into his veins. It rushes his system and makes him feel powerful again; powerful enough to become immortal despite his death. It makes him powerful enough to force people to avoid him. It chokes their throats with hesitancy and dread when he’s in proximity. It’s the kind of fear only he would want.
Unsurprisingly, the day the fight was said to take place, only two people showed up.
Flame’s not going to have that. Zam remembers the nights spent listening to Flame abrasively rant about how the fight turned out, about how the only people to show up were people he was allied with. He remembers nodding off. He remembers being just pissed that Flame kept complaining about it. In an outsider’s eyes, everyone’s already scared of him, enough to never get into that kind of situation with him. But he can’t see it, and so his incessant complaining continues on, only privy to Zam’s ears. And eugh.
Now he has a completely different mindset. Everything he has ever loved is in danger. It could be because of this. It probably is because of this.
When he gets to spawn, the light of red and orange and suns and hot beginnings reach his face.
The tree is on fire.
His breath catches. He suffocates on it wordlessly, his elytra slowly folding back in. He clutches exhausted fireworks in both of his hands. The fire’s at the base of the trunk, but it’s spreading, growing larger and hotter and taller and swallowing the entire tree. And faintly, he sees bundles of explosives placed in Planet and Bacon’s tower, hears flint and steel clash together and the hiss as the fuse wears down to the edge of the string.
He’s blown to the side. His vision blurs. Everything’s white and hot – too f*cking hot – and the tower comes crumbling down, hitting the ground and breaking beneath itself. Mud and tough bricks scatter themselves, the cement between them shattering like glass. The glass of the tower shatters. It’s so loud, but he can’t hear it, because the explosion was louder; and they’re setting off more.
The next target is his house. His starter base. He can see the daycare across from it, made of the same types of wood, cherry blossom petals laying on the roof. No. He has villagers down there. People visit it. He still visits it. It’s his first f*cking build in the faction. He pushes himself up and his feet are carrying him towards Flame and who he now sees as Wemmbu placing down the bundles of TNT and laughing to themselves as they begin to light the fuse.
But Zam’s dazed, and so it’s set off long before he reaches it. He huffs. It tears skin from his throat, all around his body, until he’s burning and feeling the fire seep into all of the layers of his skin. His hand grips the sword he has sheathed on his side. He imagines pulling it out and thrusting it through Flame’s chest. He imagines the sound it will make. He imagines how after that he’ll collapse from exhaustion and cry until he’s dead.
“What the f*ck are you doing!?” he cries, the words straining his vocal chords. The two men turn to look at him, their expressions… something. He can’t tell. They could be read, but they’re cold, and they aren’t like what he’s seen before, and he’s too tired to care. Flame tosses the flint and steel to Wemmbu.
“Blowing up spawn, dumbass,” he says, crossing his arms. His own sword is sheathed against his back, diamond and glinting in the fire that’s everywhere around spawn.
Wemmbu’s placing more TNT inside so Zam pushes past Flame and rushes in, breaking all the bundles he sees and crushing them with his foot. He prays that nothing is recoverable, that whatever he’s doing is doing something. Every part of him knows that they have enough bundles to destroy the whole world until it’s nothing but bedrock.
“Why!?” It’s another desperate thing, one that makes him sound so weak and fragile and – he swallows, steeling his voice. He’s not going to speak again but he makes himself feel better, stronger, against whatever the f*ck is happening; against Flame.
“You know why,” Flame spits, the words coated in fire and heat and the beginnings of the universe. “No one f*cking takes me seriously anymore, Zam. You remember my complaining last week.” He starts to pace. Explosions go off in the background. “You don’t know how it is to fall that hard. You don’t f*cking know how it is to not be respected.”
“So this is all because you didn’t get your way, and now you’re throwing a hissy fit!?” Zam throws his arms in the air. “You want people to fear you? You want a reputation back? Why do you think no one f*cking showed up? Because they had better things to do? Who has a better thing to do, Flame? Who!?”
He knows he sounds desperate. Begging and crying and impaled with every type of weapon. He doesn’t care.
“Everyone has better things to do, Zam!” He shouts back. His voice is the same unrelenting as it’s always been, as it was when Zam was in danger and Flame had to come deescalate it so that Zam didn’t die. It’s unrelenting in the sense that he’s firm and stubborn and nothing will change it. And Zam thought he was stubborn; the most stubborn person he’s ever laid eyes on. Flame’s not stubborn enough to keep a friendship going. Because everything around Zam is burning to the ground. At his hand.
“What the hell does this accomplish!?” Zam crushes more dynamite under his heel.
“People care about spawn and people build here,” Flame shoots back, “and I’m letting them know that if they don’t fight me like I wanted, all of their builds will be gone.”
Zam freezes. Other people do not care about spawn. Other people aren’t steadfast in their beliefs – that pacifism is a viable lifestyle in Lifesteal, despite the incredible cycle of violence. Other people have not spent hours and hours building and improving upon spawn for everyone to enjoy equally. Other people have not advocated for peace, for protection. They spawn kill and they steal hearts, only caring when it’s necessary; only switching lifestyles when it benefits them.
He feels the hot sting of tears reach his eyes. f*ck. He blinks them away. “No, Flame. You know I’m the only one who cares about spawn. Who actually f*cking cares.” His voice betrays his attempts to keep himself neutral. It breaks and cracks and he can barely speak and it’s so infuriatingly tragic.
He looks at his house and the buildings around him. Everything is burning. Maybe Flame knew. Maybe he’s known since the beginning.
“And you haven’t respected me for a while now, either,” he responds. He doesn’t say anything deliberate.
That’s just f*cking horribly, utterly wrong. Zam’s been nothing but loyal. So has Flame. He thought they were inseparable, binded like the magnetic field twisting and turning in the sunspots that sit on the sun. He guesses now that Flame would rather be feared than attached. Tension builds up, and it’s been building up, and Zam’s been too stupid to realize, and this has all been coming, hasn’t it, everything he loves burned down –
But by his hands? By Flame?
Why him?
So he lets himself cry, right there in front of Flame. Burning everything and anything and making sure none of it stands. He sees fire reflected in his eyes. He sees death. He sees nothing, no emotion. He only sees Flame as he saw him before they ever knew each other, distant and closed and two men too cautious to talk to the other. And it hurts. f*ck, it hurts.
Flame throws potions at his feet and unsheaths his sword. Before Zam can register what’s happening, he’s running. He’s running so far away and so fast that the grass blurs under his feet and mixes with the color of the fire. Everything looks like a burnt sienna, the world just after the sun has dipped below the horizon. Nothing’s calm as it is then. This is unnatural. It should be bright. Zam shouldn’t be running. Not from him; not from Flame. Never from Flame. They were supposed to last.
He fights back, but only because he doesn’t want to die. He hates swinging his sword. He hates the motion it makes in the air, how it collides with diamond armor with a sickening clang. He hates how Wemmbu joins and taunts him for his efforts; he hates how these couple actions go against everything he’s ever stood for. He hates how it’s Flame.
Some part of him thinks it’ll be him and Flame until the end of time.
He can’t keep fighting forever. He’s trapped in water, and then in cobwebs, swords swung at his feet until he can’t stand, until his head and chest are accessible. He feels his armor break under him, fragments of diamond clattering to the ground. He feels his hearts beat faster and faster and faster, sending blood to every cut and bruise on his body. He registers voices talking, laughing, arguing over who gets the kill.
He feels a sword plunge through his chest and emerge from the other side.
And he’s back at home.
His fingers subconsciously move to his neck. There are sixteen pulses. They trail up his face, slowly, tentatively. He can only see out of one eye. A hot mesh of blood and copper falls onto his arm, and he pulls his fingers away to see blood smeared across the pads of them. He places his fingers near his eye. He can feel the sting of a deep-running scar reopened, blood spilling from its chasm and trickling down his face.
The scar was originally from stuff with Abyss, harmless bedrock breaking and playful banter and a wooden sparring sword thrust a little too close.
Now it’s Flame. It’s betrayal and reckoning. It’s losing everything, after he thought he was safe, after he thought nothing in the same caliber would ever happen again. It’s the heat of flames and the flares let loose by sunspots on the sun. It’s red. Warm, hot, fiery, white.
His hand crumples around his face. He kneels.
And he sobs.
Zam gathers wood and bricks and copper in a picnic basket, the goddess of the harvest moving through her fields and collecting her reaping. He sizes material up, and if it’s in a good enough quality, he tosses it into one of his shulker boxes. He goes through a mental checklist in his head over and over and over. Scaffolding, check. Raw logs, check. Glass, check; smelting. Copper, check; oxidizing. And everything’s almost done.
He slides elytra over his shoulders. The feel is familiar, textures of feathers stuck together; unnatural fibers from the threaded string of chorus fruit and shulker skin. It weighs down his back. He pulls fireworks from another one of his shulker boxes, taking a leap from the cliff he’s standing on and knocking them together. He soars, and man, he can never get over the feeling.
Taking off with elytra equipped is always nerve-wracking, no matter how many times he jumps. For a split second, he’s falling, adrenaline flooding his veins, and the wind doesn’t catch the wings, and he’s already dead. And then, the elytra opens, and he’s flying. His rockets force wind, carry him high and higher until he can touch the sun and fall back down in a divebomb. He keeps flying; contrary to what he wants to do.
He lands on one of the cherry paths that intertwine spawn into one big and living organism, incarnate and breathing. It’s still f*cking horrible. There’s debris from the explosions literally everywhere, blocking every path. Buildings have crumbled to nothing, collapsing in on themselves after only one detonation. It makes him sick, spins the contents of his stomach until he’s retching and dropping to his knees.
He manages to keep himself from finishing the job. He’s wholly nauseous.
He sees Flame in every corner of the destroyed buildings. He sees the buildings as they once were, when he nurtured them and when Flame let him – he sees Flame and Wemmbu and dynamite, and then fire and ash. He sees death, his own blood spilled in the cracks of wood eager to soak it up. He sees the charred remains of the trunk and the water that rains from the sky, the clouds weeping to extinguish the fire, weeping as mother Earth mourns the loss of one of her children.
He feels fifteen pulses under his arm. An odd leap downwards. Not enough blood to keep him alive.
Shulker boxes are laid out on the still-standing part of the path, each one color coded and neatly organized. He takes out various bricks and the already oxidized copper, and moves to the tower they belong to. Half of it is on the ground next to a crumbled base. Bricks are scattered everywhere. He makes a little pile for the materials he’s brought over, and then steps off the pathway and into the grass, placing down an empty shulker box as he walks.
There’s a lot going through his head; if Flame will come back for round two. He certainly made a threat, and so far today the fight hasn’t happened. What else is he waiting for? Maybe he is waiting for Zam to be back so he can run it back all over again, force Zam to watch and listen as everything he loves is burned to the ground. Then bathe in that feeling; in the grief and the sorrow and the anger and all the pent-up feelings Zam keeps because he is a pacifist and nothing can dispel him from going against his beliefs.
Zam kneels to the grass and threads his fingers through the blades. Pinpricks of packed mud meet his fingers. He wonders if there is anything left here worth the grief.
Even so, he cleans. He cleans and polishes and reaps until he’s ready to sow, until the ground is fertilized and tilled and imbued with rich nutrients. Until it’s laid out neat and nice, until the wild cows can come back and start to graze at the grass still left standing. His shulker box isn’t empty anymore, filled with the remnants of death and destruction and fire and solar flares. He moves it away from the grass.
He picks up the materials he laid out and starts to build.
It’s a slow process, at first. He doesn’t remember what this used to look like before it was destroyed. It’s a tower, but it’s all meshed with the other buildings destroyed that day, into something of rainbow swirls and noisy images and exorbitant headaches. He lets himself get immersed in the act, feel the repetitive motion as he runs out of bricks and then cement and has to go replenish his stock.
He wonders why he’s doing this. The fight won’t happen. Flame will come back. Spawn will be in ruins. Everything he spends time on will be destroyed again; anything Flame thinks is too nice to be left standing, too strong of a build, will be dead and gone. He’s building grave after grave right now, a graveyard with decorative tombstones that’ll wear down with time. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards. Picked up, thrown to oblivion, buried under a mountain of its own debris.
But what can he do against this? He can fight; he won’t fight, and there’s a difference. He can’t stop Flame, because Flame will never listen to him again. That’s been made abundantly clear – too clear. He feels sick again. And if he builds spawn back up, the only thing he has against Flame, Flame will just let it crumble again, and they’ll be in this cycle for the rest of their lives, entangled in a disgustingly complex magnetic field that won’t let them go. It’ll keep getting tighter, and tighter, until they’re struggling to breathe. From anger, from grief, from desperation, from whatever. None of it matters if they both end up dead.
Maybe he’s doing this for himself. Bringing what he loves back to life because he has the power to. Because it’s the one thing he wants to be doing. He wants to see spawn prosper and grow, wants it to be a safe haven for everyone in the faction and – building it back up to just see it shine while it lasts. Truthfully, it’s all he has. It’s above Flame and the rest of them, above fighting and wars and alliances and friendship because it stands longer than anything else. It’s remembered longer than anything else.
And if he doesn’t have this one, one thing above Flame, for himself, what does he have?
It’s a truth that hurts him to realize. It bores into his chest and digs out a cavity in his heart to sit nice and cozy. And it sits, and the pumping of his blood gets just a little slower. He knows that without something to fight for, he is nothing. He’s known that for a long while. Somehow, he keeps fighting.
Zam takes a long, deep breath and exits the completed tower.
He decides that right now, he’ll simply continue to build.
