Tormented by Visions

Mob stalls forty or so blocks away from his home. He looks at the blocks he placed, the windows, the wall he built, and the dirt blocking his view of the trap he set. Untouched, unchanged. His home. Mob grips his sword tighter. He takes a deep breath and marches to his door.  Death is not his end, he should not be so afraid, he is a Player. Worlds can be changed by his hand, if he cares to change them. 

He pushes the door open. The first floor is the same. Gentle sunlight filters through his windows. His bed, his chest, and the crafting table. It’s all the same. The air is still and quiet. The dirt he’d placed over the stairs has been cleared, and remnants of it are scattered about. He takes the stairs carefully. The metal of his boots clinking against the wood. He grips his sword tighter, ready to defend himself or run. He stands on the second floor and finds it empty. The dirt over Verity’s nest has been disrupted, as though something has climbed out. Climbed out and down his stairs, chasing after something (after him).

He doesn’t really have a choice, as he stares at the dirt, willing himself to turn back, to leave. Mob sheathes his sword with steady hands. He takes out his shovel and digs. The world inside his home is silent as he digs, but his thoughts race. 

Verity told him the villagers were gone, that something was coming in three days. Was the Verity he knew the same as the Husk or were they two different things? Verity asked if he lived alone, but Verity knew that answer, no, Mob and Verity lived in the same house. Was he asking if Mob counted him as a person? Mob had said yes, he was the only Player in this world. He was alone, he hadn’t considered Verity any more alive than the villagers. Mob was wrong about that.

He’d placed Verity with the villagers, aware in some ways of the world. Someone he could have basic interactions with, but that had been an ignorant decision. 

Nearing the end, after he asked Verity to play music, Mob had started to think differently. He had started to think about how to approach Verity as a person, not an all-knowing book he could search for answers in. He liked Verity, he trusted Verity. Could things have been different if he had seen Verity as his equal? It’s too late now, he’s made a grave and he must lay in it. 

What haunts him is Verity's origin. When Mob first came to this World, he knew that it had been Modified, but he had not expected Verity. 

There’s nothing in his house. Verity is gone. Where relief should lay in his chest, but there is only disappointment. He is alone. Mob drops his shovel, takes off his helmet, and sets it on the wood ridge of Verity’s nest. He’s breathing hard as he stares at the dirt and the floor of his home, and he collapses into it. It doesn’t seem possible that Verity is gone. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. All of that, the fear, the waiting, the chaos, just for Verity to vanish. 

☺︎

The world is the same, but Mob is not. He’s more aware of the silence of the world. The lack of birds, rabbits, and sheep. His shoulder aches with his movements. Days pass in his home as he wanders aimlessly up and down, down and up. Half humming Verity’s song. His house is too quiet. It is too big now. Too empty. He takes down the cobblestone wall and fills in the trap. He breaks apart Verity’s nest. His shoulder heals, and the last physical reminder of Verity is gone. He pretends he doesn’t mourn that. 

He plants wheat seeds and potatoes to pass the time, he looks up once, searching for Verity to ask what the radius is of a block of water that will keep the soil saturated, and then feels ashamed for it. 

It rains, the first time since he asked Verity if it would. He is alone. He is alone in his world. He sits on his bed and watches it come down until night falls, and it finally comes to an end. Silence settles back around him.

It strikes him then, as he drags the blanket over his body. He has not seen a monster in nights, he has not even heard the warbles of an Enderman. He has not seen a cow or a sheep. That thought hits him hard, making his heart race. He sits upright, his chest heaving air in and out with a sudden rush of adrenaline. He scrambles out of bed, shoving his feet into his boots, and rushes into the night. Something should have Spawned in by now. Something should be out there beside his wheat and carrots. Something. 

It’s stupid and desperate to run out into the night without his sword, in only his scuffed-up iron boots. He stares out into the darkness, straining to hear anything, the groan of a zombie, the rustle of a spider, the sound of an arrow being drawn back and aimed at his head. Anything. There is nothing. He is alone. 

He stands in the dark, illuminated only by the waning moon that drifts above him, uncaring and distant. His heart rate and breathing slow. Leaving shame in its place. Mob scrubs a hand against his face. Frustrated with himself, did he seriously hope to find some proof of that Husk? He storms back inside, slamming the door behind him and kicking off his boots. It was stupid, he’s stupid. Verity is gone. He is alone. That is not going to change. He goes to bed angry.

One

Codependency; a theory that attempts to explain imbalanced relationships where one person enables another person's self-destructive behavior

The glass is cool against the back of Mob’s neck, in the gap between his helmet and chest plate. The glass is thin and fragile, his Lookout is made of wood. It isn’t meant to be a Stronghold. Mob isn’t stupid, he knows how this will end, in the mouth of this husk of a thing that has infected and corroded his memory of Verity. The small Verity whom he could cradle in his hands, the dandelion yellow Verity, the calm as the sea Verity. His friend, Verity. The only other thing that mattered, Verity.

Was Verity his friend? What was Verity? Did that even matter anymore? Did the nights talking quietly with Verity as he drifted off to sleep mean anything? Does it mean anything that there had been days where the only thing Mob wanted was to carry Verity next to his heart? Wanting to feel the gentle warmth of Verity, hear Verity’s soothing voice. Dose this mean anything, does it matter?

He knew his death was undeniable and imminent, that there was no escaping it. His babbling about the music, about the monster, about Verity was simply a way to suspend it. The glass is cool against his neck.

Verity is nearby. You can not fall asleep.

Mob’s lungs heave in the air. The fear is cresting over him. In the back of his mind, he knows that his death is not permanent. That it will never be permanent. That is the truth for people like him, Players, he always has the choice to Respawn or Quit. He can always Quit, he has an escape, an escape that not even this Husk of Verity could chase him through.

So he turns, he knows this thing, and he knows when his sight settles on the window, it will strike. What he doesn’t know is if this Husk will kill him quickly or toy with him, and he finds he does not care. Still, he turns to the window, flashlight landing on the face pressed against the fogged-up glass. Dark eyes focused wholly on him. Even knowing that the thing is there, knowing this very act will kill him, he screams in fear anyway as it breaks the glass, night air rushing in with it.

Blind instinct has him flinching back, his boot slipping off the blanket as the face of this thing rushes at him, mouth bared with sharp teeth. Some sort of wailing cry coming from it. It’s the last thing he sees as his head cracks against the wall, the impact against his helmet ringing in his ears. His last panicked thought is that at least he won’t witness this husking tearing into his flesh, at least he won’t hear it declare him as Mine.

☺︎

Mob doesn’t have the chance to Respawn or Quit. He just wakes up. He wakes up to the breeze and the sound of the lookout creaking. He wakes up to the sunrise and sees the ceiling of his tower. He wakes slowly, dazed and in a state that could almost be called calm. He wakes up to a dull throbbing in his left shoulder. The door is still haphazardly barricaded, the window broken, glass shards on the floor glitter like diamonds, but he is alive. Alive and confused. Mob sits up slowly, waiting for the other boot to drop, for the horror of his reality breaking through the early morning. Instead, nothing changes. It stays calm and still. He probes the ache in his shoulder, finding a chunk taken out of his chest plate. His tunic is torn, and in his tender skin is a bitemark. He can’t get a good look at it, but he can tell his shoulder is intact. There’s just deep gouges left from sharp teeth. The Husk bit him, tasted his blood and flesh, and left him alive.

It leaves him feeling vulnerable and confused as Mob gets out of bed. The blanket sliding off his legs to pool on the floor. His boots crunch against the glass as he looks around the small space for a long moment, dazed and enraptured with the way the first rays of sunlight touch the wall. He turns and climbs out of the window. He doesn’t bother with the door, it didn’t matter in the end anyway. He gazes out, taking in a deep breathe of cool morning dew air, watching as the sun rises and the sky changes from soft pastels to the stable and calm blue of the day. The sun that burns zombies and skeletons. The sun that keeps the monsters at bay. The sun warms his skin. He is alive.

Mob moves slowly and quietly around the side of the tower to the stairway. Fear beating in his chest, that thing could exist in the daylight, it could just be toying with him. The state of the lookout do not ease this fear. Deep gouges mar the wooden stairs and the blocks he’d placed to stop it. None of it mattered, The Husk just moved past them. He breaks a pathway back down. The day is quiet around Mob. It’s the quiet sort of world after a storm, not the quiet of everything holding its breath. There is no sign of Verity. Nothing but the damage to his lookout tower. It unsettles Mob, the world itself is unchanged, but the context of it has.

There is something in his world that is worse than a Wither or the Ender Dragon. Something quicker than a zombie or a spider. There are villages devoid of Villagers and Iron Golems. There is something with an endless and wild hunger. Something all-knowing and sly.

He has two options, he muses as he stares off into the green distance, poppies dotting the landscape. He can keep going, travel far from his Spawn, and he can explore and see what this world has to offer. He could start anew, build a home out of birch or spruce. He could find a swamp or a taiga, he could go anywhere. He could do anything. He could go home.

He could go back to a place he knows, back to his bed and his chests, his furnace, and back to where he left Verity. He twirls his sword, the blade shining in the sunlight. Could he kill Verity? Not the thing from last night, but the Verity who advised him on trades, the Verity who helped him find diamonds, who played music for him. Could he kill Verity? Verity, a thing who never ate, never drank, and as far as Mob recalls never slept. Verity, unchanging like the landscape of the plains. Mob turns towards the direction of his home. Deep down, he couldn’t just leave, he had to know. He has to see if Verity is still there. He wants Verity to be there. He doesn’t know what will happen if Verity is there.