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“I have something for you.”
There’s an object, similar to a Nether Star, placed gently in his outstretched hands. It’s coated in enchantment energy, in shifting shimmers of lavender and white and – it matches his skin. There’s warmth attached to it, bleeding from the crystals interwoven to form a star shape. It should be searing. It’s raw life energy compressed into a solid object, birthed from the essence of the Nether and the End and the Overworld.
It reminds him of cold fingers curled sweetly around a mug of hot chocolate, steam and vapor lifting up in the air to be pushed out by heat from vents; heat from fireplaces and heat from bodies, heat that can’t be escaped, because they’re in winter, and they need the warmth if they stand any chance of surviving.
It reminds him of fresh blood laced across his skin and the smell of copper. It reminds him of moisture melting from the fluids as they dry themselves to the grass. It reminds him of golden apples; dandelion suspicious stew. It makes him sick and dying, too many health potions all at once, so much regeneration his heart is hammering in his chest and it hurts.
His fingers curl around it. A solid weight in his hands. It tethers him to the earth. “Thank you, man.”
He lays on his bed, the thing of stardust and life and death still wrapped beneath his fingertips.
His eyes don’t wander. They can’t wander, when there’s a delicate source of light in the palm of his hand, breathing and living and so alive. It’s a visible contrast to everything around him. Pentar’s asleep in the next bed over, diamond armor draped across his shoulders. The lights are off in the bedroom. Moonlight seeps in through the drawn curtains, reflecting off the ground.
ECorridor has yet to put on his armor. He’s still trying to work up the courage to press the heart into place with the rest of them, all ten of them, his originals; he doesn’t know where this one comes from. Sure, it was delivered through Pentar’s hands, but there are traces of other lives in the heart.
He’s had life from others reside in his body before. While he lived in Bliss, lives came and went, compressed into gems that channeled the energy into something useful. It could only store so much — the rest fit into a neat glass vial, a default form; he didn’t see it much. But he felt it, in his body and in others. He felt energy slip into his gem after every kill, felt his abilities grow stronger, and stronger.
This should be no different, he says. But he has to apply it manually; it’s not directly sinking into his body, and that’s scary. He has to press it into place and feel his other ten original hearts shift around in his chest. He has to be conscious that this is someone else’s; life that was never meant to be his — never meant to be Pentar’s. It’s fucking terrifying, because it brings him back to Domonoko’s life. And then the loss of all of it.
So it is different. That revelation, in and of itself, is enough to get him to set the heart down on his bed covers. It sits there, unmoving, uncaring, unforgiving. It’s nothing ECorridor is and it doesn’t strive to be.
He looks away.
There’s a lot of painfully familiar texture under the pads of his fingers now. Grass stained with dried blood and marrow spilled from broken bones. The sun, pale and beating down on everyone in the sky, oblivious to what’s happening on its ground. Water dries and floats into the air as vapor and swirls with others like it to make clouds. The sun shines, and it keeps shining, long after all the water from the blood is gone, long after the grass is solid to the touch.
The heart lifts into the sky and blocks out the sun, but it’s equally bright. The sky shines purple and plants learn to soak up a different kind of light. It bears down on what’s happened and keeps bearing down. It’s as impervious as the sun was, but somehow, it’s worse, because it has the power to change it. It has the power to undo everything, to fix him before he is ever broken.
Lives in the Bliss faction work differently. Even now, when he has life for Domonoko, it would fail. If he was still in Bliss himself, he’d reject the heart – probably die and lose one, too. It’s a weight in his stomach, dragging it down to his gut, and past that. He sucks in air through his teeth. He sees Domonoko in front of him, and then he sees death; gem fragments across the floor, silent chokes for air as a throat is blocked with blood.
Domonoko’s not dead. He hasn’t been dead for years. He’s been alive and well and breathing because ECorridor put in the work to fish him from the underworld, to drag his soul from the departed and place him back in his body. The blood has never washed off. There’s still netherrack dust under his fingernails, from when he mined out the netherite to create the beacon. Even now, as Domonoko lives, and as ECorridor isn’t in Bliss anymore.
After Domonoko, more blood piled on. Not always someone he knew, but always someone’s. Always someone he didn’t want to care about, but ended up anyway, because he couldn’t fucking move on. And even with the heart sitting here – someone he didn’t even fucking kill – he’s still thinking about it. He wallows in it, silently, miserably. Ugh.
His hands slip under the crystal and pull it up from the covers of his bed. It still glows. It’s still warm under his touch. It’s still the same color. Life energy still seeps from the inside. It still smells faintly like roses and copper and ozone. It still sits comfortably in his grasp.
He can’t save others he’s killed; others he’s watched die. He can pass the life on, throw it away, crush it until it’s nothing but stardust on a cracked stone floor. He can give it back to Pentar and be done with everything, and sink into his bed until his eyes are covered by bedsheets and his mattress is permanently dampened.
There’s some part of him that needs protection. He doesn’t want to fight, not ever, not when he’s going to die himself. He doesn’t want to die, because he’ll feel what Domonoko and everyone else has felt, and that’s a nightmare, and it quickens his breath the moment he thinks about it. If he has enough life force, enough hearts, to run away when he’s attacked, maybe he can spin his own life into the protection he needs. He can morph his blood and his flesh and his bone into armor and run away and be fine. Fine enough that he won’t die. Fine enough that he won’t kill. And isn’t that just everything he wants.
With steady hands, he places his palms under the heart and presses it into his chest.