Archive of Our Own

PORT-AUX-FRANCAIS, ANTARCTIC ICE SHEETS, ANTARCTIC EMPIRE

[Philza Minecraft is a wiry blond man of indeterminate age, who seems to laugh more than he frowns and listen more than he speaks. He takes care to choose a location that lets him survey both exits, a difficult feat considering the limitations of his wings. Despite having been out of power for several decades, he is still recognized by Antarctic citizens, and our table is informed that our beverages are on the house.]

P : It’s been a while since someone asked either of us about before the Saint-Malo trials. That’s the big fucking event, the thing that put us on the map as something to be worried about. We’re labeled as the Antarctic territory before that, in documentaries, and then for a while we’re former AE, which, come on, it’s not like we packed up and left– sorry, shit, I’m getting off track. What’d you want to know, is it anything specific? You said you’re doing your project on the early years?

I: On the Pre-Reset Antarctic, yeah. The population dynamics of having less than two hundred people at Port-aux-Francais, and just ninety at the Ancient Stronghold, and the rationing years. Those years. My grandma used to talk about them.

P: Oh, shit, really? Let me guess– your name’s Hush, right? One of Billie’s grandkids?

I: I didn’t think you’d still be in contact.

P: Eh, I keep up with people. Most of the foxes these days have white fur, anyway.

I: Ha, yeah, silver’s pretty rare! She still brags about it.

P: It’s her fucking right, she switched over before Techno did. I’ve never seen someone adapt to the cold that fast, especially not at Port. So she’s the one who told you about the rationing? What else’d she talk about?

I: I wouldn’t want to influence the interview. How about we start with what you’d consider the real beginning, or a turning point, or something that led to the Antarctic Empire becoming what it is today? Whatever stands out to you.

P: That’s a tall fucking order, mate, I don’t know. Suppose it really started in Year Two, after we’d got Pete’s railroads up and the other nations got nervous. Nobody lived in Antarctica over the winter, before then. We weren’t even really planning to leave people in the Stronghold that winter, we were gonna hunker down in Port-aux-Francais and have me and Techno stay back with a skeleton crew. Not that they gave us a choice, with the embargo. 

I: That’s when you’d say it started?

P: It’s when we realized something had to change. Before that, the empire part was a joke. We’d been dropped in this world just two years ago, we were focused on surviving, right? Calling it an empire was like a kid naming his bedroom Bobby’s Kingdom, or whatever the fuck, it was a bit . 

[Philza is animated, leaning forward onto his elbows. The rest of the cafe has gone quiet. Outside, the snow picks up, and more people come in, but they stop their conversations as soon as they pick up the mood.]

P: But Transatlantic, the Corvarians, all those motherfuckers who couldn’t handle us having a stronghold and good mines, they cut us off from everything in the darkest time of the year. They trapped us in the cold, in eternal night, because they figured if we starved to death, Port-aux-Francais would give them whatever deals they wanted, and they didn’t care who they were fucking killing. We were peaceful, before the embargo. We just wanted trade deals, we collaborated with anyone who’d help us build our railroads. We never struck the first blow. After the embargo– after that winter– we figured that wasn’t gonna work. 

I: So you adopted some new technologies.

P: Yeah, we had innovations in our manufacturing, our greenhouses, our fucking sanitation– but that’s not what you’re talking about, right? Forget the emperor shit. If you’re interviewing me about this, you don’t want to hear about the greenhouses. You want to hear about the planes.

*

Explosions rocked Boomer Bridge and Boomer Station in thirteen places, half-constructed connections to Africa crumbling hopelessly into the waves, and that was the first any of them heard of the embargo: frantic radio calls and sudden silences and plumes of fire nearly too far away to see, winking out as the foundations holding the tracks sank. Philza rushed over as soon as the news reached him, leaving his patrol path to race for the weather tower at the edge of the permafrost, closer to the ocean. When he got there, the fires of the nearest explosion were still intermittently visible, tiny beacons screaming out into the dark.

The temperature was far below zero Fahrenheit, ice adorning the weather tower with thick icicles and muffling the insistent glow of the signal lights, coating their treaded boots and freezing eyelashes to skin. Even with several layers, even without a strong wind, it sliced Phil to the bone. His fingers were so numb he’d had trouble holding the reins of the sled, and the dogs had flopped in exhaustion as soon as he’d let them stop, close together and panting. 

The meteorologist who met him was called Vesca, one of the citizens who’d joined in the past few months. She dipped her head in a salute, too hampered by her bulky coat to raise her arm. Phil recognized her by her strawberry-patterned mittens; she had on a regulation greatcoat, flannel and wool and a cap with ear covers obscuring all features but the chapped tip of her nose. She’d recognized him by his appearance at the tower and his own clothing, probably, the shoulder patched with an eye of ender to indicate that he’d come from the Ancient Stronghold and a crown to indicate what rank he held there. Citizens from Port-aux-Francais had a blue sun.

“The dawn train’s derailed, sir,” Vesca reported, breath clouding out in front of her. “We saw it hit the waves. We couldn’t see what did it, but it had to be planted charges, maybe on the train itself or the underside of the supports. Has to be! There’s no way anything the train was supposed to be carrying could be explosive enough to take out the bridge.” 

“Fuck,” Phil hissed. His voice came out raspy, constricted with the cold; his fucking lungs felt scoured, frozen from the inside out. Some days the Antarctic was beautiful to him, but today was not one of those days. “ Fuck . Any signal flares?”

“No, sir. No radio contact from the train, either. We are receiving a transmission on the usual frequency, from a Business Bay ship that’s gotta be at least fifty nautical miles away, but it’s– it’s bad. Real bad.”

“Lemme guess, they’re declaring their right to all our shit?”

“They’re declaring an embargo,” Vesca said. “They said that trade between the Antarctic Empire and its allies has officially been banned, for violations of– oh, some total bullshit about monopolies and the End. We tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t answer our hails. No one at Boomer Station will answer us, either, it’s like the whole network’s down.”

The rail network was a series of narrow bridges spanning the polar ocean, heated just enough with redstone that the tracks wouldn’t freeze over, and they needed it if they were going to survive. It was a marvel of Antarctican engineering. It had taken months of building at breakneck speed, facilitating the trade connections that would let them expand their population past subsistence levels, and if it was damaged, they wouldn’t be able to repair it. Not until spring, when the ships at Port-aux-Francais might be able to navigate the ice. Not unless they wanted to send some poor bastards on a suicide mission that probably wouldn’t even work, trudging along the iced-over remains of the bridge to attempt repairs you’d need machinery to fix. 

Phil knew how it would go, if the circuits had broken: how the freeze would have settled in by now, how impossible it would have been for someone to escape a train that hit the water, how even if they resisted the shock on their system and reached the surface, the emergency ladders on the pillars would’ve been buried under coats and coats of ice. 

All of the Antarctic Empire was ice. You looked out over the wasteland and it was so white it was agony to gaze upon, rough patches of ice that would kill you with a bad step and compressed meteoric ice that was nearly solid ground, crests of icy mountains like foam on ocean waves and icy, impossibly steep valleys, all of it beautiful until you stepped outside and the cold clawed you to pieces. You couldn’t touch metal with your bare skin in Antarctica unless you wanted that skin to come off. You couldn’t stay outside more than a few hours, and it was April now, the opening chords of a black and endless winter. Twenty-four hours of unrelenting darkness a day, temperatures plummeting and any animal worth catching migrated elsewhere for the season. The only beauty was the aurora, green-violet lights twisting over the night sky like wingless dragons, and the flickering, refracted night sky, and that was a remote beauty, too distant to be useful. It didn’t help the people on the ground.

Phil couldn’t remember what he’d done with his life before SMPEarth, because nobody but the administrators knew that, but he remembered enough to know he’d be a lot more useful on the radio than finishing his patrol. Looking out for invaders had become a higher priority after the second attempt from other factions to infiltrate the End– which, okay, once was funny, twice wasn’t, especially when it was accompanied by a fire that took out half the Stronghold’s supplies– but he’d never adapted properly to the cold, and he wasn’t the best musher they had. 

Technoblade could go days with a dog team, mapping out dangerous topography and tracking polar bear dens. He’d been the visionary behind the whole faction, the rallying point of every misfit who couldn’t succeed anywhere else: the abrasive, the inconvenient, the wanted-by-the-law and Phil, who hadn’t adapted to the landscape past gaining night vision, and then just because he’d had to go nocturnal during the first winter, to find his way around.

Radio communications he could do, though. The protocols for direct communication were still being worked on, most Antarcticans coming from different factions with wildly different lingo, and any added bit of comprehension helped. 

The fires burned themselves out about an hour later. Phil stayed at the outpost for several more in case of an attack, coordinating responses to disaster zones people could reach, but no ships came close enough to bombard them, or try to land troops. They didn’t need to. All they needed to do was break the railroad and declare that the Antarctic Empire’s allies would suffer if they tried to help them, and the Empire’s own fucking land would take care of the rest.

By majority vote, the settlement known as the Antarctic Empire is under an embargo. Attempts to trade with the Antarctic Empire will result in sanctions. Attempts to break the South Atlantic blockade will result in a declaration of war. 

It was the only thing the ships lingering by Boomer Station would fucking transmit, and it was still ringing through Phil’s head a day later, when he was back in the Ancient Stronghold and its dubious warmth. That bored, dispassionate voice, reading off a recorded message, and on a second frequency a person explaining that she was stuck on the bridge, that the Strobe Flash had only partially derailed and she couldn’t free her legs, requesting a response and repeating her identification and location until the signal finally vanished. They hadn’t physically had the ability to reach her. 

“Not sure I see a way that we survive the winter like this,” Technoblade admitted to him after they got that report. They’d cut back on coal heating, so they weren’t in their usual war room, just a storage room with a furnace and some bedrolls laid out on the stone. Come what they were calling nighttime, they planned to pile into it with about ten other people, two of the three families present that had kids and as many sled dogs they could stand, but for the moment they were alone, and papers plastered most available surfaces. 

Calculations of greenhouse yields, the caloric density of nonperishables, the slim chances of fishing under the ice and coming up with something nutritious. Calculations for stretching coal and oil and how labor would affect rationing for each citizen in the stronghold, how much they could contract and still live through the night, and some discarded plans for striking back– useless, furious daydreams, because if they couldn’t cross miles of frozen bridge to save one person, they definitely couldn’t get across an entire ocean to assassinate the fuckers who deserved to die.

“We have three months, if we tighten our belts and get lucky fishing,” Phil said slowly, dread coiling in him like a serpent, and Techno nodded, stiff. Those were the final calculations, as shaved-down as they could go. Three months. If they hadn’t suffered in the last successful sabotage from Business Bay, which they’d hoped to fix with the advent of Boomer Station and their new deal with Ursus – if they’d caught more seals in the summer and cured the meat, or built a fourth and fifth greenhouse instead of investing in better heating– they might have made it. “Those fucking bastards. Do we even have the equipment for ice fishing on that scale?”

“We’d need drills,” Techno said. Adaptation had turned his face forbidding, tusks growing in at the corner of his mouth and the width of his shoulders increased by a good bit. Now that they’d made the announcement about the embargo– or rather, now that some Stronghold citizens had heard the distress calls over the radio and told everyone else what it meant– they’d had six people go down with fevers, switches flipping in their genes. “The bigger problem’s finding seals. Polar bears know how to hunt them, they’ve got the skills, but us? We’re little babies. We’re set up to be bottle fed by civilization, Phil, and a dozen pinnipeds aren’t gonna feed three hundred people.”

“Port-aux-Francais might still be reachable by ship,” Phil said. “They want the Stronghold. Starving us out doesn’t mean they have to kill everyone there, Pete might be able to make a deal.”

“He’s gonna get given the worst terms,” Techno said despairingly. “Some jerks are gonna come in and go hey Pete, how about we give you food if you give us your dignity and also all your gold, and Pete’s gonna agree. We’re gonna have to hope they offer , it’s that or certain death. You heard what he said about the damage!”

Yeah, they’d heard Pete’s report, alright. Every railroad station had been hit, sabotaged as the trains ran through a station in Australia, and the rail itself had been broken in four places. Business Bay, Transatlantic, the Corvarians, and a terrifying number of other nations had announced that they would kill anyone trying to fix it, and the admins had declined to comment.

The Antarctic Empire wasn’t a real faction, was the argument, and so it didn’t have the protections that a faction was entitled to. It was a militant settlement centered around hoarding the End’s resources, unable to support itself and entirely reliant on trade, and that made it a far-flung base at best. That made it fair fucking game, and if the people living in the Stronghold wanted to protest–

Well. They weren’t the majority, were they. The only way they were getting this embargo overturned was through a direct countermand  in the world net, and none of the admins cared enough to grant that mercy. They’d disliked Techno from the beginning.

“Should let Pete know we’d authorize it, if someone offered,” Phil said, and Techno nodded, glanced over the numbers again like they would’ve changed while he wasn’t looking. “I think a drill’s a solid plan. We’ve got metals, we’ve got fuel, we’ve got the basics of industry. We can rig something up to send people out hunting and fishing.”

“Yeah, and I have some fast-growing varieties ready for the greenhouse,” Techno drew out. “The nutrient thing might be a problem, ‘cause if we use every fertilizer available we’re gonna have a real disease risk, but we should be okay on water, and we can find another coal seam, probably use the oil until then. Heck, I bet Port-aux-Francais can go after whales, they’ve got some ships they can retrofit.”

Assuming those ships weren’t targeted too, but hey, maybe Pete would scrape up some torpedoes of his own. It wasn’t breaking an embargo to hunt for yourself .

“That still leaves us at least a month short,” Phil pointed out. “Even if we eat the fucking dogs–”

“Bruh.”

“I’m just pointing it out! I’m saying it’s an option, dude, it’s not like we can eat metal!”

“Maybe you can’t,” Techno sniffed, and Phil huffed a laugh. “Nah, but we’re not going down this easy, are we? We’re– we live here. We’re adapting, we’re making things happen. The ground didn’t work? We imported the ground. The sun stopped existing? We went to a volcano and imported the sun. We’ve got some resources, we just need to convert them into edible items somehow. Or, y’know, there’s always turning to cannibalism.”

“Oh, right, that’s the first option right there, just lop off a limb and throw it in the pot–”

“We have to form national traditions somewhere,” Techno said solemnly. “No, but– come on. Come on. There’s gotta be something.”

“Right,” Phil said, glaring down at the desk. He felt the need to pace, so he did that, offsetting internal restlessness with external motion and keeping himself warm at the same time. The furnace wouldn’t be lit until it was necessary, so the inside of the room was a cool forty degrees: coming from outside it was sweltering, but Phil still had to keep his layers on, and they kept the doors closed to build up body heat. “Food exists with those guys way over there. Precious metal exists with us over here. To eat food, we just need to turn over there into here, except we can’t use ships, and going over land’s not gonna get us off our own territory, so that leaves us the fucking– wait, shit, actually, do we still have those schematics? The ones for Spifey’s, what was it fucking called–” 

“ Phil , you’re a genius ,” Techno blurted, standing up and knocking the table over in his rush. Phil dove for the fallen papers before they could get irreversibly mixed up, and by the time he’d stood again Techno had left the room, running for his usual quarters. 

He came back with blueprints.

*

I: Just to clarify, these blueprints were for the Polar 506?

P: They were sort of for the 506. We got them through a mix of spying and reverse-engineering, that kind of shit, and Spifey, he and his people had built theirs for reconnaissance. We needed cargo capacity, so it was a bulkier fucking design to start with and we had to factor in that weight, right, and we had to add heating elements or the fuel would freeze in the fucking tank. If our engineers hadn’t been geniuses, it never would’ve worked.

I: What led to the name Octangula?

P: Eh, it was a prototype, the engineers wanted it to sound cool. Pete found this weird symbol in the permafrost back in the first year, looked kind of like an octahedron, so they named it after that. Later, we took votes for individual planes’ names– that’s how the Aurora type got its name, ‘cause it was supposed to slip past enemy lines, and the fucking– well, the Gorecrows and the Mariner, those are obvious. The first cargo planes stayed as Octangula , though. It was a good design, easy enough to manufacture parts for, and we could build it with the resources we had. 

I: But– sorry, I would just like to clarify– was the Octangula the first prototype that you tested personally?

P: Are you kidding me, I was the second person in the empire who ever flew. The situation was fucked, and it’d been a month by that point, the engineers had been working triple fucking shifts, half of them were hearing colors– we had volunteers, but it was a long shot, and we’d been working on the greenhouses and fishing at the same time. Ninety people need skilled workers a whole lot more than they need two emperors.

*

The Octangula biplane had been cobbled together from scraps and looked like it, mottled like a stray dog and rough around the edges, but its engine ran. It hadn’t exploded yet. It’d even been flown a bit, though the engineer who’d done it had basically circled the base and then nearly crashed it trying to land, so it wasn’t much more than a proof of concept. 

The runway was a better prospect. It had been lit by redstone lines, scarlet streaks glowing along the concrete to keep ice from forming. Brighter lights were posted in the buildings, yellow and searing; they turned Techno’s pale blue coat into something almost white, jaundiced the snow. They’d built the runway close to the surface of the stronghold, to let workers escape the omnipresent wind and to take advantage of the power lines; the only place other place above ground was the airplane hangar, and the only things in it were six nervous engineers and two equally nervous emperors, staring at the biplane like it might bite. 

It was bulky, easily twice Techno’s height and visibly welded, constructed of more metal than was probably advisable. The seat for the pilot was cramped, with a glass cover to protect against the cold and a stick for steering that would require constant attention to keep the pilot from falling straight into the sea.

It didn’t look much like Spifey’s plane, or what Phil remembered seeing as it shot overhead and went down in flames. His main memory of that encounter was of chasing Spifey down on foot, watching the guy stagger as the cold sank in its claws: Spifey had had a claim in the Antarctic, too, but those had been early days, and he hadn’t expected to be brought down. 

If anything, the plane reminded Phil of a bad attempt at origami, where all the copied folds went crooked and rounded and the crane came out as a goose. 

“Welp, that’s a deathtrap, back to the drawing board,” Techno said, low so only Phil could hear, and Phil bumped his shoulder in rebuke, bounced off because Techno was a head and shoulders higher than him and both of them were wrapped up like mummies. The wind was cutting but mild enough to withstand, the temperature at least a few degrees above the point where if you threw boiling water it’d hit the ground as chunks of ice, but that wouldn’t be true in a couple of hours; according to their measurements, that night would be one of the coldest they’d seen, and there were some serious risks to their heating and sanitation. It was a miracle they’d had time to check out the biplane at all. “We had a good run, right, Phil? We came to an inhospitable environment, briefly lived in a natural formation we didn’t remotely build, tricked a bunch of people into coming to the worst place on earth – that’s cool, that’s enough. We can put that on our headstones.”

“Put what on our headstones, that we forgot to ward off sabotage and got eaten trying to lure seals with lights? That’s a great fucking epitaph, I bet you could make it into a haiku.”

“Hold up, hold up, I totally can,” Techno said. “Lemme just think of a sentence with five syllables, we can make this happen– yo, Nihil, how’s it going?”

Nihil was the engineer who’d tested the prototype, a short man with redstone-bright eyes, and even through the layers of clothing he projected exhaustion. He’d spent so much time working on the Octangula’s wiring over the past month that he’d actually adapted to it, redstone blinking on and off under his skin. Right now he was sparking intermittently, crimson radiating through his sleeves. “It’s good,” he said tiredly. “Magnificent, even. Which of you has decided to die today to test it properly?”

“Dude,” Techno said incredulously. “What is this, a hundred percent chance of explosion? I thought you said the prototype was ready, we don’t have to test it today if it’s not.”

“It is as ready as it is going to be,” the head engineer said, shooting Nihil a warning look that he definitely did not register as worthy of attention. “The trouble is– and I do not disagree with Nihil about it, necessarily, on a technical level– frankly, it is a skill issue. We can build a plane. We can understand its controls. But to actually fly it, over ice sheets and the open ocean… we have not had the materials necessary to allow it to float, for a water landing. Should you land in the wrong place, the biplane will sink like a stone, and become a coffin, and that would be entirely due to user error.”

The engineer’s floppy ears were pinned flat by the end of their speech, and they weren’t the only one looking uncomfortable. The idea of going up that high, held up by nothing but air and trusting in physical principles you couldn’t actually see, nothing but the floor of the biplane between yourself and the long fall to your death– it wasn’t something people did . Birds and bats flew, and fucking insects did , obviously, but it wasn’t something that happened to sapient beings. People belonged to the land and the sea, which seemed pretty reasonable to Phil, but–

“If Spifey could do it, I’m pretty sure I can,” Phil said, steeling himself, and Techno turned to him in alarm. “Come on, mate, one of us has logistical skills and one of us shoots guns sometimes. If it’s anyone, it’s gonna be me.”

“I mean, it could be some guy we order up there,” Techno said half-heartedly. “That’s reasonable, right? You can be a despot with less than a hundred people, that doesn’t instantly make us a cult. Or, y’know, I’m fairly sure I know how the controls work. I could take a shot at it.”

“I know how the controls work too,” Phil pointed out. “I was in the same fucking room when they were explaining them. I saw the diagrams.”

“Yeah, but did you take notes?”

“I’ve got a better memory than that,” Phil said, speeding up to reach the side of the plane. The cockpit was open. Heated, but the leather would still be cold as hell.

And the thing was, it did have to be one of them. Airplanes had been Phil’s suggestion, an off-the-wall proposition that their citizens had put their hearts and souls into, and he wasn’t comfortable letting someone else die if it failed. A short flight had worked out, with one of the engineers; a longer one would have to happen sooner or later, and it might as well be Phil in the cockpit as anyone else. 

Anyway, their citizens didn’t need emperors, they needed leaders who could help them, and Techno was much better qualified for that than Phil was. He could do logistics, give earnest, intent speeches that left stars in people’s eyes. He could hold his own in a fight, defeat their strongest fighters using less of his strength than his strategy, intimidate infiltrators from Business Bay with dead-eyed ease. Phil was just the same wiry bastard he’d been coming in, a support specialist whose greatest assets were resource gathering and an ability to aim good, who’d been basically grandfathered into his position. It wasn’t a question who was more expendable.

Phil clamored up and climbed into the cockpit, refusing to acknowledge Techno’s concerned jerk in his direction. He pulled the cover down, closing himself in like a chick in an egg. 

The change in temperature was as startling as rushing into the stronghold after a long patrol outdoors: sweltering discomfort, sweat breaking out on his skin, and then a gradual relief as blood flow returned unimpeded. He peeled his gloves off, flexing his numbed fingers, and tugged off his hat and balaclava and scarf, surveying the controls. 

A toggle to start the biplane up, already flicked to the right: an engineer had rotated the propellers, priming the engine with fuel, before they’d come out to inspect it. Okay, then. The next step was cranking the lever below it, to throw the sparks that would set the engine turning– and once he’d done that the biplane roared to life, engine growling like a tiger disturbed in its den.

Phil’s stomach twisted, but he forced the nerves back, closed them up in his head where they couldn’t bother him. He’d fought battles before, in the earliest days of SMPEarth and elsewhere, hazy flashes of adrenaline and blood on his teeth and pushing through pain to get a kill that the server itself kept from his mind. This wasn’t a battle at all, but it was something with hazards he could control, and it’d serve him just as well to keep calm here as on a battlefield. 

Fuel pressure gauges next, and a switch to choose whether he drew from the main tank or the auxiliary. The stick and the footbar, which let him tilt the rudder and the ailerons, and the throttle attached to it–

Yeah, he could do this. Constant contact with the controls, that was the key. He just had to get the plane in the air, do a little loop, and bring the plane back to the runway without squashing himself into a pancake. Nihil had done it on two hours of sleep and a near-fatal concentration of caffeine, so it couldn’t be fucking impossible. 

Granted, Phil could say that same thing about multivariable calculus and still end up showing his entire ass trying to replicate those results, but he was gonna look on the bright side for this shit. 

Everyone else had moved to the side, leaving him room to drive out of the hangar and turn to the runway. Phil managed that much, trying to get used to the controls, and increased the throttle to speed up the plane, just like he’d been told–

The redstone lights blew by, smearing into a crimson aurora. The runway started coming to an end. And the wings caught the air, engine humming like a song under Phil’s feet, and the landing gear left the ground as the nose tilted upward, and through the glass it was just ice , then: ice and stars and the aurora, and the swooping endless vertigo of flight .

*

I: There aren’t many surviving records from before the faction reset. Do you remember how other factions were using airplanes, at this time? From how you’re speaking, it sounds as though it was an unfamiliar technology.

P: Well, yeah, but it wasn’t unknown . Our problem was the weather, and the isolation– we knew the others used planes for reconnaissance, some espionage. Mapping, that sort of shit. Later on– we didn’t know this then, there wasn’t satellite radio and we were out in the middle of fucking nowhere– we learned there’d been some planes in fights already, mostly skirmishes where people realized you could drop bombs from the air or shoot the other pilot if you were super close to him. Those trajectories were a fucking nightmare, though, you couldn’t pay me to wave a pistol outside of my cockpit in our territory. 

The real change came when people figured out how to stagger gunfire with the propeller blades– I think Newfoundland had a model that shot through the middle of the propeller, and Business Bay had this plane, think they fucking stole most of the design, actually– it had about a five percent chance of shooting off its own propellers, but in a short dogfight it could hold its own. Till it jammed, of course. I think I killed a couple pilots I saw grabbing for their ammo belt to unjam it.

Back then, though, we didn’t know shit about all that. We designed the Octangulas to survive our climate and carry shit, they were like tortoises! The weight limit was fucking horrible, you couldn’t even fit two people in there! So we had this prototype, and the plans for what’d become the Nacreous 220– that’s named after the clouds, we saw them all the fucking time ‘cause they were just at our max altitude– were cooking, but we were real limited with the factories, what they could produce and how long it took to convert shit. Hard to mine in the permafrost. We had to expand the Stronghold carefully so the ice wouldn’t fuck it up. 

Anyway. We had this prototype, and a second one that’d be ready in about a week, but they only fit a single pilot, and they were so fucking slow that you could be in the air a good twenty hours after leaving Port-aux-Francais, before you hit another landmass. Our contacts in Australia and South Africa, they said they’d trade as long as we kept it on the down-low, but fucking hell, we had to get there first. 

So we tried stimulants, but they had the worst fucking side effects in the world, so we couldn’t use them too much– and we tried squeezing a second person in, which worked better for the Nacreous, later, and the Aurora– but mostly we just had to keep people awake. To stay awake, and– and fucking trust that we could sleep once we got there. If anyone had ever ambushed me when I landed, I would’ve walked into them like a lamb to the slaughter.

*

Near Cape Town they didn’t have a runway yet, but they did have a road cleared, blue flag waving fearlessly and large enough to see as Philza came down. He spent a good few hours resting at the base, sore and exhausted enough to fall asleep standing up, and another hour after that making sure their trades had worked out: redstone and deepslate for Cape Town, because nobody in South Africa needed diamonds, and supplies for home. Nonperishables and fast-growing seeds, enchanted bone meal and fertilizer. 

He couldn’t take as much as they needed without overloading the Octangula, but this would put them over the threshold for starting up their next greenhouse. Port-aux-Francais had a runway, and some limited trade with Australia, though Pete had had to agree to some monstrous fucking terms to get it, complete nonaggression and a pact not to interfere with the Stronghold. He’d built his runway in secret, making promises with fingers crossed, and it was good enough to let Phil land and refuel. He’d need to refuel, after this last trip, or he’d never get over the permafrost. 

It was his third trip, the second one he’d taken outside of Antarctican territory, but he still felt practically naked standing outside in Cape Town, under a sun that seared his pupils and warmth that seeped into him like an embrace. The climate felt alien, like he’d been abducted and dropped elsewhere, a fish tossed casually onto dry land: what the fuck were palm trees, anyway? What the fuck was sand and sea, a coastline sodden with cool rain, an outdoors where you could walk barefoot and show your entire face? 

The Stronghold had had sunshine before winter set in, pale light that glittered through the thick clouds and deposited about a teaspoon of warmth max , but it wasn’t like this. Everything was unreal, outside of the boreal darkness, like Phil had flown out of nighttime into the future. His hosts offered him rooibos tea and he accepted it, sat down facing the sea and drank in its heat, its earthy scent, but– they looked at him fucking weirdly, and he couldn’t stop looking back at them with the same bizarre incomprehension. 

Too few layers. Too many people, setting up a wood fire for a huge barbeque later that day, guests filtering in with lamb and chicken and eland, wine and beer– Philza was pretty sure the runway here had been set up by two sympathetic dudes just, like, by their fucking house, so he was definitely in the way here– and the cliffs dropped off so sharply into the sea. And the ground was soil and coastal grasses, concrete and packed dirt. And all the dogs had short coats, too many of them just strays with jutting hipbones, waiting hopefully for scraps. 

“You can stay, you know,” his host told him when he couldn’t stand it any longer, a little alarmed. “What’s your flight time, isn’t it twenty hours? You’ve slept for just a day!”

“The Stronghold won’t wait,” Phil said with as much of a smile as he could scavenge. He wanted to shake out of his fucking skin. He’d heard about culture shock, the weirdness of someplace being too different, but holy shit. Literally nothing threatening was happening, and he wanted to scurry back to safety like a mole rat. To get to a high vantage point and observe everything from there, even though he’d been living on rations for so long that the smell of raw meat made his mouth water. He was always hungry these days. “But, uh, good trade, mate, thanks. I hope your party goes well.”

“Let us know when you’ll be back,” his host said finally, after about ten more minutes of polite, frustrated back-and-forth, and Phil fled the scene like an incompetent burglar.

His Octangula hunched like an albatross on the runway, colored with sun-resistant paint to have their sun symbol on the wings, the octahedron smaller inside it, and the snarling face of a hoglin on the nose. It’d been refueled, checked over for major issues. A couple of horned teens were waiting by the plane, probably not much older than thirteen and lanky as hell. 

Phil wasn’t about to start fights over how much priority their trade got with their own allies, not when the fact that they’d been accepted at all was enough to bring this whole place under fire. He nodded to them, climbing into the cockpit, and the kids propped the propeller with expert precision, the engine starting up without any misfires. Phil took off for home, diving out like a gull over the white-capped waves. 

The sensation of leaving the ground never failed to make his stomach swoop, but it wasn’t a bad feeling. It felt like a first kiss, like getting a gift he’d never expected and grinning at the person who’d given it to him– a miracle that kept going , the ground dwindling as he passed through cloud cover, the waves dwindling into a glassy turquoise sameness. Up this high, the clouds formed their own architecture, sun-drenched kingdoms and snowdrifts of towers, a misty second sea that condensed against his cockpit’s glass like rain. He could lose visibility in a second, flying blind through a bank, and come out the other side into glaring sunlight, only his goggles keeping him from getting blinded again; he could tear through a budding storm and feel his biplane shake around him, a fragile can of metal separating him from the rest of the world. Like a time capsule set for fifty years from now.

It was almost twenty hours to Port-aux-Francais, and all of it was over the ocean. Phil kept his hands on the joystick, because the slightest loss of attention would dip his nose into the sea, and hummed to himself to stay awake. 

It was meditative. It was beautiful, honestly, as the afternoon fell down to evening, and the sky changed colors. Fear sort of faded away, stilling like a bad storm’s aftermath, and any terror he might’ve had of heights just vanished. The atmosphere was a different world, with rules they hadn’t anticipated from the ground: winds that carried weather systems and never brushed any animals but birds. Cold fronts and warm fronts and the clash that brewed up thunderstorms, cooling into cloud banks as he got closer to home and the chances of hot air fell to nil. The shifts in temperature from dawn to dusk to midnight, as sunlight vanished and the planet turned and the constellations came out to keep him company. 

His radio wouldn’t work until he got into the ocean around the Antarctic, past the parts of the Atlantic where if he went down nobody in the universe could find his corpse, and as soon as it crackled to life he said, “Philza Minecraft, Octangula 1, checking in - I’m on course to home, and all’s well.”

The operator’s voice came back staticky, professional. “Can we get coordinates?”

Phil rattled off latitude and longitude, keeping it just vague enough that someone listening in on their private frequency couldn’t zero in on his position– they’d considered greater secrecy, but there just hadn’t been time yet to train people in a real code, and Morse was too universal– and added, “Fuel status is good, I’m holding steady. ETA to Port is fifteen hours.”

“You’re coming up on a developing cyclone on your usual flight path, around Mile 59 of Boomer Bridge,” the operator reported. “Winds northwest around Port-aux-Francais, at around 30 to 40 miles per hour.”

“Copy. Keep me updated, yeah?”

“Oh, no, I thought we were just here to pad our resumes, I haven’t been making an effort at any of this,” the operator said. “You wanted numbers? I was reading off my Sudoku page, sorry, sir, terrible of me, I know– what’s your alertness?”

“Maybe at a seven,” Phil said honestly, because he was feeling a little tunnel-visioned. A one meant the pilot was seconds from passing out, with a ten meaning you were so alert that amphetamines were probably involved. “If you’ve got any stories, I don’t have anything better to do but listen.”

“Yessir,” the operator said, and that was how he passed the next three hours, listening to the operator discuss the latest gossip in Port-aux-Francais, the process of retrofitting ships for whaling and Pete’s own efforts at industrialization. They had fucking observers from Transatlantic, another from Business Bay claiming he had to come along to make sure they were adhering to the embargo’s terms who looked and acted about fourteen years old; the radio personnel had set up a dummy station for non-sensitive information, and the operators were holed up in a corner of the sanitation facility, in a room built behind a storage closet. The kid from Business Bay had started passing out fliers saying Techno and Phil were tyrants whose ‘taste for glory’ would only get Antarcticans killed; Antarcticans at Port-aux-Francais, the operator told Phil proudly, had turned the wording of the fliers into a meme.

At some point the shifts changed, and the next operator prompted Phil to describe constellations, come up with new names for increasingly out-there interpretations of the stars. He sang his own original songs, accompanied by guitar and a flute he clearly had no idea how to play.

The third operator talked about animal facts almost nonstop, rambling about elephant seals and how an albatross could sleep mid-flight and the likelihood of Phil observing a colony of king penguins from the air, and then Philza was landing on their runway, guided by a few people with hand torches and an operator who was vocally and sort of offensively relieved that he hadn’t hit a tern and crashed because then the tern would’ve been dead, for just long enough to get some coffee and refuel. 

The runway was miles away from the main settlement at Port-aux-Francais, built into the tundra and not quite as cold as the Stronghold, not quite as close to the Antarctic plateau. It was hidden, monitored by a skeleton crew of people who really hated the rest of the world, and every single one of them nodded a salute to Phil when he clamored down from the cockpit. 

Coffee pressed into his hands. Body guided somewhere to sit, eyes squinted defensively against the light of the torches, but when they extinguished one by one he could let himself relax a bit, stare around and take in the world. The crew’s eyes glinted back at him, a night crowd of night people, wolves and foxes and rabbits, amorphous in their coats.

Just one hour’s rest, because they couldn’t risk anybody seeing him land or take off. Then it was a few more hours to the Stronghold, where topography would fuck up the radio and the desolation of their home settled in like frostbite, and the voice that Phil had been waiting for was finally available, off probably his second or third shift of the cycle. 

On Phil’s flights, when his best friend wasn’t so exhausted he literally passed out where he stood, one of the voices was always Technoblade.

“Hey, mate,” Phil said, affection suffusing him: something about the hum of the engines and the freedom of the flight, the last stretch of his tortuous trip and the glimmering whiteness of the earth, always had him in a wistful mood. “Philza Minecraft, Octangula 1, checking in. How’s things at the Stronghold?”

“Bruh, Floof’s puppies are intelligent and ambulatory, they’re getting everywhere,” Techno said, and Phil grinned. Beyond his dashboard, the universe was all stars and ice, the heights of Antarctica proper jutting up like teeth, the air so thin that frost formed easy as breathing . Quiet except for the engines and Techno’s voice.  “I had to stop working in the greenhouse to go figure out where they’d gotten in the assembly line, which they’re not even supposed to be near , so we had to delay a whole aileron so I could grab a husky who just wouldn’t stop howling– whose idea was it to breed them for smarts? We should execute that guy.”

“Well, in that case, mate, I’ve got some bad news for you–”

“It’s fine, we’ll get someone else to take the fall, that’s good leader behavior,” Techno said immediately, and this time Phil had to laugh out loud. It was hard to get through an interaction with Techno without laughing, or at least cracking a grin; it’d been hard the first time they’d met, when Phil had come face to face with a legendary warrior who could’ve snapped his neck like a toothpick, and the first thing Techno had done was ask if he was some kind of wizard or something, because how the heck had he gotten to that shore in a little boat. He’d been so surprised by Phil’s laugh that he’d started sputtering. “What do you say, a Shirley Jackson-style lottery? We could bring back the cannibalism idea, that’s always a hit. You know Tommy tried to sell someone a shirt saying ‘I survived the Antarctic Cannibalism Incident’ the other day? We haven’t even had one. He said he’s trying to manifest it.”

“Is that the Business Bay kid at Port-aux-Francais?” Phil asked, thinking back. “Wait, hold the fuck up, is that the same Business Bay kid who tried to sell souvenir magnets to us for our empire back in October?”

“Bro, he says he married the grind,” Techno said despairingly. “I heard he tried to scam Rockabillie the other day and she told him to meet her on the castle ramparts and locked him out for six hours. He’s gonna end up turning into a fox with the rest of them.”

He kept going, complaining about training sled dogs– which was a fucking misrepresentation, because they slept in the same room as them and Techno literally bottle fed some of the puppies– and waxing poetic about the aim of some of the hunters, who could shoot a target from so far away that they had to calculate the curvature of the earth about it, and each time there was something for Phil to react to: a joke, a question, a request for advice. A casual suggestion that Phil increase his rations, because he’d been weirdly easy to throw in their past spar, and was he eating properly, actually? He did know he could accept people’s hospitality on his stops?

Each time there was a reason for Phil to keep his eyes open, to hold himself awake against his body’s demands until he reached that in-between strangeness where the tiredness went away. 

Six hours more. At some point Techno petered off, someone else taking over the radio, but Phil knew he’d be waiting up until he got back, lingering by the entrance to the Stronghold where he could meet Phil when he came in, and he didn’t really feel like sleeping. The world was bright and exhilaratingly calm, vast and perfect: the sky was empty except for the birds and the stars and Philza, and it welcomed him in like an old friend. 

*

I: You mentioned experiencing culture shock while you were in Cape Town. Could you elaborate on that?

P: I don’t know if it was culture shock, exactly. I’d been skipping a lot of sleep, so I was usually a little out of whack, and in that case, it felt closer to the mental fuckery you get when you’ve been out in the wilderness talking to trees, alright? Just saying shit to fill the air. Except it was the opposite, the shit that happens when you finally hit civilization again. We’d been pretty isolated for most of the year, even before the embargo. All our plans for re-socializing ourselves had been for wintertime, when we’d all end up in Port-aux-Francais where we could talk to folks from Australia and South Africa pretty regularly, so when that cut off, the most we had was the ninety of us and the radio operators at Port-aux-Francais. The pilots, we were all lucky, we could hang out at Port for an hour or so, get sunlight and fresh air, have alone time– everyone else at the Stronghold didn’t even get that. So it made sense they got a little strange, y’know?

I: Could you give some examples?

P: Okay, yeah, I’ve got a few. I wouldn’t say it was so different from the culture we have these days, just isolated as all hell– we didn’t have rooibos or our coffee varieties, definitely hadn’t developed our dog breeds yet, and all the manufacturing power went to the planes, so our clothes were handmade. Lot of mending, lot of embroidery as people got bored and went wild with the designs– sun designs, mostly— and a few of the dogs had thick fucking fur, so there were experiments with spinning thread for that. Some pretty great music, too– singing’s free, and there wasn’t anything else to do while you worked, yeah? People learned to harmonize. Not to mention the murals.

I: And, um. Would you say that Antarctic culture was more or less militant then than it is today? 

P: More militant. Way fucking more militant . I mean, the admins clearly wouldn’t help us, and we still didn’t have a fucking clue if someone would attempt a land invasion in the summer, not when there’d been break-ins before. The landscape wasn’t insurmountable. Me and Techno agreed– they expected us to be weak, starved-out and focused on our own survival. If they’d really done their research, they could’ve dropped someone off to pick us off, taken the Stronghold after. 

So we posted guards, and kept up our patrols– aerial patrols, not just sled ones. That’s where Techno did most of his flying. We had combat classes, too, and those– alright, those weren’t mandatory, but the only people who didn’t go were the ones who couldn’t physically handle the exertion. The youngest kid we had was about three, and even he learned how to hit someone’s weak points if he had to. 

I don’t know, maybe I got off easy. I flew, and after the rest of the world caught on to what we were doing I was on defense, mostly, escorting cargo planes so I could keep the enemy off their tails, but Techno was everywhere. He wasn’t taking greenhouse shifts, not when the signups for those filled up so fast, for the light– he was in the factories, the kitchens, organizing logistics and negotiating with allies. He’s the one who said what we needed and when, and on top of that he organized the combat classes, probably attended about half of them. I still don’t know when he fucking slept. 

I: Did your citizens ever have to use their combat training?

P: More than once. We had infiltrators, usually dropped off by plane to trek in and go after the Stronghold– Florida was relentless–  and a few times we shot a plane down and the pilot ejected, and we had to go track them down. 

The ice got most of them, though. If the ice didn’t get them, and if they didn’t come so close that our citizens got them– Technoblade finished them off, every time. 

*

The Octangula had gone down in flames, slamming into the ocean in a tumble of shrapnel and sinking like a rock, but Phil had shot down two Transatlantic biplanes, achieving tight spirals in his Gorecrow that the other pilots hadn’t been able to match. The Nacreous had gone ahead, increasing altitude and dimming their lights just as planned; now Phil was out of ammunition, so it was his job to lead the other three off so his pilots could get their cargo home. Mourning the pilot they’d just lost would have to wait. 

They were over the Southern Ocean, several miles from but roughly parallel to the rail line connecting Australia to Boomer Station, and it was morning. The clouds below were rippling and uniform, obscuring the water almost completely, but to the west the mass of a cumulonimbus roiled, thunderhead rising like a rock formation above the other clouds. 

Storms around Antarctica could span thousands of miles, built up relentlessly by the circumpolar current and the continent’s raging winds, hardly if ever hitting a landmass and moving fast enough to fucking chase you, if they wanted. Phil had had to order flight delays of over a week more than once, talking down pilots lulled by the consistent winds around the Stronghold: storms were usually strong enough to tear off a wing or propellers or throw you off course, out to sea with low fuel or straight into the monster waves they called up, and they were at their worst offshore.

This was the far edge of a storm, insanely distant even by airborne standards and preceded by a cold front that was already shifting the wind on him, northeast shifting to southwest and throwing tremors through his wings. 

Without ammunition, it was the best chance he had. This was the first time any fighters had come out over the Southern Ocean to chase them: usually they launched from ships closer to the rail stations, to head over the permafrost where the weather was a bit more consistent, or patrolled around the Cape of Good Hope, Melbourne or Tasmania, where they thought the Antarctican planes were most likely to land. None of their allies had sold them out yet, which Phil was more grateful for by the day, but clearly that was making some people pretty impatient. 

He shifted his joystick to the side, turned with the wind and veered west, lights as bright as he could make them, and the two of the three planes followed him, trying to get in range for their guns to be effective. The strategy was to get above the other pilot, open fire before he realized you were there in his blind spot. The counter -strategy was to get behind whoever was firing at you, close the distance and take out their engine or pilot or wings, and so it relied on ambush tactics, mostly, and maneuverability. These guys thought Phil was a sitting duck, since he was obviously out of ammunition; he used that complacency against them, bracing himself and dipping down and to the side just as the turbulence on his wings took on a different flavor, and the wind shift hit the plane from Business Bay like a lightning bolt. The plane tumbled end over end, the end of some of the propeller blades snapping off– if there was anything you could rely on, it was Business Bay cutting corners– and its lights fell out of sight.

It was dark, the storm blocking the starlight and shaking Phil like a toy in a giant’s hand, changing the sky into a sooty mountain ridge, boiling with lightning. Thunder boomed, so close it rattled Phil’s teeth; electricity arced between clouds, rain slamming against the glass in front of him, and he knew the waves beneath him would be taller than ships, tall enough to swamp even a Gorecrow, which was capable of water landings.

The second and third planes had wheeled off, probably to chase after the Nacreous. He’d have to wheel off, too, but the position he’d put himself in to kill the first plane meant he’d have to go through almost zero visibility to do it. 

That was fine. His instruments said his altitude was about thirty thousand feet, a good margin to work with, and he didn’t even need a compass to know his magnetic bearings: he’d gotten the hang of flying, had an idea of how the stars should’ve looked, and something about that just let him know where North was. 

He increased his throttle, feeling calmer than he would have expected, and told himself that the worst that could happen was dying, and he’d either die or he wouldn’t. That took half the anxiety off his mind, replacing it with a zen kind of resignation, and the joy of being in the sky during a thunderstorm displaced the rest: the sheer epicness of flying into lightning and blackness and howling rain, being thrown sideways and slammed into the side of his cockpit and coming out into clarity, the pallid shoreline and a series of icebergs heralding his return to the living world. 

It’d felt like an eternity, but his timepiece told him he’d spent about five minutes cutting through the clouds, and he was shivering through the same chills he always got these days, his body falling out of whack once the worst exertion had passed. It shouldn’t have been such a sour shock to see the last plane wheel around to get back on his tail, but– 

But that was a trail of smoke rising in the distance, someone who’d been shot down and would never return to the air, and there was another plane hundreds of feet above them both, silhouetted against the aurora, diving like a peregrine after the intruder. Phil twisted to the side, getting clear as the Transatlantic plane blew past him, and Technoblade took out its wings in a single perfect cluster of gunfire.  

*

I: Do you remember what month that was, when the anti-Imperial aggression increased?

P: Oh, shit, that was– August, I think? We were getting the sun back soon, I remember that much. The worst part of the winter was over, and we obviously weren’t dead, so everyone who wanted our shit was getting desperate. That’s when they started talking about the faction reset.

See, the factions were settled by that point. People had brought families over, they’d had kids, they’d developed their own cultures– the goal of SMPEarth was nation-building, and by that point most people had a nationality. Their leaders would’ve gone out and claimed the exact same land they’d had before, especially since they’d gotten enough warning to make plans for how to do it. But the Antarctic Empire’s official leaders were me and Technoblade, and as far as anybody knew for sure, we were stuck in the Stronghold with limited resources. They knew about the planes, but other factions had planes too, y’know? The planes didn’t seem like a threat to them, they seemed like a last-ditch effort not to fucking die. 

But the admins introduced autofill as a mechanic, and they gave us like two months’ warning, and that’s where they fucked up. They wanted to use the autofill against us, fly around Antarctica and displace us without getting in range of our defenses. What those fuckers didn’t guess was how many storms they’d hit on the way out– storms that we knew how to deal with, because we’d been dealing with them for months– and how large of a territory you could actually claim with that mechanic. 

No one expects people struggling for resources to throw everything into a plan that’s guaranteed to get them dragged before the admins. Hell, we thought the best way it would end was in us getting executed, and then maybe our people could’ve bargained to keep Port-aux-Francais or used the other land claims, somehow– I can’t explain enough how fucking hopeless it was, realizing how many of the admins were against us. Those fuckers had the power of gods, they were biased, and how the fuck could we survive that? We didn’t know the storms would help us, back then, or whose side the winter was actually on. We thought that was the end of it.

I: If that was the case— I’m sorry if this is offensive— why bother with the world domination plan at all? Why not surrender before the faction reset, to salvage what you could?

P: At that point, our whole faction had a reputation for being militant, clannish assholes, no better than a cult. Pulling a stunt like the one we did proved a few things, sure, but we also meant to use the new land claims as a bargaining chip, or at least to draw some fire away from the civilians at Port-aux-Francais and the Stronghold— give the admins a couple scapegoats to pin the whole issue on, that sort of thing. I was a deadly pilot, Techno was the Blood God, we were never surviving our faction going down anyway. So what we figured was, if we were going down either way— we might as well die doing something sick as hell.

*

For once Phil and Techno had been able to take a greenhouse shift together, the rest of their citizens stepping aside to let them see the glowstone sun first. The mood around the Stronghold was grim, like a condemned prisoner seeing the outside world for the last time: they’d given everybody the day off, and people had spent it building fortifications, singing songs, painting defiant murals on every wall that didn’t already have one. 

This place is ours, that was the refrain, carved over and over on any surface a person could reach. You might take the portal but the stronghold is ours. You might reset the factions, but you’ll have to pry us out of here first to do it.

The factories had been shut down, machines grinding to a halt and going dark and cold. The kitchens were full of people cooking whatever ingredients they’d been saving, sharing tea and coffee and homebrewed chorus fruit liquor, throwing scraps to the sled dogs scuffling at their knees, and each gun was oiled, cartridges packed with gunpowder, bows strung and ready. Swords sharpened and oiled.

They hadn’t stopped working in the greenhouses. It was impossible to leave the greenhouses empty: every Antarctican loved them, because the glowstone sun chased away the horror of the night, made the constant half-starved chills fade , the specter of Vitamin D deficiency driven away. Phil could never help but mentally compare it to the actual sun, which he saw more often than the others, but– the sun was shallow, somehow, compared to the light in the greenhouse. That was comfort, glowstone and potato leaves and the moist smell of soil, that pale heatless gleam over them all like a benediction. 

Techno had been feverish with ideas all day, trying to map out the best route for world domination with pinpoint certainty, conferring with every pilot strong and rested enough to join them in the flight, but here, back in their room, he was nearly silent. There were dogs in the chamber with them, Floof and two of her puppies, but they were sprawled closer to the heat, occasionally twitching from some sled-dog dream or yipping softly. 

The furnace was banked low, embers barely smoldering under the used-up coal, the light in the room coming only from the faint, barely-there glow of the redstone circuits in the walls. Phil shifted and rolled up his sleeves, feeling almost too warm— his shirt itched, and since the sun had started returning he’d just been restless, rearranging their bookshelf and bedrolls about twenty times just for a lack of anything better to do— and Techno said, “You know they’re calling you the Angel of Death, over the radio? They don’t even know it’s you, that’s just their name for the guy who keeps shooting them down.”

“Kinda sounds like they’re calling my Gorecrow an angel, if that’s the case,” Phil said, but a satisfied thrill went through him anyway, vengeful fury rearing its head. He’d made a point, since they’d lost their third pilot, to fly defense on every Octangula that went out. Losing someone to exhaustion wasn’t such an issue anymore, now that they’d worked out double seating, but losing someone to enemy action, when so many of those bastards flew like idiots who couldn’t think in three dimensions if they were being paid for it— “Did they have a count, for how many I brought down? ‘Cause mine’s seventeen, but if they know something I don’t—“

“ Seventeen? ” Techno blurted. “Bro, they have your count down as twenty-five, and I’m pretty sure only two of those were me. Pete was eavesdropping on the broadcast, passing it along— he said the word on the street is you don’t see the Angel and live. They’re calling you an ace pilot, there’s a whole bounty on your head.”

“Oh shit, really? That’s fucking cool, how much was it?”

“Do I sound like someone who knows that information?” Techno asked, and Phil realized all at once that he hadn’t just been quiet because he was thinking . That was stress in his tone, real stress like when he had twelve tasks to complete and half a day allotted to complete them, like when the whole Stronghold was looking in his direction like he was invulnerable, incapable of losing a fight. Technoblade never dies, they said, and he’d taken it as a war cry, encouraged it in propaganda, but he wasn’t invulnerable, when it came down to it. He was a man, and he got scared. 

“It’s not so bad, flying over the ocean,” Phil said, figuring some extra advice had to help somehow, and Techno interrupted, “Phil, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think you should fly tomorrow.”

Phil stuttered over his next words. “What the fuck do you mean by that?” he demanded, almost too shocked to be angry. “I’m the one fucking person who can fly for more than twenty-four hours. I’m the only one who’s flown through a storm. Half the guys we’re sending have never flown anything but an Aurora, and the rest have been shot at at least as much as I have—”

“Phil, the bounty got announced today,” Techno said tersely. “It’s being broadcast with the faction reset announcement, they’ve got a list of possible threats and we’re one of them. They’re making it out like we’re gonna do a bunch of missions to take people down with us.”

“I don’t have to fly my Gorecrow,” Phil said, doubt worming cold in his chest. Not because it was possible that he’d get shot down, because that had been possible for every flight he’d done after the first one, but because of how Techno was talking about it. He’d known Techno had concerns about how well he was adapting to the Antarctic cold, how easy he was to throw across a sparring room and his periodic chills, the way he spent nights and nights without sleep even when he wasn’t flying. Sometimes he dozed standing up, startling citizens who found him tucked in some high corner with his eyes reflecting red; other times he couldn’t stop shivering, body temperature rising and flinching back down like a cat that’d misjudged a jump. 

The medics thought his body was finally trying to adapt– that it had been about to adapt to the climate, and that his excursions to warmer coasts had forestalled it halfway there, muddling up the switch. They’d advised Techno to ground him, except Techno didn’t have authority over him, so he’d just made it a suggestion. 

So Phil had stayed down for two weeks, waiting out a cyclone and spending as much time as possible in the cold, and basically nothing had happened. His eyes had shifted color to a golden-hazel, but the pupils had stayed round, and his night vision hadn’t improved. His ears hadn’t changed. He hadn’t grown a tail, or gills, or anything useful at all, and whatever cold resistance he’d gained had been outweighed by terrible chills, the kind that followed him indoors. Continuing the experiment hadn’t been worth losing their pilots to enemy fire.

“I truly think you’ve done enough,” Techno said, and Phil sucked in a breath, preparing to argue. “Really. You shot down like seventeen guys! You saved a ton of lives just coming up with the idea for the planes, not to mention testing them and training the new pilots and the numerous near-fatal dogfights– you’ve done your part. They don’t even have a name for the Angel, just what your Gorecrow looks like, and they’re focusing on me as the Emperor. I’m pretty sure that if you stay at the base and handle the surrender, they’ll let you go with the rest of our citizens.”

“We don’t know that they’ll let anyone go,” Phil bit out. Techno shrugged uncomfortably.

“Yeah, but. Y’know. I’ve got kind of a reputation. I bet I could get most of the attention to stay on me, let you and Pete wrangle a deal for everyone else.”

“Pete can make a deal,” Phil snapped. “ He’s an administrator, the one who planned the rail network. All I am is a good fucking pilot, and as a good fucking pilot, I’m telling you this scheme won’t work unless someone closes off the boundary over the Atlantic. The way our route’s set up, the speeds we’re going, you can’t afford to put a two-person plane on that job, and nobody else can stay awake for the time it takes. The only one who can do that is me, and I’m not interested in letting our last fuck-you to the world peter out halfway.”

“Phil, you’ll die. You’re gonna die if you do that, I can’t ask you to die–”

“I told you,” Phil said, “we’re brothers forged in blood. I said I’d follow you to the end of the world, because that’s where you fucking welcomed me– I said I’d follow you to hell, and I’ll be honest, mate, some days that’s just what this place feels like– but I’m not about to break that oath now, Techno. You can’t ask that of me. You can’t order me, either, because you don’t fucking outrank me. Emperor .”

“I could order a medical override,” Techno said, low. “Or I could just lock you up somewhere, give the order to let you out when it’s over.”

“Nah,” Phil said, and Techno huffed something pretty far from a laugh, meeting his eyes. In the dim light from the furnace, they shined like a wolf’s. “You’re not gonna do that. You’re gonna get some rest, and I’ll do the same, and in the morning, we’ll take over the fucking world. Alright?”

His fellow emperor regarded him wearily, dirt under his nails from the greenhouses and old scars showing white where his skin was exposed. A lot of old scars, and some new ones, from accidents in the factory or out on the ice. From rescues, which Technoblade always attended personally , and more than a few attempts that’d come too late. He’d never gotten over what happened to the woman on the rail bridge.

“Swear to me that you’ll be careful,” he said finally, soft and wretched. “Promise me that. I need your word.”

“You have it,” Phil said, feeling sick and tired, and Techno ended the conversation there, laid his cloak down like a pillow and fell asleep before more than five minutes had passed. Phil sat beside him, body rebelling against his best efforts to follow suit, and stood vigil until the time they’d all agreed was morning. 

It was dark when they took off.

*

I: Hold on, do you mean to say you were experiencing symptoms during the–

[Someone in the crowd actually shushes me. I accept this as something I deserve.]

*

“Alright, everybody,” Techno said over the radio, “today’s the day. You thought you had life plans before this? You thought you were a reasonable person with reasoned goals, like fighting a polar bear or drawing someone’s muscles correctly on a mural next to the End portal? Think again. While everybody else was producing their own Vitamin D, having fun with their friends and undertaking productive multicultural conversations, we studied the blade. While everyone else developed conflict-resolution skills, we studied the gun. And while everyone else was indulging in tyranny to get the resources we rightfully claimed two years ago, we studied the plane— and that is about to be everybody else’s problem!”

A brief pause, while the radio frequency was overwhelmed with pilots’ cheers. Over ten percent of the Stronghold’s population, who’d risked their lives over the past six months to bring in food and needed supplies, undertaking journeys none of their ancestors could have dreamed of, and half of the pilots they had weren’t even present. They’d been seeded at the Cape of Good Hope, in Victoria, in Alaska and Ursus and the Fallen Kingdom— in places it’d taken over a month to reach, sometimes, smuggled along other flight routes and lent allies’ planes on arrival. A lot of factions hated the Antarctic Empire, but a good number of people hated the admins’ favoritism and overreach more, and nobody was immune to a good joke. 

Phil’s route would take him northeast across New Zealand and then straight east until he hit the southern end of Argentina, the one landmass a southern storm could cross to impede its momentum; he’d land and refuel, assuming he made it that far, and plot a course north to Greenland from there, as far as he could go. If things went well, he’d intercept a guy coming down from Greenland, closely enough that they’d finish the line; otherwise, he’d keep going until he hit land again, or until the faction claiming period had ended.

It was the longest route any of them would have, a good forty-eight hours of nonstop flight before and after his stop at Ushuaia. Ninety-six hours total. He hadn’t eaten before it, hadn’t drink much water, hadn’t slept even though he’d tried; he felt too wired for that, cold with anticipation.

His chills hadn’t abated. He’d kept his hands steady, or he would have had to take medical leave— fat lot of good it’d do anyone if he plunged into the sea because he’d gotten shaky— but the discomfort was persistent, prickling across his back, sinking into the muscles there. He ached. He blocked it out and listened to Techno’s speech, his reiteration of where each pilot was going and when they should cross paths, and when the speech was over, he swapped to their private frequency and said, “You ready to go, bro?”

Techno’s voice was determined, undercut with a mild hysteria he’d probably keep until he either finished the task or crashed into a mountain somewhere. It wouldn’t impede his effectiveness. “I was born ready, old man. If they wished to defeat me, they should’ve spent more time refining their world claim process. What about you, are you doing good?”

“I’m just peachy,” Phil said, cranking the lever to spark the engine. It roared to life, cylinders starting to pump, propeller blurring into a serious hazard to life and limb; he followed the ground crew’s hand signals and turned onto the runway, the first plane scheduled to take off. 

The faction reset would happen in about ten minutes, tracking leaders’ and citizens’ progress with world magic the admins so rarely let them access, and then the server would fall to chaos, people scrambling to reclaim their own land or swarming to resource-rich areas to invade them. The Stronghold and Port-aux-Francais had their defenses ready, though they were under strict orders not to resist unless the alternative was everyone dying; as for the pilots, none of them really expected to survive, and in Phil and Techno’s case things would probably go easier if they died. With the head of the snake gone, the body could be left to rot: the citizens could be scattered wherever, leaving their brief identities as Antarcticans behind. 

Still. The rest of the world was about to learn that this snake’s head could fucking bite. 

“Good luck, you two,” Phil said, because Techno was flying an Aurora, and he wasn’t alone in his cockpit. “This is gonna be the most badass fucking thing we’ve ever done, okay? We’re about to go down in fucking history.”

“Immortalized in a history textbook as those guys whose names will get misspelled by middle schoolers, just as I’ve always dreamed,” Techno agreed. “What’d that one guy call you? Phil-asia?”

“Oh my god, don’t remind me of that—“

“Fuchsia? Was it Fuchsia? Honestly, that’s still not as bad as the dude who kept insisting my name was spelled without the H, so, y’know, it could be worse— just think, we could be at a spelling bee right now. Someone could be asking us to spell damascened.”

“As if you couldn’t recite half the Iliad at anyone who asked,” Phil said, grinning despite himself, and— yeah, this was it, this was good. This was how he wanted to go out, joking with a friend at the advent of the biggest undertaking of their lives, aiming upwards and outwards past what was survivable. Putting on a brave face and dying bravely at the end, right up to when it was too late to be a coward. “I’ll be seeing you, Techno.”

They’d be on strict radio silence once they took off, to preserve the element of surprise for as long as possible. Phil waited for Techno’s response, struck all of a sudden with the fact that this could be the last time he ever heard that voice, the last thing his best friend ever said to him, and Techno said finally, sounding a little choked, “See you on the other side, Phil. They’ll be— they’ll be cheering us on when we get there.”

The ground crew was signaling furiously. Philza took a deep breath and increased his speed, lifting off with expert ease, and the lights of the Stronghold fell away into pinpricks, smaller than the stars.

There were storms brewing offshore, an enormous cluster of systems that had been in the works for days now, whipping around the pole and throwing the meteorologists into fits, but they’d gotten lucky: the faction reset was happening just during the window to slip past it, and so the most Phil saw of the thunderclouds was the occasional lightning flash in the distance.

He lost sight of other planes fairly quickly, after that. After the first hour, he switched his radio back on to listen for transmissions from other factions, and caught some scraps of Morse Code, cryptic descriptions that almost certainly came from ships around the rail network. Scanning the frequencies let him hear a broadcast from Tasmania, chronicling the Australians’ efforts to claim their own territory before Business Bay— of fucking course it was Business Bay— scooped some parts of it out from under them, and then he was passing that landmass, heading to New Zealand where he couldn’t land, and out to the broad personless expanse of the Pacific.

It was quiet. His engine hummed, the lights of his Gorecrow blinking gently; he shut them off as the sun spilled rosily over the horizon, dissolving into the ocean like powdered pink lemonade, and let himself drift.

The key to solitude was calm, really. Living alone meant relying on yourself, your own impressions of the world, the skills you could muster and the willpower it took to use them when they were needed, and that meant knowing your own capabilities. Phil knew he was capable of long flights because he’d done a hundred of them, even if none of them had been as long as this. He wasn’t sure how he knew he was capable of going off alone to an almost certain death, considering that most of his memories of SMPEarth involved hanging out with Techno or working as a team, but the certainty was there, familiar as the swell of his lungs. Being alone for this fit him like a tailored suit, comfortably warm. Like boots he’d broken in a long time ago.

He stayed on his northeastern trajectory until he saw New Zealand’s shores, hardly needing to check his compass, and hit a rainstorm a few hours in, water pelting his windshield and coming off it in streaks, flung by his propeller. His main fuel tanks dwindled, switched over to auxiliary at about the time he’d anticipated; time blurred like the raindrops did, tiredness blinking through him like a faulty transistor, on-off-on-off and on again just in time to correct his course.

When he finally landed at Ushuaia, the hidden runway was almost abandoned except for three people, who brought him a coffee thermos to drink in his cockpit and pressed snacks on him to eat on his flight. He took a bathroom break and waited impatiently for the maintenance checks to finish, the sun taunting him as it came back up over the icebergs. 

The ground crew had a radio sharing local news, and one of them translated for him. Newfoundland and Florida had been reclaimed, she said, and Ursus had grown slightly. Business Bay was steadily snatching bits of territory from everyone else, igniting a dozen scuffles across the planet, and the Corvarians had threatened to publicly execute the next infiltrator they discovered. 

The news on whether Antarctica had been claimed was sparse, just a report that an alliance of factions had gone to circle the Stronghold and a promise to deliver more updates when they came in. The Antarctic Empire’s claim on the world hadn’t yet been reported, though, because the line they were drawing hadn’t been closed: nobody had heard anything about them.

No news was good news. Philza finished his coffee, letting the caffeine draw some of the tiredness from his eyes, and went back to the sky, something in him grinning at the strong winds off the sea cliffs. He’d already gotten farther than he’d expected to.

The chills worsened as he headed out over the Atlantic, though, buzzing through his brain and sending black sparks into the corners of his eyes, twinging down his spine. The weather worsened, too, turbulence shaking him half to pieces until he managed to escape the airstreams, the occasional system rearing up in the distance. Once he even thought he saw a waterspout, spinning up like thread into a dark mass of storms, and he had to avoid whole stretches for fear of hurricanes, because they were coming up on the middle of that season. 

Ninety-five and a half hours in, he’d shifted from exhaustion to a kind of bleak awakeness, barbed and wary like a tern expecting birds of prey. There was a trick to staying awake, one he seemed to rediscover every flight and forget as soon as he landed: a way of closing his eyes and gliding, going by wing-feel and his sense of where he was in his air, and waking up about a minute later feeling like his brain had been reset. A way of repeatedly endangering himself and his mission, except he was pretty certain he’d done it before— except he was certain he’d always done it, as long as he’d been flying, with the deja-vu surety of a recurring dream.

So he was completely awake when the update hit his brain, though he couldn’t say he wasn’t feverish. The fever wasn’t why it startled him into yawing sideways— that was because it had come over the world net, which he hadn’t been able to access since the first faction claims and which felt  like downloading information into his long-term memory, and because it said the Antarctic Empire owned 49.72% of the planet.

Over nine-tenths of the landmasses of the server, including their own original territory, Stronghold and all. A little less than a quarter of the world’s oceans, which meant that Techno’s Hail Mary had worked, that the guy stationed in Greenland had intersected the line Phil had drawn— and this was the final announcement, thrown out to everybody to explain reality’s new rules. This was something Techno had signed off on. 

Hippity hoppity, get off my property— he was broadcasting that phrase to the whole fucking world, holy shit . They’d autofilled half the planet. They’d fucking done it, and they’d kept their Stronghold despite all their worst-case scenarios, and there wasn’t anything else for Phil to do but head to land—

Except that was when his engine sputtered and burst out with smoke, propeller halting like it had been shoved by an invisible hand. Phil only froze for a millisecond, diving for the dashboard the next second to try and help something , but it was pointless, not a repair you could do from the air— and this wasn’t a catastrophe that could happen in the air, because an engine might catch fire, but a propeller would never stop and jerk the other way. That could only occur if somebody reached outside their reality and fucked with it.

On a server map, Phil would appear as the pilot farthest from settled land, in a stretch of the ocean known for extreme weather. He was the one whose sleep stats would show his last nap happening four days ago, whose accidental death would come as a surprise to nobody.

The admins of SMPEarth weren’t supposed to interfere like this, because it went against the rules they’d set up while creating the world, but admins could be biased. They could hate Technoblade, hate his resource claims and his charisma and his allies, his exploitation of a loophole in a trap they’d set for him, and one of them could decide to kill his publicly-declared best friend for the sake of petty revenge.

Techno would land, if he hadn’t already, and he’d wait for news of each of their pilots, for the reactions of the rest of the world to their scheme, and he’d never hear anything back from Phil. Not even if he flew along Phil’s entire route, scouring the ocean for signs and interrogating the crew at Ushuaia for clues, not even if he stormed the bases of the admins themselves and got himself killed. The Atlantic would have swallowed Phil whole.

The Gorecrow’s nose had tilted almost straight down, going into a sickening dive that made Phil’s ears pop. He yanked the joystick back as far as it would go, forcing the plane to level out into a slower descent— and it did, because it was a good plane, it might’ve been sabotaged by a god but it did what he asked it to— and fumbled for the parachute behind his seat, yanking on the straps and feeling the whole thing fall apart in his hands. That was more interference, but if he stayed in the plane it’d probably explode, so he had to do something else.

The biplane shuddered as it fell, a tremor that reached up through his feet and elbows and through his whole body, shooting pain through his nerves like gunpowder igniting. He was too hot, too tired, too everything — he was calm, fury snarling somewhere deep in his chest, thoughts perched too high up for fear to find them.

He tied the joystick back, so the Gorecrow would stay horizontal. He unlatched the glass over the cockpit, the cover they’d devised to keep Antarctica’s pilots warm in their deadly howling cold, and climbed out, and the wind sliced his skin like a barrage of knives. It almost dislodged him before he was ready. 

He smelled smoke and exhaust. His knuckles were white where they held the cockpit’s edges, and the wind screamed in his ears, drowning out the death throes of his favorite biplane and his own ragged desperate breathing. The cloud layer was drifting carelessly above him, and below him was an endless plain of blue-black waves, the Atlantic Ocean on a calm autumn day. The Northern Hemisphere, opposite coordinates to his usual haunts. Far from home, but pretty enough to die in, in a pinch. 

Distantly, he knew he should have been shot full of adrenaline, but his heartbeat was quiet and very slow, and the sky seemed pristine and welcoming, the ocean a great place to land and float for a while, the winds as uplifting as he could ever want them. He felt warm, as his Gorecrow plummeted. He felt so fucking warm, so fucking sick of the shape of his skin on his muscle, and finally there wasn’t anything between him and the atmosphere. Finally it was open air and open sea, just as he’d always needed, and all he had to do was kick off from the plane and let the wind cradle him as he fell down and down and down and down—

*

I : How the hell did you get out of that one? 

[Philza grins. His albatross wings shift, the ends scraping against the ground. Fully spread, they would stretch from one end of this small cafe to the other; I wasn’t aware of it at the time of the interview, but to this day they hold the world record for the greatest phenotypical change in the shortest amount of time. He’s still one of only five avian hybrids on the server.]

P : You tell me, mate. How do you think?

*

[MEDIA: Propaganda poster depicting Emperors Philza and Technoblade in fur-lined dress uniforms, wearing crowns. A biplane has been drawn behind them on a dark blue background, facing upwards with its wings spread. Both Emperors smile fiercely at the audience; the words “WHOSE SIDE IS WINTER ON?” are below them, drawn as if encased in ice.]

[MEDIA: Photograph of Emperor Philza grinning in front of an Octangula biplane, holding his bomber hat against his head. The biplane has a hoglin face painted over the nose, and its propeller is running. On the bottom right side of the photo, someone has scrawled the words “SUCK IT, SCURVY” and drawn a picture of a bird. Philza does not have wings. He is smiling at someone off-camera.]

[MEDIA: Photograph of Emperor Technoblade in work clothing, holding a bag of potatoes with a grin. The greenhouse later known as the #1 Potato Generator can be seen in the background.]

[MEDIA: Caricature of Emperors Philza and Technoblade at the Saint-Malo trial, unattributed. Wilbur Soot is portrayed as small and self-important, dwarfed on his podium by Philza’s extended wings, lovingly rendered. Soot’s speech bubble reads: “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO THE SKIES?”]

[MEDIA: Photograph of Emperors Technoblade and Philza standing on the steps of the Imperial Palace in full formal regalia. Technoblade has his head turned towards Philza; Philza is smiling close-lipped at the camera, hood pulled over his head. There is snow on the ground, and from the positioning of Philza’s hair, likely a strong wind. Philza has one wing outstretched to shield Technoblade from the weather.]