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Long before the disease spread and the server collapsed into silence and screams, ████ lived an ordinary life, so ordinary that, in hindsight, it felt unreal.
He had been born into a family of pure Vex, a lineage respected for its discipline, stability, and adherence to tradition.
Their status was high enough to ensure comfort, but not so high as to attract constant scrutiny. It was a balanced existence, predictable and safe.
His father worked for the server’s government.
The position was neither prestigious nor insignificant; it was simply stable.
Stable enough that ████’s mother never needed to seek additional income.
She owned a small flower shop near the central district, a place filled with color and calm.
████ often accompanied her after school, sitting quietly in a corner while she arranged bouquets or spoke kindly with regular customers.
The smell of soil and fresh petals became one of the strongest anchors of his childhood.
At home, life followed routines. His parents were present, attentive in their own ways. Meals were shared when possible.
Conversations were simple.
There were no great conflicts, no dramatic events.
He also had a small kitten, Jellie, barely more than a few months old.
He cared for her alongside his mother, feeding her, cleaning after her, and talking to her as if she could understand every word.
He had friends few, but meaningful.
They spent afternoons wandering the city, arguing over trivial things, daring each other to do foolish tasks, and laughing without restraint.
They talked about school, about the future, about nothing at all. It was the kind of life that only becomes valuable once it is lost.
████ often spoke aloud when he was nervous, even back then.
He complained about homework, muttered insults at broken tools, and narrated his own thoughts without realizing it.
His friends teased him for it.
His parents found it endearing.
That normality ended quietly.
A few weeks before the city began to fall apart, his mother disappeared.
She had gone out one afternoon and never returned.
The shop remained closed.
Jellie vanished the same day.
The coincidence felt wrong, but no one said it out loud.
████ was devastated.
He searched the streets, called out their names until his throat hurt, and waited by the door long after nightfall.
His father told him not to worry. He said they would return soon. His voice was calm, controlled, almost too controlled. ████ wanted to believe him.
Around that time, newspapers began to circulate vague reports,mentions of a strange illness appearing in distant regions of the server.
████ never read them.
His father made sure of that, keeping him away from the news under the pretense of protection.
Perhaps it was meant to preserve innocence.
Perhaps it was fear.
Not long after, his father suggested they leave the city temporarily.
A break, he said.
A chance to clear their minds. ████ agreed, desperate for anything that might distract him from the absence left behind.
Unbeknownst to him, his siblings were sent away separately, outside the server, to live with their grandparents.
They lived together in a remote cabin for several months.
The days blurred together. ████ helped where he could, cooked what his mother had taught him, and listened to his father speak less and less.
One morning, his father left to gather supplies.
He never came back.
████ remembered begging him not to go alone.
He remembered insisting on coming with him.
His father had promised he would wait.
That promise dissolved sometime before dawn.
When ████ woke, the back door stood open. The shotgun his father always carried lay abandoned in the middle of the fenced yard.
No blood.
No tracks.
No explanation.
He waited.
Days turned into weeks.
He survived by hunting rabbits and rationing what little food remained.
He spoke to himself constantly, complaining, reasoning, arguing with the silence.
It was the only way to stay sane...
Eventually, he began searching the cabin for answers.
He found his father’s journal hidden away in a drawer. It was small, worn, and filled with clippings and notes.
Most entries were practical: lists, reminders, plans. But deeper inside were newspaper fragments describing a disease spreading through remote areas of the server.
His father’s handwriting grew frantic around those pages.
Warnings. Fears. Plans to evacuate the family.
One entry froze ████ in place.
It described the day his mother disappeared.
According to the journal, his father had been with her.
They were walking near the city’s outer exit when the world seemed to stop.
Time itself appeared to freeze.
Eyes, countless, watching, emerged around them.
His mother was taken.
████ did not believe it.
He could not. But the seriousness of the writing unsettled him.
His father was not prone to fantasy or exaggeration.
Desperate for more answers, ████ turned on the radio in his father’s study.
After long minutes of static, a signal emerged, a recorded message looping endlessly.
A quarantine had been declared.
An evacuation was underway.
Extraction points would close soon.
How soon was “soon”?
No one said.
Staying meant death. Leaving meant uncertainty.
Talking aloud, panicking openly, ████ decided to go.
He promised himself he would survive.
He had promised his mother he would become someone good, someone who helped others.
But first, he needed to help himself.
The roads were dangerous.
Overrun.
Zombies, something he had only read about, wandered aimlessly.
He abandoned the car when it became too loud and switched to a bicycle found on an empty road stained with dried blood and scattered bones.
He traveled for days.
He fought when he had no choice, survived mostly by luck, and muttered every thought aloud as fear tightened its grip.
Complaints.
Encouragements.
Half-prayers.
By the time he reached the extraction point, exhaustion weighed heavily on him.
It was empty.
The portal stood dormant.
He remembered his lessons from school: portals required magic.
Allays, beings closely related to Vex, were responsible for maintaining them.
Without one, the portal would never open.
████ stood alone, speaking to the air, heart pounding, realizing that survival had only brought him to another unanswered silence.
At that point, ████ was already cursing his own luck out loud.
“Of course,” he muttered, pacing in tight circles near the dormant portal. “Of course I make it all this way just to die here. That figures. That really figures.”
He could hear them in the distance, the wet, uneven sounds of movement, the dragging steps, the distorted growls that no longer sounded entirely human.
He had seen too many variants during the journey to fool himself now.
Some were fast.
Some were wrong in ways he did not have words for.
Limbs bent incorrectly, mouths opening far wider than they should, eyes that reflected light like glass.
He swallowed hard.
“So this is it, huh?” he whispered to no one. “Food for… whatever you are.”
His hands trembled.
His legs felt heavy, useless.
He was calculating, involuntarily, how long it would take before they noticed him.
Seconds. Maybe a minute.
Not long enough.
He exhaled shakily, shoulders sagging.
For the first time in a long while, the idea of giving up didn’t feel dramatic.
It felt quiet. Tired.
A whisper, barely more than breath brushing against his ear.
“Run.”
At the same time, something warm and solid clapped against his back—gentle, urgent.
████ froze.
His heart slammed violently against his ribs.
That voice.
It was soft. Familiar. Too familiar.
“M–Mom…?” he breathed, barely daring to speak.
His vision blurred. He turned, half-expecting to see nothing, half-terrified that he might see something worse.
There was no one there.
Just shadows and rusted metal and the overgrown ruins of the extraction site.
“You’re imagining things,” he told himself quickly, pressing his hands against his temples. “You’re stressed. You’re tired. That’s all. That’s all this is.”
But the voice came again, firmer this time.
“Don’t stop. Don’t think. Run.”
His body reacted before his mind could argue.
Adrenaline surged, snapping the paralysis like brittle glass.
He bolted, feet pounding against the ground, lungs burning as he fled the extraction point just seconds before the first figures stumbled into view.
He didn’t stop running until his legs gave out.
He laughed then, sharp, breathless, almost hysterical.
“Great,” he gasped, leaning against a tree. “Now I’m hearing voices. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.”
Still, he was alive.
And that had been enough to keep him moving forward.
Years passed after that.
████ knew they had passed because his body told him so.
He felt it in the stiffness of his joints when he woke, in the scars that had faded and layered over one another, in the way his reflection, when he dared look, no longer matched the boy he remembered.
He had been sixteen when it started.
Weeks away from turning seventeen.
Now?
He guessed somewhere between twenty and twenty-two.
He counted seasons, not birthdays. Winters marked in notches on the wall.
Springs by how long the animals stayed scarce.
There was a margin of error, and he knew it.
“I could be older,” he muttered once, staring at his hands. “Wouldn’t that be funny? Losing track of your own age. Guess that’s what happens when the world ends.”
Most days were quiet. Too quiet.
He lived hidden, deep in a base he had reinforced and modified over time.
He left only when necessary, short, calculated trips to hunt, to scavenge, to map safe routes.
The server had changed.
Structures were swallowed by vines and moss, stone cracked under roots, roads vanished beneath nature reclaiming everything.
He learned to move silently.
He learned to be patient.
And he learned to talk to himself more than ever.
“Okay,” he whispered during one supply run, crouched behind a fallen wall. “In and out. No heroics. We are not dying today. Today is not the day.”
Sometimes, a year after everything began, he returned to his old home.
It hurt more than he expected.
The house was choked with overgrowth, windows shattered, doors forced open. Someone, some people, had been there.
Looters, most likely.
He couldn’t tell if it had happened before or after the portals closed.
Inside, he moved slowly, reverently.
“I’m just looking,” he told the empty rooms. “Just… just seeing.”
He found what mattered most tucked away, overlooked: photographs.
His parents.
His siblings.
His friends.
Smiling faces frozen in a world that no longer existed.
He sat on the floor and held them to his chest.
“Are you alive?” he whispered. “Any of you…are you okay?”
His siblings were out there somewhere. Maybe safe. Maybe thinking he was dead.
The thought twisted painfully in his chest.
“I’m still here,” he said quietly, as if they could hear him. “I didn’t give up.”
The voice returned at night.
At first, he thought it was dreams.
Fragments of memory.
His mind clinging desperately to familiarity.
But the voice didn’t just speak—it guided.
“Go east,” it would murmur.
“Not there. Too dangerous.”
“Look beneath the ruins. There’s knowledge there.”
████ argued with it constantly.
“I can’t just trust some voice in my head,” he snapped once, pacing his base. “Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”
The voice remained calm.
“You’ve survived this long.”
“…That doesn’t prove anything.”
“And yet you listen.”
He hated that it was right.
The books the voice led him to changed everything.
Ancient texts.
Studies of Vex and Allays.
Records of magic theory long forgotten.
He devoured them despite never having enjoyed reading before.
“These say…” he muttered, flipping pages late into the night, “that intention matters more than power.”
The texts spoke of similarities between his species and the Allays.
Different forms, different expressions but compatible magic.
Magic shaped by will, by desire, by clarity of purpose.
Hope bloomed painfully in his chest.
“A portal,” he whispered. “I could open one. I could actually leave.”
He tried.
Again and again.
The portal would flicker to life for seconds, sometimes longer.
Light would bloom, unstable and trembling.
But it never held.
“I don’t know where to go!” he shouted once, frustrated, slamming his fist into the ground. “How am I supposed to choose a destination when everything I knew is gone?”
Sometimes the portal opened onto nothing.
A vast, silent void.
And the void stared back.
He felt it watching him. Measuring him. Waiting.
He staggered back every time, heart racing.
“Nope,” he breathed. “Absolutely not. We are not doing that.”
Years passed like this.
Still trapped. Still trying.
And still, the voice remained.
Patient.
Unyielding.
“Not yet,” it would say when he failed.
“Soon,” when he succeeded only briefly.
████ tightened his grip on the journal and the books, jaw set.
“I’m getting out,” he told himself fiercely. “I don’t care how long it takes. I didn’t survive all this just to stop now.”
Somewhere, deep down, he hoped the voice heard him.
And hoped, just a little, that it truly was his mother, guiding him forward, one step at a time.
Until one day, he tried again.
████ woke up with his heart racing, fingers clenched into the fabric of his bedroll.
The dream still clung to him in fragments, too vivid, too structured to dismiss easily.
It hadn’t felt like the usual haze of memory or fear. It had been…specific.
A server.
Not his ruined one. Not the empty, decaying world he had wandered for years.
This one had a name.
He sat up slowly, rubbing his face with both hands.
“Okay,” he muttered to himself, voice rough with disbelief. “Either that was a premonition…or my brain is officially desperate enough to start lying to me.”
He remembered the name of the server clearly.
Even more unsettling, he remembered who managed it.
An administrator.
A figure of authority.
Someone real.
That was what convinced him to try.
All morning, he prepared in silence.
He repaired the portal frame meticulously, replacing cracked components, reinforcing the structure with runes he had learned from the old books.
His movements were careful, ritualistic.
He spoke only when necessary and even then, barely above a whisper.
“Focus,” he told himself. “You know the destination. You saw it. Just…hold onto that image.”
As he began the spell, the air around the portal shimmered.
Light gathered, folding in on itself, humming with contained power.
Magic was never quiet.
No matter how careful he was, it sang, bright, resonant, alive.
That was when he heard them.
The ground vibrated faintly at first.
Then came the sound of movement.
Too much movement.
“No, no, no,” ████ whispered urgently, not daring to turn around. “Not now. Please, not now.”
He could smell them before he saw them.
Rot.
Decay.
The distorted echoes of something that had once been alive. A horde was approaching, drawn directly to the magic.
He clenched his jaw and kept chanting.
“Almost there,” he hissed. “Just...just a few more seconds.”
A growl erupted behind him.
The zombies poured into the clearing, surrounding him faster than he could react. He felt panic claw up his throat.
“Don’t you dare fail now,” he snapped at the portal, voice breaking. “I didn’t survive all of this for nothing!”
The portal flared open.
Light exploded outward.
████ ran.
He barely took three steps before something slammed into him from the side. He stumbled, fell, felt hands,too many hands, grabbing, tearing, dragging him down.
The light vanished.
Everything went dark.
He woke to softness.
A bed. Sheets. Warmth.
For several long seconds, he didn’t move. He barely breathed.
“…I’m alive,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “Okay. Okay, good start.”
He slowly opened his eyes.
The room was bright and clean, nothing like the broken stone and overgrown ruins he was used to. And standing at the foot of the bed was someone he recognized instantly.
Xisuma.
The admin.
His heart skipped violently.
“Oh,” ████ muttered. “Oh, that’s…not a hallucination, is it?”
Xisuma looked relieved the moment ████ stirred. “You’re awake,” he said calmly, though concern lingered in his eyes. “You were badly injured when you arrived.”
“…Arrived?” ████ echoed, blinking. “So the portal worked?”
“Yes,” Xisuma replied. “Barely.”
████ swallowed. “You’re not… angry?”
He had expected suspicion. Interrogation. Rejection.
Instead, Xisuma stepped closer. “I’m glad you made it,” he said simply. “Your survival is what matters.”
That stunned him more than anything else.
After ensuring he was stable, Xisuma spoke again. “I’d like to offer you a permanent invitation to this server.”
████ stared. “You…what?”
“A place here,” Xisuma clarified. “Hermitcraft. We would be glad to have you among us.”
“…An elf?” ████ repeated faintly when Xisuma used the term.
Confused, he turned his head toward a nearby mirror.
What stared back at him was not a Vex.
His ears were pointed, yes but his features were softer, lighter.
The unmistakable traits of his true species were gone, hidden beneath something else.
Magic. Protection.
“…Someone changed me,” he whispered.
He knew why.
Vex were feared.
Their reputation, canibalistic, ruthless, had been carved into server history.
He had never been like that, but reputations didn’t care about truth.
He glanced back at Xisuma.
Their eyes met.
He knew.
Xisuma knew exactly what he was.
And still, he chose to protect him.
████ nodded slowly. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I’ll…keep the elf thing.”
When asked his name, his mind went blank.
His real name had been lost to time, scratched out, blurred, forgotten.
Years without hearing it had erased it completely.
“…Scar,” he said finally, offering a small, tired smile. “You can call me Scar.”
Xisuma nodded. “Rest, Scar.”
When the admin left, Scar lay back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling.
“This is…new,” he whispered. “A place without screams.”
Hermitcraft.
A server where he could be safe.
For the first time in years, Scar closed his eyes, not out of exhaustion, but relief and allowed himself to believe that his survival might finally mean something.