Chapter Text
When that arrow snicks into the soft part of Lomedy’s skull, very suddenly he finds himself having to think around the sharpened shape of a triangular arrowhead. It’s in his head, and so he has to think around it, that thing that is pulled to a point and serrated on the edges and taking up space in his skull. The serration is to increase the harm when the arrow is tugged out, he thinks, and that thought traces the scooped edges of the blade. Who would pull the arrow from his mind? Not Flame; they were just arguing. About to argue, more like, they hadn’t really had the chance to get into it. Maybe he would, though, because isn’t that his hand reaching out towards Lomedy?
Isn’t that the wide white of his unblindfolded sight focused on Lomedy—on the fletching blooming from his temple like a flower—on the trickle of warm blood running down his neck? Isn’t that total blank shock on his face? That thought traces the cold straight line of metal running behind his eyes.
Isn’t that Flamefrags and isn’t he Lomedy and isn’t this the end?
This thought occurs at the very point of the tip of the arrow in his skull: he’s got to catch Flame’s hand.
“So scarred up,” Lomedy murmurs, tilting his best friend’s hand around in his. Flame’s skin is, as always, pleasantly warm to the touch. “Where’d you even get these?”
His thumb traces a dark raised line across Flame’s palm; from the wrist to the first knuckle of the pinky finger. It’s one of so very many; a web of long-healed slices into skin all over Flame’s gentle hands.
His friend lets him map out the scars with his fingers. It’s easier to trace them that way; makes it feel more real. This is where his friend was cut or burnt or broken; this is where he healed.
“Dunno,” Flame mumbles. He’s got his blindfold on, and he’s looking off at nothing. More specifically, at everything that isn’t Lomedy. He really is a terrible liar. “Fights, and stuff.”
“And stuff,” Lomedy echoes. “Sure.”
Flame scoffs, and he turns to look at Lomedy, finally—though really it’s just tilting his head in Lomedy’s direction. With his blindfold, it’s impossible to tell if Flame is really looking at him or not. He threads his fingers through Lomedy’s; flips his hand over and runs his own thumb over Lomedy’s palm. “Yeah, bro, fights. Where’d you get yours?”
When his hand slips through, suddenly he is no longer Lomedy, Flame’s best friend. He is no longer a friend or a brother or a son; he belongs to gravity and gravity alone.
There’s a hitch; a halting in his heart; and then he’s plummeting down.
Somebody shouts his name but that name isn’t his anymore—that name belongs to a living person and in the blink of an eye Lomedy is no longer a living person. He’s just a body, falling.
The ghast fades out of sight instantly. Flame’s voice trails into nothing. And then it’s just Lomedy, alone in a world of gray-white; senseless, seamless emptiness.
Flame cradles Lomedy’s hand in his. His hands are a little dusty with dirt; Flame’s are soft and damp with sweat and radiantly warm. He presses his thumb to Lomedy’s palm. He traces a small, circular burn scar, drawing delicate, comforting circles into the center of his hand.
“Bro?” Flame asks, a little more carefully. “Where’d you get yours?”
“Farming,” Lomedy lies.
“Farming?”
“Mhm.”
His friend’s hand is warm. Very, very warm—but Lomedy doesn’t flinch. This warmth is fine. It’s good. It’s protective. It will keep him safe.
Flamefrags just squeezes his hand; shuffles closer so that their shoulders are pressed together. He smells a little like woodsmoke; the wind smells like summer wildflowers. The setting evening sun drapes them both in gold.
“Those vegetables are vicious, bro,” Flame mumbles. It shocks a laugh out of Lomedy, free and ringing, carried away over their fields by the breeze.
The wind is rushing in his ears. He hasn’t felt this afraid in months and months and months and all of that fear has to boil against the edges of the arrowhead in his mind. The last time his heart stopped in place like this—
“S’okay, bro,” Flame murmurs. “You’re okay. Just a nightmare.”
—was when he was suffocating on the memory of the Mafia, of his diamond-trim teammate tapping against his shoulder one-two-three it’s safe, their homemade language of humanity in their waking nightmare; speaking without sight or voice in taps and touches, and Flamefrags woke him up and framed Lomedy’s face with his hands and pressed their foreheads together and said—
“Hey, it’s okay.”
Spikes, massive behemoth spikes, pillars on pillars of ice and a flat white world coming closer and closer and—
“I’ll—
A totem, snapping, a burst of gold and green radiant showering over Lomedy as everything cracks apart and heals in an instant. He gasps—that first broken, resurrected breath in his new lungs—grasps feebly at the fletching of the weapon in his skull and yanks it out in one quick tug and feels the gray matter of his brain reform and the skin smoothen out and life spark back through everything in bright branching lightning.
—protect you.”
On the snow, Lomedy digs his broken-and-unbroken gloved hands into the frozen earth. He breathes. Alive.
“Promise.”
It is, if Lomedy really thinks about it, so profoundly unfair.
They had something good going on. Lomedy had his little farm, protected from flash flooding and foes by grace of being raised off of the ground. He had a grumpy friend who was kind and sweet but only to him and all the time he could ever need. He had food. He was safe. He had a teammate.
What a gift it is, to have a teammate. Someone who will push his bed next to Lomedy’s—who will take the second and third and fourth and maybe every shift; just staying there, by his side, always. Never alone. Lomedy hates being alone.
It’s so cold in the Mist. If his teammate was here, he could just cozy up into Flame’s side and enjoy his personal on-the-go radiator. When his teammate gets here, he’ll do just that. And maybe Flame will tease him for being corny and chalant, but he’ll also probably lay an arm over Lomedy’s shoulders and tug him close. Because for all the yapping Flame does about power and aura and being solo, Lomedy recognizes that tremble that takes a hold of his friend’s scarred hands when they get out of a close call. He recognizes that terror—he recognizes that frantic, unforgiving love.
In the air-bubble crevice of an ice-spike, Lomedy huddles into himself. He waits for his best friend to find him.
A hand, softly carding through his hair.
Lomedy squints awake, blearily, only to get a faceful of sunlight and Flamefrags.
His best friend is silhouetted in the sun. He’s not wearing his blindfold, and he’s got his locs up in a bun, and the afternoon sunlight catches in the golden cuffs all throughout his hair and Lomedy is impossibly, profoundly grateful to be alive.
“Dude. Some farmer,” Flame teases. “You’re sleeping on the job.”
Lomedy can hear a fat bumblebee buzzing through the wildflowers. There’s a swallow singing in the trees. His friend is laying down beside him, tossing an apple up and down in one hand. He gently bats his teammate’s hand and apple away; turns over, curls up in the sun and closer to him.
“Lemme sleep, bro,” Lomedy mumbles. His cheek is pressed into the grass and the dirt. Soft. It’s soft.
Flame’s hand returns to gently brush Lomedy’s curls behind his ear.
“You gotta wake up, Loms,” he murmurs. Strangely sweet. Flame’s never that sweet, unless something is wrong. Still, the sunlight is so comforting and the air is so warm with summer and Flamefrags is right here.
“Just a few more minutes,” he sighs.
Flame’s gentle, ghosting touch snaps into intensity immediately; his friend’s hand locks firmly over his jaw, muffling Lomedy’s gasp with his palm.
“Lomedy,” Flamefrags hisses. “Get up.”
In that dark crevice of the ice spike air-bubble, Lomedy snaps awake with his hand over his mouth. He suffocates a hitched breath into his own scarred palm before he hears muted voices right next to him and something about the hushed threat and the coldness and the dark and the cramped claustrophobia of the ice makes him snap into silence.
Not quiet—silence. Perfect, still silence. Mafia-silence. That suffocating, crushing stillness that the Mafia required of all its members; without trembling or shaking or soul. Machine motionless.
In a moment, Lomedy is gone. There is only the trimless soldier who knows black obsidian boxes and pearls over the void and to hover behind his diamond-trimmed safety net. He falls into it so easily and quickly and gracelessly that it makes him want to reach into his head and amputate this self out of existence. But he can’t and he won’t and it’s too late now, anyway.
The voices get closer and then farther away, fading in and out of the white endless world like a radio signal out-of-range, taking and losing form; howling wind fading into human voices fading into wind again.
Arachnid’s soldiers? Or Mistrul? Travellers, in the fog?
He stays still and he stays silent until they are gone, and then he slips out from the ice and down to the snow; checks his surroundings carefully; then, at last, begins to slink through the mist.
It’s not what the Mafia taught him. If he and his teammate were ever separated back then, Lomedy just froze; found a small spot and hid where he last saw him so that his teammate could find him easily and slink into his hiding spot and press their hands together flat, scars on scars; Mafia sign language for I’m here. It’s okay.
Two cold fingers on the underside of his jaw; diamond-trimmed gauntlets searching for a pulse, just to be certain. And when he found it, the tense line of his friend’s shoulders would relax, and his chestplate would heave a sigh, and he would rock forward to clack the horns on their helmets together, black netherite on pale-blue diamond trims. He always was so terrified of losing Lomedy. Neither of them could have believed then that of the two of them, only Lomedy would make it back into the warmth of the visible world.
Searching is not what the Mafia taught him—but he isn’t in the Mafia, anymore.
Lomedy’s boots crease oval indentations into the snow.
See? He thinks, grimly, to himself. I am alive. I did make it out.
In the springtime, at Flame and Lomedy’s first ever base, there is a crabapple tree.
Back when they first met, when Lomedy was still so desperate to be anything but alone and haunted and frightened every time he saw his own skin, he once saw Flame training under its shade.
In the Spring, crabapple trees bloom and blush fuschia pink. Their petals flutter when the wind blows strong; a soft, gentle rain of flowers spiraling through the sunny world.
That’s what he remembers best; Flame, tracing out his choreography of war like a dancer practicing in the wings; framed by dark branches and a storm of pink petals and the glorious, unrelenting sun.
It was the first time, maybe, that Lomedy ever saw him in leather armor. Maybe that was what made him certain that this was worth it. Maybe that’s what made him decide that he needed Flamefrags in his life.
To be so graceful, so elegant, so wonderfully free; to be vulnerable because Lomedy asked it of him; to be so perfectly beloved by nature.
What more could someone look for in a teammate?
Lomedy drifts through the mist like a ghost, slipping in between shadowy pillars of ice. It’s times like these he almost wishes he were still invis—this would be the perfect time to hide his armor and slip through the mist unseen, impossible to catch. As it is, his glimmering purple-black netherite is a black spot on the otherwise pristine white landscape. Even through the mist, he feels particularly findable.
Perhaps, though, he’ll be findable by his best friend. He can just imagine it now; Flamefrags, aura-farming anxiously on the peak of one of these awful, unnaturally massive spikes of ice, scanning the landscape for a flash of gold or black, and then spotting it—spotting him, somehow, with whatever magic pro player thing he does and then windcharging effortlessly down and sprinting to Lomedy, emerging from the mist like—
Footsteps.
Lomedy freezes, but it’s too late. They saw him before he heard them. All around, a circle of dark silhouettes slouch out of blank slate gray like bruised stormclouds hovering on the horizon. Players. At least five of them.
“You,” one of them says, her voice echoing hollow in the mist. “Mistrul ordered us to find you.”
Lomedy stays silent. Perfectly silent. Mafia-silent.
“Mistrul ordered us to kill you,” echoes another. He can’t see their faces, through the mist. He wishes he could see their faces. Maybe then they would feel more like people and less like the vengeful invisible ghosts of his past, come to take their due.
There are five of them. Lomedy’s armor is better than theirs but that doesn’t mean he’ll survive this.
Between the two of them, neither of them thought Lomedy would make it out of the Mafia. Not when death was so omnipresent; hovering over their heads like a pearl over the void, one whim away from being destroyed completely. Lomedy saw people flicker out of existence. He saw them fall out of the world. He saw armies slaughtered and crushed and killed; fed to the steamrolling machine of Ashswag’s ambitions. He saw his best friend his teammate his only lonely safety crumple and fall; he crawled into the massacre on his hands and knees in full invis to pull the cold invisible shell of that beloved body close to his still-beating heart.
Lomedy thought he would die that day. He didn’t. He borrowed his sweet dead friend’s bravery; he curled up there in the piles of translucent corpses and crushed glass bottles of iridescent invis against the ground. When it was safe—after the dead had been tallied and the victors left—all he had left was a cluster of glass shards on the soil, piled up like a clear crystal chrysanthemum. A flower, for the dead. A flower, for Lomedy, alive and alone.
To survive now he needs to do the same.
Borrowed bravery feels like crabapple blossoms against your hand; buttery smooth and soft, fuschia pink and fluttering delicate, wind-blown petal kisses against your palm. Looks like an apple, in his friend’s hand, rising up and then back down again, caught and caught and caught. Smells like woodsmoke and late summer wildflowers.
Lomedy straightens his back, and he lets the flat, heavy side of his mace swing off of his shoulders and slam into the snow. The silhouette-ring of soldiers flinches back.
“You’ve genuinely gotta be kidding me right now,” he drawls. “Bro. Like, bro. I don’t have time for this.”
He takes a water bottle from his belt; tosses it up and down. The apple, rising and falling. Potions, sloshing around in their glass globes. Glimmering cuffs in his hair and calloused hands; a bracing stance, a sharp-toothed smirk. “Don’t you guys have something better to do than die to me?”
One looks at the other. All Lomedy can see is the glint of their diamond helmets tilting in the mist. The other nods.
Then they turn away from Lomedy and disappear, back into the fog. The rest follow, one-by-one, sneaking wary glances at Lomedy’s mace. At his teammate’s mace.
As soon as the crunching of snow under boots fades, Lomedy clutches his mace to his chest and runs; sprints through the mist until he finds the spikes again and he can fall to his knees in the shadow of one of these massive pillars and shudder apart.
Ice is cold at his back. The mace is heavy. His heart is still beating rabbit-quick.
Lomedy presses his forehead against the flat face of the mace.
“Thank you. Miss you,” he breathes; lets his gaze drift upwards, to where the tip of a massive spire disappears into the mist. “I miss you so, so much.”
Every now and then, when Lomedy was sick, or haunted, or paralyzed by the past, Flame would set down his sword by the door, take care of the farm chores, and make some soup.
It wasn’t necessarily good soup; it took a lot of complaining to get him to make something that wasn’t just boiled vegetables or heated-up regen-in-a-bowl. Flame operated almost entirely on rations and golden carrots before he met Lomedy, and so knew next-to-nothing of the culinary arts.
Lomedy’s teammate, however, is resourceful and an unfairly quick learner, so it wasn’t long before Flame could make a pretty good broth. Boiled bones and vegetable scraps; the red-purple dark onion skins, peeled bits of carrot, the stems of kale; cooked up with well-water and a dream and an aching amount of care.
He really did care for Lomedy so very much.
So it’s strange, then; jarring and unreal, when night comes and goes and comes and goes again and there is no Flame.
He doesn’t appear magically from the mist. He doesn’t scoop Lomedy up into a crushing, warm hug and cry into his shoulder a little bit. He doesn’t clutch at Lomedy’s hand like a lifeline; whisper how frightened he was and how glad he is that Lomedy is okay and how he doesn't know what he would do if Lomedy died so he can’t die, not now, not ever, not while they play together on this server, not while Flame lives. There is no one else. Just Lomedy, alone in the ice.
Lomedy, alone with the endless fog.
Lomedy, alone.
At first, he doesn’t know that days have passed at all—there’s no setting sun, darkening of the sky, canvas of stars. Only his internal clock, the push of exhaustion and the pull of dreamless sleep; the rise of daybreak memory and, more distantly, the eight minute timer of invis potions.
He traces the spikes; finds his way through; maps them by orientation. Pieces together a day and night cycle from what little still anchors him to the sun.
Lomedy, alone for a week. It’s about now that he starts to consider that maybe his teammate is dead, and then un-considers it. If Flame is dead, so is Lomedy. There will be no third teammate. It’s about now that his mind starts to buzz and spiral and fade when he looks at the snow and the fog and the white for too long. It’s about now that he starts running out of food, so he has to go searching further into the fog and in that fog he finds—
A burnt-down village. Piles of ash. A charred rocking horse.
There is no food. Lomedy returns to the spikes and he doesn’t leave them again. For a while.
Lomedy, alone for three weeks. This is when he realizes Flame isn’t coming back for him.
Nothing breathes but Lomedy.
The land he’s found himself most familiar with in the first month is more flat than not, all level and interspersed with spikes and unnatural trees that stretch so far into the sky that he can’t see their points. He doesn’t think he ever will.
Nothing is quite hidden when he comes too close, which unsettles some instinct in him that’s been long-buried till he was ripped away from all the comfort he got used to. In his and Flame’s brief space of time where all was relatively well, he got used to all the closeness that became ritual; elbows brushing while making breakfast; chasing each other around in the garden while picking food for lunch; head leant against his shoulder after dinner, evening coming to a slow-crawling stop.
Here, in this place that Lomedy desperately wants to leave, if just for a taste of the sun, proximity is a necessary danger in finding his way back home.
It’s been long enough that thinking Flame would be the one to emerge from the fog—the chances are low. Not enough for Lomedy to stop hoping, but still low.
He’s grown from running towards silhouettes and distant sounds, calling out Flame’s name, into quieting whenever he hears anything but the rushing wind and crunch of snow under his boots. Old mantras rippling through his head, the past coagulating in the divot the arrow that struck Lomedy carved out; silence is survival. Mafia superstition.
In lieu of anything else to steady himself—unable to turn to warmth, to company, to the physical ritual of farming—he returns to old mantras.
One-two-three taps of his fingers against his palm; it’s safe, there’s nothing here that can hurt me.
After long enough, it turns to palms pressed together, searching for a facsimile of comfort; I’m here. He imagines the grooves he traced on Flame’s palms, once, a thousand miles away. Crabapple blossoms and dark branches. The rough texture, scraped up and toughened by hard work. Scars like lightning strikes against a storming sky. Glass flowers glinting in the dark.
That’s not right—his memory stutters.
His old friend’s scars were thicker, more knotted and harsh. Happened all at once, wounds splitting into each other to heal into one mass, instead of the collection built up over years like Flame.
Taking his gloves off, letting the cold bite the feeling in his fingers away, he can pretend. Pressure on the skin felt even through the cold. His old friend by his side, brought to the present by the Mafia’s silent speaking: I’m here.
When he starts showing up in the far-off edges of the mist, a long-forgotten memory finding him again, Lomedy starts wondering distantly if all he needed to bring him back was to remember him.
Maybe he just needed to hold on and refuse to let go, instead of burying him in his garden he shared with Flame.
Dusty white sprigs of carrot flowers blossoming in the sun; cups of tulips blooming red-pink-yellow along the edges of their raised scrap-metal vegetable beds.
“I still don’t think we needed this many carrots,” Lomedy muses, gently poking at a vivid scarlet tulip. It bobs in place, and Flame scoffs.
“It’s the most—”
“Ooh, the most nutritiously efficient food out there,” Lomedy mocks. “What happened to joy, huh? To whimsy and fun and good recipes? Can’t eat golden carrots all the time.”
His teammate looks disgruntled by this, as if he thinks he really could eat golden carrots all the time and thrive.
“What about berries, bro?” Lomedy debates. His teammate has always had a sweet tooth. In fact, Lomedy had just foraged a wicker basket of berries this morning for breakfast. The raspberries down by the river were a little too ripe, but they’re still good to eat. “You love berries.”
Flame pauses, halfway through reaching for another raspberry from the basket. He kisses his teeth and looks away ‘cause he’s been caught. Literally red-handed.
“Whatever,” his best friend laughs. “Go back to your dirt, garden-boy.”
He pats Lomedy on the shoulder, and the raspberry juice on his hands sinks into Lomedy’s white farming shirt.
Flame yanks his hand away, but the damage has already been done. Red-on-white makes pink. Faint, brutal pink.
There are places that are haunted because of the ghosts that refuse to leave it and there are places that swallow whole the bodies of those they wish to keep. Lomedy can’t piece together what the mist wants—not even when he stumbles upon the first massacre.
Bodies on bodies on bodies. Limp and silent on the ice, half-buried. Limbs in dark clothes sticking out of snowdrifts like gravemarkers.
Lomedy has been here thousands of times. He has tasted iron on his tongue and choked on the scent of death as a naive farmhand and now as a naive friend, waiting for peace that will never come.
The bodies are people, this time. He sees skin, faces. Ripped open wounds and gore that spells out their violent ends. Empty eyes. At least there are eyes.
In the Mafia, when the slaughter was over, the bodies stayed invis; the purple-shelled dead piling up like cicada shells in the late summer. Even in death, they retained their anonymity. Even in death, they remained inhuman.
In the Mafia, Lomedy buried them anyway. Ripping out the ground, tearing through roots, displacing everything natural for graves. Dignity in death where it was never given in life. Those are callouses he’s proud of, more than scars from pointless battle that just happened to engrave themselves into his skin.
Here, in this place where nothing grows, the ground is frozen. He cannot bury them, but he will not tear them from their restless final moments.
It's superstition, old and worn. A lost ghost becomes a vengeful one.
Lomedy must leave them, if he wants to find his way out. But he wants to help; aches with it.
He passes by each face, clears them of snow and gently closes their eyes.
"Are you cold?" he murmurs, brushing frost off of the frozen blue face of a child no older than him. Has to choke down the rot trying to eat him from the inside out when he spots the wound charred at its edges; knows exactly what they saw when they died. Glimmering cuffs in his hair; a bracing stance, a sharp-toothed smirk.
"Sorry," he whispers, too little, too late. "I'm sorry. Let me help you.”
He steps over sprawling bloodstains, regardless of the fact that the mist has frozen them and they won’t stain his boots. He sees red on white; remembers raspberry stains on his shirt; crushed in his hands; and throws up in a distant snowdrift.
Is it possible, he wonders as he stumbles away, for a resting place for rotting corpses to truly be a place to find a moment of peace? Is there some inherent betrayal in the name itself, promising to be something it can never manage to live up to in a poor man’s dying breaths?
He can take care of them, Lomedy decides, until the words aren’t an empty comfort.
Just until he leaves.
Sometimes, in the farmhouse, Lomedy would dream.
The house was old. It was here before he got here and it’ll probably be here after; some artifact of players long-gone. There were names carved into the wood, somewhere—he remembers finding them carved into the logs behind the stove when he first moved in—a handful of playertags and a few notes.
J & E forever <3 one wrote.
xTragicBonex was here, said another, and then above that: LOL. LT5 house-building.
RIP MorningDune6. I miss you.
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
Sometimes, in the farmhouse, the wind would blow through the drafty windows and make the bones of the building creak, low and mournful. It would creak, and that creak would slip into his sleeping mind, and Lomedy would toss and turn in his sleep; wake up tangled in his sheets and cold with sweat.
He never remembered his dreams; only that they were dreams. They were only dreams.
Sometimes in the farmhouse—he was alone. Sometimes Flame had a mission or a soul-quest or whatever the hell he did at night and Lomedy was left alone in that cold, drafty old home, and he would huddle in bed, under Flame’s patchwork orange-and-red quilt, already missing his friend’s radiant warmth and wait for sleep. Or, perhaps, instead: that awful, moaning creak. The wind blowing outside and inside. Dreams of pale, blurred-out half-moon faces turning towards him in the dark; wailing whispers seeping from within the walls; clawed hands sinking into the wood behind the stove.
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
He thinks he’s hallucinating, for a long few moments, when he sees netherite armour step out of the endless fog.
Overlaid atop each other; Flame’s furrowed brows and twisted frown of anger and concern; his old team-mate, face blurred, shiny armour trimmed in flashing diamond.
The past five months he’s spent out here have blended together, barebones of his routine settling like a second skin on his shoulders: Sleeping in an abandoned house and pretending the wind against the doors doesn’t sound like one-two-three, it’s safe, I’m here. Waking up and leaving to skies that are just the same as they appear in the night.
Then stepping outside to make the slow trek to the corpses he must tend to. Lomedy has never stripped them of their armour, only shielded them from the elements; it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that one of them must have followed him back, just as lonely as he is.
And then the figure steps closer and closer until Lomedy sees skin and a face and eyes.
And then the man—not an outline in the fog—speaks, saying, “Lomedy?”
This must be a ghost, Lomedy thinks first. But he hears breathing, not his own, for the first time since that arrow pierced his skull and pinned him to this place.
“How do you know me?” Lomedy asks, the only natural continuation.
“Your friend, Flame. He mentioned you once, before he left,” the man says.
“Oh,” Lomedy says, voice creaky with disuse. He clears his throat, “Are you lost out here, too?”
He tries not to make his reaction to Flame’s name obvious; chill down his spine like an icicle to the base of his neck and a brief second where all he sees is charred wounds paired with empty eyes.
Lomedy must not do a good enough job, because the stranger’s face seems to twitch when they make eye contact.
“You should be dead,” The man says abruptly, and for a moment he sounds as though he’s angry to find him breathing at all. He looks at Lomedy a little closer, leaning forward while Lomedy freezes in place. He’s torn between not wanting to flee from the first living contact he’s made with a person in months and every instinct in him screaming at the sight of the sword hanging at his hip.
“I mean, you technically are,” The man says after a long pause, “I guess the details don’t matter.”
He tips his head, a little more curious after the initial frustration of his words seems to fade. Lomedy’s insides feel cold, words rattling around in his skull, cramming themselves into the divot the arrow left behind.
You should be dead.
“What are you talking about?” Lomedy asks, not as forceful as he would’ve been back at home, under the sun, taller and warmer. “I’m—right here. I’m alive.”
Even to him, the words come out unsteady. Forced out through blue lips and stumbling teeth.
Before he left, echoes louder.
“You’ve been here this whole time?” The man asks him, ignoring Lomedy’s words entirely. His voice is softer; not in a way that comes naturally. This is disjointed and awkward, like he’s used to treating people like things to condescend to rather than comfort.
“It’s cold, isn’t it?” Lomedy says, unable to think of anything else to say now that he’s standing in front of someone who hasn’t killed him yet. It’s all he’s been able to think about for months. “It’s so cold.”
“It’s always cold here,” The man says. This, more than before, sounds kinder, only because of how honest it is, “You just have to make space for it so the cold doesn’t tear open the parts you want to keep.”
What an awful thing to ask of him, Lomedy thinks distantly. To give up what little he has left.
Later, after Flowtives tells Lomedy his name and leads him to an abandoned city that he calls his old home, he runs over the words again, like cleaning blood off his teeth. You should be dead, and then, I mean, you technically are.
Lomedy is not a ghost, and the cold has taken nothing from him yet. He is not dead, and will not let Flow convince him of it.
When he sleeps that night, the knocking resumes. Louder than it’s ever been.
One-two-three. I’m here.
And Lomedy knows that violence is the only line of defence his old friend used to have. Seeing netherite-shelled players splattered in blood became routine. Memories of death clinging to shoulders in the night, when nightmares tried to pull him down to the grave, clawed grip on his shaking limbs.
Sleep felt like death, those nights. Like rot trying to swallow him whole.
And Lomedy knows that sometimes, there was no other choice but to hide if he wanted to live. Burrowed in staying places of scared untrimmed players long-gone while he heart battle roared above him. An embrace in the cold draft that wrapped around him.
When his friend dies, Lomedy never finds out for sure where or when it happened. Just that one day, he stopped showing up, and one day, he started slipping his hands into the cold limp ones of the bodies that were left behind to see if he could find him.
No way to see his face and find him through sight alone. Lomedy had to lower himself to the ground, put skin-on-skin, shaking hands with the dead.
Maybe all that time, he was welcoming them in, lost ghosts cramming themselves under his bones. He would have let it happen even if he did know. A lost ghost becomes a vengeful one, and Lomedy has practice in being a home. He could hold onto them as long as they needed a place to stay, offering his own warmth where they had none. Lomedy knows this better than anything; needing refuge, taking whatever kindness there was where he could, because there was so little to go around. It would’ve been unfair to deny these people of it, just because they had their lives ripped away from them, far too soon.
The bodies, the bodies. All that Lomedy sees now, following him when he closes his eyes. The mist wraps around him like a second skin.
With Flow’s help, he finds more that he didn’t know he was looking for. Lomedy is a coward in a way he can admit; every new sign of life turns into another snowdrift of bodies.
He doesn’t want to find them anymore.
He comes across a girl, once, wrapped in the arms of another, a limp butterfly in a stiff cocoon, and collapses to his knees. Forehead pressed to the ice like a worshipper, he sobs. The wind, cool and quiet, holds him close.
“Look what he did to us,” Flow hisses, and his voice presses into the divot in Lomedy’s mind.
And Lomedy knows that violence is the only line of defence that Flame has, sometimes.
But the bodies, the bodies. They’re all that he sees now, the only company he has.
Sometimes, when Flow isn’t nearby and the cold gets close to tearing through his ribs, the wind whispers to him. On the loneliest nights, he starts to talk back.
His hands have done this before; his body remembers, because without one, there is nothing to hold onto.
Lomedy wipes snow from faces, closes eyelids gently, brushes hair away from the foreheads of children and presses his lips to them to apologize. Every time he is awake, because in this place where nothing grows, there is nothing to tend to but the bodies.
Every day is night. Minutes are hours. There is a ghost following him back, with searching eyes.
One-two-three. I’m here, at the door.
The cold will take the parts you want to keep, Flow says.
Outlines in the fog follow him, waiting for him to sleep. To rip him in half and cradle his bones, until he is a house they haunt.
Lomedy watches the door and sleeps very little. Flow finds him when he wakes, and greets him as he always does.
“Still here?” Questioning, as though he should have been gone by now.
“Still here,” Lomedy would answer. He doesn’t know when it started tasting like rot between his molars; a lie too bitter to swallow.
One-two, one-two-three, says the wind at night. Let me in.
Flow’s voice is a buzzing locust in a land devoid of life. Ever-present drone in the back of Lomedy’s skull, refusing to come to the forefront of his attention, even when they're only a few feet apart.
Now and then, bits and pieces of what he says become clear to Lomedy: “We can lure him back here,” while Lomedy’s arms cradle swords on swords on swords, some broken, all bloodstained; “He killed my best friend,” at Lomedy’s shoulder when the skies grow dark, snow spiralling from unmoving clouds to kiss his cold face; “You’re technically dead, you know,” after following Lomedy out into the depths of the mist, feet crunching in fresh-fallen snow.
I’m dead, Lomedy thinks absently, watching ice spikes and dead tree trunks blur together. It makes sense here; this place where the ground is frozen and nothing grows.
“We’ll get him,” Flow promises, snarl catching on the edge of his words. “Both of us.”
He only hums along. Fingers tinged a little blue gently close the eyes of another corpse. “Sorry,” he whispers, “That he left you behind, too.”
In the Mist, Lomedy learns that it is not enough to occupy a carcass and call that living; there is a spark in every breathing thing that pulses alongside a restless heartbeat. He knows this, because for the first time since escaping the mafia, he is so, so cold, right at the epicenter of his chest, that it chokes him alive.
There is no space to nurture hope under his clawed ribs; in this place, where nothing grows, he scrapes himself hollow.
He lets himself hold onto the rot, turning the empty space in him into a haunted home; without the corpses, a reminder of how cold skin feels, Lomedy is nothing but alone in a quiet fog that doesn’t care for him.
Ghosts worry in circles within the mist, lagging behind to tend to the site of their graves like fervent, restless gardeners. He sees them now.
They stare back, hungry.
Soup made from half-frozen roots is all he has to eat. The hollow in him grows wider, till he can see the bones in the back of his hand twitch every time his fingers do. Lomedy watches them, skeleton trying to tear out of him, when his hands shake.
They tremble today, when his hands ghost over the ruffled clothes of an abandoned body.
It’s one he’s seen before; the first group he ever came across, dressed in dark blue under heavy netherite shelling. Lomedy has memorized these faces that no one else will. They follow him to his house, watching him, smeared through the fogged windows.
He watches his bones twitch under his skin in the night, scared that the wind is luring his skeleton away. The only warmth left in him is his blood. There is a desperate need in him; to let the dead out; until his restless vertebra slithers out of him like a snake; relieving the pressure against his heart; white on red; raspberry stains; faces blurred against a wet window.
Tonight, only as sleep finally takes him, does he realize he forgot to lock the door.
One-two-three. I’m here.
“Still here?” Flow asks the next morning, a never-ending loop.
Lomedy is silent when he follows, listening to his radio-static voice press into the divot in his mind. It blends into the rest of them; whispers, dragging at the ends of his clothes, his skin. Hanging off his teeth.
“There’s a red desert,” Lomedy says that day. The heavy weight of a sword in his hand as he pushes the sharpened tip of it into the snow, a border around his house, “If you follow the river to its end.”
He doesn’t know if Flow hears him. Lomedy is a creature of habit who falls into the rhythm of planting; sword in hand; flip over; pushed through frozen earth. “It was nice, for a bit.”
Sword, flip, push. “Not really a home. Nothing there was ever quite like home.”
He meets resistance on the thirtieth of upwards a hundred. Wipes away the snow to find black ice under his feet. Lomedy kneels, presses his bare fingers to the surface, numb to the cold. There’s nothing left for it to take.
“When you find him,” Lomedy tells the water, “You have to bring him back.”
When he looks up again, Flow is gone. Lomedy, no longer lost, tends to his planting.
Sword, flip, push.
Blood and anger are both warm; only one is finite, in this place where nothing grows.