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“When I was a kid, my mom looked me in the eyes, and told me everything was going to be okay.”
He stands on a precipice, cloak billowing behind him. Splashes of burgundy and lime slighten the darkness, vague monsters opening their jaws beneath where the eye can’t see. Teeth gnash against the nothingness, reaching forward and swallowing him, because he, too, is nothing.
Ranboo lets them.
“I believed her. She took my hand, beckoned me forth through the portal, through the void, through the edge of the world and beyond.
“And I followed.”
He steps forward, feeling the dark crumble under his foot. It tastes like lemon. The scent of iron fills his nose.
“We entered a world. A new one. We didn’t know where we were or where we were going. Well, I didn’t. Sometimes I think she did.”
Ranboo reaches towards where his chest would be.
“I still feel the arrow shaft under my hand. I still feel her hand growing cold beneath mine. I still wonder if I could have saved her.
“I still wish it would have been me.
“She told me I couldn’t go back, then. She said I had to stay here. I saw the words leave her mouth like smoke, and she begged me to keep living as the light left her eyes and her chest and her body.
“I’d never held an ender pearl before.”
Ranboo looked up. He saw stars, and stalactites –or maybe they were stalagmites?– and he saw constellations like the dotted sky, dappled light falling on the dying forest floor.
“The void never wanted to let me leave, left chalk-white scar tissue mapping my left side and a ruby for my eye.
“It didn’t hurt.
“I wish it would have hurt.”
The sky closed above.
“I did keep living, if only for her. I kept waking up to the world, and letting the sun wash over my face. I kept opening my eyes every morning, even when I’d love nothing more but to sink into the ground and let the earth swallow my body whole.
“And for what?”
Ranboo squares his shoulders.
“For scattered memories of a reality I wasn’t sure was there? For forgotten visions of broken life and shattered blood whenever I close my eyes? Did I keep living for the smile painted on the inside of my eyelids, for the heartstring twine cutting into my wrists, rubbing red and raw and bloody against that accursed green? Did I wake up for the birdie on my shoulder, whispering sickly-sweet falsities and sowing them deep inside the monochrome folds of my brain? Is that all living was worth to me?”
He shakes his head, and tears fall forever.
“No. No, that’s not what I lived for. I know that now.
“When I used to live, I lived for distant recollections of sun-golden hair, for green buttoned cloth and badly bleached hair, for stained wood and tarnished metal and strings of forgotten melodies whispered on the summer wind. That’s what I lived for.
“I know that’s what I lived for, because if I didn’t, I’d be a monster.”
He breathes, and his lungs are empty.
“Maybe I am a monster.
“Maybe I am a monster, because I didn’t live for that. I lived for the straightforward journey, the path of least resistance. I kept waking up because I knew I wouldn’t have to think about it. And doesn’t that make me a monster?”
Ranboo reaches into his pocket. He feels a shred of empty cloth. It’s yellow, red, and blue. He knows its owner well.
“Doesn’t that make me a liar, too? A liar because I told him I’d protect him, I told him I cared about him when the bright green stains of unwashable paint were burning blisters in my skin.”
His toes teeter closer to the edge. Ranboo doesn’t worry.
“I didn’t fight when the Warden came for me.
“Nausea settled deep in my stomach and red-hot wires sunk into my brain, but I didn’t fight.
“The door slammed shut behind him, bloodstained iron bars against likewise painted deepslate. Escaping was futile, but most at least try.
“I didn’t.”
The makeshift cavern walls buckled, bending towards the center. There was nothing there.
“I should have tried, later. I should have tried when my bare feet felt grass again. Steel had dug into my neck, knifepoint to the small of my back. I could have run. I should have.
“I never would have.
“My life was a promise, a whispered dying wish on the freezing wind. I entertained it out of obligation, not will.
“It was a storybook, written in blood on pages no-one was ever meant to see. Now it’s come to its conclusion. It’s resolution. The lifebreath has fallen away, and I’m all that’s left.”
Ranboo laughs now, and it’s fringed with madness, the mirth of a hollow husk of a person with nothing left to live for.
“Here I am! I am lost pages in the wind. I am a fairytale written in blood, an amnesiac with nothing left to remember. I am the criminal in the nightly news, crimson painting my face like green once did. I am the marionette on his strings, begging the world for a pocketknife. I am the hooked fish, helpless against the pull of the line.
“Here I am, in a world of my own making, in a world I can’t help but feel at home in, in a world that’s crumbling around my feet. Here I am. I see the constellations, feel the dripping of the inkwell mapping the inside of my skull. Scars smile at me, whispering empty promises to the pupils crying in my eyes. They have no power over me now.”
Ranboo’s feet slip, and he’s falling too, the remnants of a forgotten illusion tumbling with him.
“I hear the roar of the garbage disposal in my ears, the harsh embrace of death reaching for me like the wail of the train as it rushes down the rusting tracks, and I ask myself, is it really that bad?”
The black hole envelops him. Ranboo doesn’t think to scream.