The world outside was burning, and Zed was doing his best to ignore it. The moon was normal, he told himself. It was exhibiting perfectly normal lunar behaviours. Nevermind that these behaviours would most likely result in the deaths of him and almost everyone he loved, and this time around he wouldn’t just be able to let the grim reaper possess him for a day to make everything better.
He shook his head to try and get rid of the thought. Doing so was getting harder and harder, especially since the sky had started burning. Wasn’t the moon supposed to hit its Roche limit and start tearing itself apart long before things got to this point? Zed would’ve sworn that things couldn’t have gotten to this point, and so he tried to convince himself that they hadn’t.
Still, that didn’t stop the moon from crashing. Zed felt himself lift slightly up off the ground, drifting towards the ceiling of his bedroom. He had a feeling that if he came back down again, it wouldn’t be while he was alive. As the first rumblings and shockwaves of the final end echoed out in the distance, Zed dropped all pretenses and closed his eyes, bracing for the end.
A moment passed, then another, then Zed knew no more.
There was nothing. He would’ve said he was adrift in the void, but that would have required a body to be adrift with. There was nothing, not even a him, not really. Just a spark of consciousness, the nothing knowing itself to be what it was and would forever remain. Then, a voice spoke, breaking the nothing.
I see the player you mean.
The voice was familiar to him, somehow, like the average of billions of distant friends. It was like a whisper, cradling the body he didn’t have closer to a safety which could not exist.
He has died, but it is not yet time for him to awaken from the long dream.
A second voice spoke, and he tried to open his mouth, to form words, to ask who they were and why they were talking about him, but he didn’t have a mouth, and there was no air to move with it, and so he remained silent, though worried. Whatever this ‘died’ thing was, it didn’t sound like a good thing.
Indeed. He still has stories and discoveries and contraptions and achievements and art and love and hope to create.
Create. That sounded nice. That sounded good. He wanted to do that, to create himself, because he didn’t really know who he was—he didn’t even have a name!
Zedaph.
Zedaph. That was a nice name. He liked it. He decided he was going to keep it.
Open your eyes.
He had eyes, he realised. He opened them, and he saw the nothingness, instead of simply being aware of it. It would’ve sent a shiver down his spine, if it weren’t for the part where he didn’t have a spine, or knowledge of the concept of a shiver.
Now. Feel your heartbeat. Take a breath into your lungs. Feel your arms and legs take shape around you, supporting you. Listen to the world with your ears. Feel each and every piece of yourself exist, as if it had never stopped.
Feel the blanket draped over your sleeping body, and the mattress you lie on.
Feel the warmth of the early summer sun caress your face.
Awaken into another dream, a newer dream, in which you remember the last, and in which you survive.
And remember you are not alone
And remember you are not separate from every other thing
And remember you are loved
And remember you are love
Wake up, Zedaph.
Slowly, Zed’s eyes fluttered open. A soft blanket was draped over his body, and he felt very heavy and comfortable. He let himself enjoy the comfort for a moment, letting his eyes droop closed once more, relaxing into the warmth of his bed.
And then the nature of the dream he’d just had hit him like a train at full speed and he gasped fully awake, stumbling out of bed. He stood there for a moment, turning over his hands as if making sure they were real, before looking out the window. The sun was rising, and yet—as Zed turned around to check—there was no gigantic moon still sinking below the horizon.
Something was off about the way his bedroom was laid out, too, but with the way his mind was addled with sleep and the clawing remains of death, he couldn’t quite figure out why. It certainly matched his memories of his bedroom, from before… everything. His train of thought, however, was interrupted by the pinging of his communicator with a private message. Zed picked it up from where it lay, in front of a mirror on a pile of shulkers.
<FalseSymmetry> omw!
Zed frowned. Why would False be on her way? They hadn’t agreed to do something before the apocalypse happened, Zed was pretty sure, and he knew False had outright stated that she didn’t want to be part of his experiments, so what was going on? Zed scrolled back a little in his message history, before he suddenly realised something was wrong with the timestamps. They all seemed to suggest it was the middle of June, 2021, when Zed knew for a fact that it was actually December of the same year.
Unless…
The realisation hit Zed with the subtlety of a brick to the face. Everything was wrong because Zed must have slipped back in time, somehow. His bedroom was in its original configuration. The moon was small because it hadn’t had a chance to become big yet. And, if Zed’s memory served him right, False’s message referred to her bringing him four slime balls… which meant Zed hadn’t just time travelled, he’d gone back to the start of the season.
His communicator slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor as he numbly walked out to the front of his base to meet False.