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Here is the first truth of it that Wilbur will never know: it is an accident. It is nothing, and then it is everything, startling in its quickness, one wrong step and the world shattering beneath their feet.
It is an accident, but it doesn’t really matter (will never really matter again) because it is and always will be, and there is nothing any of them can do about it.
-but it has been so quiet. For years, centuries. Maybe millennia. Time means so much less, these days, the passing of seasons like breath and years in a blink, and so few of them remain. The children are gone and have taken with them their brilliant foolhardy intensity, the abandon with which they approached all things.
There is only, now, the old and the tired and the ageless. Those who have wronged and been wronged, who let the ages slip through their fingers like sand and do not grieve for their passing.
(There is no point left to the fight. What would it be? What do they have left to fight over?)
It has become something of a routine. Something Wilbur never thought he’d enjoy: and yet, and yet. After Tommy, after Quackity, after chaos and anarchy and life and death and rebirth- but the sun still rises in the east. This, if nothing else, he can count on.
He’s weaving a familiar path through a snow-heavy northern forest, intent on seeing his father for a time before he passes onward to the ruins at worldspawn. The air sings with the cold that comes only just before dawn, the sky already beginning to bleed with color, when he breaks through the treeline.
And: the ground crumbles.
It is as if the stone has reached up and grasped the life in Wilbur’s throat with two hands, if only to save itself. His whole insides twist and he falls to his knees with the grief of it. It is monumental, fragmental. The reddening sky splits open, the mountains howl, the rivers run still.
Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
He’s not sure how he gets the rest of the way to Phil’s house. Maybe he walked. Maybe the angel dragged him from where he lay crumpled in the snow. But Wilbur blinks and he is sagged against his father’s shoulder, a thin trill ringing in his throat.
Technoblade is across the room, standing frozen by the kitchen table. There’s a thick tome grasped loosely in his hands, and his eyes are wide and unseeing- but it’s the tension in his shoulders that betrays he’s not just zoned out to Chat. Even the Blade (and oh, he shouldn’t think of that nickname, not now when he is so fragile, not when it has been so long but he never really got over the kid, though he hasn’t been a kid in even longer-) is caught up in the waves of mourning sweeping over the world.
It does not disappear. It abates, after a time, settles low and heavy under Wilbur’s lungs, and when his hands stop shaking he pushes himself back to his feet. Philza’s hands ghost across his shoulders as if he were going to fall again, but retreat when Wilbur shakes his head to clear it.
“We need to go to the ruins,” Phil says. Technoblade nods. There’s not really a question about it.
They go.
Pausing only to gather potions and weapons, the three of them set out south. It is an instinct ingrained into them after so long in these lands, pointing them to the center of it, to the sword driven into the world’s heart- but they’re not Dream, made of the world as he is. They don’t know what they’ll find when they get there.
Wilbur pauses on the front porch, though, caught by a sense of something he cannot name. Technoblade glances back at him- “Are you coming or not?”- but Wilbur doesn’t respond.
A moment, a moment, a moment again and: it hits him.
It was sunrise when he arrived here. It has been- an hour, at least, the sun should be well up in the sky by now. But it hasn’t moved. “The sun,” he whispers. “The sun, the daylight cycle, it’s- it’s all broken,”
Philza looks up toward the eastern sky, but Wilbur can’t read anything from his expression. “More reason to move quickly,” he says. “And we won’t have to stop for cover at nightfall.”
And that’s the sum of it. Travelling under a perpetual dawnlight sky is- unnerving, to say the least. All the shadows are too long and the light is just a shade too red (red like blood coating everything, an ill omen a portent of doom-) for comfort. It’s ethereal, haunting, and as they near the ruins, a pit of dread slowly but steadily opens up in Wilbur’s stomach.
(He tries not to notice the trees that rot around them, the leaves turned brown in the height of summer. The places he knows with the surety of millennia hopping them where rivers once ran and do not any longer. Even the mountain-stone itself crumbling, turning to dust before his eyes. He tries not to notice the world turning in on itself, even as it does too fast for him to understand.)
Wilbur’s not sure how long it takes them to arrive at the crater, but it feels like one moment they’re still thousands of blocks away and the next they’re hovering at the edge of the precipice. Nature has long reclaimed the ancient battleground- grasses cover the exposed dirt, waterfalls spill all the way down to a small lake at bedrock, little scraggly trees even cling to the cliff faces.
(Wilbur can see where the fires once burned, where the explosions once rattled the sky in a Doomsday he was not alive to witness. This was his symphony, once, when it still played. But the trumpets are gone and so are the flutes, the melody fallen to silence; the snares are still and there is no thunderous bass. All that is left are the violins, hanging thin and paralyzed above an orchestra long gone.
Sometimes he wonders how they all could have been so blind. They had so little time.)
The obsidian latticework still hangs overhead, but it’s been consumed by a village-in-miniature, small wooden structures suspended over and hung from underneath it. This is worldspawn, still, after all, and for all the ruins of its youth, it was never going to be abandoned for long.
The three of them make their way up. The moment Wilbur sets foot on obsidian, Ranboo appears before him in a flurry of purple particles. The half-enderman is hard to read on a good day, but today he’s positively inscrutable, and Wilbur hasn’t a clue what to make of it.
“Ranboo,” Phil calls out from behind Wilbur. “Mate, what’s happened?”
He stares at Phil for a long moment, and if Wilbur didn’t know better, he’d almost say there’s horror flickering in his eyes.
(Does he know better?)
“You’re the last to arrive,” Ranboo finally whispers. Without another word, he turns and makes his way back across the pathways, leading them to an unassuming hut Wilbur recognizes as Dream’s, the one he shares with Sapnap and George when they come around.
The air is thick when they duck inside. All the remaining survivors of the world have gathered, as Ranboo promised- Wilbur and Philza and Technoblade, Ranboo and Niki and Eret, Skeppy and Bad and Sapnap and George and-
-and there’s only eleven of them, they’re so easy to count so-
“Where’s Dream?” but the unbidden words spill out of Wilbur’s mouth before he can bite them back, before he stops the knives he knows they are and never meant, because the crumbling world and the yawning mouth of void-deep grief and oh, oh, he already knows, doesn’t he.
(Dream does not have the three lives of a mortal, not here in his home territory. It takes so much more to kill a worldgod than death.)
But Sapnap looks him steady in the eye through tears Wilbur has not once ever seen him shed, and he is terribly, terribly right.
.
They don’t go home. What would be the point?
Their time has run up against a wall they didn’t think was even possible. Without the server’s worldgod, it’s going to disintegrate under their feet, the code and matter of it unsupported and untied together. It’ll return to the void from whence it came, and with it anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the storm.
The servergates- closed, no one’s gone in or out for so long, they haven’t needed them- are so jammed and stuck only the worldgod (the dead worldgod, the dead worldgod ) could possibly pry them open. In short: there’s no good way out.
There’s a blur of time, minutes or hours (or maybe days, but Wilbur’s never let go for that long before- some of the others have, but he could never let himself) and Wilbur finds himself leaning on Dream’s balcony, staring up at the frozen sky.
Suspended in bloodshed, he thinks. There’s some kind of poetry there. He was always good at that, wasn’t he?
A catch of breath, and Eret appears at his side, quiet and inexplicable as ever.
“Bad and Skeppy are leaving after they sleep,” they hum. “Bad thinks if he can get into the Nether, he can force a rift to a more stable server.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“They die,” Eret replies simply. “But it’s a chance better than guaranteed.”
There’s no good answer to that, so Wilbur lets it hang between them. “What are you going to do?” he finally asks. “You planning on running away from the apocalypse?”
“Of course,” they almost laugh. “Takes a little more than disintegrating servercode to get rid of me.”
And: yeah, that sounds about right. They’ve been around for- aeons beyond counting. They were already old when Wilbur was just a child. “Gonna go look for Foolish again?”
Eret smiles. “He’s waiting for me. Has been, for a long time. Would hate to disappoint.”
Wilbur tries not to let it bite. It’s not Eret’s fault that no one’s ever waited for him, not their fault he always preferred the company of mortals to anyone who would last longer than a blink. (Eret and Foolish, Technoblade and Philza, Wilbur Soot and- who, exactly? Tommy’s long dead, and there’s no one who’s ever filled that hollow in his heart.
Here’s the thing: he and Ranboo sit together, sometimes, when the tide comes in and there’s no one else who understands. It’s been so long, and they’re still gone, they’re still gone, they will always be gone-
-and yeah, there’s others, Ranboo has his Syndicate and Wilbur has his family, for whatever it means, but it’s not the same. Of course it’s not. Of course it’s not, because they’re still gone. )
“What about you? How are you planning to get out?”
Wilbur looks away, the breath catching in his throat, because: they’re going to make him say it. He knows what comes next, and he doesn’t think there was ever any other ending for him, but he doesn’t want to say it.
He swallows. “I’m not.”
Eret snaps their head around to face him. Wilbur resolutely avoids meeting their eyes. “Sapnap and George are staying, aren’t they? What’s the difference, why shouldn’t I?”
“Sapnap and George won’t last long without Dream, one way or another,” they say very gently, but Wilbur can hear the shock wavering under their voice. “You are the son of the Angel of Death.”
“And?” Wilbur snaps. “I should’ve died a long time ago anyway. I’m living on borrowed time, have been for so long, I-” and all of a sudden all the fight drains out of him, and all of a sudden he feels every single one of his years. It’s been so long. “I’m tired. And I’m ready.”
Finally he looks across to Eret, finding any shock they might have felt wiped clean off their face, white eyes hidden comfortably behind their glasses. Steady. Immovable as stone.
“This is my home. And if its time is over… I think I’m okay with finally following the bells.”
They watch one another. Then Eret hums (half-understanding, half-resignation) and vanishes back inside.
.
The sun used to rise in the east.
For a very long time this is what Wilbur has held to, what he has relied on: so long as the world turned, the daylight cycle would wear on. Even when everything else was gone, the sun would always rise in the east.
Now everything else is gone, and the sun doesn’t even rise at all. Poetry, poetry. Maybe it’s bitter irony.
It doesn’t matter, really, like most things. There’s only the three of them left- the two who would die one way or another, and the only son of the Angel of Death.
The Angel himself is long gone, of course- he and his god took their Syndicate and slipped between the worlds. Who knows where they’ll go, what they’ll do. It’s none of Wilbur’s business, never was.
Philza asked Wilbur to follow in their wake only once, only already knowing the answer. He knows the dimness lingering on someone whose end has come, who has chosen not to turn away, and he knows his son. He has said goodbye before.
(Philza has never been the hugging type. Moments before he vanished, he caught even Wilbur himself by surprise when he yanked his son into a tight embrace.
“I love you,” he had whispered, and before Wilbur even had a chance to process it, he was gone.)
Wilbur is on his own most days. George is fading fast, skin grey and ashy and eyes perpetually struggling to focus, and Sapnap refuses to leave his side. Wilbur hovers on the balcony or wanders the lattice, waiting as the horizon grows ever closer. The distant sky collapsing in is a marvel, something like beauty in the end of all things.
He counts the hours until it reaches them, turns it to days that don’t mean anything in the sky, calculates when to expect it. (Two weeks. They have two weeks, maybe.)
And then: it comes for them. Plain inevitability. The sky turns to dust and the wooden railing darkens under Wilbur’s fingers. Air catches in his throat, acrid, suddenly, startlingly unbreathable.
He stumbles back inside the house, collapsing beside Sapnap. This is it, he thinks, almost-hysteria turning in his throat. This is it. It’s finally come. The last of them are finally going to die.
(George was gone by the end of day ten. Wilbur slipped out the door while Sapnap held him close and begged him not to go. It felt like intruding to witness such a thing, what he was never supposed to know; but time cannot be denied, even at the end of all things, and by the time Wilbur returned he was gone all the same.
There was no body to bury, but the two of them worked through the ache of it all to turn a shallow grave at the edge of the crater anyway.)
The thing is that Wilbur never really knew Sapnap. They only ever lived adjacent lives, ships passing in the night, and yet and yet: here they are. One chronically left behind, one chronically leaving. Immortals them both, and they’ll die together in a collapsing world.
The wood walls crumble before their eyes. Wilbur blinks, long and slow, sensation and energy draining out of him. A startled huff forces itself out of Sapnap’s lips, but Wilbur’s too caught up in his own end to pay any attention.
Because here is the final truth of it: Wilbur Soot is the son of the Angel of Death. This has never been a boon for him, but here and now, one last time, he sees with perfect clarity what comes next.
The unwinding world loosens the knot of life his soul is tangled in. It tugs free, slowly, slipping into the great void beyond. It would be painful, he thinks, if he were anyone else (dying immortal, contradiction itself the first impossibility but the old gods are dead and he is so, so tired-)
It is quiet, when he closes his eyes. It is quiet and dark and warm and there is no impression of the cold, damp train platform he (even now, even now) sometimes has nightmares of.
(Proper death, proper end, not just the halfway-limbo of the unwilling.)
It is like a hug, he wonders, and church bells sing in the distance. The impression of breath brushes through his hair, a gentle laugh and a cool hand taking his, and
(here, he balances, clinging to the last thread of the world: here, on the edge of his mother’s domain)
he
is
home.
(He lets go.)