The Temptation of Power ||| Hermitcraft Watcher AU

Chapter Eleven

"Please, Grian..." Mumbo mumbled as his best friend stood before him in black clothes with black and purple wings. He was a Watcher. How... how had he not realised? All the signs added up, all the strange behaviour suddenly made sense. He'd been a bad friend, he hadn't noticed.

He'd let this all happen. And Grian thought he hated him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid spoon. He was helpless as his best friend stepped through the portal and disappeared. All he could do was cry as tears made their way down his cheeks.

"Grian." He sobbed, wishing he could go back in time and stop this all from happening.

"Mumbo, I don't think he was Grian anymore." Pearl said, walking towards him.

"Did you know?" He asked.

"What do you mean?" She replied.

"Did you know he was... was..." he didn't want to say it.

"I suspected it." Pearl replied.

"Why didn't you say anything?" If she had, they could've avoided this.

"I... I couldn't be sure I was right."

"So you just..." no. No. This wasn't the time to blame. Grian had said it himself: with the Watchers around, now wasn't the time to turn on their friends. He sighed. "What do we do?" Now he was speaking to everyone.

"What can we do?" False replied. When Grian said the Watchers could kill them before she even reached for her sword, she hadn't believed him. Now she did.

Mumbo looked at the portal. Unlike Nether portals, it was completely silent. In fact, instead of their noise drowning out the silence it felt more like the silence was louder than their noise. The silence felt deafening, yet it felt not quite there at all. Like silence was just the natural state. He supposed it was, without anything else there to fill it.

It was still active, it's purple sheet of magic swirling in different ways and shades than Nether portals. How much longer would it be active? It could turn off any second.

"I don't think that's a good idea." Iskall said, catching onto his train of thought.

"What other ideas do we have?" Mumbo responded frustratedly.

"None, but if you get killed you won't be here to come up with a better one." Xisuma said. Mumbo sighed.

"Do you think he even wants us to go after him?" Scar asked. "He went by choice, and... and he said we weren't his friends."

"Maybe they brainwashed him or something." Impulse suggested.

"And we let it happen..." Pearl mumbled.

"That's not true, you can't blame yourselves-" Bdubs started.

"But we knew something was going on. And we just... attacked him." Mumbo said.

"We didn't attack him." Iskall said.

"We did though. We addressed the problem too aggressively, we shouldn't've tried to force him to tell us what was going on. We should've been better friends." Pearl replied.

The room had fallen to a morbid silence and the only sound was the distant sound of sheep baaing outside. Guilt hung from the roof like a layer of fog.

"Listen," Joe said, "I don't know what happened between you all before today, but there's no point blaming yourselves because it won't make a difference now. It's in the past. What's in the future is the potential to get Grian back, so... work towards that instead of spending your time regretting things you can't change. And Xisuma is right, we can't make impulsive decisions that'll make us end up dead."