Alex knelt, cupping the blue flower in her hands before running them reverently down the stem. Meun. Mildly soothing for headaches and sore throats, although other herbs were better, but the best single treatment in the world for cold or flu. It loosened phlegm, brought a gentle drowsiness and appeared to strengthen the whole body, as it could often halve the recovery time from a mild sickness. It was also notoriously hard to locate. It only grew in low light, deep in the woods, where few would go. But she had her bow, and Steve was with her as well. At least, he had been there in the clearing. She looked around. Wait a moment, where was Steve? It wasn't like him to disappear like that. She stood, marking in her mind the exact place where the plant grew. It wasn't good for drying now, but she'd come back for the seeds after the flower had wilted. Fia would be so happy. She turned back towards the clearing but didn't see Steve anywhere. Fortunately she saw nothing else either. She stood and walked around the meun, making sure she knew its location from every direction. As she walked something further into the woods caught her eye. A deep ravine gouged into the earth, and on the opposite bank, half-hidden in shadow and weeds, was another flash of blue. Meun was everywhere in this part of the forest. She walked towards the ravine, smiling. Right over a washout, which crumbled away, toppling her into the ravine. As she fell a patch of deep darkness flashed past her eyes and a warning sounded in her head. Caves. Monsters.

Steve tripped and found himself trampling some sort of low shrub. A sharp woody scent reached him and he identified it without looking. Cat's-ear. Alex would be happy to see it growing so near the wall. He turned to look at the wall in question and sighed. It was crumbling. He picked up a large stone and fitted it back into its place, then pulled himself up on top of it and sat, looking into the village of Hiré. The building closest to him didn't look much better than the fence, although it was newer. Steve crossed his legs and listened to the birdsong. Herobrine never came herb gathering, although he had become absolutely obsessed with alchemy. That was something entirely different, apparently. Herbalism was a fairly sane and ordered science which used natural remedies found in the earth. Alchemy was an insane search for the ultimate power, using strange ingredients that were often downright dangerous, if not immoral, to gather. Its mantra was that anything in the earth could be twisted to serve the higher purpose of man in his search for wisdom. Herbalism, comparatively, was looking at the world and knowing what you could eat, what you should leave alone, and what was medicinal. Steve had been worried about him but not as much as he should have been. But how could he expect so much evil of his own half-brother? They had been closer than many full brothers were. Well, he knew now. He thought back to that conversation…

Herobrine had brought him into his study for the first time in many months. He'd been working feverishly over something but wouldn't say what. There was a new smell in the place, something like blood, and it made Steve uncomfortable, though he'd made up his mind to be supportive. "Well?" he said. Herobrine was leaning on his knuckles at the opposite end of a long table, cluttered with instruments only a small fraction of which Steve recognized as things with wholesome uses. He looked thoughtfully at Steve.
"I'm trying to think of how to say this. Will you come on a thought experiment concerning what I'm trying to do?" So he hadn't finished this thing yet? And still he was being so serious about it?
"Sure."
"Everyone wants to live forever, deep down, don't they?"
"Don't we live forever?" said Steve blankly. Herobrine made a dismissive motion.
"Let's leave religion out of this, I think we both know that it only means maybe there's a nice place people go to when they die, and dreaming about it helps me not be depressed by the cruelty and madness of the universe. Everyone wants to live forever. And yet nobody really devotes themselves to the search for immortality. I think it's pure human indecisiveness. We think maybe it doesn't exist, or maybe it's not "right for us," whatever that malark means, and we can't make up our minds to go after it. I suppose that's for the better, perhaps the universe can take only so many great ones. Small minds can't… I'm sorry, are you following?" Steve looked blankly at him. He was trying.

Steve jumped down from the wall into Hiré. I had no idea, he thought.

Alex managed to turn in the air and avoid landing on her head, which would have hurt considerably more, possibly killed her. She'd landed in a deep bed of shrubs which had cushioned the fall, although they scratched her mercilessly into the bargain. She lay half-hanging from the branches, half on the earth, catching her breath and watching loose dirt trickle down the wall she'd fallen from. She also kept an eye on the dark cave mouth she'd fallen past on her way down. So far nothing had come out of it. She stood and tested herself for injuries. She'd been lucky and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving. Still praying, she shot a glance at the cave mouth and inched towards a star of beautiful blue growing among the scratchy shrubs. A third stalk of meun, and beyond it another. She'd found a treasure hidden in this ravine, but she didn't trust that mouth of darkness. It might be only a shallow depression, and empty, but it might also lead into a near-endless maze of lightless tunnels where horrible things crouched waiting for a thoughtless explorer to turn the corner. She'd bring Steve and Herobrine with her when she came back, and Hagen—then again, she wasn't sure she should worry her parents with her fall and the cave. Oh, and she'd bring torches. They had to clean the place out or she wouldn't feel safe in the area. With both of the brothers with her she was sure they could handle it. Herobrine would certainly leave his books for an afternoon if she told him of the cave and the meun. She walked into a shallow overhang where several stalks of meun grew all together and forgot her tension. They were thriving here. She would brave the dark woods on any day to come back. Noticing how dark the ravine grew further on, she backed away and nearly tripped over the annoying scratchy shrubs. The very helpful scratchy shrubs that might have saved her a broken bone, she reminded herself, but that didn't make them any easier to wade through. She scanned the side of the ravine that she'd fallen from. What would be the easiest way to—she was interrupted by a low growl from the direction of the cave. She spun. A zombie was standing on a sheltered part of the ledge at its mouth, eying her with empty all-black eyes. Her bow swung up and she pelted it with an arrow before it could consider finding a way down. It snarled at her, stumbling back. She fumbled for another arrow, only now noticing that she'd lost several in her fall, and shot it again. This time it stumbled into a ray of sunlight and its snarls of pain intensified. The powerful light burned into its skin, blackening and stiffening it. Flames licked the decayed tissue here and there. The zombie swatted at itself, fell from the ledge and rolled to the floor of the ravine. It was dead by the time it had stopped rolling. Alex watched it for a moment with another arrow on the string, then put it away, strung her bow across her body, dug her hands into the wall of the ravine and began climbing.

There was a bank of lavender growing against one crumbling wall. Lavender, Alex had told him, signified everlasting love. He'd been confused as to how that applied to herbology, and then she'd had to explain the language of flowers to him. "Great, even more confusing stuff to remember. With my luck I'll remember something as a flower of happiness and forget that it's deathly poisonous to touch."
"Nothing is deathly poisonous to touch! Nothing natural, anyway. There's poison ivy, but it won't kill you. Herobrine thinks there should be a poison that kills immediately upon skin contact, has he told you?"
"Oh, he told you about that? Yeah, he told me. I live with him. I hear this kind of stuff a lot."
"Do you think he's a little… weird?"
"Oh, sure," said Steve. "He'll grow out of it."

He didn't grow out of it, thought Steve. Not even slightly.

"But I think I've found it," Herobrine told him, and couldn't suppress a tight grin. His hoarfrost-grey eyes glittered.
"Found what?" said Steve. He wasn't following at all and he felt stupid.
"A cure. A path. Immortality. I call it Respawn. It would make it impossible for you to stay dead, death would be like only a short sleep, and then you'd return to the world unhurt. And it would make us much stronger. I told you, didn't I, that I was upset because human bodies can't take the stress of really advanced magic?" Steve remembered that conversation, which had degraded into a discussion of what constituted "advanced magic," and why anyone would even want the power to wipe a mountain out of existence or store the power of five lightning bolts in their body. That had been Steve's question. He hadn't mentioned the other powers that Herobrine had hinted at because he frankly preferred not to think of them-the ability to force another mind into servitude or steal a body from the control of its spirit... it sounded like part of the Corruption. Zombies had no mind, and it was horrible for everyone involved. Herobrine had simply given up then, laughing.
"Um, yeah, I remember that." He wanted to ask why Herobrine was still thinking about it, but he didn't. Herobrine obviously saw things differently than he did. That was fine. He was being a little obsessive about it, but that was fine, too. He trusted his elder brother even when his obsession of the moment freaked him out a little.
"So you see how amazing this would be. It wouldn't just give freedom from death, it would give the capacity for nearly unthinkable power."
"…Okay?" Herobrine was looking impatient.
"Doesn't this interest you?"
"You've hypothetically found something that might do this."
"I have found it. Thing is, it's damned hard to make."
"Of course," said Steve, fully expecting him to say that it required a toenail from an imaginary dragon found on a mountain of pure gold beyond the realms of dream and that he'd given up, at which point they could stop the whole silly conversation and maybe get something to eat.
"It calls for three human sacrifices, taken at the prime of life and in perfect health, otherwise it won't work. I've tried to get around it, but it just doesn't take shortcuts. I had one attempt literally blow up in my face! You should've been there, this weird pink goo got everywhere and I couldn't get it out of"
"Wait! Wait! What!? Human sacrifices?"
"Yes. See, if I did it, I would use converted zombies—"
"People?"
"In the past, if you cured someone of the Corruption with your blood, they were considered your property."
"But—"
"And if they had already died once anyway, what would be the problem with killing them again? Just think about it. Don't look at me like that."
"That's black magic."
"What?"
"Black magic. It's evil."
"Steve," said Herobrine, "There's no such thing as black magic. There's only powerful magic and weak magic, and you can choose which you use. Your own power increases only as you abandon yourself to the search."
"By killing people?"
Herobrine sighed. "Zombies. See, I was afraid you'd react like this. You're missing the point. You think some magic is bad."
"I don't fully trust any of it. Can we forget the experiment? I mean, you're never going to think about doing this, right?"
"Shh. Listen. All magic is the same, but you can choose whether to follow the path to its end, gaining real power, or to paddle scrupulously in the shallows like a coward, get nowhere and die an old, blind fool." his eyes glittered almost madly, and Steve felt himself panicking. He panicked easily at times.
"I will never be a blind fool." Steve mumbled something weakly and Herobrine appeared to come back to himself. "Sorry, what was that?" he found Steve looking at him almost with fright—something that had never happened before. It was to be a regular occurrence in the future.
"Stop it… come back?"
"What?"

Alex pulled herself up over the edge of the ravine and lay panting on the ground. Her boots were full of dirt and rocks. She shook them out one by one before walking back into the woods. "Steve?" she called. There was no answer. She didn't want to call louder in case she attracted something else, but she was becoming worried. She raised her voice. "Steve!" after calling several times she heard crashing from behind her. An extremely clumsy-sounding crashing, even for Steve. And he would have answered her. She began running for the bright glow of the clearing, bow in hand.
"Alex!" Suddenly there was crashing from her left and Steve emerged, shaking leaves out of his hair, dripping sword in hand. "Hey! You ran off and I lost you. I was fighting things. Are you alright?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, except I fell off a cliff."
"Huh?" he stepped between her and the first crashing sound, which just then stumbled into view. It was a zombie. Steve raised his sword and waited for it. "You fell off a cliff?" he asked, beheading it with a swish of his sword. Alex told him.
"So that's why I'm covered with dirt and I look awful."
"You don't look awful. Your hair's coming loose, though." to her surprise he tightened the small braid that kept her hair out of her eyes.
"Um.. thanks. What about you? You've been fighting?" he briefly spread his arms.
"I'm alright." He was dressed in homespun, with short, thick brown hair and the beginnings of a beard. Alex wanted to hug him. She didn't.
"Well, that's good! I think we should start back."
"Me too." Steve liked to be home before dark. So did she and any wise person who didn't want to be eaten, of course, but Steve hated the night. It didn't keep him from going out in it if he needed to, but he hated it. Steve might be the bravest person she knew, Alex thought, because he was afraid of many things but let none of them affect him.
Steve wondered if Alex had noticed the sprigs of lavender he'd woven into her hair. She didn't seem to have, and he decided not to mention it.

"You never told me any of this!" Steve had said. Herobrine fiddled with a silver knife on the table.
"No. I was afraid you'd react like this."
"But this is—I mean, don't you always talk to me about—how long has this…" He was sputtering, and Herobrine cut him off.
"Well, I'm telling you now. There's so much beyond what we consider the real world—a pale, dying, scrabbling place, seeing only its own filth. There is beauty. Power. Otherness."
"Well I'm not arguing that, I guess. But there must be other ways—"
"Umm. Look, we're getting off track. If I could make a potion of immortality from sunshine and dandelion sap, would you drink it?"
"Me?"
"Yes."
"No!"
"No?"
"I don't want to live forever. We're not supposed to live forever. Could you imagine that? Living on after all your friends have died—over and over, for thousands of years—seeing the world change so much that you don't recognize it and nobody understands you when you speak?"
"What if Alex could live forever as well?"
"I don't think Alex would want to either! Think about it—living forever? It would be unbearable."
"Why?! You think this is the only world? You think it ends here?"
"This world is all I want!"
"Steve… calm down. Don't cry. Don't cry. There must be better places out there. Listen. There's a world with three suns where night never comes, only a soft twilight that swiftly turns to dawn. It's all lakes, some leading into underwater caves of ancient secrets, and islands of deep grass and white flowers that sing in the wind. You'd never have to face the night there. And so much knowledge... with the power this will allow me to claim, and with unlimited time, we can unlock the secrets of the universe. You love knowledge, Steve. You're a philosopher. If you want, you can be the bringer of knowledge to other people. A prophet. You can pass on what you think is worthwhile. Think of it—no doors will remain locked to us if we have eternity to open them." Steve had caught his breath while Herobrine was speaking.
"We weren't meant to live forever." Herobrine groaned. He was going to be like that, was he?
"No, then?"
"No. Not if it was made from happiness and snuggles, doubly no because you have to murder people for it."
"Sacrifice. And they'd already died once anyway." the matter-of-fact way he discussed it made Steve uncomfortable.
"No. And I want you to stop this. If I catch you even thinking about making this stuff I'll come down here and smash everything that I can smash and burn the rest." Herobrine ran a hand through his hair, braided with gold threads, and laughed.
"Well… I didn't think it was going to go like this, I'm sorry." Steve looked up. Apologizing was not something Herobrine did lightly.
"For what?"

Alex poked Steve, and he joined in singing with her and Fia. Hagen didn't sing because he sounded like a bullfrog in distress and Steve usually didn't because he was self-conscious, but he preferred singing to getting elbowed in the ribs every few seconds. They were kneeling around the lit brazier after dinner, which Steve had been easily convinced to stay for.
"Creator of all and giver of goodness, we thank you for this day," said Fia. It was customary for the man of the family to lead evening prayer, but Hagen's vocal prayers usually took the form of "umm… thanks for stuff… bless us and um… amen" so Fia had taken over early in their marriage. "Thank you for the gains of this day and for keeping our children safe in the forest." Steve wondered if she was including him in "children." He couldn't think of anyone else she could mean, and he was touched. Everyone burned a small portion of what they had worked with during the day—Fia a few dried leaves, Alex some blossoms from the forest. Hagen contributed a small scraping of coal from the forge fires for himself and Steve. It was an old tradition to show thanksgiving in this way but Steve didn't know of anyone besides this family who still did it. "Please continue to look with favor on your creatures. Bless our family and our village. Guide our lord and his son.." that would be Steve's family, and God better be listening because they needed it. Lord Heron was probably semi-drunk at the moment, beating zombies to death with a stick in some area of the house that he was too cheap to keep well lit. Herobrine would be locked in his room obsessively reading books that Steve was pretty sure were bad for the reader's sanity and dabbling in obscure and frowned-upon branches of alchemy. Fia worried about him. He sometimes bought herbs from her, but not the usual kind—spearmint for fresh breath, lavender for relaxation, cat's-ear ointment for skin blemishes—no, he was interested in ground up bits of this weird type of tree bark and that tincture of lichen, sometimes things that had practical uses, but sometimes not. She drew the line at gathering ingredients which had no known use in anything except magic, and had tried to give him a concerned motherly talking to on several occasions, which he wormed out of as best he could. Fia had high standards and considered herbalism a science devoted to wellbeing. She sold no poisons, even for rodents—they could easily be trapped, and a mousetrap was no danger to a human being, unless a very clumsy one shoved a toe in. (Steve had done this. Repeatedly. It was a running gag.) For a similar reason she would not sell contraceptives as such, not believing in upsetting the natural rhythms of the body, which had order of their own and should be worked with.
"See you tomorrow," said Steve, pausing at the door.
"Say hello to Hero," said Alex, tying up the herbs she'd gathered to dry.
"And make sure he's getting enough sleep," said Fia in tones that implied much more: don't let him convince you to stay up late hunting zombies because you'll be a wreck in the morning, don't let him read the Necronomicon, make sure he's not delving too deep into the dark arts, don't let him follow any instructions in the Necronomicon, make sure he eats the occasional vegetable. Please don't read the Necronomicon. Steve agreed with everything, stated and otherwise, and started walking back to the fortress. A few windows were lit, the rest were black and a few didn't even have glass. A zombie suddenly sailed out of one of the latter, and he heard Lord Heron swearing. Steve sighed.
"Your hair looks nice, Alexie," said Fia.
"Hmm? Thank you." she ran her fingers through it and pulled out a sprig of lavender. She looked at it blankly for a few moments and then ran to the window, just in time to see Steve disappear down a winding street.

In a way, Steve thought, I should have seen it coming. But everything seemed so normal, or at least, what I was used to. And then that.

"Why are you laughing?" said Steve.
"Because," said Herobrine. "You already drank it. I thought you would agree with me, naturally, but now that it's turned out like this I guess it's for the best that I didn't tell you."
"What?"
"Think, Steve. You're not that stupid."
"That potion you—you insisted I take it, and you told me it was for accelerated healing!"
"It does cause that, as a side effect. And it's been very useful, hasn't it?"
"I drank it? I drank someone's blood."
"Forget about the blood, I shouldn't have brought it up. I'm sorry I tricked you, but I wanted you safe. From the first moment I saw you I've wanted to protect you. And now I have." he smiled at Steve, who was trembling.
"But…. why?"
"So you'd be safe. I know I—"
"But you didn't ask me! I didn't want this!"
"It's already happened, you'll get used to it. Look, we'll be the same. And we'll never die. I promise." he lifted a glass bottle from where it had lain hidden on the table. Its contents were strangely luminous, garnet colored and the consistency of thick syrup. Steve, to his dismay, recognized it.
"Don't drink it," said Steve. Herobrine left it on the table and looked pityingly at him.
"Why not?"
"I don't want you to do this to yourself. Please don't."
"Why? It's already made."
"I don't think it's right and I don't think you'll be happy."
"You don't want me with you? You'd rather be alone for eternity than have me with you, is that it? What if I promised I wouldn't bother you? Hell, I could move to another planet and destroy the linking gates if you preferred," said Herobrine sardonically.
Steve's face twisted, but all he said was "I can't let you put the same curse on yourself that you put on me."
"You call freedom a curse? Sit down and take some deep breaths, you're obviously not taking this well." Herobrine looked away. Was there a glass of water or—the potion whizzed past his face and smashed on the wall. It fizzled and slid slowly down the stones in an extremely unappetizing fashion. Herobrine whipped back around to face Steve, who looked like he was about to faint.
"You fool," he said. "That was Alex's."

Steve knelt beside the crumbling wall and picked a few sprigs of lavender. A wild sheep poked its head out of one of the empty doorways of Hiré and looked suspiciously at him. There were a few of them wandering around, sleeping in the easily accessible houses at night. They probably considered the village their own property. In a way it was. Hiré had fallen long ago, back when Steve had been human. And that had been long ago indeed. He walked down a winding street and pushed open the one door he'd kept in good repair. Indoors was empty, like all the other houses, and drifted full of dust. He walked from room to room: cold forge, empty apothecary shop, living rooms in the back. Here and there, bits of old dried lavender were crumbling to dust. He dropped the fresh sprigs on the floor and went outside, locking the door behind him. He froze when he saw Herobrine several yards away, looking at him. He stood in a corona of shuddering white light. It gleamed from his eyes, erasing their color, and Steve sometimes wondered if it was painful, for there were dark bruise-like marks around his eyes and showing here and there across his skin. He bared his teeth at Steve and teleported away with a scream of displaced air and a more intense flicker of the light around him. Thank God, thought Steve. That had been an unusually friendly (or at least nonviolent) encounter. They hadn't actually spoken in nearly two centuries. He didn't want to think about the reasons. Neither of them were taking immortality well, thought Steve, and they were still comparatively young. He left Hiré and started the long walk to his most recent temporary home.

On the way out, he stopped to light a fire on one of the fallen stones of the wall and threw in a few buds of lavender.

A/N: What? Stop looking at me like that. I never SAID it was linear, did I? No, I didn't. I'm sure your brain will recover eventually.

So there's a bit of a debate in this one, or at least, it would be a debate if both sides didn't keep losing their composure and shouting I CAN HAZ FEELINGS ABOUT DIS at each other instead of actually arguing. I really had to restrain myself from correcting them and logically stating what each one meant. So, whose side are you on? I'm with Steve, but of course I'm biased.

This is –eventually—going to tie in to a much longer fic I'm writing that's a crossover between the Minecraft and Lovecraft canons with a lot of crazy original thinking. There's also a character from C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, making it technically a triple crossover. (It makes only slightly more sense in context.)