A brief look inside the mind of a specific creeper from Legend—Crysallxius.
This is how I perceive creepers for the most part, and if you read this two years ago when it came out, you'll notice how different I made this. Hopefully you think it's better than it was, because I do.
And crepus means explosion in Latin.
…
She was a human. That was what I knew.
The universe collapsed—my universe, the one I'd resided within for my entire life. My life, an eternity, the closest thing to forever I'd yet felt.
My universe collapsed. Its leathery surface fragmentized as it was destroyed it from within, the translucent liquid around me bubbling and electrifying with a force from nowhere and heaving outwards.
That's how we learn. We watch an explosion free us from our eggs, we feel it roiling within us till the time comes and we set it free. Set it free to kill the humans, the villagers, the passive mobs. The ones who stole the world from us.
Us. Creepers. Crepus.
I am what she calls a creeper. She. Human. Minecrafter.
The egg burst and I was released into a different universe. Bigger, colder. Brighter. I saw her face and couldn't comprehend the sheer complexity of it, or of anything I began to suddenly see—the world, the huge stalks barreling upwards from the earth, trees. The wide empty-not-empty vault trapping everything beneath it, sky. The vast expanse of the surface beneath my feet, ground.
Anything I saw. All of it just too much for my mind to bear, my mind there only to guide me to prey, to hide me from sun, to send just the right combination of signals down a nerve in my back, to the spot just below my heart. That's where the explosion would start, below my heart.
There was agony, all the time, all throughout my life as my eyes saw and my ears heard. Agony at just not being able to understand the why and how of everything that surrounded me and made up the new universe. I know we're all more intelligent than Minecrafters, but in a different sort of way. Our minds still occupy a different sort of reality, a different existence. The way the world was when it was ours. I understand that.
She, the human, picked me up in pale hands that weren't deterred by the uneven bristles that covered my body. All it took was a quick thought, and I would be gone, nothing left of her or me. I didn't want that, so I didn't think.
I didn't think and we were safe.
She took care of me, speaking in her strange tongue, mouth composing a symphony of rough mellifluous sounds. I didn't understand. Not yet.
But I would. She saved me. She slowly changed the composition of my mind with her own voice, and that part of me became more human. I could think and we were safe.
I'm not a creeper. Crepus. I'm part that and part her, and only like that can I survive in a universe like this. A universe where my kind's not meant to exist anymore, and we only do out of anger. Anger that our comprehendible world of dark chaos was stolen and turned into something else.
Her name was Jade. She named me with a sound I liked to hear but could never remember what it was till she said it. I guess it worked well like that anyways.
Jade lived with a big group of humans that would drive a sword through my brain if they saw me. So they didn't see me. Jade did less and less often as the sky changed with seasons, over and over again.
It was time. Time is something that moves, Jade had told me when I could understand her voice. Time is something that can't stop.
So time is eternal. This agonizing, unfamiliar universe is eternal. Huh. Yet creepers still live in what time left behind.
Jade wasn't eternal. There came a day when her kind turned against her, sent her somewhere she couldn't return from.
I left to find that place. I was losing my human part without her there to remind me it existed.
Time moved. I was beginning to feel it, see it as it dragged the sun across the sky.
Sky. I kept forgetting what it was called.
The universe began to darken again. It hurt. The agony came back. I lurched in my walk, struggling to move as the weight of everything, or trying to understand it all, returned. Worse than it had been, those days after I hatched in Jade's hands.
Then I forgot her. I wandered where I could, not used to the constant pain like every other crepus I saw. I forgot everything.
There was nothing left of me.
Pain.
It was dark, that was all.
Really dark.