Grian feels the Entity mocking him as he groans and leans back against a cold, unforgiving spike of bedrock at the bottom of Doc’s cold, unforgiving pit. He has tried three times to contact help, but everyone who is online or looking at their communicators is either busy or would get stuck themselves, or maybe they just aren’t getting his messages, and he has a stupid sprained or possibly broken wing and the slimes are avoiding him for some reason so he can’t even get them to kill him so he respawns properly and god, he’s miserable and hurting and hates that he hadn’t thought through diving for diamonds and -
He makes a frustrated groan as his message to his friends doesn’t go through again and, in a brief moment of stupidity, throws his communicator. It bounces off the stone. Makes him feel slightly better, but not much.
Slowly, he feels something lethargic curl in the back of his mind. Well. There he is, facing the consequences of his actions.
Wonderful. The peanut gallery.
Grian curls his legs up to his chest. He just wants out of this hole before he starves to death. He’ll respawn, one way or another, but he doesn’t have a quick way to do it, and his wing’s a bit too injured to crawl out easily and move himself, and maybe he doesn’t want to just... hurt for like, several days, because his communicator isn’t working for some reason. He knows it was stupid, doing a dive like that around uneven terrain, okay, he’s not an idiot. He’d just - he hadn’t realized how badly the size of the perimeter would mess up wind currents, and he’d thought he had enough rockets to correct for them if they were rough, and - he knows it was stupid. He doesn’t need his other bad decision criticizing him. Even if it’s here to help.
Here to...?
Well, it will hurt anyway. Grian’s made a deal before. Surely he’s willing to deal again?
The thing curled in his head is vast, and it is interested, and Grian aches. Okay. Sure. He’d made a deal with the Entity once. It had been a gunpoint deal. It had hitched a ride. Grian had... objected. The two of them had hashed out a compromise. That time, Grian had been in control. The Entity hadn’t known what to do, when it turned out that Grian had the annoyance and the will to try to kick it out, and had offered Grian power. Some power it was, Grian was stuck at the bottom of a hole and was going to starve to death and he shouldn’t be panicking, he’s had worse, but his wing is definitely broken and even with a respawn that can take weeks to heal and he doesn’t have weeks he just has -
The Entity is not finished giving him power.
He turns that over in his head for a moment. The thing in the back of his head lets him, withdrawing as though to make sure it’s only Grian in there to think. He knows its not, but he appreciates the gesture.
Alright. He knows he got some knowledge from the Entity. It’s part of what he’s doing with the Rift. But what power is he missing?
They aren’t fully bonded yet.
Grian snorts. The Entity knows full well he’s not letting it eat him. They’ve had that little argument. They’ve had that little argument a multitude of times. Grian always wins. Grian will continue to win even as his lungs shudder at the bottom of a pit he is going to die in and be mocked for dying in (which is uncharitable to think of Doc, Grian knows he won’t, but it feels like). Grian's too stubborn to give up being Grian. It doesn't matter what the Entity wants, or if the Entity wants to win.
The Entity, the thing curled in his head explains, has no particular interest in winning anymore. No, the Entity is invested now. It could leave, it supposes, but it's... invested. It has come up with another solution.
Grian's interested in winning though.
Grian's interested in not dying at the bottom of a pit.
Grian's interested in having his thoughts to himself again, but has no interest in letting the Entity go - it's too interesting. And he's intrigued. And if the Entity is no longer interested in winning, in controlling Grian utterly, then if it's offering power -
Alright. What’s its solution then? What power will it give him to get out of this? And if it’s a trick, Grian’s not sure what he’ll do, but...
So it explains. And it retreats again. And Grian laughs, hoarsely. “That is going to hurt,” he says weakly, because it is. It’s going to hurt a lot, and he’s going to die horribly. But it never said it wouldn’t hurt. “That is going to hurt both of us, if you’re tying us that closely together.”
But he would get out of this hole. And he would have power. And Grian - Grian isn’t really afraid of hurting, he’s just afraid of hurting for a long time.
“Alright,” Grian says. “Alright. We seal this. You only eat a little bit,” he says. “That’s the deal. And I get a bit of you. We’re stuck together now, now aren’t we?”
Good, thinks the Entity, thinks Grian, and then there are thin stone talons on Grian’s hands where they hadn’t been before and he takes a deep breath, and he swallows, and he digs them into his heart.
He does not have very long to watch the blood and flesh drip down them before he’s screaming. He’d been right. It hurts.
He thrashes on hard stone when he wakes up in it and he knows he’s not done, he has to do it one more time, he has to - to seal it both ways, so he walks to the Entity (who may or may not be there) and he holds up his clawed hand and he laughs hoarsely and asks “is that still the part you want?” because he’s going to at least be a bit sarcastic about it, if he’s doing this.
The Entity says yes.
It hurts less to tear his heart out the second time. Still hurts a lot. When he wakes up on the ground, he’s not sure he’s respawned, given that he’s still bleeding, but his wing is healed to a degree even the respawn wouldn’t have managed, and he’d made it out of the hole in the ground, and he can feel a heartbeat beneath his feathers, and it’s strangely warm and damp and he knows he’s inside of the Entity now, not in a pit waiting to die.
The Entity has flesh now. Grian’s talons are still made of sharp stone. He feels power between his teeth, and it feels good.
“Don’t ask me to do that again,” he says, and he looks down at the place where there’s still a bloody wound and promptly passes out. When a panicking Mumbo finds him about two hours later, the only sign there’s anything wrong is the frankly absurd amount of blood staining all of his clothes, but he’ll talk his way out of it. He always does.
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