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jack-pseudonym · 1 month

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A Love Letter to Herobrine

So, fun fact: that screenshot that I'm using as the thumbnail is not the origin of Herobrine as a piece of Minecraft mythology. This image was first posted on 4chan around August 31st, 2010, and the character had been floating around the Minecraft forum for a while before that.

The earliest description of a character resembling Herobrine was posted around July on a general creepypasta thread. The Minecraft wiki calls this story "White Eyes." It was posted by a user named Flaky and you can read it here. The post doesn't feature the iconic Herobrine design, but it's the origin of a lot of the beats that keep coming up in Minecraft horror stories.

To summarize real quick: a Minecraft Alpha player is so creeped out by the weird noises and phenomena in a cave under their base that they seal it up and move elsewhere. Eventually they discover a dungeon with a single broken music disc inside, which causes the cave noises to return louder than before. To play the disc, they need resources from their old storage room built directly above the cursed cave. When they return to their base, the player has an encounter with a pair of glowing white eyes. Eventually they go creepypasta-insane from listening to the music disc and (I think) die.

The contents of this post are not as important as the fact that the author provides us with a screenshot of the cave, which should be right next to the famous Herobrine image in the history books.

(If you're not seeing it, check the bottom left.)

The next Herobrine sighting is the famous one. It's pretty much a compilation of all the ideas about the character that were floating around the Minecraft forum at the time. The main thing it introduces to the canon is the idea that the "Herobrine" account was owned by the deceased brother of famous Minecraft dev Hatsune Miku. The obvious implication is that Herobrine is his ghost. It also gives us the classic "fog hill" image, of course.

The third "canon" sighting was concocted by an early Minecraft streamer named Copeland. This is the highest effort of the three and probably the first Herobrine Sighting Video ever recorded. The first thing Copeland did was edit Herobrine into a few wide screenshots of his base to create hype for the stream. This resulted in the third member of the triumvirate of famous Herobrine screenshots, and honestly maybe the creepiest.

In order to get Herobrine on video, Copeland changed the texture of a painting. He went live shortly after, playing like normal for a while before “encountering Herobrine” in a dimly-lit room, screaming, running out of the room, and turning the game off. He continued to stream for a bit after that before declaring he would delete the world.

Why is Minecraft scary?

It's important to keep in mind that Minecraft at this point had exactly one full-time developer and no marketing department. The only reason a given thing was added to this version of Minecraft was that the developer thought it sounded interesting. This had two major effects on the state of the game that enhanced its creepypasta factor substantially.

One: the game is very bare-bones. Minecraft Alpha's infinite replayability comes from its core concept rather than a depth of additional features. Even some basic quality-of life fixes like the ability to stack most food items are absent from this version of the game. This resulted in the features that were present being scrutinously analyzed and theorized about by hundreds of people at a time on the forums, because once you had diamond armor and a big house there wasn't much else to do except dig into mechanics.

Two: many of those mechanics and features that did exist in Alpha were bizarre, and several of them seem like the developer was going out of their way to create a creepy atmosphere. Let's take a look at the mechanics I'm talking about and examine how each of them contributed to the Herobrine mythology.

Fog and light

One thing the White Eyes story and the famous Herobrine post have in common is a focus on low view distance. The second post even specifically mentions that they were playing with their render distance set very low since their computer didn’t have the specs to run anything higher, which most people in the 2010 indie gaming community could probably relate to.

This is relevant because Minecraft cuts off your view distance really sharply. If your render distance is set close to you, everything beyond the cutoff disappears into a thick bank of fog. This is probably best illustrated by looking at the same hill from the famous screenshot with a higher render distance.

In the Herobrine screenshot, this entire back half of the hill is completely cut off. Literally anything could be inside the fog and it would be totally invisible until you got within a few dozen blocks.

On top of that, this hard cutoff of visibility happens the same way with darkness. Walking just a few blocks into a cave leaves you completely unable to see anything until you place a torch. And, of course, if that torch were to be somehow removed, you would be instantly plunged into pitch blackness. Just look at the White Eyes screenshot up above.

The simplistic lighting engine of Minecraft Alpha is obviously not intended to make the game scarier. That said, as someone who’s become totally accustomed to modern Minecraft’s smooth lighting mechanics, it’s really remarkable how much more eerie the game is when you’re consistently forced to walk into total darkness and thick fog to get anything done. Without smooth lighting, when night starts to fall it looks like an enormous shadow passing over the whole world.

If you've heard of the classic Internet creepypasta Ted the Caver, there's a bit where Ted is stuck inside a similarly cursed cave with no light. Earlier in the story, the writer points out that darkness in caves is different from darkness above ground - there is straight-up no light to see with. Your eyes never adjust. Something could be literally inches from from his face and he would never see it. These older versions of Minecraft feel like that.

(If you want to experience the horrors yourself in the modern day, turn smooth lighting off, brightness down to Moody, and crank your render distance down. I seriously recommend it.)

Dungeons

Dungeons are the only place in this version of Minecraft where you can find naturally generated cobblestone. The normal way to get cobblestone is to mine stone and place it back down, and it was the go-to strong building block for quite a while. This gives dungeons the distinct feeling of having been built by someone.

But this is contrasted with the monster spawner, which is one of the most alien blocks in the game. It’s not obtainable in survival mode in any way, it’s destroyed if you try to pick it up, and the floating image of a monster inside the cage is still probably the least blocky thing in the game.

Dungeons are also extremely rare for some reason. You could easily spend weeks in the same survival world and never find one, especially if you didn't enjoy caving for the sake of it once you had all the diamonds you needed.

All this is to say that if you were a Minecraft player in 2010 who’d never encountered one, someone on the forum describing finding a dungeon would sound exactly like the intro to any other creepypasta you'd read recently, right up until it happened to you. It's hard to convince your subconscious that an eerie forum story is completely fictional when things like dungeons are real.

Music discs

Okay, I've been writing about the eerie side of Minecraft for like a thousand words, and I somehow haven't brought this up yet. We need to talk about Discs 11 and 13.

The vast majority of music discs in Minecraft are electronic music tracks composed by German musician C418. They’re basically lo-fi beats to relax / play Minecraft to. There are two considerable exceptions to this genre. Let’s talk about 11 first.

The first thing you’ll notice about it is that the colored portion is black and the outside of the disc is cracked and broken, which is one of the most creepypasta things to ever be in a real game. And then, when you pop it into the jukebox and turn it on, instead of lo-fi electronic beats, you get this.

The track opens with heavy breathing and footsteps on stone, as the recorder of the disc runs through what is pretty clearly a cave. They sound terrified of something, but after a few seconds they stop and catch their breath. Soon, though, there’s a sound like faraway music and the recorder breaks into a run, faster this time, terrified again. The speed of the footsteps increases until the sound changes from stone to dirt, a sign that they’re almost at the surface, until there’s something that sounds like a growl and the sound abruptly cuts off. The last few seconds of the recording are static.

This is probably the most overtly horror-themed Minecraft ever gets, and this disc features heavily in a lot of Minecraft creepypasta. It makes sense. In the middle of an album of chill, electronic music, there’s one disc that’s a found footage horror short film, complete with the person holding the recorder meeting with some fate at the end. Imagine you’re going through your friend’s old VHS collection and there’s a copy of The Poughkeepsie Tapes in the middle of it with no explanation.

Also, this is the only time there’s any real physical evidence of another person existing in this world. Villages weren’t added until the release of Beta months later, and even then, this doesn’t sound like a villager. It sounds like us.

Disc 13 is less infamous by comparison, but it’s still jarring compared to the rest of the soundtrack. 13 consists mostly of slow, reverberating ringing sounds, and at this point I’m going to bring in the last weird Minecraft feature, because they sound like cave noises.

Cave noises are maybe even more infamous among the community than disc 11 as “the thing that makes Minecraft scary.” The most common of these noises are either relatively realistic, like wind or something, or eerie but obviously musical, like part of the soundtrack. Every so often, though, you’ll get one that sounds like footsteps, or the sound of a minecart traveling down a distant track. There’s obviously nothing actually there, but it’s another piece of evidence that even if you’re the only person in this world, there are things here that you didn’t make. This is not helped by the fact that the criteria for a cave noise occurring include darkness.

Conclusion 1

If you take all of these things together - the fog, the darkness, the weird signs that you’re not necessarily alone in this world - it’s easy to see where the sheer amount of creepypasta about this game comes from. It would not be unbelievable in 2010 that something like Herobrine could actually be in the game, and even if you were an adult and didn’t buy that he literally existed, Minecraft Alpha is still a nearly perfect game for scaring the shit out of yourself after just having read a bunch of horror stories.

(I know this because I scared the shit out of myself several times while revisiting Minecraft Alpha for this essay.)

Why Herobrine?

Surprise! There's more.

So we know where the Herobrine story comes from: a bunch of people playing an old, weird sandbox game that - intentionally or by accident - also functions surprisingly well as a survival horror game, and scaring themselves because it’s fun.

Now I want to talk about why the Herobrine story specifically resonated so hard with people that it still exists while hundreds of others have been basically forgotten. Keep in mind, the White Eyes story originated on a thread for a completely different creepypasta that no one has ever heard of. So what’s special about Herobrine?

To start with, we need to take a look at the specifics of Herobrine that set it apart from other creepypasta characters. The Minecraft wiki has a definition of “canonical” Herobrine that includes the first forum posts and images, like the famous 4chan post, as well as the Copeland streams. These are, quote, “fundamental to the creation and popularization of the character.” So let’s look at the commonalities between them.

Herobrine apologism

The most interesting thing these stories have in common, especially compared to more modern Herobrine, is a complete lack of aggression from Herobrine in game. The narrator of White Eyes does go crazy and maybe die, but that happens due to influence from Disc 11. The actual entity with the white eyes only appears once, and it never personally acts on the player.

In the original 4chan post, Herobrine is explicitly stated to run away and disappear if the player tries to approach and get a clearer look at him. The Copeland saga begins with Herobrine watching him in the corner of a screenshot, and even during the close encounter Herobrine doesn’t chase him out of the house or even follow him. He just stands there.

Just looking at the original Herobrine canon, there’s almost no reason to even conclude he’s malevolent at all.

So if Herobrine isn’t out to get you in the original canon, what does he do? Aside from watching you from the edge of your vision, there are a few consistent things to watch out for in the oldest videos. The most famous Herobrine signs are pyramids made of sand, trees with the leaves removed, and tunnels to nowhere, almost always lit with redstone torches.

The thing that strikes me about these signs is that they’re almost player-like, except with no internal logic to them. Building structures, cutting down trees, and digging tunnels are core to the gameplay loop of Minecraft, except in the Herobrine versions there’s no productivity. The pyramids are uninhabitable and the tunnels are never deep enough to find ore. It’s like what someone would do if they knew what you were supposed to do in Minecraft, but couldn’t understand why.

By far the most common explanation for the origin of Herobrine is that he’s a ghost. The most famous herobrine story says that he’s the dead brother of Hatsune Miku, and that part of the mythos is considered basically canon now. Even if you don’t like that element (can you tell I don’t?), a lot of posts from this time period describe him as the ghost of a miner. This is probably because the game literally has inexplicable mining sounds programmed into its caves. Either way, it’s hard to avoid the idea that Herobrine used to be a normal guy. Someone who lived in this empty world before you did.

"REAL HEROBRINE SIGHTING 100% PROOF"

There’s a Youtube playlist that I come back to a lot. It’s called “The Oldest Herobrine Sightings Ever (In Order!)” Most of the videos are either clearly faked, made by a 9-year-old, or clearly faked by a 9-year-old, but they still have a vibe to them that totally captivated me when I was younger and half buying into it.

They still give me a similar feeling years later, which is obviously partially due to nostalgia, but I don’t think the feeling is actually the exact same. It’s not quite nostalgia, and it’s not the the fear-slash-fascination I felt in 2012, glued to these videos while ready to run out of the room at any time in case something too scary happened. It’s closer to a good kind of melancholy.

And if you go back to The Oldest Herobrine Sightings Ever with the idea of feeling some empathy for him, it makes them hit a lot harder than if you just assume he's a murder ghost who’s coming to get you. I know I’m pretty far into Death of the Author territory at this point; I’m projecting an amount of emotional complexity onto fake cryptid sightings made by internet babies that almost definitely wasn’t there to begin with, but that doesn’t make this reading of the story any less impactful to me.

In order to make this point of view more believable, I’ve cherrypicked a video from the playlist for us to look at. The video is, naturally, called “REAL HEROBRINE SIGHTING 100% PROOF” by CreeperAssassin87. It's only five minutes long and I recommend watching it so you can determine for yourself if I'm making shit up.

In the video, CreeperAssassin heads out of their (pretty impressive) base only to find themselves face-to-face with the man himself. What happens next is probably the best example of my point in the whole playlist, but if you watch the other videos closely you can notice this pattern.

CreeperAssassin says very confidently that Herobrine started “chasing” them, but look at what he’s actually doing. He’s not running at the player or even really looking at the screen, and he’s not armed with anything more dangerous than a pickaxe. Remember, at this point in history, Herobrine wasn’t believed to have any magic powers to attack you with either. There’s nothing actually threatening going on here.

After that jumpscare, CreeperAssassin naturally spends the rest of the video running away and hiding, with Herobrine following close behind. My favorite part comes after the player has sealed themselves inside the wall of the castle. Herobrine breaks in, and once he has CreeperAssassin completely cornered...

...he doesn’t do anything. He just stands there and stares. The narration claims to have “luckly escaped” [sic], but I genuinely find it hard to see any malice in his behavior here.

One of the last appearances of Herobrine in the video is him watching CreeperAssassin through the window of their base after they block off the door. At this point, the video has firmly established that he's able to break blocks, and CreeperAssassin is completely cornered again. If he wanted to harm the player, he could do it easily. But once he's shut out, he just resigns himself to it.

Again, this video is probably the strongest example, but this observation holds pretty well for the vast majority of Herobrine sightings from this time period. If you shift your perspective a little bit, his behavior is not far off from what a normal person might do if they encountered another player for the first time.

Oh, hello. Who are you? It's nice to finally meet someone else. I thought I was alone out here.

Of course, nearly everyone he meets runs away and shuts him out. Eventually most of them either abandon their haunted worlds or delete them entirely.

Conclusion 2

For a lot of people on the Minecraft forums in 2010, Herobrine may have been an introduction to stories like this. I obviously doubt that a tragedy about a ghost doomed to wander alone forever was what any of the people involved here intended to make. That said, those emotions are still present, and strongly enough that they inspired me to write this entire thing.

I believe this contrast between the fear created by reading a scary story about an eerie game and the inherent sadness of the Herobrine figure is what made this story stand the test of time. Compare Herobrine with his more one-dimensionally hostile imitators, and then compare him with other creepypasta hall-of-famers like Ben Drowned. All the greatest urban legends make you feel something more complex than "afraid."

One last thing that I thought made a really good anecdote to conclude this vibes-based essay.

One of the most successful post-canon additions to the Herobrine lore is the idea of a Herobrine spawner, a structure you can build that will let him in to your world. The materials needed to do this are pretty consistent between stories, involving a base made of gold, redstone torches, sometimes some mossy cobblestone, and a netherrack pillar on top. Lighting the netherrack on fire is what activates the structure.

(There are some pretty obvious parallels here with real-life rituals meant to summon ghosts or spirits, especially the lighting of a fire.)

The origin of this structure, as far as I can tell, dates back to one of the first ever mods meant to add Herobrine to the game, a server plugin released in 2010. This plugin not only introduced the spawner, but Herobrine’s behavior in it is really interesting. He’s much more docile in this plugin than in the substantially more famous Herobrine Mod released the following year, where he directly attacks the player and summons zombies and whatnot.

The keystone here is the name of the plugin, the file you have to download to let him into your world. It’s not called “Him,” or “WakeUp,” or “WhiteEyes.”

It’s called “iLoveYou.”

#pseudoessay #minecraft #minecraft alpha #herobrine #creepypasta #migrated from old website #long post

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pip-n-chips · 11 months

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how (some) DoL characters play Minecraft

Robin

Mainly sticks with the easy difficulty

Likes building things in survival mode instead of creative for the extra challenge

Has keep inventory on + mob griefing off

Plays multiplayer a lot (sometimes with local orphans, sometimes online), and can get quite competitive during minigames

Parkour is the bane of their existence

Has like 46 dogs in their main survival world

Scared of Herobrine (they know he's fake, but...)

Has thought about streaming their gameplay, but they need some encouragement from you in order for them to go through with it

The peaceful music from the game paired with Robin's commentary is calming, you might take a nap...

Whitney

Griefs your base with TNT and lava buckets, initially

Starts getting more creative with ways to fuck with your shit, you'd be impressed if you weren't so pissed

Got a friend of theirs to help them use cheats, but brags about it + takes the credit for themself

Has been banned from a handful of online servers, takes pride in the ever growing list

Builds,,, questionable sculptures

"lmao get good bro"

Basically a big troll lmfao

Throws their controller/hits their keyboard when raging (they strike me more as a console type of person, though)

Has a dog/cat/horse they name the same thing every single time (perhaps in remembrance of an old pet or stray)

Mickey

Almost exclusively* plays modded singleplayer

* Maybe they used to play with Robin or other orphans (before life got so much more complicated, anyway,,)

Has made their own mods + add-ons but hasn't posted any online

Fond of mods that add RPG + fantasy elements to the game (especially DRAGONS!)

Pretty good with redstone, they like making weird contraptions

Has a complicated + organized base

Sets up traps, hidden compartments + other secrets in their base even though they're the only one who'll see it

Tries to get all the achievements (vanilla + any that mods add) + collects and frames special items

Has a lot of commands memorized + knows how to use command blocks

Sydney

You introduce them to the game and they like it a lot!

It's funny watching them learn more about the game and what to do/what not to do

Punched a bee once and fell off a cliff trying to run from it

Dies a lot tbh, and you see death messages you've never seen before because of that lol

Corrupt!Sydney makes their character twerk (crouch, un-crouch, repeat), laughs at it every time

Surprisingly good at building, recreates locations from their favorite books

Only really plays it when you guys play together, though

If you're gaming together at their house, Sirris pops in to check in on you guys at some point and pauses to smile at the heartwarming sight (as embarrassing as it may be for Sydney)

Kylar

"What if I put my Minecraft bed next to yours? haha jk... unless?"

Has the most OVERKILL gaming PC setup you've seen (way too many screens, everything has lights, etc etc. looks pretty dope tbh)

Likes designing Minecraft skins! (there's like 10 separate skins of you in different outfits)

Plays heavily modded Minecraft, but will play vanilla or lighter mod packs with you

Definitely tried that one Girlfriend mod at some point

Has attempted a few speedruns (in the Top 10s for some of them!)

Gets SO excited when you tell them that you like Minecraft too (but it's not like they didn't know that already)

Alex

Doesn't have much time to play with their current workload

When they do, the most they do is play it as a farming sim (???) (you get them to explore more options to do in the game)

Becomes a BIG fan of parkour!

Downloads parkour + adventure maps so they can play it offline (farm WiFi can be unreliable)

Learns some basic redstone, mainly to improve their (in-game) farms

Automatic farms + mob grinders, though they still like the experience of doing it themself

Builds a Minecraft version of their real farm, excitedly shows it to you

Names some in-game farm animals after their siblings as a joke

Gwylan

Only plays offline because they live in The Forest ™️

Loves potion brewing! (they don't have an internet guide so they experiment with different combos all by themself, gets quite good at it)

Hoarder. Has so many items scattered across their chests, they forget what they do and don't have

Aesthetic matters to them a lot when choosing where to put their base + building it

Went to the End + defeated the dragon just to get the blocks there + the egg for decoration

1.17 (first part of the Caves And Cliffs update) is their favorite yet, all the new blocks and cave biomes make them go aaaaaaaaa

Felt so bad when they had to kill animals for food in the beginning, has a good farm system now though

Definitely keeps mobs you can't tame as pets

#degrees of lewdity #dol #robin the orphan #whitney the bully #mickey the hacker #sydney the faithful #sydney the fallen #kylar the loner #alex the farmhand #gwylan the shopkeeper #thoughts-n-hcs

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putting-spaceboy-in-places · 3 months

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the herobrine sighting place

Captain Spaceboy is at the original Herobrine sighting!!

This Herobrine seems like a nice guy!

#captain spaceboy in places #place #captain spaceboy #captain spaceboy omori #omori captain spaceboy #omori spaceboy #spaceboy omori #spaceboy #omori #minecraft #herobrine #herobrine minecraft

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milimeters-morales · 10 months

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okay gn think of Miles and Ganke squeezing into Ganke’s bunk (more of Miles squeezing since Ganke refuses to move an inch) while trying to watch nature documentaries and everytime the narrator mentions mating or anything like it, Miles starts laughing pretty loud and Ganke has to tell him to be quiet or else they’ll get in trouble. And then Miles just can’t stop laughing, so he switches it to Herobrine sightings, which Miles says scares him so bad that he needs to sleep in Ganke’s bunk tonight to feel safe enough. Ganke is long suffering

#miles morales #spiderman #spider man #ganke lee #milesganke #arachnitech #m&m posts

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dogtoling · 5 months

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I see herobrine so now I gotta ask. Which of ur ocs would try and find him, or any other cryptids?

And. are creepy pastas just e-cryptids?

Okay well this is kind of hard to answer. herobrine would likely not exist in splatoon so we're going to assume an in-universe minecraft (i like to propose Brinecraft) parallel with... wait herobrine... you know what he can keep the name now hes like the main character. Anyway first let's assume Splatoon Minecraft (which can be functionally identical to ours but wouldn't be the same game) also has a Herobrine.

First we need to narrow down which of my OCs would be interested in cryptids in any capacity to begin with. this is what my heart tells me

(and of course i have more characters than this, but I omit side characters and ones i dont have little drawings of).

So like my immediate gut feeling was Squl definitely would enjoy the concept of cryptids and horror, but also his parent is a Magnapinna, so I doubt he has much passion for something like that in real life given that in his experience every time there's been a "cryptid sighting" or a scary rumor, it's usually just been his parent.

However for good measure we can make a graph out of this as well

this is subject to change, of course. So in the end, we have six people who definitely would have passion for this kind of thing, and seven people who might, so they're technically not off the table.

In the case of Herobrine of course we need to employ another very specific graph to find out what would be likely:

Now let's see what overlap we have from the gamers and cryptid hunters:

so that's a selection of people who would, potentially, specifically, POSSIBLY seek out herobrine. Or go out at 4am to look for Bigfoot or whatever. Bigfin. yknow that checks out, again, that's just Squl's parent. Again. (Also this selection is mostly 'teens with nothing better to do' and Rodge. Which is hilarious to me)

And finally: are creepypastas just e-cryptids? idk. Yeah I guess. I wrote a several chapter long story in 5th grade where Jeff the Killer Jeff the Kills everyone at the end. I'm not sure online creepypasta is similar to enough to cryptids conceptually that they would have that kind of overlap; I think Slenderman would fall into both though? They might just be closely related concepts. Like dog breeds.

to close it off, I think Graf would by far be the most likely person to intentionally go cryptid hunting. So I guess there's your answer to the first question...

#mailbox #i knew i saved a canvas full of these guys with the background removed for a reason

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splintergirl13 · 6 months

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ANGST DAY ANGST DAY ANGST DAY

Cough herosteve pining words under the cut

Uh trigger warning for self harm, angst, etc. Bad stuff. Beware. Also forgive me I literally wrote this off the top of my head

"Why do you scratch your wrists?"

The softly spoken sentence was not a true question. As the asker felt like they knew the answer already. But wanted to hear the answer out loud.

The rain was the loudest thing besides the silence in the dark room. It hit hard against Steve's wooden roof.

The dead of night. Another summer storm. He had begun to dread them. It seemed like night after night they kept on happening. With no end in sight.

It wasn't the sleep he was loosing that he lamented. No. It was Herobrine. Who wore a dent into his rug as he paced back and forth in front of the window. Flinching at every flash that lit up the room.

Steve never lit any candles. The demon's bright eyes were better than any flame at lighting up the room. Especially at this hour.

Herobrine flinched at the question. As he always did with the miner spoke to him.

It was the only thing Steve had said tonight. When he heard the thunder roaring in the distance and dragged his lethargic body to the living room couch. To wait for the horrible ritual to begin.

Herobrine tensed and then let out a breath. Continually scratching at his arms. He wet his lips as sparks flew from his finger tips.

"Chains." Were his final response. He turned his head towards the window. A long scratch at his arms. Steve caught the faint glow of blood mixed with his healing powers. "My brother... held me down with chains when we fought. He-"

He broke off to pace again. His voice was taught. Harsh. Steve leaned forward, not expecting this much of a response.

"H-he would use the chains to hold me down." Herobrine shook his head. "To signify that the fight was over. I was powerless. It usually was when he grew bored of the fight. Because everything I did-"

The words grew more desperate. Louder and scared. He haunched over. Hands on his head. Steve was about to tell him to stop when he spoke again.

"I could never beat him. And we both knew that. I tried my best but it was never enough! Nothing I ever did was ever enough for HIM! I just wanted to do well! I just, I just-"

He sighed a full body tremble and lowered his hands to look at his wrists.

"I just wanted to do something right by him. The chains signified to me that I had not performed well enough. And it was time to send me back to the nether so I could try again. Bashing in my head with that fucking hammer. Waking up alone. A failure."

Steve was frozen. Needing to hear all of this. Rationalizing it as healthy. Maybe to get it off his chest. But he was mostly just curious.

"I scratch my wrists." Herobrine continued. "Because they hurt. They itch with power. Power that I can't control. They itch when I feel. When I feel anxious or a failure or- I don't fucking know." He spat. "They just hurt. And I can feel his chains. I can feel his magic."

He pinched his temple. "And sometimes I can still feel the hammer."

A loud clap of thunder had them both jumping. It rolled across the plains like a train. Slowly disappearing into the world.

Herobrine shook. Holding himself in his arms. Licking his lips. Anxious and scared and hurt.

An idea popped into Steve's mind. He quickly got up from the couch, gently apologizing when Herobrine jumped back. And went to the kitchen. He grabbed a towel and turned his water tap on as hot as it would go. He then places the towel under it when the temperature was adequate.

He went over to Herobrine and held out the towel. The demon didn't move as Steve drapped it over his wrist.

"Warm towel." Steve spoke gently. "Makes my shoulder feel better after a hard day mining. Doc recommended it for my old wound. Maybe...it can help you?"

Herobrine stared at the towel. Allowing a small smile. "This is hardly warm."

"Listen, it's warm for me!" Steve laughed. Herobrine did as well.

"Thank you." The demon breathed. Placing a hand on the towel. "You... it does help."

#inktober #inktober2023 #minecraft #herobrine #herosteve

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