Welcome Home (Dream SMP Rapunzel AU)

Spirit of my Silence

I will be your friend.

[ thank you to thechannelwithoutaname/wolfythewitch on tumblr and twitter for the original idea of a techno and wilbur centric rapunzel au :D!

tw: kidnapping, referenced possible gore

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Totems of Undying are an old scar in history, known to resurrect the dead. They give mortals a second chance at life, a mistake of the gods that proved the ugliness in humanity. They brought people back, and if you could keep one, it meant immortality. It meant eternal youth. If you could master that, you could live forever. Medicines and money would be a bore, and all you needed was to learn the nicks and knots, the words and the tune.

But at some point, like everything else, that knowledge had begun to disappear. The Earth grew over the wars of the past in layers of new life. Totems of Undying, already uncommon, withdrew from the planet having either fled or died, when the last drops of power were wrung from them. It's why they disappear when their job is done: a life for a life, a promise with a host. They were spirits of the world whose bones had been objectified into relics, their life force sealed into something as worthless as gold.

The tale starts with a man, a sickly man, who had found the last totem on Earth—an interpolation in their godless realm. Hidden away in the crevice of a rock, it'd been embedded into the andesite. The man, named Cornelius, sung the fabled words to the totem and watched it glow. With his voice, his wounds and scars mended, heart and lungs returned to health. The cycle would repeat, paranoid that any day the totem's power would run out. Back and forth the man would go between the months to sustain him. A good man, maybe he once was, but his rectitude eroded with time.

In a kingdom not too far off, once barren, now blanketed in crystalline snow and surrounded by a gelid sea, a king and queen live happily together over a paradise of snow. The Antarctic Empire they called it: a wondrous land that grows on the ranks of an island. It is frozen in a never-ending calm, marched by the feet of the strongest soldiers and inhabited by the richest of men. Despite such glory and strength, its rulers are a contrast, the finest and most compassionate to have ever been. A polarity between their land and themselves.

But one day, Queen Kristin fell terribly ill. The kingdom believed it would heal at first, as a different doctor was sent to the palace every other week, but months passed by and her sickness only worsened. By the fifth, she was thin and pallid, and King Philza began to search for a solution beyond mere medicines: a miracle.

And so he sought out an old friend, a single deity that still remained, whose stories were whispered around campfires and over a glass of ale. The god, a man tired of war and intrigued by mortality's antics, gave him a book of fables. It told a tale of gold that gleamed brighter than the sun and eyes greener than their world.

Immediately, Philza sent his general to search the land for the last totem on Earth. Captain Puffy scoured the land up and down, left and right at every axis, herself a friend of the queen and in debt to the woman.

One day, they look beyond their borders and find a rock split in half, buried in vines and root where the sunlight couldn't touch. Their miracle lodged in its crevice.

Within a handful of time, the totem is carved from the andesite, and Cornelius watches nearby in the bleak dark of night. The guards quickly abandon the scene, returning to their kingdom, but Cornelius would not give up. He kneels down to the rock that kept him alive more than his own mother, tracing calloused fingers along the empty indent which his treasure once called home. Cornelius, furious, stands from the ground and takes after the party of bandits.