Children of Death | Dream SMP AU (discontinued)

The House in the Mountains

This chapter contains descriptions of war, child abuse and self-mutilation.

Beyond the village where Wilbur lived, there was a forest, lush and green and overflowing with life. And beyond that, there were mountains. They towered above the rest of the world and the tips of their fang-sharp peaks were usually shrouded in clouds. Hidden somewhere near the top was a house that was older than most people alive, and most people would never see it.
Few people climbed up those mountains, and nobody ever climbed down. Wilbur could have understood why even if it wasn't for the danger that came with going near the treacherous terrain. Not much lived up there; there were tiny silver fish in the water and of course there were insects, but other than that, the only creatures populating the mountain range were corvids. Thousands of dark-feathered birds with beady black eyes, watching from everywhere at once.
Beyond the mountains there was a forest, growing in a wall-like ring around Wilbur's home. And beyond that, there was a village. One just small and insignificant and well-hidden enough that the man who was the reason that mountain range stayed desolate might just take six years to find it.
Philza Minecraft had been one of the last living elytrian soldiers before their extinction. The war that killed the rest of his kind had been started by humans, as a lot of awful things were. You'd think, of all species, the ones that were basically just humans with wings would be safe; and the reason humans wanted them dead so badly is because they were. Elytrians had more land and power than most non-human races, mostly due to living in high-up places that were dangerous or impossible for many creatures to venture into. But they were also very similar to humans; they were a strange anomaly, having almost entirely human bodies apart from pointy ears and some bird-like features, including large wings covered in black or grey feathers. And like humans, they had gained power using intelligence, craftiness and their ability to create tools and inventions for themselves. But unlike humans, they had natural defences of their own, being their wings and claw-like nails, which made them a serious threat to the seemingly harmless species' absolute power and control over the world. Humans had failed to oppress them like they had all other races that weren't their own, and they had tried, and tried hard.
A powerful human ruler had launched a war on the species, with propaganda portraying what they called 'crowmen' as black magic users because of their connections with birds and corvids, and as power-hungry beings who wanted to take the world for themselves and topple the humans from their rank as the most powerful race. As more human societies allied with the first and the elytrians fought back fiercely, it spiralled into a war between two whole species who resented each other deeply for its duration. And Wilbur's father, Philza, was in the middle of it.
He was a strong and noble fighter, and once his people had been driven out of everywhere but the mountain range where he'd been born, he led whatever was left of the elytrian race as ferociously as he ever had. They were few, weak and afraid and surrendering hadn't helped - this war wasn't about stealing land or showing power, it was about wiping every last elytrian out; and the young, elderly or injured weren't spared, so all that was left were the toughest soldiers and a few of their family members who they'd managed to protect, and even they were wearing thin.
Father had never told them how it happened, but when the war was soon to end with the humans victorious, he had died. Death had come to him in the form of a tall, beautiful human woman - ironic, really, for him to fall in love with the form of a species who had destroyed his own. The God of Death had taken a liking to the tragic and furiously loyal soldier, and come to visit him in Limbo. The two of them had talked and then Death had come again, and again, the pair falling for each other a little more each time they met. Until one day, she offered to let him out.
Philza was given a second life, and even knowing his species would be long dead, he took it. He arrived in the living world to the mountains he'd lived his whole life in barren, and returned to his house to find it burned to the ground. Bit by bit, over months, he rebuilt it from pieces of other destroyed homes and Death visited him frequently with gifts from human civilisations where an elytrian could never go. And after many, many more years of this, she gave him the gift of immortality. Well, near immortality. The ability to die over and over and return the same, with hundreds of lives that she could replenish any time to keep him alive forever.
Centuries passed with just the two of them, and as the Elytrian War became old history, humans would sometimes attempt to climb the mountains. Philza was furious. How dare they just come wandering back to the place where they slaughtered his kind? There were thousands of elytrian graves here, and the reason they were all dead were using it to go sightseeing. He had grown bitter from centuries of loneliness and the grief of his whole race being murdered, or maybe the isolation was starting to drive him insane. Whatever the reason, any human who made it far enough for him to see them would be killed.