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primarilymedievalish · 16 days ago

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as-as a birthday present (my birthday was yesterday wheee) can I get that sausage corruption ramble you promised? 🥺

Oh my gosh, happy late birthday!

Here is what I have so far. It’s not super polished yet, but I hope you enjoy!

(I’m going to make a lot of references to canon, here, to help illustrate my thinking and give me a place to start. Because do I ever have a lot of thoughts about this. This is going to be very, very long.)

In the beginning, Sausage tries his hand at sorcery and magic. We all know this. It starts in episode five with the gem crystals and the trees. He starts learning magic before the end heist; before the cod wars even begin or the wither rose alliance is formalized. It starts with magic from an outside source, channeled without really understanding how it works or what it takes, and he keeps experimenting and branching out and learning from trial and error. All well and good. This is the baseline.

Time passes. Fast-forward to episode fifteen, titled “THE MAGIC SUMMONING CIRCLE!!!”. This is the most drastic escalation yet. He uses a huge array of magical items, collected from around the world specifically for their amount of power (not type). I have a full list of the items he uses, but that’s not the most important part. The details of the summoning circle’s construction and the form the ritual takes are interesting; I have a friend, who’s relatively knowledgeable about this, who has variously described the summoning circle in Mythland as “more of a sacrificial altar than a summoning circle” and “a better place to summon things than to contain them.” Sausage throws the item into the sacrificial cauldron, kills a blood sheep, and summons Bubbles into this realm. He also claims to have consulted with many authorities, including the Sorcerer Supreme.

For the sake of transparency, I will say that my friend thought that Sausage’s ritual practices in episode fifteen were reckless, dangerous, and likely to go wrong in drastic ways. Please make note of this.

Shortly thereafter, Sausage puts on his blue sorcerer robes, almost abandoning his courtly attire completely. Sometime around this time, he claims to be making attempts to visit the spirit realms, and describes them variously as shadowy and cold. His behavior begins to draw concern from his friends. This is also the point in canon where he starts assassinating people.

In episode nineteen, Sausage first encounters the demon Xornoth outside the gates of Eastvale, who almost immediately singles him out as useful to court. Sausage seeks out their attention, and offers to free them.

Here’s why this all matters:

In my earlier post, I mentioned how fireblight, one of my real life inspirations for corruption, enters plants through injuries and natural openings. It is my belief that Sausage’s corruption began before he met Xornoth in Eastvale. His sorcery was risky, and held few safety measures. I imagine the results to be like a metaphysical strain or contusion; relatively minor, but an easy prelude to lasting complications. In addition, the summoning circle’s design, and the description of “cold” and “shadowy” spirit realms leads me to believe that Sausage found the fringes of Aeor and Exor’s realms, respectively, and caught the attention one attached to the latter of these two powers. Xornoth, being an opportunist, took the chance they had been given, before he even had the strength to be fully corporeal.

It doesn’t start that night by the gates of Eastvale. There’s not enough time for that.

Gem describes Sausage’s magic as ‘dark’. There’s a few ways we could take this, but I’ve found an interesting definition of dark magic in Empires SMP to be magic that is hungrier than usual. All magic leaves its marks on the caster, but dark magic devours. It’s not unlike a corruption of its own. The difference between a mutualistic symbiotic relationship and a parasitic one isn’t in their closeness. It’s that, ultimately, one side benefits at the other’s expense. Even before the demon, Sausage wasn’t exactly taking safety precautions with his sorcery. A perfect target. None of this is very cut and dry, but I don’t find it too hard to believe that it started to twist him. Fireblight infects its hosts through openings, especially injuries. Sausage’s experimentation with sorcery provided the perfect opening for Xornoth’s corruption to take root.

The summoning circle changed things. It was the first time his use of magic went from passive to active, using hazardous procedures and with limited experience. Sausage messed around with the nature of the universe without accounting for the nature of the universe messing with him. Before, his forays into magic don’t really affect him in ways that cannot be easily attributed to his baseline characterization. I do not believe that, if our ‘normal’ Sausage had been faced with the demon at the gates of Eastvale, he would have reacted the same way as the Sausage of episode nineteen. I don’t think that he would have been so easy for our demon to court. Sausage may not have thought of it as a big deal, or a betrayal, or anything that he couldn’t manage. That’s kind of the point.

You may be wondering how we can tell if his behavior in this arc, before meeting Xornoth, is due to his innate character reacting to the sudden availability of the pursuit of more advanced magic, or some subtle corruption, some spiritual mark. I’m certain that Sausage, too, would like to know the answer to that question. There’s no way to know for sure. But the thing about corruption is this: it finds its way to your heart, and there is where it grows, feasting on the worst parts of yourself. You will do things, and you will claim them as your own, because after all, they come from your very heart. Sausage needs no convincing to offer to kill the dragon and free the demon then threatening the life and home of one of his closest allies. His being, warped. Nothing new; only magnified. Helped along, by inches.

There’s no way to know for sure, but the results to me seem suggestive.

In episode twenty, Sausage does a few things of note. The first is take the title of Sorcerer Supreme, previously one of the authorities he consulted for approval before summoning Bubbles. Isn’t that interesting? A magical authority, separate and sought out, incorporated into his own name. Isn’t that an interesting thing to happen as his entanglement with dubious magical forces escalates? Isn’t that an interesting coincidence as he searches for ever greater magical power? A seeker of knowledge abruptly becomes its giver.

Secondly, Sausage subsequently makes his deal with Xornoth, forgetting all doubts as soon as Xornoth claims him as a friend. He furthermore, offers Gem and Jimmy protection from Xornoth in this same episode, and Gem at least finds his behavior markedly unusual and extremely offputting. He tells her about the demon, and his interest, although not the deal; Xornoth told him to keep it between them. He is still speaking with his own voice. He’s still acting within the framework of his own character. He’s not even free of doubts, or at least, not entirely.

It’s not inconceivable that Sausage would do this any of this own volition. But all together, I think it’s telling. By episode twenty, Sausage is being corrupted. And people are noticing. From other people’s perspectives, it’s obvious that something’s up. From his own, however, the creep is far more subtle.

I imagine he begins to show physical signs of corruption at about this time. Scrapes that don’t quite heal. Lumps and bumps that ache and sting and ooze with pressure. Black blisters, streaking beneath his skin. Nothing that can’t be covered up and denied. Nothing so great it can’t be ignored. It’s him, his choice. His own heart. He’ll tell you. He doubles down on his sorcery, in this period. Grows ever closer to the blood sheep and the demon. Is it corruption if it feels like himself?

He is being eaten. Cankers and galls and thoughts he can’t quite finish, routes he can’t quite take. He has always wanted; wanting is at the very core of his character. But the shape it takes is different, now; just a little. Twisted upon itself. If he notices, he doesn’t care.

Often, some types of parasites will hijack some aspect of the host organism’s behavior to serve their own needs. The host will act in ways that benefit the parasite, and may be completely alien to their own behavior and best interests. This is obvious from the outside. But from the inside, corruption is so hard to detect. Why shouldn’t you do this? Of course you would do such a thing; look, you’ve already started.

For context: all of this happens before Lizzie and Joel even get married.

So by this point, he’s already being eaten pretty rapidly. But the thing about corruption is that it feels like yourself. You are what you eat, after all; and he is like a cored and rotting apple, all worm-trails and bruises. It feels like himself, slippery sickness and all. He has yet to receive a single power. His alliances are crumbling. His body is starting to show the signs. All the harm to the host, all the benefit to the parasite. He does not waver. He is going to free Xornoth. He is going to kill the dragon. Of course he’s not corrupted. What a ridiculous idea!

There is no longer a clean line where Sausage ends and the corruption begins. There might never have been; but by this point, it is so deeply entrenched that I cannot imagine him even noticing as he grows ever more distant from his own self. I think you described it as dying a slow and horrible death while you can’t stop hearing the whispers? That’s pretty accurate for his case, too, with the caveat that he can’t even care. It’s just numb. He can’t feel the seams.

At about this point, Xornoth gives Sausage something called “Hive Corruption” via the summoning circle, which Sausage receives eagerly and delights in testing on a villager’s house—one that he, not so long ago, was so joyous to welcome his kidnapped librarians home into. He spreads the corruption without a thought. Why should he care if his people suffer? Why would that that a concern? Earlier, many of Sausage’s projects as king were for the glory, pride, and benefit of Mythland. People were fed and housed just as happily as mercenaries were directed into the heart of Pixandria. But of course, destroying part of his town is just him. Nothing out of the ordinary here. It’s his own heart. He wanted to learn magic. He wants to be more powerful than Gem. He will be more powerful than Gem, soon.

I can’t imagine the Hive Corruption being anything but a test. Xornoth likes tests; likes to see how far things can be twisted. It’s entertaining, for them, to watch people squirm and bend and lose their nature. I imagine that they were satisfied with the answers they received.

Xornoth is relatively subtle. It’s not possession; not yet. I imagine that actively directing a host’s actions requires much more effort and energy than eating them from the inside out. Xornoth still isn’t free. There’s not a lot of energy to spare. And why bother? Why bother, when the twisting and warping and stringing along is serving its purpose just fine, and getting Xornoth plenty to eat? Parasitism, after all, is a very successful strategy. So long as Sausage keeps willingly feeding them all that strength and vital energy… it’s a whole kingdom, effectively under their control, with a nice banquet to go alongside. A win-win.

Corruption is a parasite. Demons are corruption personified. You are what you eat. We will come back to this.

I could talk forever about this arc. But just around the corner is the Nether betrayal, and I can’t do justice to the topic of Sausage’s corruption without it.

I could talk about the lead up. I could talk about how, by this point, Sausage was convinced that his allies weren’t really his allies anymore; that his only real ally was Xornoth. I could talk about how fWhip and Gem grew ever more fearful of the same. But what I want most to mention is this: I believe the nether betrayal to be the first instance of outright possession in canon (not counting a few implied, brief instances earlier—like I said, Xornoth likes their tests). When Xornoth whispers in the nether, Sausage speaks only in echoes. Almost word for word, he parrots Xornoth. I highly recommend watching Sausage’s perspective of the battle; the degree to which he unthinkingly repeats and obeys is genuinely creepy. This is also the first time when Sausage actually receives special powers from Xornoth; further deepening Xornoth’s control over him in a way that doesn’t depend on direct corruption, solidifying Xornoth’s position as the single most important figure in Sausage’s life.

This, like the summoning circle, is a turning point. But his face is still his own. His voice is still his own. Xornoth whispers to him: he is special, he is strong, they’re betraying him, he should smite them with his sword. Xornoth whispers, and he obeys. It’s automatic. It’s unblinking. There’s not even a question in his mind. It’s not even his own heart by this point: it’s Xornoth’s. Why should it be otherwise?

Xornoth tells him to smite them with his sword. Sausage tells them: “I will smite you with my sword!”

His eyes are still blue. His face is still his own. His voice still sounds human. fWhip and Gem see his face, in that frantic, furious fight: it is utterly still. No leering grin, no wolfish snarl; no expression to match his voice. His face has never been still a day in his life, before. It’s like a death mask. It’s like a stranger. It’s like a shapeshifter stole it, wordless and alien and terrifying.

It doesn’t look like his own face, anymore, though the features all are his. Possession is active, costly, and so often pointless when you can twist and leech and rot instead. But I think Xornoth found it worthwhile in this instance.

Xornoth whispered; Sausage obeyed. This is the point of no return. This is the point where the distinctions stop mattering. This is how it ends: with a whisper. There is no Sausage without Xornoth. Who needs those other people? He has a better friend now. Xornoth told him so. Xornoth gave him special powers. Gem and fWhip are out to get him.

When the power fades, he doesn’t mind what he’s done. Why should he?

Rotten from the inside out. He’s not his own. He doesn’t care. He is being devoured; let’s say 60% of his soul is left uneaten. If you tried to exorcise him now, he probably would not survive.

He is dying. He does not care.

A thing about some behavior-changing parasites: the brain is left intact. Circumvented. Rendered irrelevant. So it is here, as well.

His face is still his own.

Of course, then the Dragon dies. This, too, changes things, but not much. He gets his powers, at long, long last. I imagine the blisters and cankers have popped, by now. I imagine his lymph nodes are swollen and dark. I imagine he aches all over. I imagine his hands tremble, when the strength recedes. I imagine it stings like lye in his veins. Animals fear him: he smells like death, not a human being. I imagine he, distantly, remembers his fear. But only distantly, for after all—the power is great, and isn’t his heart still his own? And if it’s Xornoth’s, it’s all the same. He still speaks with his own voice. He still looks at his reflection and sees his own face. Doesn’t he?

The powers he gains are a direct result of his physical corruption. Since corrupted tissues function more or less like normal, but with a connection to a whole network of power, it is fairly straightforward for Xornoth to leech some of the stolen vitality back into Sausage, making him faster and stronger. Of course, this is extremely deleterious to his health, and only hastens the rate of rot. When he is not being fed strength, he is therefore in even greater physical pain, and often has difficulty with physical tasks, due to rewired muscle memory and the extreme stress his body is under.

Of course, some of the vitality he’s fed for these powers was once his own. Never let it be said that the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor.

It is about this time that Sausage starts telling all and sundry that he is not possessed. He’s still in control. He made this deal of his own free will. Even if he fears—what then? What then? What friend does he have beyond Xornoth?

There are these scenes, now, where his mouse trembles on the screen. I imagine that it means something.

It is when he first loses himself that he truly remembers fear. His time is gone and his body is changing, and Pearl said he spoke without memory, with a voice that wasn’t his own, with words that weren’t his own—

Remember: corruption is what consumes. Demons are corruption personified. You are what you eat; and he is all but eaten away. And now we’re at the meat of the matter: the part I promised.

Demons form from active corruption. There is more of him that had been eaten than what which hadn’t. This is how demons are made. It’s not his heart, anymore. The corruption has a face, now: it has taken his. It has a voice: it has destroyed his. It has a name: it stole it from him, and called himself Supreme. Sausage is a side thought, now, a footnote, a thing drained almost dry. There is something else inside him, now, and it does not want to share. It grows, and with it, so does Sausage’s fear. But it’s too late for fear. There is nothing left of him. He knows this. And still, the power is great.

He does not remember his days, anymore. Later, they will be a void—blank, black, fleeting, fearing, doomed, deserving. He asked for this. He asked for this, of his own heart! It was his own heart, then, or at least, it felt like it. What’s the difference, in the end? He writes his will. He counts his days. He tracks the darkness and filth spreading beneath his skin. His eyes are still his own.

His face is still his own. And it is the face of a man who knows he’s dead.

He has his power, still. That is his doom: no one is strong enough to stand against him, anymore. He is sure of this. If there was, they could stop him. But here he remains.

The arena is the last day he remembers. His body’s destruction still lags behind the rest, but not by much. There’s nothing left of him intact. There is nothing the demon hasn’t touched. He doesn’t need to be twisted or possessed, anymore: he will do it all of his own heart, and laugh.

It isn’t his voice, anymore; nor his face. To the causal eye, Sausage looks like a different person, and a dying one at that. His eyes have burst from bleeding, and his hands are twisted black. There’s a pallor in his skin and a dullness in his eye. He’s lost weight; neither Xornoth nor Sausage Supreme think about eating when the corruption will sustain life, and when he is himself, he’s often too exhausted and in too much pain to even try. There is a gray-burning sludge oozing on his knuckles, staining his robes. He laughs, and laughs, and laughs. There is nothing left of the king of Mythland.

This is how demons are born. And he’ll play his role willingly.

Xornoth is shown as a vaguely humanoid figure, twisted beyond recognition, nothing left unblackened, nothing that has not burned. The same here, just not quite as far along.

And then, he fights with Gem. It turns out there is a speck of him left, in the end: just enough. The barest inch of him still existing. He asks for death, and dies in his own mind.

Like I wrote in my fic, Gem kills him accidentally, by ripping the corruption out. She thought it would save him. But the thing is, you can’t remove some parasites. They’ve grown too close to the host. Their lives are intertwined. There’s no way to separate them without killing the host. So: Gem uproots the corruption that had eaten itself replete on his soul, and Sausage dies.

The corruption, however, wasn’t destroyed. Ripped out with one staff, and sent away with the other—and Gem didn’t care where it went! She just wanted it gone.

I believe that Sausage Supreme is a demon: the corruption that consumed him, given solid form. It ate enough of Sausage to be able to survive the separation where Sausage couldn’t. It isn’t his ‘bad parts’, though that would be an easy mistake to make. He is what became of all of Sausage’s soul that got eaten, reshaped in his warped image; just barely recognizable. And he is not happy about this. He had everything! Power, life force to nourish him, things to corrupt, things to destroy. Now, he’s trapped in the void with nothing to do but hate. So hate he does.

Meanwhile, Sausage gets revived, barely. Upon completion of his quest in the Spirit Realm, he is provided with enough vitality to return to his body and regrow the damaged and missing portions of his body and his soul. The process is not quite perfect; he is left with nothing missing, but nothing that was eaten is restored to exactly the way it was. Scar tissue. He wakes up sometime before his funeral starts, at least; he doesn’t remember when exactly, and who can blame him? Now we get to the fun part: he may have survived, but he has to live with being more scar than soul, with knowing what could be created from his own heart, with knowing that it felt like his own heart. And this has consequences! It changes him, in more ways than one.

Firstly, magic. His new powers, involving being essentially untethered from time and space, are a direct result of being devoured, ripped apart, and shoved back into life with a huge influx of raw power to keep him from just dying again due to the extent of his wounds. The common feature of all the magical skills he develops during the season’s final arc center around being somewhere he is not. We see this magnified in season two, where, a thousand years and many lifetimes later, increasing exposure to magic starts fragmenting his presence and sending him to lives and times not his own. We see him both watch without any kind of physical presence (for instance, his view of Xornoth’s defeat) and interact with his surroundings in other worlds (such as ruining Rivendell in revenge for Scott hurting Gem). Ultimately, they and all inconsistencies in what he can and cannot do are rooted in the inherent instability of these powers, as they derive from the piecemeal nature of his death and revival. He died slowly, and was dragged back wrong. This lingers.

I suspect that all of the timeline nonsense and messy reincarnations that occur later are rooted in this: Sausage came back, but he did not come back whole. He is mentally, physically, and magically messed up, to the degree where it doesn’t really straighten itself out. Lifetimes later, he still feels the echoes, without knowing where they come from or why.

(Sausage’s death and subsequent visions have actually become the source for a lot of my headcanons about the nature of prophecy in Empires! To have visions of the past and future, all you need to do is weaken your connection to your current time. And what untethers like death and a not-quite-clean revival?)

Second among the impacts of Sausage’s death is the mental and physical scarring itself. He is not okay. He is so far from being okay. He is, quite literally, scarred for life. He can’t sleep. He can barely eat. He can barely walk for a while. He came back in better shape than he should have by rights, he knows that, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

Something I use from time to time is the idea that, in Mythland, the body is seen as an integral part of someone’s being. Sausage’s body is no longer one he recognizes. It’s not the fact of scars; it’s what they represent. Degradation. Downfall. Turning against everything he’d ever loved to get what he was sure he wanted. Sausage’s yearning had often somewhat ineffectual. There’s horror there, and disgust: this is what became of him when he finally got what he wanted.

Another element of this disgust is that dead bodies are often described as “corrupted flesh”; rotting and unrecognizable. He lived through the rotting of his own body, and then he died, and then he came back. Sausage at this point almost thinks of his body, and by extension, the rest of him, as a dead, hateful thing. Something that should have been put to rest, and is still wandering around in the broad daylight, worms and all.

There’s a lot of interesting medieval imagery about death and the pollution of the rotting corpse. Since it can get very graphic, I’m not going to go into too much detail here, but suffice it to say that all of that is running through Sausage’s head. Worms and all.

These scars are very distinctive, and cover most of his body. Since they are faintest on his face, and fashionable court dress involves high collars, long sleeves, and very little skin showing, many people don’t know the extent of his corruption.

The physical repercussions are more than aesthetic, as well. Exhaustion, lingering pain, and sensory disruption are part of it, as is retraining once-familiar tasks. Part of this is a direct result of having various tissues be eaten away and healed over; part of it stems more closely from the effect of his borrowed strength and speed. These powers put more stress on the body, and trained it in ways counterintuitive to healthy, long-term function independent of the corruption. I am not a physical therapist. I am not a doctor. But I do think that there would be a lot of work—usually hidden, somewhat shame-riddled work—needed for him to be able to comfortably do a lot of his usual tasks.

He has strong, visceral reactions to magic now, especially dark magic. It feels like it’s eating him alive again. That’s part of what keeps him from going back to his studies of magic, alongside his immense guilt and shame. It hurts to be near it sometimes. It’s just too much.

He has nightmares almost every night. Of what he’s done, and what has been done to him. He wishes he could wish they would not stop. Isn’t it only just that he suffer for what he has done? All the same, he tends his scars, and sleeps with the dogs (for they are warm and do not flinch away), and pretends he is at peace.

Sausage doesn’t remember being corrupted very clearly. He’s also got a boatload of trauma from this, and as time goes on I do think it develops into PTSD.

This leads us to the third thing he has to figure out after coming back: living with himself. Because you can bet that, by this point, Sausage absolutely hates himself, and his own stupid heart for leading him here. (It all felt like his own heart. Where does the corruption end? Where does he begin?) He doesn’t trust himself, anymore. He doesn’t know himself, anymore. If you thought he had issues before all of this, you should just see him now.

How does he even begin to keep going?

Just for fun, I imagine him finding some solidarity with other corruption survivors, if he can get over the guilt. There aren’t many of them, and he had the most severe case on record (you can bet he’s ending up in the textbooks for this). But the piglins and the people of the Crystal Cliffs especially had some survivors, and one way or another, he meets some of them. Just knowing that he’s not alone helps, I think. Seeing the same scars on someone else’s skin, and knowing that they lived, too.

Last of all, the conflict between Sausage and Sausage Supreme ends in season two with a duel where Sausage consumes the demon that ate his face, his name, his voice, and his being; the one that rotted him hollow, and left him scarred.

In the end, Sausage looks at the thing that ate him, and he eats it right back.

#thank you for asking!! I hope you enjoyed :D #happy belated birthday!#tw possession #tw body horror #This was very long but I really like sausage’s corruption arc :)#empires s1 #my thoughts

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