#thank youuuuu for giving me the chance to be creepy about ancient cities today

[shadeswift99]

SHADE. Shade I need your minecraft worldbuilding brain.

They introduced a bunch of new shards to 1.20. The one depicting the Warden is called "mourner."

THE POSSIBILITIES?? It's not just guarding these ancient cities, it's mourning what they once were? Maybe it's similar to an iron golem, a construct built to protect and then abandoned? Maybe it caused the ruination and it mourns what it destroyed? Maybe it's just cranky we disturbed it????

I really like all of those ideas! But, as is my duty as Shade, I am going to introduce you to an extra and more horrifying possibility!

So. Sculk. It's a fungus-like corruption that spreads when it's fed by XP, which is essentially souls or life energy in-universe released at the death or breaking of something. No mobs other than the Warden can spawn in the Deep Dark, which to me suggests sculk has a level of toxicity that even the undead can't handle. Except some people - players - seem to be able to withstand it, at least for a short period of time.

There sure is a lot of sculk in ancient cities, isn't there. A whooole lotta sculk. Whole lot of that stuff that duplicates through death of other living things.

Maybe the cities were full, when the first sculk was discovered. Maybe the toxicity claimed the first person to find it and spread as a result of that, the danger growing the more it took, until it was a wave few could escape. Maybe some got away through those odd portals, the ones with higher natural resistances lasting long enough to flee. ...Or, maybe some of them, left alive long enough to watch everyone else die, couldn't bring themselves to leave. Maybe they stayed to mourn the loss, exposing themselves for longer than even they could withstand. Maybe instead of dying, they changed.

The Warden has the same size hitbox as a player. In spite of visually far exceeding that size, it can fit through the same size gaps. Almost as if it outgrew the volume the Universe had calculated for it. And its ribcage, open and filled with sculk-like texture inside, has always read as human-like to me. The sculk controls it, so the body tries to kill living things to fuel the spread. It's only natural.

But maybe, like the cordyceps fungus, the sculk leaves the brain intact while bending the muscles of the body to its own purposes. Perhaps the Warden's eyes are closed because the mourner is still mourning - the loss of their city, still, or what they lost of themselves by not turning away.