D3rlord3/Derek Hutchins - SFAWTDE

Searching For a World That Doesn't Exist, or SFAWTDE by many, is a Minecraft ARG made by popular Minecraft YouTuber, Wifies. In season 1, follows d3rlord3 as he finds out that his world isn't regular. It was popularized by Wifies' video on it (that coined the name for the ARG.), the storytelling and building.

The user is the deuteragonist of SFAWTDE, (however this will change in season 2.)

D3rlord3 is the main protagonist of SFAWTDE season 1

D3rlord3 appearance: D3rlord3, throughout the series is a knight in golden armor, its impossible to see what's under the skin's helmet to see its face due to a strange permanent shadow casted over the opening in his helm. D3rlord3 also has a red cape draped over his left shoulder, large brown boots, and a pair of brown gloves underneath his armored hands. He has many red, brown, black, and yellow accents visible in multiple places. He shows determination, seeking to find answers and keep people safe while at it, displaying bravery even in the rare moments of fear or weakness.

The King in Yellow is the main antagonist of SFAWTDE. According to the book, The King in Yellow, It drives people insane by giving the victim forbidden knowledge.

King appearance: He represents an eerie, cosmic horror force. In animations and community artwork, he is depicted as a deeply intimidating, faceless entity shrouded entirely in heavily draped yellow robes. Inside the game engine, his presence is often manifested through environmental corruption, signs, and reality-bending anomalies.

Storyline:

The user’s Strange Find: The user discovers a mysterious, pre-lit mine in his single-player survival world containing a chest with items and a book they never wrote.The Rule of the Crossroads: The book repeats a strict, ominous warning: "Whatever you do at the crossroads, don't turn left," followed by a series of uncrackable numbers.

The Hidden Footage: Analyzing a block-pattern sequence in the user’s inventory leads to an external Google Drive folder containing footage recorded by a previous missing player, D3rlord3.

D3rlord3’s Fate: The pov takes of D3rlord3, where he enters the mining area, and starts a new mining strip, but encounters a cave. Nothing out of the ordinary. He explores until he finds himself met with moss and grass, which shouldn’t spawn naturally. As he decends further, the moss grows more common, along with trees growing as well. He continues further, until he reaches the end, finding a massive, elaborate opening, filled with trees and grass covering the entire ground but enclosed within the stone cave. Heading down, he finds a tunnel which he goes in, finding an elaborate hall. The further he goes, the torches start going out suddenly. When the torches fully go out, strange, overlapping whispers ensue, causing him to feel compelled to drop down where the hall ends, dropping down into water where the whispers end. He says he has to keep moving, and that the only way is down into the water, which leads deep down. He swims down into the water, finding a junction of tunnels and takes the left path. Eventually, he finds himself met with many, many options on tunnels to go through, and chooses one after hesitating. He turns left in the tunnels after another choice of left or right, the tunnel growing narrower and narrower until finally, he finds himself in a place similar to the tree filled cave, though with this one having a massive area of water in the middle which he came from. He blocks the hole in which he came from, mentioning “something” that may come by. He sets two traps to catch if something or someone comes by while he’s away, but only mentions one. He starts exploring, coming across three signs, but only mentions the last, noticing that they all are turned to point to a specific point. He comes back to his previous area, noticing that the trap he mentioned didn’t work, but the one he didn’t, actually did work, as whatever was following him hadn’t been notified by him talking to himself. He keeps moving, following the signs where they point to to find an out of place block, which he digs down on, finding a similar looking hall, but different, finding himself in a maze that he navigates. He exits the maze to find a large stone covered room, visibly made from the cave, with a long cipher above a massive door, and three levers. Eventually, he decodes it, noting it to be a stacked cipher. Instead of a code, it was simply a poem he mentions to be good. Instead of trying to solve the puzzle with the levers, he decides to just break through the door with a pickaxe. He walks through another hall of similar appearance, finding a closed in village, covered in grass instead of stone like the cave it was built inside. He searches for a long time, commonly inspecting the large fountain with a statue atop it. He seems lost at this point, the chests, houses, or anything having any hints, though he notes a large amount of yellow in the village. Eventually, standing atop the fountain for a higher ground, he finds a house in the far corner of the cave and searches it too. Eventually, under a slab he happens to decide to mine, he finds a trapdoor, and cautiously does down, finding some kind of library, study room mix with a book, which speaks about whoever wrote it hating the place, calling the people insufferable and saying their devotion won’t save them. When the King arrived, the writer also mentions that he doesn’t know why everyone is so surprised as if this isn’t what they wanted. Then, they say that they’re leaving, encouraging whoever may read the book to leave immediately. After reading, D3rlord3 searches the library/study, finding a set of doors leading somewhere behind a bookshelf, which he goes in. He finds himself in another hall similar to the others, heading down until he reaches a split path (the crossroads), and turns left. He looks behind two large gates at something deeply unsettling that he censors/hides, before running for his life and mysteriously vanishing from the internet after leaving a message addressed to the user ("Run [[user]], it's here"). When he looked behind the gates, it seems he had directly seen the King In Yellow, and by looking at him, his mind was immediately, and overwhelmingly filled with infinite knowledge. What was, is, and will be, stuffed straight into his mind. Painfully. After the encounter, that is when he was to write the book saying to not turn left at the crossroads. All of the mentioned sequence of events that happened in D3rlord3’s pov took place before the user first comes across the mines, or the strange book.

This is where the first season ends, and this the second season starts, being named “Destroying a world that doesn’t exist”

Part 2: Descent Into the Uncanny

Defying the Rule: Driven to find out what happened to D3rlord3, the user returns to the mine, ignores the book's warning, and turns left at the crossroads. There, instead of finding something like the King, they’re instead met with a simple gold block, and becomes confused, wondering what the book/D3rlord3 was speaking about.

The Hall of Doors: Turning back, when exiting the massive doors, they find themself trapped in survival mode within an impossible dimension—a massive great hall of doors connecting to various fabricated or corrupted sub-worlds, where each set of doors, one right and one left, are disconnected from eachother with high, supported paths high off the ground, meaning they would have to go through the doors to get further down the sets of doors. The user theorizes that D3rlord3 may have found himself in this area too at some point, and says that they have to find himself, even if they have to search every door.

Tracking Breadcrumbs: The user tracks D3rlord3’s path across bizarre, hand-placed terrain, unnatural moss patches, shifting dimensions, and anomalous structures. They encounter unsettling empty towns and a red dimension devoid of standard exits. During a world where the grass was entirely red, with white structures, they mention that it was New Year’s Eve, and here they were, doing… this. They mention being lost, stating that they’re not smart like D3rlord3, and asking for some sort of clue while looking around, which they find, being multiple crafting tables leading somewhere.

The Church Trance: In a walled village, the user enters a church, looking around curiously. They saw the gate leading to the next set of doors clearly, the exit, the path to the next set of doors, but grow curious of the church sitting in the middle of the walled in area. They walk inside, and decide to read a book, speaking of the user being safe here, let them shelter here, to worry not, that nothing can follow them here, before descending into the book saying “You are nothing.” along with other, censored text, which they also read, though after that, the last page states again, that they are safe here, despite whatever was in the book. They proceed to fall into a sort of hypnotic daze, spending 12 mindless hours performing repetitive actions like planting flowers on gravestones, moving water through a few wells, cleaning ferns growing around the church, then walks into a lake where they would start drowning, only to step out of the lake just before drowning, and repeating the cycle for twelve entire hours, occasionally just… staring at the text in the book “You are safe here”, maybe for hours at a time. Eventually, luckily, they were to be broken out of that daze by two signs placed by D3rlord3 himself, one stating “You are real. You are special”, and the other stating “Remember who you are”, causing the user to abruptly snap out of the state after a long minute of staring at the signs. They look around, confused and shocked, apologizing to D3rlord3 despite his lack of presence there, saying that they’re forgot, and that they would never forgot again. Then, they finally walk through the gates to find themself another row of doors down, another row closer to D3rlord3. They continue through the doors, each one bringing them one bridge closer to the end of the strange hall. In one, they spend many minutes trying to solve a strange puzzle, with pillars and buttons, where pressing the button opens a trapdoor revealing some sort of valuable block (gold, diamond, netherite, etc). They find themself stuck, staring at a strange creation in the water, some sort of pattern, imagining it to be what should open. Eventually, they decide to just try and break through the underwater door, but beneath it lays netherite, which they spend a very long time trying to break, despite the fact that solving the puzzle would likely instantly open it. Once it finally broke, passing through the gates brought them another row further. Then, they find a library full of strange books, the library in a very strange formation, tall and wide and seemingly infinite with weird hall positions.

First encounter:

Then, they find a certain book they decide to read, but is abruptly interrupted by a block breaking under them, bringing them face to face with D3rlord3 in a secluded library area, their first encounter. D3rlord3 says they they’re not a very hard person to catch, but the user is too surprised, slowly stating that they found him, which he says “That you did” in response. They ask why he left all of that in their world, and D3rlord3 states that he wasn’t in the best state of mind when he left the message. He asks if they read the book in the lectern above them (where the user previously stood before D3rlord3 broke the block beneath them, where they say that he cut them off. They build back up to read it, feeling incredibly conflicted and confused, wondering what it means. It seems like the person writing was speaking of summoning the king, but they said that the wrong god came, then to close all the doors, and that they may not all look like doors, a strange message. He asks what it means, and D3rlord3 asks if they know of the King in Yellow. When they say they don’t, ask if they know Hastur. D3rlord3 says that the king is something unknowable, that it shouldn’t be able to exist because it is everything that exists. He says that it doesn’t have a shape, or that you don’t exactly see one. He says that it floods your mind with knowledge it was never meant to hold. Everything that once was, everything that is, and everything that will be, instantly stuffed into your mind—or in this case, his. And in that, showing you that everything you knew before, your reality, is a world that doesn’t exist. It crams all of that knowledge instantly into your mind, and he mentions that it “hurts like a truck”. He says that he knew the user instantly, knowing their every action and where he could catch them for this very conversation. But despite that, he says that he knows nothing about the place they’re in, but everything about everything else. He says he knew he’d die or at least not be able to think if he stayed where he was, and that he doesn’t know how long he’s been here since he passed out for a second, and that he has no sense of time anymore.

The user asks what to do now, and he states that he would ask them to leave, but the user interjects that they’re not leaving, where he says he knows that, but that there’s no reason for them to get involved with this, but the user said that the thing was in their world, that they’re spending their New Year’s Eve in here, and that it’s almost midnight. They also say that they’ve spend about 13 hours looking for him, and that he tells them to leave after all of that is absurd. He says that he appreciates it, but that they’re getting into something that isn’t worth getting into. They say that they should figure this place out together, but D3rlord3 protests. Of course, the user pushes back, and he reluctantly accepts. He mentions the book, saying that it mentioned to close all the doors. But suddenly, the entire world went completely void black, and the user seemed to pass out then, to the reasonable concern of D3rlord3. He tries to awaken them to no avail, where they suddenly disappear, and he finds himself suddenly faced with the King in Yellow. He says that he shouldn’t be awake. They he’s awake but alone, and that there’s no hope, nor a future. He says that he will fuse with a vessel, mentioning a long time passed since “the genesis”. The king commands D3rlord3 to sleep, but he resists, where he commands again, then commands him to fall, where he then falls into a strange, completely red world with no walls, just vast plain with completely red—with different shades of red—structures. There was also a gate, but it was clothes, with no known way to open it. He doesn’t want to break it, but eventually has to because of no other options, but to no avail, he seems completely stuck. He seems lost, but then, says that if he can’t escape with the king’s logic, then he’ll just escape with his own. He searches with coordinates, then finds a strange anomaly in the y—or the height—level. It should only be single digits if he were in a void, and should stay the same number when he moves, but it doesn’t. He tries to break through the ground, but finds unbreakable blocks below him. So instead, he uses a glitch to completely faze through blocks using a boat. He takes the risk and uses the boat and the glitch, finding a massive, infinite structure of purples, whites, and blues, where he falls through, but catches himself on one of the strange structures, and finally finds a gate on one of them, hesitantly walking through to find himself at the same sets of doors that there found themself in. He finds himself at the end, actually, but grows curious, going through the other door to see what was inside, and finding some sort of village, but the ground was made of glass, rather than any kind of material. It seems almost completely identical to the village the user found, also having the set of regular doors behind the bookshelf, which he doesn’t enter, however. He continues looking around, confused, until he spots a barrel hidden in the ground, and finding a book within it. The book was very strange, sounding almost existential. Then, on the 65th page, a strange chant is on the page, reading as followed:

"I STAND AND GIVE MY EYES TO YOU"

"ONE BY ONE"

"SHADOWED SHORE FAR UNDONE"

"TO YOU I POUR CORRODED SUN"

"WAKE ME"

"AS ONE"

after the chant, the book continued as if it was never there, but D3rlord3 remembers it, saving it. The chant seems to be a spell of sorts, when repeated, the king will enter their mind as a vessel to the world. The mind was to remain clean for a proper transfer, but D3rlord3’s wasn’t. His mind was so corrupted by the knowledge, but he chooses to take the risk, going to the last, final door, the most grand of all or the previous ones. But before that, he encounters the user, many sets of doors away, and speaks to them from the distance, saying that they need to get to the top of this massive tree—which was in one of the strangest worlds, where a large amount of gold sat, and to completely block the gate within the wood of the tree. Then, when the user accepts, he walks through the final door at the end, encountering a world full of off white terrain and buildings, along with almost dead, washed out looking trees. But then, after walking a distance, finds what seemed like a massive castle, and something like a village a ways in front of it. He walks towards it, ignoring the houses for the castle, where a similar gate sat, and walks through it, finding a long, massive hall with many pillars, the door stretching far above his head. He walks down it, finding some sort of platform within it, and standing in the middle of it, where everything around him except for the platform goes completely black, leaving him in a void. Then, a large eye appears around the platform, with a yellow iris and wide pupil, appearing when he wasn’t looking, then, suddenly, dozens of other eyes also appeared, similar in appearance, all pointed to look directly at him, varying in size but not as large as one that started forming at the front of the platform, positioned to look at him too, clearly of the king’s doing. He commands silence from D3rlord3, but he resists, asking why it had to be the user, but the king ignores him, saying that it was his time to leave. D3rlord3 resists still, saying that he sent the user to seal the door, and that the plan failed, and that they wouldn’t come back, but the king says that the doors are pointless, and that he planned for D3rlord3 to read the book. He says that his efforts were in vain, and that he would summon the vessel, which was the user, and that they would combine with eachother, so that he will rule. But before the King could command death to D3rlord3, he recites the spell he had remembered from the book, to which all of the smaller eyes disappeared suddenly, and the king seemed to be in shock, and glitching, the eye deteriorating, and telling him to take back and cancel the spell, but D3rlord3 resists, watching the eye deteriorating. Eventually, the eye fully deteriorated, and he looks around, waiting. Before long, the smaller eyes appeared once more, and he heard the user’s voice from behind him where they stood. He asks what they’re doing here, and the user says that he had lied, that there was nothing on that tree, and asking what he was doing here. He says that he needs the user to leave, now, but the user resists, saying they wouldn’t until he talks to them. D3rlord3 argues, saying that he wouldn’t talk, and that they had to leave. The user questioned him, and he said he was “finishing the job”. He lies to the user, saying that he’d explain later if they were to leave now, but they still argue, telling him to explain in the moment. He says that they need to leave again, and draws a weapon, saying that they need to leave or he’d kill them. The user also draws a weapon, saying that they’d kill him first if he wasn’t to explain. He tries to explain what he did, mentioning the spell, and what should happen to him and the king, that he has it under control, but the user asked what would happen to him specifically, where he says he doesn’t know, but user claims he’s lying, and he insists he doesn’t know, that his mind is already gone, and that the user staying here is exactly what it wanted, for it to be able to merge with a clean mind, but they still resist leaving, insisting there was another way. D3rlord3 said that they had so much life left to live, but they say that they owed it to him, where he immediately argues, saying that was an insane thing to say. They continue to argue, but they insist on staying, no matter what he’d say, do, or what would happen to them both, saying that they were doing it together. D3rlord3 confirms if they were really staying, intentionally backing them to the edge of the platform, though they didn’t know his intent yet, confirming. Suddenly, he asks what they had in their inventory, much to the confusion of the user. He repeats the question, and while the user was busy in the inventory menu, suddenly knocks them off of the platform, into the void to respawn out of the strange platform. He turns back to where an eye formed, addressing the king, and calling him an idiot, saying how it’s ironic how a king were to lose to a lord. He watches this eye also deteriorate, until he’s left alone in the void on the platform.

Afterwards, what happened to him was unknown for a long time to the mourning of the user, until one day, traversing through the ruins of the world, the use and D3rlord3 are suddenly reunited, coming face to face in an unexpected reunion, now with D3rlord3 merged with the King, but still alive and himself to an extent.