The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay
agreed to find some shade from the hot desert sun while they planned this next move. They looked around and saw that they were in the middle of a sinkhole that must have been created when the sand fell down and buried Avery’s base. They walked over and sat against the edge of the sinkhole that provided shade from the sun. Charlie opened the book to the chapter entitled ‘Entering the End’ and read aloud.
“To enter the End, one will, before all else, require twelve Eyes of Ender.” He looked up at his friends. “Does anybody know what those are?”
Neither of them did. Charlie found a glossary of Nether and End items in the back of the book and looked up the Eye of Ender. The picture showed an orb, green-grey in colour, which resembled the eye of a cat. The crafting recipe for it included one Ender Peal and one Blaze Powder. None of them knew what those were either, so Charlie opened the book first to the Ender Pearl.
“An Ender Pearl is most readily obtained by the killing of an Enderman,” Charlie read.
“Wait, an Enderman?” said Kat. “Isn’t that the thing that almost killed you this morning?”
Charlie sighed. “Yeah, it is. And it looks like we’re gonna have to kill twelve of them if we want to get to the End.”
Stan gulped. He remembered the Enderman’s overwhelming power well, and he wasn’t eager to face one again. “What about Blaze Powder?” he asked quickly. “How do we get that?”
Charlie turned the page and found what he was looking for. “Blaze Powder is a substance that is crafted from a Blaze Rod. The Blaze Rod can only be obtained by killing a Blaze, a creature indigenous to … the Nether,” said Charlie, his stomach lurching. After all he had heard about the Nether, he was not eager to go there.
“So, if we want to get to the End,” said Stan, piecing it together, “then we have to kill a bunch of Endermen, and we also have to go to the Nether and find these Blaze things?”
“Oh yeah!” cried Kat, pumping her fist in the air. “Road trip to the Nether!”
“Wait,” said Charlie quickly. “Not so fast. Who says that we have to go the Nether first?”
“Well, do you want to fight the Enderman again?” asked Kat. “Whatever’s in the Nether, it can’t be worse than something that can teleport and tries to kill you if you just look at it.”
“Not to mention,” added Stan, “that the King’s forces are definitely still looking for us, and they’re going to comb the entire Overworld before they start looking in other dimensions.”
Charlie tried to think of another argument of why they should not go to the Nether, but he couldn’t. He did agree with the reasoning of both of his cohorts. “OK,” said Charlie, resigning himself. “I guess our next move is to go to the Nether.”
As Charlie flipped through the book to figure out the way to enter the dimension, Kat kept on doing fist pumps and jumping around like a hyperactive puppy. She was obviously very excited to explore the place. Stan felt nervous, but he too had a growing sense of exhilaration. He was very much anticipating, with potent curiosity, the exploration of the new dimension, whatever it might hold.
“OK, apparently to enter the Nether we’re going to have to build a portal,” said Charlie, referring to the book. “It has to be five blocks high, four blocks wide, hollow in the centre, and made out of obsidian. From what I understand, obsidian is created when running water hits stagnant lava. It’s almost indestructible, and it can only be mined with a diamond pickaxe.”
“We passed an entire lake of lava on the way here, remember?” said Stan.
“Oh yeah, I remember that!” agreed Kat.
“OK, so we have stagnant lava,” said Charlie. “But how are we going to get a flow of running water across it?”
“Are you stupid, Charlie?” said Kat with a laugh. “I found a bucket down in the mine shaft!”
“Oh yeah,” said Charlie, feeling, indeed, a little stupid.
“OK, then!” said Stan, clapping his hands together. “Let’s make camp in this sinkhole overnight, and tomorrow we’ll hike out to the lava lake and make a portal to the Nether!”
And they did just that. Kat walked over to a pond in a grassy oasis nearby and filled her bucket with water, while Charlie and Stan used all the sand and dirt in their three combined inventories to make an inconspicuous sand house against the corner of the sinkhole. They quickly threw together a crafting table, a furnace and three beds with the wool made from the string of the cave Spiders.
They also made preparations for their impending quest. Charlie made torches out of the coal and wood he had found while mining, and he used the remaining coal to smelt the iron ore he found in the furnace. He used the resulting iron ingots to create two new iron chestplates for himself and Stan. Kat still had her leather tunic and cap.
After crafting the chestplates, there were three iron ingots left. Stan wanted a new axe, but Charlie said he needed one of the remaining ingots to combine with flint he had found underground. He had read in the book that the way to activate the Nether portal was to light the inside on fire, and to do that he would need to craft a tool known as flint and steel. After he created this, the two remaining ingots went to a new iron sword for Kat.
They had some leftover string and wood. These Charlie crafted into a chest and a new bow, which he gave to Stan along with twenty arrows that he had collected from Skeletons underground. The chest was filled with the group’s items that they would not be taking to the Nether: some dirt, a lot of cobblestone, the book, the contents of the chest from the mine shaft except for the bucket, and the Ender Chest. With all their necessities on them and all extras safely stored in the chest, the three players, the cat and the dog were all happy to go to bed.
As the wool mattress of the bed beneath him conformed to his body, Stan thought, for the first time, about the Griefer whom he had probably just killed beneath the desert. It was incredibly conflicting. Although Stan was quite happy that they now had a dangerous enemy off their tails, and he knew that they could not all walk away from that fight intact, Stan found his insides squirming with guilt when he remembered the agony of being crushed by the sand himself. Suffocating in that buried room must have been a dreadful way to die. Even if Stan had dismissed Mr A’s story about Avery007 as being completely untrue, Stan still felt as though Mr A did have an underlying reason for his hatred of lower-level players. And now that he was dead, they would never find out what that was.
Regardless of his guilt, Stan was too tired from the events of the day to dwell on it for long. It was only a matter of time before he succumbed to sleep.
It seemed like forever to Stan since they had had a really good night’s sleep, but it was a peaceful night, and Stan woke up to the crowing of a chicken, feeling refreshed and ready to tackle whatever the Nether had to offer.
They wasted no time leaving. They clipped their remaining potions to their belts, along with their weapons and arrows. Stan and Kat slung their bows over their shoulders. Kat and Charlie commanded their pets to sit and hide, as Charlie had read that Rex and Lemon would be unable to enter the Nether.
Before the clock even showed that the night was over, the trio was retracing their steps back towards the lava lake. They passed some burning mobs on the way there, but they were too preoccupied to pick up the materials. They reached the lava before the sun was high in the sky.
Stan was amazed. At a passing glance the body of molten lava had seemed like a lake, but now he could see that it expanded for kilometres, forming what could more appropriately be called a lava sea. Kat was equally amazed. Charlie, on the other hand, wasted no time placing the water from the bucket on the shore of the lava. Initially Stan was confused as to why the water from the bucket seemed to stay confined to one block on the shoreline. Wasn’t water supposed to flow? However, water then began to flow from this single source block, eventually spreading out into the lava and cooling a fair amount of it instantly into the black-as-night obsidian blocks. Ignoring the coal ore and