The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay
me, did you say dragon? The Ender Dragon? I thought that was just a myth!”
“Tell that to the slash across my chest,” replied Charlie, who had just come over next to Stan and was holding his wound with a weak grin.
“Here, take this,” said the Apothecary, and he proceeded to pluck a blood-red potion off his sash. To Stan’s amazement, the Apothecary reached into the mist and placed the potion into it, where it floated as if a message in a bottle lost at sea.
“Go on, take it!” exclaimed the Apothecary. Tentatively, Stan reached into the swirling purple mist and found to his surprise that the potion was quite tangible. Stan grabbed the potion out of the chest and held it up to the torchlight, as if to check that it truly was real. When he realized that it was, he wasted no time applying the potion to the wound on Charlie’s chest, which instantly resealed itself.
“If you put something in an Ender Chest, you can then access it from any other Ender Chest on the server,” explained the Apothecary. “That’s why I gave one to you. Now that you’ve found the stash, I want you to put all the loot into the chest, and I’ll take it out and store it here in the village, where we can use it for the war effort.”
“Sounds good,” replied Kat, for she, DZ and Oob were all listening by that point, too. The four players wasted no time in unloading all the valuable materials contained in all the chests into the single black Ender Chest. Just as quickly, the Apothecary took the items out of the swirling mists and handed them off to places that Stan couldn’t see. He assumed that they were being handed to people who would put the items in safe chests in the village.
“OK, that’s the last of it,” said Stan as he placed the last item, a stray Potion of Swiftness, into the chest, and the Apothecary took it out.
“OK, so, Apothecary, here’s my next question: do you have any idea how to get out of the End?” asked Charlie.
“You mean you don’t know?” hissed Stan to Charlie in disbelief as the Apothecary responded.
“I don’t know. Are you telling me that you went in there without any knowledge of how to get out?” he asked.
“It would appear so,” said Stan, barely able to contain his rage. He was about to lash out at Charlie when Kat interrupted him.
“The book, guys, remember?” she said with an exasperated sigh.
“Oh yeah,” replied Charlie, blushing as he pulled out the book about the Nether and the End. “Apparently … ah yes, here it is, apparently since we’ve defeated the Ender Dragon, a portal back to the Overworld will have appeared, and when we go through it we’ll go through a process called ‘Enlightenment,’ whatever that means, and then we’ll reappear back at Spawnpoint Hill.”
“What’s Enlightenment?” asked Kat. “I am so done with tasks right now … I just want to get back to the Village and plan to take down King Kev. I’m sick of tasks!”
“Don’t worry. It says here that we don’t have to do anything but just listen while we sit there and are teleported back to the spawn point,” Charlie read.
“OK then, I’ll see you at the Village,” replied the Apothecary, and with one last wave, he closed his Ender Chest so that the purple mist now hung in empty black space.
The players climbed out of the King’s stash room and saw that, indeed, a portal back to the Overworld had appeared in front of them. It appeared to be a fountain made out of Bedrock, with four torches illuminating some sort of black egg atop a pillar at the centre. Wanting desperately to be back in the Overworld, however, the four players rushed up to the portal and one by one, DZ, Oob, Kat, Charlie and Stan all jumped without hesitation into the black portal that would take them first through the Enlightenment, but then, thankfully, back home.
I see the player you mean.
Stan2012?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read our thoughts.
That doesn’t matter.
It thinks we are part of the game.
I like this player. It played well. It did not give up …
This player dreamed of sunlight and trees, of fire and water. It dreamed that it created. And it dreamed that it destroyed. It dreamed that it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter.
Ha, the original interface.
A million years old, and it still works.
But what true structure did this player create,
in the reality behind the screen?
It worked, with a million others, to sculpt a true world in a fold of the
It cannot read that thought.
No. It has not yet achieved the highest level. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a game.
Take a breath, now. Take another.
Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return.
Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity,
in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are.
Your body touching the universe again at every point,
as though you were separate things.
As though we were separate things.
Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change …
Sometimes the player thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from one hundred and fifty million kilometres away.
Sometimes the player dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat and infinite. The sun was a square of white. The days were short; there was much to do; and death was a temporary inconvenience …
And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees …
and the universe said I love you
and the universe said you have played the game well
and the universe said everything you need is within you
and the universe said you are stronger than you know
and the universe said you are the daylight
and the universe said you are the night
and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you
and