Hey, guys! My first Minecraft story here. I suggest you play the game before you read this, because it will make a lot more sense. I've posted this both here and on the Minecraft Forums, so if you want to read it in its publicly reviewed glory...Also, if you don't know what 'the Nether' looks like and want to find out, Google is your best friend.

Enjoy!

Before: Miana

No one remembers how we came to Clethe. We simply were...there. Individually standing around, staring at the sky, the ground, the water, drinking our new world in.

Quickly, we came together. Men and women, all of us, in one massive tribe, moving over the land and sucking it dry. Try as we might, the draw of power was too much to resist. We decided that just because we did not know the bounds of Clethe-and it must be said "Kleth-ey"-did not mean we could reap the benefits without forethought.

The first settlement was born, to take from only one place. We called it Topis, and it was built next to the sea on a wide delta. Water snaked through it, and small sandstone hovels were built to protect the Topisians from the worst of the coastal sandstorms. We became adept at procuring drinkable water from the abundant cacti, and even fashioned cactus-spike clubs when creatures came for us in the night. It was a harsh existence, but an existence none the less.

Soon we yearned for more. We wanted bigger houses, tastier food, more understandable communication, and most importantly, we wanted luxury. Houses, we made, taller, wider, with bigger windows and sweeping balconies. Food we grew now, wheat out of carefully watered fields, life in the middle of the horizon-breaching sandy delta, and eventually we trapped a pair of pigs and used them to formulate the first pork-herd. Even a language was created for us, so no longer did we rely on insistent pointing and guttural growls.

Luxury, however, meant digging. Digging meant the dark.

Soon enough, we had learned that the dark meant dark things. Tall, hobbling green things with the twisted face of tormented souls-creepers, for their lack of sound. Greenish people in tattered clothes and blank, black eyes-zombies. Rail-thin, glowingly white archers we named skeletons for their deceptively frail-looking bone-like outer shell. Red-eyed, black, camouflaged arachnids that climbed the walls. All of these plagued us wherever we went. Topis soon developed its own complement of eager guards and yeomen.

None of these creatures were appealing in the slightest. No one wanted to venture downwards to fend for themselves, or be shut away beneath the sun for any length of time. But it had to be done, and do it we did. A select group of hardened warriors and a large party of resigned miners set up a colony around the largest, deepest cavern they found. They named it Delving.

For long sevendays no word came from Delving, and the people of Topis resigned themselves to the fact the bounties of the deep earth would never be unlocked. But the greatest surprise came when an entire train of carts came back, filled to breaking with wonders we had never seen before.

Iron, shining and silver, conveniently already smelted into bars. Gold, lustrous and deep yellow, magnetically appealing but next to useless practically. Bags and bags of red dust, labelled "redstone." We decided just to call it "the dust." Lapis, extraordinarily blue with flecks of gold, nuggets with one large sphere of melded perfection, with instructions on how to repeat the process.

The most intriguing item, however, was the obsidian.

There was an entire cart full of it, huge lumps of night-black stone. It varied, it shined with purple overtones and the blackest shadows imaginable. It drew in light like sand drew in water, and it drew our people in with it. It was even more attractive than gold, and we huddled around it in both wonder and the grips of a nameless fear.

We decided to make a door out of it, to honor a building in Topis. No one even remembers what building it was, not anymore. But they made a door, wide enough for two people. The obsidian bricks melded seamlessly with each other.

Some maintain to this day that the obsidian door was the cause of all this. That it attracted the attention of the Fates, and that is what threw Topis into the new rush of discovery.

Whatever the reason, be it coincidence or something more sinister, there was a great fire in the center of Topis. With the help of the delta and enthusiastic fire-fighters, it was soon put out, but not without one new discovery.

The obsidian door was...glowing. Within the doorway was a pulsing sheet of murmuring purple, a lighter shade of the tones in the stone itself. The...material swirled and buckled, never ceasing to stop. Occasionally it flared like fire. A quick council was held, but it was decided that the door must be closed, and the intervening purple flow destroyed.

At least, that's what THEY decided.

Before someone could drop water through it-that was the first test-some city idiot ran through, screaming about the discovery of a lifetime. He just wanted the honor of knowledge he should not have tampered with.

As soon as he ran into the portal, the purple jaws snapped shut. The mist seemed to...grab at him, tendrils taking his arms and legs, changing his rebellious roar to a scream of fear. The purple air coursed up his body to his neck where it covered his head, muffling his screams. With an almighty heave, the portal collapsed inward and returned to an innocent swirling wall.

Shouts and screams ran rampant like a fire through wheat. Gossip was already far ahead of order, and nothing could be done to calm people down. Everyone wanted the door gone, but none dared step forward to close it. It was now accepted that this was no mere mist-this was a violent portal.

The council members must have deliberated for an hour when the portal opened again. It spit out the poor man almost disgustedly, but I think that's what everyone was feeling.

His clothes and hair were charred, but his skin was mostly unscathed. He had some kind of dark brown mud all over his legs and feet, and glowing yellow dust was like another layer of skin for him. In his trembling hand, he held a large chunk of some blood-red stone. So his suicide mission had not been a complete failure.

That was the day we discovered the Nether.

At least, that was his name for it-he could barely describe a world of heat, demons, and hell. I need not tell you anything that came between the Discovery and First Journey. Just that I was one of those sent through-I was part of that first terrified group. The council had picked twenty warriors and ten explorers to go through and see what was on the other side of that terrible door. I must say, none of us were too happy. However, we had Guard Captain Thropp with us, the best warrior in the entire city, so we felt reasonably safe.

Our job was to find samples of everything we could and bring it back, even if that meant a living inhabitant. We took this directive without a flinch, and stepped up timidly to the portal. Once again, it gave us no chance to think twice-it reached out and pulled us headlong into the Other.

The sensation was excruciating. Like you were being snapped in pieces and crushed into a pulp at the same time. But none of us thought of that as we came out the other side.

I'm not going to describe the Nether to you without the interfering medium of a painting. It's too terrible at first sight. I can tell you this: it is a world of blood and fire, rock and muck, death and horror. All I can tell you is what happened.

A...thing came hurtling towards us. It was a ghastly creature of white legs and open mouth, shooting flaming projectiles at us before we had time to blink. When we came out of the portal, we were shot out down some sort of hill made of the same stuff the accidental discoverer had, the bloody looking stone. Now we started a full retreat back to the portal.

The explorers went through first. This was what us guards had been trained to do. Thropp screamed at them to get this portal down, and fast. The explorer nodded and leaped through.

Thropp went down first. Our Guard Captain.

My brain kicked into overdrive. Obsidian takes a long time to destroy into small enough pieces to remove. About ten minutes of hard mining. However, with what the burned and bloodied explorers told them, they'd have ten people working on it. That meant one minute.

I counted in my head as the ghast-it's new name-sent fireball after fireball at us. We used our shields if we had to, but the archers were peppering it with iron arrows as fast as they could. A few shields had already disintegrated into sluggishly moving heaps of molten iron.

Round after round of this. We had thirty seconds left. I screamed at them to get through the portal, that it was about to go down. They listened to me, for once. Nine of them-all that were left-got through without delay, throwing swords or firing arrows the whole way. I was just about to go through when I saw him.

One lone man, half his leg gone from a blast, slumped over a fallen comrade, screaming in pain and shooting arrows at the same time. I couldn't just leave him-I can't stand the thought of others in pain...or worse, dying alone, without even the comfort of a blue sky to ease you to sleep.

I went back for him. Leaping over the body he was protecting and fully dragging him to the portal. Fifteen seconds. He limped alongside me before I pulled him up in a bodily lift and ran full pelt for the purple mist. Ten seconds. In an act of complete desperation, I threw him.

For once, the portal worked for us. The purple arms reached out and tugged him through. He was going to see the sky again. That much I was sure of.

Five seconds. So close...I was barely three feet away from the portal, the ghast apparently having gone down from the coat of arrows. I thought I had three seconds left as I dived.

I miscounted. I could see it closing. Screaming to the near-silent world, I desperately forced my sword through. They must have seen it on the other side. They'd know to stop mining...

The portal swirled shut with a sickening, ghostly scream, seemingly drawn down a drain, vanishing into a pinpoint of nothingness. My sword went with it, sheared off neatly, smoking from the power it had come in contact with. I stood there, dumbfounded, with only a hill of truly bloodied stone, now, to thank.

I was left behind, alone in the hellish Nether, without even a sword to defend myself with.

Not even a sword.