"The distance between death and life is the distance between one man's hand and the other man's throat." -Ancient Minecraftian proverb
Herobrine awoke suddenly, heat cascading off him, in a panic. He knew he was in a room, in a bed, but that was all he knew because his eyes had suddenly become unresponsive to everything but the terrifying premonition flickering in his deepest prescient memory.
Bodies lay everywhere. His citadel in the Nether was being overrun, finally, by enemies that he could do naught but watch and fear.
He sat up, jerked out from under the covers, ran in a blind panic to where he thought the door was, and hammered on it. Something fell with a thump right next to him. A book, judging by the fluttering noise it made as it hit the ground and bounced. Resisting a sudden wave of nausea, he felt around himself as the vision raged silently in his head.
And now the very ceiling was falling. Herobrine looked up in fear as a ton of stone crashed down nearby. Fire everywhere. Must run. Must hide. Must survive.
Bookshelves! Damnation, he was in the wrong part of the room, and he shuffled on his knees to his right. He connected with a hard surface, rebounded off the surface, and fell on his back. To his horror, he felt his legs kicking around like a dying insect's, felt his vocal cords vibrate as a ragged animal noise poured out of his throat. Rolling left, he crawled in the fog of his vision away from the mysterious surface.
A pigman was lifted off its feet and destroyed. Blood spurted everywhere. Herobrine, on the floor, covered his face and kept moving. He knew he needed to get somewhere, anywhere other than this suddenly hellish and miserable place that had been his home.
A small door swung open as he brushed past it, and slammed into his side. Pain blossomed, which along with the heat and sickness of prescience made the whole situation unbearable. But he knew suddenly that he was close to the exit. Beside his door was a collection of cupboards, he knew that. Using these cupboards, he could navigate out of his room and into the hallway, maybe call for help. He crawled frantically, got to his feet, and unsteadily fell on his knees again, shuffled to where he remembered the door to be, reached out, connected with metal. He turned the doorknob and staggered to his feet out into a hallway, his own familiar hallway that he was now blind to except in the future wreathed in flames.
People ran past him as he thundered into the hall. The wooden planks were cracked and burning, the portraits on the walls missing, the floor patchy and opening to a great depth of molten rock and metal. On the wall, he noticed, someone had written "NOT GOOD." That was a bit of an understatement.
Herobrine ran into a wall, flew backwards, cried out, and heard the rustling of great wings as the Ender Dragon charged over and stood beside him. He felt the dragon's hot breath fluttering his hair, and felt a taloned hand grasp his shoulder and pull him into a sitting position against a wall.
"Uuh," he groaned, as his head nearly exploded in pain. The vision flickered, and then reappeared. He saw one last thing before the image winked out for good.
He saw a hooded man with an axe raise it and bring it down. The axe split smoke, and came down hard on his neck.
"GggggggnnnnnnNNNOOOOOO!"
"You alright?" asked the Ender Dragon, reappearing as a blurry black shape with two blurry purple dots at the top.
"Does it even," growled Herobrine, "does it even FUCKING LOOK! like I'm alright?"
The Ender Dragon put a talon to its chin in thought.
"No," it said at last, "on second thought, it doesn't."
Herobrine moved a hand in front of his eyes, waved it. He could see the vague outline of the hand, but not the fingers or the little palm line things. Now what were those called?
"I just had a vision," he rasped, getting shakily to his feet. "A vision."
"What?"
"A vision," Herobrine repeated. "Aaagh, my head."
"You did have a lot of Nether Wart last night," the Ender Dragon said.
"I did?" Herobrine tried to think back on the previous night, but found it hard to remember. His head felt like it was stuffed with wool blocks. His ears were singing soprano.
"You did, as a matter of fact," the Ender Dragon informed him. "Two whole drams, all down the hatch at once. You should really know better, man, that stuff's an awareness-enhancing drug."
"I know, dammit," Herobrine muttered, walking into the kitchen. His vision improved slightly, and he could see that the Ender Dragon had left the table in a hurry. The cup of tea that had been in the Ender Dragon's favorite spot had been knocked over and broken in half. There were mugs in a chest by the furnace, and Herobrine took one plus a handful of cocoa beans. He pressed the beans by hand underneath a cascade of boiling water from the faucet, and sat down at the table with a full mug of coffee ready to drink. The Ender Dragon stumped into the room and sat down, its tail flipping up and over the back of the seat. They sat together in silence, sipping their beverages. The Ender Dragon had obtained a new cup from its stash. The tea on the menu was Earl Grey, and the tea's scent wafted to Herobrine and mingled peculiarly with the aroma of the fresh-ground coffee.
The Ender Dragon said finally, "So... your vision."
"My vision," Herobrine said grumpily.
"Your vision you just had," the Ender Dragon continued, "er, what did it involve? I just sent word to Notch, and he's chomping at the bit to hear my report."
"You sent word to Notch? Well, tell him it's none of his business." Herobrine placed the mug down on the table and sat farther back in the chair, arms crossed in front of him, biceps tense.
"Oho, I can't do that just like you say," the Ender Dragon said chidingly. "I'm sworn to report new developments to Notch. More'n my job's worth not to tell him."
"Your job," said Herobrine firmly, "is not worth... the hairs... on my arse."
There was a long silence.
"Well, maybe my friendship's worth a little more," said the Ender Dragon.
"We're not friends," snapped Herobrine crossly, "we're... business associates!"
"Business associates?" said the Ender Dragon. "We share a house, of course we're friends."
Herobrine sighed.
"Fine," he said. "But if Notch gets all worried and sends me to the middle of the bleeding desert again because he's 'worried for me' then-"
"He just wants to know," the Ender Dragon said.
"Oh."
Herobrine recounted his vision. He described in detail the scene that had played out before his eyes, how he had wanted so badly to run away from the citadel, and how the hooded... person had executed him. At this the Ender Dragon stopped him.
"A hooded man executed you?" he asked.
"Hooded person,"Herobrine clarified.
"Sorry, a hooded person executed you?"
"Yes," Herobrine said, sipping his coffee (which was still boiling in the powder-blue mug).
"I thought prescience was limited to bits where you were alive," the Ender Dragon prodded.
"Yes, well, the person took its time with the raising of the axe and everything," Herobrine replied. "I saw the executioner in detail. A rough woven cloak, with a hood as I've related, in a black or dark gray color. The face was hidden, but the person was about..." He rubbed his beard thoughtfully, and winced as the hairs intruded on his Nether Wart-heightened sense of touch. "... five foot seven-and-a-quarter inches."
"Oh dear," the Ender Dragon murmured. It stood up, crossed to a window, and opened the drapes. Then it looked with those deep violet eyes out into the panorama of the Netherscape, across the ocean of lava, towards a cluster of mushrooms on a small rock pinnacle five miles away.
"A lot of people are about that size," the Ender Dragon said thoughtfully, studying the colossal fungi with a glazed look. "How would we know who it was who killed you?"
"We won't," Herobrine said.
He thought back to the axe. The head of the axe was iron, and nicked in a very specific pattern: two deep indents at the top, and seven smaller indents in the middle and bottom. The middle was made of jungle wood, which was strong enough to withstand a chopping blow by a diamond sword, but flexible enough to survive a long day out chopping things.
"Maybe if we looked for the murder weapon," he said. "But we can't now. Go on, send your report to Notch or Jeb or whoever's picking up all the mail these days."
"Alright," said the Ender Dragon. It walked out of the room, shutting the door behind itself with its tail.
Herobrine stood up himself, and walked to a closet in the corner of the kitchen. Opening the door, he selected the top chest, and from it a black silk tuxedo. The bottom chest gave him a pair of black silk pants and shiny turquoise diamond boots. He put these on. Then, almost without thinking, he reached for a small diamond dagger and slipped that into his shirt pocket.
Afterwards, as he strode out of the house and towards his personal nether portal connecting him to the Overworld, he wondered why he had grabbed the dagger. He never usually grabbed a dagger when he ventured up top, due to his natural intimidation factor. But then, he reflected, somewhere out there was someone who didn't care about natural intimidation factors, someone who only cared about death. More specifically, his death.