Prologue 2: Fristad (Book of Dreams)

The young man set the finished stone pickaxe upon the ground and brushed the sweat of his hands onto his burlap pants. A small pile of tools had formed beside him: tightly packed torch bases waiting to be lit, stone picks and shovels with formidably sharpened tips, and arrows each of the exact same size and shape. Every wooden surface was as smooth as if it was freshly oiled, although no oil was needed, as the magic of the crafting bench already left the tools in such a perfect state.

The man had been working at the crafting bench for several hours, inside of a windowless room dug out from the wall of an ancient city. The room looked more like a miner's workstation than a home; its walls were filled with chests with furnaces, with no more than a sleeping bag and a few blankets hanging from the back wall. The man did not appear as if he belonged in this room. He certainly was not a miner. He had neither muscles, nor armor, nor weapons to show for his strength. All he wore was a black vest over a white shirt, beige burlap pants, and leather boots. His only source of protection was perhaps the axe whose iron blade poked out of the leather sheath hanging from his waist.

The man in the vest sat on the crafting bench to rest. His eyes conveyed growing concern as he watched the furnaces closely. The furnaces' dim flames were starting to die out, and there was no coal left to refuel them. The miner who left him there promised that she would be back in time to "keep the furnaces nice and hot," but the man was beginning to doubt that her journey had gone as planned.

There was another emotion in the man's caramel-colored eyes which was somewhat more subtle. It was an unexplainable nervousness, a kind which someone would feel lingering in their mind a moment after they looked at him and then turned away.

After a moment of thought, the man pushed himself off of the crafting bench. He picked up one of the newly-crafted torches with his left hand and scraped its head against the ground, and the torch burst alight with a yellow flame.

He pushed aside the wooden pallet which acted as an improvisational door to the room and slid it back into place. The smell of smoke and burning coal was replaced with the smell of rancid sewage waste coming from the end of the corridor he was now in. He followed the corridor down to a great passageway.

From there, the man wove his way through piles of trash and decaying machines until he entered another corridor.

Every once in a while he would pause at an intersection, to remember the path that the miner showed him.

He turned a corner and then stopped. His eyes widened in shock.

An active Nether portal stood at the end of a room. Before the portal laid an empty suit of iron armor on top of a pile of treasure: polished spheres of solid redstone, gem-studded jewelery boxes, gilded candelabras...

The man's eyes wandered toward the crushed bow and arrows laying in front of the heap. "Someone must have killed Brittany," he thought. "If they were strong enough to kill a miner, there's no way I'd stand a chance against them. I have to get out of this place."

He stepped forward but then paused. "Wait, I shouldn't do that," he thought. "I should take a different portal that's far away from here, as far as possible from any direction the killer could have gone... except that won't work because great distances in this world are small distances in the Nether. I would just waste time."

He smothered the head of the torch into the wall, destroying the flame. He replaced the iron axe in his sheath with the torch handle and gripped the axe tightly with both hands. His brow clenched and his muscles flexed. A cool draft breathed against his face, smelling faintly of dried leaves.

"Notch help me," he thought. "If he sees or hears me first, then I'm a goner."

After a moment, the man hesitated. He dropped the axe on the ground and picked up the pieces of iron armor, one by one, put them on, and picked up his axe again.

"Sorry, Brittany."

He walked forward into the portal. His form stretched and distorted until the purple membrane broke open into a grainy black space, which pulled him inside before snapping shut.

The man braced himself for a sharp turn, but instead found himself accelerated forward.

"This can't be happening!" a female voice inside the man's head shouted. "The Nether portal is broken! Every second this current is dragging us deeper into the void. What did I do to deserve this? I didn't work so hard to get to the overworld, only to be lost and forgotten again!"

The man watched as his arms faded into the ink of the growing darkness. "Does that I'm going to die?" he thought.

"Yes."

The man closed his eyes and waited. "I don't feel anything yet," he thought. "That gives me time to think."


Well, that was our second prologue from the series, Book of Dreams by Asanetargoss, a personal favourite of mine. Next Prologue will look at Steve and Jennifer from The Herobrine Chronicles.

If you have any questions, just PM me or post a review, I'll be glad to respond or answer any of them. :D

-Dublinjake/Kmandy