Little pillars of smoke pierced the canopy at various points, telling of camps beneath. From his branch, Voidblade couldn't see the refugees themselves, but he could hear their voices. Anger and optimism were widespread among the camps' denizens. They had come far, fleeing the forces of the Tower and the ruins of the village. It was unfair - the Tower had ripped them from their worlds and they had congregated together at the foot of the Prophet's hill. Now, the machinations of the Entity and its captains had scattered them again. Voidblade had been among their number, and even though they were humans, he felt a certain sympathy for them.

"The enemy of my enemy…" he lamented. "I hope we can just get this over with soon so I can get back to warring with the humans instead of protecting them."

However, he stopped this line of thinking and calmed himself down. Getting frustrated wouldn't change their situation. Soon, they would reach the shelter Fire had established, and they would be welcomed. For now, they would have to sit there, eating their meagre rations and cursing the pursuers who were no doubt hot on their heels. This insistence that they were in danger confused and infuriated Voidblade. It seemed to be a rule that humans, no matter what world they came from, always assumed they were being targeted. It also seemed to be a rule across worlds that this couldn't be farther from the truth.

In truth, they probably had little to fear. The Entity had sent its forces to attack their village and their congregation for its own specific reasons. The Prophet was a dissident of some sort, preaching against the Entity and prophesying the downfall of its Tower, or something of the sort. Now that his congregation was considered scattered they were unlikely to consider them worth pursuing. Besides, they had been there pursuing Fire's colleagues, who had arrived a few days prior, weak and injured. However, something had happened in the village, and its priorities had changed. It wasn't sending anyone out to pursue the congregation or its original targets. Instead it was fortifying the village.

Voidblade had teleported far and wide, even going as far as the village outskirts, and he had seen the Entity striding about in its bronze armour. If he didn't know better, he might have thought it was pacing in agitation and worry.

But for the moment, they had no idea what it was up to. For now, he had to report to Fire, and explain that soon they would have wounded to tend to, and soldiers to arm.

He stood up, teleported and found himself at the mouth of the shelter. Rolling his shoulders, Voidblade readied to walk amongst the humans. It had been fine when it was just the three women (and Fire, and the dwarf). Now they were everywhere and it was getting… awkward. He didn't hate all humans, exactly, but humans had massacred his kind to the point of capitulation in his world, so he was aware of human cruelty. The enderborn had started that war, but the human retaliation had been terrifying. Maybe these humans were different. Voidblade wasn't holding out for that, however. He had been let down enough times.

He pressed the button and the immense piston doors started to slide apart. He stepped right through and began to walk at a brisk pace. On his left was a small library where Destiny sat, staring at a page with a scowl on her face and fingers running through her brown ponytail. Until recently she had been out hunting constantly. Then, the others arrived and people kept joining her hunts and she had been polite, but obviously wanted to be alone. As Voidblade understood from the well-meaning whispers about the shelter, she had lost a loved one recently. He hoped she recovered quickly. War did not wait for grief. But she seemed to know that well - she had killed Herobrine's protégé.

"Then again," Voidblade mused. "A lot of people here claim to have killed Herobrine, or to have served him, or to come from a world where he doesn't exist at all. It would be nice to come from a world where that killer never existed."

Passing by on his right were the red-haired woman they called Jennifer and Fristad, the shepherd. They had bows and were obviously about to go hunting. The latter wore a strange chest-place which glowed purple in places. He had seen the crystals used to suppress magic. There was a story in this to be sure, but no one seemed comfortable talking about it and Voidblade was more than happy to remain ignorant for the time being. Nonetheless, he had resolved to snap Fristad's neck if he ever attempted to remove the suppression device.

"Voidblade!" called Fristad suddenly, beaming in that obnoxious human fashion. Voidblade didn't believe these ostentatious, grandiose emotions could possibly be sincere and yet it was all humans seemed capable of displaying. "My man, how did the scouting go?"

Voidblade turned to look down at him, incensed and stooping a little. "I am not your manservant."

Fristad's eyes widened and his face flattened with surprise.

"I… I didn't say that," responded Fristad with a tone so meek it became a question.

Voidblade looked him up and down, trying to decipher whether he was being mocked.

"Sorry," said Voidblade. "There appears to have been a breakdown in communication. Have a nice day, my… man."

He then quickly strutted off, not looking back. However, if he had he would have seen Fristad turn to Jennifer and start asking if he'd done something wrong, and the red-headed warrior pat him on the shoulder and start to smooth the feathers of his worry.

He reached a bend in the corridor. Urist the dwarf and Steve Brine, Jennifer's boyfriend, were talking to Lucy, a blonde-haired woman who apparently had been a housemaid before being recruited by Fire. The former was characteristically short and dumpy and covered in soot. They had been mining. Steve, however, showed absolutely no sign of this endeavour. His armour and skin were clean. This was an odd, slightly unnerving characteristic of Steve and Jennifer - they never got dirty, as though they only interacted with the physical world part-way. Steve didn't even seem used to the concept of blood, always flinching when he saw bleeding.

Regardless, the two had been mining and now they were reaching into their seemingly cavernous pockets and producing quantities of stone and riches that Voidblade couldn't fathom. And Lucy responded with equally unfathomable comprehension, noting down and categorising every article of their delivery in her notebook.

"So, where do you want us to put the coal?" asked Steve, balancing a perfectly square block of coal ore the size of a child on his fingertips. That was another thing - no matter what he pulled out of the earth with his pickaxe, it always took on the shape of a perfectly euclidian cube.

"I designated one of the areas for ore storage just earlier, can't miss it, just one entrance further down the tunnel than what we used so far. It also has sub-sections for the different types as opposed to the old pile."

"Cool," Steve nodded, before pocketing the coal and setting off down the hall.

Voidblade kept his eyes on the floor and marched past Lucy, mumbling his report out in rapid-fire: "Scouting mission completed. No Tower sightings. Refugees approaching."

Lucy looked up from her notebook and smiled. "That's great to hear, thank you for giving us eyes out there, Voidblade."

Voidblade stopped and made rigid eye contact. He nodded once.

"You're welcome," he proclaimed, before resuming his measured, inconspicuous charge down the hallway. He congratulated himself for the level of courtesy he had afforded the human. If he kept that up he might just survive in this shelter after all.

He paused a moment when an energy arrow shot out from the training room, a large cavern they had converted into a bit of a dojo. It had pierced a fully-cooked chicken drumstick and was now pinning it to the wall. The arrow rapidly disintegrated and Voidblade caught the food as it fell. It occurred to him that he hadn't eaten so he looked in through the door to make sure it wouldn't be missed.

"You're improving," said Rose diplomatically. "Accuracy-wise, you're doing great. You just need to work on timing, and not shooting the last one out the door. Come on, that's like the fourth time today - you're just letting that become a habit."

A quick inspection of the room revealed the black-haired assassin sitting in an armchair, materialising knives to throw at a bullseye across from her. However, that was the least interesting aspect of the room. There were half a dozen other targets around the room, each of which had a small pile of pierced drumsticks on the floor in front of them. At the centre of the room was Warnado, the small hooded child, holding a bow of glowing light. Of his face, only the mouth and two glowing red eyes were visible. He wore a large brass-coloured gauntlet that covered most of his forearm on one arm but not the other.

"Really? My timing's off?" he snapped. "Here I thought it was just chance that the last one keeps going out the door! Surprisingly, lady, it's a little difficult to get the timing right on summoning six separate chicken drumsticks in mid-air, then shooting them just as they pass by weirdly-placed targets with arrows I have to will into existence!"

"Stop getting frustrated. Take five. Next round I want all the chicken on the bullseyes."

She threw three knives at her target in quick succession. Warnado went over to a basin of water and started splashing his face.

These knives were then gathered up by Amanda and sorted into labelled buckets depending on make. Voidblade observed the process repeat several times. At seemingly random intervals Rose started throwing, and then the second she stopped Amanda would snap to attention and snatch up the knives before Rose started throwing again. No warning was given and in the three or four times Voidblade saw this process repeat, nearly all of them were near-misses. It appeared to be some sort of reaction-time exercise.

"Hm, that's enough cleavers," Amanda suggested. "Lucy said we really need some more stilettos."

Amanda was about as young as Warnado, barely a teenager. And yet she had a world-weariness about her. Lack of sleep had engraved rings beneath her blue eyes, and her skin was so pale her dark brown hair seemed jarring. Her manner was where it was clearest though. Despite the tendency of even mature humans to waste words, she said only what she needed to say when it needed to be said - she would have fit in well among Voidblade's people.

"Honey, Lucy can need as many stilettos as she likes. You aren't ready for me to start throwing stilettos." She threw another cleaver to punctuate her point.

Amanda shook her head and returned to her catcher's position.

"Hey V!" Warnado called, leaning against a stone pillar and waving. Voidblade realised "V" was referring to him. The red glows were slightly narrowed, indicating a frown. "What do ya need?"

Voidblade realised he had given the humans quite enough words for that day. That was perhaps the thing he hated most about being in a primarily human environment - humans never stopped asking questions. How are you? Did you have a good day? What do you want? Why are you staring at me like that? And so on. Enderborn always seemed to be on the same page and he vowed to never take that for granted ever again when he got back to his world. He pointed a finger at the drumstick, then at his mouth. Warnado deliberated a few milliseconds upon this laconic but intriguing polemic in favour of the enderman getting the tasty chicken leg before offering a thumb's up of resounding approval. Voidblade, meanwhile, held true to his withdrawal from human contact and had ducked back out of the room before the thumb was even fully raised.

Biting voraciously, he rounded a corner and took a moment to appreciate just how bright the shelter was. A large lamp pierced the ceiling every few minutes. Miniature swords of light needle his vision and he fought the urge to rub them. Voidblade supposed he should be glad he didn't have to stoop to avoid them, as he had in the village's buildings. That had motivated in part his decision to sleep in a tree at the foot of the Prophet's hill - he was tired of knocking his head off the ceiling.

The command room was just at the end of the hall, but Voidblade stopped himself one last time to steal a sidelong glance into the infirmary. The wizard, Astro, stood over a bed. However, the wizard, with his black hair and his face line with age and worry, was of little interest to Voidblade. Everything about him, from his slight stoop to his aura of sadness, disgusted the enderman a little. He could never take real interest in such a frail specimen. Voidblade was interested in the man in the bed.

The divider was drawn back and Voidblade could make out the outline of his body, covered in layers of duvets and blankets. Beneath all that, his body looked soft and smooth as a snow drift. Voidblade could hardly reconcile this with the image of mortality they had recovered a few days before. His obsidian-plated cuirass had been shattered, and the ribs beneath fared little better. His pale skin and auburn hair had become a frail canvas for blood and bruising flesh. His opponent had slammed him against the line between life and death until his back broke. If not for the potions from Fire's world, he would be dead. With their help, he was due to recover within a few days.

Now, a half-dead human was hardly an interest to Voidblade, but this was an exception. He heard many strange things about him. That he was a General. That, contrary to the others, he had served Herobrine. That the book that sat on the table beside him, seemingly unassuming, was a source of power to him. However, above all, Voidblade had heard he had taken on the Entity alone. He lost, and evidently quite severely, but there was something to learn there.

Voidblade couldn't stop himself from speculating in the face of that. He wondered if the fight had been close, or if it had been a massacre. The stories spread about the congregation did not inspire hope in Voidblade. Entire armies fell before the Entity. The Entity itself could be considered an army, literally or figuratively depending on who recounted. That he had survived at all seemed something of a miracle and this one miracle might promise another. Sadly, for the moment, the auburn-haired General remained asleep and the miracle remained solitary.

Voidblade continued on before Astro could notice him and force an interaction, finally reaching the doorway. He stopped to tear the remaining chicken into his mouth and swallowed it down before throwing the chicken bone into a small gutter. Voidblade almost walked on, but reminded himself of something Lucy had called him up on. He pressed his palm into a large stone button and watched as the bottom of the gutter opened up and the bone was consumed by lava.

Inside the command room were three individuals. Tyron, who called himself Dragoknight, was tending a furnace. The fire reflected in his clear blue eyes, and sweat matted his green fur. He was half-listening to the conversation of the other two. He reached into the glowing blue portal on his back from which he materialised a bucket of water. He blew on its surface and it immediately began to frost over. Tentatively, he cracked the surface of the ice and trickled a thread of diamond-shaped droplets onto the flames. He drew back as the steam emerged, placing the bucket back into the portal and proceeding to rearrange his damp facial fur. He then began to stare at his sword, which he called Kir, and cocked an eyebrow.

Fire and Shadow stood over a map showing the topography of Nexus, the patch-work world the Entity had trapped them all in. Fire was a huge scaled creature not unlike an enderman, though he had short, white hair, glowing red eyes and wore fabrics like the humans. He called himself a "Mencur-Besh", though Voidblade did not know what this meant. He had a series of small flags in hand that he placed with pin-point precision upon the map.

Shadow sat on the edge of the table, just under five feet tall and kicking her legs back and forth. Like her brother, she had red eyes and hair of a shocking white, though it was long. A wave of it flowed down until it broke upon her shoulders and mingled into her robes somewhere past the armpit. It stood in dichotomy with her skin, which was the colour of night. There was not a trace of her namesake on the wall or floor. Wodahs the living shadow has evidently left its master for a stroll.

The two siblings were deep in conversation and Voidblade waited for a moment to intervene.

"We know from Destiny's scouting missions that the Tower's immediate area of influence is surprisingly small. The Entity or the Ender, whoever is in charge of the troops directly, may send out patrols but it seems that very little attention is given to what goes on in Nexus. Most of their focus seems to be on the outer worlds."

Shadow replied: "I think I understand the logic. From what I could gather from the Prophet's sermons, the Entity gains power the bigger Nexus becomes, so from its point of view everything that's here is already conquered and secured. It seems to find 'internal' threats unlikely, maybe even impossible."

"We should be careful trying to read too much into the Entity, it doesn't exactly think along the same lines as we do. However the effect is the same, we should be able to operate relatively unhindered." Fire said. And so they continued. And continued. And continued without missing one beat.

As Voidblade waited seemingly ceaselessly for a gap to appear in the wall of conversation a small voice chirped in his head. "Hello friend! Reason for coming? Will tell Tyron. Make things faster."

Voidblade's first thoughts were immediately along the lines of "Who are you?" And his first reaction was to look around as though stung by a wasp.

"Kir."

Voidblade's blood stopped pounding so much. They had mentioned that the sword could talk. This was just the first time it had found reason to talk to him. Yet it already called him "friend". It was worse than the humans.

His mind naturally floated toward why he had come and without having meant to, he answered Kir's request.

"Got it."

Tyron turned and smiled at Voidblade with his glassy eyes and said, "We have news from the scouts. Come in Voidblade."

Fire stopped talking, Shadow stopped preparing her response and the siblings stood to attention.

Voidblade seized the moment and explained, "The Prophet's congregation will arrive within a day or two. In numbers. No pursuers apparent."

The three looked at each other and Voidblade awaited instructions.

Fire didn't answer immediately, his gaze suggested he was thinking something over.

"I will have to check out capacity with Lucy. We should have enough for at least nine hundred comfortably, about double that as an absolute maximum. I think I'll have Urist and his team construct an additional sleeping area, that should push our capacity well above a thousand. For now our mushroom farms should more than cover our food needs and in a pinch we'll resort to the spiders… I had hoped for a smoother transition."

"That is all well and good," added Tyron. "But we are making them into an army, are we not?"

"Once they have had a few days to adjust we can start dividing them up based on existing combat skills, the ones proficient in fighting can act as instructors along with people from our group, who will act as coordinators."

"And that's all great," Tyron conceded. "I was more getting at who's going to lead them, and command structure beyond that. I get the impression you're keen on leading, and I'm not opposed to that, but we should have a conversation about it. If we can present a united front, the congregation will join us more readily. You may be the 'Champion of Life and Death' they're so keen on, but people only put as much faith in prophecy as others put in."

Voidblade blinked. He had not thought about who might lead them other than Fire. Since they arrived, Fire had been the undisputed leader, and none of the others had questioned this when he took them in. In fact, his position had just been consolidated further, with Shadow, Tyron and Astro forming a Council of advisors. In Voidblade's view, everyone else was either too young (like Warnado and Amanda), too solitary (like Destiny or himself) or as happy to receive commands as to give them. Then again, humans were inexplicable and irrational. Voidblade just hoped one of their number didn't end up leading.

Shadow said: "The exact wording was 'Mortal gods have taken two kinds and forged them into a higher one! Their champion will come to command the forces of life and death!' but that's besides the point."

Fire chuckled, then turned to Tyron again. "It's a good thing you brought that up. So far I have been leading because it was a natural transition from building the shelter and nobody objected to it. But yes, I do not plan on taking the leadership without asking anyone about it. The best way of going about it would probably be a ballot of some kind."

"That was about what I was going to suggest. Secret, written ballot. Nice starting point of democracy," Tyron clapped his hands together and pointed them at Voidblade, "Here, can you do me a favour and go around gathering the others?"

Despite his annoyance at having to talk again, Voidblade nodded and asked if there was anything else.

"If you could grab Astro first, that would be great. I'll need his help organising the count."

Voidblade teleported into the infirmary. He could have walked it, but that would have given them more opportunities for instructions. The enderborn liked to think they had the best work ethic of any species, but Voidblade was the first to admit it had its limits.

Astro was still standing over his friend, so Voidblade came over and tapped him on the shoulder. The wizard, who had been deep in thought, didn't jump when the talons brushed him. Instead, he slowly shambled around and his stupor continued until he was looking Voidblade in the eyes. He only seemed to show the slightest bit of surprise when the enderman began to speak, as though it made the whole situation oppressively more real.

"Liability," thought Voidblade.

"Tyron requires your help," rasped the enderman. "They are going to vote on who shall lead the congregation to war."

Astro nodded in a slow, creaking way that said "I hope beyond hope it isn't me." He moved toward the door, looking so thin and frail a light breeze might have been carrying him along against his will. With that, Voidblade warped off and began to rally the others.