(*waves*) Hello, good afternoon and welcome to my first foray into actual Minecraft...sort of ;-;
A bit of backstory: this was originally written and submitted as a part of my final year university project and with that came the dawning realisation that the thing my entire degree certificate rested on counted as fanfiction. Because that's always a smart thing to do.
I think I almost certainly took a little liberty here and there for the sake of storytelling, but hopefully it's not outright incongruous with the actual game. With that said, fic-ward, ho!
Run, Player, run!
Swathes of sand shift and rasp in protest beneath each pounding step. Ugly hisses and groans, the clatter of carious bones, my own ragged breaths lash the night. A prayer that I'm heading in the right direction goes unspoken and unheard.
Faster.
At the blurry fringes of my vision, more and more forces throw themselves into the fray, fortified with bows and axes and deadly fangs ready to sink into my guts. Safe in the certainty that even if the battered iron blade clutched in my clammy hand was pure diamond, they'd still grind me into dust sooner or later. The gnawing in the pit of my stomach steadily erodes my strength, nudging me to remember the morsels of bread and baked potatoes that serve as my travelling companions, but that'd just take up time I can't spare. I ache to slow the relentless strain of my limbs, if only to catch my breath and my bearings. I mustn't. It's all or nothing.
Faster!
And at long last, a structure takes shape on the horizon - bedecked with flickering shadows cast by torchlight, but no less recognisable. I could almost smile. Almost. The sand under my feet evolves into grass, carved with a brownish path.
An unexpectedly loud thunk rings out from behind and I stagger like a rock struck my shoulder blade. One hand comes up on reflex to touch the spot. I choke out a cry (doubtless alerting yet more droves of what's lurking nearby) as fire lances across it. My fingertips hastily pull away, stained with red.
I've been shot.
Still I run. And run. And run. The pain deep in my right shoulder crawls across my back and down my upper arm; crimson streaks seep into my sleeve.
That well-known oak door only marks the entrance to a somewhat crude, isolated shelter. To my eyes, though, it may as well be the gateway to Heaven. My fingers fumble with the handle and I launch myself inside, my knees meeting the birch floorboards.
I dart a glance around, chest heaving. Just me. Me, and a haphazard array of brimming chests, and the clothes on my back, and- and a name, that name, Player, a familiar note in an alien melody-
Through glass panes arranged into the shape of a window, the moon sheds its alabaster light upon the cyan blankets of a patiently waiting bed. It creaks in time with my pained wince as I clamber onto it, knowing without looking that faces are out there too, staring with soulless eyes. They're angry. Maybe the feeling of being cheated chafes somewhere deep in their rotten selves. The blotches drying into my sleeve, dulled to a rusty hue, are proof that I made it through another night. And they don't like that.
I don't slacken my grip on the sword. Not even when dawn's light finally surfaces to kiss the crags of distant peaks and cut zombies and skeletons down with a glance. The shadows of doubt still play in every corner.
(You may not rest now.)
No safety is ever assured here. Let alone lasting.
(There are monsters nearby.)
A blank green stare, one of many although I'm never quite sure how many, tends to be all that greets me whenever I pass this way. Today is no different. I nod, murmuring "hi" and "what have you got for me?"; his face remains as blank as a scrap of coarse, pale brown paper.
Only to be expected, really. I can't speak his rasping language and I doubt he knows mine either – at the very least, he never forms any syllables I recognise, nor does he seem inclined to. Yet somehow, we always understand one another.
He's deceptively humanoid. Him and all of the others. They're roughly my height (apart from their scores of children, who barely reach my knee), with visible heads, features, arms, legs, even if they keep their hands clasped out of sight. Something is off, nonetheless. Quite a few somethings. Those eyes, all identical in their hue, are a little too vacant, unblinking…their movements are too stiff.
The only name I have to attach to them is villager. Even that tends to raise more questions than it answers.
Can they possibly be people?
Am I?
How would I ever find out? There's nothing that can give me an answer. Nobody who could know. In all my time here, I've never so much as spotted anyone else of my kind…whatever that kind is. As far as I'm concerned, though? That these beings aren't like me is beyond question.
There's been times where I've emerged from deep underground with a pickaxe in hand to find a blueish-black horizon devouring the last grains of day and times where I've been curious (some might say daft) enough to be wandering around outside at a similar hour. If that grants me nothing else – and it doesn't, unless a face full of arrows counts – I do get a prime glimpse of how the locals respond to certain intruders. They barricade themselves into humble houses of wood and stone. Huddle like penguins with their tiny children and try to escape into sleep as yet another surge of night-born creatures pounds on their doors and walls. Then when morning arrives and those creatures wilt into lumps of flesh on the ground, they continue to farm and forge like nothing happened, despite the putrid stench lingering in the air.
When it comes to (potential) humans, though, I'm just someone who drops by every other day or so. And they tolerate that. That's it.
Crops and brilliant green currency are bartered between me and my newest acquaintance and I bid him a one-sided farewell before I dart back in the direction I came, turning away from the hamlet and its illusion of tranquillity. My feet trace their way to that golden-brown path of my own fashioning – yet another path for me to go down alone, no matter what may or may not be prowling around. That's just another thing necessity has compelled me to adapt to. Another simple fact, much like 'water is wet' and 'the village's stray cats that nose at my hand in search of fish are adorable'. Because I am the only one like me in this world.
A world that, when all's said and done, exists solely for me to inhabit. For me to build up and cut away, fear and conquer. For me to exist along with it. While I draw breath, so does this land; as long as its sun still blazes an arc across the skies, I too live on.
Deep below daylight, mineshafts sprawl for mile after endless mile, bare except for a scatter of carts cradling abandoned caches - yet surely I wouldn't leave anything behind, nor waste supplies on propping up the place (let alone one with such thick stone). I know this world far too well for that. It could never have been my hands that did it. Not in any waking memory, at least.
...then whose?
I'm alone, no matter which way I turn. The sole glimmers of light here are shed by the torches I've strewn over the walls and ground. The sole life-breath is mine. Running a knuckle along the cold lip of the nearest cart, though, my spine tautens with the realisation that they haven't tarnished one bit from disuse as I'd have expected. Not even a trace of dust.
A baleful wind eventually creeps through the entrance slit and tugs me on, a reminder of the hour that must be closing in above ground. I trace my torch-trail, deliberately planted only on one side for the sake of tracking - after you stray off course in a pit like this, it's not a mistake you make twice.
Empty. But not silent. Blueish spiders skulk behind their lacework; rasping hisses slice through the clammy air and every move I make is watched by red eyes. Distant tunnels resonate with a tinny rumble, as if grazed by a phantom minecart rattling its way to nowhere. The very walls and ceilings seem to sigh, to sing...sometimes, that is.
When I scrabble my way out of the shaft and onto the surface, its colours have long bled away into almost absolute darkness, undisturbed by tonight's new moon. And every dead black eye and sunken socket - every single one ablaze with murder - immediately latches onto me.
I know (though damned if I can fathom how or why I know it) that the blood coursing through my veins is the blood of this universe too: we can only ever be as alive as one another.
Unbidden, something in the back of my mind wonders if it resents that somehow.
I should see it coming. Somehow, I never do.
It was completely accidental, the discovery that a honeycomb of caverns lies deep beneath my house. So accidental that it took scooping out just the wrong chunk of stone and then tumbling some fifteen feet into utter blackness for me to realise it. As soon as the first mangled groan from somewhere in front reverberated off the jagged walls, I knew what I'd stumbled across.
Hollowed-out cave systems like this are no rare breed. Yet none of them are ever quite similar. Some hold yawning canyons that catch the spillover from seemingly endless lava streams; veins of precious materials glimmer at their bases. In others, there's little to be found...except for what dwells in their tunnels, of course.
That's my mistake. After everything, I still haven't learned to be afraid of the dark.
By the time I sense the presence over my shoulder, its countdown hiss has begun. I'm sure, so sure, that my ears ring with an explosion - that stone and granite and quenched torches erupt around me.
Then just like those-
No.
-just like a paper towel caught in the teeth of a shredder or a mirror splintering into a million fragments-
NO.
-my world dissolves into nothingness.
My eyes (do I still have eyes?) are screwed shut against the void before me, silent as the grave yet somehow diluting everything else into white noise.
And the universe whispers, you played well.
Ahhh, going back to something you made months ago isn't an experience like any other.
Looking back, I had a pretty good time scribbling this and figuring out how blocky shenanigans would translate into written text, so let me know what you guys thought :)
(*tips hat*)
~ Rainy