Keep out of sight of Aurorion. Jeb says. Don't annoy anyone important, he says. Don't set fire to anything important, he says, And definitely do not put vinegar in my morning coffee, you insufferable scamp!
Pyrien made a point of doing all these things.
He didn't mean to do most of them, of course. He didn't mean to get caught by Aurorion while dumping the contents of a 2-litre bottle of dark vinegar into the Aether's public hot drink machine, or 'accidentally' making off with Amora's hairbrush (Notch knows she loses it often enough without his help. Did she even count as important? Pyrien had never held much truck with romance. His favourite kind of romance was the sort that was happening very, very far away from where he was and didn't involve him in the slightest). He didn't mean to transform Notch's throne into a pile of ash (Why was it made of wood in the first place? Again, is it even important?), and finally, 'mistaking' (Oops) a cup of pure brown vinegar for Jeb's morning coffee.
Check, check, check, and check.
Jeb might as well as have asked for it.
Psh, it wasn't like anyone in the Aether (With the exceptions of Jeb and now Aurorion) actually knew of his resumed existence.
Anyway, at least he hadn't done some of the other things Old Brainy expressly forbade him to do, like destroy the world as we know it, and antagonise Herobrine. Which was basically the same thing.
Eh, maybe later.
As of now, he had other business to attend to.
Namely finding out whatever piece of doubtlessly important information Old Brainy was trying to hide from him.
And it wouldn't hurt to raid Hydros' food stash once in a while. Unless he got caught, of course.
"I thought you were dead." I repeated for the umpteenth time.
Horus gave me a narrow-eyed look as if to say well, you thought wrong.
"How are you not dead?" I asked, again for the umpteenth time.
Like before, I received no answer.
Improbable things happen, I guess. Like the ghost village we were currently occupying. Stone, all of it. And cold. There were a lot of ghosts (For the lack of anything else to call them), and sometimes if you listened carefully, you could make out little scraps of what they were trying to say.
Right now they were screaming and howling, but generally not being very coherent. They seemed to be opposed to the presence of a being. A very strange being who, the last time I checked, didn't have silver light coming out of his eyes.
It had gone as soon as it had appeared. The light shut off suddenly, leaving only expressionless dark blue orbs. Silver irises. I wasn't even fully sure they were there.
He leant with his back against a wall, head tilted slightly backwards, eyes fixed on something far away.
"What are you looking at?" I didn't expect an answer. He hadn't made a sound since I found him drenched in the blood of a thousand other creatures and his own.
"Things that once were." His voice was so soft I thought I imagined it.
"Uh..." I didn't know how to respond to that.
We lapsed back into silence. Again.
Eventually, I had to say something.
"How badly are you hurt?" I asked. Badly enough that he should be dead, I thought to myself.
He shrugged, the very effort of which should have him screaming in pain, but didn't. He tapped a place on his chest, then touched a long cut on his leg, and moved his slim fingers over his eyes.
"What's wrong with your eyes?"
For a while, he didn't move. Then he did.
Horus snapped his fingers. The resulting sound, after so much silence, made me flinch. A pale silvery flame flickered above his hand, and he lifted it to his face.
I gasped very loudly and maybe overly dramatically.
Trails of blood ran from his eyes like tears, making red tracks down his face and his neck. Then I realised why he seemed to be looking into the distance.
"You're blind." I gulped.
He rolled his eyes. Duh.
"How did you-"
"Ender Pearl."
He dropped his hand to his side and the flame flickered out. Just before the light went out...
"Wait-" I whipped out my sword. The blade shone so brightly someone could read a book under the light and not damage their eyesight.
I winced at what I saw. "You've got a hole in your shoulder." I said.
He flicked a lazy look at me. "I do," he acknowledged easily. I was almost convinced he was bluffing about being blind.
"It's a damn big hole."
"It is of a sizable nature, yes,"
"You're going to die." Goddamned miracle he hadn't already. "Not-... Nether, you're going to die!"
"Not quickly," he said conversationally. "I will heal. And then I expect to die a slow and excruciating death via poison."
"Ye gods! Is there anything we can do?"
"Not for now, no. But I think I can stave off my untimely demise long enough to find a cure. For now, we should continue."
"Ye gods," I said again for good measure.
And that was that.
Life was all well and good when practically no-one knows you exist.
Anything Pyrien made a mess of simply got blamed on someone else. It was all very amusing, really. Apparently the deadbushes superglued all over the throne room was someone else's fault now, and so was the anti-gravity spell on Hydros' palace.
Jeb was pissed. Very pissed. He couldn't actually tell Pyrien off for... well, anything because his existence was supposed to be kept a secret.
That was good. If Pyrien managed to keep it up, he might actually make Old Brainy annoyed enough to tell him something. After all, he couldn't make Pyrien stop if he doesn't exist.
Pyrien: 1
Jeb: 0
Currently Pyrien was in a storage house he had found his way into. It had drawn his attention like chicken-pens draw foxes, and now, lo and behold, the fox was in the chicken-pen.
There were a hella lotta weapons in there. Some of them were really old, relics of some war Pyrien had never heard of (Being dead).
He snuck around a corner and whisper-whistled. A huge cannon glowered from the back of the hall in a I-can-wipe-your-side-of-the-Wall-off-the-map sort of way (He made a note to fire it sometime. Preferably after aiming it in the general direction of the Aether Labs and one grumpy Inventor), and various other gigantic pieces of war machinery resided in their corners of the rather large room.
"Ooohh baby." He breathed out, momentarily distracted by the largest wrecking ball he'd ever seen.
He walked up to a catapult and ran his hand along the ropes. He briefly contemplated using it to launch Jeb into orbit. Then, all of a sudden, he darted behind the monster wrecking ball.
Voices. Footsteps. His supersensitive hearing picked up feathers rustling as well, so it must have been a group of Valkyries.
"I'm telling you, there has to be someone in here." A voice insisted. Pyrien wrinkled his nose. Do-gooders. A bit like what another temporarily dead god from a different universe had complained about in the Void. Cops, he remembered they were called.
"But none of the wards were triggered." Another voice argued. Pyrien smiled a very smug smile. He prided himself at his extraordinary skill of breaking-and-entering. Though most of the time he never broke anything, especially security wards. He didn't have to if he could just slip past them.
The Valkyries proceeded to break into an argument. Three, Pyrien counted, judging by the voices.
A few minutes of bickering later, they finally came to a conclusion.
"Fine, then. Since you're so eager to catch your bogeyman, you can go in and have a look around." An exasperated voice said at last.
Nervous shuffling, wing-feathers scraping against the ground. Pyrien peeked out as the Valkyrie came into view. He quickly scaled to the top of the wrecking ball as the Valkyrie looked around himself warily.
Creeaak.
The Valkyrie jumped and cursed loudly. Pyrien set the wrecking ball swinging just a tiny bit...
And cut the rope it hung on.
The unfortunate Valkyrie didn't even have enough time to shout PANCAKE! before vanishing under several tonnes of iron and a gleefully grinning boy-god.
BOOOOOM.
The noise it produced was probably loud enough to drown out even one of Aegios' farts (Notch knows those were loud enough to scare earthquakes into deep, dark holes, never to emerge).
Outside, the remaining Valkyries swore their feathery little hearts out.
Pyrien dropped from his spot and landed as lightly as a beggar's purse. He examined the severed wrecking ball and shrugged to himself. Meh, he'd be fine. Valkyries were built to withstand extreme forces as a precaution of various gods' sometimes unsafe antics. He'll probably wake up in a day or two with a splitting headache. And an everywhere-else ache.
Pyrien ducked behind a catapult as Valkyrie No.2 came in with a sword. A female this time. Pyrien figured he should be careful with this one. Females tended to be unpredictable and especially inclined to poke little holes in whoever sought to wrong them (Nether hath no fury as a female scorned). Intriguing species they might be, but Pyrien valued his bodily intactness, thank you.
He fiddled a bit with the rope on the catapult, and then rapped sharply on the frame. The Valkyrie snapped around in his direction and advanced slowly, her sword held in front of her. One step. Two steps-
The third brought just where Pyrien needed her to be.
With a snap of thought, an invisible force struck at the Valkyrie's left foot.
She slipped up immediately and fell face-first into the catapult's pouch yelling something that was probably extremely un-kid-friendly. At the same time, Pyrien loosed the ropes and set off the catapult.
TWANG.
The Valkyrie shot off with the velocity of a godly spitwad to join the orbit. Well, adios to that. Pyrien thought smugly. He turned around-
-To find the third and last Valkyrie doing a very good impression of a stranded goldfish.
For a moment, the two simply stared at each other both thinking along the lines of what-the-Nether-are-you-doing-here. Pyrien recovered first and muttered something out of the side of his mouth.
"Ah, screw this."
FWOOM.
One blast of godly energy later, the Valkyrie was flying backwards through approximately four stone brick walls with four definite concussions. Hopefully that would erase the memory of seeing a supposedly dead god from his mind.
Pyrien quickly cleaned up the mess and re-attached the wrecking ball before anyone important came by with the intention of finding out what the Nether was going on.
Five minutes later, Jeb almost had a stroke.
"YOU INSUFFERABLE LITTLE BRAT!" He roared. Pyrien took one look at his face (Just long enough to think 'oh, a tomato'), and ran for his life.
"Now." Tevon cleared his throat importantly and unrolled a map with great and most definitely unneeded pomp. "We are here-" he waved vaguely at what was approximately a quarter of the whole map. "-and we need to get here." He gestured in the vague direction of a total of six Kingdoms and one small Empire.
The guards tried to look like they understood what was going on. They failed spectacularly.
"Now, I've been doing some research-" he grinned smugly, obviously very proud of himself. "-and the most amount of supernatural and possibly Herobrine-y sightings are around here," He indicated at a large area containing four cities, countless small countryside towns, and a mountain range.
The guards tried their level best to appear impressed. Most failed spectacularly.
"Our next stop is here-" he tapped on a city, then frowned, and pointed at another one. "No, it's-" he poked at another point on the map, and frowned again. "Ugh. Here." He said, prodding agitatedly at another city two thousand kilometres away from the first one. "Yeah, that's it."
The guards tried not to roll their eyes. Again, most failed spectacularly.
Tevon rolled the map up again and looked expectantly at the guards.
The guards looked expectantly at one another. Until one guard got tired of giving people expectant looks.
"Your Highness!" He exclaimed dramatically, falling to his knees. "Such ingenuity I have never heard of before!"
Tevon tried to look modest. He failed most spectacularly. "Oh, no need for that. I do this every day, and more besides."
The guards tried to not laugh and failed spectacularly. Luckily for them, Tevon was too occupied in his self-admiring to notice the storms of sniggering and gales of laughter.
The prince unsheathed his sword and struck a heroic pose. "Onwards we go!" He declared.
A guard passed out from oxygen deprivation. Later on, he would deny it had been caused by an overdose of laughter.
The village was full of life. Children ran laughing through the streets and chickens squawked and milled around people's feet. There was a joyful sort of quality just hanging in the air, along with a few pints of magic. You could feel it caressing your, murmuring soft songs there to be heard by whoever had the time. But over that joy, something seemed a little off about the people. Something dark and vicious. I was in the business long enough to recognise the hidden fear of the hunted.
The place seemed all so familiar, like I had seen it before, a long, long time ago. I shivered and the feeling passed.
A girl came up to me. She looked to be about ten years old, with hair as black as liquid shadow, and eyes red as blood but twice as bright. She had a light, elvish look about her, and was beautiful and graceful the way mortals could never hope to be.
"Hello." she said. Her voice was like liquid silver with a touch of music.
"Uh, hi." I replied confusedly.
"You must be Remembering something." she regarded me with a unreadable look. "Watch. But do not try to interfere."
Then she vanished in a whisper of shadow.
Huh. That was weird.
I frowned to myself. I couldn't remember how I got here. Everything felt perfectly normal, but I couldn't remember how I got here.
I turned around to find myself face-to-face with a man who was walking directly towards me. I yelped out a warning as I tried to backpedal but he didn't seem to be able to see or hear me.
Nope, he just walked right through me as if I wasn't there.
"Notch!" I yelped. It was like I was a ghost. I was suddenly worried I'd died in my sleep and just didn't realise. Then the whole world seemed to suddenly draw in a breath and hold it.
An unknown presence infiltrated the atmosphere, the shadow of power making the air tingle and snarl.
The villagers tensed, and drew various types of weapons. Fire roared into life in someone's palm, and lightning crackled around another's clenched knuckles. Other, weirder things were happening elsewhere, and a flock of dragons darted in and out of the clouds. I never knew so many dragons existed, I thought the Ender Dragon was the only one.
A cavalry on winged horses pranced about in the sky, and not far off a volcano erupted into brilliant orange flames which coalesced into the shapes of huge birds made of fire.
The world waited.
Then, as if a signal had gone off, it burst into chaos.
Strange manlike leaf-bird creatures like what we saw on that bridge, stone golems, golden lions with beaks and wings and many more weird creatures swooped out of a flare of lime-yellow explosion. A silver and gold dome dome of light flashed into existence over the village, but soon the silver light gave out under the snaps of other-coloured energy and the gold went not long after.
The two worlds clashed and one broke.
I tried to summon my sword to no avail. I couldn't touch anything, as I found out by attempting to punch a wall. I yelled in frustration as a dragon fell from the sky and crashed next to me, its shredded wings flapping uselessly as it tried to unleash its sputtered-out flames, the white flying horse with a single pearly horn who had caused its fall pinned under its maimed wings. The skies would have been sunny and clear if not for the screeching battling creatures that now turned it into a storm of feather, scales and blood.
I gave up when it was clear I could do nothing but watch, as the girl had told me.
A man strode out of the swirling portal, the mere aura of his power making the air scream and shiver. He raised a immense double-bladed battleaxe and sent out a single power-charged thought.
:Challenge:
Gradually I noticed someone walking slowly across the field to meet the god. A boy, looking no older than seventeen, though his aura shouted out with the same power as the other's. He walked like someone resigned to his fate, someone who knew he was walking towards a battle he could not win. His sword, which shone royal gold like a miniature sun was clenched in his right hand while his left was stuffed deeply into a pocket. His black curls obscured his eyes and most of his face, though from what I could see he was quite comely. He seemed a bit familiar, though I couldn't for the sake of me recall a god like him.
The man smiled like a shark about to be fed.
The youth raised his head, his black hair falling back to reveal blazing golden eyes, the same shade as his sword.
"Where is my brother, you bastard? What have you done to him?"
I am extremely sorry for the neglect. However, I will probably be doing more neglecting. I've got school camp after school camp and teachers from out school do not permit technology during camps. Damn.
And there is the matter of homework and end-of-year tests...
Ugh.