Chapter Twenty-Four: New Dawn (With Additional Side Of Silverfish)

Excerpt from The Book of Days:

The Destroyer sought to wreak havoc on the human world, for He saw it was beautiful, and could not bear that His brother had outdone Him. Thus, He passed through the masses, whispering thoughts of sin and jealousy, to which many a virtuous man fell.

(Translation: Humans did what they did best for many millennia. Which was to blame somebody else for, well, just about everything. The hurricane yesterday? It was Herobrine. You fell asleep on guard duty? Herobrine was messing with you, you did a jolly good job of not dying. Cake didn't rise properly? Ooh, you'll never guess who paid a visit.)

The Creator, in His infinite wisdom, was not unaware. But the Destroyer was His own flesh and blood, and He could not bear to reprimand Him.

(Translation: He would have grounded him, but was too scared to)

There was once a Primordial Being, languishing away in the Void.

This Primordial Being was in the process of regretting a lot of things. More specifically, They were regretting their life. They particularly regretted the part where they died.

They also regretted spiders, very, very much. Owing to the fact that They were responsible for them, nobody should feel obliged to show any amount of pity toward Them.

Being a Primordial Being of Creation, death was usually merely an annoying setback. However, this particular Primordial being had over the course of Their many lives managed to get Themself killed in various new and creative ways, none of which any Primordial Being, or indeed any normal Being, had Being subjected to.

Oh dear, it's making puns again.

Moving on.

Their very latest death had not Being very spectacular, but it had Being very effective at keeping Them dead. It had involved many sharp instruments, and a considerable amount of pain. If - When They reincarnated, somebody was going to have the worst day of Their life, because it was going to be the last day of Their life, well, at least the last for a very long time.

They sighed. Or they tried to. Physical bodies weren't designed to survive in the Void, probably owing to the fact that nothing existed in the Void. No sound, no light, no space. No Time.

The Primordial lived for existence. There was nothing in the Void but other lost gods, waiting to either reincarnate or fade completely. All of a sudden, They felt completely and terribly alone.

For the first time in a very long time, They found Themself thinking coherently. They thought wistfully of hugs.

A very thin young man waited patiently by the side of a road. He was holding a tankard of beer in one hand, and the reins of a geriatric and overweight horse in the other. Beside him, the traffic chugged sluggishly along as horsemen and wagon drivers filled the air with incandescent curses.

The young man finished his drink and tossed the empty tankard casually into the stream of traffic. It bounced off the leg of a very frazzled horse, who had been standing in the same spot for much longer than it wanted to and was now thinking wistfully of fresh grass and a peaceful, spacious countryside paddock. It was understandable then, that the sudden pain caused by hard flying object immediately sent it into a fit of uncontrollable rage.

The young man grinned as chaos ensued.

"Woof," said a dog.

The geriatric horse eyeballed the creature nervously and skittered away from it.

"Oh, you," the young man said unenthusiastically. "World's ending, you know. Someone got there before you did. Come to speed up the process, eh?"

"Actually," a new voice chimed in. "We were kind of hoping to stop that from happening. I've gotten fond of the world as it is, you know?"

A boy strolled into view. He had a casual, flippant air about him and an annoying little grin that twanged all the wrong nerves. He had curly ginger hair, a leather jacket, and a lingering aura of smugness and self-pride that was a lot bigger than he was, probably owing to the fact that he wasn't very big at all.

The young man concluded that he was a god. No other being in the Overworld could radiate narcissism quite like a god.

"Bugger off," he muttered, already turning away. "I ain't done nothing wrong."

Gods weren't to be trifled with. Everybody knew that. They were generally quick to anger and not altogetherly that subtle, something to do with the smiting that went around when they got seriously unhappy, which happened a lot more than you'd imagine. Holy wrath and righteous rage aside, underneath all the glam and glory most gods were just mean-minded bastards. Especially the ones he'd come across in the past.

"But you could do something right."

The young man snorted in derision. He gave the boy a sideways look, and saw he wasn't smiling anymore.

"Woof," the little dog said, very, very quietly.

"I'm very sorry with what you had to deal with," the boy continued. "But you see, up there, They've all got their knickers in an almighty twist and nobody knows what the Nether is going on anymore, and somebody's being tampering with the coffee machine again - They all hate that - well, basically, it's hell and high water Up Yonder, and They're not likely to sort Themselves out anytime soon. And hey, if you guys could help me with this one thing They'd look right silly for what They did back then, eh? It'd be something you can rub in their faces to your delight for centuries to come, how you saved Their collective rears after everything They'd said about you." And it will make Jeb very, very unhappy indeed, oh yes, Pyrien said internally.

The thin young man considered it and shrugged. He had spare time. And immortality did get boring after a while.

Some time later, I woke up with my face inches away from a fire.

"Notch!"

"Not quite, I'm afraid."

Ignoring my companion's helpful input, I rolled to a place where my face felt like it wasn't going to melt off.

"What was that for?" I hissed.

"As my previous attempts at waking you had been found to be somewhat insufficient, I thought to try something new, as you seemed disinclined to wake up in a lake."

I looked around. My eyes had a bit of difficulty focusing due to the recent episode of intimate contact with a stone floor, but they seemed to agree, albeit rather woozily, that there was not a lake in sight. "There isn't a lake," I said, fully expecting to be told that in no uncertain terms had my eyesight fooled me.

Horus raised an eyebrow. "Not yet."

Well, I was partially right.

I looked past him a little and saw the dragon. Ye gods, it was huge. Even lying down it was taller than I was. All that I could see of it was a gleaming wall of red scales, topped with a battlement of spines that could have been used to put small print on a stone tablet.

And there was a sound. Rising and falling, almost like the wind-

"It's breathing!"

"Yes, Steve," Horus said patiently.

"It's alive!"

"Yes, Steve."

"It'll wake up and kill us bo - kill me!"

"No, Steve." Horus brushed past me and picked his way delicately through the rubble. "It is indeed alive, as you have observed, but quite incapable of any ill-will. You see, autonomy of thought originates from the soul, a minor detail which the Red Dragon currently lacks."

"A sort of fellow-feeling, eh?" I muttered out of the corner of my mouth.

Horus fixed me with his trademark Stare until I coughed and looked away.

"So that's the end of it?" I asked. "We can get out now?" Gods above, it'd been an eternity since I'd last slept on a comfortable bed, and I desperately needed a shower and a change of clothes. My current outfit hadn't taken well to being repeated ground through the gravel, burnt, and being swiped at by the odd enterprising zombie. I didn't even think to ask about the dragon, and why it didn't have a soul. It just became a sort of background weird to all the weird that was already happening.

"Yes."

"Oh, thank Notch," I groaned.

Horus looked slightly amused. "I somehow don't think Notch has anything to do with this."

"Thank Herobrine, then, I don't honestly don't care." By this stage I was well and truly fed up with the gods in general and blaspheming looked like a welcome change to the scenery. Besides, I didn't think They'd hear me down here. It was the Nether, after all, and I suspected if They did come prodding around down here too often, immortality wasn't going to help them in the slightest in what happened next.

Horus gave me a sideways look, but otherwise didn't say anything.

It was five minutes later. A scale was obtained. A Nether Portal had been constructed.

I looked proudly at my handiwork and tried to ignore the fact it was literally a portal from Hell. Beyond this portal lay warm meals, a shower, and if luck would have it, a nice, soft bed. Preferably king-sized and equipped with enough cushions to drown in.

A finger tapped me on the shoulder, prompting me to leap three feet into the air.

"Pardon me for the disturbance," Horus said dryly. "I will trust you to follow after me. If you have any problems, well, I won't be there."

With that delightful parting line, he stepped into the swirling purple mist and promptly vanished without a trace.

Charming bloke.

I sized up the ominous, swirling mist and grimaced. It crackled and hissed like something demented, and I wasn't too happy to venture willingly into its embrace. I remembered the nausea and unforgiving headache that came with my first immersion. Then I remembered the concepts of beds and warm meals, and the joys of mining, which whoever had designed the Nether did not bother to accommodate for. Try as I might, I could not sense the presence of diamonds anywhere. It was utterly discomfiting, like a certain clumsy somebody (me) had misplaced one of my ribs. The first thing I did when I got back, I vowed, would be to take a nice hot shower, and then traipse off into the mines for an afternoon, deadlines, consequences, natural disasters and Horus be damned.

Having thus far convinced myself, I took a deep breath and pitched myself into the void.

"Ah. You again."

I blinked, and found myself in a familiar place. I looked around to see miles and miles of... nothing.

Actually, that wouldn't quite be accurate. My eyes knew there had to be something, but somehow couldn't pick up on it. Try as I might, I could not for the sake of me remember the sight of the place.

"Bit of a tourist, aren't you?"

The red-eyed girl sat cross-legged in the nothingness, a thin, ironic grin on her face.

"We need to stop meeting like this," I said tiredly.

Az gave me a look of theatrical hurt. "Ah! Do you tire of me so quickly, dear friend? My monotonous journeys have nothing but tenous and prosaic, and I find myself yearning for the sight of a familiar face, even one as strange as yours."

"Hey," I protested, without much heat.

If anything, her grin only got wider. "What are you doing here again, anyway? I don't see you lot on the dreamtrails often."

I assumed by 'you lot' she meant 'humans'. It didn't take a genius to figure out she wasn't mortal.

I shrugged listlessly. "Wouldn't I like to know?"

"Would you?" Az tilted her head inquisitively. I thought she rather moved like a bird. No, not just any bird, a crow. Curious, pondering, spontaneous. Like she could fly away at any given moment but chose not to, simply because it wouldn't be a very interesting decision to make.

"I guess," I said cautiously, not knowing what she was getting at.

Az hummed a little. She stood up and walked around me slowly, inquisitively, in an almost childlike manner. "So, how did you die?"

The question caught me completely by surprise. "Pardon?"

She stopped in her tracks. "Thought so. You didn't act dead." She went back to wandering around in circles, humming to herself tunelessly.

I was aware that a certain train of thought had taken place, and that I was shown the beginning and the conclusion of it, but had not the faintest idea of the proceedings that had taken place in between. In short, it made me very confused.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Please start from the beginning."

"I'm afraid the actual explanation would last longer than your life expectancy," the girl said mildly. "It's very complicated, this immortality business, and I'm not very good with words. I think I can whittle it down somewhat, but I'd need to enlighten you to the nature of this place."

She swept her arms out in an extravagant flourish. "Welcome to the Void, Steve. The Darkest Abyss, the Vault of Nightmares, the proverbial space-under-the-bed of Creation, where unwanted things are left to fester. The ultimate nightclub for miserable people, you might say. Membership is compulsory. Leave your shoes and vital signs at the doorstep. Insanity is not a requisite, as we will provide it. "

"I feel honoured," I deadpanned. "Is misery a requirement too?"

Az considered this. "Well, it just happens, you know. Being dead generally makes people miserable."

You could hear a pin drop.

"But I'm not dead," I said at last, in some measure of confusion. "I think I'd know if I was dead. And I've been here, what, four times now? Anyway, I'd remember if I'd died, right?"

"A lot of people don't," she said thoughtfully. "But yes, I agree with you. You don't look very dead."

To say the least, I was happy not to be dead. Of course, I'd died before, but that was when I could still respawn and anyway, I hadn't remembered anything. Jeb said something in passing about it, that Notch had made him wedge a feature in the respawn system that erased certain memories taking place close to the time of death. Said something about functionality, the anomalies of the mind.

I glanced at the red-eyed girl, who had started to hum again.

I wasn't dead, but if this place-

The proverbial penny dropped.

"You're dead, aren't you?"

"Why, yes, I should think so. Comes of having a building fall down on top of you, I expect," Az said cheerfully. "I doubt there was enough left of me to bury."

"I'm sorry," I said solemnly. "Being dead sucks."

"It does," Az agreed. "I've got a craving for cordial, but the Void doesn't really do cordial, you know? In fact, it was only recently I've started to think coherently - the Void doesn't really do coherent thoughts, either - and the first thing I thought was hey, I haven't had cordial for centuries, I would really like some cordial right now - the blackberry kind that burns your throat when you drink it straight, you know what I mean - and I say "Let there be cordial", and by all accounts, there should be cordial. But is there cordial? No. No, there is no cordial, because I am dead. I have reached the end of cordial. There is no cordial. Truly abysmal service, if I may say so. Two stars."

She proceeded to contemplate the deeper meaning of cordialless-ness in a sullen silence.

"If I meet you in real life, well, life, anyway, I'll buy you some cordial," I offered. "Then we can have a good whine on the downsides of being dead together."

Az lit up like kindling in a blast furnace. "I'll take you up on that." She grinned. "It might be sooner than you think. I'm like a cockroach, me. Something steps on me, I pop right back up. Sometimes quite literally."

I winced at the image. "Well, here's to hoping that by the next time we meet, neither of us'll be dead."

"Cheers to that."

The girl drifted closer curiously. "One more thing, though..."

She stepped back. "Can you describe what you see?"

I looked hard. Then I looked harder. Finally, when my eyes started water from the strain, I said:"Absolutely nothing. Why?"

Az scratched her head. "Well, you said you couldn't see anything the first time we met, correct? Oh, and the Vanquished Dread, Soul of A Thousand horrors, The Darkness Which Falleth Over All That Is Bright, etc. etc. just drifted past us and I was wondering why you didn't react. The fellow is hideous even without a flesh form, I tell you, and that is no mean feat. And He's being moaning this whole time. Something about revenge. There were a lot of details, particularly scenes involving-"

I looked around me in sudden alarm. "Wait - where?" I whirled around. Looked up, looked down. Nothing.

"Here, I'll show you." Az tapped a finger against my forehead-

-and my field of vision exploded.

Sound and sight and smell and feel merged into a kaleidoscope of colours. Shapes. Shards of shapes. I was surrounded by space-that-was-not-space, that was warm and cold and without temperature, formless and formed all at the same time. I whirled around with a cry-

In front of me was an entity. Exactly what kind of entity, I was unable to put into words. It was made from shattering glass. Sifting sand. The motion of stars moving through the night sky, the crackling of a campfire. The warmth of a campfire. I could taste something sweet in my mouth. Barley sugar? A wing flap, pooling shadows, the feeling of pages turning beneath fingers. Somebody, somewhere far away, was playing an organ. And there was red. Red red red red redredredred-

I blinked, and Az was grinning at me. The Void was empty once more.

"God-vision," Az was saying. "The ninth sense. The paramount of all senses. Making a good first impression has reached new heights of importance, because they can literally see straight through you, and everything you stand for. How did it feel?"

"Like I was about to go bonkers," I replied, a little out of breath.

"Exactly." And she smiled. "That's why humans don't have it. They wouldn't have much in the way of a life expectancy otherwise, to say nothing about mental health. It's why the Void appears to humans as nothing more than a formless grey space."

"That explains a lot." I felt a little tug in my chest, which, according to previous experiences, signified the end of my surprise submersion in the realms of the dead. "Well, I should-"

"No, no, it explains absolutely nothing." Az grinned. "I do love a mystery now and then. You, my dear fellow, should by all accounts possess this wonderful ability, yet you do not. Why? Perhaps I will find out. Perhaps I will be ignorant of its cause forevermore. I do hope I get to find out."

"I don't understand," I protested. I was getting a little light-headed, though I wasn't sure whether it was from the transition out of the Nether Portal, or whatever Az was spewing. "I thought it was normal for ordinary humans?"

Az blinked. For a moment she looked surprised. Then she laughed, and I got a horrible sinking feeling something unexpected was going to happen again.

"The Void is a bit finicky when it comes to its customers, I'm afraid. You see, it's an immortals-only club. Ordinary you may be, my poor deluded friend, but human, well, you most definitely are not."

And that, ladies in gentlemen, was how I woke up. Screaming gently in surprise, in the middle of the night, flat on my face next to a Nether Portal. Poetic. Picturesque. Cursed by the entire sodding universe to spend the rest of my life in a state of constant terror and bewilderment, having become a mere puppet to the cruel whims of Fate. About to be obliterated from existence by an irate sorcerer.

I stopped screaming instantly.

"Is he... functional?"

"He and functionality are not on the best of terms," Horus said sardonically. "I fear they have not seen face-to-face in a very long time."

The sorcerer leaned on the handle of his scythe. "We have the scale, as per our agreement. As soon as my companion is coherent, we can proceed with the deal. Unless you have other plans to attend to?"

The Enderman coughed. He stepped back a little.

A faint moan emitted from nearby foliage. There was a brief pause, and a zombie shuffled out into the open. Then another zombie followed the first. And another. And another, etcetera. Some skeletons followed suit, and I'm pretty sure I saw a few creepers in the mix. There was a massive grey boulder that appeared to be squirming, and after close inspection, it turned out to be a colossal mound of silverfish.

I groaned into the dirt. Silverfish were disgusting.

"I'm sorry, my friends," the Endermen murmured in a sickening imitation of regret. "Meet 'Other Plans'."

You know, at this stage, I wasn't even surprised.