Hey y'all, it's Ender! I hope you're having a great day and I hope to make it even better with this new chapter! 1,567 words this chapter. NOTE: I don't own Minecraft, Mianite, any YouTubers mentioned, and really, I don't own anything except this story.
Chapter 5
User woke up to sunlight streaming through the windows and pooling on the floor in a golden puddle. He hadn't slept well at all last night – it wasn't nightmares though, it was the fact that he just didn't want to allow the opportunity for nightmares. He was tossing and turning all night, scared of what he would see once he fell asleep, getting tangled in the sheets more than once. He had finally sunk into the depths of sleep just as the grey dawn light was beginning to spread over the sky, but now, a few hours later, he was extremely tired.
User slowly climbed out of the bed, his movements sluggish as he struggled to keep his eyes open. He didn't want to let on how tired he was when he came downstairs, but he had been going quite a few days with very little sleep. He had probably gotten a little over seven hours worth of sleep in the past week – less than a tenth of the sleep he actually needed.
User sighed as he slipped on his goggles, leaving them nestled in his windswept hair as usual. Hope. That's what the goddess Khione had promised that he would always be able to see when she had appeared to the Fyre group many years ago, when they were still young. User wondered if she had known what would happen to him. If she had known that he would need to see hope.
Because right now, the future was looking pretty grim.
User also noticed a peculiar thing about his goggles since his return to life – they no longer gave him night vision. Before he had gone to the land of the dead, they had given him night vision when he wore them over his eyes. Now, they just seemed to make the world around him darker and more forbidding.
He supposed it was a side effect of what had happened right before he was brought back to life.
Which reminded him, he had promised to tell Syndicate what had happened to him in the land of the dead.
User shuddered, fearful of reliving his worst memories. That place was – beyond horrible. He had vowed that he would never wish death upon anyone after his own experience in the ashen grey forest.
"User?" Syndicate's voice drifted up the stairway. "Are you awake yet?"
"Yeah," User called back, forcing the tremor out of his voice. "Just give me a second and I'll be right down."
"Okay," Syndicate responded. "I have breakfast ready too, if you feel like eating."
User's mouth twitched into a smile and he grabbed his jacket from where it was hanging from a hook on the wall, slipping it on over his T-shirt. Syndicate must have cleaned his jacket early this morning, because there was not a spot of mud left covering the dark blue and gold lined coat.
User walked over to the stairway and walked down, seeing that Syndicate was already sitting at his table, a plate of pancakes that were drowned in maple syrup in front of him. User softly made his way over to the table, sitting down across from Syndicate.
"Where's Twisted?" User asked curiously, noticing his best friend's absence. Normally, the half-wizard would be up by now.
"Tucker wanted to tell everyone about something," Syndicate shrugged. "I told Twisted to go ahead and that I would take care of you. He left not too long ago but probably won't be back until late. Tucker has a habit of talking for hours."
"Ah," User nodded. His stomach growled loudly and he shrank down, embarrassed. Syndicate laughed, clearly amused.
"There's a plate of pancakes sitting on the counter," Syndicate grinned. "The syrup's over there too."
User smiled gratefully, and after getting up, covering his pancakes in syrup, and walking back over to the table, began to eat slowly, taking cautious bites.
"Eat up," Syndicate encouraged cheerfully. "You look half-starved."
User didn't want to eat. The food tasted like ash in his mouth. But he obliged, and managed to get through two pancakes before he just couldn't eat any more. User swallowed and took his half-finished breakfast over to the counter, setting it down in the sink. He went back over to the table and sat down, staring at his hands, which lay still on the table.
Syndicate finished eating after not too long and wordlessly took his own plate over to the sink. He set his plate down next to User's, then went back over to the kitchen table.
"Are you ready to talk about it?" Syndicate asked gently. User nodded, choking back his nervousness.
"Where do you want me to start?" User whispered. Yeah, I'm totally not stalling right now or anything.
"Start with what happened when you first entered the land of the dead," Syndicate said firmly. "And tell me everything."
User took a shaky breath and began to speak. "When I first woke up in the land of the dead, I immediately knew that I was in the afterlife. It was nothing but a flat plain of bleached grass, like old bones, and grey, dead trees. The sky was the colour of a rainy day and there was a thick white fog, right at eye level. There were tattered patches of darkness floating between the trees that I later learned were lost souls.
"Lost souls are the spirits, who, after everyone has forgotten about them, turn into dark, vengeful, hate-filled beings. Every time a new spirit enters the world, one of the lost souls will hunt them down and try to kill them again. They'll take the new spirit's memories, and they will become an ordinary spirit themselves for a little while before fading back into a lost soul. The other spirit though, will then immediately fade into a lost soul. Very few spirits manage to remain 'alive' long enough to be forgotten.
"I was terrified right from the start. I was certain that I would be trapped there for all eternity. I was barely in there for an hour before two lost souls started chasing me, trying to take my memories so they could return to their original form. They almost caught me several times, but I managed to scale a tree to escape from them.
"I stayed up in that tree for a long time, like a cat that had gotten stuck. When I finally came down, the lost souls were gone. I knew I couldn't relax though - that place held nothing but threat.
"It was another few days before my next encounter with a lost soul. It - it snuck up on my when I wasn't paying attention and grabbed my hand. I jerked away from it but the damage was done. It looked like long, dark, cracks were spreading across my hand and I looked away, feeling sick. When I looked back, my - my hand was nothing but b - bare bone.
"I stumbled away from the lost soul as fast as I could, but it wasn't fast enough. It - it caught me and pinned me against a tree. It started chanting something that I couldn't understand and - and -" User broke off, trembling. Syndicate was staring at him in shock, but quickly moved to comfort User, scooting his chair over so he could embrace User in a warm hug.
"Go on," Syndicate whispered encouragingly. "You can tell me."
"I - I started to dissolve," User whimpered. "Syndicate, I was literally crumbling to pieces. The dark cracks from earlier spread across my whole body and right then, at that moment, I saw Death.
"Death was a - a horrible de - demon. Imagine your worst fear. Now multiply that by ten million. That is the extent of the terror I felt when I looked at Death. I - I felt something sn - snap inside me at that moment, staring into D - Death's eyes. I fell into a shivering, sobbing wreck, and as I did so, I felt as though I was becoming feather-light. Now, I knew from experience that that was not how dying felt like, so I was confused.
"Then I blinked, and I was surrounded by a blinding white light. I blinked again, and the world came back into focus. I was alive again. I was breathing. I wasn't c - crumbling into bits of darkness like I had been just mo - moments before. But I knew I would never be safe again - never be happy. And I would never be able to see ho - hope in the same way again."
User finished his story and struggled to hold back a sob. Telling Syndicate hadn't made the fear disappear at all - rather, the opposite. His terror seemed to intensify as he recalled the face of the true horror of Death.
Syndicate opened his mouth as if to reassure User that he was safe now, or some nonsense, but was interrupted by Twisted slamming open the door and making both Syndicate and User jump.
"Guys," Twisted began, before pausing and taking in the scene before him - Syndicate's eyes filled with shock and horror, and User shaking badly. Then he visibly swallowed and continued, his voice laced with an urgent tone.
"We have a serious problem."
Oh! Suspense is rising! Poor User tells us about his time in the land of the dead! The others learn of the dragon! And in all of this, where is Kundime? Find out next chapter!
Random Observation: Ya'll know that there are a bunch of stories in the Mianite Collection by now - but did you know that they weren't all published in the order I thought of them? I first came up with the idea for TCL after watching one of Jordan's livestreams, and from then on, I thought of The Prankster's Blade (which was never published), TWC, TPD, THS, TMJ, THM, and TBP!
MyBrokenHeart123: And now you learn the reason why... it just seems to get sadder and sadder!
DiamondScribe: Sorry, no can do with PMing the whole story! XD If you want, I could PM you a bit of the ending though... And I really don't want this collection to end either! I just feel like this brought me a lot closer to writing, and it's probably going to be a huge blow, not writing about Dec or Wag or any of the others, at least for a while.
RusYRP: Yeah, they are! They will always be there - except when they are not...
TheUserCreated: Okay, you can stop calling yourself that now. It was funny the first time, now it's just getting weird.