Right this has been a stressful week, and strangely enough not because of school work. I must have a bipolar writing disorder or a very weird case of OCD because since I stopped writing I've been giving my blood pressure hell thinking about a hundred things I should have done different in the last chapters. It's gotten so bad I'm on the fence on whether or not to start over, since all the 'fixes' are mostly for the first three chapters. Since I'm not entirely certain I'm still sane I'll give this a bit more thought, that and I need to lie down a moment. Till then enjoy the show.
-Please ignore the momentary loss of sanity, the author regrets that he had forgotten to take his happy pills and will be back shortly.
It's dark. But not cave dark. Cave dark's different from the darkness of being asleep you see.
A memory fills the darkness. Whitewolf is sitting in an open desert, nothing but sand and sun for miles around. In the distance he can hear someone humming, the sound of horses neighing and pigs oinking come from behind him. But his favorite part comes next. Someone sings in the distance, more like a low quiet hum broken by the occasional lyric.
"Praise the sun it has returned,
Praise the sun the mobs have burned,
Till the time the night ends,
Wait for the sun's ra-,"
The voice drifts off, and the darkness returns, but the memory doesn't end.
"Is everything ready?" a voice asks.
"Yes, I don't think they can get in," a second voice says, more nervous than the first.
"Good, we can get started,"
Whitewolf stretches out his hand, but feels nothing. He tries to sit up, but nothing moves.
"Hold still dear, you need to hold still," the second voice says soothingly.
"Peace child, it's alright. You'll be alright. When you wake, you'll be ready for the Great Builder's Light,"
Wake up.
-()-
'There's a lot of water here,' Whitewolf thinks to himself.
The sound of water rushing past him slowly brings him back to his senses.
'I think I need to pee now,'
He opens his eyes, and there's little more to be seen. He can see a light far above where he figures they fell from. The sound of battle still resounds above, and human voices grow more distant as the fight draws on. Eventually the sounds of fighting cease completely, and only the sound of the waterfall remains.
Whitewolf sits up, his bones snap back into place as they heal. He stands up and feels around himself. He hears Snow Drift neigh close by, Pith and Jett groan closer still. His hand comes onto his flint and iron, and he strikes it to give some light.
In the light he sees their items sloshing along the water current at the bottom of the ravine. Pith and Raven lie on opposite ends of the water flow, dazed but in one piece. Whitewolf looks to where he landed and sees a stone slowly reforming a spiderweb of cracks. Snow Drift neighs again as the fire fades, and Whitewolf snatches a bundle of torches from the water and plonks one down on the wall. The light reveals Snow Drift struggling to get up in the current, weighed down by his half filled packs.
Pith walks towards Whitewolf, looking pretty miserable.
"Awake yet bro?"
After a moment he notices that Pith is shivering, at first he assumes that its because of the water but as the water slides off of him in sheets he still trembles.
Pith notices Whitewolf watching him and walks past him to check on Snow Drift.
"Well nothing's broken," Pith says after checking Snow Drift over.
"Thanks for worrying, I really am," Whitewolf says.
Raven stirs and joins the two, shaking the water from her hair.
"Hey wait where's the golem?" asks Raven.
"Snowy?"
"He must have run off when the creeper went off," Pith says looking up to the top of the ravine, not wanting to think of the more likely case.
Their stomachs give a collective groan and Whitewolf walks over to the fallen packs.
"Anyone hungry?" he says pulling out several cooked pork chops.
"I'll take them," Pith says grabbing half a dozen and cramming them down. "What have we got?"
Whitewolf rummages through the packs, throwing things out of it.
"Looks like some torches, cobblestone, an iron bar, wood, sticks, a dozen pork chops, some coal, two iron picks, a dozen arrows, and a slice of bread,"
"Well that's not too bad,"
"We should keep moving, either those mobs or those bandits will be out there," Raven says watching the opening.
"Like they'll want to come down here, so which way?" says Pith.
Whitewolf climbs up a spur of rock and look up and down the ravine. The way north is blocked by lava falls, and southward the caves are filled with slow flowing water and obsidian.
"Let's go north, we just have to watch out for the lava," says Whitewolf climbing back down.
"Ok no, that's just asking for Herobrine or some creeper to get us. We should find a cave system that leads up, once we're on the ravine walls we can just mine ourselves a pathway,"
"Well I do need the lava but I don't want to get killed either, I guess I'll just-hey wait where'd Whitewolf go?"
Pith turns around and spots Whitewolf crossing the lava via a narrow bridge of cobblestone. The two run behind him, yelling for him to turn back all the way. After it becomes clear Whitewolf won't listen to them Pith widens the bridge with cobble stone and carefully leads Snow Drift behind them.
"How did that song go?" Whitewolf says out loud.
When no one answers he starts humming something, and starts singing.
"-The'll be no more crying when he starts singing his old...," he trails off, mumbling to himself.
"Sweet song," Raven continues.
"Right, then it goes, get up get up the sun is red," Whitewolf continues.
"Get up get up the mobs are dead," Pith sings next.
"Live love, laugh and be happy," They all finish laughing and making Snow Drift nervous.
"How do you know an old Sea Stone song?" Pith says.
"Sea Stone? My mother would wake me up every morning with that song, I started to hate it after a while,"
"I heard it too, and I'm pure blooded nomad," Whitewolf says.
"Huh, that's weird, must be an old song," Pith says.
Pith looks to his right, and sees a cave that leads downwards into the darkness in a rare lava-less spot of land.
"Come on, whatever's in there can't be worse than this," Pith says jumping off.
"Um, let's just keep going, there's got to be a cave that leads up right?"
"That's not what you were saying before,"
"Hey don't worry if you're scared I'll take the lead," Whitewolf says brandishing his sword.
Raven considers pushing him into the lava, but sighs and pushes past him.
"Ladies first," says Raven.
Carrying a torch in one hand and his sword in the other, she leads the way down. Snow Drift snorts and pulls back, refusing to go into the passage. But with no way to go back and nowhere else to go, he follows the three down.
The cave leads further and further down into the underground, and though they hear distant moans and monsters they see nothing on their way down. The cave grows wider and wider too, though it has no branching paths, till they reach the bottom. At the bottom they find an abandoned mineshaft half blocked off by cobwebs. Raven hacks through the webs, slicing the silk into thin slivers but only revealing more webs behind it and light on the other side.
"What in the nether?"
Raven slices the webs into ribbons, and finds herself standing on the edge of a ten block drop.
The three look ahead and see a massive cavern open before them. Above holes in the ceiling let in rays of moon light revealing gigantic stone pillars that reach to the ceiling where it once supported what looks like a tower. Around it dozens of smaller pillars lie on their sides, smashed into a thousand pieces and scattered across the cavern. Along the walls cracked stone bricks once formed buildings which alleyways flooded by stone and dirt, and ancient rusted statues lie on the ground.
They follow a staircase leading downward and walks down towards the ruins.
"This is amazing," Pith says, his voice echoing off the walls.
"What is it?" Raven asks.
"I don't know, their older than any of the three kingdoms,"
"Yea, fascinating, let's do the history tour later. Chances are mobs will be using this place as a lair,"
Pith walks up to a side of the pillar and points out a figure on it.
"Hey what's this?" he says calling the other two over.
Raven brings her torch, illuminating a pictorgraph painted onto the pillars. An image of a giant with wide shoulders and long arms striding over hills and mountains.
"What's that?" asks Raven.
"That? That's a Great Builder, you know the ones who helped Notch build the world," says Whitewolf as if he were asked what the sky is. "They don't teach you that in Oak Dale?"
"What do you want? The picture's faded and I can barely see," she says.
"What's this?" Pith says pointing underneath the pictograph.
Underneath the feet of the giant the ground opens into caves, and in the one directly below the Builder three pairs of white eyes glow in the darkness.
"I don't think we'd like to meet it," Whitewolf says.
Pith's spine tingles, and he walks away to look at the rest of the cave.
"Hey look," Raven says, pointing to a light coming from a cave in the cavern's wall.
Torch light.
"There are people mining out here?" says Pith.
"Not that I've heard," Whitewolf says.
"I'll check it out,"
Pith mounts Snow Drift, much happier to be in an open cavern, and trot to the light. Pith pokes his head inside to see a cave with torches on the left side leading upward.
"Hello? Anyone here?" He calls.
He gives up and starts to turn, when he sees someone standing behind him. He and Snow Drift jump backwards with a shout. The woman laughs and pats Snow Drift's snout to calm him. The woman isn't terribly threatening though. She has dirt covered black hair and yellow eyes, and pale skin that likely rarely sees the sun. She wears a simple white toga that looks like it's been resowed several times.
"Sorry to startle you, it's been a while since I've seen anyone," the woman says smiling at them.
Pith can hear Whitewolf and Raven running towards him, no doubt thinking he had ran into a creeper or something. That's when he notices the enderman standing right behind the woman, half hidden in the shadows. Looking straight at him.
A bit of a musical chapter, and there's a bit of a reason to that. Right till next time.