When we arrived at the next safe place, Bill looked on the verge of collapse. I didn't blame him – I knew how it felt to lose the ones you cherish. Staying silent, I led the way into the small tunnel through the rock.
Unlike the first cave, this seemed man-made. The walls and floor were smooth, made of regular square bricks set in an orderly pattern. The bricks seemed to be made of the stone of the Nether, and I notice it had a slate-like quality, made of layers of rock. The thin tunnel led to an empty room where we dropped our packs.
"You get some sleep," I told the others. "I'll take first watch." Neither of them needed any further encouragement, and I leant back against the wall, ready for a long night's guarding.
The night passed uneventfully, the darkness outside staying silent and unmoving. In the morning, Chris opened his pack and pulled out a white envelope. He took a sheet of white paper from inside it and read it aloud.
"When you reach the stronghold, follow the corridors. Slay the Blazes and bring back the rods. At the end of the stronghold, a Portal will return you to Kakonatos. And look, there's a drawing here." Chris showed me the picture of a floating head of some sort, surrounded by rods floating in midair. He looked up at me.
"We should go as soon as possible. We're so close to getting home!"
"Not yet, we're not." Bill's first words since Zoey's death made me jump. He walked up to us, his face serious. "Those Blazes are a nasty piece of work. We always avoided them. One thing's for sure – if the Council sends us in there, most likely the majority won't come back out."
"Then we'd better prepare," I told them. "Sort out any cuts and burns you have, and we can finish off the last of the food." We all did so, applying cream and plasters to our various wounds picked up from long hours trekking across the Nether. I tore open my last ration pack with my teeth, wrinkling my nose at the concentrated smell of salt emanating from the packet. Peering inside, I found it was strips of already-cooked salt beef with a sachet of some sort of high-vitamin juice. Whatever it was, it tasted foul, but it was invaluable for getting through the day, and they had conveniently put one into every ration pack. I swallowed it in one gulp, trying to keep my tongue as far away from it as possible without it being impossible to swallow, and popped a strip of beef into my mouth to chew on the way.
With this pick-me-up installed, I changed the bandages on my hands. Whatever Zoey had put on them, it killed me with pain but had sped up the healing process remarkably. Where the gouges had been two or three centimetres deep, they had risen to barely one, and the lighter cuts had disappeared entirely. Unfortunately, the bottle had been left in Zoey's pack when the Zombie Pigmen attacked, and was left behind.
"Everyone ready?" They nodded and I picked up my sword from where I had left it on the ground. Walking quietly into the tunnel, my shoes clicking on the smooth floor, we all explored a section of the vast maze of rooms. When we regrouped, we found that the entire fortress was deserted.
"Who built this?" wondered Chris aloud. Bill shook his head.
"No-one knows," he replied. "I found some stairs, so maybe we should go up and try to find the surface." We all agreed to try the stairs. When we reached them, we found a strange fungus growing underneath. Bill's eyes lit up.
"Nether Wart!" he exclaimed, hurrying forward and inspecting the wide caps of the mushrooms. "This is fantastic! Roast these, and they're as good as any potato." He cut free several and stowed them in his backpack. "Always good to be prepared."
Chris and I did likewise, and we cautiously headed up the stairs. At the top was a room with huge open windows on all sides except one, which had a massive door the size of a Nether portal that led to a bridge made of the same stuff as the walls. We carefully made our way across the bridge, alert for any monsters that might attack us, but found nothing.
The ground below us was on a steep slope, and eventually we were so high up we couldn't see the ground anymore. I prayed for the bridge to hold – nothing could survive that fall.
At the end of the bridge was a steep staircase to a wide platform with a low wall around the edge. There was a peculiar cage in the centre and two thin bridges extending out to the sides, burying themselves in cliff walls. Bill stopped us before we could go down to investigate.
"It's a Spawning Cage," he said by way of explanation. The blank look on our faces prompted a heavy sigh.
"Creatures – in this case, Blazes – will 'spawn' out of that cage. It's otherwise known as a Birthing Cage? They are created from the dead remains of their brethren inside the cage, given life by harnessing the extreme heat levels of the lava and expelled into the Nether. Then, when they die, the body is boosted to an atomic level of matter and sucked into the cage to reform as a new Blaze." Silence prevailed as we tried to make head or tail of his words. I was a miner, not a scientist, for Notch's sake...
"Basically, the cage makes Blazes and spits them out, and then when it gets killed after a while another one will get made," Bill said helpfully. We let out twin sighs of "Oh!" as we finally understood.
"Look! One's being formed now," Bill pointed out. Black smoke hissed out of the cage, forming a cocoon-like egg shape, then dissipated leaving the strangest creature I had ever seen floating a little way above the floor.
Its head was a misshapen human head, orange-red with wide empty eyes and no mouth. It had no body that I could see; the head was flying above a small cloud of black smoke surrounded by what I assumed to be the "rods" the note had talked about. They were about half a foot long, bright red and glowing with heat. As we watched, one of them shattered with an odd scraping noise, only to be immediately replaced by a new one coming from the smoke.
"Everyone ready?" I asked. They both nodded.
"Then let's get us some Blaze rods!" I cried, and drew my sword.
Ok, iDog finally called me out on my character 'originality'... Yes, I took the description and name of Bill from Left 4 Dead. I was wondering when someone would figure it out.