Hello! This is Pastrinator64 with...3 more chapters of Hourglass. Yeah, I can't believe it either.
I've been quite busy with a combination of new jobs, new animated projects, summer obligations, relationship issues, and a general shift of interest from writing to art. That's the best way I can sum it up, honestly. I love, LOVE this story and have for the last 4 years of working on this series as a whole, but I couldn't really do anything to stop myself from wanting to do more art and move on from it.
Although, knowing how attached I get to characters, this story is still so, so present in my heart. I care about it as a whole, I really do! And that's why, as slow as it may come, even if my entire audience disappears, I'm going to finish it. I won't give an end date because I don't really know when it'll finish. I don't want to make another promise that I can't fulfill.
The ONLY promise I can fulfill now is that I will. Finish. Hourglass.
If any of y'all have questions, just write 'em out in the review and I'll either reply to you in Private Messaging or say something at the beginning of the next chapter. Thank you so much for being here to read my book, the few of you who are somehow still here. 3
Now, let the story commence! (Lol, I'm still gonna say it.)
Chapter 58: The Drop
"Whoaaaa…this is super frickin cool!"
Astrid's admiration went from whisper to shout in a matter of seconds, causing most of the group to cringe as her voice echoed all along the walls of the tunnel around them. Norman immediately raised a hand and shushed her, his patience quickly running thin.
"Astrid, we could be right on top of the Unforgiven Spawn for all we know…" he murmured, staring back at her and using all the diction he could. "We. Have. To. Be…"
He paused, let out the hand that wasn't holding Shatter to motion for her to finish his thought. Astrid smirked, pausing for intentionally too long before replying.
"Quiiiiiiiet." she said extra-slowly.
Norman huffed through his nose and turned around without saying anything more; he didn't have time to deal with Astrid's antics right now. The rest of the group took the signal and continued to walk forward with him. They were so, SO close to their goal, it was electrifying. And with almost 24 hours left yet before time was up, he almost felt even the teensiest bit confident they weren't going to run into any more problems.
"If we can be quiet…and we can be careful…we shouldn't run into any more surprises." Norman vocalized, glancing back for a second at the rest of their group. "But we have to all be on our toes, or one slipup could get the whole group in a hole—"
The millisecond Norman finished his sentence, the sound of stone on stone slammed their eardrums and shook the entire tunnel, making half of them scream and the other half trip in place. Carol went the whole way on the latter, still not at all used to wearing her clunky iron boots.
"GWAHO!" she unintelligibly shouted when she smacked the unforgiving floor. "What the hell was that?!"
Norman stayed frozen where he was, Shatter held out in one hand and the other held at an open palm, ready to defend from whatever was thrown their way. Despite having all this experience with dealing with sudden, scary encounters and battles, he was still on the edge like nothing he could describe. Especially after losing several friends and family members, he wasn't sure what to expect from the glitched, deteriorating world that used to be a simple sandbox game called Minecraft.
The rumbling caused from the crash slowed to a stop, allowing everyone to fully regain their balance. After a few seconds, Carol stood up awkwardly and winced, holding her scraped elbows with opposite hands. Grimacing, she said,
"Well…that could've been worse."
In front of her, Astrid gave a short laugh and turned around, lighting jabbing a finger at her.
"Heh, y'know, that kinda sounds like something I would s—"
As if on cue—or perhaps a bit late—the floor beneath the entire group opened up in an instant, cutting off Astrid and dropping them all into blackness. Norman was not anticipating this whatsoever and his grip on Shatter slipped, causing him to flail as he fell and slap it further down past his reach. As the group fell fast, many of them screaming, Norman focused all of his attention on the rapidly darkening block spaces around him, trying to picture them well enough to summon some cobwebs. With all their armor, however, they were falling so fast that eventually he couldn't see the outline of the spaces around him at all and couldn't hope to conjure even one cobweb!
"NOOOOOOOOOOO!" he heard Sabrina shriek the loudest, piercing the air like a dagger.
Suddenly, Norman's body came to a screeching halt in a frigid, massive blanket of some sort. The substance beneath him crunched lightly when he hit it and he felt himself become embedded almost entirely, submerging his face in icy-coldness. He winced from the awkward landing, thankful to be alive but definitely sore; he was missing nearly all his hp, so he blindly fiddled around in his hotbar until he landed on his cooked chickens and proceeded to eat a couple. Just as he was taking his first disoriented bite, aDRIAN groaned,
"What in tarnation…just happened? …we're dead, aren't we?"
"A… *cough* Anyone got a torch?" Bailey interjected, choking a little from the impact.
Norman sighed, searching around in his hotbar again and mumbling,
"I thought everyone was equipped with them by now, but okay…"
He found his full stack of torches in a matter of seconds and sat up, placing one in the space right in front of him. The light illuminated a small area around him, most immediately revealing that they had fallen into a massive mound of snow. Just as Norman was trying to figure out how they'd survived it, Auconi spoke up.
"We are incredibly lucky there was all this snow underneath us, or we'd be good as dead. Not even I could place blocks with it being as dark as it was."
Before Norman could question the logic of the situation, Bailey vocalized his thoughts for him.
"How would…how did snow protect us from all that fall damage? We should be dead! Right?"
"There was an update that added cushioning to certain blocks, don't you know?" replied Auconi, sounding a tiny bit shocked. "Or…wait, you were probably not around when that happened. I was 5 when we got the update, so you and Bailey must've been back on Earth and not even known about it."
Suddenly, Auconi's rather helpful explanation was cut short by the sound of Carol calling out,
"Sabrina?" Norman watched her stand up on the other side of the snow mound and look around. "Oof…hey Sabrina, did you land headfirst in the snow or something? Like, I know you're the quiet one and all but I can bet you'd be whining about a bruised ass by now, eheh."
Norman rolled his eyes and stood up, looking around for Shatter. It didn't take him long to spot it: buried deep in the snow just a block behind Astrid. When he approached his dropped weapon, he first helped Astrid to her feet, who brushed snow off her iron leggings.
"Thanks, duder." she said with a smile, giving him the finger guns.
Norman nodded and smiled very lightly in response, then turning to his diamond shovel and grasping it by its ends. With one heave, he wrenched it out of the chilly white pillow and threw it over his shoulder, looking around to see if everyone else was alright.
Adrian was standing up and caressing his arms, looking slightly in pain but otherwise okay. Bailey was being smart like Norman was and actually eating to heal her lost hearts before anything else, still sitting in the snow. Auconi looked like he'd already eaten and stretched, because he was just standing there and looking impatient to get going again—sort of how Norman felt on the inside.
Before he got around to checking on Carol, though he was pretty sure she was fine based on how she was acting twenty seconds ago, the ex-hooker called out a second time,
"Saaaabrina?"
She sounded extremely confused. Norman spotted her roaming around in the darkness on the edge of his torch's reach, bending over and brushing snow away from several spots. He took a step forward.
"Something wrong, Carol?" he piped.
She came back into the light suddenly and got down on her knees, continuing to brush away more snow. Faster and faster, with an increasingly concerned look on her face.
"Damn, where'd she land…?" she muttered, sounding legitimately worried now.
Other people started to take notice that Carol was beginning to act frantic and walked over. With a mouthful of cooked mutton, Astrid lifted a free hand in gesture and said in muffled words,
"Wassup, Car'l?"
"Shit, shit, shit…" Carol repeated, taking large handful of snow and throwing them behind her. "Sabrina, you'd better not…like…you…"
In her frenzy, she caught sight of Norman's shovel and swallowed, suddenly raising an open palm and spouting,
"H-hey, can I use that for a second?"
Immediately, Norman understood what was going on—or at least, possibly—and he reacted quickly, taking Shatter off his shoulder and replying,
"Wait, let me do it. I don't want you sending yourself flying into a wall on accident."
He dug Shatter into the ground, popping up the block of snow in front of up him as a handful of snowball drops. With how ridiculously efficient a diamond shovel worked on its own, he cleared nearly ten blocks a second, working his way around himself and the other to shred the mound lower and lower. While he was digging, he said,
"You're sure she's not up here with us?"
"She would've responded when I made fun of her!" Carol retorted, sounding intensely flustered now. "And I hit the wall pretty quick just walking out past the torch, so it's not like this room is all that big!"
Norman kept digging, gritting his teeth and replying,
"You didn't touch every wall, did you, though? So this room could technically be bigger than you think, I'm just—"
Without warning, Norman broke one block just in front of him that opened up to complete blackness: another endless drop. He leaned forward and, when he found himself staring straight into the darkness below, cried out and jumped backwards.
"WHOA! Okay, okay, we're almost literally on thin ice here, NOBODY dig!"
Everyone immediately raised their hands and got on their toes, looking around as if the floor beneath them would collapse at any moment.
"Thank…God for Minecraft's unrealistic physics." Norman added, just thinking where they'd all be if this snow was affected by gravity.
"What do you me—" started Bailey, just before she caught sight of the hole and flinched backwards. "OHHHHH, got it! Wow…"
One by one, the rest of their group took turns looking cautiously at the hole, crouching as tensely as they could to avoid accidentally falling in. When Astrid went up, she was stupidly brave and leaned all the way over the hole so she could stare directly down through it.
"Astrid, youuuuu…" Norman began, raising a finger.
"Wait, wait! Did anyone else see that little red speck way down there? Y'know, I think that's…that's lava! We're in a volcano, I mean, so I can't think of what else it'd be."
Norman's eyebrows rose an inch at this news and he slid forward, leaning himself as far as he could comfortably lean before he was also looking directly down the hole. Astrid's claims were confirmed, as he too saw the distant crimson dot glowing ever so faintly at the bottom of the pit…however many blocks below them.
"How, then," Norman started, standing up straight again and glancing at the others. "Did all this snow get here?"
"Oh God…" Carol muttered, nearly cutting him off.
He looked at her specifically, noticing the look of absolute horror that had now spread across her face. She rushed to the hole and practically stuck her head in, moving it this way and that and shouting,
"Sabrina?! HEY, SABRINA! HEYYYYYYYY!"
She stood up rather quickly, before Norman could pull her away from her dangerous spot over the hole, and backed away, gripping her wavy blonde hair in bunches and opening her eyes awfully wide. She took a breath, staring at no one in particular, and continued to take steps back.
"Holy shit…holy shit, Sabrina. Sh…she—"
Carol gasped lightly and stopped in place as she felt herself step on something. Her head whipped down to see the corner of something metallic stuck in the buried in the snow. She scooped away the surrounding whiteness and lifted the metal out, revealing it to be a single iron boot. Carol choked, hand holding the boot going limp and dropping to her side as she looked up again, now staring at the rest of her group.
"Did…anyone drop a…a b-boot?" she murmured, eyes starting to water.
Everyone reactively looked down at their feet, checking simultaneously for such a missing boot, and one by one returning to Carol with a shake of the head. Carol's teeth gnashed as tears started to flow in multitude down her face.
"Oh…no…oh no, oh shit, SHIT!"
Very quickly, Carol broke down onto her knees and lifting the iron boot, gripping it with white knuckles.
"S-SABRINA! Oh GOD, Sabrina, Sabrina NO!" her head fell forward and she grabbed her face with both hands, dropping the iron boot. "SABRINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAA!"
Bailey very quickly came to her side and removed her burly iron chestplate, wrapping Carol in the biggest, tightest hug she could muster. She held Carol there as she continued to scream her best friend's name, tears and snot dripping down her face as raw emotion swept over her entirely.
"WHY, GOD, WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH?!"
Astrid's head darted back and forth from between Carol and Bailey on the ground to Norman, and to the multitude of shocked faces around her as well.
"Wh-whoa, what happened?! I don't…"
Norman put a hand to his lips and thought, also quite horrified as the facts of the situation settled in.
"She must've spammed her Block power out of panic when she fell, putting that entire bed of snow above her as she went. So we landed safely on it without…suffering the entire fall, but Sabrina just kept going…"
Astrid's mouth slowly opened for a second or two as she took this in, eventually raising her fingers to her mouth and biting on them, looking down.
"Ohhh…" she breathed, taking another second before sitting down on the snow block behind her.
Everyone stood, sat, and in one case weep on the floor for the next several minutes as they each pictured Sabrina's terrifying fate in their heads. Carol continued to scream and cry until her throat was blown out, where she eventually slid out of Bailey grip into the snow face first, gripping handfuls and burying her forehead in the chilly substance. Her sobs had gone quiet now, but were just as powerful and ripped through her over and over as they came.
"Sabrina…" she growled, breath quivering.
For almost twenty seconds, they all stayed there in deafening silence, with Carol so choked up she couldn't sob anymore. This silence was broken, then, by the sound of a stone block breaking on one end of the room. Everyone including Carol glanced towards the source of the sound and found themselves staring into darkness. Promptly, a torch was placed near the source and illuminated Auconi standing there, iron pick in hand and one block missing from the stone wall at his side. He paused, turning back to look at them. For a bit, they just stared at each other until he finally spoke up.
"One Spirit. One hellspawn. ONE more thing we gotta do and it's all over. If we don't keep moving, we will run out of time. That's a fact."
He then turned to Carol specifically, who looked on the verge of exploding at him.
"A few days ago, I lost my best friend too. A much of a mixed bag as he was, he was my best friend. I broke down too, blamed myself quite a bit for his death, and generally let my head go to shit. But one thing that kept me going was the prospect that maybe, after all this is over and the Glitch is dead for sure, we might be able to bring him back. By the power of uniting the Spirits In Between or whatever, I know that it's possible. And because of this possibility, I was able to pick myself up pretty damn quick and just keep walking. I would've done Darcy no service by lying down and crying while the whole world was being shredded into pieces around me."
Auconi paused, taking just a second to think and to let Carol absorb his words before continuing.
"We are literally steps away from ending this. However recent the death of our friends around us is, especially in the likelihood it happens during battle, we cannot stop here. We have to keep going. And since we've got no other pre-made path to take, I'm digging us a new one."
Carol grimaced, sniffing long and hard before looking down at her feet and trying to get her balance. Bailey helped her stand after a few seconds of struggling and soon Carol was back on her own two feet, albeit shakily so. She retained the grimace and wiped her nose with her sleeve, sniffing a second time.
"I hate you…I hate this…b-but you're right…fuck, you're right. We gotta…keep going."
As she took a few weak steps forward and unearthed her own iron pick from her hotbar, she muttered,
"I never should've gone with that fuckboy Al in the first place…all those talks about giant minecarts and…and pleasure rides, Jesus Christ…"
With her pent up anger, she growled and swung her pick into the stone block next to Darcy, breaking it in one go.
"Talks about never needing another partner again, how he was more than enough for the two of us, that conceited motherfucker…" she swung again, breaking another block. "Talking about seeing the sites in Blocks Vegas like he knew the place, GOD what an ass!" another swing, another block broken.
Carol continued to vent passionately about how everything was Al's fault as she dug into the wall, deeper and deeper. So as not to disturb her, Auconi motioned for everyone to join him in digging and started to mine as well. Soon, all of them—now six—were chipping away at the side wall, accompanied only by Carol's spill of anger.
This awkward, painful, dreary, tear-filled dig lasted for almost an hour, which, despite being in Minecraft time, felt far too long to be digging for Norman. He was starting to get worried they'd just dig their way out of the volcano's side and have to climb back up to the cave entrance and try again. What an incredible, horrible waste of time that would be if that actually happened…
"—and he had the NERVE to call Sabrina the uglier of us two, where he just went and joked about it like it was nothing. Sabrina, y-you were fucking beautiful and deserved all the love any single human could give and fuuuuck…" Carol grumbled; she was beginning to run out of steam, her anger giving way to total hopelessness. "Oh God, why did she have to do that…why'd she have to up and die…? Damn it…"
Carol suddenly stopped digging, turning around in place and leaning up against her end of the long tunnel they'd dug. Auconi, who was still mining next to her, looked down and breathed through his nose, quickly saying,
"Carol, c'mon. I know, I know how difficult this is, I've felt…no, I'm FEELING what you're feeling, but we have to keep digging. We just. Have to."
She glanced up at him halfheartedly and glared at him with red, tired, tear-stained eyes and a runny nose. Once again, she sniffled, and then let out an exhausted breath.
"I've been screaming my fucking lungs out for the past hour, I'm sitting down."
Auconi put a hand to his side and jabbed at her with his pick, adding,
"Carol, I'm serious! We are so, so close to getting this done. The faster we do get this done, the faster you'll get a chance to see Sabrina again."
"Don't even say her name." she bit, her tone grave and final; she sighed, closing her eyes and slumping into a half-lying position. "Besides, digging one more goddamn piece of stone isn't gonna get us all that closer to Sycallion."
As if on cue, Astrid cried out from the opposite end of the tunnel with extreme energy.
"GUYS, GUYS! I FOUND AN OPENING, C'MERE!"
It took him a second to take his eyes off of Astrid across the space, but he eventually turned back to Carol and shrugged in the slightest of "I told you so" ways before joining the others who went to look. Carol grumbled, taking her time as she got to her feet and shuffled over to her group.
"Hold on, let's open this up a bit so everyone can see." said Norman, digging into the nearby stone blocks.
He, Astrid, and Bailey together did just that. Soon, they had a 6x4 hole to look down into the room ahead.
And what they saw was quite unlike anything they'd seen before.
I know, I know, we're NEARLY THERE GUYS! They've just got one more roadblock and it's all over. ;)
What kind of demon will Norman and the gang encounter? Will they be able to defeat this final Unforgiven Spawn? Will Carol be able to gather up enough will to join them in the fight? And what in the Overworld are Jeff, Evan, Amya, and JB up to right now?! Find out NEXT chapter of Hourglass!
This is Pastrinator64, your fellow writer and reader, signing out!
*throws sugar bomb and disappears behind its cloud of fine white sugar*
...Goodbye for now...
~Pastrinator64 [~]