It is a yellow light, far brighter than even the sun on the hottest of Summer days. Yet, despite its brightness, it does not singe my eyes in pain, and stop at the cornea, but it instead penetrates far deeper, reaching my fundamental perception of light. The brightness shocks me from any hope of sleep.

Why this? Is it a nightmare made of light, denying me the comfort of at least understanding the fear that the dream forces into me?

I realize that I am laying down with the reflection of the light off every angle of the room flowing into my vision. I lean forward and turn my head to the left, trying to avoid direct contact from the strangely bright yellow light. The blankets slide forward as I try to collect my settling thoughts. The vertical ridges of the grey wall inches from my head provides a dull but calming surface with which I clean my thoughts from the uneasiness which the light makes me feel. I try to reassure myself of the finite nature of my sleep-induced fear before attempting, reluctantly, to assess my surroundings.

I turn my head to the right to better understand the strangely amplified light's effect on the room. In the bottom right corner of my vision, Jonas lays fast asleep, his black eyelids concealing what one would expect to be a purple glow. Everything else, however, seems brighter than usual. The crevasses in the shelves on the far wall are clearly illuminated; the wrinkled stone between the books take up a larger surface area of the shelf on the far wall than I recall. I glance to Jonas' left in loathing anticipation towards the stone floor, where the glowstone in the center appears molten from the incredible light. It must be glowing brighter from some sort of magic.

Why didn't the bright light wake Jonas up? Perhaps he's so used to having all that purple glowing light within his eyes, that he doesn't mind the light coming from outside of them all that much.

What exactly is happening to the glowstone that's making it glow so brightly?

I slide out to the left, bringing the blankets on my side of the bed up to the edge of the pillow. I walk around the bed, strafing towards the strange glowing stone. Its bright light seems to only emanate from itself and nothing else; there is no evidence of glowing smoke from any source of magic. And yet, just looking into the stone makes me feel uncomfortably warm... even more so than I recall feeling from the heat being trapped underneath my thick armor. Perhaps the magic of the enchantment is getting to me.

Maybe Dan would know why the glowstone is behaving so oddly. I should ask him.

I turn around, away from the molten light, and open the door. I walk across the hall to Dan's room, and slowly crack open his door, cautious to not wake him on the off-chance that he's asleep. I am jarred by the glowstone light on his bedroom floor, which is just as bright as the glowstone in the room I was sleeping in. Just beyond the glowstone is a wide bed, with plenty of room for two people to sleep comfortably. The blankets on the left side are folded and crumpled back, revealing the sheet covering the mattress.

Dan isn't here.

I look around the room briefly, curious of what it looks like in the bright light. It is a bigger room than the one Jonas and I are sleeping in. To the left of the bed is a desk covered in many open books halfway read, profusely thick with innumerable pages. Underneath the desk, a wooden chair is slightly turned outward from its pushed-in position. In front of the desk, several large chests line against the wall. The opposite wall is lined with a well-filled, ceiling high bookshelf. How in the world can one man have so many books? How does Dan even have time to read them all? One would think that, with the amount that he has, Dan would know more about them than the sentient creatures he specializes in, so it's odd that he wouldn't understand how to handle the Book.

Perhaps Dan is studying over in one of the rooms behind the secret passageway.

I back out of the room, closing the door in front of me, and head down towards the right end of the hallway, where the narrow stairs hug against the earth. I ascend them, less wary of the sound that my footsteps make on the dry stone, and more perplexed by how well-lit the stairwell is.

The secretive rows of bookshelves lower into view. I walk into the leftmost aisle, and approach the other end of the room, where a passage underneath a painting should be. As the leftmost bookshelf parts from my line of sight, I glance left. The opening is no longer there, replaced by a neat corner where the stone of the wall and the floor meet seamlessly, as if the opening was never there.

That's odd. It seems Dan isn't in his study. Perhaps he's upstairs in the foyer, or even outside?

I turn around and head back down the aisle, every wall and crevasse unusually bright. The sources of the light, multiple squares of glowstone in the space of the ceiling between bookshelves, appear molten as well. I take a left where the bookshelf ends, where I briefly see the many chests, including the strange dark Ender chest, whose purple glow seems to illuminate the wall far more than I remember.

Everything is brighter. What is wrong with this house?

I circle around the corner to the right, where a staircase leads up to the foyer. I ascend it, my boots echoing their collision with the stone onto the narrow walls. I step up towards the back right corner of the small, arid room lined with cobblestone walls, and turn around to face the center of the room.

The foyer, too, is bright as day. On the center table, the tiny, yellow flickering flame of the torch shrinks from perhaps half a hand's length to but a speck, yet even at its smallest moment, the walls of the room remain brightly illuminated by the sunlight streaming inside from the rectangular sliver of space between the door and its stone frame. An outline of dust surrounding the sliver of light glows in rays of blue, struggling back and forth with the flickering torch to control the color of the walls.

Is it daytime already? I suppose I wouldn't have been able to tell from underground. Maybe Dan put a spell on the lights to make them glow brighter in the morning to help him wake up... yet I only recall him being in the rooms beyond the hidden stone passage just a few minutes ago. It's possible that I passed out without realizing it. After all, the newly enchanted armor made me exhausted when I first put it on.

I step towards the lit frame of the front door, and reach for the knob. A heavy tiredness persists in my body as the magic of the armor continues to drain my energy, while a cold restlessness clings to my limbs, preventing me from slipping into sweet, rejuvenating sleep. My nervous thoughts reject it like a poison, even though my being requires it. My eyes remain glued open, forced to stare upon the vertical sliver of blue light as it is stretched open by the rotating door. A ball of white light appears from the right side of the sky, halfway between the horizon and the apex. The sky is a bright blue, yet, strangely enough, all the stars are visible.

I close the door behind me. This can't be right. I must be in some sort of dream where light is all screwed up. No wonder I can't close my eyes.

And yet... something else is missing.

I walk slowly across the field and scan across the horizon, noting the presence of various zombies, skeletons, and spiders roaming between the sparse run-down shacks, as well as the occasional creeper, all illuminated in light they should not be able to spawn in.

Why do I get the irksome feeling that everything is quieter than it should be?

The silence is broken by footsteps breaking into the dry grass behind me. I turn around and, to my bitter surprise, I see a skeleton with a bow in hand, with an arrow already drawn with the same hand. It hasn't aimed at me yet.

My arm instinctively reaches for the sword at my belt... only to discover that there's only the leather hilt.

Where did my sword go? I must have lost it when I...

"Hello there," a voice inexplicably coming from the skeleton greeted.

Hold on... did it just... did this pile of floating dead bones just talk?

"Holy cow!" I blurt out. "You can talk!"

"Oi, you can talk too!" it replies, then tilts its skull back to the side. "...bloody idiot. When in the Nether did you spawn? Just twenty minutes ago?"

"What are you talking about?"

Does my armor really make me look that much like a skeleton? I glance down at my leg armor... and my eyes are caught on the mass of ivory joints floating outside of my sleeve near the place where my right hand should be. The slender bones flex apart as my mind focuses on them.

No, this can't be possible! Have I turned into a monster? Why did I deserve this?

The bright light... I understand now. That was night vision, wasn't it? And the silence is because my heart is... my chest is... and I can't close my eyes because...

I lift my ivory hand up to my eyes, and reach my fingers towards where my eyelids should be. I cannot help but flinch as the bony remnants of my fingers reach pass the point where they ought to stop. My vision of the bones reaching into my skull becomes fuzzier until I hear a hollow tap coming from the back.

My skull is... hollow. I don't have eyelids or a brain. My chest is probably a heartless hollow cavern... and I probably have no organs to speak of. I'm just a mass of floating bones suspended in space and animated by dark magic coming from Notch-knows-where. I'm...

I clench my skull hopelessly from the cheekbone. "I'm dead!"

"No, you're UNdead," the skeleton corrects me. "It's a fate slightly less worse than death." It tilts its bow upward for a moment, as a casual gesture. "You must be one of those humans that just got infected. I can tell you're not in your element."

I shake my head, still stunned at what I've just become. "That doesn't make sense. It wasn't like I was killed by a skeleton or anything like that."

"Well, at SOME point, you were infected, not that I care about the details. The more pressing issue at the moment..." the skeleton points its ivory arm at me, "... is that you need a bow."