Stonebrook High School

Chapter 14

Gabriel had a wide smile on his face when he exited the cafe, much to Olivia's annoyance.

"How can you be smiling right now?! That wasn't funny," she pouted, crossing her arms. Gabriel just laughed and ruffled her hair.

So there they all stood, the six people shuffling their feet outside an abandoned cafe in the dark.

"Well..." Lukas awkwardly scratched the back of his head. "Can you continue the story? As we, I don't know, walk to some other place?"

"Oh, I know a good place," Axel said, happily trotting off to the right of the cafe. The others shrugged and followed him.

"Hmm.. Where was I?" wondered Gabriel out loud, holding his chin. He fixed his gray beanie and put his shades back on.

"You were at the part where Magnus blew up the lab and you guys took the Eyes," recalled Lukas. The Jesses nodded. "What he said."

"Ah, that's right. A few months later, after hours and hours of training and preparing, we finally were ready to adventure to Asia and find where the Ender Dragon hid. It wasn't very simple; there hadn't been many clues as to where the Dragon was in the old lab papers. All we knew was that it was in Southeast Asia- so to Southeast Asia we went."

He glanced down at the children beside him, chuckling lightly when he saw they were all looking up at him, eyes wide with interest. "The first stop we took was in Cambodia. We would have started our quest in the Philippines, but we learned the Dragon was hidden underneath mainland Asia. Sadly, we had no time to admire the beautiful sights and wonders of Cambodia– we had to trek through a path that covered Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The reason for starting in Cambodia was because there were these artifacts that we needed to collect, and they were arranged in order on the path. We would not be able to find the artifacts had we gone by car or other transportation. After readying ourselves, we walked down the path, collecting whatever seemed like they would be Dragon artifacts. It took a long time but after a month of walking and mosquitoes, we finally arrived at the hidden archway."

"Hidden archway? What did it look like?" asked Jess, fingers tingling with restlessness.

"It was a large keystone archway, covered in moss and vines so long it seemed like an entrance to a secret garden. The only thing that helped us realize it was the door to the Ender Dragon was a large, carved stone sculpture of an Asian-style dragon, decorated with the natural growth of the earth. Since a large, overgrown gate blocked our path and the archway was much too tall for us to climb over it, we had to painstakingly break the gate with large rocks in the immediate area. Took us a long time, but we did it." He rubbed his hand across his forearm as if remembering the soreness that came shortly after. "We had just gone through the gate when Magnus slipped, making a loud cry that we were sure the birds remember. Soren tried to catch him, but in the process slipped as well. Both started to tumble down a wide stairway that started to take shape, inviting us in. The stairway wasn't a path down to another surface area. It was a path to a large underground cavern that was approximately half a mile beneath the surface. Thankfully, Ellegaard had plenty of spare redstone torches to light our way as we tried to search for the two. We found them at the end of the stairway, but something else had caught our attention."

"The Ender Dragon?!" exclaimed Axel with a sharp gasp. He stopped fidgeting with his hands when he realized how loud he was. "Sorry. Just excited. We're almost there."

Gabriel nodded to say he wasn't affected. "In the cavern were the largest glowing crystals we had ever seen. They weren't manmade, but they weren't exactly natural either. These crystals were three times the size of I and emitted some sort of luminescent light from the cores. The heat around the crystals was also unbearable, scorching to the point where Soren's clothes were burning off when he tried to touch it. The strange rocks were arranged in somewhat of a circle around the perimeter of the cave on top of these tall, black towers which seemed to be obsidian. Naturally, we assumed something was in the center of the cave, so we decided to climb down from the staircase into the heart of the cavern."