Stories of the Past

How it Began

The cave entrance looms before me, the dark unwelcoming, and a crawling feeling running over my skin. I can feel myself staring into the cold blackness, probably looking like an idiot, but I can't tear my eyes away from it. My shoulder is nudged by someone else's and I flick my eyes up to see Notch walking past.

"C'mon, Brine. It's really not that bad! We have torches!" He calls out as he walks into the cave, sword on his back, pickaxe hanging on his hip and a flame atop a stick in his hand, illuminating the area around him as he hops from each level to the next, going into the cave.

"I know you don't like them, but we need to get some stuff and we've already exhausted the top areas. We'll dig a staircase to get out by in case of an emergency, but we'll be fine. We have your back," Steve tells me as he follows my line of sight. His gear is on him in the same way as Notch's, and the same way mine is. Steve jumps down and I sigh, letting out the small amount of anxiety in me, leaping after my brother.

The cave is empty for the most part, alight with the torches we've set on the walls on previous expeditions, making the area les a gloomy. I still hate the cold, musky atmosphere caves have. Can't wait until we all move up to the mountains like what Notch has said, it'll be so good to be closer to the sky. I hate being underground, trapped beneath the surface of the Earth with no escape except up. You'll eventually get trapped if you only run forwards.

We end up deeper than we've ever been before, and we stop once Notch starts hacking away at a wall where iron is, Steve and I quickly find in. Our own places. I swing at coal, breaking chunks of it off and making them scatter across the ground. As I pick the coal off the ground, the sound of bones clacking catches my attention. I look to Steve and Notch to see if they hear it, but they keep going, obviously having not heard it. I shrug it off and turn back to the wall I've made a small dent in, continuing to chip away at it.

That is until I hear the clacking again, this time closer. My head whips up to see a skeleton turning the corner. "Steve! Notch! Skele!" I yell at them. They drop their pick axes to the ground, each of us unsheathing our swords. Zombies and other skeletons follow the first one around the corner and I glance over to see another horse rounding the other corner. Our escape route is blocked off by the mobs as they swarm towards us.

We cut through the horde, bones and bodies littering the floor, yet more keep coming. There must be a spawner around here.

I finish off another skeleton, it's bones falling to the ground in a heap, and look up to see Steve killing a zombie. But he doesn't see the arrow that's pointed at him. Everything seems to go in slow motion as time slows around me. I try to yell at Steve but it's useless, the skeleton letting go of the arrow. I could knock him out of the way, no, don't have enough time for that. I do the one thing I can think of, the one thing my body is pushing me to do.

I dive in front of Steve, making him fall to the ground with me on top of him, an arrow embedded in my chest.

Black haze swirls in my vision, blurring everything around me and making all the voices sound so far away. I can just hear my name, echoing through the halls, as though it's down a long tunnel. Someone, an unidentifiable coloured blob, leans over me, maybe shaking me? I don't know.

My eyelids feel a weight on them, a weight I cannot fight, making them droop closed. I struggle to take another breath, a liquid rising in my throats and spilling over my lips, sticky and tasting coppery. Blood.

I feel myself fading, a force dragging on me, pulling me somewhere else, and I can't fight it off. I try, I try so hard, to open my eyes, see my brothers, know they're okay, but I keep getting dragged away by this unknown force. "BRINE!" I hear before all my sense are taken over by darkness, a peaceful darkness.