Tales of Minecraft: The Curse (Remake)

24: One step closer

Luke's POV
"Alright, so we're looking for a massive mountain," Zip said after we all had had breakfast the next morning.

"Like that mountain just there?" I asked, pointing. I mean, it was a huge mountain, we couldn't be more than half a day's walk from it.

"Luke, why didn't you say that half an hour ago?" Tim asked.

"What? I thought you had all noticed it!" I protested. "I mean, it's not like it's hard to miss."

"There's no time to waste," Zip said, cutting off any reply that Tim might have made. "The last thing we want is to waste time, because the more we muck around, the more people die to the monsters."

"Oh yeah, forgot about that," Jade muttered.

We didn't have much to pack up, so we left pretty much straight away. I found myself continually looking for Fury and Wolf, but of course, they weren't here. Like I had guessed, it took us about half of the day to walk to the base of the mountain, which became bigger and bigger the longer we walked to it. The forest cleared as we neared the base of the mountain and when we finally left the trees, a massive set of double doors came into view, so big that I wondered how we didn't see it before. It was made of a dark brown wood, with brass handles longer than my arm. Crowning the top of the doors were the words 'THE CENTRE', just to clarify where exactly we were.

"Wait," I said, suddenly realising something. "Does it mean 'the centre' as in the centre of the world?"

Zip shrugged. "Probably. Not sure how that works, but it makes sense if it is."

"I don't like the sound of those words," Alex mumbled. His ankle had been completely fine when we woke up the next morning, but he didn't know why and the rest of us were as clueless as he was.

I glanced back at the door and realised that I had missed words that were inlaid in brass in the middle of the doors. It seemed to be a poem of some kind.

Enter in those pure of heart
And with care, ye shall depart
Beware those with an evil thought
Lest your journey come to naught

"Oh yeah, that's super cheery," I agreed.

"Well, we have no choice," Zip said. "We're here to make the potion that will stop the monsters from being super strong."

She went up to one of the doors and pushed on the brass handle. The door opened, eerily silent for something so large that hadn't seemed to have been opened for the last several years, given the spiderwebs around it and the rust on the hinges. The room beyond it was dark. Zip slipped in the partly-opened door first. Tim followed her, then Alex, then Jade, and I came in last. I paused for a moment at the door, looking behind me at the silent forest. I suddenly had a very, very bad feeling. It must have been the fact that the door opened so silently, or that the interior was dark and that we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I turned away from the door and joined my friends, who were standing in a slight huddle, looking around at the black room.

"If we could see what the heck we were doing, that would be great," Tim muttered.

As if the room that we were in had heard him, a soft blue light appeared from several metres in front of us. Instantly, the light shot up, leaving trails behind it and then it exploded into dozens of bright, multi-coloured lights, illuminating the massive room that we had stumbled into. The lights came from a central column that glowed with an inner glow. My head flicked from my left to my right. Rows upon rows of shelves were standing, packing the room, each with thousands of small, rounded bottles lined up on it. As I watched, more bottles appeared out of thin air while others disappeared like they had never existed. Some of the bottles were glowing brighter than others.