Okay, we've waited long enough. First of all, if you haven't read the first book, I'd advise reading that before you even think about starting this one; otherwise you'll have no idea what's going on.
One month later
“Put that stupid pamphlet away!” Karion snarled at the skeleton who was reading the death toll. He pressed a hand-paw to his forehead and groaned. He didn’t want a numerical reminder of his failure.
“Oh-okay,” said the nervous skeleton, who rolled up the papers and stowed them in his inventory. “I just figured that since it’s been a month now, you’d be ready to hear it--”
“Well, I’m not.” The Enderman leveled a sharp glare at him. “I’m just not.”
The skeleton nodded sadly and left the room, just one part of an underground stronghold. On his way back to the main chamber, he passed by dozens of other mobs recovering from the battle. A Blaze missing a few rods waved a cheerless hello to him; a nurse spider helped wind a bandage around a creeper’s mangled leg; a Wither skeleton hobbled past, leaning on a crutch; a zombie pulled arrows and broken pieces of spears out of a large slime’s goop.
He came to the main chamber, a large stone room that had once been an Ender portal room. The portal was incomplete, with only three of the required twelve Ender-eyes shoved into the slots. In front of the portal, there was a slab of bumpy cobblestone serving as a pathetic table. The survivors were gathered around it, slumped in their seats. They looked tired, depressed, and thoroughly unprepared for action.
Joel perked up only a little when the skeleton returned. “Is Karion coming over for the meeting?”
“No. He’d rather sulk in his room.”
“Oh. Well, thanks anyway.”
The skeleton nodded and left.
“Well, we’ve failed,” James began grimly. “We got pounded. We’ve solved nothing.”
“We lost so many,” Joel set his chin in his hands. “Beans, Isaac, Elizabeth, Nimbus...” He looked over at Willow. The she-creeper started to cry all over again when he mentioned her mate among the list of the dead. Dew snuggled up to his mother, trying to comfort her.
“It’s anyone’s guess as to how long it will take the humans to find our base,” Theophilus added, adjusting his goggles. “Do we even have a plan?”
“No,” Joel grumbled. “That was up to Karion, but all he’s been doing for the past two months is wallowing in his room. He won’t even talk to me. He’s been just a cranky cuss ever since we got here.”
“You have to understand, Joel,” Theophilus admonished, “that this has been quite tough on Karion. He blames himself for what happened. The poor fellow feels responsible for all of this.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Joel responded, rolling a pencil over the uneven stones, “but I wish he would snap out of it. It’s kind of disturbing to see him so...un-confident.”
“Un-confident?”
“It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to try.”
----
Karion paced restlessly on the stone floor of his room. It was a part of the stronghold that had once been a block of prison cells, but now it was cleaned out to make proper habitation. He had an extra-long bed to sleep in, a desk, and a furnace, but that was it for furnishings. He didn’t need a special room. He didn’t want one, either.
The Enderman sat on the edge of the bed. This is all my fault. If it wasn’t for me, they would all right. Duressed, yes. But at least they would be alive.
He rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Immediately, a flashback of the ill-fated battle overtook his mind. He could still hear the tortured shrieks, could still see the buildings collapsing into flaming rubble, could still smell the smoke and ash!
“Argh!” he shouted, grabbing the pillow and throwing it across the room in anguish. He sucked in and exhaled a wobbly breath. Then he remembered.
----
“Wake up! Wake up!” a soft yet urgent voice rang in his ears. Karion could feel someone tugging at his arm. He cracked his eyes open with some effort, his vision blurred and his head pounding like a timpani. A pair of deep purple eyes, like gleaming amethysts, stared back at him. A concerned Ayva was struggling to pull him to his feet. “Hughh...wha?” Karion mumbled and sat up. “Ayva?” Avya nodded. “Yeah...Yeah.” Karion looked around. The last few of the fires smoldered in the corners of the ruined lobby. The charred remains of what had once been the wooden balcony took up most of the room, with thousands of glass shards from the shattered chandeliers scattered over them. Everything in the lobby was broken, burned, or otherwise destroyed. “Come on. We have to get out of here.” Ayva helped Karion to his feet. “Where are the others?” he asked. “I saw some of them escape.” A stab of guilt twisted in his gut. “Just some?” “Let’s deal with that later.” Ayva leapt nimbly over the rubble, with Karion following. Sometimes running and sometimes teleporting, the two Enderpeople made a harried retreat out of the ruins of Abendale.
----
“What a disaster,” Lieutenant Benny lamented, wiping his eye. He and a small company of soldiers stood on a hill overlooking the charred ruins of Abendale. They had won the battle, but at the price of their city. Survivors of the armageddon were making camp on the rubbish fields outside the walls.
“Let’s go down by the tent village,” a soldier named Keith suggested. “See if we can help the survivors at all. At the very least, we can make them feel protected.”
Benny nodded. “Good idea. Let’s go.”
The soldiers didn’t bother to march. They simply walked, as a group, in their battered armour and without their weapons, down the grassy hill to the encampment. It was a homely cluster of makeshift tents and shanties thrown together out of salvage. People looked up at the approaching knights with turgid gazes, not sure how to feel about their arrival. As Ben and his men passed quietly through the camp, past endless tired and frightened faces, they noticed one thing. Or rather, one thing that was missing.
Not a single fire pit had been dug in the entire camp.
----
“Aw, man, look at the place,” Steve rumbled sadly. He sat with his legs dangling off the edge on the ledge of the roof on his new house, overlooking the ashy ruins of Abendale. “Tragic.”
In the ensuing chaos following the city’s destruction, groups of survivors had fled blindly and ran into the surrounding wilderness, with little more supplies than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a tool or two, and even less survival knowledge. These amateurish rogues had transformed from innocent citizens trying to scrape by into shameless thieves and vandals.
Steve had returned home from a mining trip one night to find his house decimated. It had been looted, picked clean of all valuable resources, and then the structure of the building itself chipped down to shambles so the raiders could build their own shacks. Although angry, Steve wisely decided to not start a fruitless mission to track down whoever had done it and give them what for. His slate of progress had been wiped clean by disaster more times than he could count, (although it was true he couldn’t count very high...math wasn’t his strong suit) forcing him to start fresh.
Despite the loss, Steve didn’t see much to complain about. He still had everything he took with him on the trip--his diamond sword and pickaxe, a set of iron tools, plenty of torches, cobblestone, and wood, and all that other wherewithal the typical player carries. And most importantly, he still had faithful old Tundra.
With Tundra at his side, he’d traveled westward away from the ruins until he came to the brink of the Western Woodlands. It was there that he built a small wooden cabin from the local oak and birch trees. It had a cobblestone foundation, oaken walls, big oak logs for main support beams, and birch for the floors and roof. It was perhaps a bit homely, but it was a definite improvement over the architectural disaster that had been his old house.
----
In the forest,The forest far away,Something is rising.It waits for its day.
“So no-one has any ideas? At all?” Joel was frustrated that a month later, all anyone could do was mope. “We have to do something.” He slid down into his seat and glanced round the room, where the other ringleaders were sitting at the meeting table.
“According to our calculations,” Theophilus began, flipping through a notebook, “we have lost about 83.7% of our army in the battle. Our original hideout was destroyed as well, quite likely irreparably, and that’s not to mention that the humans have probably already dispatched a sizeable squad of soldiers to find us, which will definitely eliminate the possibility of openly traveling overland. We would have to find a way to quickly replenish our troops before they can locate our current hiding-place.”
“Gee, thanks for the pep talk,” Joel grumbled to the spider.
“I was just trying to be realistic.”
“Uh, hey…” Ayva piped up. “I think I might have an idea.”
Instantly all eyes were on her. “Tell us, tell us!”
“Well, when I was a little girl, the elders would tell us some stories,” she began, squirming in her seat uncomfortably from being in the spotlight, “stories about another dimension--”
“We don’t need stories! We need facts!” Nicodemus cut in.
James stopped him. “Quiet, creepy crawly. We don’t have any other options.”
“The elders talked about a fourth dimension. Not the Overworld, not the Nether, not the End--something entirely new.”
“Keep talkin’,” Joel encouraged her.
“They said it was an endless forest locked in eternal gloaming, populated by all sorts of unknown animals. Things we’ve never seen before--little horses with tree branches growing out of their heads...rabbits with tiny ears and big bushy tails...huge wolves…skeleton wizards...”
“You’re spewing nonsense,” Nicodemus grumbled. James shot him a dirty look.
“How does one reach this fourth dimension?” Joel inquired, pencil poised over a sheet of paper before him on the table.
“They said...they said…” Ayva faltered. “I forgot how they said the portal is made. But I think...I think there was one hidden somewhere here in the Overworld. Probably in some secretive, mystical place.”
“Secretive, mystical places,” James echoed to the others. “Possible candidates, anyone?”
----
Karion was lying with his back on his bed, the upper half of his torso propped against the wall, and reading his Federalist Papers. The book had gotten slightly damaged in the battle, but it was still readable. He was in the middle of a particularly profound argument by Mr. Hamilton when someone knocked softly on his door.
He sighed. “Sure, come in.”
The door creaked open and Ayva stepped into the room. For the first time in days, Karion allowed himself a little smile.
“So we had another meeting,” she began.
“Do they have a plan this time?” he inquired, stowing his book back in his inventory.
“Sort of. We’re going to the Twilight Forest.”
Karion fairly fell off the bed and scrambled un-gracefully to his feet. “The Twilight Forest? I thought that place was just a myth!”
Ayva shifted from foot to foot. “Um...I’m actually not sure if it’s really real or not.” She sighed. “I thought that maybe if we had a little idea thrown out there, they would stop wallowing. Stories by the elders--they’re not always true, you know.”
Karion stopped to think. He would have been miffed at anyone else for building up false hopes, but for some reason he just could not be angry at Ayva. And what if they weren’t false hopes? At a time like this, they had to jump for even a small possibility--they didn’t have anything else.
“Do we lie, Ayva?” he asked cryptically.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do we lie?” he repeated. “Us Endermen, do we lie?”
“I-I suppose not. After all, my mama and papa told my siblings and I to always tell the truth. And the whole truth, too.”
He smirked knowingly at her. “So why should our elders be any different?”
A sweet smile crossed Ayva’s lips. “Yeah...You’re right.”
“Come on,” he said, walking over to the door. “Let’s find the library. If any place is going to have a book on the Twilight Forest, it will be a musty old library in a stronghold.”
----
“Thanks for helping us get these tents set up,” a baker who had introduced himself as Phil said to Benny and his men. “Do you think we should even try rebuilding Abendale?”
“I couldn’t say,” Benny replied, helping the baker’s little daughter lace up her boots. After her footwear was securely laced, he stood up and panned a hand at the blackened rubble that had one been a grand city. “It seems too far gone.”
“I guess you’re right,” Phil sighed.
“Papa!” the little girl complained, tugging on the bottom hem of his apron. “I’m hungry.”
“We’re all hungry!” a soldier whined to Benny. All of the soldiers, except for a few high-ranking men, had shed their armour and were now walking around comfortably in their tabards and tunics. Those who had kept on their armour stood guard, posted at strategic places around the perimeter of the camp.
“Okay, okay,” Benny soothed, trying to keep everyone calm. “I have some raw porkchops in my inventory, and I’m sure a couple people around here have bread and maybe some carrots. I can get the chops roasted up all nice once I get a fire going--”
“NO!” the people cried. “No fire!”
Benny’s hands shot up defensively. “Woah! Cool your jets, folks! It’s just a little cooking fire--”
“NO FIRE!”
“Why not?”
“NO FIRE!”
“Okay, okay, no fire! I guess we’ll just eat the bread and carrots, then.”
“That’s fine!”
Benny nodded to his men, who took the bread and carrots from the people offering it to them, and distributed them evenly to the people. Everyone got a slice of bread and half a carrot.
The lieutenant sat a few paces away from the bulk of the group, next to his friend Keith. “What the heck? I just said I was going to make a little cooking fire, and they went crazy!”
Kevin shrugged. “I think I know why they might’ve reacted that way.”
“Why’s that?”
“Given what these people have been through, I’m sure another fire is the last thing they want to have in their camp.”
----
“I don’t understand what happened,” Alex said, talking absentmindedly to her cat, Lucy. “One minute we’re being thrown out of a big mountain, the next we’re running away from a flaming city. Then I go back to my house and what d’you know, the raiders got it! Picked the place clean. They left just two stinkin’ fish and a half-broken iron pickaxe. Jerks!”
Lucy meowed from atop a bookcase, gazing at Alex with a wise look in her crystal blue eyes. The pretty Siamese cat then licked her delicate paw and jammed it in her ear to clean it.
“So then, I had to hightail it out of there before I got mugged or robbed or something,” Alex continued, filling in the silence with her grievances while she stuck the finishing jungle plank blocks in place for the floor of her tree-house. “I snitched a horse from someone--hey, they steal from me, I steal from them--and rode down here. It seemed like a nice enough place, and don’t forget the cocoa beans. Chocolate! I decided that a tree-house would be the best shelter. That way, the mobs can’t get me. And then I saw an ocelot stalking around nearby, and I thought, ‘Hey, an ocelot. I think I’ll tame it.’ And that’s how I found you.”
Lucy stared at Alex. She meowed again and jumped off the bookcase, then leapt nimbly onto the bed and curled up comfortably for a nap. She looked like a furry cinnamon roll placed on the plush red blanket.
----
You will find me Between the wings. You will find me Where the summer grass sings.
One month later
“Put that stupid pamphlet away!” Karion snarled at the skeleton who was reading the death toll. He pressed a hand-paw to his forehead and groaned. He didn’t want a numerical reminder of his failure.
“Oh-okay,” said the nervous skeleton, who rolled up the papers and stowed them in his inventory. “I just figured that since it’s been a month now, you’d be ready to hear it--”
“Well, I’m not.” The Enderman leveled a sharp glare at him. “I’m just not.”
The skeleton nodded sadly and left the room, just one part of an underground stronghold. On his way back to the main chamber, he passed by dozens of other mobs recovering from the battle. A Blaze missing a few rods waved a cheerless hello to him; a nurse spider helped wind a bandage around a creeper’s mangled leg; a Wither skeleton hobbled past, leaning on a crutch; a zombie pulled arrows and broken pieces of spears out of a large slime’s goop.
He came to the main chamber, a large stone room that had once been an Ender portal room. The portal was incomplete, with only three of the required twelve Ender-eyes shoved into the slots. In front of the portal, there was a slab of bumpy cobblestone serving as a pathetic table. The survivors were gathered around it, slumped in their seats. They looked tired, depressed, and thoroughly unprepared for action.
Joel perked up only a little when the skeleton returned. “Is Karion coming over for the meeting?”
“No. He’d rather sulk in his room.”
“Oh. Well, thanks anyway.”
The skeleton nodded and left.
“Well, we’ve failed,” James began grimly. “We got pounded. We’ve solved nothing.”
“We lost so many,” Joel set his chin in his hands. “Beans, Isaac, Elizabeth, Nimbus...” He looked over at Willow. The she-creeper started to cry all over again when he mentioned her mate among the list of the dead. Dew snuggled up to his mother, trying to comfort her.
“It’s anyone’s guess as to how long it will take the humans to find our base,” Theophilus added, adjusting his goggles. “Do we even have a plan?”
“No,” Joel grumbled. “That was up to Karion, but all he’s been doing for the past two months is wallowing in his room. He won’t even talk to me. He’s been just a cranky cuss ever since we got here.”
“You have to understand, Joel,” Theophilus admonished, “that this has been quite tough on Karion. He blames himself for what happened. The poor fellow feels responsible for all of this.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Joel responded, rolling a pencil over the uneven stones, “but I wish he would snap out of it. It’s kind of disturbing to see him so...un-confident.”
“Un-confident?”
“It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to try.”
----
Karion paced restlessly on the stone floor of his room. It was a part of the stronghold that had once been a block of prison cells, but now it was cleaned out to make proper habitation. He had an extra-long bed to sleep in, a desk, and a furnace, but that was it for furnishings. He didn’t need a special room. He didn’t want one, either.
The Enderman sat on the edge of the bed. This is all my fault. If it wasn’t for me, they would all right. Duressed, yes. But at least they would be alive.
He rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Immediately, a flashback of the ill-fated battle overtook his mind. He could still hear the tortured shrieks, could still see the buildings collapsing into flaming rubble, could still smell the smoke and ash!
“Argh!” he shouted, grabbing the pillow and throwing it across the room in anguish. He sucked in and exhaled a wobbly breath. Then he remembered.
----
“Wake up! Wake up!” a soft yet urgent voice rang in his ears. Karion could feel someone tugging at his arm. He cracked his eyes open with some effort, his vision blurred and his head pounding like a timpani.
A pair of deep purple eyes, like gleaming amethysts, stared back at him. A concerned Ayva was struggling to pull him to his feet.
“Hughh...wha?” Karion mumbled and sat up. “Ayva?”
Avya nodded. “Yeah...Yeah.”
Karion looked around. The last few of the fires smoldered in the corners of the ruined lobby. The charred remains of what had once been the wooden balcony took up most of the room, with thousands of glass shards from the shattered chandeliers scattered over them. Everything in the lobby was broken, burned, or otherwise destroyed.
“Come on. We have to get out of here.” Ayva helped Karion to his feet.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
“I saw some of them escape.”
A stab of guilt twisted in his gut. “Just some?”
“Let’s deal with that later.” Ayva leapt nimbly over the rubble, with Karion following. Sometimes running and sometimes teleporting, the two Enderpeople made a harried retreat out of the ruins of Abendale.
----
“What a disaster,” Lieutenant Benny lamented, wiping his eye. He and a small company of soldiers stood on a hill overlooking the charred ruins of Abendale. They had won the battle, but at the price of their city. Survivors of the armageddon were making camp on the rubbish fields outside the walls.
“Let’s go down by the tent village,” a soldier named Keith suggested. “See if we can help the survivors at all. At the very least, we can make them feel protected.”
Benny nodded. “Good idea. Let’s go.”
The soldiers didn’t bother to march. They simply walked, as a group, in their battered armour and without their weapons, down the grassy hill to the encampment. It was a homely cluster of makeshift tents and shanties thrown together out of salvage. People looked up at the approaching knights with turgid gazes, not sure how to feel about their arrival. As Ben and his men passed quietly through the camp, past endless tired and frightened faces, they noticed one thing. Or rather, one thing that was missing.
Not a single fire pit had been dug in the entire camp.
----
“Aw, man, look at the place,” Steve rumbled sadly. He sat with his legs dangling off the edge on the ledge of the roof on his new house, overlooking the ashy ruins of Abendale. “Tragic.”
In the ensuing chaos following the city’s destruction, groups of survivors had fled blindly and ran into the surrounding wilderness, with little more supplies than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a tool or two, and even less survival knowledge. These amateurish rogues had transformed from innocent citizens trying to scrape by into shameless thieves and vandals.
Steve had returned home from a mining trip one night to find his house decimated. It had been looted, picked clean of all valuable resources, and then the structure of the building itself chipped down to shambles so the raiders could build their own shacks. Although angry, Steve wisely decided to not start a fruitless mission to track down whoever had done it and give them what for. His slate of progress had been wiped clean by disaster more times than he could count, (although it was true he couldn’t count very high...math wasn’t his strong suit) forcing him to start fresh.
Despite the loss, Steve didn’t see much to complain about. He still had everything he took with him on the trip--his diamond sword and pickaxe, a set of iron tools, plenty of torches, cobblestone, and wood, and all that other wherewithal the typical player carries. And most importantly, he still had faithful old Tundra.
With Tundra at his side, he’d traveled westward away from the ruins until he came to the brink of the Western Woodlands. It was there that he built a small wooden cabin from the local oak and birch trees. It had a cobblestone foundation, oaken walls, big oak logs for main support beams, and birch for the floors and roof. It was perhaps a bit homely, but it was a definite improvement over the architectural disaster that had been his old house.
----
In the forest, The forest far away, Something is rising. It waits for its day.
“So no-one has any ideas? At all?” Joel was frustrated that a month later, all anyone could do was mope. “We have to do something.” He slid down into his seat and glanced round the room, where the other ringleaders were sitting at the meeting table.
“According to our calculations,” Theophilus began, flipping through a notebook, “we have lost about 83.7% of our army in the battle. Our original hideout was destroyed as well, quite likely irreparably, and that’s not to mention that the humans have probably already dispatched a sizeable squad of soldiers to find us, which will definitely eliminate the possibility of openly traveling overland. We would have to find a way to quickly replenish our troops before they can locate our current hiding-place.”
“Gee, thanks for the pep talk,” Joel grumbled to the spider.
“I was just trying to be realistic.”
“Uh, hey…” Ayva piped up. “I think I might have an idea.” Instantly all eyes were on her. “Tell us, tell us!”
“Well, when I was a little girl, the elders would tell us some stories,” she began, squirming in her seat uncomfortably from being in the spotlight, “stories about another dimension--” “We don’t need stories! We need facts!” Nicodemus cut in.
James stopped him. “Quiet, creepy crawly. We don’t have any other options.”
“The elders talked about a fourth dimension. Not the Overworld, not the Nether, not the End--something entirely new.”
“Keep talkin’,” Joel encouraged her.
“They said it was an endless forest locked in eternal gloaming, populated by all sorts of unknown animals. Things we’ve never seen before--little horses with tree branches growing out of their heads...rabbits with tiny ears and big bushy tails...huge wolves…skeleton wizards...”
“You’re spewing nonsense,” Nicodemus grumbled. James shot him a dirty look.
“How does one reach this fourth dimension?” Joel inquired, pencil poised over a sheet of paper before him on the table.
“They said...they said…” Ayva faltered. “I forgot how they said the portal is made. But I think...I think there was one hidden somewhere here in the Overworld. Probably in some secretive, mystical place.”
“Secretive, mystical places,” James echoed to the others. “Possible candidates, anyone?”
----
Karion was lying with his back on his bed, the upper half of his torso propped against the wall, and reading his Federalist Papers. The book had gotten slightly damaged in the battle, but it was still readable. He was in the middle of a particularly profound argument by Mr. Hamilton when someone knocked softly on his door.
He sighed. “Sure, come in.”
The door creaked open and Ayva stepped into the room. For the first time in days, Karion allowed himself a little smile. “So we had another meeting,” she began.
“Do they have a plan this time?” he inquired, stowing his book back in his inventory.
“Sort of. We’re going to the Twilight Forest.”
Karion fairly fell off the bed and scrambled un-gracefully to his feet. “The Twilight Forest? I thought that place was just a myth!”
Ayva shifted from foot to foot. “Um...I’m actually not sure if it’s really real or not.” She sighed. “I thought that maybe if we had a little idea thrown out there, they would stop wallowing. Stories by the elders--they’re not always true, you know.”
Karion stopped to think. He would have been miffed at anyone else for building up false hopes, but for some reason he just could not be angry at Ayva. And what if they weren’t false hopes? At a time like this, they had to jump for even a small possibility--they didn’t have anything else.
“Do we lie, Ayva?” he asked cryptically.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do we lie?” he repeated. “Us Endermen, do we lie?”
“I-I suppose not. After all, my mama and papa told my siblings and I to always tell the truth. And the whole truth, too.” He smirked knowingly at her. “So why should our elders be any different?”
A sweet smile crossed Ayva’s lips. “Yeah...You’re right.”
“Come on,” he said, walking over to the door. “Let’s find the library. If any place is going to have a book on the Twilight Forest, it will be a musty old library in a stronghold.”
----
“Thanks for helping us get these tents set up,” a baker who had introduced himself as Phil said to Benny and his men. “Do you think we should even try rebuilding Abendale?”
“I couldn’t say,” Benny replied, helping the baker’s little daughter lace up her boots. After her footwear was securely laced, he stood up and panned a hand at the blackened rubble that had one been a grand city. “It seems too far gone.”
“I guess you’re right,” Phil sighed.
“Papa!” the little girl complained, tugging on the bottom hem of his apron. “I’m hungry.”
“We’re all hungry!” a soldier whined to Benny. All of the soldiers, except for a few high-ranking men, had shed their armour and were now walking around comfortably in their tabards and tunics. Those who had kept on their armour stood guard, posted at strategic places around the perimeter of the camp.
“Okay, okay,” Benny soothed, trying to keep everyone calm. “I have some raw porkchops in my inventory, and I’m sure a couple people around here have bread and maybe some carrots. I can get the chops roasted up all nice once I get a fire going--”
“NO!” the people cried. “No fire!”
Benny’s hands shot up defensively. “Woah! Cool your jets, folks! It’s just a little cooking fire--”
“NO FIRE!”
“Why not?”
“NO FIRE!”
“Okay, okay, no fire! I guess we’ll just eat the bread and carrots, then.”
“That’s fine!”
Benny nodded to his men, who took the bread and carrots from the people offering it to them, and distributed them evenly to the people. Everyone got a slice of bread and half a carrot.
The lieutenant sat a few paces away from the bulk of the group, next to his friend Keith. “What the heck? I just said I was going to make a little cooking fire, and they went crazy!”
Kevin shrugged. “I think I know why they might’ve reacted that way.”
“Why’s that?”
“Given what these people have been through, I’m sure another fire is the last thing they want to have in their camp.”
----
“I don’t understand what happened,” Alex said, talking absentmindedly to her cat, Lucy. “One minute we’re being thrown out of a big mountain, the next we’re running away from a flaming city. Then I go back to my house and what d’you know, the raiders got it! Picked the place clean. They left just two stinkin’ fish and a half-broken iron pickaxe. Jerks!”
Lucy meowed from atop a bookcase, gazing at Alex with a wise look in her crystal blue eyes. The pretty Siamese cat then licked her delicate paw and jammed it in her ear to clean it.
“So then, I had to hightail it out of there before I got mugged or robbed or something,” Alex continued, filling in the silence with her grievances while she stuck the finishing jungle plank blocks in place for the floor of her tree-house. “I snitched a horse from someone--hey, they steal from me, I steal from them--and rode down here. It seemed like a nice enough place, and don’t forget the cocoa beans. Chocolate! I decided that a tree-house would be the best shelter. That way, the mobs can’t get me. And then I saw an ocelot stalking around nearby, and I thought, ‘Hey, an ocelot. I think I’ll tame it.’ And that’s how I found you.”
Lucy stared at Alex. She meowed again and jumped off the bookcase, then leapt nimbly onto the bed and curled up comfortably for a nap. She looked like a furry cinnamon roll placed on the plush red blanket.
---- You will find me
Between the wings.
You will find me
Where the summer grass sings.
<<Antidisestablishmentarianism!>>
Insulting people for their beliefs is not a good way of convincing them to adopt yours.
Fiction is just a game of make-believe recorded on paper or film. But that's what makes it so great.
Hipster Jesus liked you before you were cool.
Pretty good!
اكتب الإساءة على الرمل و انحت المعروف على الصخر
"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble"
Update time! Chapter 2 is now out.
Insulting people for their beliefs is not a good way of convincing them to adopt yours.
Fiction is just a game of make-believe recorded on paper or film. But that's what makes it so great.
Hipster Jesus liked you before you were cool.