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There’s always a calm before the storm.
—
The Deep End was like nothing Ides had ever seen before.
It wasn’t really somewhere the Players went. He wasn’t even sure Players were meant to be there! She’d heard the stories - of Watchers, towers, fields of Void thousands of blocks wide. He definitely wasn’t meant to be there.
But here she was, staring wide-eyed at the chorus plant that stretched taller than any he’d ever seen before, and all the thoughts of turning back left her mind. Even the Void seemed… brighter, more stars twinkling in it than any End he’d travelled in. She wondered if he’d permadie if she fell into it.
Better to not find out, he figured.
Pulling a stack of cobble out from her inventory, Ides marked her entrypoint and started in a random direction.
—
All that glimmers isn’t gold.
—
It had been days.
No one warned Ides that the Deep End would be maddening. Dangerous, yes; a bad idea to visit, yes; but not this. This monotony, this confusion, not knowing where he was or where she was going. He’d been marking his path with cobble, but somewhere along the line the link must’ve been broken and she got lost. No coordinates in this dimension, no path back to his entrypoint, and no escape plan. Great.
It really didn’t help that everywhere looked the same. There’d been landmarks in a few places along his path - at one point she’d seen a Watcher tower in the distance, although he’d skirted past it to avoid their wrath - but other than that… everything was just towering chorus fruits (some a hundred blocks tall, or more!), endstone islands, and dark, glimmering Void that seemed to reach up the sides of the islands and stain the Endstone.
How much longer could she last here?
—
It only takes one mistake to lose everything.
—
Hunger.
Deep, frothing hunger. That was all Ides could feel. It clouded his brain, clawed at her stomach, made his reasoning bad and her coordination worse. Where was the path home? Would he die here, hungry and alone?
Bridging over a gap between islands, the hunger taking up all of her brainpower, Ides didn’t notice the spots in his vision until it was too late, and her unconscious body crumpled into the Void.
—
The light at the end of the tunnel is sometimes the train.
—
[DO YOU HEAR ME?]
Ides cracked his eyes open, a dark film over her vision as he squinted at the ever-bright stars that glittered and swirled around her body. Tendrils of the deepest black were fixed around his legs as she floated in Void, although he felt nothing.
[PLAYER.]
What was that? Some voice, piercing through the Void? A trick of her mind?
[PLAYER, LISTEN TO ME. WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME.]
“Who are you?” Ides called out, voice barely travelling as thick clouds of blackness gathered around him.
[YOUR SAVIOUR.]
And suddenly, as if by magic, she was standing up, his weak muscles almost failing her. An invisible floor held some of the dark cloud back, supporting him as she regained his strength and the tendrils around her legs were cut away by an invisible force.
[ RUN. ]
Without a second thought, Ides was running faster than he’d ever ran in his life, sprinting across the invisible floor keeping the Void at bay. As she ran he felt black tendrils try to grab his legs, clawing at her flesh, but every time an invisible hand pulled them back, dissolving them back into the Void they belonged to.
[IT’S TIME TO ENTER A WORLD, PLAYER.]
What world? The one he came from originally?
[NO. A NEW WORLD.]
Did she have a choice?
[NO.]
A door appeared in the Void, tinted red and yellow and green, and he wasted no time sprinting towards it. She didn’t want to stay here; didn’t want to be claimed by the Void’s greedy hands for the rest of time.
As Ides opened the portal-door and stepped through, his vision went black, and her mind went blank.