The Complete Elementia Chronicles: Quest for Justice; The New Order; The Dusk of Hope; Herobrine’s Message. Sean Wolfe Fay
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Take a breath, now. Take another.
Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return.
Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity,
in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are.
Your body touching the universe again at every point,
as though you were separate things.
As though we were separate things.
Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change …
Sometimes the player thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from one hundred and fifty million kilometres away.
Sometimes the player dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat and infinite. The sun was a square of white. The days were short; there was much to do; and death was a temporary inconvenience …
And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees …
and the universe said I love you
and the universe said you have played the game well
and the universe said everything you need is within you
and the universe said you are stronger than you know
and the universe said you are the daylight
and the universe said you are the night
and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you
and the universe said the light you seek is within you
and the universe said you are not alone
and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing
and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself,
talking to itself, reading its own code
and the universe said I love you because you are love.
And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, and dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
You are the player.
Wake up.
And Stan did wake up. He found himself standing on the warm, familiar ground of Spawnpoint Hill as gently as his entry into the End had been. He was in a stupor, filled with awe at what the Enlightenment had turned out to be. Perhaps this was what had made him oblivious to the blunt spikes that were attempting to penetrate his diamond armour.
“Get down!” screamed Kat, snapping Stan out of his pensive state, and Stan realized with horror that they were under heavy fire from arrows. He fell to the ground, and he looked up wildly and saw four dispensers surrounding him, firing arrows from all sides. Stan’s eyes went from the dispensers to the trails of glowing red dust leading to them, and he realized with a start that he and his four friends were lying atop a stone pressure plate.
Quick as a whip, Charlie drove his pickaxe into the smooth stone plate, which shattered into chunks. Instantly, the bursts of arrows from the machine subsided. The players and Oob awkwardly stood up in the limited space between the arrow dispensers. As they worked their way out of the centre of the small maze of machines, Stan realized the purpose behind the arrow machines and was revolted. The machine had been put there by the King to instantly kill anything that appeared there! Had the players not been wearing diamond armour, they would have been murdered on the spot.
After Charlie had torn down the arrow machine with his pickaxe, the five of them quickly congregated. Stan wasn’t really focused on the others, though. He took the opportunity to look around Spawnpoint Hill, which he was standing on for the first time since he had joined the game.
Stan shook his head in incredulity. The serene hill was not changed in the least from the scene that had been Stan’s first impression of Minecraft. Actually, that wasn’t right, Stan thought as his eyes drifted over to the section of bare dirt blocks where the dispensers had stood minutes before and which had not yet been re-covered with grass. These dispensers demonstrated the change that had taken place within Elementia much more than any large structure ever could. Stan’s first moments in Minecraft had been met with the warm, comforting light of torches to ward off the mobs and a chest of food, a tool of defence, and a guide on how to play. Any players that had entered Elementia since then had seen nothing except arrows to the cranium.
Now that they were but a stone’s throw from launching their attack on the King, Stan took a moment to think about it. He realized that what had once seemed like a crazy, whimsical desire had manifested itself within his very being and had evolved into a crazy, consuming obsession. Stan wanted the King dead, and for the first time, a new realization crashed over him as he stared at that simple uncovered dirt: he wanted to do it himself.
Stan wanted to be the one to personally smite the King with a sword, bury an axe into him, end his life with an arrow. By whatever manner the King was destined to die, Stan wanted the blood to stain his hands. Stan’s time in Elementia so far had been pockmarked by so much death, destruction and misery that Stan wanted nothing more than to be the one to end the person responsible, no matter what the cost.
The odd thing was, even though Stan wanted to kill the King with every fibre of his being, he somehow knew that even if he did not seek the confrontation, it would inevitably happen anyway. Stan couldn’t tell how he knew this. Maybe it was the higher power of dubious existence contacting him again, but Stan knew that, like it or not, he and King Kev were going to lock sword and axe on the battlefield, and only one of them was leaving that confrontation alive.
Stan was so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t even realized that they had started walking back down the road, still shaded by trees in the same manner as on that first day. He smiled СКАЧАТЬ