Minecraft Dungeons

by Matt Forbeck

  Yes. A castle fit for one who will rule all the lands. A place where you will be safe—and from which you can launch your armies.

  “Exactly! It will be the most glorious building this world has ever seen!”

  Such a proud structure needs an equally amazing name.

  “Right! Something to tell people who hear the name that they would be fools to come near it.” Archie racked his brain but couldn’t think of anything appropriate. He’d lived his entire life in and out of Illager mansions, but all of them stacked on top of one another wouldn’t measure up to the place they were building.

  Highblock Keep.

  At this point, Archie wasn’t sure if he or the Orb had come up with the name. He only knew for sure that it fit perfectly, and he wasn’t interested in exploring that question further.

  Soon enough his plans came to fruition, and the structure itself was complete. It would take him time to furnish the place fully, but now he could finally move into it at least.

  Welcome home.

  Archie walked up the long, wide steps to Highblock Keep, which had been carved from the mountain’s living stone. The scale of the place took his breath away. He’d never seen any structure so gigantic in all his days. And it was all his.

  Although they had just built the place, in Archie’s mind the keep didn’t seem fresh and new. Instead, it felt like it had been there forever, waiting to be rediscovered, like a gorgeous statue hidden inside a flawless block of marble. Archie and the Orb hadn’t built it but revealed it.

  Enter and take possession.

  As Archie topped the stairs, he found himself staring across a deep chasm at a gigantic gate, taller and wider even than the doors that had led him into the hollow mountain. He didn’t see a way to get across the massive gap, which seemed wide enough that only a bird could ever cross it.

  For a long moment, Archie didn’t know what to do. Had he actually designed a home he couldn’t get into? Then the voice of the Orb of Dominance echoed in his head once more.

  I can help you with that.

  Archie slapped himself on his wide forehead and chuckled. Of course. He had the power in his hand. He only needed to use it.

  He held the staff up high once again and thought of a bridge. Large chunks of wood leaped up from the surrounding terrain and fastened themselves to the ledge on the far side of the gap, one at a time. As he watched, they continued to rise up and attach themselves to the edge of that wooden peninsula, growing closer and closer to him with every second.

  Soon, the peninsula reached the near end of the gap and finished up. It had formed a wooden drawbridge across the wide-open air. Still, it didn’t seem finished.

  After a moment’s pondering, Archie waved the staff again, and this time gigantic chains leaped from the corners of the bridge near him and stretched all the way to holes that formed in the highest corners of the gate on the far side of the gap. With these, the drawbridge could be hauled up, cutting off the remainder of Highblock Keep from the rest of the lands beyond, keeping whoever might be inside absolutely safe.

  Archie didn’t quite understand how a drawbridge worked, or how to design the mechanisms that would allow it to be raised, but the Orb took care of all that. It reassured him without any words at all, and he felt comforted that whatever he was doing there in Highblock Keep, it was perfectly right.

  Thus fortified, Archie marched straight across the drawbridge with a confidence he had never felt before. When he reached the far end, the gate rose open before him, and he entered Highblock Keep proper.

  Inside the keep’s gargantuan walls, Archie began to explore. It was one thing to design a place and something entirely different to walk through it—especially a place as large and complex as this. Whenever he was unsure of which way to go, the Orb prodded him in one direction or another, and he learned to trust its instincts as if they were his own.

  The place was massive, like it had been built for people much larger than the little Illager. Despite how imposing it was, he felt perfectly at home there. There was no need to measure up, as it all fit him perfectly.

  At some point beyond the gate, a large, wide, stone bridge led from the front section of Highblock Keep over an open section of the sea. From there, it crossed to a mountainous island that seemed like it had been formed by a volcanic eruption that had frozen all of the lava in place while it blackened into the hardest stone.

  The Obsidian Pinnacle, on which sits this section of the larger keep. This too is all yours. The start of your empire.

  A wild grin formed on Archie’s face, and he felt grateful no one else was around to see him. If they had been, they might have thought him insane.

  As Archie strolled about, the redstone golems followed in his wake. The thrumming of their heavy footsteps comforted him, but he decided it was time to show them to their new chambers. He led them into a large, underground room that they had carved out back when they’d started the keep’s construction. Like most of the place, it had ceilings so high that even they could move freely in the chamber without fear of scraping their heads.

  Archie raised his staff high, and the Orb of Dominance illuminated the entire chamber. “Here you are, my redstone golems!” Archie shouted. “Welcome to your home!”

  As the redstone golems settled into their places, Archie took a moment to marvel at them and the power they represented. Even just the six of them amounted to the most impressive fighting force he’d ever seen. His wildest ambitions had never stretched even this far, and now it seemed that they were only at the cusp of what he could manage to conquer with the Orb.

  His rise was only beginning.

  “What else?” Archie asked when he could finally catch his breath. “What else could the world possibly have for me?”

  All of it. The entire world can be yours. You only have to take it.

  That thought sobered Archie up. He hadn’t thought of himself as a thief as much as a pillager. Among the Illagers, the penalty for stealing from fellow Illagers was stiff, and Walda meted out justice without mercy.

  You are not stealing anything. You are claiming what is rightfully yours.

  Archie didn’t understand that at all. How could the rest of the world be his? To be honest, he didn’t quite understand how the Orb of Dominance and Highblock Keep had come to be his, other than out of sheer luck that befell someone wandering in lonely parts of the world where he didn’t belong.

  You were not chosen by coincidence. This is your fate.

  The Orb had said that before, but still, this confused Archie even more. Being picked by random chance at least made some sense to him. He’d been driven to the hollow mountain out of desperation, and he understood how few others would come this way without Undead mobs at their back.

  Then Archie realized something that caused him to stop breathing for a minute. Perhaps the mobs hadn’t been chasing him the way he’d thought. Maybe they’d been herding him instead.

  That would explain why they never caught up with him. Why none of them had seriously harmed him throughout his terrible ordeal.

  Again, Archie came up against something horrifying that he realized he didn’t want answers for. The possible explanation scared him more than the mystery, so he was content to live with it remaining unsolved.

  “Exactly how am I supposed to conquer the world?” he asked aloud instead. “I can’t just wave my staff at it and make it happen.” He hesitated. “Can I?”

  No, but with my help and that of the army we will amass, such lofty goals are within your grasp.

  Archie felt the staff tugging him upward. He returned to the stairs, leaving his redstone golems behind. They stood as he departed and watched him until he exited the room.

  He followed the staff’s pull up, up, up, moving higher and higher through the Obsidian Pinnacle until he reached the peak. There he discovered a chair carved
out of the stone for him. He hadn’t remembered including it in the place’s designs—much of those busy days now seemed like a blur—but there it was, all the same.

  As Archie neared the chair, he spotted a hole in the stone floor, right in front of the seat. It was the exact width of the staff.

  Place me in there and sit down. I will show you what you need to see.

  Archie slotted the end of the staff into the hole, and it sank down into the stone until the Orb of Dominance hovered just above the height of the chair’s seat. He hesitated to let go of it for a moment, but forced himself to relinquish his grasp. To his relief, nothing horrible happened when he did. He sat down in the chair and found the Orb hanging there in the air before him, right at his eye level.

  Peer into me. I shall provide you vision.

  Archie didn’t quite understand what the Orb meant by that, but he had learned to trust it. He opened his eyes as wide as he could and stared into the Orb’s glowing surface until his pupils shrank into tiny dots.

  Then he saw.

  The Orb’s glow faded away—at least to his eyes, which he had given over entirely to it—and a vision of the desert to the south of Highblock Keep appeared before him. This was a part of the desert he had avoided before, but he somehow knew exactly where it was located as he looked at it.

  He seemed to be looking down on the land from a great height, as if he were a bird hovering above it. Night had covered the land in a blanket of darkness broken by the light of the moon overhead. A new dawn already colored the sky to the east, but it was far from alighting on the sands below.

  Two forces met on the desert, engaged in a vicious battle. On one side, a horde of husks and skeletons streamed forth in an unending line from a massive temple carved out of sandstone. Archie had seen it from a distance when he’d skirted the edge of the desert, although not from this angle. Even so, he recognized it instantly.

  On the other side fought an Illager raiding party. Archie gasped in shock as he recognized Thord in the thick of it. His old nemesis stood on the edge of the battle, conjuring vexes—small winged creatures armed with sharp swords—to enter the fight for him. Any time a husk came close to him, he threw up his arms and summoned a line of gigantic fangs from the ground to snap up and bite the hungry mobs.

  Although Archie detested Thord, he had to admire the evoker’s skill with his spells. He seemed untouchable as far as the husks were concerned. Sadly, the same could not be said of the others in the raiding party, who were struggling to survive the husk horde.

  “Those fools!” Archie said. “They’re losing!” As he said the words, he realized that this shouldn’t have surprised him. The same thing had happened to the last raiding party he’d been in. Only he and Thord had survived, and that only by sheer luck.

  At this point, though, Archie had begun to doubt there was such a thing as luck.

  “Why are you showing me this?” Archie said, suddenly suspicious. Disgust at the raiding party’s weakness swelled up in him. He wanted nothing more than to turn away from their impending failure, but the Orb seemed to ignore his wishes.

  Because you need to see it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As Archie watched from his seat at the top of the Obsidian Pinnacle, dawn finally reached the desert where the Illager raiding party still battled the Undead mobs. The flow had cut itself off, as the Undead knew their time to fight was running out, but those who remained continued to battle the Illagers with bites and bows.

  The mobs continued to take down Illager after Illager until the sun brought their savagery to an end. They continued to fight even as they caught fire. The Illagers, for their part, turned and fled at that point, keeping the Undead from setting them ablaze as well.

  Once the Undead had been reduced to ash, the fleeing Illagers ground to a halt and collapsed. A few of them tended to their wounds. Others simply needed to catch their breath. They would survive.

  A good few of them, though, wouldn’t. They hadn’t even lasted long enough against the Undead to have the chance to flee.

  With but a thought, Archie’s viewpoint zoomed in farther. He could now see the faces of the people recovering on the sand, enjoying the moment of respite they had before the desert became unbearably hot. Among them, he spotted Thord.

  The evoker began stomping around the others, ordering them to stand up and get ready to march. They seemed to be making a push toward somewhere, although Archie could only guess where or why.

  It struck him that Thord had done the same sort of thing when Archie had been part of the raiding party, and he hadn’t understood it then either. Why would the Illagers raid the Undead mobs? They didn’t offer anything in the way of loot. There wasn’t any profit in fighting them.

  Archie had never been able to summon the guts to ask Thord the question. Most times when he had opened his mouth in the party leader’s presence, his only reward had been a smack across the back of his head. But it had never seemed to him that Thord knew why they were fighting the Undead either. He just liked fighting, and anything that let him do that was all right by him.

  Like all the rest of them, in the end, Thord had been following Walda’s orders, Archie realized. She was the one who’d know what was going on, if anyone did.

  Either way, the Illagers couldn’t attack the Undead mobs forever. There seemed to be an endless supply of husks and skeletons, and Walda would eventually run out of Illagers.

  “They need me,” Archie said.

  Yes, they do.

  “Otherwise, the Undead mobs will eventually kill them all.”

  They are your people. They can form the troops for your army.

  Army? The Orb had mentioned the idea before, but now it excited Archie more. He’d long detested fighting himself. It was dangerous, mean, and dirty, three things he hated. That was why he’d striven to avoid being part of the Illager raiding parties for so long.

  But having someone to fight on his behalf? At his orders? That intrigued him.

  Dead Illagers couldn’t fight for him though. He had no way to control them. He needed them alive.

  How could he save them? What could he do to intervene on behalf of the Illagers?

  Should he take the Orb of Dominance and march into the desert? He could likely destroy the Undead the same way he had at the entrance to the hollow mountain, but that seemed risky. He’d only fought a handful of the creatures before, not an endless horde streaming from that temple.

  You can send your redstone golems. They can fight on your behalf.

  This made sense to Archie. Although if he had the redstone golems, what did he need the Illagers for? He could just let them die.

  That thought appalled him. He’d been a part of that tribe for as long as he could remember. Even as badly as he’d been treated there, he didn’t want them all dead.

  But when it came to an army, wouldn’t the redstone golems be enough? They looked so tough, Archie couldn’t imagine what would be able to stand against them. Any one of them could step on him and squash him like a bug.

  They aren’t enough to protect Highblock Keep from a siege.

  That thought brought Archie up short. He felt safe and protected here in his new home. Who would ever lay siege to such a place?

  Had someone else once controlled the Orb? Whoever they were, they had probably controlled the redstone golems he’d found too. They might even have built the amazing creatures themselves.

  What had happened to them? Why had they abandoned their power? Had they been run off or killed? And who would be powerful enough to have beaten them?

  And would they be coming back?

  No one could ever claim me from you.

  Archie wondered how the Orb of Dominance could possibly know that for sure. Then he again decided that he didn’t want to know the answer, which was probably wrapped up in how the Orb had
fallen into his hands in the first place. Questioning his good fortune could only hurt, he thought.

  There was no point in looking back, but he could move forward. He could save his people, and he could build his army at the same time. He just needed to bring them to him.

  Archie leaped off his seat, snatched up his staff, and made his way down to the dungeons where he’d left the redstone golems. When he got there, he raised the staff high above him and said, “Arise! We have work to do!”

  The redstone golems roused themselves and stood at attention before him. He inspected them carefully. Despite how hard he’d been working them, they all seemed to be in good shape. Not that he would know any different unless they were actually falling apart.

  Archie gestured with his staff and climbed up out of the dungeon. The redstone golems followed right after him. They moved slower than he did, each of their heavy steps shaking the ground as they marched.

  Archie grew impatient with the speed they were making. At this rate, it would take them forever to reach the Illager raiding party. Still, he felt sure the redstone golems were walking as fast as they could.

  They moved up through the bowels of the Obsidian Pinnacle and made their way across the wide stone bridge to the front section of Highblock Keep. Once they crossed the drawbridge, Archie stopped and gazed back at the place. He’d only just gotten here, and he was leaving already. Would it be okay until he returned?

  He hesitated for a moment. Should he do this at all? Would the Illagers want his help? They’d banished him, after all.

  Just as important, would Highblock Keep be safe without him? It wouldn’t be much help to gather an army, he thought, if it cost him his stronghold.

  As he pondered these mysteries, the Orb of Dominance surged in brightness. A moment later, the drawbridge began to rise.

  The last of the redstone golems was still standing on the wooden bridge. The instant it began to move, though, it hustled forward and leaped off the end, landing on the rocky shelf next to Archie.