“Ready?” Esme asked.
“I’ve got him,” Anton said, so I followed Esme in the direction that the wither skeletons had come.
The fortress appeared on the horizon, a looming castle complete with towers and turrets and surrounded by lava that poured out of holes in its walls in gloppy gushes, filling pools in a cavernous lake that was so far below I wasn’t sure anyone could reach it. Torches lit up the walls in ruler-straight lines, showing the path into the fortress, and the vast outline of the building. As we got closer, details on the fortress came into view. There were archways with elaborate patterns, buttresses coming out of the walls like steadying hands with fingers grabbing hold of the earth. Steps were carefully cut into patterns of rising and falling levels—which would make a straight charge from the outside impossible—that was almost like artwork. Although the castle was tall, it was also spread out and looked like a hulking monster, crouching, waiting to explode out. And when we got close enough and looked down into the depths where the lava pooled, it seemed like it might really have been a colossal creature that could attack and crush us into ash beneath its fiery feet. Everything about the fortress—the high, spiked towers like spiny ridges along its back, the gaping opening at the front that looked ready to snap shut and consume anyone who got close enough—seemed designed to dissuade anyone from entering. As we moved toward it, Esme hesitated at the bridge that would take us to the large mouth of a front door.
“It doesn’t look so bad from far off,” I said.
Esme nodded in agreement, then strode off bravely across the rock bridge, straight toward the entrance.
“This is exactly what it wants,” I whispered to myself. “An easy meal.” But I followed her anyway, though admittedly a good few steps behind.
When we got to the huge open door, I looked back, and Anton and Lonnie were coming as well, but had only reached the start of the bridge. Anton waved me on, and I thought, Sure. I would wave you on too if I could hang back a bit.
We entered a large room with tapestries hanging on immense walls that looked like they went three levels up. The room was lit with candles inset into the stone and a huge candelabra ablaze with what might have been a hundred more candles. The higher levels had archways cut into the walls, like inset balconies, while the floor we were on had a few doors surrounding it. Esme walked across the empty room over a few crisscrossing layers of carpet, and went to the nearest door on her left. She opened it, and there was a long hallway leading away from the room, but no other openings from the hallway that we could make out from where we were. She went to each successive door, and found nearly the same setup. Leading away from the room, every path was a long, dark hallway that led who knew where.
“We could split up,” I suggested.
Esme shook her head. “Better to stay together. If we get separated and we need help, it’s going to be bad.”
“Okay, so which door?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Pick one?”
“Me?”
“You,” she said. “If it’s a bad one, I will blame you for picking it, and if it’s a good one, I’ll take all the credit for leading us there.”
“A win-win,” I said.
She smiled. “Exactly.”
“Look, Esme,” I said, seizing the moment alone with her. “I’m not trying to make things difficult. Really.”
“I know you’re not,” she said. “I know I can be—”
“Harsh? Abrasive? Inflexible?” I suggested.
She chuckled. “Yeah, those. Having something to do that makes logical sense is exactly what I come here for. I know if I follow a plan, things are going to work. But outside…everything the doctors and my parents try is unpredictable.” She stepped into the hallway and grabbed one of the torches to take with us. “Can you imagine what that’s like?”
“Imagine knowing that you caused all the pain that the people closest to you are in. That it’s all your fault. My parents, my sister, Lonnie. Even the other driver. None of them would be hurting if it wasn’t for what I did in one moment of being a total idiot.”
Esme blinked at me twice, before continuing on. Just when I thought she was going to let this line of conversation go, she added, “I’m not really mad at you, Bianca. I’m mad that this is the only place where I can feel like I’m in control of myself again. And sometimes, I guess I try to be too controlling of others in the game.”
“Once we log off, I can get someone to roll me over to your room,” I said. “I’ll find some way to bring the sword on the outside, and I’ll tell the doctors that the next time they don’t do right by you, they’ll have me to answer to.”
She smiled weakly.
“Too bad real life can’t be more like a game.” She waved her hand dismissively and added, “Whatever. Not important.”
“It’s important. All of this is important. Just because it’s a game doesn’t mean it’s not significant,” I said. “I’m sure about that.”
She briefly laid a hand on my shoulder and nodded before moving ahead. The hallway opened up onto a wide landing with two paths leading in different directions where the floor dropped away, so they were like bridges leading to other parts of the castle. Esme went on one of them, and I went on the other.
“Bianca, look down,” she said.
Beneath us was a crisscrossed network of pathways and stairs leading down to the belly of the castle.
“How are we going to find the blaze spawner?” I asked. “It could be anywhere.” I rolled my eyes and happened to see that the crisscrossing paths were above us, too. “Look, Esme!”
“Ugh.”
“Now what?” I asked. “Maybe we should split up.”
“Definitely not now. It will be too easy to get lost. At least if we have each other, one person can remember the way we came so we can get out again, while the other person focuses on finding the blaze spawner, and keeping any of the mobs away.”
“I suppose I’m the one who’s going to be figuring out where we are and how to get back?” I asked.
“That’s right, Dora. You’re the map.” She moved off along her own path, and I had to run back around to catch up.
“How do you even know this is the right way to go?” I asked. “You’re just guessing.”
Esme stopped short, and I bumped into her. She pointed up at one of the walls on the other side, near the ceiling of the fortress. “See that?” she asked.
“What?”
“Look. That glowy yellow thing coming out of that wall?”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” she said, as she ran off again.
“We can’t know that it’s the blaze spawner,” I said.
“We’ll find out when we get there, won’t we?” she said. “And it’s as good a place as any to start.” She picked up her pace, making me have to run full-out to catch up.
On the other side of the bridge, the door opened into a room that was nearly as stark as the first one we’d entered. Esme found a far door that led to a stairway, and she took them two at a time. I was moving a little too slowly to do that. I knew it was probably because of the blow from the wither skeleton, but I did my best to keep up.
The floor above was elaborately decorated with paintings on every wall; actual windows, even though they only looked out on other parts of the castle and highlighted the dark rat-maze we were in; and detailed furniture that reminded me of the Gothic artwork on all of the archways. There were no other exit doors, though.
Esme walked back out of the room, looked up at the next level, and then reentered the room.
“Maybe there’s another way,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, it has to be here. None of the other bridges lead close enough to the room with the blaze spawner.”
We went back to looking through the windows at the rat-maze, and then feeling up
the walls inside of the room.
“Maybe it’s designed to be misleading,” I said. “This room is the closest, but there’s no way to get to the blaze spawner from here. We have to go back and try one of the other paths.”
She narrowed her eyes at me for a moment, then nodded agreement. I led us back out to the bridge, and across it, down the next hallway, until we came to what looked like an identical room.
“Did you bring us the same way?” Esme shouted, sounding frustrated.
“I didn’t. You saw that I didn’t!”
“So, all of the rooms are the same, then,” she said, deflating, sounding tired and defeated.
“These two are,” I said. “We can’t know about the rest of them. There are lots of variables…” I trailed off when I saw the despondent look on her face.
“There’s no opening, and this path led us even farther away from the spawner. So, we’ve just wasted a bunch of time.”
“It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this out,” I said.
She looked at me, then she looked over my head to the place my health bar was, except it wasn’t there anymore.
“Bianca,” she said quietly.
“I know,” I said.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. The clock was starting to run out on me.
“So what do we do now?” Esme asked.
“We finish the game,” I said. “Which means, it’s bashing time.” And before she could say anything else, I started hacking into the wall, which yielded nothing at first, but as I moved around the room, I eventually found another set of stairs leading up. “Voilà!”
“I was going to be really annoyed if that didn’t work,” she said, shooting me a grin.
“How would I know?” I answered, gently bumping my shoulder against hers and smiling. “You’re annoyed at me ninety-nine percent of the time.”
She laughed. “Maybe ninety-six.” Then she followed me up the stairs, which led us to the correct level, and onto a balcony that looked down on the middle of the fortress and its network of stairs and passageways that now reminded me of drawings of a nervous system, all leading back to the entrance.
“At least we can get out,” I said.
Esme led us straight toward the room with the glowing yellow light. She hesitated at the door and looked in. “There are probably traps.”
“After all this?” I asked.
She took out a couple of pieces of rotting meat, and threw them into the room.
Nothing happened.
“Well…” I began, and darted around her and into the room.
“Bianca, wait!”
By then I was well inside the room, and facing the black cage of the blaze spawner, with the blaze glowing inside it.
Esme came up behind me. “What if there was a trap?” she asked.
“You already checked,” I said. “And look! Blaze spawner! Dead ahead!”
Esme pulled out her sword and held it in one hand, ready to fight. I followed suit, although I wasn’t prepared for this enemy. The blaze exited the cage in a howl of fury. I could feel the warmth of it radiating against my skin. As it passed us, I raised my sword to bring down on it, but as soon as I got close enough, the searing heat of the blaze felt like an oven. I missed, coming down hard on the stone floor behind it. Esme, fortunately, managed to make contact, and her Fire Protection armor kept her from injury.
“Why didn’t you come with Anton?” I asked, readying for another attack. “Both of you have Fire Protection armor, and I have basically nothing.”
“I need to keep my eye on you,” Esme said, as she lifted the sword for another pass at the blaze. She hit it again and it howled as it smacked against the wall of the room and turned back on us. The singe mark it left in the wall looked like a screaming face. “I need to make sure you don’t disappear again.”
This time, instead of letting the blaze get close to me, I threw the sword at it, catching it right in the middle. The weapon stuck for a moment, and the blaze screamed and turned, coming straight at me. How exactly do you defeat a fire creature again?
Esme thrust through with her sword. It changed the blaze’s trajectory, but it seemed angrier, and more determined to hurt us. The heat in the room was growing more intense by the second. I wished there was some way to cool it down a bit. Suddenly, I was reminded of Lonnie’s original plan.
“Snowballs!” I yelled.
“What?”
“My snowballs!”
I opened my inventory, pulled a couple of snowballs for myself, and gave a bunch to Esme as well.
We took turns hurling the snowballs at the blaze, hitting it every time, and distracting its attention. Its colors became dull, and the blaze itself grew quieter, and hung lower in the air between us. Another volley of snowballs got the mob down on the ground, leaving behind a blaze rod, which I swiped quickly, and ran for the door with Esme right behind me.
Just when I thought all was going to be well and that we would escape with no problem, mobs of wither skeletons approached us. There was nowhere to run but down into the room and back out to the network of bridges. Unless…
I looked at Esme, then out at the web of thread-thin bridges below us.
“No,” she said.
“What are our options?” I asked.
“It’s a stupid thing to try,” she said.
“No stupider than staying here and trying to fight our way out.” I hesitated only a moment to see her face relax from an outright no to a slightly softer maybe, and then I pulled myself over the railing, aimed for what looked like the closest bridge, and jumped.
You know how when you’re playing a game, your depth perception might be a little bit off? What looks near is actually much farther away, and what seems to be a long way off is right in front of your face? That sort of thing? Generally, you need to shift your position a little to get a sense of what’s around you and how you’re situated inside of a landscape, but it’s really hard to shift your position after you’ve done a swan dive off a balcony into the belly of a fortress designed to kill you. So, I don’t recommend it.
Anyway, I was falling toward what looked like the closest bridge, which turned out to be a bridge two levels farther down than the actual closest bridge, a fact I only realized about half a second into the jump. Perspective, my brain provided, too late to be useful. I reached out with my right arm and bow, hoping to catch the edge of what was actually the closest one, and missed. Then I reached out with my left arm at the next one and banged into it, hanging off the side. With my heart pounding and my arm aching, I scrambled over the railing and onto the bridge, and then took a moment to question the choices that had led me here. That’s when I remembered Esme. I looked up.
She was surrounded by wither skeletons, trying to hold them back.
“Jump!” I screamed. “Esme! Jump!”
She looked down at me, her face contorted with fear.
“I’ll catch you!” I had a flash of Lonnie’s face when he tried to catch me from the monkey bars.
I couldn’t tell what the face was that she made, but she climbed up on the railing and dove toward me. But as she did, three wither skeletons thrust their swords at her, each one of them catching her in a different part of her body. I saw her jerk and curl into herself so she was coming down like a rock, and I had no limbs to grab hold of. I stepped up on the railing, realizing that this was probably the stupidest move I’d ever made in my entire life, and held out both of my arms. As Esme came whizzing down, I grabbed and jumped backward in one motion, hoping I had caught her and that I didn’t jump so far that I’d fall off the platform.
When I opened my eyes, Esme hung over the side of the bridge. I yanked her up, and she fell in a heap beside me. Both of us panted.
“I wasn’t sure that was going to work,” I said when I’d caught my breath.
“I was sure that it wasn’t,” she said. “But thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Then, “They got you.”
She looked down at her body. There were three slashes—one on her torso, one on her arm, and another on her leg. “Yeah. They did.”
“One of them got me before, and I’m still doing okay,” I said.
“One,” she said. “Not three.”
The pale face of a wither skeleton appeared in the darkness at the far end of the bridge. I pulled Esme to standing. “We have to get back to the Overworld to heal.”
She nodded. I held her against my body and ran toward the entrance as several more skeletons took chase. Then, below us, I heard a series of explosions.
Esme looked confused for a moment, and then her face cleared up. “Anton.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Maybe he got the nether wart,” she said.
Below us, bridges were beginning to collapse from the explosions. Behind us, the wither skeletons were still coming. “We can’t worry about that now.”
We ran with the nether fortress collapsing around us and mobs on our heels, and made it to the main drawbridge that led out of the fortress. Beneath the drawbridge, the lava bubbled in huge popping bursts as if it was being heated even more than usual. Pieces of the fortress fell in on itself, crushing the wither skeletons as it did, and cracking the drawbridge beneath our feet. I continued pulling Esme along, worried about where Lonnie and Anton might have gotten to, and whether they had made it out of the fortress before it was destroyed.
We stepped off the bridge and onto Nether soil just as the last of the fortress fell into a huge pool of bubbling lava, splashing an arc of it over our heads. I dragged Esme out of the way as it came down and seared the ground right where we had been standing a moment before.
“Do you think they made it?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” The ground beneath us rumbled. I picked Esme up and moved even farther away, fearing the ground might start falling in soon.
The Crash: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 17
