Chapter 21: Alex

Year 14, Day 10

The world is quieter now. Not safe—never safe—but quieter.

After I returned from the End, the first thing I did was destroy the spawner near the village. Smash it, scatter it, grind the fragments until not even dust remained. I needed to know if defeating the dragon meant anything… if the world would finally breathe again.

So I waited. One week. Two. I patrolled the walls every night. I hunted down the stragglers in the forests and the caves, the last remnants wandering without purpose. By the end of the month, my territory was clean—no groans in the dark, no rattling bones, no rotting hands reaching across the treeline.

But I didn't trust it. Not yet. Months passed. Still nothing. No undead clawing at the walls. No shadows shambling under the moon.

And when the first full year came and went, still without a single sighting, we celebrated. The villagers cried, laughed, embraced each other. They rang the bells and filled the streets with lantern light. After so long living in fear, they finally felt the warmth of hope.

For the first time since I arrived in this world, I saw what peace might look like. But while they celebrated, I couldn't ignore the truth gnawing at the back of my mind.

That was only one spawner. One small victory carved out of countless unseen enemies. We already knew of others scattered across the island—dozens hiding beneath moss-covered ruins, buried in ravines, tucked beneath the roots of ancient trees. And that was just here.

How many more lurked beyond our shores? On the broken chain of islands stretching toward the continent, each one a fragment of forgotten history. In the dense forests I had crossed once before, where the canopy swallowed the sky and every shadow seemed to breathe. In the deserts where sandstorms howled like the dying. In the mountains I never climbed, their slopes hiding secrets older than memory. In the labyrinth of caves beneath the earth—some so deep that even the bravest miners refused to follow the echoes.

How many spawners existed in the world at large? A thousand? …Or millions?

The more I thought about it, the more that question hollowed me out. For every one I found and shattered, there could be countless others pulsing in the dark, birthing more undead even as I slept. An endless tide waiting to wear the world down, inch by inch, until all that remained were bones and silence.

The world is enormous—far too vast for any one man to conquer. I could wander until my legs failed and my armor turned to rust. I could dedicate every breath, every heartbeat, every drop of strength to tearing down these cursed machines. And still… it would not be enough.

For every spawner I crush under my boot, countless more may lie hidden: humming in the dark, birthing the undead without rest or mercy. Endlessly. Tirelessly. Day after day, night after night, their unseen armies stir and gather strength. Sooner or later, they will spill out of the wilderness and come here.

The Ender Dragon had been a mountain—a single, towering obstacle I could train for, prepare for, and overcome.

But this? This is the ocean. An endless tide, stretching farther than my eyes, my maps, or my lifetime could ever reach. I realize now that I am no longer fighting a creature. I am fighting time itself. And time cannot be cut down with a sword. It cannot be pierced with an arrow. No armor can protect me from it, no potion can slow its march. Yet still, I stand here, staring into that vast and ceaseless horizon… wondering how long I can hold it back.

Year 16, Day 22

Two years have passed since my last entry—two long, restless years spent hunting every spawner on our island. At last, the land surrounding our walls are now clear. The forests are quiet again, the beaches safe enough that even children wander near them to fish. The mines no longer echo with the groans of the undead.

But the undead still come. They stagger across the bridges from the mainland and the archipelago—bridges I built with my own two hands. Stone, mortar, concrete… materials I once believed would connect people, now invite the dead. Those bridges were meant to be lifelines, paths of trade and refuge. Instead, they have become arteries through which the plague flows.

They come in the dead of night. The undead wander out of caves hidden beneath rolling hills, tucked behind forests, buried under roots and stone where the sunlight cannot reach. When the moon rises, they spill out—dozens at first, then more, as though pulled by some silent agreement. Sometimes there are tens. Sometimes hundreds. Their footsteps echo across my bridges in a slow, synchronized march. They do not think. They do not hesitate. They do not tire. They come because the spawners tell them to. They come because that is what they were made for.

And all of this is happening on a continent I have barely touched—a fraction of a percent of a fraction of a world so massive I cannot even begin to comprehend its edges. This is the part that haunts me:

Even if I sealed the gates… even if I raised the walls… even if I demolished every bridge and retreated into isolation with my people— I would not be saving us.

I would only be redirecting the tide toward those with no defenses at all.

If undead cannot reach my land, they will swallow someone else's. If I stop them here, I condemn another village there. Every path I close simply shifts the burden to those who have no hope of surviving it. And when they fall, when their homes collapse, when their farms rot—those wandering undead will simply regroup and come back here anyway, in greater numbers than before. They will swim if they have to. They will adapt and become the drowned.

I would not be solving the problem. I would be delaying it…and claiming innocence as others pay the price. Whatever consequence follows, it will fall on me—because I knew the truth and chose to look away. I cannot call myself a survivor if survival demands that kind of cruelty.

So today, I crossed the bridge. Shadow's monument stood behind me as I walked, its stone eyes fixed on the horizon I now traveled toward. Past the archipelago, past the dry plains, past the forests that still whisper with danger—I kept walking until I reached the cliffs above a stretch of mainland wilderness.

And there, hidden beneath a patch of dead brush and loose stone, I found it: a cave mouth breathing stale, cold air from deep inside the earth. The smell alone told me the truth. There are spawners down there. Not one. Not two. A nest.

The undead are not only wandering here from distant lands—they are being born beneath my feet, spilling out through cracks in the world like a poison leak. Destroying this nest won't end the plague. But leaving it untouched would be unforgivable.

If the undead still walk toward my home, then I must walk toward the darkness that sends them. And whatever waits in that cave… I must face it. Alone, once again.

Year 16, Day 25

At first, the cave seemed ordinary. Another wound in the earth, another place where darkness pooled and the undead waited like patient spiders. I've learned the rhythm of these places—the branching tunnels that split like veins, the dead ends that lure you into silence, the pockets of ore glinting like trapped stars. Routine. Familiar. Almost comforting in a grim sort of way.

My Netherite sword carved easily through the undead that shambled toward me, its edge singing each time it met bone. The enchanted iron armor I wore did its job, absorbing blows that would've shattered me years ago. Nothing down here could surprise me anymore…or so I thought.

The first biome shift was subtle—a change in smell, in moisture. Then the walls sharpened into needle-thin stalactites and stalagmites, forming a forest of dripping stone that could impale a careless traveler. A single stalactite fell when a zombie brushed against it. One misstep, and I would've joined the bones scattered below.

Beyond that came a lush cavern, impossibly alive. Moss carpeted the floors in thick beds of green, glowing faintly beneath the hanging vines. Sweet fruit dangled from above, pulsing with bioluminescent light like suspended lanterns. Creepers lurked behind curtains of moss, their camouflage perfect until the moment they hissed. Even after all these years, this world still finds ways to evolve in ways that defy reason…and expectation.

I don't know how long I wandered before I found something. Maybe I had already walked past it once, the blackness was so complete it felt like it swallowed torchlight whole. But when I finally stepped into that biome… I knew immediately that I'd crossed into something ancient. Something wrong. Something alive.

At first, I could only describe it as sludge. Black growth coating the walls and floors, dripping from the ceiling, spreading across the ground like an infection. It wasn't stone. It wasn't moss. It pulsed—subtly—beneath my boots. A slow, sickening throb, like the heartbeat of something buried deep beneath the world.

My torchlight reflected off the slime in a dull blue shimmer. Sculk, I later decided to call it. A network of veins and patches that responded to sound. When I brushed a hand against one of the walls, it quivered. When I stepped forward, tiny patches of sculk brightened—like stars waking in a dead sky.

Then the zombies came. Three of them, stumbling blindly from a nearby tunnel. I don't think they saw me, but they came looking for me all the same. They stepped onto the sculk, and the entire floor lit up with frantic patterns—pulses racing outward like ripples across a pond.

That was when I heard it. A low groaning rumble, like pressure building inside a mountain. Then the rumble sharpened, rising into a screech that rattled my bones. I froze. The zombies froze. Even the air felt too afraid to move.

The ground split. Or maybe it opened. I don't fully understand what I saw. One moment, there was only black sludge. The next, it erupted—vomiting out a creature the likes of which I've never imagined.

It stood nearly seven feet tall, its entire body carved from darkness. No eyes—none that I could see—only a gaping mouth and glowing ribs pulsing with faint soul-blue light. Its head bore two curled horns, like something between bone and fungus. Its claws—no, its hands, massive and blocky—dragged along the floor as if it were listening to its own movements. The creature inhaled sharply, ribs flaring, as if it were tasting the air for intruders.

Then the zombies groaned, and that was all it needed. The creature charged with terrifying speed, moving faster than anything that size had any right to. It slammed its fists into the ground, and the shockwave alone obliterated the first zombie—shattered it into rotten pieces. The second tried to run, but the monster reached it in two steps and crushed it flat. The third didn't even get to scream.

The cavern trembled with every blow. I crouched just outside the sculk, gripping my sword but knowing it wouldn't matter. If I made a sound—any sound at all—I'd be next.

Then a bat fluttered overhead. One flap. One tiny flap. The creature whipped toward the sound, opened its mouth wider than I thought possible, and unleashed a blast of sound that tore the bat apart midair—reduced it to dust.

Silence followed. A tense, suffocating silence.

I waited what felt like an hour before the beast finally sank back into the sludge, the sculk dimming as it disappeared beneath the black surface.

I didn't approach. I didn't test my luck. I backed away slowly, step by quiet step, until I was certain the sculk could no longer hear me.

Whatever that thing is… it is not undead. It is not natural. It is not part of the world I know—not even part of the world I thought I was beginning to understand.

But what I do know is this:

It is powerful. Terrifyingly so. Powerful enough that even the Ender Dragon—the great beast that ruled The End—would kneel before it if such a thing were possible. The dragon fought with rage and fury… but this creature fights with something colder. Something older. Purpose. Like the darkness itself chose a shape and let it walk.

All my life in this world, I've believed the undead were the greatest threat. That the spawners were the heart of all evil, the engines that churned out endless hunger and death. But this… thing—doesn't come from a spawner. It doesn't wander. It doesn't hunt for food.

It listens. It waits. And when something trespasses on its blackened soil, it rises from the sculk like a nightmare being birthed from silence and destroys what dared to respass in its sacred goop.

It does not attack the living because it hates them.

It does not attack the dead because it fears them.

It destroys because that is what it was made to do. Or worse—because that is what it chooses to do.

It guards the sculk like a hound from hell, and the earth reacts to its presence like it's welcoming a king. I needed to give it a name, something fitting for a creature that rises from the abyss to punish anything that dares to disturb the silence below. Then, as if nothing happened, it returns to the sculk.

So in this journal, I decide to call it: "The Warden." And I pray I never meet it again.

Year 16, Day 142

I found something deep in the cavernous tunnels. A space so vast it felt like stepping into the hollowed-out heart of the world. The tunnel spat me out onto a cliff of raw stone, and from there, the cave stretched so wide that my torchlight vanished into the void before it touched anything at all. I raised the flame higher, but it was useless—the ceiling was lost somewhere above the darkness, too distant to see. The cavern felt like the inside of a mountain turned inside-out, a cathedral built by nature in a scale meant for giants.

Below me spread an underground sea. Lakes, rivers, entire oceans sprawled across the cavern floor, their surfaces black and glassy until disturbed by creatures that had never seen the sun. Blind fish darted beneath the surface, pale and ghostly. Squids drifted through the water with soft blue glows rippling along their bodies, like drifting spirits illuminating the deep.

And woven through it all was corruption. The undead wandered the shores in droves, their numbers swelling the deeper I looked. They milled aimlessly, arms dangling, groaning into the cavern wind. This place had been untouched by the sky for who knows how long—centuries? Millennia? Entire ecosystems had evolved in darkness, thriving without sunlight. And yet even here, the corruption spread. Even here, the spawners churned.

I stood on that cliff for a long time, unable to speak, barely able to breathe. The world is not what I thought it was. It is bigger—far bigger—than any of us imagined. A labyrinth of worlds beneath worlds, caves beneath continents, life hidden under layers of stone and shadow. If this is what lies beneath a single stretch of land… then how much of this planet remains unseen? How much corruption festers in places no human has ever walked?

For the first time since The End, I felt small again. Not weak. Just… small. And painfully aware of how little I truly understand.

For four months I lived inside that cave—no, that underworld—beneath the mainland. Four months of walking paths no human had walked in millennia, of relying on glowing fruit and blind cave-fish to keep myself alive. Four months of hammering out temporary shelters in the walls, smelting iron by torchlight, repairing my netherite blade on anvils I forged in the dark.

Four months of fighting. What began like any other cave—the narrow tunnels, the dead ends, the glitter of ore hidden behind layers of stone—soon twisted into a labyrinth that mocked every rule I thought I understood.

Every time I believed I'd reached the cave's end, the rock split open into another passageway. Some of the deeper chambers didn't even resemble the Overworld anymore. Water and fish vanished, replaced by oceans of molten lava roaring beneath black stone. The heat blistered through my armor, and the air smelled like burning metal and old death. Still, I pushed onward, inch by inch, mining the deepslate for precious diamonds and scraping raw ore from the walls. I smelted it all with buckets of lava, turning the inferno itself into a forge. More iron. More gold. More tools for the village that depended on me.

And scattered throughout this underground world—like tumors buried in the planet's flesh—were the spawners. Four of them. Each surrounded by crude cobblestone structures, hastily assembled by hands that had never belonged to the living. I recognized the signs by now: the strange arrangement of blocks, the unnatural stillness, the faint rattling echo like bones knocking together in a draft.

I destroyed them one by one, as I've done so many times before. The undead came pouring out in frantic waves, as if they knew their anchor to this world was shattering. Zombies clawing at my armor, skeletons loosing arrows in the pitch-black dark. My Netherite sword sliced through rotten limbs; my enchanted armor muffled the blows against my ribs and shoulders. Every fight left me aching, sweating, trembling—but victorious.

And when each spawner finally cracked apart and went silent, I let myself collapse to my knees—just for a moment. One breath. One heartbeat. Then I forced myself onward again.

But it was the chests that made my blood run cold. The first time I saw one, tucked into the corner of a spawner chamber, I assumed some lost adventurer had placed it there—some forgotten wanderer offering a reward to whoever ended the undead cycle. Rotten food, broken trinkets, rusted gear… nothing valuable, nothing worth carrying home.

But the deeper I went, the more the truth revealed itself—quietly at first, then all at once, like a blade sliding between the ribs. These chests weren't left by travelers. They were left by the undead.

Every time I destroyed a spawner—every time—another chest was found in the corner. Not crafted by careful hands, but cobbled together with the crude patience of something that only half-remembers how hands are meant to work. Always the same rough wood. Always the same contents. Scraps.

Dried meat long turned to dust.

Children's toys—splintered but unmistakable.

Cracked bits of pottery.

Bones wrapped in cloth, as if saved.

Random objects with no pattern except one: They were things a human once cared about. The realization sat heavy in my stomach. The undead weren't just killing the living—they were collecting. Bringing back trinkets to these rooms as if the spawner chambers were… bases. Safe havens. Storage spaces. Exactly the way I use my camps.

In a way that chilled me more than any cave draft, I understood: Some small part of them remembers. Not consciously, not fully, but like an echo trapped in the skull. A leftover instinct from a person long devoured by whatever magic animates their bones and flesh.

And suddenly, so many details I had ignored clawed their way back to the surface. The way zombies sometimes paused before attacking, heads tilting as if listening for a familiar voice. The way skeletons held their bows—not like they learned to, but like they remembered it. The way they wandered through tunnels with a slow, stubborn searching… not aimless, but lost. Like animals looking for a home that isn't there anymore.

I don't know what's worse—that these creatures might retain the faintest flicker of who they were… or that the world itself keeps dragging them back to life. Either way, the line between the living and the dead is thinner than I ever wanted to believe. And that thought will follow me deeper than any cave.

They aren't Hollywood monsters. They aren't mindless. They scavenge. They remember. They hoard. Not as humans—no, that part of them is long gone—but as something caught between worlds, fragments of old lives flickering like dying embers.

It unsettles me more than I want to admit. Because if the undead still cling to pieces of who they once were… then what exactly am I destroying every time I break a spawner?

And more importantly— How thin is the line between the living and the dead?

And so, after four months of exploration, I finally packed up my findings—stacks of iron, diamonds, gold, redstone, emerslds and those strange glowing fruits that somehow keep their light even after being plucked. I tucked away samples of moss, ores, and everything I thought might help the village. My rucksack was heavy, but my heart felt even heavier. I was ready to ascend back into the overworld at last.

That's when I froze. An Enderman stood in the tunnel mouth, tall and still as a monument, its body a column of shifting shadow that seemed to drink in what little torchlight remained. I dropped my rucksack without meaning to, my hand automatically going to the hilt of my Netherite sword. After everything I've seen down here—sludge biomes crawling with sculk, glowing lakes that stretch into blackness, undead spilling endlessly from spawners, and that colossal guardian I now call the Warden—I genuinely thought nothing underground could surprise me anymore.

But an Enderman, here, at the very threshold of my escape? That chilled me deeper than the dripping stone ever could.

At first, I assumed it had come to kill me. To stop me from destroying any more spawners. To defend whatever ancient cycle the undead belong to. The Endermen appeared after I shattered my first spawner all those years ago—maybe they were guardians of some kind, protectors of the balance between life and death. If so, then this one was here to finish what the dragon couldn't.

I met its eyes. I braced myself for the familiar, world-splitting shriek, for the teleportation blur and the fists slamming into my armor. But nothing happened. Nothing. The Enderman just stood there… watching me.

And this part still haunts me—its stare wasn't hostile. It wasn't hollow or predatory like the others I've fought. No… it looked at me as though it knew me. As though it recognized me from somewhere beyond the reach of this world.

Slowly, I lowered my weapon. It spoke then—its garbled, static-laced language echoing through the cave. A sound like broken glass dragged across a copper pipe. I didn't understand a single word. Perhaps no human ever truly has.

Then, without warning, it reached into… somewhere. A pocket of void? A memory? A place between places? I don't know. But it withdrew an object and tossed it at my feet.

A book. A plain leather-bound journal. Before I could utter a word, it vanished—teleported into the darkness, leaving nothing but a faint distortion in the damp air and the soft echo of its departure.

I stared at the journal for a long moment before I crouched and picked it up. My breath caught in my throat. The leather was weathered, scuffed, familiar. Far too familiar. A Survivor's Log. I turned it over in my hands, palms suddenly slick with cold sweat. Then I saw the initials charred faintly onto the cover.

Alex.

My pulse hammered in my ears. I tore it open to the first page, and the handwriting—sharp, hurried, unmistakably hers—stared back at me. Alex's final entry. The answer to her disappearance. To what happened after she jumped into the End without hesitation while I stood frozen with fear.

I ran. I ran all the way home—bursting through the village gates, past confused villagers, past the smithy and the farms—until I reached my house. Only then did I let myself breathe again. Only then did I open her journal again. Only then did I begin to learn the truth.

Year 16, Day 159

It has been two weeks since the Enderman placed Alex's journal at my feet and vanished into the dark. Two weeks of reading and rereading the entries by the flicker of lantern-light. Two weeks of sleeping less, eating little, and feeling the world tilt beneath me with each passing page.

The glow berries I brought back from the underground lake have been my only comfort—sweet, cool, and bright against the bitterness that grows in my chest. I ate them slowly as I read, letting their gentle light steady me while my hands trembled over every scribbled word.

Alex…

She wrote so much. More than I expected. Enough that I felt her presence in every stroke of ink—her certainty, her fear, her unraveling mind.

Still, I couldn't read all of it. Some pages were nothing but jagged black lines—violent bursts of ink that tore through the paper. Others were filled with loops of nonsense, symbols that matched no language I know, phrases repeated again and again until the words lost all meaning.

But the entries that were readable… I forced myself through every one of them. And now I try—try—to put into my own words what she discovered, what she endured, what she became desperate for someone—anyone—to understand.

⸻

She wrote first about the End—about her final battle with the Dragon. She fought as hard as anyone could. Harder, maybe. But she lost. And losing to the Dragon doesn't mean dying. No… the Dragon does something far worse. It breaks you. It broke her armor first, then her weapons, then her body. And when she fell to her knees, the Endermen dragged her—not to finish her, but to offer her. A sacrifice. She looked up into the Dragon's face as it opened its jaws and exhaled black fire. That should've been her end. But it wasn't.

When she woke, she was somewhere else—she thinks hours passed; it might've been days. There's no way to tell time in the End. No sun. No horizon. Just that eternal void humming beneath everything. Even I have trouble telling how much time has passed while exploring the caves without having my villagers tell me how many days have passed since I left the village.

She found herself in an End City. A place of towers of Purpur blocks, glowing faintly like dying embers. And the Endermen who lived there… they didn't attack her. They cared for her. They fed her chorus fruit—the strange violet fruit that blinks you across short distances. They taught her how to move around the End, between islands suspended over the void like forgotten dreams. They showed her which paths were safe, which void currents to avoid, where the shulkers nested and how to deal with them. She described Endermites scuttling beneath her feet, the hiss of teleportation echoing through endless corridors.

And this—this was the first thing that truly chilled me: She learned their language. Not a foreign tongue. Not some alien script. English, but backwards. She said once she realized it, their words snapped into place. Fluent. Precise. As if they'd been speaking to her clearly all along and she'd simply been too human to understand.

Pages and pages described her life in the End. Her lessons. Her companions. Her attempts to understand the Dragon. Her exploration of islands no living human has ever seen. You'd think she stayed there—lived out her life in that impossible place. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. Something happened in those later entries. Something that made her handwriting unravel and her thoughts twist into spirals. Something that even now, reading and re-reading her words, I still can't fully understand.

All I know is this: Alex didn't die in the End. But whatever happened in those End Cities… whoever she became… She wasn't the same person who jumped into that portal. And I'm starting to fear I know why the Enderman gave me her journal. And why it looked at me like it remembered my face. Because that Enderman didn't know me, but rather who I was. And when you put the details together, it sent chills down my spine.

At first it was subtle—dark patches on her skin she blamed on bruises. Then she hit her head on the top of a doorway. Not because she tripped. Because she had grown tall enough to hit it. She described her skin turning black. Her fingers stretching. Her vision sharpening. Her voice echoing strangely when she spoke aloud. She was turning into one of them.

The Dragon's fire doesn't kill you. It steals your light. It reshapes you. It makes you its servant. And as her body changed, her mind began to crack.

Then she heard the Dragon's voice:

"Bring me more light. Build spawners. Bring me more people. Flood the world with the dead."

She wrote about hearing the Dragon's voice—commanding her, whispering to her, calling her. Telling her to build spawners. To lure more humans into the End. To feed the Dragon the light it craved.

Her entries started repeating.

The dragon is calling.

The dragon is calling.

The dragon is calling.

Page after page. The handwriting growing jagged. Distorted. Then collapsing into pure hysteria—scribbles slicing across paper, words shattered into ink stains and torn parchment. And then— Nothing. The journal ended mid-page. Just stopped. And that's when I realized the truth: Alex wasn't dead.

She had become an Enderman. And the one who gave me her journal… was her.

She was still in there somewhere—whatever was left of her. Something small, something desperate, something fighting the madness long enough to hand me this one final clue. There was a note about an Elytra buried in the cleaner pages. A direction. A place. A whisper of intent. She wants me to find it. She wants me to come to the End.

The Dragon is gone now—slain by my hand—and with its death, the Endermen are free. But not restored. Not healed. Just shadows of what they once were, people wandering aimlessly in an endless world with no sun, no purpose, no future. Lost souls waiting for nothing.

And so… I have no choice. I must return into the End. Into whatever waits for me there.

For Alex. For myself. For this world slipping deeper into corruption.

Tomorrow, I leave again.

May the light stay with me, while I still have it.