//------------------------------//
// Angled Mountains (My Little Minecraft: At the End) 
// Story: The League of Sweetie Belles 
// by GMBlackjack 
//------------------------------//

It begins, as it often does, with an explosion. 

“Why did you have to touch it!?” Adder shouted, dodging a chunk of green, oozing flesh. 

Cinder, currently covered in noxious green ooze, stared at her hoof in disbelief. “What in… how? What?” Her focus moved past her hoof and to the small crater the explosion had created. “All I did was touch it! Why does that make it explode?”

“Ah dunno, but Ah do know the ants just watched their queen blow up.”

Cinder paled. Slowly, she turned around to examine the other side of the cavern, a section not covered in the innards of the recently-deceased queen ant. There were at least a dozen pony-sized insects more than a little upset that their ruler had been, from their perspective, assassinated. They opened their jaws and hissed. 

Adder activated her lightsaber, holding the grip in her mouth rather than her front hooves. Cinder fumbled for the dimensional device. 

The ants charged, surging forth like a sea of carapace, jaws, and spindly legs. 

“Cinder…” Adder grunted through her teeth. 

Cinder dropped the dimensional device. “Everything’s fine!” 

Adder stared the lead ant down. Animal though it was, it wasn’t an idiot and knew the lightsaber was beyond dangerous, so it twisted to the side, aiming its jaws for Adder’s legs. 

Adder twisted her head sideways, cutting the front of the ant’s head clean off, dropping the clattering jaw to the ground. The second ant received a spike to the neck, but the third managed to smack Adder to the side with a leg. 

Only then did Cinder open the portal. She dragged Adder through, falling onto a flat, grassy ground. The portal closed as fast as it was able to, but this still allowed one ant through. It shrieked, unable to process that it had been separated from its brethren. Adder struggled to lift her blade, but her head was heavy. She lobbed off one of its feet, but its jaws were still poised to close around her neck. 

Cinder forced the ants jaws open with her telekinesis, giving Adder the seconds needed to end the creature. Its head fell into two pieces, sizzling from the weapon’s heet. 

Adder let out a sigh of relief and deactivated her lightsaber. “Thanks.”

“Sorry about the fumbling…” Cinder said, rubbing the back of her head. “We should have been out sooner than that.”

“It’s fine. We’re alive. Though we do seem to be running from danger a lot…”

“They were friendly!”

“You wanted an ant as a mount. We probably should have known that wasn’t going to go well.”

“Well. Uh…” Cinder clicked her tongue. “All right, fine, fair enough.” 

“Anyway… where are we?” Adder took a moment to look around… and was struck dumb. “...Wait a moment.”

The tree was tall, with a thick trunk covered in brittle bark that gave way to a tangled mess of leaves several meters above them. It was shockingly large and fat for a tree, and the leaves were pressed together more like a bush, so much so that they couldn’t see any branches. 

The tree was also entirely made of meter tall cubes. Four cubes of trunk, and a loose collection of leafy cubes sitting atop that. 

Adder looked beyond the tree, finding numerous other trees also made of the same cubic structure. Even the grass was cubic, raising or lowering in elevation with sharp increments rather than a smooth slope. In the distance, she could see a rounded mountain, but upon closer inspection even this was made out of cubes. 

“...The sun is square,” Cinder said, pointing up. 

“Well.” Adder blinked. “This is… interestin’, at least.” 

Cinder started tapping her hoof, examining the surrounding world in fascination. “Cubes. Cubes everywhere. That flower doesn’t look cubic, but it’s fixed exactly in the middle of the grid a—” The ground gave out beneath her, dropping her into a cubic meter hole with dirt on all sides. Despite appearing as a smooth cube, the texture of the dirt remained, dirtying her white coat. “What…?”

“The thing you were standin’ on just vanished!”

“I figured that part out…” Cinder grunted, pulling herself out of the hole. She was a little too large for it, so her head dragged against the edges as she moved, dirtying her mane. Looking into the hole from above, she was confused to see a much smaller cube of dirt laying at the bottom of the hole, so small she could easily pick it up. Lifting it out with her magic, she turned it around and examined the dirty patterns on every face. “Weird…”

“Did you cast a spell to shrink the ground?”

“No. Maybe it shrinks itself?” With a shrug, she tossed the cube back on the ground. 

It grew to full size and affixed itself to the landscape with a soft thunk. A second later, grass grew on the top of it. 

“That’s not normal,” Adder said. 

“No, really?” Cinder, acting on a hunch, tapped the recently placed block with her hoof. A small crack formed in the center of it as she did so. When it reached the edges, the cube detached from the landscape and fell to the ground, small enough to hold. 

Adder tried it, tapping a section of the ground. It detached in much the same way, shrinking and falling to the ground. She glanced at Cinder with a grin before jumping into the hole and hitting other blocks from the side, creating a three by three hole in the ground. “I’ve dug a pit!”

“Congratulations,” Cinder chuckled. “How far down can you go?”

“Let’s see…” She dug the pit a little deeper, but soon ran into gray blocks of stone. Tapping these did cause a crack to form, but it progressed much, much slower. “Guess it’s too hard to mess with.”

“Clearly. Lightsaber?”

Adder activated her weapon and stabbed the cube with it. The blade went through it, but the cube didn’t diminish in size. Swinging wide, she chopped off a corner with ease. 

The oblong angle she had created in the cube looked wrong, somehow. 

“Somehow Ah don’t think that’s a good idea,” Adder said, sheathing her weapon. She kicked a few dirt blocks to make stairs so she could climb out of the hole. “That rock needs somethin’ else to move i—what are you doing?”

“Punching a tree,” Cinder said, punching a tree. She’d been at it for several seconds, but the cracks were almost at the edge of the block. 

“Cinder n—”

The block detached from the trunk and fell into Cinder’s hoof. The rest of the tree floated above, not affected by the loss of the block below. 

Adder shook her head. “Ah thought gravity…”

“Not the same in every universe. Though… it is strange that we’re falling and this tree isn’t.”

“Maybe we’re not made of blocks?”

“Possb—”

There was an oink. Between the two of them, there was a pig. Or, they thought it was a pig, given it’s pink complexion, big nose, and curly tail. It was, like everything else in this world, made out of sharp angles, though it wasn’t cubic. The body was rectangular, and where it met the legs the transition was smooth rather than jarringly sharp. It moved like an animal would with the bending of muscles and pulling of tendons. 

It just had a lot of hard edges. 

Adder held out a hoof to the pig. “Aren’t you the cutest lil’ thing?” 

The pig was not afraid, but it didn’t seem to understand what was going on either. 

“Only you would call a pig cute,” Cinder commented.

“Shush, pigs are amazin’. They can do all sorts o’ things. Though…” Looking around, Adder saw nothing but natural landscape. “This is a domestic pig, not a feral one. Too pink.”

“Maybe that’s just what pigs look like in this universe.”

“Maybe. But if Ah had to guess, Ah’d say this fella came from a farm or somethin’.”

“Little? He’s almost as big as we are!”

Adder rolled her eyes. “He’s still a pig. No matter how square-ey he is.” Adder patted the pigs head. “Isn’t that right, Poppy?”

“And you named him already. Brilliant. Didn’t you just say he was probably part of a farm?”

“And then Ah’ll call him by his real name if we find it. Right now, he’s Poppy. Isn’t that right, Poppy?”

Poppy oinked. 

Cinder waved her hoof around, trying to think of something to say. The tree trunk in her hoof decided that meant it was a good time to explode into four blocks of wooden planks, dropping to the ground around her. 

“...One block becomes more.” Adder cocked her head. “Huh.”

“Hmm…” Cinder trotted back to the tree and kicked another trunk loose. Lifting it up in her magic… she shook it violently. It popped into four more wooden planks, easily. Shaking one of the planks nothing happened. “Okay, I admit it, I’m fascinated by the way this world works. I want to figure it out.”

Adder picked up one of the planks and set it on the ground, growing it to its full size. “Y’know, we could make a house out of this. If every wood block becomes four planks, that’s…”

“On it,” Cinder said, punching some more wood blocks. “Help me gather this, will you?”

Adder pointed her hind hooves at another tree and bucked it. It wasn’t enough to remove the block, though it did make a large crack appear. An apple also fell out of the tree as a bonus. “Huh.” Munching on the apple, she returned to work, bucking wood right out of the tree. 

It was nice, not having to worry about it falling on her. The first time Applejack had taught her to cut down a tree, it had almost crushed her. That had been… fun. 

Four trees later, they’d gathered enough planks to make some walls atop a smooth section of the grass. A single room large enough for both of them to walk around comfortably. Admittedly, there wasn’t anything in the room aside from the two of them and the grass below, but they’d still made it in all of five minutes and had plenty of planks to spare, not to mention a couple of apples and Poppy. 

The windows and doorway were just holes in the wall, though. 

“...There’s gotta be a way to make a door…” Adder said, scratching her chin. 

“How? I’ve tried shaking the planks, nothing happens.” 

Adder shrugged. “Maybe we should try other stuff. Think we can smash the planks together to get a trunk again? Grow a new tree?”

Cinder grabbed four of the planks together, holding them in her magic. She shook, and they fused together. Unlike popping apart, which had been seemingly instant, this took visible time. The four planks each became a soft white light that joined with the other lights, forming a new cube; one that wasn’t a tree trunk. 

It looked like a cubic table with a grid on top. Along the edges hung various small tools, ranging from saws to little chisels. She placed it in the corner of the house, growing it to full size. 

“What do you suppose that is?” Adder asked.

“The grid squares are about the same size as the smaller cubes, so…” She placed four of the planks on the table’s squares. Without any shaking from Cinder, they popped into another one of the tables. Cinder set it in another corner for Adder. “Looks like this is a better way to make things than ‘pick up and shake’.”

“And it can hold nine things.”

“I could hold nine things…”

Adder rolled her eyes. “Let’s start experimenting!”

“We do have a lot of wood to mess with…” She glanced outside at all the leaves they’d left floating in the air. 

The sun was setting. 

“Wow, days on this planet are short,” Cinder observed. “It was midday when we got here…”

“Let’s work through the night like proper farmers!” Adder shouted, lifting her hoof high. 

Cinder rolled her eyes. “Sure, why not. Unless something funky’s going on, the nights will be just as short.” Scanning the horizon through the doorway, she made out the rising moon. It was, of course, as square as the sun. “...I don’t know what I was expecting.”

A bony hand shot out of the ground roughly ten blocks away from their current position. With alarming speed, a human skeleton with a cubic head rose from the ground, a bow in its hand. It took one look at them and pulled the string back. 

Cinder lobbed a fireball at it, shattering its head into a dozen pieces. 

“That was… weaker than I was expecting,” Cinder admitted. 

“We’re used to fightin’ giant monsters all the time. That was just a skeleton.”

More things began to erupt from the ground outside. Alongside more bow-toting skeletons rose humanoid zombies with green, rotting flesh. They let out an agonized moan before approaching the house. 

Cinder started shooting fireballs out of the doorway like a gatling gun, wondering if they should run to another universe. 

Adder, ever the practical pony, placed two wooden blocks in the doorway to completely block it off. She filled in the windows as well, plunging them into darkness. 

Cinder lit her horn. “...What makes you think they can’t get in?”

“If they start breakin’ the blocks down, we’ll hear it. And Ah don’t hear anything.” She lifted her ears up, listening closely. “Ah don’t even hear any arrows flyin’.”

Cinder listened as well, swiveling her ears in every direction. She could hear the zombies and skeletons moving around out there, but none of them were getting closer to the house. Curious, she removed a block from the wall and looked out. The moon had fully risen, and the undead were wandering aimlessly. It took a few seconds, but some of them noticed her and charged. 

She filled the block before any of them could reach her. A single arrow impacted the wood from the other side. No further attacks came. 

“Are they really so stupid they forget about us when they can’t see us?” Cinder asked.

Adder shrugged. “Maybe they just know they can’t break the blocks, so they give up.”

“Weird.” She frowned. “What kind of curse is this place under that the night brings the undead?”

“Dunno. Ah do know we can experiment with these craftin’ tables.”

“Crafting table… I like that.” She picked up a block of wood and placed it on the table, the light from her horn letting the two of them see. “Here goes nothing…”


~~~


Through trial and error, they found out how to make chests, sticks, doors, swords, pickaxes, and other tools out of nothing but wood. They ran out of wood faster than they would have liked, but the night was short. 

They had been poking their heads out every few minutes to see the progress of the moon across the night sky, so they knew morning was soon to come. However, they had not expected to be notified of it by the pained grunts of zombies outside. Poking their heads out once more, they discovered that the morning light was lighting the undead on fire, dropping them to the ground in piles of ash, rotten flesh, and bone. 

Adder cocked her head. “Ah thought that was the thing with vampires.”

“We really shouldn’t be surprised that things are different here.”

“Good point.”

Cinder made her way out of the house and picked up one of the discarded bones. Shaking it, she found she could convert it into bonemeal with ease. “Weird.” She also picked up a bow and several arrows while she was at it. 

“Ah see somethin’,” Adder said, pointing. Amidst the dead and broken zombies and skeletons, a strange green creature was moving about, prodding one of the zombies with a foot. It was a tall creature, slightly shorter than the average human, with four legs situated at its narrow base. A somewhat leafy texture covered its body, while an agonized face dominated its cubic head. 

It turned and saw Adder. Slowly, it began to walk toward them.

“...Is it friendly, Poppy?”

Poppy didn’t react to the creature with anything more than a calm oink. 

Cinder rolled her eyes. “He’s a great help. Just be wary.”

The creature moved almost silently, but purposefully. It only stopped its approach when it got close to them, at which point it started hissing and sparking. 

“Down!” Cinder shouted, jumping back, taking Adder with her. 

The creature exploded in a shower of white dust, destroying several blocks beneath it. The shockwave dropped the two ponies to the ground and tossed Poppy into the side of a dirt block. 

“...It exploded…” Cinder stood up and rubbed the bruise on the back of her head. “Okay, don’t mess with those things.”

Adder ran to Poppy to check if he was okay. “Have you seen anythin’ like that anywhere before?”

“Exploding monsters? Not that I remember.” Cinder grinned. “Cubes and exploding monsters. I like this place more and more every day.”

“And the day is short, real short.” Adder gestured at the sun that was making its way into the sky alarmingly quickly. “If we want to do anythin’ we should get goin’.”

Cinder nodded. She ran back into the house and picked up the wooden axe they’d made last night and used it to quickly dismantle the house they’d made, including the nice wooden door. She threw all the shrunk objects into a chest before hoisting the chest onto her back. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Those mountains seem like a good place to explore. And if night falls, we’ve got ourselves an instant house in this chest right here.” 

They set out across the plains. The mountains may have been distant, but they couldn’t have been more than a few miles away. Adder may not have done much exploring in her time, but she knew scenery shouldn’t change that drastically in the short journey to the mountain. 

This world did not operate on these rules. They walked directly from a plain to a desert, crossing the boundary from comfortable to baking hot in a handful of blocks. Cinder picked up a few sand blocks while they passed through, but made no move to stay for very long. 

Just when they were getting tired of the sand, they entered the snow. No boundaries, not even so much as a block between them, just instant sand to snow. It even started snowing on top of them, accumulating in little chunks. The stuff on the ground could be harvested into snowballs, but they didn’t stick around long enough to break down any of the trees. 

At long last, they entered a simple forest at the base of the mountain where the temperature was reasonable. They knocked the snow out of their manes and the sand out of their coats, shivering to warm themselves back to normal temperatures. 

“Every climate was smaller than my farm!” Adder said. “How’re you supposed to get a good crop goin’ in a place like this?”

“Not sure… but we might be able to ask them.” 

There was what appeared to be a small village at the base of the mountain. The structures were largely made of wood with a few trunk blocks here and there, though the streets had a cobblestone pattern to them and there were clearly small farms dotted around the settlement. The creatures that lived there were human enough, though they had square heads and noses that were far too large. Furthermore, there either weren’t any women in the village at all, or these particular hominids were genderless. 

Taking in a deep breath, Cinder marched into the village, walking up to a random villager. “Hi! I’m Cinder!”

“Hmm,” he responded. 

“I come from another world where things are a loooot less square. You?”

“Honh.” 

“Do you… say anything besides grunts?”

“Mmmm.”

“Shouldn’t the translation spell be workin’?” Adder asked.

Cinder tapped her hoof on the ground as she thought. “I’m not sure this is a langua—” she removed the block she was standing on and fell in the hole again. “...Okay, that’s just…” She pulled herself out and looked back at the villager. “You didn’t see anything.”

“Hmm.”

“Right…” Cinder frowned. “Well, if you don’t try to stop me I’ll be going into town now… so… see you around?” 

“Hmph.”

The two ponies carefully passed him and entered the town proper. The villagers walked around, only occasionally glancing up to take the two ponies in. It was clearly an unusual event to have two round creatures waltz into town, but not unusual enough that the villagers felt the need to do anything about it. They went around their business. Some were farming, one was cooking what smelled like meat in a furnace, another was standing on top of a stone watchtower, and another was tending to a massive iron beast. 

If Cinder had to give it a name, it would be a golem. A massive hulk of metal with two arms and legs that marched around as if defending the town. Upon seeing the two mares, it seemed to consider driving them away. Instead, it picked up a poppy in a nearby flower bed and offered it to Cinder.

“Thanks!” Cinder said, sticking the red flower in her mane. “I think this looks good on me, don’t you?”

Adder pursed her lips. “Well, now Ah need to find somethin’ cool.”

“You have a lightsaber. I just have a flower. That’s hardly fair.”

“I’m not really that good at using it yet…”

“It’ll come with practice. Trust me.”

“Well Ah know that bu—POTIONS!”

“What?” Cinder watched in mild confusion as Adder pressed her face to the glass of a house, bouncing giddily. Inside there was a golden stand carrying three magical potions.

“That looks like a brewin’ stand… Ah haven’t made potions in a while.” She jumped to the side, knocking on the front door. “Hello?”

A villager opened the door with a confused expression. 

Adder pointed at the brewing stand and then at herself, giving the villager the best puppy-dog eyes she could manage. 

“Hnh,” the villager said, shaking his head. He pulled an emerald out of his pocket and tapped it with a finger. He waved towards himself in the universal gesture for “pay up.” 

Adder frowned. “Don’t have any emeralds…” She pointed at the emerald and scratched her head. 

The villager tossed an iron pickaxe at her and pointed at the mountain. 

“You want me to dig the emeralds up for it!?”

“Hmmmh.”

“Right, you can’t understand me…”

“Given how easy it is to mine here, that might not be that difficult,” Cinder said. “That tool he gave you can probably break through rock pretty quickly.”

“Yeah… Yeah! Ah’m gonna get some emeralds and then show this guy Ah totally can buy this brewin’ stand! And then Ah’m gonna brew somethin’! Ya hear that? Brew!”

Cinder rolled her eyes. “The sun will be setting soon, we should hide out in our house. Though, I will ask…” She pointed at the glass, cocking her head in confusion. 

The villager took out a block of sand and stuck it in his furnace. A few moments later he pulled out a block of glass. 

“...Simple, but I’ll take it.”


~~~


Rather than packing up the entire house when morning came, they left the door-and-glass-window equipped structure standing at the outskirts of the village. The iron golem had done an excellent job of destroying any and all undead that approached the town, so aside from the pained agonizing screams of zombies being pummeled to death, the night had been peaceful. 

At first light the two ponies set out to the mountain, equipped with nothing but their usual supplies, a couple picks, and an empty chest on Cinder’s back. Poppy stayed at the house. They quickly found a wall of exposed stone ripe for the mining. 

“Here it goes.” Adder swung the pick two times before the stone block popped out, transforming into cobblestone in the process. Cinder helped her with the wooden pick they had made earlier, though it was significantly slower than the villager’s gift. They made their way into the mine, digging at a slight downward angle to create a staircase. 

“Y’know, Ah wonder how far down you can go,” Adder wondered. 

“We could just dig straight down,” Cinder suggested. “It’d be a little awkward with two of us…”

“Psh, it’ll be fine.” Adder dug out a three by three hole that both of them could stand in. They continued digging down in this three by three hole, passing all sorts of strange blocks. White and orange blocks of different kinds of stone popped up, easily collected and placed within Cinder’s chest. Coal ore popped into lots of little black rocks. On a hunch, Cinder stuck these on a stick and made torches, allowing her horn to have a break from lighting their way.

They even got some lapis lazuli and iron ore… but no emeralds. Not a single one, so far. 

“These things are rare, aren’t they?” Adder asked. 

“Probably why he wants them,” Cinder responded. 

“Hmm… Ah’ll show him. Ah’ll find all the emeral—woah!” She had just dug a hole in the ground that opened up into a large cavern. At the bottom of said cavern was quite the impressive river of lava. She was lucky there were other blocks for her to stand on. “...Maybe we shouldn’t be digging straight down.”

Cinder took paper out of her mane and folded it into a hang glider. Taking her chest off and setting it to the side, she climbed into her creation. “Or we could fall through and explore the cave, hmm?” 

“Ah am never gonna trust that paper thing of yours.”

“Psh, get on, it’s perfectly safe.”

“If we fall into the lava we’re gonna burn.”

“Then I won’t fall into the lava.” She dug a short ways ahead, making a larger opening into the cavern. “C’mon, let’s soar!” 

With a grunt, Adder reluctantly latched onto Cinder. They pushed off, drifting into the cavern with a papery triangle over their heads, covering a significant distance in a matter of seconds. They could feel the heat of the lava wafting up to meet them, but Cinder kept their altitude high enough to avoid danger. 

From the lava. Not from a skeleton hiding in a dark cave offshoot. An arrow shot right through their papery sail, compromising the glider’s integrity. 

“Hang on!” Cinder shouted, shooting a fireball at the skeleton to keep it from shooting at them again. She twisted the hang glider to the side, aiming for a section of the cavern not filled with lava. She succeeded. 

That said, she did get them stuck in a lot of cobwebs, so it wasn’t the best landing ever.

Cinder chuckled to herself. 

A spider as large as she was heard her and skittered toward her through the webbing, fangs bared. 

Adder activated her lightsaber, cutting all the webbing trapping her away in an instant with a satisfying sizzle. Twisting forward, she drove her blade into the spider’s jaw, popping out the back of its skull. It was dead.

Adder sheathed her weapon. “Y’know, for as scary and weird as these monsters are, they’re kinda pushovers.”

“Adder, I found emeralds.”

Adder jumped to Cinder—getting stuck in the webs again. After cutting both of them free, Cinder pointed down a small cavern. Dotted around the edges of the rock were six separate blocks with green crystals in them. Adder grinned and hacked them all away with her pick, ending up with six pristine green crystals at her disposal. “Mission success! Now we just have to… go… back.”

“Let’s just dig up. At an angle.” Cinder took her wooden pick to the stone. “We should be able to get out and circle around on the surface.”

It wasn’t exactly slow going, but it sure felt like it. Endless rock that they couldn’t even pick up since Cinder had left the chest behind. It was, after all said and done, somewhat boring work to bore a hole through a mountain. Cinder found herself hoping for a cave filled with monsters by the time they reached the dirt layer, popping out into the cold night air. 

They were on the other side of the mountain. It was the middle of the night. Behind them, there were dozens of zombies and skeletons. 

In front of them was a castle so large Cinder was surprised it managed to stay hidden behind the mountain. It was difficult to tell what it was made out of in the dark, but numerous torches placed high atop the castle’s towers made it clear how massive it was. A cobbled path indicated where the front door was. 

Rather than slaughter their way through a ton of zombies and skeletons, which they probably could do if they put their minds to it, they ran for the front doors of the castle. Cinder produced a paper shield and levitated it behind them to catch stray skeleton arrows. The zombies in question were far, far too slow to keep up with a pair of young mares running at full gallop. 

Their hooves transitioned from mountain grass to cobblestone as they approached the doors. They charged through the entrance with ease, finding nothing blocking their entry whatsoever. 

Slamming the doors behind them, Adder pressed her hooves to the entrance, hoping to block it. “...Will these doors keep them?”

“Don’t know.” Cinder took out her pick and mined the ground made of actual bricks, gathering the blocks. She pulled Adder out of the way and blocked the doors with the blocks. “But they won’t be able to now.”

“Good. Maybe now we can wait for day…”

“Or find whoever lives here.” Cinder put a hoof to her mouth and called out “HELLO!?”

Only when the echo returned did she realize how vast the entry hall was. They were but specks in the dome-shaped interior, the holes they made in the brick path not even visible when viewing the entire structure. Glowing blocks of soft yellow and harsh blue hung from the ceiling, combining with torches to make chandeliers of various different heights. The walls themselves were covered in blocks made out of solid iron, gold, emerald, and other materials the ponies couldn’t identify for sure. Brick stairs led up to platforms in the middle of the vast space, each of which connected to other platforms with more stairs and bridges. A few of these paths led to holes in the hall’s walls—portals to other areas of the massive structure. 

It would have been more spectacular had everything not been covered in dust. 

Adder brushed away the accumulation on a nearby table with a flower pot. “...Ah don’t think anyone’s been here in a long time.”

“Why don’t the villagers take this stuff?” Cinder asked.

“Maybe they don’t know about it?”

“...Or maybe there’s some other reason…” 

The two ponies climbed up the stairs, walking along a bridge into the first portal they found. The hall was lit with red, dim torches and the floor was of a soft orange carpet. At the end of the hall… was a library. Towering, expansive, and filled with a vast array of books, it would have made any Twilight squeal in glee. And once said hypothetical Twilight noticed the magic books floating on pedestals in the midst of all the books, that squeal would turn into an excited gasp followed quickly by a mile-a-minute monologue. 

Cinder’s reaction was limited to the dropping of her jaw.

“Huh. Books.” Adder pulled one off the shelf, checking the cover. “Hey, Ah can read this! Craftin’ Recipes.” She flipped through the pages, finding illustrations of a three-by-three grid filled with various objects that became other objects. “This is all about how to use that craftin’ table!”

“Enchanting 101,” Cinder read aloud, taking a book that described how to use the magic books floating around. “This… this could tell us so much about how to use the things in this world.”

“Anythin’ like histories? Journals?” Adder asked, going through book after book.

“Strangely, no…” Cinder hopped around the library a lot, examining various different shelves with the hopes of finding some explanations about this world. She found nothing of the sort: all the books seemed to be practical in one way or another, and none of them were even labeled by an author. Reports of crafting recipes, monsters, creatures, different types of blocks, the different kinds of scenery and items… and an entire shelf devoted to cataloguing which areas of the world had been mined out. 

“Was this all written by one person?” Cinder wondered, noting that the handwriting was rather similar between the tomes.  

“You’d have to be real fast at writin’ or real old to do that,” Adder commented. 

“Hmm…” Cinder approached a section that appeared to be filled with books that were architectural blueprints. She eventually came to one that showed her the very castle they were standing in. It took her a while to recognize it since it had been dark when they came in, but the shape of the towers and the doors were right there, as well as the design for the main room and a floor plan for everything else. 

One label in particular stood out to her. 

Map room. 

“Adder, I think I’ve found something. We need to head back to the hall.”

“But Ah just figured out how to make mushroom stew!” Adder winked. 

Cinder rolled her eyes and trotted back to the main hall. Following the blueprint’s design, she climbed up to the highest portal in the hall, coming out into a short passage that led to a set of iron double doors. Above the doors sat what appeared to be a statue made of brown sand with two blackened skulls on top of it. Behind this statue was a painting depicting a creature with three black skulls. 

Creepy. I wonder where the other skull is. 

The iron doors opened themselves as they stepped upon some pressure plates, opening up to another expansive area. They stood on a platform with staircases that ran up and down, allowing multiple vantage points to look at the map that filled the entire opposite wall. There had to be ten stories worth of map in front of them. Massive oceans dominated, curling and twisting around dozens of continents that twisted and turned on often unrealistic ways. Thousands of biomes colored these continents with a patched pattern. Hardly was there a space without a desert nearby, or a snow patch, or some kind of thick jungle. It was chaotic, crowded, and way too much to take in. 

And yet, as they looked closer, they could see the structures built on the world. Massive bridges that spanned oceans, roads that ran over hills, entire cities larger than any of the biomes the map had to offer. There were a few oddly shaped structures they couldn’t easily identify, and even a few that seemed as though they were shaped to spell out words like “Hi!” 

It would have been impossible to find out where they were had that section of the map not been placed a block in front of all the others, separating it. On it, they could see the castle they were standing in, the mountain, and the village on the other side. The village itself seemed to mark a place of untamed wilderness where none of the massive structures were built.

Cinder scratched her chin. “A preserve…?”

Looking closer, Cinder could see a few more places like this on the map, usually centered around small villages, though she also saw some small villages that seemed to be part of massive structures. Had whoever built these made agreements with all of the villagers, or was there something else at play here? 

“Hey,” Adder said, pointing up. “Ah think we can get on the roof.”

Climbing up the stairs all the way to the top of the map, they arrived at the lookout of one of the castle’s towers, looking out over the world. 

Oh, what had been hidden from them by the mountain, the sun revealed to them now. Massive, sprawling bridges spiraled out from the castle’s base, running what appeared to be rails over the tamed wilderness. In the distance, they could see what appeared to be a skyscraper. Closer than that, they could see little hutts, statues, and floating sky islands dominated by cabins. There was even some motion: a weird machine of blocks that moved up and down like a snake and what appeared to be a minecart moving forever on a circle of tracks. 

But there were no people. 

There weren’t even any villagers here. The only life they saw was a cubic slime hopping around aimlessly and a herd of cows grazing obliviously. 

“...What happened to them?” Cinder asked. 

“If it was really one person, they… might just be building elsewhere,” Adder commented. 

“But this seems like the place they store their information and knowledge of the world… it’s roughly in the center of the map. They probably return here regularly to record new things and shelve it for later use. There’s too much dust here.”

“Think somethin’ happened to them?”

“Maybe. There are a lot of dangers in this world.” 

“But nothin’ else we’ve seen is able to build like us. Those villagers just make their little houses, and Ah never saw them break a single block.” Adder smirked. “What if the thing that built all this was like us, just passin’ through and decided to have some fun with a bunch of blocks?”

“...And then they left once they were done?”

“Or they got bored or somethin’. The story doesn’t have to end badly. Or maybe they just went on a trip to see if they could go around the world, Ah dunno.”

“Still… this is impressive.” Cinder held her hoof out over all the constructions. “Even knowing everything about how this world works, I’m not sure I could build this much.”

“Wanna try?”

Cinder raised an eyebrow, making her flower shift slightly in her mane. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Why not? It’s not like we’re really doing anything out here.”

“...We’re looking for where I came from. This isn’t it.”

“And we’re just wanderin’ around aimlessly lookin’ around without a place to go back and rest.”

“Are you saying we could make a home here?”

“Maybe not a home, but… a base of operations? This place is pretty peaceful even with the monsters, has a lot of stuff we can play with, and we can literally build whatever we want to make our base the best. We’ve only been here a few hours and already we’ve found a ton of stuff. Imagine what we could do with a few days?”

Cinder smirked. “We have been here a few days.”

“You know what I mean.”

Giggling, Cinder nodded. “I think I do. A base of operations, huh? Well… I am very curious, and this place has had its fair share of surprises without exploding a queen ant in our face… Sure, why not, let’s give it a shot.”

Adder beamed. “Yes!”

“But you get to learn how to farm.”

“Ah’ll be brewin. Speakin’ of, Ah think we should get back and get that stand…”


~~~


A being watched carefully as the ponies journeyed over the mountain, back to the village. 

They never suspected it was watching, simply because it was too far away. Occasionally they would glance at it’s direction, but it would never make eye contact. 

That would… not do. 

But it still watched them. Its midnight black form refused to leave them alone as they journeyed across the world to complete their mission. It spoke to itself in some incomprehensible, gurgling language unlike anything else this world had to offer. 

The ponies returned to the village and purchased the brewing stand without incident. They returned to their ramshackle house and began working with their new information. Immediately, they set out for the mountain again, no doubt to get the chest they had left behind. 

The chest the being had already sifted through, looking for anything of interest. It had found nothing, though it did keep a stone simply because it could. 

As they entered the cave once more, the being teleported somewhere far, far away. 

This was not to say the Enderman stopped watching them. It just had other things to attend to at the moment. 

Though it was sure the two ponies’ arrival was very, very important somehow.

It could swear it heard a train whistle in the distance. 


~~~



My Little Minecraft: at the End will return…