Core Essence – Tales from the Nether contest entry (PG-rated)

The Nether Portal, contrary to popular belief, does not actually lead to a different dimension. Rather, it reaches to a world underneath the deepest layers of bedrock, somewhere no ordinary miner could ever reach.

This world directly surrounds the core of the world, explaining its heat and fiery nature.

However, lately the Core has been running out of energy. The reasons are not clear, but it has changed the Nether, allowing different lifeforms to flourish in areas that were previously too hot for them to exist in.







Core Essence



The backdoor clicked shut, and Stefan was out, out of bed and about. Packed in a thick winter coat and with a shawl across his face, he approached the dark purple Portal. It was slowly freezing over, the snow slowly piling on top occasionally melting during the day while cold winds during the night would freeze that meltwater, causing icy slush to pile up into stalagmites.

It had taken a lot of thinking and some surprisingly careful preparation for a preteen, but Stefan had made up his mind. This Portal was the main thing that had kept his village strong during the winter, allowing them to keep up the defense against the pillagers that came during harvest season to steal their hard work. That it had mostly stopped providing that heat was a problem that had the entire village in titters. The priest said they must have displeased some deity that none of them could name, and cost the village its blessing.

Others said it was inevitable the portal would stop working, that they’d gotten lazy and complacent. Yet more said this was a trap, to weaken them then send unholy terrors from the fiery dimensions on the other side to eat them all.

Stefan knew they were most likely wrong, though there might be a bit of truth to them all. Whenever he asked for more information, though, the adults told him to stop asking questions.

Since nobody was willing to help him solve the mystery of the cooling Portal, he’d decided it was up to him, and nobody had to learn about it, not even his parents.

He could just imagine the look on his faces when he came back with the mystery solved, the portal providing heat again to save their second crop. They’d be conflicted between hugging him and making his favorite dessert for a month or scolding him and grounding him for years.

Shouldering his pack and putting his other hand on the handle of the hand-ax he’d gotten from his dad’s toolshed, Stefan prepared to step through the portal.

“What are you doing?!”

The hiss came from behind the blacksmith’s coal shed, but definitely did not match up to Harold’s voice. The old blacksmith was quite friendly to Stefan normally, though he could go from friendly to thunderous in a flash if he caught Stefan messing around in his forge.



“Seriously, what are you thinking, getting so close to the Portal?”

There it was again. Clearly a feminine whisper, though a bit high even for that. So not Harold’s wife Matilda then.
Suddenly it clicked. It made a weird sort of sense she’d be out of bed and hanging around near the Portal at the same time he was. He always seemed to run into her at the strangest times.



“I’m going through the Portal, Alicia. Nobody else seems to be willing to look into this problem. They’re all blaming things or entities outside their control, and that’s all they’re doing. Even my own parents have forbidden me from questioning or even speculating what might be the cause.”



“That’s stupid, haven’t you been told what horrors are waiting on the other side? You’d be dead before you’re 3 steps away from the portal! You’re only fourteen for Notch’s sake!”



The girl had now come out of hiding from behind the shed, getting closer to him and trying to use her greater height and stronger posture to intimidate him into submission. Alicia had always been more solidly built than most girls her age. It probably had something to do with helping her father in the forge these past few years, since they had lost Alex, the eldest son of the smith, to the pillagers a few years prior.

Stefan sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Look Alicia, I’ve already decided to do this. I’m packed and prepared as best as I can, and you’re not stopping me. I haven’t got the time to argue about it either, you know your dad will be getting up in less than an hour, and so will the baker.
You being here has already ruined part of my plan, since I was planning to just vanish and turn up again once I solved it. Better everyone believes me missing or dead than think I deliberately went through the portal, you know what sort of mess that would create. So you can’t tell anyone where I’ve gone.”

The girl glared at him for a moment, then her entire demeanor changed, going still.



“Don’t worry, I won’t be telling anyone, you can be sure of that.”

Surprised at the quick change in her attitude, Stefan narrowed his eyes. “And why did you suddenly change your mind that quickly?”.

Alicia took a deep breath before replying.


“Simple, I’m going with you!”.





Stefan sighed as he removed his ax from the skull of yet another rogue piglin. When he took it with him to be his weapon and tool, he honestly had not expected to need it this much. He’d barely been on the other side of the Portal a week, and already he’d had to slay two dozen creatures, from small zombified pigs that barely reached his hips to these boar-like creatures. He’d even slain what the locals called a Ghast once, purely by accident. He’d been hacking away at a tough blue-ish tree in one of the Cold Zones when the backswing of his ax hit the fireball the Ghast had shot at his back, and rebounded it perfectly.

It didn’t take particularly long for Stefan to figure out why the Portal was no longer warm. When he’d arrived, instead of the reddish, fiery wastes he’d been expecting, he’d been greeted with a fresh breeze and a blue forest. He’d almost stepped back through the Portal in confusion, before remembering he had to get away before Alicia could get loose from where he’d tied her to a lantern pole and drag him back through to get revenge.



He hated doing that to a girl that had become his friend, regardless of the oddity of encountering her in the strangest places, but he couldn’t let her put herself in danger. That he’d be endangering himself and worrying his parents to death was bad enough, for her to be in that same danger and her family worrying was needless. He could handle himself, he’d be fine alone.

He purposely forgot she’d been stronger than him these last few years. It stuck in his craw to be weaker than anyone, but at least as the resident nerd, tinkerer and BeeKeeper’s apprentice he had a reason to be scrawnier and weaker than, say, Thomas, the Lumberjack’s boy, or the Butcher’s son, Rolan.

But for a girl the same age as him to be significantly stronger? He knew it shouldn’t really matter to him, of course the Blacksmith’s apprentice was going to be stronger than him, regardless of her gender. Yet his pride wouldn’t let him acknowledge it.

Was that why he’d refused to let her come with him? Maybe, but that wasn’t important now. What was important was that he had to gather enough Netherite Shards to make a proper sword and armor, so he wouldn’t die if he tried to fight a Wither.

The locals had told him a lot about what was going on, how for years the Nether, as their realm was called, had been developing ‘Cold Zones’, spots where the heat of the Core could no longer reach, which then became as cold as any underground cave would be without the Earth’s core to warm it up.

After a lot of asking around, the Shaman of the village he’d arrived at had told him of the Withering Legends. How defeating one of those summoned monsters could provide him with a power core that would emit a steady stream of energy for not just years, but decades, providing all sorts of beneficial boosts to the entire village.
How the local village, through the portal, might even benefit as well, its range was that wide.

Unfortunately, the few adventurers that set out to collect one never made it back. So he wasn’t taking any chances, and gathering the resources to make the strongest possible weapons and armor. The experience he was getting by fighting off all the creatures attacking him was a bonus too. Perhaps he could ask the Shaman to help him enchant his sword once he made it?

While Stefan was thinking all this, he didn’t notice the large Piglin Hog coming up behind him, readying itself for a charge. While he heard it coming and turned around to face the creature, he couldn’t bring his ax up in time and dodge. Just when he was preparing for his armor to be ruined and his ribs broken by the goring slash, a large doublehanded hammer crashed down on the Piglin’s skull, crushing it.

“Hello Bee-Boy, miss me?”

It seems Alicia had decided to go through the portal after all.

“Not really, but it took you long enough to get here.”

This, for some reason, surprised her out of the indignation she’d initially reacted with.

“What do you mean, took you long enough? And where did you get that steel helmet and chestplate?”



Stefan took off his helmet and wiped his brow before replying.

“I’ve been here a week, Alicia. I don’t know what made you change your mind or why it took you so long, but perhaps some backup can’t hurt”.

“A week?! I followed after you in less than 2 hours! After that dirty trick you pulled it took me almost half an hour to get loose, and another hour to pack. How the hell can you have been here a week?”

Stefan went silent. The implications of this were amazing. If 2 hours in the Overworld meant a week in the Nether, then they could stay here for months and barely be missing for a few days.

“What it means is that the situation is less dire than I thought. If we can stay away for months without being gone for more than a few days, at least the shock of our return will be minimal. I wouldn’t want to turn up to my own funeral, after all.”

“At least you’d show up, it would be a hell of a lot better than not showing up at all because your funeral took place down here!”

“True, but that’s unlikely once I finish this particular quest. Netherite is no joke, while it takes the blacksmith using lava to heat it up for forging, nothing in the Nether can break through it with anything short of endless determination. I could probably survive wading through lava for a few minutes with a full suit of armor. I’d only gotten enough for a sword and a chestplate, I was going to have my chestplate and ax re-smelted into a pair of leggings and boots.
With this new information, perhaps we can get enough for both of us, and then the Wither won’t stand a chance”.

With that, Stefan filled in Alicia on all the things he’d learned, and what he knew the solution to be. How the Earth’s core seemed to be running out of power, causing Cold Zones to appear in the Nether. How the Portal had gotten caught in such a Cold Zone, and how building a new Portal out of that Zone would just result in a Portal appearing miles away from the village. Nothing useful to them.

Alicia disagreed about that being useless, just not useful for the specific case of warming the village in the winter.





After two full months of grinding through hordes of hostile creatures and piles of a dirty red earthy substance called “Netherrack”, Stefan and Alicia had finally gotten enough Netherite for two full sets of armor and a sword and axe. Alicia had first wanted a hammer, not an axe, but Stefan replied that the Wither was resistant to blunt damage to some extent, and had to be cut to pieces. For someone with her strength, an axe would be a perfect weapon for that purpose.

They’d also learned to make shields from the wood of trees and the spare steel they scraped from abandoned settlements, and Alicia had originally bought a bow and some arrows. Those proved useful against the Ghasts, a single hit killing them, but the arrows ran out fairly quickly and there were no birds of any sort whose feathers could be used to make new ones with.

Now that they were both outfitted in the strongest weapons and armor it was possible to make, slaying a bunch of Withering Skeletons was trivial, certainly not the major threat even a single one had been before.

There wasn’t really a cure for the Wasting Disease they could cause by touching you, all you could do was drink lots of water, eat a lot more, and hope the disease wasn’t strong enough to rot away a limb, causing it to need to be amputated before it could spread. Luckily, neither of them had had to go through that, though they had wasted the last of their arrows on the one skeleton they’d run into before getting geared up.

Now, Alicia had just harvested the last intact skull they needed, successfully cutting off its head with a single stroke before their own wasting disease took over after they died.

“Looks like we’re ready. Want to get this over with? I could do with going back home, I haven’t had any of mom’s apple pie in ages”

“Yeah, there’s not much else to do anyway. You remember the plan?”

“Of course I do, I’m the one that came up with most of it”

“Hah, you wish! But if you want to believe that, go ahead. It’s not like I care!”

“Oh, we both know you care. Far too much, in fact. Don’t worry though, I care too.”





The village of StrivenDale was probably the most prosperous village on the continent. Many attributed it to the special properties of the beacon that had been lit some years ago, but they were wrong.

That Beacon had almost been the downfall of the village. Sure, it had kept them warm in winter, but it had attracted both monsters and pillagers in greater hordes than anyone had ever seen before.

No, the real reason for their prosperity was the fact that that enormous horde of enemies had been defeated by just two warriors.

Nobody knew their faces, at least outside the village, since whenever they were seen they wore a strangely colored armor that could turn away any number of arrows or crossbow bolts. Not even the explosive creepers that were the bane of any miner or lumberjack could do much more than knock them around.

All anyone knew is that one of the warriors was a lot taller than the other, and much stronger, while the other one was fast and agile, using their sword to stab at weak spots, taking out their enemies while they were distracted by the hulking warrior.

There were many theories about the hulking warrior and his companion. Some said they were lovers, or even husband and wife. Others said they were brothers, born into the world to defend it from evil.

Others still said they were from another realm, that they’d stepped through a door in the sky, fully clad in their strange armor to repel the invasion.



Alicia could only laugh whenever another traveling merchant would spout his theories. Sure, before going into the portal she would’ve been affronted to be mistake for a boy just because she was taller and stronger than most boys her age. After the experience she’d had with Stefan, though, it was all just funny.

She’d taken to wearing dresses outside the forge, first as a joke and to get her mother off her back about ‘acting like a lady should’. Then she realized that it seemed to cause people to forget she was now taller than most men in the village, and at least as muscular. Perhaps it was a testament to her mother’s sewing skill, but it allowed her to feel like a girl while thumbing her nose at all the macho boys in the growing town, competing to see who was the toughest.

She already knew who was the toughest, though he still seemed as scrawny as ever. Stefan really hadn’t filled out much, but what little muscle he had had before their adventure was now hard as rock, and his speed and dexterity were something else.

As for the tale about them being lovers? Perhaps in a few years. Their shared experience had brought them close together, sure, but they were still only sixteen, too young to get married by quite some time still. That is if she could even put up with him, sarcastic little smartarse that he was. She’d managed it for more than two months, sure, but from the perspective of the town it had barely a few days that they’d been gone.

She’d see what happened. Perhaps she could learn to put up with him. Perhaps it would even be funny to reveal themselves as those warriors to the entire town, instead of just their parents, and laugh at the looks on everyone’s faces.

But for now, they had time. None of the pillagers were anywhere to be seen anymore. Life was good.



(Author's note: This story was written starting <2 hours before the deadline. That's why it's a bit rough).