The Fall of a World
Winglink Intro pt 1 of 4 Words: 1021
Before servers, respawns, or even players, there were three lonely worlds. The first one quickly defined itself as a bright green world full of sunlight and life. The land, perfect for so many entities, regularly found itself welcoming new animals and plants. For years, the place’s code would shift, bringing new wonders every time. Eventually, it welcomed the intelligent creatures we now know as the ancients. They quickly made their mark on the land, creating bustling towns, mines, and eventually large underground cities that showcased impressive technological advancements.
The second was a dark, unforgiving place. The sky, if it existed, was blocked by an unbreakable roof, making the vast lava pits and eternal flames the only source of light. Despite this cruel world, a group of animals from the first world found themselves in the hellish place and managed to thrive. Their code shifted in a way that almost mirrored the ancients. They didn’t have the same skills required to make the tech of those in their homeworld but still created looming structures to keep themselves safe from the danger outside.
The third was quiet and calm. Contrasting the claustrophobic underground cave of the previous world, it had no roof. Unlike the safe ground the first one welcomed life on, it didn’t even have a floor. Instead, it kept its ecosystem on magnificent floating islands. Smaller pockets of life lived on islands above the stone lands that, while stable pillars of the world, couldn’t sustain life. Any of the creatures that had to forage or hunt to live formed various skills for navigating these islands. The dragons, elytrians, and many others were given glorious wings, while others learned to disappear and reform themselves in a new location. While rare, a couple even learned to float to and from the different islands.
These three places started out isolated from each other, but eventually, the technology of the ancients broke through the barriers blocking them from each other. With this new portal, a large group fled from the first world into the third. It was too long ago for us to know what motivated them to flee their familiar home for a land unsuited to creatures that could not easily bridge the gaps between islands.
Because of their ingenuity and knowledge, they were able to create ways to survive on these strange lands. The stone of the larger islands below could float in place with ease, even when disconnected from the core island. With this material, the ancients could build bridges between the islands, making resource and food gathering possible. Years passed, and the third world finally welcomed its own structures. Using the very same stone as a base, they created large cities for most of their population to live in. They became a normal part of life in this world until one curious inventor opened Pandora's box.
He looked at the elytrians, large bug like creatures, and began to wonder if his people could ever traverse this world the same way they could. Sure, the bridges kept them alive, but it was still hard to expand due to the distance between some of the islands. With these questions in mind, he stole the wings from the remains of an elytrian. With some adjustments and enhancements, he learned to glide. Impressed by his creation, the rest of his kind began harvesting and creating elytras. Not long after, one even discovered that the eyelike gems on the bugs’ backs made it possible to fly!
At first, they assumed elytrians simply flew by catching the air like the dragons, but this was not the only method they used. Within the gems on their backs, they held the same type of magic that let the islands unsupported by stone float. If they harvested the gems, they could fly wherever they wanted in this place and create new structures with any materials they wished. They could finally fully thrive in this place like they did in their original world.
With these tools, they expanded at a rapid pace. The new cities they built, similar to the islands around them, became less accessible to those without elytras. The rate they harvested the elytrians needed to match this expansion, and the population just couldn’t handle it. After generations of this, the species was lost.
While this would hurt the ancients who had become reliant on it, the consequences shouldn’t have been too drastic. Many species have been lost in all of the worlds, even if this loss wasn’t as natural. However, this wasn’t the case with the elytrians. The gems they used to float held the same magic the smaller islands had, but the cores within them were a lot stronger when compared to the bug-like creatures. Because of this higher strength, the cores sometimes found themselves overheating, and the island they held collapsed onto the stone below or even into the void. The elytrians were able to harvest the magic within these cores to feed their own gems, putting less strain on the islands and letting them float for eons. This gave enough time for islands to form and replace them.
With the elytrians gone, some of these cores began to overheat. The devastation this caused was not a fast one, but it was one without an escape. The creatures of this world looked on as, with every passing year, more and more islands began to fall. The ones that hit the islands, escaping the fate the void promised, simply couldn’t sustain life on the stone of the larger lands. Eventually, after the final island fell, the third world was left with four surviving forms. The almost unkillable chorus plant that managed to grow on the cold stone, the shulkers, mysterious creatures that didn’t seem to need food, the queen of dragons, the last of her kind, and the warped remains of the ancients, who were changing due to of the chorus fruit they barely survived on.
Now, all that’s left are pieces of the ancients’ abandoned cities with stone foundations, fossils of the once bustling ecosystem, and us, the gods of the void and
The End